The third season of Ryan Murphy’s “Monster” anthology series arrives on Netflix on Oct. 3. The eight-part miniseries, this time titled “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” focuses on the eponymous serial killer, who confessed to killing two women in the 1950s and was the culprit in a long list of additional depravities that shocked the nation and redefined notions of American violence.
Portrayed by Charlie Hunnam in the series, Ed Gein was born in La Crosse, Wis., in 1906. The son of an alcoholic named George and a religious zealot named Augusta, Gein was raised alongside his brother Henry in a disturbingly strict household. The family moved to a farm in Plainfield, Wis., when Ed and Henry were children, where Augusta hardly let them leave the property besides going to school. She read them the Bible and taught them to fear the outside world as a sinful and dangerous place.
George died in 1940, leaving Ed and Henry as the family’s breadwinners. Both started working jobs off of the farm, and Henry eventually married a woman from town. Ed, meanwhile, only grew more attached to his mother with age.
Four years later, Henry died in a brush fire on the family farm. Ed was attempting a controlled burn that got out of hand and Henry’s body was found after firefighters put out the flames. Heart failure was determined as the cause of death, as Henry’s body was not burned or injured, though some have since suspected intentionality on Ed’s behalf.
Shortly after Henry’s death, Augusta suffered two paralyzing strokes, intensifying her and Ed’s isolated, co-dependent relationship before her death in 1945.
Afterwards, Ed boarded up his mother’s rooms in the farmhouse, keeping them pristine as he began living in squalor. He took odd jobs around Plainfield, even babysitting local kids. In his isolation, though, he developed a fascination with pulp magazines and violent stories about Nazis and cannibals. He was particularly interested in Ilse Koch, the Nazi wife who made lampshades out of Holocaust victims’ skins.
Gein was relatively enigmatic for these years, until 1957, when he was suspected and subsequently arrested for kidnapping Bernice Worden: a local hardware store owner who disappeared shortly after Gein made a purchase at the store. When law enforcement searched Gein’s property, they found Worden’s body skinned and decapitated, hanging in Gein’s barn. In the house, they found her severed head and heart preserved in bags. Around the property, they discovered additional bones, body parts and human skins fastened into masks, furniture and other trinkets.
During questioning, Gein not only confessed to murdering Worden, but admitted that he had exhumed bodies from various nearby cemeteries. He led investigators to the desecrated gravesites, which corroborated the evidence.
In Gein’s house, investigators also found the skull and severed face of Mary Hogan: a tavern owner who had gone missing in 1954. Gein admitted to having shot her.
Gein said that he was motivated by the desire to make a full-body suit out of these women’s skins, planning to occupy them and become his mother reincarnated.
Other than Hogan and Worden, Gein’s subjects were all exhumed cadavers, though he is suspected to have been involved in the disappearance of additional women and girls from the area. Particularly, some suspect him of having kidnapped and killed 8-year-old Georgia Jean Weckler and 14-year-old Evelyn Grace Hartley, neither of whom have ever been found. Nevertheless, no substantial evidence has ever proved Gein’s culpability.
Gein’s trial was just as dramatic. One of the officers questioning Gein assaulted him during the interrogation, making his initial confessions inadmissible in court. When the trial eventually happened, Gein was tried with first degree murder and pled guilty by reason of insanity. He was arraigned, diagnosed with schizophrenia and found unfit for trial.
He spent the next 11 years in state hospitals for the criminally insane before finally going to trial in 1968. He was ultimately deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, but was forced to spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital before dying of respiratory failure at the age of 77 in 1984.
Before the trial, the Gein farmhouse was destroyed in a fire and his case became infamous. So much so that Alfred Hitchcock implemented elements of the story into “Psycho.” He based Norman Bates, the film’s murderous, oedipal antagonist on Gein, solidifying Gein as the new image of a serial killer in the American zeitgeist.
After the trial, Gein also served as the inspiration behind Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and since his death, has inspired Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs,” Garland Greene in “Con Air” and Dr. Oliver Thredson in Ryan Murphy’s very own “American Horror Story: Asylum.” Other films have been based on Gein’s story more directly, including 1974’s “Deranged,” 2001’s “Ed Gein,” 2007’s “Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield,” 2010’s “Ed Gein, The Musical,” 2003’s “House of 1000 Corpses” and 2005’s “The Devil’s Rejects.”
Evidently, “Monster” is far from popular culture’s first attempt at recreating Ed Gein’s story, but like Murphy’s previous “Monster” installments about Jeffery Dahmer and Eric and Lyle Menendez, the series will explore the man with unprecedented depth, intensity and (for better or worse) entertainment value.
Alongside Hunnam, the show also stars Laurie Metcalf as Augusta Gein, Lesley Manville as Bernice Worden, Vicky Krieps as Ilse Koch, Tom Hollander as Alfred Hitchcock, Olivia Williams as Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator Alma Reville, Joey Pollari as Norman Bates actor Anthony Perkins and Will Brill as Tobe Hooper.
The show also features Suzanna Son as Gein’s romantic partner Adeline Watkins, Robin Weigert as Adeline’s mother Enid, Charlie Hall as Worden’s son, Tyler Jacob Moore as the Sheriff that assaulted Gein, Mimi Kennedy as Perkins’ notorious psychologist Dr. Mildred Newman and Addison Rae as Evelyn Grace Hartley.
Evidently, the show spans more than just the events of Gein’s gristly crimes. It dissects the origins, impact and aftermath of this true American horror story.
variety.com
#Serial #Killer
