“The precise time that Ed started committing his unusual crimes is unclear, although Ed himself was very forthcoming with information when interviewed by police. He regularly made trips to a local graveyard and would dig up the bodies of recently deceased women, after spotting them in his favorite newspaper section: the obituaries. His trips to the graveyard sometimes resulted in him removing an entire body, sometimes just assorted parts. After taking these parts to his farmhouse, he would turn into a rather ingenious artist. He turned skulls into soup bowls and upholstered several chairs in human skin. Several of the heads he shrunk (just like in those cannibal stories he liked to read) and then decorated his home with them. A stylish new belt was decorated with a string of female nipples. His bed itself had four skulls on the bedposts…and a shoebox full of vulvae underneath.
When recounting these crimes, Ed was asked whether he performed any sexual acts with these body parts. After all, his entire set of crimes was a Freudian nightmare. Ed was adamant and said he never did anything like that with the bodies since they “smelled too bad.” Somehow, that makes it sound worse and doctors still considered this crimes to be sexual in nature, whether or not the man had intercourse with the dead or not.
But something in poor Ed was left unsatisfied. After all, dead bodies were no fun, even after he got all “Martha Stewart” on them. He wanted fresh meat and developed a fixation on a bar owner named Mary Hogan. She was big and middle-aged, the kind of woman Ed liked. In 1954, the woman disappeared from her bar, never to be seen again. That is, of course, until her head was found in a paper bag in Ed’s farmhouse. With her preserved skin and the skin of his other acquisitions, Ed Gein constructed what would be his dream object: a suit made entirely out of female skin. This “woman suit” allowed Ed to live his ultimate fantasy of wanting to be a woman. Even more disturbing, Ed told police officers how he used to go outside of his farmhouse and dance in the moonlight, donning his woman suit and banging on a drum. When he said it, he told them like he was reciting a grocery list.
Let me repeat, so you get the image burned into your head. This guy liked to put on the skin of dead women and dance in the moonlight, banging a drum.”