Warning: this article contains content some readers may find disturbing
The third season of Ryan Murphy’s true crime drama Monster will hit Netflix next month, following the story of “the Butcher of Plainfield” Ed Gein.
Charlie Hunnam will play the Wisconsin murderer, whose crimes horrified the small village of Plainfield in the late 1950s.
But do you know the real story of Ed Gein?
Little Eddie Gein
Gein was born into a fervently religious family. His mother was Lutheran, and would preach to her children about death, murder, and the inherent evil of women. She would punish Gein whenever he tried to make friends.
Despite this abuse, Gein idolised his mother and grieved for years following her death in 1945. Boarded up alone in his mother’s farmhouse, Gein became fascinated with Nazi atrocities, including those of war criminal Ilse Koch.
Koch allegedly had lampshades made from the skin of tattooed prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp.
It was around this time that Gein began a truly disturbing endeavour.
The crimes of Ed Gein
After his mother’s death, Gein began creating a ‘woman suit’ fashioned from the body parts of corpses he graverobbed – or killed himself.
The discovery was only made in 1957, after Gein was arrested for the murder of 58-year-old Bernice Worden. When authorities searched his property, they found the body of Worden along with numerous other body parts belonging to different women.
Gein confessed to the murder of Worden and another woman whose remains were found at his property, Mary Hogan.
Multiple other unsolved murders from the area were associated with Gein, but polygraph tests exonerated him. His psychiatrist also determined that Gein only targeted women who physically resembled his mother.
Learn more about Ed Gein on Morbid’s three-part series, start with part one here.
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