Law&Crime Sidebar - The Dark Secrets of Ed Gein Netflix Didn’t Show

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

When Nicholas Yates told police his mother vanished, it sounded like a missing person case. But when detectives uncovered bones in a backyard burn pit — a murder investigation began. Law&Crime's Jesse Weber breaks down the chilling affidavit, what investigators say they found in the yard, and what Yates allegedly confessed to police — with Indiana criminal defense attorney Andrew Baldwin.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:If you’re ever injured in an accident, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. You can submit a claim in 8 clicks or less without having to leave your couch. To start your claim, visit: https://forthepeople.com/LCSidebarHOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger, Christina O'Shea, Alex Ciccarone, & Jay CruzScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You're working too fast. I'm sorry, mother. Just go slow and steady. Take your time, sweet boy. Netflix just dropped Monster, the Ed Gein's story. It's the latest series from Ryan Murphy about the real-life killer who inspired Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Here's the question. How much of it is true, though? How much of it is Hollywood horror? We're going to talk with an expert who has written the book on Ed Gein, literally, to separate fact from fiction. Let's talk about it right now. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Webber. So Netflix has dropped another bingeable series, Monster, the Ed Gein's story.

It is the third chapter in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's true crime anthology that previously reimagined Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. The series was already a hit. This one is now a hit, too. Because this time, the series turns the gaze towards one of America's most disturbing real-life figures, Ed Gein, the quiet Wisconsin farmer whose crimes in the 1950s redefined horror forever. Now here's the trailer for the series, which, if you don't know, is number one on Netflix

chart right here in the United States. What shocks you most about him? How did he do it? What was his childhood life? Now... I'd like to show you something worse. You're working too fast. I'm sorry, Mother.

Just go slow and steady. Take your time, sweet boy. So who is Ed Gein? Ed Gein is the man who inspired Psychos Norman Bates, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leather Face, the Silence of the Lamb's Buffalo Bill, but how much of what Netflix shows is real? How accurate is it? And how much is pure Hollywood, Hollywood nightmare fuel? We're going to get into that.

We're going to get into that with an expert, a true crime author who has written books about this guy. Okay, but first let me back up a little bit, rewind, let's talk about it. Let's go to Plainfield, Wisconsin. Now, I want you to picture a lonely farm on the outskirts of a small, frozen Midwestern town in the late 1940s. The neighbors know Ed Gein as this quiet, polite handyman. Maybe a little odd. Sometimes babysits for local families, but behind that mild manner exterior was a man spiraling into madness. Ed Gein was born in August of 1906 to George and Augusta Gein, a pair of deeply religious parents who raised Ed and his brother Henry under their mother's iron rule.

This is according to a 1957 article in Time magazine. Augusta was a devout fanatical woman who taught her boys that women were sinful, in particular telling them that something similar to the Bible's Noah's Ark, that that story would happen again to punish them for being immoral. She isolated Gein from the outside world, punished him for trying to make friends, and filled his head with fire and brimstone ideas about sin and sex and damnation. Experts believe that Ed Gein essentially worshipped her and became obsessed with her. Now, George, Ed's father, was an alcoholic who died in 1940. And four years later, Ed Gein's brother, Henry, died in a fire under what was determined to be suspicious. circumstances, though it was officially ruled an accident. Investigators could never prove if Ed Gein was involved and he never confessed. By the way, you know why we're able to bring

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start a claim and fight for what you deserve? Morgan and Morgan makes it so simple. You can start a claim from your phone in just eight clicks. So if you're injured, you can easily start a claim at for the people.com slash LC sidebar by clicking the link below or scanning the QR code on screen. So Gein was living alone with his mother until her death in 1945 after two strokes, leaving him devastated. Locals said he sealed off her bedroom, turned it into a shrine. And this is when things started getting really dark. According to reporting from A&E, he began reading pulp horror magazines and anatomy books, and information about Nazi medical experiments involving things as absolutely horrific as using human skin to make lampshades. Then, in the early

