October 7, 2025 • 11 mins
#TrueCrimeTuesday, diving into Ryan Murphy’s chilling new Monsters series about serial killer Ed Gein.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, it's Tuesday. It's twelve thirty. It's time for True
Crime Tuesday. The story is true, sounds true? No, it
sounds made up. I don't know. Parry and Shannon present
True Crime. Before we get into the specifics of this
show Monster the ed Geene story, I'll stick with Gene.
(00:22):
I think you're probably right there. I have a question
that has bothered me since I started thinking about who
makes movies?
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Do you have any hand cream? H No?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
No, okay, I have made some hand cream.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I left it at home. I was gonna say, you
look pretty flaky today.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
The question of who rights the scariest movies that you
can think of?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Right?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Are they movies or they books?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
That's also that's fine too, But whoever creates this type
of thing? I think it really came to a head
when the Saw movies were so popular, that there are
people out there who have really sick, demented thoughts about
humanity and us as bags of meat and bone, and
(01:17):
that they want to put it on paper or they
want to put it on celluloid. They want to show
other people the crazy, depraved things that go on in
their heads. And I always wonder what didn't make the cut. Well,
what are the craziest murder scenes in movies and TV
and books? Also what was edited out? Because some of
(01:40):
these I'm not a shrinking violet, but some of them
are completely unnecessary.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
And to that point, when I'm watching the latest Ryan
Murphy show about ed Geen, I'm thinking to myself, why
didn't you just stick with what you had?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Why add more?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Instead of leaving something on the cutting room floor, he
added things to make the plot even scarier, or more
gruesome or worse.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Ed Gean is a guy I guess grew up in
the forties Plainfield, Wisconsin. He's torn between his perverse instincts.
I guess there's an autoerotic asphyxiation scene right off the bat,
and his devotion to his mother.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Right off the bat. In the show, I'm not spoiling anything.
If you spent more than five minutes watching this, he's
caught wearing his mother's underwear, hanging from a belt, standing
on a chair in his room, and masturbating, to which
I asked my husband, who happened to be walking by
in the home. How many serial killers were caught masturbating
(02:45):
by their mother?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
All of them probably right, But that's not to say
that everybody who's been caught masturbating, by the way he treadn't.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's what he said, which really troubles me that both you.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Did that really trouble. Okay, that's funny.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
But this guy, the mom in this case, played by
Laurie Metcalf.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And the whole time, you're like, Aunt, Becky, Oh, that's
I heard you say that earlier.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I didn't know what that meant, all right. So in
this case, this super religious mother abhors sex and sin
and women. And I guess the older son had already
gone away with a woman.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
So the older son had at least in the first episode.
She was upset with the older son because he had
been getting close to a woman. And in fact, he
tells Ed his younger brother that he's going to marry
this girl and you got to get away from mom.
And Ed doesn't like that his older brother said, you
got to get away from mom. So there we are.
Here's what we know about the true story. This isn't
(03:48):
a spoiler. This is just what happened in history. And
like I said, Ryan Murphy takes liberties and how.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And this is no different.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
It's kind of the trouble that everyone got into with
the Menendez brothers. Remember it was Ryan murphy second season
of the show Monster, where he profiled the Meneda's brothers
and he took liberties, and he took the molestation thread
a lot further than it ever went in real life.
And that's when people started calling for new trial and
(04:16):
you know, victims' rights and all of this stuff. Where
it was Ryan Murphy's own adaptation of that story was
the reason why there was renewed attention to the menandas brothers.
So here he is with ed Gean taking different liberties,
making something out of nothing here, but here is the
true story. Ed Gean was born in nineteen o six
(04:39):
to his parents, George and Augusta. He had one brother, Henry.
They moved to the farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin when Ed
was young. They lived mostly in isolation. He attended school,
Ed did, but was said to be punished by his
mother if he tried to make friends. Grew up in
a strict and religious household of the things, and producer
(05:01):
Matt chimed in on this as well. One of the
hurdles you have to get over is Ed's voice in
the show.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Now.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
He is played by the Sons of Anarchy Hattie.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Guy Charlie Haunum.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, really, yes, which is why I think a lot
of people had fascination about it. At least I had
fascination through the whole first episode that he's able to
transform himself into this character.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Oh but okay, go on.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Yeah. And his voice in this is so chilling and
so eerie. It's hard to take. You're just kind of
cringing the whole time when he's speaking. Anyway, we'll get
into more of this when we come back about what
happened in the real life story of ed Geen, what
(05:51):
went on with his parents and abuse and the farm
where I mean the whole like isolated on a farm
in a religious household.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
What scary movie is that? It seems pretty cut cookie cutters.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Edward Theodorgan, born in Wisconsin in nineteen o six, came
from a fervently religious from the Lutheran family there, and
is the subject of Ryan Murphy's latest season of Monsters.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Lutherans used to be more hardcore because the Lutherans, I know,
it's like a Catholic light. They are a lovely people.
