October 22, 2025 • 42 mins
On September 8, 1960, Psycho shocked cinema audiences with a level of psychological horror never seen before. But Psycho wasn’t pure fiction. It was inspired by the gruesome true story of Ed Gein, the real-life Butcher of Plainfield.
When police raided Gein’s Wisconsin farmhouse in 1957, they uncovered a macabre scene: human remains crafted into lampshades, furniture, and clothing. These discoveries stunned the nation and sparked a media frenzy that would influence generations of horror storytelling.
In this episode of True Crime Conversations, host Claire Murphy speaks with acclaimed true crime author Harold Schechter, whose book remains the definitive account of Ed Gein’s crimes. Following the Netflix release of Monsters: The Ed Gein Story from Ryan Murphy, Schechter reflects on how Gein’s legacy has been interpreted, and sometimes distorted, by Hollywood.
You can find out more about Harold's book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Original Psycho here.
CREDITS
Guest: Harold Schechter
Host: Claire Murphy
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman
Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy
Audio Engineer: Carl Step/Abe’s Audio
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. When moviegoers headed
into cinemas across America on September eight, nineteen sixty, they
had no idea what was about to happen to them.
The movie Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock's all time greatest creations,
(00:26):
was new to cinemas. It was a story of Norman Bates,
the man with a split personality and an unhealthy relationship
with his mother, whose type of depravity had never been
explored on the big screen before, a true American monster,
his violence culminating in the stabbing murder of Marion Crane,
played to screaming brilliance by Janet Lee as she was
(00:46):
confronted by the knife wielding maniac while showering.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
That scene reportedly led to trauma so deep that many
who'd seen it became terrified of entering their bathrooms unaccompanied.
The soundtrack to that moment is still used to depict
violence and horror. But Psycho wasn't all fiction. It was
actually based on the very true story of a simple
(01:10):
Wisconsin man, a man whose mother's love was all he
ever wanted, and when he could no longer get it,
would go to extreme and horrifying lengths to recreate it,
events that would lead to that man ed Gean, being
tagged as the Butcher of Plainfield. I'm Claire Murphy and
(01:31):
this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's
most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know
the most about them. When police rated ed Gean's property
in November nineteen fifty seven, they would have to spend
days sorting through the trophies he'd collected.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Body parts were everywhere, but I'm closer.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Inspection investigators realized that that waste basket in the corner
it was made out of human skin. In fact, several
chairs had also been upholstered in human skin. The lampshade
that was a human face. The horror of what ed
Dean had left behind in his family farmhouse led police
(02:12):
to believe that he'd maybe murdered a dozen people to
create this twisted set of homewares, But the reality was
much much darker. Ed Dean and his influence on pop
culture remains to this day, with the recent release on
Netflix of Ryan Murphy's third series of Monsters. The ed
Gen Story when allther Harold Schechter saw it was being made,
(02:33):
he wanted to find no one in Ryan Murphy's camp
had reached out to him. After all, his book is
the leading source of information about the Gan family and
the events leading up to Ed Dean's arrest and subsequent conviction,
where the court found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
But when we sat down with him to discuss Gan's crimes,
he says, as soon as he saw the opening scenes
(02:53):
of Monsters, he knew they hadn't based the story on
any of his work. Harold joins us. Now, Harold, thank
you so much for joining us today. Your name has
come up pretty much in every conversation around ed Gain
seeing as he's back in the headlines from Ryan Murphy's
Monster's version on Netflix.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Have you seen it yet?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yes, I have. I saw it as soon as it dropped.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, you know, initially, when I first heard Ryan Murphy
was going to be making an Ed Gaan documentary and
no one had reached out to me because I don't
want to sound its modest, but you know, my book,
Deviant really told the Gaen story for the first time,
(03:38):
and yeah, I felt that no one could really make
a series about Gain without referring to or using my book. Then,
as soon as I started watching the series, I was
upset because so little of it had to do with
my book, and I dropped the whole idea of any
kind of legal action because the series deviates, if I
(04:03):
can use that word, so far from the historical tree truth. Now,
I've been upset because millions of people are going to
think that they've seen the actual story of ed Gean
when what they've seen is I would estimate ninety percent fabrication,
possibly more so. Yes, So that's my response to it.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Well, let's talk about the real story of ed Gain then,
and we'll keep referencing back to monsters just to see
where it does. Dbaight, But I think to best understand
ed Gain, you have to understand his family background first.
Can you give us a little understanding on who his parents,
George and Augusta were.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well, one thing I discovered The Deviant was my first
true crime book, and I've encountered the same thing in
many books I've done since is that there were such
obscure people that there's almost no record of what was
going on really in the household. I mean, we know
(05:05):
that the father, George, was apparently an abuse of alcoholic.
We know that Augusta was a dominant figure in the
household in terms of running a business. They originally had
a lacrosse before they moved to Plainfield. We know that
she totally dominated Ed's life, That she was a religious
(05:28):
fanatic who drilled into him the sens that the world
outside their little farmstead was kind of a sodom and gomorrah,
that women were evil, that Ed had to protect himself
from the dangers of strange women. You know that she
(05:49):
would hector him constantly and read to him biblical passages
about the evils of womanhood. Pretty much. That's really all
we know about his parents and his relationship to his parents.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
We see amongst his Augusta kicking George out of the
family home, which obviously isn't true. I mean, for many
reasons we can fill in the blanks. Because Augusta was
such a devout Lutheran, divorce or separation wouldn't have been
on the cards for her. Yeah, so what do we
know of George's fate? Did he was he kicked out
(06:26):
of the home?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
No, No, absolutely not. I think he became increasingly a
burden to Augusta because again his problem with drink made
him increasingly unreliable and unable to perform a lot of
the chores around the farm. But he died at home
(06:48):
and read his obituary in the local newspapers. So that
is just one of I would have to say, almost
countless fabrications that the Ryan Murphy series presents.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Well, let's talk about Augusta, because she does play a
pivotal role in both monsters. But in ed Gane's life,
we know that, as you mentioned, she was quite domineering,
and you in your book step out how you've seen
her role increase over time, in that she becomes the
named proprietor of the business that they run, that she
is the name on the deed of the farm first
(07:23):
and second farm that they.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
End up purchasing.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Why do they end up in such an isolated place
because Plainfield itself is a very small community. There's only
several hundred people who live there. But the farm on
which they lived was outside of that too, and in
the early nineteen hundreds there wasn't a lot of you know,
road traffic outside these farms. It would have been weeks
for people to head out and visit them, and then
(07:47):
you know, they would then have to head into town
for supplies. But why isolate her family from everybody?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well, again, as you Sam, and it's a very part
of Wisconsin, everybody's pretty isolated from each other. I think
they moved there because there was this available farm with
a you know, a very de sensive piece of property.
They thought they could make a go of it. After
living in the city Lacrosse, she wanted to get away
from the city because again she felt cities were hell
(08:16):
holes of corruption and depravity. You know. The isolation I
think suited Augusta because again she was very, very wary
of all the people around her. Possibly she felt she
could exert a more domineering influence over the lives of
her family members if they lived farther apart from the community.
(08:40):
But in general, people lived isolated lives. I mean, the
Games were an extreme case, but that part of Wisconsin
is very sparsely populated. Even when I went up there
in the nineteen eighties, you could drive through very long
stretches of that part of the state and never, you know,
(09:02):
pass another car on the road.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
So they're out there on this isolated. Augusta is in
charge of educating her two young boys, Henry and Ed.
