My strange hobby unwinding with serial killer documentary

I don't know whether there's something wrong with me but after having tea - usually something plain like salmon and a jacket spud, seeing as you're asking - and getting the kids to bed, I like to settle down on the lounge settee and watch a programme about a serial killer.

- Steve Canavan

I don't know why I do this. I mean I'm not a serial killer myself. I thought about becoming one, but my high school careers teacher advised a more secure job like teaching or accountancy (plus she pointed out you get a pension, proper holiday allowance and there's less equipment required, so I took her advice).

But I do, for reasons unknown, have a grizzly fascination with people who do awful things. I mean what causes a human to get warped enough to take someone else's life? It is terrifying, yet weirdly intriguing.

I mention this because I've just finished watching a drama on Netflix entitled Monster (they don't like to underplay things on Netflix), about a guy called Ed Gein.

Now I consider myself quite well versed when it comes to serial killers (well, everybody has a talent don't they?) but I had never previously heard of this fella, yet it turns out he is one of the most frightening individuals who's ever existed.

In a nutshell, and without wishing to put you off the corned beef hash you're eating tonight, he was a psychotic killer who as well as slaying people in brutal random fashion, had a penchant for stealing corpses from local graveyards (including his own mother's, which he then dressed and sat it in a chair in her bedroom) and fashioning various household keepsakes from their bodies (he made a chair, for instance, out of the skin of one victim). His story was the influence for films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hitchcock's Psycho.