I love the services. It's lovely. You can be married
and be a priest, well a big fan of the
Lutheran Throw that throw whatever flavor it is, throw into
the mix.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
That dad was an absolutely raging, violent alcoholic. So Ed
grows up in a at the very least confusing home
and in all honesty, I mean the he was put
in jail for exhuming corpses from graveyards and it gets gross.
He was fashed, I mean keepsakes from their bones and
(07:01):
their skin. He confessed only to killing two women nineteen
fifty four and nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
He made a lamp shade from human Skin's I mean
that's resourceful.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
One word.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Well, I mean, if you're living in Plainfield, Wisconsin, on
a farm, you're not going to go down to the
target and buy a lamp shade.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
You're going to make one out of animal skin? Are
you not?
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Or you decide you probably don't need a lamp shade,
that you don't need it that much that you would
use human skin for It's well, you.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Could use animal skin, right, yeah, a deer as possible.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
So one of the issues that you have.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
I'm going to google this and this may be one
of my worst googles. Can you make a lamp shade
out of skin.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I thought you said he already did. I just want
to see if it's common. It is not.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
It is not going none of it is good. How
would it be common?
Speaker 3 (08:02):
I just meant like to make it out of like
deer skin, Like if you lived off the land, did
you make things for your home with like you.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Know, I get where you're coming. Thank you. I was
dying out here for like right, yeah, like.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
A goat goat skin would be probably a lamp shade.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Okay, I'll move on.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
You know, your birthdays not until July. I'm going to
have a hard time remembering that between now and then.
Get you to find and then it will not be homemade,
trust me. But one of the issues that is that
ed gen eventually I mentioned that he was uh confessed
to killing a couple of women. He was eventually found
unfit to stand trial. Uh, but he was dealing with hallucinations.
(08:56):
And one of the things that happens in this show
is Ryan Murphy kind of blurs the line between what
actually happened and the hallucinations. So he is basically crediting
ed Gean with killing more people than he might have
actually killed.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Right, Because you got to know what's hallucination and what's not.
And since he's.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Doing it from Ed's perspective here, that's why the line
is blurred, because even Ed didn't know apparently what was
going on.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yes, an untrustworthy narrator, he did tell investigators this was
in real life, that his desire to kill and keep
human flesh was driven by his deep connection with his mother,
his desire to be more like a woman by wearing
their skin.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
So this is kind of like a you.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Know, Silence of the Lamb.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
You're right, Buffalo, Bill, But you told me was not
real not that long ago.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Well, it's that case is not real. But I'm sure
that people took the writer's creators took some sort of
liberties with past serial killer cases. Yeah, I'm worried about Well,
I'll tell you what I was gonna say. I'm worried
about you because you watched this show. I'm not. I'm
worried about this woman who watched this show. Stand by,
(10:17):
she's gonna.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
How are you guys?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Good?
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Fine, fantastic to hear. This is Karen.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
And in regard to Monster the Gean story, I all
of a sudden blanked on his first name.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I think it's ed Geen.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
I am a true crime enthusiast as well with Hugh Shannon,
but I couldn't stop watching it. I blew through all the.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Episodes so.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Well, I get that like I started it after that
Chargers game on Sunday, so I had already had my
fill of horror, the darkness and complete depravity, like I
had sat through four hours of it already on that day.
I don't know why I decided to put sprinkles on
top of my disastrous day with more disaster and detritus,
(11:12):
which was this show, but I did. And I am
going to get it because you said that, I'm going
to give it another try. I'm gonna try episode two
today because I haven't watched four hours of complete disappointment already.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So you don't think this was four hours of complete disappointment.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No, oh, and not after that game I watched on Sunday.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Now you have some truth full? Yeah, text, do you
have a measuring stick?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Sometimes when you're going through it and you're watching it
much like you know Hell, you don't realize what you're in.
You're just kind of getting through it. I just got
to get through it and just get your body's getting
through it. It's like it's just like a survival thing.
