Ed Gein was born in 1906. Following the death of his alcoholic father in 1940, Gein worked on the family farm with his brother Henry; both lived with their mother. She was a domineering woman who kept a tight emotoinal grip on her sons. Ma Gein instilled in her boys a belief in the supposed evils of women and the sins of the flesh. She kept her boys pure, seeing that they worked God's land and brought forth it's fruits without becoming befouled by the opposite sex.

Worry about her sons and farming their land pushed the family's stress factor to the breaking point. Son Henry exhausted himself fighting a fire one day and died. Mrs Gein suffered a severe stroke in 1944, and died of a second more serious attack in December 1945.

Ed Gein, then 39, was left alone. Ed withdrew from reality. His mind developed strange fantasies. He became a voracious reader of anatomical texts, and developed a new interest in women. Then, without explanation, he seeled off all of the farmhouse except for his bedroom and kitchen.

Alone and independent, Gein began to pursue a new vocation: grave robbing. He began exhuming the bodies of women buried in the remote areas of graveyards. Covered by the darkness, Gein dug up the corpses and dragged them to his farm. There, in a shed, Gein drew and quartered his prized trophies as if they were slaughterhouse cattle. Portions of the quartered corpses were often cooked and eaten.

In early November 1957, Gein visited the Worden hardware store in Plainfield. The store was owned by Bernice Worden and her son, Frank. Gein often talked to Frank about hunting. The deer season was starting and Gein was curious about Frank's hunting plans. When Frank said that he would go hunting on Saturday morning, November 16, Gein told frank that he'd stop by the store that same day to buy some anti-freeze. When Frank returned to the store late Saturday, he was surprised to find the door locked. Inside, he dicovered a pool of blood on the floor. Alarmed by his mother's unexplained absence, he looked closer and found a sales slip in her handwriting made out to Gein for some anti-freeze. Frank called the sheriff to report his mother missing, and suggested that Gein be contacted immediately.

He was found at the home of Bob and Irene Hill, a friendly couple who often invited the quiet farmer to dinner. They had finished eating, and Ed was sitting in his car by the time the two officers arrived. Officer Dan Chase, asked Ed Gein several questions; Gein's answers indicated that he knew Bernice Wardon was dead. The officers truly believed that Gein was involved, so arrested him. Meanwhile two more officers drove to Gein's farm. Inside the woodshed, they found Bernice Wordon. Her body had been butchered like a deer. Bernice's severed head, found nearby, showed that she had been killed by a gunshot.

An expanded search uncovered nine masks of human skin. One proved to be the remains of Mary Hogan, a saloon keeper who had disappeared nearly three years before. The lawmen also found that Gein had used parts of his female victims to decorate the house, sculls on the bedposts, a chair made of skin, bowls made from skull-caps, a shade-pull with a pair of woman's lips attached, nine vulvas in a shoe-box, the grisly list went on. The investigators determined that 15 women had ended up as souvenirs in Gein's house of horrors.

In December 1957, the court found Gein criminally insane, and sent him to Wisconsin's Central State Hospital for the insane. Based on an expert conclusion ten years later that Gein should stand trial and defend himself, a petition was made for his release from the hospital. On January 16, 1968, the proceedings began before judge Robert Gollmar. Gollmar ruled that Gein suffered from mental disease and that he should be returned to the Central State Hospital.

Ed Gein died on 26 July 1984 of natural causes in the geriatric ward of the Mendota Mental Health Institute, where he had been cared for since 1978.