We understand, as you've mentioned that she's very strict on
them as far as her religion is concerned, but she's
also instilling in them, as you've also mentioned this fear
and distaste of women in general. It does seem that
(09:26):
at some stage Henry does try to kind of move
away from that. But Ed is a little bit different,
he seems, and this is also mentioned in your book
where her school friends are concerned that he seems like
a sweet enough boy, but he struggles to make connections
with people. And it turns out that his mother is
also playing a role in that, in that every friend
(09:48):
that he makes, she tells him that something wrong with
that child's parents or the father.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Is immoral or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
So what kind of mental state do you think ed
Geen is in as he's growing up under the influence
of his domineering mother.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Well, again, from what we know, for whatever reason, Augusta
apparently wanted to have a daughter and there was something
and when Ed came along, you know, she was very
disappointed that she hadn't given birth to a girl. Her
first child was a son, Henry, and I think she
part of the stranglehold she kept on him involved his
(10:29):
turning her into a more feminine kind of person. You know,
there's always something from what I understand from having interviewed
people who had known him, which I did when I
did my research in Plainfield, a little bit of feminine
about Ed. You know, that made him a bit of
a not a laughing stock, but you know, sometimes a
butt of cruel teasing. So yeah, I mean, she she kept,
(10:52):
you know, this emotional stranglehold on him. You know, the
expression tied being tied to her apron strings. I mean,
he was really bound to her. That expression doesn't really
capture the extent of her of her hold on him.
(11:14):
I mean, she just kept him kind of attached to
her own by his umbilical court to her and Henry.
You know, there is evidence that Henry was trying to
pull away. Henry had, you know, saw the kinds of
conditions that his Brotherred was living under, did urge him
(11:37):
somehow to try to achieve some kind of independence from
from Augusta. Again, we don't really know all the details
of some indication that it created a certain amount of
tension between them, which then after Gan's crimes were exposed,
led people to believe he murdered Henry, which I'm quite
sure he did not. But the interesting thing is, until
(12:00):
these sensational murderers become known to the public anonymous, obscure figures,
they're complete non entities. So there's no reason there would
be any real biographical information about their past lives other
than what they themselves, you know, as zed Gain did
later tell psychiatrists or law enforcement officials. And the accounts
(12:25):
of neighbors are very unreliable. Once it is revealed to
be this monstrous kind of figure, everybody suddenly, you know,
is recalling and I put that in air quote dealings
with the family. They always knew something was really weird
going on in that household. But you know, you can't
(12:47):
take a lot of those accounts face value.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I guess we can attribute that to Adeline as well,
who is also featured in Monsters. Adeline initially when she's
spoken to about and if you haven't seen Monsters, she's
essentially Edgain's girlfriend in Monsters, who's seems almost complicit to
a point in the crimes that he's committing. She's interviewed
back after he is arrested in the fifties, and she says, yes,
(13:14):
they had a twenty year long relationship and he seemed
like a sweet, nice man. But then he's interviewed not
long after that and says completely the opposite and that
she never had a long relationship with him, and on
he dated him for a short period in the fifties.
So those recollections, they contradict themselves even at the time
of his arrest.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Well again, as relationship with Adeline, as is portrayed in
the TV show, is one of its more egregious features.
I don't mean to seem cruel about this, but if
you look at photographs of the actual Adeline Watkins, she
bears a striking resemblance to the actress Margaret Hamilton as
(13:56):
the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard of
os She was apparently a little bit of a publicity
hound when the media descended on Plainfield the discovery of
Ed's atrocities. I think she enjoyed the attention she was
getting by claiming she had been Ed's girlfriend, which, as
you say, she later attracted. There's no evidence they had
(14:19):
much of any kind of relationship at all. I mean,
he might have one time asked her to go up
roller skating, which was a favorite pastime of his. But
that's what all it amounted to. You know, she was
not this twenty something blonde hottie who is portrayed as
means accomplice and conspirator and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
That just didn't happen. Well, another thing I'm guessing that
didn't happen is Monsters tries to explain the motivation for
Ed Dean doing what he did through Adeline, in that
she gives him a box with photographs from Nazi concentration
camps of the bodies of Jewish people and a comic
(15:02):
book that is basically a fictionalized dialog somewhat fictionalized tale
of ilsa cook who was a German war criminal who
worked in the concentration camps and committed atrocities against Jewish people.
Was any of that even vaguely true? Was he all
influenced by what was happening during the Second World War?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Well he might have. I mean, Gan was a voracious reader,
not of comic books, but of these sensational, lurid men's
magazines at the time, and many of them did in
fact feature stories about hot Nazi bebes torturing, not even
(15:45):
so much committing, you know, committing those kinds of death
camp atrocities. There are stories where they're whipping prisoners of war.
So there is evidence that Ed was fascinated by some
of those accounts that he came across the magazines. We
don't know specifically that he really know anything about Ilsa
(16:07):
Koch per se. There were a number of those female
Nazis who very notorious for having made lambshades out of
human skin. You know. Again, the whole notion that he
was introduced to this by Adeline Watkins, you know, is
just made up, but it is true. You even can
(16:30):
see there are some photographs that were published in Life
magazine back in nineteen fifty seven when the Gaenes story broke,
and there were photographs of the inside of his house
and you know, the incredible chaos and squalor, and there's
one shot actually of a cardboard cartan filled with these
(16:54):
men's magazines. So yes, he might have read about it
and probably did read about him there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Listening to True Crime Conversations with me clam Eurphy, I'm
speaking with true crime writer Harold check about the life
and crimes of ed Gan up. Next, I asked Harold,
if Edgin had succeeded in digging up his mother Augusta's body,
would he still have gone on to commit his horrific crimes.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Well, his initial foray into.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Utilizing dead bodies for his crimes was after the death
of his mother Augusta, which he seemed to take pretty hard.
And if she was as dominant a force in his
life as we believe she was, then that would have
been a terrible blow for him because at that stage,
his father has died, Henry has died, and now his
mother has died, so he's left on his own, and
(17:47):
he does try to dig up her body, but he
can't access her because due to the soil conditions in
that part of Wisconsin, they sometimes will put concrete over
the top to stop them from sinking down. So do
you think had he been able to access Augusta's body
and dig her up at that time, do you think
he would have gone any further? Because he does then
start digging up other people around her.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Do you think he.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Would have gone further had he been able to access
his mother's body Initially.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I've never thought of that. Well, very possibly, no one
of the major problems I have with the TV series
is it portrays Ed Green as a serial killer, and
Ed Gan was not a serial killer. The term serial killer,
so I'm sure you know, was coined specifically to apply
(18:33):
to people like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. You
know what used to be called lost murderers in the
old days, extreme sexual sadus who derived their perverse ecstatic
pleasure from abducting and torturing and then murdering victims. That
was not Ed's m Ed was essentially a necrophile. The
(18:55):
two women he killed, Mary the tavern keeper Mary Hogan,
and the hardware store owner Bernice Warden, he executed very swiftly.
You know, there's no kid and torturing them. He just
wanted their bodies to bring back home. So his major
motivation seemed to have been this effort to resuscitate his mother. Well,
(19:16):
there's a dual motivation. He's acting out this again to
play armchair for adian psychoaalysty. You know, this deep ambivalence
towards this woman, towards his mother. The one hand, he
consciously sees her as his saint, his only friend, and
he wants to bring her back to live with her.
(19:36):
At the same time, he's obviously acting out these homicidal
impulses towards the body in terms of the mutilations he performs.
