Episode 5 of Monster: The Ed Gein Story was largely centered around Adeline and how her soul had probably been corrupted due to her proximity to Ed. She was insulting to everyone and anyone around her. She even abandoned Ed and went off to New York City to pursue a career in photography, hopefully under the guidance of the famous photographer, Weegee. But before going, she apparently put the bug of necrophilia into Ed. Hence, while Adeline went off to the Big Apple, Ed dug up the body of Eleanor and fornicated with her at his house. While Ed was having a good time, things were hellish for Adeline over in New York because the room she had rented had no heating system, and, on top of that, Weegee had rejected his candidature. Eventually, she took out her frustration on the landlady and then returned to Plainfield. When she wanted to get frisky with Ed, she came to the realization that he didn’t like warm bodies anymore. But she was supposedly ready to take cold plunges in the bathtub to make her body as cold as a corpse, since that’s what it’d take to get Ed excited. With all that said, did Adeline stand beside Ed when his crimes were exposed to the world? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Ed Is Arrested
Episode 6 of The Ed Gein Story begins with a flashback between Bernice and Frank where they are deciding what all they’re going to buy for Thanksgiving. Then it cuts to a scene that’s unfolding possibly a few hours after Bernice’s murder at the hands of Ed, as Frank and the Sheriff walk into Bernice’s store looking for her, and all they find is her blood. Without wasting another second, Frank, the sheriff, and the rest of the police department rush over to the Gein household and begin turning it upside down. They find human body parts strewn all over the establishment. And as they begin photographing the place, Frank assumes that the only reason why no one has found his mother in the house is because, maybe, she is in the barn. Well, he is partially correct because Bernice’s body is present in the barn, but it is in such a mutilated state that it’s tough to say that it belonged to a human.
While all this is going on, Ed returns home and is immediately captured by the Sheriff, who begins asking him about what he has done. From here onwards, Ed begins lying about everything that he has done. As he is yapping, Frank realizes that Ed is back and punches the living hell out of him. That doesn’t compel Ed to tell the authorities the truth. So, they are left with no other option but to detain him. In possibly the saddest scene in the show, the coroner takes up the difficult task of piecing together Bernice’s body by matching all the parts that have been found in Ed’s house just so that Frank can bury his mother. After 6 goddamn episodes of absolute ghoulish nonsense, the show manages to generate emotions such as sympathy and empathy by looking at the whole situation through the eyes of a grieving son. It’s the bare minimum, I know, but I have just watched a scene blur the line between necrophilia and regular sex. So, pardon me for giving some credit where credit is due.
Adeline Denies Her Ties With Ed
As Ed’s crimes come to light, some of the spotlight hits Adeline as well. She fully distances herself from whatever Ed has done and uses all the attention that she’s getting to get a job for herself. But Adeline learns pretty quickly that if she isn’t associated with Ed, nobody is interested in her. Without her connection to a string of horrific crimes, she is just some country girl with a massive ego and an attitude problem; that’s it. I mean, after Bernice’s funeral, when Adeline pretends that she is a member of the press so that she can ask Frank some provocative questions, the sheriff shoos her away while calling her a pest. That’s her legacy.
Now, let’s get one thing straight: as mentioned in all the previous articles, the real-life Adeline did admit that she was in a pretty long relationship with Ed, but then she later claimed that she was just saying anything for some publicity and that she barely knew Ed. What’s authentic and what’s not, I don’t know for sure. And the issue with The Ed Gein Story is that it presents Adeline’s involvement in Ed’s life—we even see her motivating him to take part in necrophilia—as fact and then doesn’t even do the bare minimum to present the person’s truth. It’s like the showrunners have already decided what they think is the truth and then set their narrative around it. I know that it’s pointless to expect nuance from a Ryan Murphy production, but since I’m not a fan of his projects, I’m treating it as I’d treat any other crime drama about a serial killer. Based on that, I don’t think this is the correct way to present a narrative where the facts have been heavily debated. Either you ensure that the ambiguity is palpable, or you don’t touch on that topic at all.
Ed Takes The Polygraph Test
The sheriff starts interrogating Ed about his action, and Ed just straight-up denies killing anyone. He admits that he had a hobby of digging up dead bodies, but he denies murdering anybody. The sheriff keeps asking about the manner in which Bernice has been found to try and get a straight answer from him, but Ed keeps going in circles so as to avoid answering that he is the one who has done all that to her. So, the sheriff throws a curveball by asking if he has partaken in cannibalism and supplied several body parts to his neighbors. Throughout the show, he has claimed multiple times that he is going out hunting, but we never saw him hunting any animal. That makes the source of the meat that he gives everyone pretty questionable. To which Ed says that he doesn’t remember doing any such thing. In fact, Ed’s fuzzy memory becomes his most important defense because every time he doesn’t want to confess to doing something horrendous, he just says that he has no memory of that particular incident. Realizing that they have reached a bit of a stalemate, Ed advises the Sheriff to put him through the lie detector test. In this day and age, we know that the polygraph can be fooled. But back in the day, folks had much more faith in the lie detector. Hence, when a lot of Ed’s lies were confirmed to be authentic by the polygraph, the authorities had no option but to not hold Ed accountable for the murder of quite a lot of people whose body parts were found in his house.
The only crimes that Ed owned up to were the murders of Mary and Bernice, which certainly gave their respective families some form of closure. Did all this happen for real? Yes, it did. This is one of the rare moments in the show where official accounts of what happened during the investigation actually match up with what’s being shown on-screen. At the end of The Ed Gein Story episode 6, the sheriff invites Frank over to Thanksgiving dinner, something that he was supposed to attend with his mother. And when the sheriff cuts into the turkey, the image of the electric knife cutting through the meat of the bird makes him think about how Ed must have butchered his mother. Now, in real life, apparently, less than two weeks after Bernice’s death, Frank had reopened his mother’s hardware store. Eventually, Frank and his sister, Miriam, filed a lawsuit against the Gein estate, which was worth $57,800. Some time later, Ed’s whole house went up in flames, and given how the fire marshal back then was Frank himself, well, he didn’t have issues with that incident. Was he the one who did it? Nobody can say for sure.
