Was Buffalo Bill Based on Ed Gein? The Real Killers Behind Him

Partly. Buffalo Bill, the killer in Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and the 1991 film, is built from three real men. John Douglas, the retired FBI profiler whose classes Harris sat in on, told Salon in 1999 that Buffalo Bill "is a composite of three killers who Harris learned about in a lecture." Ed Gein gave the character his skin suit. Ted Bundy gave him the fake cast on his arm. Gary Heidnik gave him the pit in the basement.

Gein's part is the one people remember, and it is also the part most often told wrong. Below is what the court records and news reports say about Gein, what Harris took from him, and what the Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story made up. If you came for the merch, our Ed Gein shirts, masks, and sweaters are in the Ed Gein collection.

What Buffalo Bill took from each of the three killers

The three real killers behind Buffalo Bill

Real killer	What Buffalo Bill took	What the courts decided
Ed Gein	A suit and masks made from human skin	Found guilty of one murder in 1968, then found not guilty by reason of insanity
Ted Bundy	A fake cast, used to get women to help him	Convicted of murder in Florida and executed January 24, 1989
Gary Heidnik	Women held captive in a pit in his basement	Convicted of two murders in 1988 and executed July 6, 1999

Douglas described the Bundy part in the same Salon interview: "His modus operandi was that he used a phony cast on his arm. He'd wait outside libraries. When the right victim came by, he'd drop the books." In the film, Buffalo Bill wears a cast and asks Catherine Martin to help him lift a couch into his van. Our Ted Bundy article covers his case in full.

Heidnik held six women in a pit he dug in the basement floor of his Philadelphia house in 1986 and 1987. Two of them died. He was convicted on July 1, 1988, of two counts of first-degree murder, along with kidnapping and rape counts, and Pennsylvania executed him by lethal injection on July 6, 1999. CNN, writing about the case in 2023, said Buffalo Bill "was partly based on him." In the film, Buffalo Bill keeps Catherine Martin in a pit in his basement and calls down to her, "It rubs the lotion on its skin." Older versions of this page quoted the line as "puts the lotion," which is not what Ted Levine says.

Who Ed Gein was

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, the younger son of George and Augusta Gein. The family later moved to a farm outside Plainfield, a small town in the middle of the state. According to a study of Gein’s life by psychology students at Radford University in Virginia, George was "an abusive alcoholic" who beat both boys, and Augusta was "a fanatically religious woman" who supported the family through a grocery business.

George died in 1940. On May 16, 1944, Ed's older brother Henry died while burning brush on the property. The county coroner listed asphyxiation as the cause. Gein's biographer Harold Schechter later reported that Henry had bruises on his head, but police dismissed foul play and no autopsy was done. Gein was never charged in his brother's death.

Augusta had a stroke not long after Henry died, and she died on December 29, 1945, at 67. Gein stayed on the farm alone. He closed off her rooms and left them as they were, while the rest of the house filled with junk.

What police found at the farm in November 1957

On the morning of November 16, 1957, Bernice Worden, 58, disappeared from the hardware store she ran in Plainfield. The last sales slip she wrote that morning was for a gallon of antifreeze that Gein had said he would come back to buy. Police arrested him that evening at a grocery store in West Plainfield.

At the farm, a sheriff's deputy found Worden's body in a shed, hung upside down and "dressed out like a deer." She had been shot with a .22 caliber rifle. Inside the house, investigators found human skulls on the bedposts, bowls made from skulls, chairs covered in human skin, masks made from the skin of women's faces, leggings made from leg skin, a vest made from a woman's torso, and a lampshade made from the skin of a face. Judge Robert H. Gollmar, who later tried the case, listed the items in his 1981 book about it.

Gein told investigators that between 1947 and 1952 he had made as many as 40 night visits to three local cemeteries, and he admitted to taking remains from nine graves. He also confessed to shooting Mary Hogan, 51, who ran a tavern and had been missing since December 8, 1954. Her skull was found in the house.

Time magazine astutely attributes one more piece of the fictional killer's world to Gein: the house. "Virtually every messy, creepy, isolated killer's home one sees today on TV and in the movies takes as its model the run-down, detritus-filled Wisconsin farmhouse," Ben Cosgrove wrote for Time in 2014. The real farmhouse is gone. It burned down on March 20, 1958, ten days before Gein's belongings were due to be auctioned.

What the court decided

Gein was arraigned on November 21, 1957, on one count of first-degree murder, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia, and he was found unfit to stand trial. He was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupun.

By 1968 he was judged competent. His trial opened on November 7, 1968, before Gollmar, with no jury at the defense's request. On November 14, Gollmar found him guilty of the first-degree murder of Bernice Worden, the Capital Times of Madison reported that day. A second hearing dealt with his sanity, and Gollmar then found him not guilty by reason of insanity and sent him back to the state hospital. When Gollmar died in 1987, the Associated Press called Worden "the only person Mr. Gein was convicted of killing."

