In October, the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Monster will make its debut on the streaming platform. The grisly, often disturbing series places its focus on famous killers; the first season gave us the Jeffrey Dahmer story, season two dramatized the story of the Erik and Lyle Menendez, and now season three will be all about serial killer/body snatcher Ed Gein.
So shocking and brutal were Gein’s murders that multiple horror movies are said to have been inspired by his story. We’re talking about iconic films such as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
While those films were, of course, fictional versions, Ed Gein’s true story is the stuff nightmares are made of. He is also often referred to as The Butcher of Plainfield, sometimes The Plainfield Ghoul.
Gein was born in Wisconsin in 1906, the middle child of three sons born to Augusta Gein. Augusta was a religious fanatic, known to preach to her sons regularly about the evils of drinking and of promiscuous women. Gein was heavily influenced by his mother, with whom he became obsessed.
A shy boy, Gein had many odd mannerisms; he would often laugh randomly in school, and his mother discouraged him from making friends, so he had few social skills. His older brother Henry became worried about Ed’s extreme attachment to their mother, and began to speak poorly of her around Ed. When Henry was found dead, it was believed to have been from heart failure, but it was later said that he had bruises on his head. Perhaps Ed killed his brother, but it was never proven.
Augusta died in 1945, and Ed was grief-stricken, saying he had lost his “only friend and true love.” Afterwards, he remained on the family farm, and started to read lurid pulp novels and magazines.
In November of 1957, a hardware store owner named Bernice Worden disappeared, and it was reported that her truck was seen leaving the store that morning. When her son arrived to check on her, he found the cash register open, and there was blood on the floor. The last receipt of the day was for a gallon of antifreeze purchased by Ed Gein, and he was arrested that evening.
When police searched Gein’s property, they found Worden’s beheaded body, which was hung upside down in a shed, her ankles and wrists bound. She had been shot, gutted like a deer, and her body had been mutilated.
But that wasn’t all that was found at the property. Law enforcement officers also found human bones, a wastebasket and chairs covered with human skin, multiple skulls, some with the tops removed, bowls fashioned from human skulls, a corset that had been fashioned from a female torso, Worden’s head secured in a burlap bag, her heart stored in a plastic bag, female genitalia in a shoe box, and other assorted body parts. When questioned about the horrific finds, Gein claimed to have made dozens of visits to local graveyards, where he dug up recently buried bodies. Most of the women he exhumed were said to have resembled his mother, and he said he was trying to create a “woman suit” in the hopes of becoming his mother. He also admitted to having shot a 51-year-old woman named Mary Hogan, who had disappeared three years earlier; her head was found in his house.
Although it was only proven that he had killed two women, he was suspected of killing several others. Ultimately, he served the rest of his life in a mental hospital, where he later died at the age of 77.
Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) will play Gein in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and his mother Augusta will be portrayed by Laurie Metcalf (Scream 2).