So all his efforts, as you know, had to do
with getting his mother's body back, and since he couldn't
access it, trying to somehow reconstitute it from the body
(19:57):
parts of these other women. So whether or not he
would have been satisfied if he had been able to
bring Augusta back again, I thought of that, it's an
interesting question. Again we can always speculate, well.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Can we talk a little bit about the things he
was doing with the bodies. You say it was to
reconstitute his mother essentially, But in amongst all of that,
in the Monsters series, there is a big connection with femininity.
And as he mentioned, he was a more effeminate young
man and potentially his mother had almost groomed him into
(20:32):
being the daughter that she actually wanted. And there's this
exploration of his gender and his obsession with women's underguments
and women's bodies, and the fact that he does essentially
make a skin suit out of women's body parts that
he has allegedly worn at some stage. There is also
a conversation in Monsters that he has a fictional conversation
(20:53):
with a transactivist who explains he's not trans, but he's
actually just obsessed with femininity and women's bodies.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
But do you think that was true in that he
was very.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Concerned about what gender he was supposed to be and
that kind of navigation of who he really was, and
that's what he was doing with those bodies too, Well.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
It's probably part of it, you know, when you're say
Gene made a skin suit. Of course, that's where Thomas
Harris got the idea for his Buffalo Bill character and
signs of Lambs. There wasn't a whole suit. The investigators
who first were digging up all these horrible body parts
(21:38):
and so on in his farmhouse came upon what they
called a mammary vest. So he had apparently flayed the
top part of a woman's torso with the breast and
strung it with some kind of cords that he could
put on his own body, which definitely suggests that. Obviously
(22:01):
in my book they say that he was somebody who
dressed up in women's skin and steff to women's clothing, So,
you know, Freud uses the term over determined, which means
that there's no one simple cause of behavior. You can
see in that again, both his evidence to recreate his
(22:23):
mother as well as to be you know, the girl
that his mother always wanted to have, the thing about
ed Geen. I was talking about this actually to somebody
the other day. It's impossible to explain his behavior. Ultimately,
we all want to, in a way reduce this unimaginable
(22:45):
kind of human behavior to something we can grasp with
our rational minds because it gives us a sense of
control over But I'll often say this is hard to
understand ed Geen, as it is to understand Mozart. That
there are certain human beings whose minds and motivation are
(23:07):
just beyond the ability to understand. So all those factors
obviously played into creating the creature we know is ed Game.
Trying to reduce it to some kind of simple explanation
is just not possible. That the conditions of his life
caused something to crack in his psyche, and all this
(23:30):
archaic stuff having to do with flaying victims and wearing
their skins and making trophies out of body parts, you know,
things you see in archaic religions somehow flooded out in
that little Wisconsin farmhouse. It's one of the things that
makes the case so endlessly fascinating is that in the
(23:53):
nineteen fifties, in the midst of this bland bomby America
that's been mythologized as happy days, everybody living in nice
suburban houses around it with white picket fences and sitting
around on Sunday nights and watching I Love Lucy, the
American Heartland. There was this person who the squalor and
(24:18):
darkness of his little hovel was enacting you know, these
archaic rituals like an Aztec priest dressing up in human skin,
well like going back to our prehistoric ancestors dissecting the
bodies of their victims, shrinking their heads, you know, keeping
(24:39):
body parts as trophies.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
So can we talk about the things that were found
in ed Gain's house. When he is finally arrested, he's
arrested at a neighbor's house having dinner, and it's after
he murders Bernie's which she's the local hardware store owner
in the movie. It suggested that they had a relationship,
a sexual relationship, and then he in his schizophrenic state
(25:06):
believes that she's given him a venereal disease and that's
why he goes and murders her.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Which none of that is true, right.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Well, as far as we know, because we're not insided
Gane's head at any stage, none of that is true.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, no, none of it True's complete, complete, outrageous lie.
And somebody said apparently Bernice Warden's relations to sentence very
upset about that. I mean, Gene had no contact with
her at all. I mean apparently the day before he
(25:39):
killed her, he had come into the hardware store and
sort of joshingly asked her she wanted to go out
roller skating. But the portrait, it's really kind of unconscionable
what Ryan Murphy and his collaborator Ian Brennan did something
(25:59):
like that where there still are family members. I'm not
even sure how they could get away with that with
out being sued in sometain way.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
But there's even a suggestion that Bernice's son is absent
in her life and is not you know, and she's
very sad and lonely. But he wasn't He the local
deputy and raised the alarm after she went missing, Like
none of her story seems to be true.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
No, none of it's true. I mean literally none of them.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
I mean, other than working in the hardware store. That
seems to be the only true thing. Yeah. So, after
Ed kills her and takes her back to the property
at the farm, police quickly find out that he is
a suspect because the son does mention that he's come
into the store and has kind of said a few
things to her. And they find him having dinner at
(26:46):
a neighbor's house, and they arrest him. And then they
go and they raid his home. What do they find
inside the GameHouse?
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Well, first of all, they find Bernice Swarden's body in
the summer kitchen adjacent to the house, strung up, beheaded,
strung up, dressed out like a deer, the body hollowed
out of all its internal organs. They find her head,
(27:17):
which Geen had inserted. He had taken a couple of
nails and bent them to make them into hooks and
inserted one in each ear with a rope between them.
He was apparently intending to hang that up as a
trophy on his wall. Inside the house proper, they found
(27:38):
bowls made out of the caps of human skulls. They
found a box full of vulvas which had been painted silver.
They found a belt made of nipples, a shade pull
made of human lips. They found that mammary vests that
we spoke about before. They found a number of flayed faces,
(28:01):
and had flayed the faces off of some of these
corpses and tried them out and hung them on his
bedroom wall. Again, these incomprehensible, incomprehensible horrors. They also at
some point found Mary Hogan ed would sometimes choke around.
Oh she said, I got her at home. You know,
(28:22):
nobody took them seriously, but you know, they found her
head in a paper bag.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
I kind of imagine what they must have been like
for the police who are investigating this. Do they ever
speak about the impact that finding all of these had
on them mentally?
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Well, I know that they spoke about the long term effect,
but yeah, one can only imagine. I think the horrors
were so again incomprehensible, that they couldn't even really process
what they were finding. Gean is really unique as far
as I know, not only in the annals of American crime,
(29:00):
but in the annals of world crime. You know, people
have kept body parts is killers have kept body parts
as souvenirs and so on and so forth, but nobody
did what gain did I mean? Gain? Again? He was
essentially a necro file, but he was less a necro
file who is interested in having sex with the corpses,
(29:21):
although again Ryan Murphy's show does portray him as having
sex with the corpses, which as far as we know,
he never did, as somehow using their body parts as
raw material for the home improvement project. It makes a
very American kind of necro file.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Next, Harold tells us what it says to police when
he's finally arrested, and exactly how much detail he went
into about his crimes When he's arrested. What does he
say to police? How does he tell them what he's done?
Does he admit to it initially?
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Well, no, not initially. When you read gains confessions, his
interrogators ask him all these leading questions, which he admits to.
You know, So let's say, so Edd you we found this,
we found this weird vest, you know, made out of
the top part of a woman's body, and did you
(30:26):
put it on and pretend you were your mother? And
he'd say, yeah, that sounds about right. Late later on,
when he was institutionalized and people would interviewed him, he
would deny almost everything, without ever really explaining how all
those artifacts ended up in his farmhouse. He did admit,
(30:50):
or at least he did not deny, that he had
done all these things.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Well, Coman talk about a lot of the other things
that Monsters claims he did. There's a disappearance of fifteen
year old Evelyn, who in the story was recovering from polio,
and so ed Dean had stepped into babysit the children
she normally babysit, but then she recovered and returned, and
he resented that, and the Monster show suggests that he
(31:16):
kidnapped and murdered her. The only truth I can find
to that is that he yes, at some stage babysat
children to supplement income from for the farm, and that
was about it.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well. Evan Hartley was a young girl who disappeared while babysitting.