1950s, women in this area, women around Plainfield, started disappearing. The horror unraveled on November 16, 1957, when Bernice Worden, a local hardware store owner, went missing. Police found the receipt connected to Ed Gein in her store and blood on the floor. When they arrived at his farmhouse, what they found still defies belief. Inside, the horrors were unending. Organs in jars, human skulls used as bowls, masks made of female faces, a lampshade made from human skin, a corset fashioned from a woman's torso. And in a shed, and in a shed, they discovered Bernice's decapitated, mutilated body hanging upside down like a deer carcass. Now, here's the thing. Ed Gein confessed not only to killing Bernice, but another woman,

tavern owner Mary Hogan, who had vanished three years earlier. But most of the body parts in his home, they came from the graves that he apparently robbed. Women who, he reportedly said, reminded him of his mother. He admitted to exhuming at least nine graves, cutting out useful parts to make furniture and wearable items. Investigators verified many of those details by reopening graves and finding them disturbed and things missing. According to USA Today, Ed Gein was later found mentally unfit to stand trial, spent the rest of his life in psychiatric care. He was never really prosecuted for the other crimes that he admitted to. He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric care until his death in 1984 at the age of 7.000.

Okay, now let's go back to Netflix, right? Netflix's monster, the Ed Gein's story. It stars Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein. It's produced by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. This eight-episode series released on October 3rd. It blends biography with horror. It traces Ed Gein's childhood, isolation, descent into madness. But here's what's interesting. It weaves in pop culture threads about how his crimes later shaped Psycho, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the silence of the lambs. It is slick, it is cinematic, it is deeply unsettling, but also in classic Ryan Murphy fashion, the argument is it's dramatically embellished. So to help us separate fact from fiction, to really uncover the real story of Ed Gein, I want to bring on a special guest. I always

say I have a special guest, but this is really, really a special guest. We're so happy to have him. Harold Schechter is joining us. Now, who is Harold? Harold is a true crime author of the book deviant the shocking true story of ed gine the original psycho harold thank you so much for taking the time really appreciate it uh very glad to be here thank you inviting me for inviting me on you got it so as our resident ed gine expert let's just start here what got you involved in wanting to study his life um to write the book let's just start there well uh i for 42 years my day job was as a professor of American literature here at Queens College here in New York City. And my special area of study was 19th century Gothic literature, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and so on.

So I've always been very interested in why we need stories about monsters. and at some point in my researches on another book, I came across the fact, which was not widely known at the time. I mean, I was unaware of it, that both Hitchcock Psycho and Toby Hooper's The Texas Chancellor Massacre had both been inspired by the same true life criminal. So I began to investigate that, thought it might make an intriguing. subject for a book and proceeded to do a great deal of research into the story, traveling to Plainfield, speaking to Gein's neighbors and people who had grown up with him and interviewing psychiatrists who had treated him and so on. And the result was my book

Deviant. And let me say this. There is a tremendous interest in Ed Gein. I mean, even if you look at the Netflix series right now, I think it's number one on the charts. You've watched a majority of it. We're going to get into specifics, specific points about whether they got it right or not. But from your opinion, two questions I have. One, do you think that they got his story right, generally speaking? We'll get into specifics. And two, there has been a backlash on these kind of shows that would arguably glamorize or dramatize a killer.

you know, and we saw it in the Menendez brothers. We're seeing it here. Do you have a concern with these kinds of shows where you're blending horror with entertainment? So let's start here. How much of it do you think is actually correct, how much of it's accurate, and do you have a concern with a show like this? I would say that 90% of it is inaccurate. I was actually quite taken aback by the kinds of liberties.

the writer ian brennan took with a gine story there's so much in the show that's pure fabrication and has nothing to do with the realities of the case in its broad outline it's accurate i mean gine was this loner overly attached to his mother who became a grave robber and murdered two local women but aside from a few bare facts like that There was pretty much nothing in all eight episodes that seemed to me to bear any reality to the historical facts. That's interesting that you say that, and I want to dive into that. But you mentioned his mother, Augusta, it's often portrayed as the key, the key to his psyche. From your research, was that really the root of Ed Gein, his psychology? Was it just part of a larger picture? Let's start right there.

Well, it was certainly a major part of his psychology. I mean, it appears that after her death, when he was living alone in this ramshackle farmhouse with no electricity or running water, he grew so lonely for her company that he attempted to dig up her corpse and bring it back home to me. but he was unable to reach the coffin, primarily because the soil in that part of Wisconsin is very sandy, and many graves, many coffins are interred within concrete vaults. That seems to have been the case with Augusta. So then he began to dig up the bodies of middle-aged and elderly women, who might have reminded him in some way of his mother,

and bring those back to his farmhouse. Apparently, when he ran out of suitable corpses in the local graveyard, he decided to make a couple of them. So he murdered these two women, I would say executed them and brought their bodies back home. So, yeah, a lot of the actions that have made him so notorious and really unique, in the annals of American crime had to do with this

