© 2008 William Ahearn
Even among serial killers, image is everything. Ed Gein – the psychotic behind the inspiration for Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho and then Alfred Hitchcock’s film – is sometimes referred to as America’s “most famous serial killer” and fans chipped souvenirs off his grave marker until it was stolen in 2000. (It has been since recovered.) This is the kind of idolatry usually associated with dead rock stars such as Jim Morrison of The Doors whose grave was constantly being defaced in a cemetery in Paris.
Beneath the bizarre hype of Ed Gein is the possibility that Gein wasn’t a serial killer. Technically he isn’t in that Gein is known to have killed only two people. He was suspected in the killing of his brother and several women who disappeared in the area surrounding his Plainfield, Wisconsin home but those allegations were never proven. Arrested and found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1957, in the days long before DNA, Gein gained his reputation for what he did with the bodies that he robbed from a cemetery.
More on Gein can be found here, here and here.
More on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” is here.
(Alfred Hitchcock also made a serial killer film in the 1972 “Frenzy.” Typical of Hitchcock, it’s the innocent-man-on-the-run trying to clear his name. In Hitchcock’s world, the innocent are easy to spot since they are constantly escaping from and eluding the police and breaking out of prisons.)
Ed Gein may be seen as a dark cloud foreshadowing the storm of serial killers looming just over the horizon. Soon the killers and the film producers would be working overtime.