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WHEN
WE SNAP,
WE
SNAP!
Ed
Gein: The extremity of his crimes has been the
inspiration for a number of movies, including Alfred
Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho and 1991's Silence of the Lambs
and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. Known as The Butcher of
Plainfield, Gein gained
notoriety in the 1950s for murdering at least two women and for
committing grisly, fetishistic acts on corpses he had stolen from
graves. In November 1957 the Plainfield, Wisconsin police, investigating the
murder of Bernice Worden, paid a visit to Gein's farm, where he
lived alone. Inside the house they found an array of body parts, the
disemboweled corpse of a woman and general cannibalistic squalor.
Gein was taken into custody and admitted to killing Worden. He also
confessed to the 1954 murder of Mary Hogan, but explained that the
rest of the corpses around the farm (more than a dozen, all female)
had come from robbing local graves. Gein was said to have
made many crafts, (like pillows and lamp covers made of
human skin) to which were sold and never recovered. (Sweet Dreams) He also
enjoyed wearing female body parts and dancing in the Wisconsin
moonlight. Deemed insane (you
think?) by the court, Gein was given a life sentence of
confinement to the Waupan State Hospital. In 1968 he was tried for the
murder of Bernice Worden and found guilty, but still deemed
criminally insane and sent back to the state hospital, where he died
of cancer in 1984.
Sidenote: I actually exchanged greetings with
Ed in 1982 while he swept a hallway at the State Hospital in Waupan,
Wisconsin in 1983. I was visiting with
a famous Milwaukee Psychiatrist. I had no idea who
he was until we had left and were driving home. He seemed like
a sweet old man, but he was most likely thinking about making a coat
of my skin.
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Jeffrey
Dahmer:
(May 21, 1960 - November 28, 1994) was an American serial
killer from
Milwaukee
who killed at least 17 men between 1978 and 1991 (the majority of
which occurred in 1991). His name has since become almost a synonym
for serial killer.
Most of his
victims were young, homosexual black men whom Dahmer subjected to
sexual assaults prior to murdering. He achieved notoriety after his
arrest following the discovery of his victims' decaying bodies in
acid vats in his apartment, including severed heads in his
refrigerator, an altar of candles, and human skulls. Accusations
soon surfaced that Dahmer had also practiced necrophilia and
cannibalism.
The explanation offered by Dahmer himself for his behavior
was that he was attempting to remove the free will from his victims
so that they would stay with him. Dahmer had experimented with
removing sections of skull and pouring various chemicals into the
brain cavity to create an "automaton", compliant to his wishes and
acquiescent to his sexual desires, by means of lobotomy and the
like. On
July
22, 1991,
with handcuffs still attached to one wrist, another man, Tracy
Edwards, was able to successfully escape from Dahmer's apartment and
flag down a police squad car. Police were led back to Dahmer's
apartment, where the remains of eleven victims were found. After
being charged with fifteen counts of murder he entered a plea of
guilty but insane. On February
17, 1992,
a court sentenced Dahmer to fifteen consecutive life sentences which
required a minimum of 936 years imprisonment.
He was clubbed
to death by a deranged fellow inmate named Christopher Scarver in
Portage,
Wisconsin
at the Columbia Correctional Institute gymnasium. Scarver stated
that he was the "son of God," and was acting out his "father's"
commands to kill Dahmer and another inmate on Dahmer's work detail.
Dahmer was born
to a fundamentalist father in
Milwaukee.
Some feel that repressed homosexuality contributed to his hatred of
homosexuals, including
himself.
When
asked where he thought he went wrong, Dahmer said: "I should have gone to college and
gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that's what I
should have done."
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SYBIL: Sybil
was born in Wisconsin in the early 1920s. At the age of 37, she
was treated by a psychiatrist, Dr Cornelia Wilbur, who came to
believe that her patient was a multiple with 16 'alter'
personalities. Under hypnosis Sybil had recovered lost memories of a
traumatic childhood. Dr Wilbur believed that Sybil's mental illness
had been caused by these extreme traumas she had experienced in
youth. As a way of coping with the distress, Sybil had split-off,
creating 'alter' personalities at moments of crisis in her life.
These 'alters' would experience the pain instead of Sybil. It was a
compelling theory, that used childhood abuse to explain multiple
personalities. A book was published in the 70's bringing much
publicity to this case which would also spawn a
movie.
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Crazy Craig: Abnormally obsessed with Wisconsin, Craig created a site
called Cheesehead University. He used it as a venue for all
his bantor and rantings. The site would save him from full
blown dimensia and hide is true mental
instability.
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