Netflix’s latest entry in its “Monster” anthology takes on Ed Gein, the Plainfield grave robber and murderer whose crimes inspired Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s a natural fit for a prestige true-crime series: a small town, a domineering mother, and a house of horrors that rewired American pop culture. But accuracy matters when you’re dramatizing real victims and real communities. Here, the series is a mixed bag – getting key pillars right while padding the narrative with invented scenes, speculative victims, and a finale that veers into surreal sentimentality.
The Confirmed Victims vs. the Show’s Expanded Body Count
Start with the foundation: only two homicides have been conclusively tied to Ed Gein – Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. The series acknowledges them, then widens the frame with unconfirmed killings, including babysitter Evelyn Hartley and two hunters who supposedly wandered into Gein’s shed. That latter scene leans hard into exploitation, staging a “Leatherface” moment that might be cathartic television but isn’t supported by the historical record. Rumors have long swirled around additional victims because of the ghastly trove found in Gein’s home, but rumor is not proof. Elevating whispers to plot points risks misleading viewers about what we actually know.
Bernice Worden: Romance Subplot vs. Evidence Trail
The show crafts a tragic, quasi-romantic arc between Gein and Bernice Worden, complete with a plan to move in together – then has the imagined relationship curdle when the voice of Gein’s mother labels Worden a “Jezebel.” Dramatic? Sure. Documented? No. The more prosaic, well-sourced story is damning enough: Gein lingering around Worden’s hardware store, acting suspicious, then a confrontation – possibly over theft – ending with Gein firing a rifle from the store’s rack. Investigators tied him to the scene through a sales slip listing his name as the last customer. No lingerie tag, no star-crossed courtship, just the paper trail you’d expect in a small town where everybody knows who came in last.
Mary Hogan: Not in the Bar
Mary Hogan’s murder also gets a cinematic makeover. Onscreen she’s shot in a barroom blaze; in life, Hogan (who managed a tavern) was killed in her home and taken to Gein’s property after the fact. It’s a small change in staging that creates a big shift in tone, turning a grim, private crime into a saloon spectacle. The series didn’t need the flourish; the reality is already tragic enough.
The Brother by the Brushfire
One area where the show tracks the record well is the death of Gein’s brother, Henry. He was found near a brushfire with bruising that raised eyebrows. Suspicion has always clung to the episode, especially given family dynamics and Gein’s status as the lesser-favored son. The series keeps the ambiguity intact – one of its better instincts.
Mother Augusta: The Blueprint for Horror
If there’s one part the series nails, it’s the gravitational pull of Augusta Gein. Her puritanical worldview – women as the source of male sin, absolute control over Eddie’s affections – warped her son’s psyche in ways the show captures with unsettling clarity. Augusta suffered two strokes, and contrary to the show’s visual trick of an impenetrable grave, there’s no evidence her burial site was somehow fortified against a grief-stricken exhumation attempt. Still, the broader truth stands: Gein’s fixation on his mother, and on recreating her, drives both his grave robbing and his choice of victims.
Motive, Not Myth: Why He Killed and What He Made
The series is at its best when it sticks to the macabre facts. Gein did not murder for sexual conquest in any conventional sense. He robbed graves, arranged corpses, and fashioned household objects from human remains in an effort to collapse the distance between himself and his dead mother – sometimes literally wearing the boundary away. The show’s visual inventory of bone and skin artifacts is horrifying precisely because it is rooted in the record.
The Arrest, the Farm, and the Polygraph Problem
Another useful correction to popular myth: Gein wasn’t caught in a daring farmhouse raid. He was spotted at a grocery store, arrested there, and only then did a search of his property reveal Worden’s body in the shed. The polygraph episode is also instructive. He “passed,” which says less about innocence than about the profound limits of lie detectors in cases involving mental illness and dissociation. When a subject doesn’t accept his own acts as reality, autonomic tells won’t map neatly onto truth.