After Gan's horrors were discovered. As is often the case
when some sensational murderers have been uncovered, police officers with
unsolved cases flocked to Plainfield hoping to be able to
(31:47):
close out these cold cases. One of them was the
avalent Hartley case. But ye Gan evidently had nothing at
all to do with the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley abducting
teenage girls and torturing them and killing them. Again, Gan
was all about it was not his emma. He was
not a serial sex killer, which is what the show
(32:09):
makes them out to be, and at the end of
the show, it makes them out to be sort of
the forefather of all these notorious serial killers who appeared
back in the seventies and supposedly were inspired by Gain,
which is again what can I say, you know, just
get another complete fabrication?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Is that why we see that scene when he's confronted
by two hunters in that little outhouse where you talked
about Benice being strung up like a deer, and then
he chases them into the woods with a chainsaw and
murders them, which essentially tries to explain the influence on
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
But there's no evidence that that ever happened.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Right. No, again, the two hunters, you know, hunters who
are always getting killed during deer hunting season for one
reason or another. Yes, that's complete. I guess I have
to use the word lie there's no evidence Gan ever
owned a chainsaw after the Gaen crime. The Gaen crimes
(33:14):
became known to most of America because shortly after they
came to light Life magazine, which was essentially this photo
journalistic magazine that at the time could be found in
almost every middle class American household, did a big, big
spread on the Green crimes, and supposedly Toby Hooper, who
(33:38):
was young at the time, he would have been about
he was sort of my age, would have been about
nine or ten, you know, read about it and was
kind of permanently traumatized by it and recollected the story
when he went to make Texas Chainsaw the massacre. But
the chainsaw thing, yeah, that Gaan did not dismember any
victims were chainsaws, and he didn't kill those two hunters.
(34:02):
So yes, that's another thing. Yeah, most of it, you know,
if they did, was what Murphy and Brennan did was
take the broad outlines of the game story and then
just fill it in with whatever they thought was going
to t the late An audience for a few hours.
I sometimes think of it as a throwback to the
(34:25):
kinds of biopics that were made of Hollywood back in
the nineteen thirties and forties. You know the story of
Louis Pasteur, or you know the story of Thomas Edison
or the story of whoever. You know. They take the
very broad outlines and just make stuff up to keep
the audience entertained. So I mean monsters, I said, it's
(34:48):
a particularly particularly egregious example of that kind of thing.
So little of it is based on historical fact. You know,
really you could name the few things that were based
on historical fact, Like there wasn't Ed Gain he did,
you know Rob Graves, he did have this weird relationship
with his mother. Actually, as soon as I turned it
(35:10):
on the first scene which shows him engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation,
as soon as I saw that, I thought, okay, I
don't have a legal case anymore.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
So that a lot of that what happened behind closed
doors in that farmhouse, yeah, essentially has to be made
up because we don't really know what life was like
for them behind closed doors, right.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Well, the fact that he helped solve the Ted Bundy case,
I mean, you name it, it didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
What was life like for ed Geen after he was
arrested and institutionalized because they did find him insane, and
I know they did try to bring him to court
to trial, but again he was found insane. So what
was life like for him? Did his mental health decline?
Did it stabilize? What was it like for him when
he was actually.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
From what I know and they actually know at least
one person who visited him in the institution and spoke
to him. Yeah, life was much better for him once
he was locked up in an institution before you know,
the expression of three hots and a cop. You know,
he had, you know, meals that were much better. You know,
(36:18):
when he was living alone, he might open a I
mean the series sort of got this part right, you know,
open account of big beings, put it on the stove,
the dump it into you know, the top part of
a human skull, and need it. So he was being fed,
He had surrounded by people for the first time in
(36:39):
his life. He was given books to read, He had
a correspondence with people who were very sympathetic towards him.
So his life was a good deal more pleasant than
it had been up to that point.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
What was life like at the end for ed Gina?
Did he pass away peacefully? Was there I mean, unsolved
things they were still trying to work out with him.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Was his life like at the.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
End, Well, he had died of cancer. I'd never really
come across specific information about his last days. I don't
think he was apparently unaware of his influence on American culture.
The thing about Monster is they make it seem as
(37:26):
though his major legacy was, as I said, the forefather
of the serial killers who suddenly appeared back, which is
totally false. But he did have a major impact on
American culture because Robert Block, who was a pulp horror writer,
(37:50):
was living very close to Plainfield at the time the
Gaen story broke. Block was a protege of HP Lovecraft.
He had become known for these pop power stories. When
he read about the game case, he realized this would
be great premise for a horror novel, he felt because
(38:13):
I was I corresponded with Block when I was writing
my book. You know, his problem was knowing how isolated
gen was. Gan never traveled anywhere. Where was he going
to find all his victims? So he thought, well, I'll
have the victims come to him, And that's so he
came up with the idea of the Bates Motel if
you read the novel, when Norman Bates is finally arrested,
(38:34):
he compares himself to Ed Green. So there's a very
very explicit connection. And what I tell people, I grew
up on the I'm a baby boomer. I grew up
in the nineteen fifties culture filled with All I did
was go to horror movies and watch horror movies on TV,
and read horror comic books. And you know, the culture
was full of monsters pop culture, but all the monsters
(38:57):
were from other places, you know, Dracula from Transylvania, or
the Werewolf of London, or Creature from Black Lagoon from
deep in the Amazon, or Marsian Vaders. Norman Bates was
the first all American monster. And insofar as Ed Dean
stood behind Norman Bates, you could say that Gan kind
of americanized the genre of horror. And that's a major
(39:20):
major impact. And he also again through Psycho stands as
you know, at some time people call the godfather of core.
You know, the psycho is the prototypical what came to
be called slash or splatter movie. So Gan did have
a major cultural impact, but it was on pop culture,
wasn't on you know, inspiring Richard Speck and Ted Bundy
(39:43):
and Edmund Kemper and so on.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
So I guess the legacy that ed Gan has left
behind continues then in pop culture, as much as it
may have been fictionalized for this instance in Monsters. Do
you think we'll ever stop being fascinated by ed Gan
in his story?
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Well, one of the reasons I was interested in the
game story when I first discovered it is that I
was a professor college professor for forty two years, and
I taught across called myth and archetype. You know about
these narrative patterns and archetypal figures that populate the folklore
(40:21):
and literature of the world. And I've always been very
interested in why we need stories about monsters in our
lives from our earliest years. And Gean has become a
kind of mythic monster at this point. I mean in
that sense again, you could say Ryan Murphy and his
(40:42):
collaborator did what people have always done with mythic monsters.
If you look back at the history of American the
American Frontier, there were these psychotic killers like Jesse James
and Billy the Kid, and their stories have been incredibly
mythologized by Hollywood. So there's a sense in which, yeah,
(41:04):
I mean, Green is such a myth monster at this
point that any creator, you could say, is free to
tell whatever kind of story about him they want to.
My main problem with the Ryan Murphy Show is that
it presents it as true crime. So I think, yeah,
Gan will you know? Gan will definitely remain an undying
(41:28):
part of America's cultural mythology.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Thank you to Harold for helping us tell this story.
