The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (21 page)

After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. He was found guilty but insane and institutionalized for the rest of his life, dying of cancer in 1984.

By then, however, Gein had already achieved pop immortality, thanks to horror writer Robert
Bloch
, who had the inspired idea of creating a fictional character based on Gein—a deranged mama’s boy named Norman Bates. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock transformed Bloch’s pulp chiller,
Psycho,
into a cinematic masterpiece. Insofar as
Psycho
initiated the craze for “slasher” movies, Gein is revered by horror buffs as the “Grandfather of Gore,” the prototype of every knife-, axe-, and cleaver-wielding maniac who has stalked America’s movie screens for the past thirty years.

Ed Gein, Superstar

Ed Gein’s ghoulish crimes have served as the inspiration for the three most terrifying films of the past thirty years:
Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and
The Silence of the Lambs.

Though Robert
Bloch
, the original author of
Psycho,
insisted that his book was not simply a fictionalized version of Gein’s crimes, his immortal character, Norman Bates, was clearly inspired by Gein. (Indeed, in Bloch’s original novel, Norman himself points out the parallels between his own crimes and Gein’s.)

Ed Gein; from
True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers;
art by Jon Bright

(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

Tobe Hooper, the director of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
reportedly heard stories about Gein from Midwestern relatives and grew up haunted by these tales. In his splatter-movie classic, the Gein-inspired character is not a mild-mannered motel keeper with a split personality but a bestial hulk named Leatherface, who sports a mask made of dried human flesh.

Thomas Harris researched the
FBI
’s files on Gein before creating his fictional serial killer Jame Gumb (aka “Buffalo Bill”), a transsexual wannabe who attempts to fashion a suit from the flayed torsos of his victims. Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning movie version relied on Harold Schechter’s book
Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original “Psycho”
to create the squalid look of Gumb’s Gein-inspired house.

Psycho, Chainsaw,
and
Silence
all take considerable liberties with the Gein story. The film that sticks closest to the facts is a 1974 low-budget shocker called
Deranged,
which has developed a major cult following among horror buffs. Some video versions of
Deranged
are prefaced by a brief documentary on Gein called
A Nice Quiet Man,
which includes the only known footage of some of his hideous human-flesh artifacts.

G
RAVE
R
OBBING

See
Necrophilia
.

“Every man to his own taste. Mine is for corpses.”

H
ENRI
B
LOT

G
ROUPIES

Fame can be a powerful aphrodisiac—even when a person is famous for committing serial murder. Celebrity killers have attracted groupies for at least a century. During a ten-day span in 1895, a handsome San Francisco medical student and Sunday school teacher named Theo Durrant—the Ted
Bundy
of his day—lured two young women into an empty church, then murdered them and raped their corpses, leaving one body inside the church library, the other in the belfry. Durrant’s trial was a nationwide sensation, exerting a morbid fascination on people from coast to coast. A young woman named Rosalind Bowers, however, carried her fascination to what most observers felt was an unseemly extreme. Virtually every day of the trial, the dainty Miss Bowers appeared in court with a bouquet of sweet pea flowers, which she presented to the “Demon of the Belfry” as a gesture of support. Before long, Miss Bowers had gained a measure of celebrity herself, being dubbed by the papers the “Sweet Pea Girl.”

In the century since the Durrant case, high-profile serial killers have continued to attract almost as many groupies as rock stars. While some of these murderers have possessed a certain superficial charm (like Bundy) others have been seriously repellent (John Wayne
Gacy
, for example) or just plain over-the-top bizarre (like Richard the “Night Stalker”
Ramirez
). But no matter how loathsome or grotesque the killer, there have always been women who considered him a dreamboat. Even Ed
Gein
—a dimwitted, middle-aged necrophiliac with the approximate sexual magnetism
of Gomer Pyle—received frequent letters from women begging for locks of his hair.

One of the most startling examples of this strange erotic phenomenon came to light only recently with the publication of the book
Love Letters to Adolf Hitler,
culled from the collection of a man named William Emker. Shortly after the end of World War II, Emker—then a U.S. Army officer—was searching through Hitler’s bombed-out headquarters when he came upon a trove of letters written to the Führer by female admirers. “Sweetest love,” one typical letter begins, “favorite of my heart, my dearest, my truest and hottest beloved. I could kiss you a thousand times and still not be satisfied. My love for you is endless, so tender, so hot and so complete.” Emker found thousands of missives like this one, addressed to “My darling, sugar-sweet Adolf,” “My beloved Führer,” or sometimes simply “Dear Adi.” The fact that the greatest
Mass Murderer
of the twentieth century could stimulate such overheated fantasies only confirms the disquieting point: there is something about monsters that just turns certain women on.

Fritz Haarmann

One of the most infamous lust slayers of the twentieth century, Haarmann was born to a working-class couple in Hanover, Germany, in 1879. He was a sullen and slow-witted child whose favorite pastime was dressing up like a girl. At seventeen, he was committed to an asylum after being arrested for child molesting. Six months later, he escaped to Switzerland and made his way back to Hanover.