The Gruesome True Story of Grave-Robbing Serial Killer Ed Gein

Charlie Hunnam Gets Naked, Murders Addison Rae in Bone-Chilling ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story Trailer’

Ed Gein’s crimes were the stuff nightmares are made of.

Not to mention the stuff you see in the scariest of horror movies, the small-town Wisconsin serial killer inspiring Pyscho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.

So, it was only a matter of time before Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan added Gein to the Monster canon. Following seasons on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, the latest installment of their crime anthology series premiered Oct. 3 on Netflix, starring Charlie Hunnam as the outwardly mild-manner farmer who killed at least two women but had far more skeletons in his closet.

Pretty literally, as he also made a practice of digging up corpses and fashioning household items from bones, skin and various body parts.

Murphy said in a Netflix interview that he thought of Hunnam for the part after seeing a “haunted” paparazzi photo of the Sons of Anarchy actor and thinking that there was “something very Ed about him.”

To which the British actor cracked, “I must have been having a bad day.”

Who was Ed Gein?

Edward Theodore Gein was born Aug. 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisc., the second son of George Gein and Augusta Gein—who, according to Harold Schechter‘s 1989 book Deviant, had been hoping for a girl.

What Ed and Augusta’s complicated relationship wrought inspired the character of mother’s best friend Norman Bates in Richard Bloch‘s 1959 novel Psycho, which Alfred Hitchcock immortalized in film a year later.

The Gein family moved to a remote 195-acre farm in Plainfield, a village of around 700 people, in 1914.

George was an abusive alcoholic and Augusta was overbearing, to say the least, making her sons swear that they would keep themselves “uncontaminated by women,” per Schechter. Ed and his older brother Henry Gein seemingly resigned themselves to bachelorhood, remaining on the farm after their father’s death in 1940.

Who were Ed Gein’s victims?

When Frank Worden returned to his family’s hardware store from a day of deer-hunting on Nov. 16, 1957, he was alarmed to find a trail of blood leading from the sales counter and out the back door, along with some .22-caliber shell casings—and his mother Bernice Worden, 58, was nowhere to be found.

There was a receipt for a sale of anti-freeze by the register, and Fred remembered that Ed had stopped by the day before to inquire about the product. He called the sheriff and deputies set out for the Gein farmhouse.

In a woodshed on the property, authorities discovered Bernice’s headless body hanging from the roof bars, as detailed in The Lost Tapes. Her heart was found in a plastic bag.

Did Ed Gein kill Evelyn Hartley?

While Netflix’s Monster posits that Ed murdered 14-year-old Evelyn Hartley (played by Addison Rae), he was never definitively connected to her October 1953 disappearance.

Evelyn was out babysitting and, when the teen didn’t call her parents as scheduled, her father went to check on her. He found an open basement window, according to the Spokesman-Review, and went inside to find the child asleep, but Evelyn was gone and there was blood spatter near the window and on the lawn outside.

Ed denied having anything to do with Evelyn’s disappearance and, per Schechter, passed two lie detector tests.

Adeline said that their last date was Feb. 6, 1955, when she turned down Ed’s marriage proposal. But, she explained, “not because there was anything wrong with him. It was something wrong with me. I guess I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to live up to what he expected of me.”

In addition to bonding over a shared love of reading, she said, “We discussed every murder we ever heard about. Eddie told how the murderer did wrong, what mistakes he had made. I thought it was interesting.”

But while it was initially reported that she was involved with Ed for 20 years, Adeline clarified to the Stevens Point Journal weeks later that they only dated “intermittently” for about seven months. She also stressed that she never went to his house.

What happened to Ed Gein?

Ed was charged with Bernice’s murder in November 1957 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was declared unfit to stand trial and committed to a state hospital.

In 1968, he was found fit to confer with counsel and was granted a bench trial. The defense argued that Ed didn’t mean to kill Bernice, that he was looking at one of the guns for sale at Worden Hardware and it went off by accident.

Judge Robert H. Gollmar found Ed guilty of murder, but a subsequent trial to determine sanity resulted in him being readmitted to the state hospital.

Ed died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984 at the age of 77.

He’s buried alongside his parents and brother at Plainview Cemetery, but there’s no tombstone marking his grave. People chipped away at it over the years until someone swiped the whole thing in 2000. Authorities found the stone but it’s in storage to make the spot less of a pilgrimage site. Souvenir seekers have been content to break off pieces of his mother’s tombstone instead.

And Hunnam in Monster: The Ed Gein Story is hardly the only star who’s tested his or her acting chops playing a serial killer. See more chilling onscreen transformations: