The last 2 entries in Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s Monster franchise have been criticized for sensationalizing facts, and as expected, the latest installment in the series, The Ed Gein Story, is no different. What actually happened in real life was that as soon as Eddie Gein’s gruesome crimes were discovered, strange rumors started to circulate around Plainfield.
Trigger Warning
In Netflix’s show, we came across a scene in episode 6, where Sheriff Arthur Schley, while searching Ed Gein’s house, found Bernice Worden’s heart boiling inside a pot, which gave the investigating sheriff the idea that the owner of the house practiced cannibalism. However, as per the real-life photographs of the crime scene, it is not what had happened. At around 8 PM on 16th November 1957, Sheriff Schley and Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster approached Ed Gein’s farmhouse to question him about Bernice’s disappearance, but he wasn’t at home. The two officers went around the woodshed next to the house, where they stumbled upon the most spine-chilling sight that they ever encountered in their lifetime. They discovered Bernice’s headless body hanging by the heels from the rooftop and immediately called for backup. Upon further investigation, the authorities discovered other parts of her butchered body inside the house. As per the autopsy report, her head and viscera were found in the same location, while her heart was in a plastic bag in front of the potbellied stove. Yes, it wasn’t found inside a pot.
But you might be wondering, where did Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy get this outlandish idea from? According to Harold Schechter’s “Deviant,” the revelations of the ghoul’s heinous crimes generated even ghastlier stories across the town. One such story straight out of the rumor mill was that Bernice’s heart was found in a frying pan on one of the burners. In real life, the police had located a pile of entrails wrapped in a newspaper, but as Ed Gein’s story went viral, people altered these facts and started circulating rumors that Ed’s refrigerator was packed with human organs. And that’s how the townsfolk of Plainfield convinced themselves and the rest of the world that Ed Gein wasn’t just a grave digger or a butcher but also a consumer of human flesh.
However, every lie or rumor has a grain of truth in it. As per the “unidentified investigator,” who was present during Ed Gein’s interrogation, talked to the reporters and leaked some ghastly details of his crimes. He told the press that after digging up corpses from the graves, Ed cut them and kept only the parts that interested him, like the heads, which he used to decorate his house, and the strips of skin to sew his human body suit. And yes, “those” too, which he had kept inside the box. While he would dispose of the rest of the parts by burning them in small pieces on his kitchen stove. Hence, it could be surmised that the reason why the authorities found a heart and other parts of the body near the stove was not because he was going to consume them, but because he was going to get rid of them, but before he could do so, the police arrived at the crime scene and caught him red-handed to put the butcher of Plainfield behind bars, the place such a monster actually deserved.
While most of the investigators were of the opinion that he never consumed human flesh, the rumors kept on spreading, and once again one such piece of hearsay made an appearance in Netflix’s show. In episode 6, Sheriff Schley told Ed that folks in town say that he gave them venison, but he never went hunting, so where did he get his “deer meat” from? It was an actual story circulating around town that Ed handed packages of human flesh to his neighbors, and as soon as it started to spread, people ran towards the local clinic with gastrointestinal complaints. But as mentioned earlier, no evidence was ever found that suggests that Ed distributed human flesh. During an interrogation, District Attorney Earl Kileen had directly questioned Ed whether he had mutilated Bernice’s body with the intention of eating her flesh, to which Ed replied that he didn’t remember.
The rumors around Ed’s cannibalism also seem to originate from his taste in South Seas yarns, particularly the stories centered around cannibals and headhunters. He had always been a lonely child devoid of any connection with the outside world. His adventure stories of headhunters, Nazis, and cannibals became his escape from the real world and shaped his psyche, from which he was never able to recover. The grisly fiction was the reality Ed grew up reading, and a part of his mind found it quite normal to have a peculiar hobby like the heroes in his book. The only issue here was there was no one around to save Ed or to show the right path. He never actually learned the difference between what’s human and what’s monstrous, and as the time passed, his mind couldn’t differentiate anymore.