And then once it's over, you're like.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
What was that. Then it hits you, right, that's the
stage I'm in. Got it.
Well, it's Tuesday. It's twelve thirty. It's time for True
Crime Tuesday. The story is true, sounds true? No, it
sounds made up. I don't know. Parry and Shannon present
True Crime. Before we get into the specifics of this
show Monster the ed Geene story, I'll stick with Gene.
(00:22):
I think you're probably right there. I have a question
that has bothered me since I started thinking about who
makes movies?
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Do you have any hand cream? H No?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
No, okay, I have made some hand cream.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I left it at home. I was gonna say, you
look pretty flaky today.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
The question of who rights the scariest movies that you
can think of?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Right?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Are they movies or they books?
Speaker 1 (00:56):
That's also that's fine too, But whoever creates this type
of thing? I think it really came to a head
when the Saw movies were so popular, that there are
people out there who have really sick, demented thoughts about
humanity and us as bags of meat and bone, and
(01:17):
that they want to put it on paper or they
want to put it on celluloid. They want to show
other people the crazy, depraved things that go on in
their heads. And I always wonder what didn't make the cut. Well,
what are the craziest murder scenes in movies and TV
and books? Also what was edited out? Because some of
(01:40):
these I'm not a shrinking violet, but some of them
are completely unnecessary.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
And to that point, when I'm watching the latest Ryan
Murphy show about ed Geen, I'm thinking to myself, why
didn't you just stick with what you had?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Why add more?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Instead of leaving something on the cutting room floor, he
added things to make the plot even scarier, or more
gruesome or worse.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Ed Gean is a guy I guess grew up in
the forties Plainfield, Wisconsin. He's torn between his perverse instincts.
I guess there's an autoerotic asphyxiation scene right off the bat,
and his devotion to his mother.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Right off the bat. In the show, I'm not spoiling anything.
If you spent more than five minutes watching this, he's
caught wearing his mother's underwear, hanging from a belt, standing
on a chair in his room, and masturbating, to which
I asked my husband, who happened to be walking by
in the home. How many serial killers were caught masturbating
(02:45):
by their mother?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
All of them probably right, But that's not to say
that everybody who's been caught masturbating, by the way he treadn't.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's what he said, which really troubles me that both you.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Did that really trouble. Okay, that's funny.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
But this guy, the mom in this case, played by
Laurie Metcalf.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And the whole time, you're like, Aunt, Becky, Oh, that's
I heard you say that earlier.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I didn't know what that meant, all right. So in
this case, this super religious mother abhors sex and sin
and women. And I guess the older son had already
gone away with a woman.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
So the older son had at least in the first episode.
She was upset with the older son because he had
been getting close to a woman. And in fact, he
tells Ed his younger brother that he's going to marry
this girl and you got to get away from mom.
And Ed doesn't like that his older brother said, you
got to get away from mom. So there we are.
Here's what we know about the true story. This isn't
(03:48):
a spoiler. This is just what happened in history. And
like I said, Ryan Murphy takes liberties and how.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And this is no different.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
It's kind of the trouble that everyone got into with
the Menendez brothers. Remember it was Ryan murphy second season
of the show Monster, where he profiled the Meneda's brothers
and he took liberties, and he took the molestation thread
a lot further than it ever went in real life.
And that's when people started calling for new trial and
(04:16):
you know, victims' rights and all of this stuff. Where
it was Ryan Murphy's own adaptation of that story was
the reason why there was renewed attention to the menandas brothers.
So here he is with ed Gean taking different liberties,
making something out of nothing here, but here is the
true story. Ed Gean was born in nineteen o six
(04:39):
to his parents, George and Augusta. He had one brother, Henry.
They moved to the farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin when Ed
was young. They lived mostly in isolation. He attended school,
Ed did, but was said to be punished by his
mother if he tried to make friends. Grew up in
a strict and religious household of the things, and producer
(05:01):
Matt chimed in on this as well. One of the
hurdles you have to get over is Ed's voice in
the show.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Now.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
He is played by the Sons of Anarchy Hattie.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Guy Charlie Haunum.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, really, yes, which is why I think a lot
of people had fascination about it. At least I had
fascination through the whole first episode that he's able to
transform himself into this character.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Oh but okay, go on.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Yeah. And his voice in this is so chilling and
so eerie. It's hard to take. You're just kind of
cringing the whole time when he's speaking. Anyway, we'll get
into more of this when we come back about what
happened in the real life story of ed Geen, what
(05:51):
went on with his parents and abuse and the farm
where I mean the whole like isolated on a farm
in a religious household.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
What scary movie is that? It seems pretty cut cookie cutters.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Edward Theodorgan, born in Wisconsin in nineteen o six, came
from a fervently religious from the Lutheran family there, and
is the subject of Ryan Murphy's latest season of Monsters.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Lutherans used to be more hardcore because the Lutherans, I know,
it's like a Catholic light. They are a lovely people.
