This weekend, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” was at the top of Netflix’s “Top 10” list, exactly like two other movies in the series by Ryan Murphy. The story of Ed Gein, like the last two, including an Emmy-winning 2022 series about Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, features a lot of lies and exaggerations in its eight episodes.
What is real and what is made up? We know this much, mostly from old news stories and publications like “The Ed Gein File: A Psycho’s Confession and Case Documents,” edited and produced by John Borowski, and “Ed Gein: Psycho,” by Paul Anthony Woods.
Warning: This page has spoilers for “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” and talks about the terrible details that are shown.
How many people did Ed Gein kill in real life?
Ed Gein admitted to killing two people: Bernice Worden, 58, who owned a hardware shop, in 1957, and Mary Hogan, 54, who owned a pub, in 1954. The show shows both fatalities.
Even though he was asked about other murders, he never confessed to any more, and there was no proof to imply otherwise. Gein’s house had body pieces from several additional bodies in it. He said he had dug up the remains of nine to ten more women from cemeteries nearby. When detectives looked into the cemetery locations, they found that his statements were true.
Did Ed Gein help catch serial killer Ted Bundy?
The eighth and last episode of “Monster” is as self-referential as it gets. You shouldn’t take much of it seriously.
FBI agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler visit Gein when they are seeking to apprehend a serial killer that the audience already knows is Ted Bundy. This seems like a nod to the popular Netflix show “Mindhunter.” The two agents’ actors look a much like Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, who play roles based on the real-life agents in “Mindhunter.” The show even brings in Happy Anderson, who played Jerry Brudos, the “Shoe Fetish Slayer,” in “Mindhunter.”
The episode tries to make us believe that Gein inspired most of the serial killers of the time and that the agents were able to apprehend Bundy because Gein gave them information. The show changes things around enough that the spectator starts to wonder whether it’s all just a crazy episode in Gein’s head. But none of that really happened.
If that wasn’t enough of a hint from the show’s makers, the head nurse at the hospital where Gein is being held tells him to write a book because so many other people have changed his story. Like some of the freedoms listed below.
Did Ed Gein actually talk like he does in the program on Netflix?
Charlie Hunnum talked to Variety about how he learned to sound like Ed Gein. There aren’t many recordings of Gein’s voice, but Hunnum was able to get a 70-minute chat with him.
Did Ed Gein have a girlfriend, Adeline Watkins, who collaborated on some of his crimes?
Did Ed Gein have a girlfriend named Adeline Watkins who helped him with some of his crimes?
For a short period, Gein was friends with a woman named Adeline Watkins. However, her involvement in the TV show is very exaggerated and mostly made up.
The actual Watkins talked about their relationship in an interview with a Minneapolis newspaper. It was described as a two-decade romance, but she later said in another interview that the specifics were exaggerated. According to “Ed Gein: Psycho,” she said they both loved reading. Gein had become interested in tribal cultural customs around the world, which he read about in geography publications.
The opening episode of the miniseries shows Adeline Watkins, however she said in real life that she never had a long-term relationship with Gein. She said she didn’t know him well until 1954, which was a long time after the first episode.
She said they were close for around seven months, but only sometimes. She said they went to the movies together and that she had never been to his residence. Gein never told anyone anything else about Watkins.
Watkins tells Gein about Ilse Koch, a real-life Holocaust war criminal, in the performance. Koch and Gein are both known for making a lampshade out of human flesh. However, it isn’t obvious that Gein had followed her narrative closely, and Watkins would not have been the one to tell him about it.
In the show, the made-up character Watkins is Gein’s confidant and even tells him to go down certain paths for his perversion.
Did Ed Gein model his actions after Holocaust war criminal Ilse Koch?
Gein could have easily known about Koch’s war crimes in Nazi Germany, but there is no evidence that he admired her or copied her behavior like the show version of Gein does.
In a subsequent edition of the show, Koch and Gein talk on the radio, even though they are both imprisoned in different parts of the world. The conversation turns out to be a sign of schizophrenia. Vicky Krieps, a Luxembourg actress who is probably best known to American audiences for her work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture candidate “Phantom Thread,” plays Koch. Lesley Manville, another actress from that movie, plays Bernice Worden, one of Gein’s victims.
Did Ed Gein have a love affair with Bernice Worden before killing her?
The show makes a big leap by saying that Gein and Bernice Worden, the owner and manager of a hardware store, are in a romantic relationship. Gein, the real person, told police that he wanted to own her, but mostly because she looked like his mother, which he always said was true for his two surviving victims.
The show shows Gein sleeping with Worden and then turning her down right before he shoots her in the hardware store with a revolver he took off the shelf and a shell casing he had in his pocket. The way the murder happened is similar to what happens in real life, however investigators are suspicious of Gein on the program because they uncover a gift tag from Worden to “Eddie.” Gein was found in real life because he left a receipt for antifreeze, which was the last thing Worden sold in her store.
While he was at Central State Hospital after committing his murders, Gein told physicians that he had never had sex, which was in line with the rigorous religious code his mother taught him before she died.
The gruesome finding of Worden’s headless body in Gein’s shed is quite similar to what really happened and even looks almost exactly how the body did in crime scene photos.
Did Ed Gein kill his brother, Henry?
In the first episode of “Monster,” Gein kills his 43-year-old older brother Henry because Henry wanted to get away from their controlling mother, Augusta. Gein hits Henry with a piece of wood on the show, then drags his body into the woods and sets a brush fire to make it look like Henry died.
