murders identified the victims as random and Gumb as depressed following the act.
Gumb also had a record of assaults on gay men. Gumb had an affair with Raspail and later killed the man with whom Raspail replaced him. This was the first victim in whose throat Gumb inserted a butterfly cocoon. Gumb adopted the cocoon as a symbol because of his fascination with the change from caterpillar to beautiful butterfly. Raspail said of Gumb, who did not even like to touch his own genitals, that he was "not really gay, it was just something he picked up in jail. He's not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill, and so angry" (Harris 172).
When Gumb acquired an inheritance he quit his regular job and began to abduct women and "hunt" them in the dark in his rambling basement while wearing infra-red glasses and shooting them when they were sufficiently terrified. He had applied at several institutions for consideration for transsexual surgery but had been rejected both for lying and because his psychological tests did not show him to be a true transsexual. Gumb then began to kill women for their skins and was engaged in the process of carefully tanning their hides and sewing a perfect woman's 'suit' for himself. Despite the sadism of his earlier hunting of women, which he still enjoyed, Gumb decided that killing women in this way was "childish and a waste" (Harris 302). Gumb preferred to ignore the women whose skins he would use and treated them as objects -- referring to his next victim as "it' and to the murder as the "harvesting" of the hide. Gumb frequently watched an old film of his mother in a beauty contest
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