Ed Gein Research Papers

Even some of the most horrific events bring out the best in people and their imaginations. Movie directors and book authors alike get their creativity from something. Whether it is their favorite bedtime story as a child or a real life experience. Think of the book The Things They Carried by Time O’Brien for example. In the book, O’Brien tells made up short stories from his experience in the Vietnamese war. Both pleasant and traumatic events make the stories seem as if he really experienced them, and the readers find themselves forgetting that the stories are false repeatedly throughout the book. Ed Gein’s case and his life story made him the most influential serial killer in America as demonstrated in the book series Psycho by Robert Bloch,

He was born on August 27, 1906 on a farm in La Crosse County, Wisconsin to George and Augusta Gein and had an older named Henry. Augusta was a very religious woman and was very protective of her sons, she would always tell Gein that sexual intercourse was a sin; women were prostitutes and the Devil’s spawn. Augusta died of a stroke in 1945, five years after George died of heart failure and a year after Henry died in a brush fire. It is believed that Gein killed his own brother because when the police found Henry after the boys got separated, the spot where Henry was found did not have any evidence of fire damage and he had bruises on his head. Gein stayed in the farmhouse even after the death of his family members, though he did stop farming because the government gave him funding and he had a few small jobs here and there. While on the farm he usually kept to himself (Ed Gein, Wisconsin

He was sent to Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and diagnose with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that prevents the person who has it from distinguishing the difference between reality and fantasy. Schizophrenia may result in some combination of hallucinations, delusions, and extremely disordered thinking and behavior (Schizophrenia, Mayo Clinic). He had a second trial in 1968 when he was deemed san enough to stand trial where he was found guilty of first-degree murder but sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital because was still legally insane. Ed Gein died of respiratory failure due to lung cancer on July 26, 1984 at the age of 77 at the Mendota Mental Health Institute (Ed Gein, Wisconsin