attempt to resurrect his mother and before we get into the specifics of the show you raise a larger point there are people who say their accounts who say he's not the conventional serial killer as we would know more of a grave robber like you said who crossed the line

would you agree with that he's not a traditional serial killer as we you know typically think yeah I've been saying that for a while The new edition of my book, which you can see up my shoulder, I wrote an afterward, and the first thing I talk about is the fact that Dean was not a serial killer. In fact, the phrase serial killer doesn't even appear in my book. The phrase serial killer was coined to describe specifically what used to be called lust murderers,

that is to say, psychopathic sex killers like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, who derive their sick pleasure from abducting, torturing, and then murdering victims, and usually having an orgasm when they finally kill them. Gein was not a sex killer. The two women he killed, as I said, he just shot in the head. I mean, he executed them. He wasn't interested in torturing them. He was interested in bringing their corpses back home so he could mutilate them in the way he'd like to do. So, yeah, Gien was one thing about the show that I had difficulty with is that, you know,

presents Gine as this sort of prototypical serial killer who inspired all these other serial killers. A, I'm sure all the serial killers a show at the end of the show had no idea who Ed Gein was. Again, among other things, he was a pretty obscure figure. I am modestly take some credit for bringing him into the larger public awareness. But, yeah, but he was not a serial killer. No, and I appreciate you emphasizing that point. Let's get into some of the storylines in this. And we'll start with what you just said, you know, how Ed Gein would sneak into these graveyards at night under moonlight, dig up the coffins, harvest the skin, the bones to make these macabre artifacts.

From that depiction in the show, that aspect of it, is it all accurate or no? That part of it's pretty accurate from what I saw. the most inaccurate part is the scene in which we see gine having intercourse with one of the bodies it's very unclear if he ever had any sexual activities with the bodies there's some suggestion that he might have at one point tried or thought of it but he wasn't particularly interested in Right. You know, the classic, the term necrophilia was originally coined to describe a 19, early 19th century French military man. He was known as Sergeant Bertrand, who would go into courte, go into graveyards at night, dig up corpses until we found one of a recently buried attractive young woman. and have sex with a corpse.

You know, I always think of Gein, I know this sounds somewhat flippant, but, you know, is a peculiarly American kind of necrophile who didn't want to have sex with corpses, he wanted to use their bodies as raw material for his home improvement projects. Yeah, that's definitely the way to put it.

All right, let's talk about this babysitter aspect. So this claim that he was a babysitter, The series shows several eerie scenes where he can be sitting on the floor, telling children's stories, the camera slowly revealing the horror that is waiting back home. Do the historical account suggests, A, that he was a babysitter and that he was creepy or strange around children, or is that an invention of the show? He was a babysitter, and the fact that he was a babysitter says something about the way he was perceived in the community. you know, he was just seen as maybe slightly simple-minded, but friendly and obliging person who would run errands for neighbors and so on. So apparently he did do some babysitting, but he actually related very well to children. When I did my research, I spoke to a young man,

I guess he was in his 40s, maybe at the time I spoke to him, who had been Gein's nearest neighbor and had been in Gein's house, you know, who spoke warmly of Gein. Gein apparently related better to children than he did to grownups. So all that stuff about Gein terrorizing these kids is just one of many fabrications in the show. Talk about grownups. We mentioned it earlier, Bernice Warden,

so this hardware store owner, was killed by Gein found mutilated in his shed. The Netflix series kind of portrays this romantic relationship, right, between the two of them. And in Monster, his relationship with her, and she's portrayed by Leslie Manville, it's complex, it's longing, it's elements of resentment, its delusion. The show builds them into these kind of tragic opposites, right? She's a widow trying to move on. He's this lonely man yearning for a maternal figure.

There's a lot of emotional tension. What is accurate about the relationship? What is not? Do you think that they took creative liberties with the romantic aspect? Nothing is accurate about it. I mean, it's complete fabricating. You know, Bernie Swarden, kind of a grandmotherly kind of person who ran the local hardware store. You know, Gein did seem to apparently have some interest in.

her. He sort of joke, well, it was hard to know if he was joking or not, but at some point he asked her to go if she would go roller skating with him. Roller skating was a favorite activity of his. But apart from that, they had no relationship whatsoever. You know, somebody sent me recently a posting online that the warden family is quite upset. over how the show depicts their relationship. There's no truth to it at all. That's common. We see that in a lot of these shows. People who are portrayed, the family members,

particularly of those who are no longer here, they are quite vocal about how it's being portrayed. Because for a lot of people, this is going to be a show, their first introduction to Ed Gein. They may take everything as true, which is why, again, Harold, I'm so happy to have you here to break it down and separate fact from fiction. There are darker subplots here.