I love the services. It's lovely. You can be married
and be a priest, well a big fan of the
Lutheran Throw that throw whatever flavor it is, throw into
the mix.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
That dad was an absolutely raging, violent alcoholic. So Ed
grows up in a at the very least confusing home
and in all honesty, I mean the he was put
in jail for exhuming corpses from graveyards and it gets gross.
He was fashed, I mean keepsakes from their bones and
(07:01):
their skin. He confessed only to killing two women nineteen
fifty four and nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
He made a lamp shade from human Skin's I mean
that's resourceful.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
One word.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Well, I mean, if you're living in Plainfield, Wisconsin, on
a farm, you're not going to go down to the
target and buy a lamp shade.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
You're going to make one out of animal skin? Are
you not?
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Or you decide you probably don't need a lamp shade,
that you don't need it that much that you would
use human skin for It's well, you.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Could use animal skin, right, yeah, a deer as possible.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
So one of the issues that you have.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
I'm going to google this and this may be one
of my worst googles. Can you make a lamp shade
out of skin.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I thought you said he already did. I just want
to see if it's common. It is not.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
It is not going none of it is good. How
would it be common?
Speaker 3 (08:02):
I just meant like to make it out of like
deer skin, Like if you lived off the land, did
you make things for your home with like you.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Know, I get where you're coming. Thank you. I was
dying out here for like right, yeah, like.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
A goat goat skin would be probably a lamp shade.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Okay, I'll move on.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
You know, your birthdays not until July. I'm going to
have a hard time remembering that between now and then.
Get you to find and then it will not be homemade,
trust me. But one of the issues that is that
ed gen eventually I mentioned that he was uh confessed
to killing a couple of women. He was eventually found
unfit to stand trial. Uh, but he was dealing with hallucinations.
(08:56):
And one of the things that happens in this show
is Ryan Murphy kind of blurs the line between what
actually happened and the hallucinations. So he is basically crediting
ed Gean with killing more people than he might have
actually killed.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Right, Because you got to know what's hallucination and what's not.
And since he's.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Doing it from Ed's perspective here, that's why the line
is blurred, because even Ed didn't know apparently what was
going on.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yes, an untrustworthy narrator, he did tell investigators this was
in real life, that his desire to kill and keep
human flesh was driven by his deep connection with his mother,
his desire to be more like a woman by wearing
their skin.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
So this is kind of like a you.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Know, Silence of the Lamb.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
You're right, Buffalo, Bill, But you told me was not
real not that long ago.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Well, it's that case is not real. But I'm sure
that people took the writer's creators took some sort of
liberties with past serial killer cases. Yeah, I'm worried about Well,
I'll tell you what I was gonna say. I'm worried
about you because you watched this show. I'm not. I'm
worried about this woman who watched this show. Stand by,
(10:17):
she's gonna.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
How are you guys?
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Good?
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Fine, fantastic to hear. This is Karen.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
And in regard to Monster the Gean story, I all
of a sudden blanked on his first name.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I think it's ed Geen.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
I am a true crime enthusiast as well with Hugh Shannon,
but I couldn't stop watching it. I blew through all the.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Episodes so.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Well, I get that like I started it after that
Chargers game on Sunday, so I had already had my
fill of horror, the darkness and complete depravity, like I
had sat through four hours of it already on that day.
I don't know why I decided to put sprinkles on
top of my disastrous day with more disaster and detritus,
(11:12):
which was this show, but I did. And I am
going to get it because you said that, I'm going
to give it another try. I'm gonna try episode two
today because I haven't watched four hours of complete disappointment already.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So you don't think this was four hours of complete disappointment.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No, oh, and not after that game I watched on Sunday.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Now you have some truth full? Yeah, text, do you
have a measuring stick?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Sometimes when you're going through it and you're watching it
much like you know Hell, you don't realize what you're in.
You're just kind of getting through it. I just got
to get through it and just get your body's getting
through it. It's like it's just like a survival thing.
And then once it's over, you're like.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
What was that. Then it hits you, right, that's the
stage I'm in. Got it.
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