Behavioral Science Is Real; The Bundy Crossover Isn’t
Yes, federal profilers interviewed Gein as part of the early effort to understand serial offenders – the real-world work later fictionalized in Mindhunter. That’s a valuable thread. But folding Gein into a Ted Bundy investigation crosses into fan-fiction. Likewise, the notion of a pen-pal pipeline with Richard Speck is tantalizing television with no evidentiary ballast. True crime already struggles with mythmaking; inventing killer-to-killer correspondence only feeds the problem.
Trials, Insanity, and the Vanishing Courtroom
For a series that prides itself on procedural texture, it’s strange how little time it spends on Gein’s legal odyssey. Viewers see him deemed unfit to stand trial and then – blink – he’s institutionalized. Missing are the years of hearings and the eventual bench findings (no jury) concluding he was not guilty by reason of insanity. Skipping this compresses the story into a single shrug, when in fact the system grappled for years with how to categorize a man who was both a murderer and profoundly ill.
“Harmless” in Hospital? Not Exactly
Late-in-life Gein is portrayed as an oddly likable ward mainstay – soft-spoken, gentle, almost pitiable. Accounts do describe him as quiet, compliant, and routine-bound. But he remained mentally disturbed and obsessed with morbid topics long after admission. To tilt the frame so far toward “kindly old Ed” is to undercut the lasting danger of his pathology and, frankly, the memory of his victims.
Adeline Watkins: A Relationship Rewritten
The show invests heavily in Adeline Watkins as a romantic figure, even a morbid muse. In reality, her public statements were inconsistent; later accounts pared their relationship down to acquaintanceship over several years and a brief, months-long period of romance. Most importantly, she said she never visited Gein’s home – the ultimate rebuttal to any insinuation that she marveled at his trophies. Turning Adeline into a wide-eyed witness to the horrors may heighten drama, but it does her (and the audience) no favors.
Ilse Koch and the Lure of the Big, Bad Influence
Centering Ilse Koch – the notorious “Bitch of Buchenwald” – as Gein’s singular inspiration is another flourish that overpromises. Gein was fascinated by grisly images emerging from World War II, and those images likely fed his fantasies. But there’s no solid basis for a Koch fixation as a primary driver. The horror of Gein’s world was home-grown: mother worship, isolation, and a mind splintered by grief and repression.
Pop Culture Shadows: Psycho, Texas Chain Saw, and the Perils of Back-Filling
Any Gein retelling lives in the shadow of Norman Bates and Leatherface. The series nods to those legacies, and fair enough – they’re part of why this story grips us. But the temptation to back-fill Gein’s life with scenes that resemble the movies he inspired is exactly backward. The films are stylized extrapolations; his crimes were smaller, sadder, and in some ways more disturbing because of it. When the show stages a “serial killer dance party” in the afterlife – with glowing goo and nightclub lighting – it stops being a history and becomes a haunted house.
Verdict: A Solid Skeleton, Too Much Costume
So did Netflix tell the real story – or just a scary one? Both. The spine is sturdy: the two confirmed murders, the mother fixation, the grave robbing, the grotesque artifacts, the interview with early profilers, the insanity findings. Around that skeleton, though, the show drapes a lot of costume – unverified victims, invented crossovers, embellished romances, and a third-act bid for sympathy that curdles the whole. My view: true crime doesn’t need neon to be nightmarish. In a case like Ed Gein’s, sticking to the record is not only more respectful to victims – it’s more frightening than any dance-floor denouement.
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Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, John developed a love for the great outdoors early on. With years of experience as a wilderness guide, he’s navigated rugged terrains and unpredictable weather patterns. John is also an avid hunter and fisherman who believes in sustainable living. His focus on practical survival skills, from building shelters to purifying water, reflects his passion for preparedness. When he’s not out in the wild, you can find him sharing his knowledge through writing, hoping to inspire others to embrace self-reliance.
