What they found at Ed Gein’s farmhouse, however, would shock not only the residents of Plainfield, but the entire nation. But this time authorities quickly honed in on the mild-mannered little man whom everyone thought of as odd but harmless. Nearly two years later another middle-aged store-owner disappeared from Plainfield. 32-caliber cartridge nearby, and a bloody trail indicating the body had been dragged out the door to a spot in the parking lot where presumably it was loaded into a truck. She was a middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense attitude and a somewhat mysterious past, but who would want to kill her? Yet the evidence was clear: a pool a blood on the floor, a spent. The subtitle is all the synopsis anyone needs: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”.The residents of Plainfield Wisconsin were more than a little concerned when the owner of a local tavern disappeared in December 1955. This is his story-recounted in fascinating and chilling detail by Harold Schechter, one of the most acclaimed true-crime storytellers of our time. Driven to commit gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagining, Ed Gein remains one of the most deranged minds in the annals of American homicide.

After her death and a failed attempt to dig up his mother’s body from the local cemetery, Gein turned to other grave robberies and, ultimately, multiple murders. The man behind the massacre was a slight, unassuming Midwesterner with a strange smile-and even stranger attachment to his domineering mother.

The place was an ordinary farmhouse in America’s heartland, filled with extraordinary evidence of unthinkable depravity. The truth behind the twisted crimes that inspired the films Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.įrom “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” ( The Boston Book Review) comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, a mild-mannered Wisconsin farmhand who stunned an unsuspecting nation-and redefined the meaning of the word “psycho.” The year was 1957.

Deviant by Harold Schechter