You can read more about his book Deviant, The Shocking
True Story of Ed Gan, the Original Psycho at the
link in our show notes. If you want to see
images from this story, head to our Instagram page at
True Crime Conversations and give us a follow and have
a look at our case explainers as well while you're there.
If you enjoyed this episode, please review our show on
Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
We'll eve a comment on Spotify.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
True Chrime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy and
produced by Tarlie Blackman. Thanks so much for listening. I'll
be back next week with another True Chrime Conversation
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. When moviegoers headed
into cinemas across America on September eight, nineteen sixty, they
had no idea what was about to happen to them.
The movie Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock's all time greatest creations,
(00:26):
was new to cinemas. It was a story of Norman Bates,
the man with a split personality and an unhealthy relationship
with his mother, whose type of depravity had never been
explored on the big screen before, a true American monster,
his violence culminating in the stabbing murder of Marion Crane,
played to screaming brilliance by Janet Lee as she was
(00:46):
confronted by the knife wielding maniac while showering.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
That scene reportedly led to trauma so deep that many
who'd seen it became terrified of entering their bathrooms unaccompanied.
The soundtrack to that moment is still used to depict
violence and horror. But Psycho wasn't all fiction. It was
actually based on the very true story of a simple
(01:10):
Wisconsin man, a man whose mother's love was all he
ever wanted, and when he could no longer get it,
would go to extreme and horrifying lengths to recreate it,
events that would lead to that man ed Gean, being
tagged as the Butcher of Plainfield. I'm Claire Murphy and
(01:31):
this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's
most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know
the most about them. When police rated ed Gean's property
in November nineteen fifty seven, they would have to spend
days sorting through the trophies he'd collected.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Body parts were everywhere, but I'm closer.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Inspection investigators realized that that waste basket in the corner
it was made out of human skin. In fact, several
chairs had also been upholstered in human skin. The lampshade
that was a human face. The horror of what ed
Dean had left behind in his family farmhouse led police
(02:12):
to believe that he'd maybe murdered a dozen people to
create this twisted set of homewares, But the reality was
much much darker. Ed Dean and his influence on pop
culture remains to this day, with the recent release on
Netflix of Ryan Murphy's third series of Monsters. The ed
Gen Story when allther Harold Schechter saw it was being made,
(02:33):
he wanted to find no one in Ryan Murphy's camp
had reached out to him. After all, his book is
the leading source of information about the Gan family and
the events leading up to Ed Dean's arrest and subsequent conviction,
where the court found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
But when we sat down with him to discuss Gan's crimes,
he says, as soon as he saw the opening scenes
(02:53):
of Monsters, he knew they hadn't based the story on
any of his work. Harold joins us. Now, Harold, thank
you so much for joining us today. Your name has
come up pretty much in every conversation around ed Gain
seeing as he's back in the headlines from Ryan Murphy's
Monster's version on Netflix.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Have you seen it yet?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yes, I have. I saw it as soon as it dropped.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, you know, initially, when I first heard Ryan Murphy
was going to be making an Ed Gaan documentary and
no one had reached out to me because I don't
want to sound its modest, but you know, my book,
Deviant really told the Gaen story for the first time,
(03:38):
and yeah, I felt that no one could really make
a series about Gain without referring to or using my book. Then,
as soon as I started watching the series, I was
upset because so little of it had to do with
my book, and I dropped the whole idea of any
kind of legal action because the series deviates, if I
(04:03):
can use that word, so far from the historical tree truth. Now,
I've been upset because millions of people are going to
think that they've seen the actual story of ed Gean
when what they've seen is I would estimate ninety percent fabrication,
possibly more so. Yes, So that's my response to it.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Well, let's talk about the real story of ed Gain then,
and we'll keep referencing back to monsters just to see
where it does. Dbaight, But I think to best understand
ed Gain, you have to understand his family background first.
Can you give us a little understanding on who his parents,
George and Augusta were.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Well, one thing I discovered The Deviant was my first
true crime book, and I've encountered the same thing in
many books I've done since is that there were such
obscure people that there's almost no record of what was
going on really in the household. I mean, we know
(05:05):
that the father, George, was apparently an abuse of alcoholic.
We know that Augusta was a dominant figure in the
household in terms of running a business. They originally had
a lacrosse before they moved to Plainfield. We know that
she totally dominated Ed's life, That she was a religious
(05:28):
fanatic who drilled into him the sens that the world
outside their little farmstead was kind of a sodom and gomorrah,
that women were evil, that Ed had to protect himself
from the dangers of strange women. You know that she
(05:49):
would hector him constantly and read to him biblical passages
about the evils of womanhood. Pretty much. That's really all
we know about his parents and his relationship to his parents.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
We see amongst his Augusta kicking George out of the
family home, which obviously isn't true. I mean, for many
reasons we can fill in the blanks. Because Augusta was
such a devout Lutheran, divorce or separation wouldn't have been
on the cards for her. Yeah, so what do we
know of George's fate? Did he was he kicked out
(06:26):
of the home?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
No, No, absolutely not. I think he became increasingly a
burden to Augusta because again his problem with drink made
him increasingly unreliable and unable to perform a lot of
the chores around the farm. But he died at home
(06:48):
and read his obituary in the local newspapers. So that
is just one of I would have to say, almost
countless fabrications that the Ryan Murphy series presents.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Well, let's talk about Augusta, because she does play a
pivotal role in both monsters. But in ed Gane's life,
we know that, as you mentioned, she was quite domineering,
and you in your book step out how you've seen
her role increase over time, in that she becomes the
named proprietor of the business that they run, that she
is the name on the deed of the farm first
(07:23):
and second farm that they.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
End up purchasing.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Why do they end up in such an isolated place
because Plainfield itself is a very small community. There's only
several hundred people who live there. But the farm on
which they lived was outside of that too, and in
the early nineteen hundreds there wasn't a lot of you know,
road traffic outside these farms. It would have been weeks
for people to head out and visit them, and then
(07:47):
you know, they would then have to head into town
for supplies. But why isolate her family from everybody?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well, again, as you Sam, and it's a very part
of Wisconsin, everybody's pretty isolated from each other. I think
they moved there because there was this available farm with
a you know, a very de sensive piece of property.
They thought they could make a go of it. After
living in the city Lacrosse, she wanted to get away
from the city because again she felt cities were hell
(08:16):
holes of corruption and depravity. You know. The isolation I
think suited Augusta because again she was very, very wary
of all the people around her. Possibly she felt she
could exert a more domineering influence over the lives of
her family members if they lived farther apart from the community.
(08:40):
But in general, people lived isolated lives. I mean, the
Games were an extreme case, but that part of Wisconsin
is very sparsely populated. Even when I went up there
in the nineteen eighties, you could drive through very long
stretches of that part of the state and never, you know,
(09:02):
pass another car on the road.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
So they're out there on this isolated. Augusta is in
charge of educating her two young boys, Henry and Ed.