Gein was never tried for Mary Hogan's death. Gollmar later wrote that the state tried him for only one murder because of the cost, even though he had admitted killing Hogan. Police also suspected him in the 1952 disappearance of two deer hunters, Victor Travis and Raymond Burgess, but he was never charged with it.

Gein died of respiratory failure caused by lung cancer on July 26, 1984, at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. He was 77. People search for Ed Gein's last meal, but he was never executed. Our list of serial killers' last meals has a section on Gein.

Psycho, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill

The Encyclopedia Britannica’s list of films inspired by Gein names three: Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Psycho came first, as a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch. In a 1984 interview, Bloch said it was not Gein himself or the crimes that gave him the idea, the Associated Press reported. It was the situation: a small town where a man had killed people without anyone suspecting him. Hitchcock's film followed in 1960. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre took the mask of human skin and the farmhouse full of bones, and we cover how much more came from Gein in the true story behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Buffalo Bill borrows the most literal piece: a man making clothing from women's skin. The rest of the character is not Gein. Gein's two known victims were women in their 50s from his own town, Worden and Hogan. Buffalo Bill kidnaps young women he does not know, from several states, and keeps them alive in a pit before he kills them. None of that happened in Plainfield.

What Monster: The Ed Gein Story made up

Netflix released Monster: The Ed Gein Story on October 3, 2025, as the third season of Ryan Murphy's Monster series, with Charlie Hunnam as Gein. The show keeps coming back to the films on this page, with scenes of Hitchcock making Psycho and characters based on Gein appearing to other people.

Several of its biggest plot points have no record behind them. Brian Tallerico, reviewing it for RogerEbert.com the day it came out, wrote that the show "purports with very little basis in fact" that a friend named Adeline Watkins got Gein interested in Ilse Koch, the wife of a Nazi concentration camp commandant. He also noted that "the show imagines a sexual encounter" between Gein and Bernice Worden. If the series sent you here, the dates and court results in this article come from news reports and the judge's own account, not from the show.

Books about the case

Judge Gollmar published Edward Gein: America's Most Bizarre Murderer in 1981, a year before he retired from the bench. The biography most later accounts draw on is Harold Schechter's Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original "Psycho," first published in 1989. If you want the full story, here is this book on Amazon.

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Buffalo Bill and Ed Gein FAQ

Was Buffalo Bill based on Ed Gein?

Partly. Thomas Harris took the skin suit from Gein. The fake cast came from Ted Bundy, and the basement pit came from Gary Heidnik, according to FBI profiler John Douglas.

How many people did Ed Gein kill?

A court found him guilty of one murder, Bernice Worden's, in 1968. He confessed to shooting Mary Hogan in 1954 but was never tried for it. He was suspected in other disappearances and never charged.

Was Ed Gein executed?

No. After the 1968 trial he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent the rest of his life in state mental hospitals and died at Mendota Mental Health Institute on July 26, 1984, at 77.

Is Leatherface based on Ed Gein?

Partly. The Encyclopedia Britannica lists The Texas Chain Saw Massacre among the films inspired by Gein. The skin mask and the farmhouse of bones come from his case. The chainsaw and the family of killers are not in the case record.

Browse the full Ed Gein collection, or read about serial killer movies based on true stories.

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Sources

• Bowman, David. "Profiler." Interview with John Douglas. Salon, July 8, 1999. salon.com.
• Karimi, Faith. "His gruesome crimes were a basis for 'Silence of the Lambs.' The sister of one of his victims has mixed feelings about his execution." CNN, March 19, 2023. cnn.com.
• Commonwealth v. Heidnik, 526 Pa. 458 (Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 1991). law.justia.com.
• Florida Department of Corrections execution record for Theodore Bundy, executed January 24, 1989, reproduced by the Clark County Prosecuting Attorney. clarkprosecutor.org.
• Associated Press. "Judge Robert H. Gollmar, 84; Presided Over 'Psycho' Trial." The New York Times, October 22, 1987. nytimes.com.
• "Ed Gein Found Guilty of 1957 Murder in Plainfield." The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), November 14, 1968, page 2.
• Gollmar, Robert H. Edward Gein: America's Most Bizarre Murderer. 1981. The judge's account of the case, including the items found in the house.
• Schechter, Harold. Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original "Psycho." Pocket Books, 1989.
• Cosgrove, Ben. "Ed Gein: Portrait of America's Original 'Psycho Killer.'" Time, March 31, 2014. web.archive.org.
• "Ed Gein." Encyclopedia Britannica, archived December 22, 2024. web.archive.org.
• Jenkins, Brandie, and others. "Edward Theodore Gein." Radford University Department of Psychology, 2005. radford.edu.
• Tallerico, Brian. "Monster: The Ed Gein Story." RogerEbert.com, October 3, 2025. rogerebert.com.
• "Ed Gein." Wikipedia, read September 28, 2026, for the dates of Henry and Augusta Gein's deaths, the farmhouse fire, and the gravestone theft, each cited there to contemporary newspapers and to Schechter and Gollmar. wikipedia.org.