Texas Chain Saw advertised itself under the tagline "who will survive, and what will be left of them?" which implied that at least some of Leatherface's victims would survive the film. And one does. Final Girl Sally escapes, covered in blood and short on sanity, but, y'know, alive.

Real life is far crueler than fiction. For the women Gein encountered, there was no nail-biting escape, no speedy exit in a truck while their attacker threw a well-choreographed chainsaw tantrum. Those who encountered Gein never lived to tell the tale.

Both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden met gruesome ends. Hogan was shot in the back of the head while closing up her bar and dragged back to Gein's farmhouse. There she was butchered, her face turned into a mask for Gein to wear, a gory detail that would later become part of Leatherface's costume. If anything, Worden's death was worse. Like Hogan, she was gunned down. Unlike Hogan, she was later found naked, hanging from the rafters of Gein's barn, her head cut off, her insides pulled out and her face stowed inside a bag.

As Harold Schechter implies in his book on Ed Gein, Deviant (reported here via Worth Books' summary version), some good at least came from Worden's death. Her son was a sheriff's deputy who had noticed Gein acting suspiciously around her store. The moment she went missing, he pointed the finger at Gein. Police went to investigate and walked into a nightmare.

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