We understand, as you've mentioned that she's very strict on
them as far as her religion is concerned, but she's
also instilling in them, as you've also mentioned this fear
and distaste of women in general. It does seem that
(09:26):
at some stage Henry does try to kind of move
away from that. But Ed is a little bit different,
he seems, and this is also mentioned in your book
where her school friends are concerned that he seems like
a sweet enough boy, but he struggles to make connections
with people. And it turns out that his mother is
also playing a role in that, in that every friend
(09:48):
that he makes, she tells him that something wrong with
that child's parents or the father.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Is immoral or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
So what kind of mental state do you think ed
Geen is in as he's growing up under the influence
of his domineering mother.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Well, again, from what we know, for whatever reason, Augusta
apparently wanted to have a daughter and there was something
and when Ed came along, you know, she was very
disappointed that she hadn't given birth to a girl. Her
first child was a son, Henry, and I think she
part of the stranglehold she kept on him involved his
(10:29):
turning her into a more feminine kind of person. You know,
there's always something from what I understand from having interviewed
people who had known him, which I did when I
did my research in Plainfield, a little bit of feminine
about Ed. You know, that made him a bit of
a not a laughing stock, but you know, sometimes a
butt of cruel teasing. So yeah, I mean, she she kept,
(10:52):
you know, this emotional stranglehold on him. You know, the
expression tied being tied to her apron strings. I mean,
he was really bound to her. That expression doesn't really
capture the extent of her of her hold on him.
(11:14):
I mean, she just kept him kind of attached to
her own by his umbilical court to her and Henry.
You know, there is evidence that Henry was trying to
pull away. Henry had, you know, saw the kinds of
conditions that his Brotherred was living under, did urge him
(11:37):
somehow to try to achieve some kind of independence from
from Augusta. Again, we don't really know all the details
of some indication that it created a certain amount of
tension between them, which then after Gan's crimes were exposed,
led people to believe he murdered Henry, which I'm quite
sure he did not. But the interesting thing is, until
(12:00):
these sensational murderers become known to the public anonymous, obscure figures,
they're complete non entities. So there's no reason there would
be any real biographical information about their past lives other
than what they themselves, you know, as zed Gain did
later tell psychiatrists or law enforcement officials. And the accounts
(12:25):
of neighbors are very unreliable. Once it is revealed to
be this monstrous kind of figure, everybody suddenly, you know,
is recalling and I put that in air quote dealings
with the family. They always knew something was really weird
going on in that household. But you know, you can't
(12:47):
take a lot of those accounts face value.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I guess we can attribute that to Adeline as well,
who is also featured in Monsters. Adeline initially when she's
spoken to about and if you haven't seen Monsters, she's
essentially Edgain's girlfriend in Monsters, who's seems almost complicit to
a point in the crimes that he's committing. She's interviewed
back after he is arrested in the fifties, and she says, yes,
(13:14):
they had a twenty year long relationship and he seemed
like a sweet, nice man. But then he's interviewed not
long after that and says completely the opposite and that
she never had a long relationship with him, and on
he dated him for a short period in the fifties.
So those recollections, they contradict themselves even at the time
of his arrest.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Well again, as relationship with Adeline, as is portrayed in
the TV show, is one of its more egregious features.
I don't mean to seem cruel about this, but if
you look at photographs of the actual Adeline Watkins, she
bears a striking resemblance to the actress Margaret Hamilton as
(13:56):
the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard of
os She was apparently a little bit of a publicity
hound when the media descended on Plainfield the discovery of
Ed's atrocities. I think she enjoyed the attention she was
getting by claiming she had been Ed's girlfriend, which, as
you say, she later attracted. There's no evidence they had
(14:19):
much of any kind of relationship at all. I mean,
he might have one time asked her to go up
roller skating, which was a favorite pastime of his. But
that's what all it amounted to. You know, she was
not this twenty something blonde hottie who is portrayed as
means accomplice and conspirator and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
That just didn't happen. Well, another thing I'm guessing that
didn't happen is Monsters tries to explain the motivation for
Ed Dean doing what he did through Adeline, in that
she gives him a box with photographs from Nazi concentration
camps of the bodies of Jewish people and a comic
(15:02):
book that is basically a fictionalized dialog somewhat fictionalized tale
of ilsa cook who was a German war criminal who
worked in the concentration camps and committed atrocities against Jewish people.
Was any of that even vaguely true? Was he all
influenced by what was happening during the Second World War?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Well he might have. I mean, Gan was a voracious reader,
not of comic books, but of these sensational, lurid men's
magazines at the time, and many of them did in
fact feature stories about hot Nazi bebes torturing, not even
(15:45):
so much committing, you know, committing those kinds of death
camp atrocities. There are stories where they're whipping prisoners of war.
So there is evidence that Ed was fascinated by some
of those accounts that he came across the magazines. We
don't know specifically that he really know anything about Ilsa
(16:07):
Koch per se. There were a number of those female
Nazis who very notorious for having made lambshades out of
human skin. You know. Again, the whole notion that he
was introduced to this by Adeline Watkins, you know, is
just made up, but it is true. You even can
(16:30):
see there are some photographs that were published in Life
magazine back in nineteen fifty seven when the Gaenes story broke,
and there were photographs of the inside of his house
and you know, the incredible chaos and squalor, and there's
one shot actually of a cardboard cartan filled with these
(16:54):
men's magazines. So yes, he might have read about it
and probably did read about him there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Listening to True Crime Conversations with me clam Eurphy, I'm
speaking with true crime writer Harold check about the life
and crimes of ed Gan up. Next, I asked Harold,
if Edgin had succeeded in digging up his mother Augusta's body,
would he still have gone on to commit his horrific crimes.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Well, his initial foray into.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Utilizing dead bodies for his crimes was after the death
of his mother Augusta, which he seemed to take pretty hard.
And if she was as dominant a force in his
life as we believe she was, then that would have
been a terrible blow for him because at that stage,
his father has died, Henry has died, and now his
mother has died, so he's left on his own, and
(17:47):
he does try to dig up her body, but he
can't access her because due to the soil conditions in
that part of Wisconsin, they sometimes will put concrete over
the top to stop them from sinking down. So do
you think had he been able to access Augusta's body
and dig her up at that time, do you think
he would have gone any further? Because he does then
start digging up other people around her.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Do you think he.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Would have gone further had he been able to access
his mother's body Initially.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I've never thought of that. Well, very possibly, no one
of the major problems I have with the TV series
is it portrays Ed Green as a serial killer, and
Ed Gan was not a serial killer. The term serial killer,
so I'm sure you know, was coined specifically to apply
(18:33):
to people like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. You
know what used to be called lost murderers in the
old days, extreme sexual sadus who derived their perverse ecstatic
pleasure from abducting and torturing and then murdering victims. That
was not Ed's m Ed was essentially a necrophile. The
(18:55):
two women he killed, Mary the tavern keeper Mary Hogan,
and the hardware store owner Bernice Warden, he executed very swiftly.
You know, there's no kid and torturing them. He just
wanted their bodies to bring back home. So his major
motivation seemed to have been this effort to resuscitate his mother. Well,
(19:16):
there's a dual motivation. He's acting out this again to
play armchair for adian psychoaalysty. You know, this deep ambivalence
towards this woman, towards his mother. The one hand, he
consciously sees her as his saint, his only friend, and
he wants to bring her back to live with her.
(19:36):
At the same time, he's obviously acting out these homicidal
impulses towards the body in terms of the mutilations he performs.
So all his efforts, as you know, had to do
with getting his mother's body back, and since he couldn't
access it, trying to somehow reconstitute it from the body
(19:57):
parts of these other women. So whether or not he
would have been satisfied if he had been able to
bring Augusta back again, I thought of that, it's an
interesting question. Again we can always speculate, well.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Can we talk a little bit about the things he
was doing with the bodies. You say it was to
reconstitute his mother essentially, But in amongst all of that,
in the Monsters series, there is a big connection with femininity.
