Ed Gein's Dark Legacy: How the Butcher of Plainfield Influenced Some of America's Biggest Serial Killers

Bowls carved from human skulls. Human skin stretched across chair seats. A lamp shaded by a human face.

The macabre household trophies of Edward “Ed” Gein shocked the nation in 1957 after authorities investigating the disappearance of a Plainfield, Wis., hardware store owner discovered Gein’s home decorated with the grisly remains of countless human corpses.

After the gruesome discovery, Gein confessed to multiple crimes, including robbing graves for body parts and slaying a woman, Mary Hogan, whom he said resembled his mother. Gein later said his depravity was fueled by a conflicted relationship with his mother, whom he obsessed over and resented.

Despite his confessions, Gein was convicted of only one crime more than a decade later: the murder of Bernice Worden, the hardware store owner, whose decapitated body was found hanging in a shed on Gein’s property by a Waushara County sheriff’s deputy.

After his arrest in 1957, court-appointed psychiatrists diagnosed Gein with schizophrenia and ordered mental health treatment. In 1968, prosecutors tried Gein in front of a judge, not a jury. The judge found Gein guilty of Worden’s killing, but also not guilty by reason of insanity—separate legal determinations of the criminal facts and Gein’s mental state at the time.

Gein spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals, until 1984, when he died of respiratory failure. He was 77.

In the years that followed, Gein became the inspiration behind some of Hollywood’s biggest horror blockbusters, including Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And while no real-life serial killer has directly credited The Butcher of Plainfield for inspiring their murders, some—from Ed Kemper to Jeffrey Dahmer—used similar methods to those Gein employed in their own killings, such as post-mortem mutilation and trophy-making.

Edmund Emil Kemper III, better known as Ed Kemper or The Co-Ed Killer, murdered at least eight people—including his mother. Though their methods were strikingly different, Kemper would later say his desire to kill grew from a toxic relationship with his mother, much like Gein.

In interviews after his arrest, Kemper claimed his mother was abusive when he was a child.

His killing spree began in 1964 when he killed his grandmother “to see what it felt like,” Kemper reportedly told authorities. Kemper also killed his grandfather. He was 15 years old.

However, Kemper was never convicted of their killings. After his arrest, court psychiatrists diagnosed teenage Kemper with paranoid schizophrenia and sent him to Atascadero State Hospital for treatment. He was released in 1969, on his 21st birthday.

Kemper eventually moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., and settled into a routine of offering rides to female hitchhikers. He killed at least six of them, many of them college students, earning the moniker “The Co-Ed Killer.”

In 1973, Kemper also killed his mother, mutilating her corpse, and her friend. He surrendered himself to law enforcement, confessing to the eight killings. That same year, a jury convicted Kemper of eight counts of first-degree murder, and a judge sentenced him to eight concurrent life sentences. Kemper has been denied parole multiple times.

Robert Berdella Jr., better known as The Butcher of Kansas City, tortured, raped and murdered at least six men between 1984 and 1987 in Kansas City, Mo. His habit of dismembering his victims’ bodies and keeping their body parts in his home echoes Gein’s post-mortem activities.

Berdella bound his first victim, 19-year-old Jerry Howell, to his bed for more than 24 hours, where he tortured him until Howell died. Then, Berdella mutilated and dismembered his body.

At least five more similar killings followed before a final victim—22-year-old Christopher Bryson—escaped, flagging down a police officer and leading authorities to Berdella’s home.

Authorities searched Berdella’s home and found evidence of his crimes, from drugs to photographs to human remains. He was arrested on April 2, 1988. Over several months, he pleaded guilty to six murders and received a life-in-prison sentence without possibility of parole.

Berdella died in prison on October 8, 1992, of a heart attack.

Gary Heidnik held multiple women captive in his Philadelphia row-house basement, torturing, raping and killing at least two before police uncovered what they called his “house of horrors.” He tortured his victims; some survivors reported deliberate mutilation after death in Heidnik’s basement, drawing a parallel to Gein’s postmortem desecration.

Heidnik was diagnosed in early adulthood with schizoid personality disorder, and authorities arrested him for a myriad of crimes—including rape and assault—before learning of his even more insidious acts: torturing women, then desecrating their bodies and storing their body parts.

In 1987, one woman convinced Heidnik to release her. Once freed, she called the police. During a March 1987 search of Heidnik’s home, in a self-dug pit in the basement, officers discovered three chained captives alive, as well as human remains.

Prosecutors charged Heidnik with multiple counts of kidnapping, rape and murder, and a jury ultimately convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, six counts of kidnapping, five counts of rape, four counts of aggravated assault and two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse in 1988.

A judge sentenced Heidnik to death and—after more than a decade of appeals and litigation—Pennsylvania executed him by lethal injection on July 6, 1999.

From 1978 to 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer, known as The Milwaukee Cannibal, killed 17 men and boys, many in his Milwaukee apartment.

Like Gein, Dahmer kept parts of his victims’ bodies—skulls, bones and preserved organs—and even planned to build a shrine to display skulls he had collected in a grotesque, altar-like setting.

In 1991, however, one of Dahmer’s victims escaped and led police to Dahmer’s home. An investigation revealed Dahmer sometimes lured victims by offering money for nude photos or promising alcohol, then drugged and strangled them. Then, he dismembered and preserved their body parts.

Sometimes, he ate them.

At his trial in 1992, Dahmer admitted to the killings but claimed he was insane. A Milwaukee jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of 15 counts of murder. A judge sentenced him to 15 consecutive life-in-prison terms without the possibility of parole. Years later, Dahmer received a 16th life-in-prison sentence for a separate 1978 killing in Ohio.

Dahmer was imprisoned for only two years at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. On November 28, 1994, he was beaten to death by another inmate.