Monster: The Ed Gein Story episode 7 takes us further into the disturbed and clinically ill psyche of Ed Gein, with him now finally going through the diagnosis and the treatment that he should have been subjected to much earlier. As soon as the police found incriminating evidence at the Worden grocery store that pointed towards Ed, there was simply no escape for the man, with several shocking discoveries made by the authorities at his house. The Ed Gein Story episode 7 spends most of its time at the Central State Hospital, as Ed continues to have hallucinations and finds it even more difficult to differentiate between reality and his imagination.
Spoiler Alert
Does Sheriff Arthur Schley set Ed Gein’s house on fire?
Episode 7 begins in 1958, a few months after the arrest of Ed Gein, with a different man in focus in the small town of Plainfield. Frank Worden, the grieving son of Bernice, is still unable to accept the sudden and brutal end to his mother’s life. He is also evidently clueless about how exactly to express the immense hatred, anger, and feeling of revulsion against Ed that has only been growing in his mind for this long. But he does eventually come up with a plan to seek some sort of revenge on the criminal, although it will not technically hurt him as much as Frank would have wanted to. With his mother gone from his life, and her murderer put away in a psychiatric hospital after being deemed unfit to be imprisoned, all that Frank Worden can think of is to capitalize on the situation and expose the world to the ruthless and beastly nature of his supposedly meek and cowardly neighbor, Ed Gein.
Therefore, Frank decides to set up an estate auction at Ed’s house, inviting townsfolk and also people from all over the country, as the case was getting media attention on a national scale, to visit the house where the Butcher of Plainfield carried out his gruesome acts and also buy items used by him. He carefully puts price tags on each of the items in the house, ranging from usual crockery to the sewing hooks used by Ed to create his human leather overalls. More than anything else, this incident highlights two specific matters, with the first being the extreme emotional distress that Frank finds himself in, as he tries to get over his sorrows through whatever desperate means possible. He knows that what he is doing is not really the most natural or expected course of action in such a situation, but Frank also does not care anymore, as his mother’s murder has simply removed his moral compass.
Secondly, the long queues outside the house during the auction highlight how humans have an inherent curiosity towards the macabre and the grisly, and how many jump at the chance to be a part of violent incidents from history by owning mementos from the incident. It is absolutely baffling for Sheriff Arthur Schley to see so many people line up in front of the house to buy items used by Ed Gein in his regular life and also in his overwhelmingly inhuman crimes as memorabilia. He is also equally concerned about the mental health of his deputy, Frank, as he knows that the latter will simply keep going down a spiral if he continues to associate with situations related to Ed. To top it all off, he knows that letting such objects used by a fearsome criminal will only spread Ed’s maniacal beliefs and intentions across the country, or at least the town, which would be terrible.
Thus, Sheriff Schley first tries to talk Frank into canceling the auction and then directly decides to take action to bring an end to the event. Although the auction begins, and people bid for various items, none of the objects are handed over to them because the auction is to continue for a couple more days. However, Ed Gein’s house is found to have mysteriously burned down on the night of the first day of auction, with all the items inside being destroyed. Frank directly asks Schley what caused the fire, to which the sheriff states that the reason remains unknown, and suggests that it might be a case of arson. But it is clear to Frank, and to the viewer as well, that it was Schley who must have ordered the house to be burned down in the dead of night in order to shut down the auction and to save Plainfield and Frank Worden from further trouble.
Who does Ed talk to over the ham radio?
The only remaining item left in a sellable condition at Ed’s house is his pickup truck, which Adeline responsibly auctions off, sending the money to Ed at the Central State Hospital. Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, Ed was a very obedient and normal patient at the hospital, disturbing nobody and even teaching carpet weaving and sewing to the other patients. Around this time, he receives the money that Adeline sends him, and he decides to buy three ham radios, one for himself and the other two to be sent to his idols in life, whom we meet in the next few minutes. The first is Ilse Koch, better known as the Witch of Buchenwald, and the second is Christine Jorgensen, the singer and actor who became widely popular as the first American transwoman to have gone through sex reassignment surgery. Both these historical figures had indeed inspired the two sides of Ed, which is why he now expressed a desire to reach out to them through ham radio.