The genuine brush fire happened in the spring, not the winter as shown on the show. Fires like that happened all the time. Henry’s body had major burns on it, and the official cause of death was heart failure caused by lack of oxygen. Even though his body had some marks that could have been wounds, officials at the time said there was no foul play.
Gein never admitted to killing his brother, but he did admit to killing two women. When others found out about those crimes, they started to think that Ed might have had something to do with Henry’s death.
Did Ed Gein kill a nurse?
In the seventh episode of the show, there is a scene where Ed Gein kills a nurse in the hospital where he is being held. Later in the show, it becomes clear that this was a psychotic episode. Gein never did anything like that in real life and was seen as a good patient.
He was transported to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Waupun, which is now the Dodge Correctional Institution. Later, he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. He passed away in 1984 at the age of 77 from lung cancer-related respiratory failure.
Did Ed Gein murder nanny Evelyn Hartley?
In the third episode, Gein stalks and then kidnaps babysitter Evelyn Hartley, who seems to be upset that she took his job of watching two young kids.
The show made up the part that culminates with her kidnapping and murder.
In real life In 1954, Hartley did go missing from La Crosse County, which is more than two hours away from Gein’s house in Waushara County. When Gein’s crimes were discovered in 1957, he was asked about Hartley because he had been to see family in La Crosse around the time she went missing. He denied having anything to do with her disappearance. He definitely didn’t run into her because she was watching over a family that Gein knew.
Her case is still open, however a tape found in 2004 named some suspected attackers, and Gein was cleared of any connection in 1957.
Did Ed Gein really watch kids?
Yes. The TV show makes Gein seem like such an odd person that people in the town don’t want to sit next to him at the diner, however when he was younger, people in the town found him to be strange but trustworthy. He took odd jobs around town, and “Ed Gein: Psycho” says he would even supervise neighborhood kids for a short period when their parents had to run an errand.
There is no proof that Gein drove kids to his house and then scared them with the bodies he kept there, as the show said.
Did Ed Gein use human skulls to manufacture a bowl?
In episode 2, Gein eats from a dish that is created out of a human skull. That is one of the things Gein constructed with the bones he dug up from cemeteries nearby.
Did Ed Gein wear bits of bodies he dug up from graves?
Yes, Gein admitted to wearing pieces of the bodies he had torn off of those he dug up. Gein is said to have told police that his complicated relationship with his mother made him want to become a lady or at least more like one. Gein went to his mother’s grave many times before deciding to dig up some bodies so he could wear their skin and become more like a lady.
Did Ed Gein dig up his mother’s remains after she was buried?
Episode 2 suggests that one of the bodies Gein carried back to the house was his own mother, Augusta. However, the Gein character later says that it wasn’t her mother’s real body. He did visit her grave often, but she was not one of the dead he dug up.
In the show, Adeline is brought home to “meet” his mother, but Watkins, who is genuine, said in an interview that she never stepped inside his home and that their relationship was not as long-lasting as the show says.
In Plainfield, it wouldn’t have been a secret that Augusta Gein had died, but Ed’s character in the program can trick others into thinking she is still alive. This makes Gein seem more like Norman Bates from the movie “Psycho.”
Did Ed Gein kill Mary Hogan, the proprietor of the tavern?
Gein was caught because Bernice Worden went missing and her body was found on his property, although she was not his first victim.
Gein admitted to killing Mary Hogan, a 51-year-old tavern owner who had been missing for three years, during his interrogation about Worden’s death and all the horrible things found in his home. Gein’s house had Hogan’s skull and some skin in it.
Gein wasn’t a suspect in Hogan’s disappearance, but the show makes it seem like he was involved in the search for her. Even though he admitted to killing her, he was never put on trial for it.
Did Alfred Hitchcock cast Anthony Perkins in “Psycho” because he was “like Ed Gein”?
In episode 3, Alfred Hitchcock tells Anthony Perkins that he had to play Norman Bates in “Psycho” because he was “like him,” which means he was like Ed Gein. Hitchcock talks about a secret that Perkins keeps from everyone.
This is presumably a reference to Perkins’ status as a closeted gay man, something Hitchcock likely knew, and not because Perkins had homicidal tendencies. The part characterized Perkins for better or worse, affecting his career and making it hard to cast him as anything but a villain after that.
Did Ed Gein kill two hunters who wandered onto his property?
Once Gein’s crimes came to light, he was questioned about a number of additional disappearances in the region. That included a pair of hunters named Victor Travis and Raymond Burgess; on the show, Gein hunts them down and murders them with a chainsaw.
There is no evidence Gein had anything to do with their disappearance, nor does it fit his MO. Gein also used knives and not a chainsaw for his actual crimes; the introduction of the chainsaw in Texas Chain Saw Massacre was purely an invention for the film.
The hunters’ disappearances remains a mystery, though is it possible one was hired to kill the other?
Was Ed Gein a cannibal?
The show tells a different story, but the real-life Gein repeatedly denied having sex with corpses, referring to the smell as a deterrent.
Did Ed Gein put vulvas in a box in his house?
That detail is true.
Gein denied he had eaten human flesh, and there was no evidence that he had. The show implies he at least flirted with the idea and that he distributed venison to area residents, leaving some to question if he was actually giving away human flesh. There is no indication that’s what was happening.
Was there an auction for Ed Gein’s belongings after he was arrested?
Yes, several items from Gein’s home were sold after his crimes were unearthed. His farmhouse was set ablaze and ruined, but his 1949 Ford was purchased for $760 dollars and taken around the area as an exhbition item, including a charge for admission. It was subsequently banned from fairs because of its grisly origin.