In the shadow of a new Netflix series dropping today, the name Ed Gein is crawling back into the spotlight. Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third installment in Ryan Murphy's chilling anthology, stars Charlie Hunnam as the reclusive Wisconsin killer whose twisted life inspired some of horror's most iconic villains—from Norman Bates in Psycho to Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But amid the dramatized gore, one lingering question haunts: did Gein murder his own brother?
Edward Theodore Gein, born in 1906 to a domineering mother and an alcoholic father in La Crosse, Wisconsin, grew up in isolation on a rundown farm. His family moved to Plainfield, where young Ed idolized his fanatically religious mother, Augusta, who preached sin and damnation, especially around anything sexual. Brother Henry, four years older, seemed to resent the dynamic, occasionally clashing with Augusta right in front of Ed. Then, in 1944, tragedy struck—or so the official story goes. A brush fire near the farm left Henry dead, his body charred and oddly positioned. Ed reported him missing, then led authorities straight to the corpse. Bruises on Henry's head raised eyebrows, but the death was ruled accidental. However, suspicions simmered; some locals whispered that Ed, fiercely protective of his mother, might have snapped during one of their arguments. No charges ever came, but the doubt festered, especially after Augsta's death in 1945 left Ed utterly alone, preserving her rooms like a shrine while the rest of the house decayed.
Gein's descent deepened. By the mid-1950s, he was confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, whom he shot and whose head he kept as a gruesome trophy, and hardware store clerk Bernice Worden in 1957, whose body was found gutted and hung like a deer on his property. Police raids uncovered lampshades and clothing fashioned from human skin—mostly from exhumed graves, it turned out, as Gein robbed at least nine local cemeteries to fulfill his macabre fixation on his mother. Though he admitted to the murders, experts debated his sanity; he was deemed unfit for trial initially, spending decades in a mental institution until his death from lung cancer in 1984 at age 77.
Netflix's take, airing now, dives into this bleak psychodrama, blending fact with speculation on family ties and buried rage. Yet for all the on-screen shocks, Gein's real legacy endures in quiet horror—what drives a man to such depths, and how much of the darkness was there from the start?