And as he mentioned, he was a more effeminate young
man and potentially his mother had almost groomed him into
(20:32):
being the daughter that she actually wanted. And there's this
exploration of his gender and his obsession with women's underguments
and women's bodies, and the fact that he does essentially
make a skin suit out of women's body parts that
he has allegedly worn at some stage. There is also
a conversation in Monsters that he has a fictional conversation
(20:53):
with a transactivist who explains he's not trans, but he's
actually just obsessed with femininity and women's bodies.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
But do you think that was true in that he
was very.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Concerned about what gender he was supposed to be and
that kind of navigation of who he really was, and
that's what he was doing with those bodies too, Well.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
It's probably part of it, you know, when you're say
Gene made a skin suit. Of course, that's where Thomas
Harris got the idea for his Buffalo Bill character and
signs of Lambs. There wasn't a whole suit. The investigators
who first were digging up all these horrible body parts
(21:38):
and so on in his farmhouse came upon what they
called a mammary vest. So he had apparently flayed the
top part of a woman's torso with the breast and
strung it with some kind of cords that he could
put on his own body, which definitely suggests that. Obviously
(22:01):
in my book they say that he was somebody who
dressed up in women's skin and steff to women's clothing, So,
you know, Freud uses the term over determined, which means
that there's no one simple cause of behavior. You can
see in that again, both his evidence to recreate his
(22:23):
mother as well as to be you know, the girl
that his mother always wanted to have, the thing about
ed Geen. I was talking about this actually to somebody
the other day. It's impossible to explain his behavior. Ultimately,
we all want to, in a way reduce this unimaginable
(22:45):
kind of human behavior to something we can grasp with
our rational minds because it gives us a sense of
control over But I'll often say this is hard to
understand ed Geen, as it is to understand Mozart. That
there are certain human beings whose minds and motivation are
(23:07):
just beyond the ability to understand. So all those factors
obviously played into creating the creature we know is ed Game.
Trying to reduce it to some kind of simple explanation
is just not possible. That the conditions of his life
caused something to crack in his psyche, and all this
(23:30):
archaic stuff having to do with flaying victims and wearing
their skins and making trophies out of body parts, you know,
things you see in archaic religions somehow flooded out in
that little Wisconsin farmhouse. It's one of the things that
makes the case so endlessly fascinating is that in the
(23:53):
nineteen fifties, in the midst of this bland bomby America
that's been mythologized as happy days, everybody living in nice
suburban houses around it with white picket fences and sitting
around on Sunday nights and watching I Love Lucy, the
American Heartland. There was this person who the squalor and
(24:18):
darkness of his little hovel was enacting you know, these
archaic rituals like an Aztec priest dressing up in human skin,
well like going back to our prehistoric ancestors dissecting the
bodies of their victims, shrinking their heads, you know, keeping
(24:39):
body parts as trophies.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
So can we talk about the things that were found
in ed Gain's house. When he is finally arrested, he's
arrested at a neighbor's house having dinner, and it's after
he murders Bernie's which she's the local hardware store owner
in the movie. It suggested that they had a relationship,
a sexual relationship, and then he in his schizophrenic state
(25:06):
believes that she's given him a venereal disease and that's
why he goes and murders her.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Which none of that is true, right.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Well, as far as we know, because we're not insided
Gane's head at any stage, none of that is true.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, no, none of it True's complete, complete, outrageous lie.
And somebody said apparently Bernice Warden's relations to sentence very
upset about that. I mean, Gene had no contact with
her at all. I mean apparently the day before he
(25:39):
killed her, he had come into the hardware store and
sort of joshingly asked her she wanted to go out
roller skating. But the portrait, it's really kind of unconscionable
what Ryan Murphy and his collaborator Ian Brennan did something
(25:59):
like that where there still are family members. I'm not
even sure how they could get away with that with
out being sued in sometain way.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
But there's even a suggestion that Bernice's son is absent
in her life and is not you know, and she's
very sad and lonely. But he wasn't He the local
deputy and raised the alarm after she went missing, Like
none of her story seems to be true.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
No, none of it's true. I mean literally none of them.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
I mean, other than working in the hardware store. That
seems to be the only true thing. Yeah. So, after
Ed kills her and takes her back to the property
at the farm, police quickly find out that he is
a suspect because the son does mention that he's come
into the store and has kind of said a few
things to her. And they find him having dinner at
(26:46):
a neighbor's house, and they arrest him. And then they
go and they raid his home. What do they find
inside the GameHouse?
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Well, first of all, they find Bernice Swarden's body in
the summer kitchen adjacent to the house, strung up, beheaded,
strung up, dressed out like a deer, the body hollowed
out of all its internal organs. They find her head,
(27:17):
which Geen had inserted. He had taken a couple of
nails and bent them to make them into hooks and
inserted one in each ear with a rope between them.
He was apparently intending to hang that up as a
trophy on his wall. Inside the house proper, they found
(27:38):
bowls made out of the caps of human skulls. They
found a box full of vulvas which had been painted silver.
They found a belt made of nipples, a shade pull
made of human lips. They found that mammary vests that
we spoke about before. They found a number of flayed faces,
(28:01):
and had flayed the faces off of some of these
corpses and tried them out and hung them on his
bedroom wall. Again, these incomprehensible, incomprehensible horrors. They also at
some point found Mary Hogan ed would sometimes choke around.
Oh she said, I got her at home. You know,
(28:22):
nobody took them seriously, but you know, they found her
head in a paper bag.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
I kind of imagine what they must have been like
for the police who are investigating this. Do they ever
speak about the impact that finding all of these had
on them mentally?
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Well, I know that they spoke about the long term effect,
but yeah, one can only imagine. I think the horrors
were so again incomprehensible, that they couldn't even really process
what they were finding. Gean is really unique as far
as I know, not only in the annals of American crime,
(29:00):
but in the annals of world crime. You know, people
have kept body parts is killers have kept body parts
as souvenirs and so on and so forth, but nobody
did what gain did I mean? Gain? Again? He was
essentially a necro file, but he was less a necro
file who is interested in having sex with the corpses,
(29:21):
although again Ryan Murphy's show does portray him as having
sex with the corpses, which as far as we know,
he never did, as somehow using their body parts as
raw material for the home improvement project. It makes a
very American kind of necro file.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Next, Harold tells us what it says to police when
he's finally arrested, and exactly how much detail he went
into about his crimes When he's arrested. What does he
say to police? How does he tell them what he's done?
Does he admit to it initially?
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Well, no, not initially. When you read gains confessions, his
interrogators ask him all these leading questions, which he admits to.
You know, So let's say, so Edd you we found this,
we found this weird vest, you know, made out of
the top part of a woman's body, and did you
(30:26):
put it on and pretend you were your mother? And
he'd say, yeah, that sounds about right. Late later on,
when he was institutionalized and people would interviewed him, he
would deny almost everything, without ever really explaining how all
those artifacts ended up in his farmhouse. He did admit,
(30:50):
or at least he did not deny, that he had
done all these things.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Well, Coman talk about a lot of the other things
that Monsters claims he did. There's a disappearance of fifteen
year old Evelyn, who in the story was recovering from polio,
and so ed Dean had stepped into babysit the children
she normally babysit, but then she recovered and returned, and
he resented that, and the Monster show suggests that he
(31:16):
kidnapped and murdered her. The only truth I can find
to that is that he yes, at some stage babysat
children to supplement income from for the farm, and that
was about it.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well. Evan Hartley was a young girl who disappeared while babysitting.