And one of the things here is this tie with Gein to a real unsolved case, the 1953 disappearance of Evelyn Hartley, a 15-year-old babysitter from LaCross, Wisconsin. She vanished on October 24th. She was babysitting a family's 20-month-old daughter in the show, in Monster, detective suspect that Ed Gein, and he even hallucinates about Evelyn, who's played by Addison Ray. in real life harold what's the story were there ever any police leads linking him to evelyn hartley's disappearance well when the horrors in gien's farmhouse were first uncovered all these body parts the immediate assumption was that they had come from murder victims that gine was in fact a serial killer although that phrase didn't exist back then they probably would have called it a mass murderer. You know, there was no suspicion at the time that he was a grave robber. So after his arrest, as often happens in such cases, all these police officials descended on Plainfield

hoping they could close out these cold cases by pinning them on Gein. But there is absolutely no evidence that Gein had anything to do with Evelyn Hartley's disappearance. And I I am firmly of the belief that he was not responsible for it because, again, that wasn't Gein's MO. You know, he wasn't interested in abducting and sexually abusing and torturing young women. He was strictly interested in somehow both trying to resurrect his mother. his mother back to live with him while at the same time you know the psychologist who examined gine felt justifiably that he had these very ambivalent feelings towards his mother which he never

consciously admitted to right you know there was a woman who so dominated and obviously in many ways helped destroy his life he both worshipped her but on a level he was not aware of you know he he harbored all these homicidal feelings towards her so he was bringing back these bodies both in an effort to as they say resurrect her but also you know to enact these terrible mutilations yeah but in any case yeah the evelyn hartley thing the part in uh the show where he kills these two uh hunters and dismembers them with a chainsaw. There's so much in the show, you know, that is absolute make-believe.

Right. That he helped solve the Ted Bundy case and so on and so forth. Yeah, I wanted to get to that one. But since we're talking family, there's another big part of this, this lingering mystery about what happened to Ed Gein's brother, Henry, is the idea that he killed him, right? So remember, we told you earlier that Henry died in a... fire under what was deemed suspicious circumstances, but Monster portrays his death in an interesting

way. In the show, Ed Gein is seen killing his brother during an argument about their mother, striking him in a rage, staging the death as a brushfire accident. That is one of the series' most striking scenes. Any aspect of that that seems to match up. Well, there is a scene in my book that I based on something he must have said, in which he and Henry, you know, Henry is sort of a warning Ed about the mother. But there's no evidence that Ed killed Henry. My own feeling is, again, that he did not kill Henry, that they were both fighting this brush fire, and that Henry, which was, you know, not a necessarily uncommon thing, died from asphyxiation or had a heart attack,

and he apparently, when he collapsed, he apparently hit his head on a rock. Again, after Gein's atrocities were uncovered, there was all this talk about his having murdered, Henry, you know, that it was a Cain and Abel situation. But as far as my own opinion goes, based on my research, he did not kill Henry. Okay. All right. Look, you mentioned Ted Bundy. I was going to mention it later. Let's talk about actually right now. We'll get into some more of the killings that were portrayed in the show. There is a connection in the show, right? So the series ends with this kind of surreal twist that Ed Gein institutionalized, but lucid, is consulting with a young FBI agent about a new killer at the time

named Ted Bundy. That is a big development in the show. My understanding is the timelines don't even match up, even if this were true, right? I mean, this, any, did he help with the investigation to Ted Bundy at all? No, right? No. And all those scenes at the end where you have, as I think I might have said before, you know, these serial killers, Richard Speck, you know, Brutus, I forget his first name, you know, citing Ed is this inspiration. Again, it's ridiculous. First of all, Ed was not a serial killer. And second of all, it's very doubtful that any of those figures had any idea who Gein was at that time.

So the notion of the FBI consulting him in their hunt for Ted Bundy, You know, I kind of admire that level of imaginative fantasy, but has no basis in reality. And going back to the idea of what killings were actually tied to a man, not, what's complete fiction, there is a part where we see, Ed Gein, years after, being locked away, kills a nurse inside the psychiatric ward. like, you know, the monster never really stopped, right? It's brutal, it is shocking. It leaves you thinking that he was still dangerous, even under supervision. Did that actually happen?

