American homicidal maniac. The son of an overbearing mother who forbade her son to show any interest in women, he worked on the family farm where he grew up in Plainfield, WI. When his mom and brother both died the same year, he turned inward, becoming more reclusive. He sealed off his mom’s room, but took to wearing her clothes in the privacy of his house. He neglected the farm, and began reading books on anatomy. He worked in town and at the local farms as a handyman, trusted enough to take care of neighbor kids when the parents were away.
Gein began a secret life of horror. He dug up corpses of women, skinning them and draping the skin over himself, a model for the later film, “The Silence of the Lambs.” In 1954 he shot a woman to death and took her home where he hung her in the barn by the heels and dressed her like so much meat. In 1957 he shot another woman and did the same. He made bracelets of human skin, a drum, sawed a skull for a soup bowl and had a refrigerator full of human parts. It was estimated that he plundered as many as 15 bodies from graves, a necrophile and a cannibal.
Gein’s gory secret was discovered and he was committed to life in an institution for the criminally insane in December 1957. The local people burned down the farm, as a place of unspeakable evil. Gein died of respiratory failure due to lung cancer at the age of 77 in the mental institution in Madison, Wisconsin, on 26 July 1984 at 7:45 a.m.
Link to Wikipedia biography