Ed Gein - Serial Killer

The wikipedia entry on Ed Gein is thorough and fascinating. Reading over it, you can see the impact that Gein's killings had on popular culture. The serial killer genre begins with Psycho, which is deeply inspired by Gein's killings and his obsession with his mother. The pinnacle of the genre is Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris's book. While Hannibal Lecter is more original (though here it's said he based the character on murders he covered while a police beat reporter in the 1960s), the focus of the FBI's manhunt ("Buffalo Bill") is almost a verbatim replica of Ed Gein. For instance, Gein stated he wanted gender reassignment after his mother died. His murders involved keeping bodyparts as souvenirs, including vulvas and human skin that had been carefully removed from the cadavers and made into lampshades and masks. Gein was literally making a "woman suit," just like Buffalo Bill is doing throughout the novel and movie adaptation.

It's interesting to me because there have really been only a few high profile serial killings. One has to believe that serial killers are rare people. Humans may have great capacity for murder and torture, but oftentimes it seems both are purely done with utilitarian motives. They are done in the context of a robbery, over money, crimes of passion, for some profit motive, etc. But the serial killer is motivated by none of these things. The normal deterrences that are embedded in the mind and soul seem to not exist for this person. I've read by psychologists that family upbringing does not operate on child outcomes in a purely linear way. Rather, there is a minimum amount of care that must be required for a child. Below that, and really bad outcomes happen. Above that, and good ones happen. Going twice beyond that, though, and the improvements do not increase by two-fold. So you have to really screw up to screw them up, in other words, but if only moderately screw up, then the outcomes are thankfully much better. Because of the natural affection shared among kin, you can imagine easily why such deep levels of maltreatment are relatively rare. And with child welfare agencies being what they are in developed countries, even moreso. But in a population of 350 million, these outliers still show up in large absolute numbers, and when they do, they are entertainment. They are puzzling, rather - a curiosity. How can someone eat another person? Why would kill a string of women to collect and preserve their vulvas so he can wear them beneath his clothes? How can someone love their mother so much that they want to murder people, and that somehow in their mind helps them become their mother? It's all very strange and impossible to understand, and I think this is why the serial killer is increasingly portrayed as intelligent and calculating. Like the Zodiac murderer, for instance.

But it seems to all trace back to Gein. The Gein paradigm is the first serial killer where the pathological sickness motivating the murders is really grisly. There doesn't seem to be any hate or malice, even. It appears like utility maximizing behavior, which is what makes it the opposite of other types of murders. The Zodiac paradigm is different. There the person does seem full of rage, full of hate - brilliant, yet accusational towards society. You see this character in Se7en. Both are deeply disturbed, but the Gein paradigm is not an entertainer in the way that the Zodiac killer is.