No. I know, apparently Gein, who was living much better in the institution than he had ever lived before, you know, with other people and actually being served of, you know, fairly decent meals as opposed to eating reheated baked beans out of the top of the human skull and had, you know, nice surroundings, well, relative to where he had lived before. You know, it was just an easygoing, model prisoner, very cheerful, very friendly, conducting all these pen pal correspondence that he developed warm relationships with. So, again, yeah, maybe.

up. Made up. Okay. And you put the murders to the side. Going back to romance, there's another part that we got to talk about where we meet Adeline Watkins. I believe this is she played by Suzanne Asan. She's this waitress, this aspiring singer who supposedly falls for him. And she visits him in secret after his mother dies. And for a few episodes, it's almost like this tragic love story, her trying to save him, him wanting connection. being too far gone, you know, you could say it's tender, it's unsettling, it gives the show this weird emotional break in the middle of all of the horror, in the middle of all everything we're seeing. Any aspect of that that's real? I mean, what do we know about her?

Well, there wasn't Adeline Watkins. First of all, short answer. No, no, no, that is real. Okay. So Adeline Watkins did live in Plainfield. If you're not. see photographs of her, and I don't mean to be cruel, but, you know, she bears a striking resemblance to Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West. She apparently, I mean, she and she might have gone roller skating once with Gein. It's a little unclear, but evidently she was something of a publicity hound. And when the media descended on plain feet, after the discovery of Gaines' crimes, she put herself forward as Ed Gine's girlfriend.

She actually later retracted all that, but they barely had any kind of relationship. And as I say, she was by no means, you know, resembled the actress who plays her in the show. Mm-hmm. I want to circle back to something that you mentioned before, the legacy of Ed Gein. You talked about whether or not anyone was inspired by what he did, and you're seeing Hollywood, whether it was psycho or whether it was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And the show kind of makes, or, you know, Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill, the woman suit. It seems there was an inspiration from this, or maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think Netflix series plays with that idea in the series. They weave in little nods to these directors. How much of that connection is real? And I guess how much has Ed Gein shaped Hollywood horror the way that Netflix suggests? And it goes back to a larger theme, right? If people are watching this and people are trying to understand what they should take away from this story, what should they?

I mean, what is his inspiration? What is his connection? why should people, what should people look for in this series and what should they not look for? Well, where the series goes wrong, again, is suggesting that Ed's main legacy was, you know, is this pioneering serial killer. Ed does have an important legacy. He actually is an important cultural figure. And the reason for that is, you know, I always tell people, I'm a baby boomer. And I grew up in the 1950s and I spent or misspent, you know, watching all these horror movies and stuff. And before Psycho, all the monsters in popular culture came from other places.

You know, Dracula comes from Transylvania and there's the Wolfman. of London and the mummy from Egypt or Martian invaders, what Psycho did in the character of Norman Bates was create the first really all-American monster and also was really the precursor of the later slasher movie genre. And insofar as Ed stands behind Norman Bates, which he does, You know, most people know Psycho justifiably through Hitchcock's masterpiece, but Psycho is based on a book by the horror writer Robert Block, and in the book, when Norman is arrested, he compares himself to Ed Gein. So, Gein is the direct inspiration for Psycho, and insofar as Psycho, again, Americanized the genre of horror. you could say that Ed did have this major, major cultural impact. And when we go back to this Netflix show, I'm assuming you would say, take everything with a grain of salt, listen to this episode of Sidebar, where we correct fact from fiction.

But I think you would agree the title, monster, that would be accurate to describe. I would say you should take it with a whole salt shaker full of salt. not just fair enough and but yes but you know there's no question that gine was a monster although many people who have read my book and i also did a graphic novel with the great comic book artist named eric paul called did you hear what eddie gine done people have read that you know it's possible to feel given the horrendous conditions he lived under and the kinds of abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, possible to feel a small degree of sympathy for Gine, which, of course, it's not possible to feel, you know, for John Wayne Gase or Ted Bundy.

Right. You know, these people were pure evil. You know, Gine was not evil in that way. Well, I encourage everybody to check out your work on this, including that graphic novel, including the book Deviant, The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the original Psycho. Thank you so much for taking the time. actor. Really, really appreciate it. Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me on.

And that is all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you should get your podcasts. You can follow me on X or Instagram. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll see you next time. this long crime series, ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.