Inside the Shocking Crimes of Ed Gein, The Butcher of Plainfield Who Inspired a Generation of Horror

Ed Gein’s grotesque crimes have haunted pop culture for decades, influencing some of cinema’s most repellent characters.

The Wisconsin grave robber and killer is the chilling true inspiration behind Psycho’s Norman Bates, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill. His life has been brought back to life again for Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest season of Monster, with Charlie Hunnam playing the legendary killer.

The show, which launched on October 3, on Netflix, explores Gein’s horrific existence, his heinous crimes, and his bizarre mother-son relationship that drove him to psychological ruin. Hunnam, famous for playing tough guys on Sons of Anarchy and Pacific Rim, plays the kindly, unassuming farmer who, in secret, led a life of murder and grave-robbing that stunned America during the 1950s. Murphy told a Netflix interview he was motivated to cast Hunnam based on seeing a “haunted” paparazzi snapshot of the actor, adding, “There was something very Ed about him.” Hunnam responded with a joke, saying, “I must have been having a bad day.”

Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27, 1906, to George and Augusta Gein in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His father was a violent alcoholic, and his mother was a controlling religious zealot who considered women to be wicked and evil. Their tense relationship became the basis of Ed’s fascination with his mother, one that would eventually be immortalized in Psycho. The family relocated to a remote 195-acre farm in Plainfield in 1914, where Ed and his brother Henry spent their boyhood under Augusta’s dominating personality. She made them give up women and stay “pure.”

In 1940, following their father’s passing, Ed and Henry stayed with their mother. But in 1944, disaster befell them when Henry perished in a suspicious fire, an incident some have speculated for decades about possibly not being an accident. Shortly afterward, Augusta suffered a stroke and passed away in 1945, leaving Ed heartbroken and utterly alone. As described by crime writer Harold Schechter, “Ed was a very extreme pathological form of what used to be called a mama’s boy. Whenever he talked about her after his arrest, he cried his eyes out.”

For almost ten years, Ed lived isolated on the farm alone, his fall into insanity deeper. He started exhuming dead bodies from city cemeteries, gathering body parts and creating grotesque domestic items from corpses. When authorities later raided his house, they found chairs upholstered with human skin, skulls being used as bowls, and even masks created from dead people’s faces.

The terror was uncovered on November 16, 1957. Frank Worden, having just returned from a hunting excursion, discovered that his family’s hardware store had been in chaos. His mother, Bernice Worden, was missing, and bloodstains led from the back door. Detectives discovered a receipt for antifreeze, and Frank remembered Ed Gein inquiring about it the previous day. When officers reached Gein’s farmhouse, they found something that would stun the country: Bernice’s headless body suspended upside down in a shed, her heart sitting in a plastic bag.

Ed was arrested at a neighbor’s house that evening. A search turned up even more atrocities, the head of missing tavern owner Mary Hogan, as well as other ghastly human remains. Neighbors remembered Ed making light of having Mary “down at his place,” but no one ever seriously considered the claims.

In his later confession, Gein said he had murdered both women and engaged in grave-robbing, but not his mother’s body. He said he used obituaries to find recent graves and dug up corpses for body parts. When asked about the female body parts in his house, he said unconvincingly, “I wouldn’t enjoy it or anything.”

Although Netflix’s Monster suggests that Gein killed 14-year-old Evelyn Hartley, played by Addison Rae, he was never conclusively accused of her vanishing. Evelyn disappeared in October of 1953 when she was babysitting, leaving a trail of a fight and blood near an open window. Although Gein was suspected, he protested innocence and even passed two lie detector tests.

Another peculiar character in Gein’s life was Adeline Watkins, played by Suzanna Son in the series. When he was arrested, she appeared as his ex-girlfriend. Adeline said Gein was “good and kind and sweet” and that she rejected a marriage proposal from him in 1955 because she feared she could not live up to his expectations. The two shared a love of books and talked about murders they read about in the papers, but she later explained that they only dated sporadically and that she never went to his home.

In November 1957, Ed Gein was arrested for murdering Bernice Worden and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Found unfit for trial, he was sent to a state hospital. Eleven years later, he was found competent to stand trial, where his defense claimed that Bernice’s death was an accident. The judge convicted him of murder, but a later sanity hearing led to his return to the Mendota Mental Health Institute, where he stayed until his 1984 death at age 77.

Ed Gein was interred next to his family at Plainfield Cemetery, but his headstone was continually desecrated and ultimately stolen in 2000. The authorities soon recovered it, locking it away to discourage ghoulish souvenir collectors. Now, only shards of his mother’s tombstone are left, eroded by those that remain fixated on the tale of Plainfield’s darkest inhabitant.

Although Gein’s documented number of confirmed victims was limited relative to other serial killers, the raw horror of his crimes and the psychological undertones surrounding them have secured his place in American horror iconography. His legend remains fascinating and repugnant to audiences today, a grim reminder that reality is often more horrifying than fiction.