After Gan's horrors were discovered. As is often the case
when some sensational murderers have been uncovered, police officers with
unsolved cases flocked to Plainfield hoping to be able to
(31:47):
close out these cold cases. One of them was the
avalent Hartley case. But ye Gan evidently had nothing at
all to do with the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley abducting
teenage girls and torturing them and killing them. Again, Gan
was all about it was not his emma. He was
not a serial sex killer, which is what the show
(32:09):
makes them out to be, and at the end of
the show, it makes them out to be sort of
the forefather of all these notorious serial killers who appeared
back in the seventies and supposedly were inspired by Gain,
which is again what can I say, you know, just
get another complete fabrication?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Is that why we see that scene when he's confronted
by two hunters in that little outhouse where you talked
about Benice being strung up like a deer, and then
he chases them into the woods with a chainsaw and
murders them, which essentially tries to explain the influence on
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
But there's no evidence that that ever happened.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Right. No, again, the two hunters, you know, hunters who
are always getting killed during deer hunting season for one
reason or another. Yes, that's complete. I guess I have
to use the word lie there's no evidence Gan ever
owned a chainsaw after the Gaen crime. The Gaen crimes
(33:14):
became known to most of America because shortly after they
came to light Life magazine, which was essentially this photo
journalistic magazine that at the time could be found in
almost every middle class American household, did a big, big
spread on the Green crimes, and supposedly Toby Hooper, who
(33:38):
was young at the time, he would have been about
he was sort of my age, would have been about
nine or ten, you know, read about it and was
kind of permanently traumatized by it and recollected the story
when he went to make Texas Chainsaw the massacre. But
the chainsaw thing, yeah, that Gaan did not dismember any
victims were chainsaws, and he didn't kill those two hunters.
(34:02):
So yes, that's another thing. Yeah, most of it, you know,
if they did, was what Murphy and Brennan did was
take the broad outlines of the game story and then
just fill it in with whatever they thought was going
to t the late An audience for a few hours.
I sometimes think of it as a throwback to the
(34:25):
kinds of biopics that were made of Hollywood back in
the nineteen thirties and forties. You know the story of
Louis Pasteur, or you know the story of Thomas Edison
or the story of whoever. You know. They take the
very broad outlines and just make stuff up to keep
the audience entertained. So I mean monsters, I said, it's
(34:48):
a particularly particularly egregious example of that kind of thing.
So little of it is based on historical fact. You know,
really you could name the few things that were based
on historical fact, Like there wasn't Ed Gain he did,
you know Rob Graves, he did have this weird relationship
with his mother. Actually, as soon as I turned it
(35:10):
on the first scene which shows him engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation,
as soon as I saw that, I thought, okay, I
don't have a legal case anymore.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
So that a lot of that what happened behind closed
doors in that farmhouse, yeah, essentially has to be made
up because we don't really know what life was like
for them behind closed doors, right.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Well, the fact that he helped solve the Ted Bundy case,
I mean, you name it, it didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
What was life like for ed Geen after he was
arrested and institutionalized because they did find him insane, and
I know they did try to bring him to court
to trial, but again he was found insane. So what
was life like for him? Did his mental health decline?
Did it stabilize? What was it like for him when
he was actually.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
From what I know and they actually know at least
one person who visited him in the institution and spoke
to him. Yeah, life was much better for him once
he was locked up in an institution before you know,
the expression of three hots and a cop. You know,
he had, you know, meals that were much better. You know,
(36:18):
when he was living alone, he might open a I
mean the series sort of got this part right, you know,
open account of big beings, put it on the stove,
the dump it into you know, the top part of
a human skull, and need it. So he was being fed,
He had surrounded by people for the first time in
(36:39):
his life. He was given books to read, He had
a correspondence with people who were very sympathetic towards him.
So his life was a good deal more pleasant than
it had been up to that point.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
What was life like at the end for ed Gina?
Did he pass away peacefully? Was there I mean, unsolved
things they were still trying to work out with him.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Was his life like at the.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
End, Well, he had died of cancer. I'd never really
come across specific information about his last days. I don't
think he was apparently unaware of his influence on American culture.
The thing about Monster is they make it seem as
(37:26):
though his major legacy was, as I said, the forefather
of the serial killers who suddenly appeared back, which is
totally false. But he did have a major impact on
American culture because Robert Block, who was a pulp horror writer,
(37:50):
was living very close to Plainfield at the time the
Gaen story broke. Block was a protege of HP Lovecraft.
He had become known for these pop power stories. When
he read about the game case, he realized this would
be great premise for a horror novel, he felt because
(38:13):
I was I corresponded with Block when I was writing
my book. You know, his problem was knowing how isolated
gen was. Gan never traveled anywhere. Where was he going
to find all his victims? So he thought, well, I'll
have the victims come to him, And that's so he
came up with the idea of the Bates Motel if
you read the novel, when Norman Bates is finally arrested,
(38:34):
he compares himself to Ed Green. So there's a very
very explicit connection. And what I tell people, I grew
up on the I'm a baby boomer. I grew up
in the nineteen fifties culture filled with All I did
was go to horror movies and watch horror movies on TV,
and read horror comic books. And you know, the culture
was full of monsters pop culture, but all the monsters
(38:57):
were from other places, you know, Dracula from Transylvania, or
the Werewolf of London, or Creature from Black Lagoon from
deep in the Amazon, or Marsian Vaders. Norman Bates was
the first all American monster. And insofar as Ed Dean
stood behind Norman Bates, you could say that Gan kind
of americanized the genre of horror. And that's a major
(39:20):
major impact. And he also again through Psycho stands as
you know, at some time people call the godfather of core.
You know, the psycho is the prototypical what came to
be called slash or splatter movie. So Gan did have
a major cultural impact, but it was on pop culture,
wasn't on you know, inspiring Richard Speck and Ted Bundy
(39:43):
and Edmund Kemper and so on.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
So I guess the legacy that ed Gan has left
behind continues then in pop culture, as much as it
may have been fictionalized for this instance in Monsters. Do
you think we'll ever stop being fascinated by ed Gan
in his story?
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Well, one of the reasons I was interested in the
game story when I first discovered it is that I
was a professor college professor for forty two years, and
I taught across called myth and archetype. You know about
these narrative patterns and archetypal figures that populate the folklore
(40:21):
and literature of the world. And I've always been very
interested in why we need stories about monsters in our
lives from our earliest years. And Gean has become a
kind of mythic monster at this point. I mean in
that sense again, you could say Ryan Murphy and his
(40:42):
collaborator did what people have always done with mythic monsters.
If you look back at the history of American the
American Frontier, there were these psychotic killers like Jesse James
and Billy the Kid, and their stories have been incredibly
mythologized by Hollywood. So there's a sense in which, yeah,
(41:04):
I mean, Green is such a myth monster at this
point that any creator, you could say, is free to
tell whatever kind of story about him they want to.
My main problem with the Ryan Murphy Show is that
it presents it as true crime. So I think, yeah,
Gan will you know? Gan will definitely remain an undying
(41:28):
part of America's cultural mythology.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Thank you to Harold for helping us tell this story.
You can read more about his book Deviant, The Shocking
True Story of Ed Gan, the Original Psycho at the
link in our show notes. If you want to see
images from this story, head to our Instagram page at
True Crime Conversations and give us a follow and have
a look at our case explainers as well while you're there.
If you enjoyed this episode, please review our show on
Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
We'll eve a comment on Spotify.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
True Chrime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy and
produced by Tarlie Blackman. Thanks so much for listening. I'll
be back next week with another True Chrime Conversation
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