Although Ilse Koch had never held any official position in the Nazi military or government, she had taken up an important role by herself as the wife of Karl Otto Koch, the commandant at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Ilse ordered the torture and humiliation of thousands of Jewish prisoners, as she considered them to be sub-humans undeserving of any respect. Among many other forms of torture, Ilse had first (seemingly) come up with the idea of using human leather, harvested from dead Jewish prisoners, to make various pieces of furniture and tapestry, which could then be used for decorative purposes. She had made lampshades out of human skin and had also first written about the idea of a belt made with human nipples. Ed Gein had learned about these through the vile and almost pornographic pulp magazines that were published about Ilse Koch’s tortures, and had implemented both ideas in his own life.
While the Nazi woman represented the evil and torturous side of Ed, Christine Jorgensen represented the other extreme in him—his desire to be a woman in a more permanent manner than just indulging in transvestitism. His extremely messy discovery of his sexuality, both as a teenager and also as an adult, which had been unnaturally controlled by his mother, had made Ed feel uncomfortable in his own skin, and so he yearned to live under the skin of a woman, quite literally. Therefore, when he first read about Christine Jorgensen, who had gone to Sweden following the end of WWII to undergo a sex reassignment surgery and finally live her life as a woman, Ed felt overjoyed and inspired. It seems like Ed’s ultimate goal in life was to change his sex, although his morals and complex belief system also made it impossible for him to achieve this goal. It was when his overly violent tendencies mixed in with this immense desire that he cut off vulvas from the bodies of women to try and stick them onto his own body permanently.
Why does Roz’s presence deteriorate Ed’s condition again?
During the long hospital sequence, Ed is seen behaving normally with everyone at the place, especially one of the nurses, Salty. There soon seems to be a bond of friendship developing between the two, with Salty evidently feeling sympathetic towards Ed. There is nothing in Ed’s behavior either that would suggest that he is a serial killer who had committed the most horrific of crimes, until there is a sudden change in him with the emergence of a new warden named Roz. Right after coming in, Roz removes Salty from the scene and imposes her own set of rules to keep all the patients under control, and Ed immediately hates the woman for her authoritative nature.
It seems like Ed has trouble accepting dominating figures, as his inherent but suppressed masculinity tries to take over whenever someone tries to control and dominate him. This was what had created the slew of mental problems in him in the first place, as Augusta’s practice of exerting control over every aspect of her son’s life had pushed Ed to commit most of his crimes. Now, when the helpful and understanding Salty is replaced by the dominating Roz, Ed’s conditions resurface very quickly, and he makes an elaborate plan to murder the new warden in one of the toilets at the hospital. He is seemingly helped by Salty as well, who secretly hands Ed the keys to his room so he can sneak out and commit the murder late at night, when there would be nobody around to catch him.
Are Ed’s conversations and experiences in the episode real?
Ed executes his plan brilliantly, as he gets hold of a chainsaw and then hacks Roz to death with it, leaving a grotesque and bloody scene not just in the toilet but all over the corridor. He then returns to his room and falls asleep peacefully, only to realize on the next morning that this experience had been totally imaginary. Ed’s worsening schizophrenia escalates to such a level that the already thin line between fiction and reality inside his mind is almost invisible now. Therefore, he imagines the whole scenario of sneaking out of his room to kill Roz and is then terribly frightened upon seeing her alive and well at the hospital the next morning. Since The Ed Gein Story often deliberately blurs this line for us viewers as well, it is difficult to say for sure whether Salty is even a real person or if she is also just a part of Ed’s imagination.
Similar to this experience, Ed’s conversations with his two idols turn out to have been completely imaginary as well. During their talks over the ham radio, Ilse Koch had repeatedly asked him to not feel guilty or sorry for whatever he had done, much like her own self, who had defended herself in court till the very end. Christine Jorgensen, on the other hand, had tried to distance herself as much as possible from Ed, and had only tried to prove how his criminal acts did not have any connection with his transvestite desires. But in reality, neither of these individuals had been sent the ham radios that Ed had wanted to gift them, since it was the hospital’s protocol to simply stow away any such items requested by patients in the basement of the building.
Ed’s own radio had never been connected to electricity, meaning that it had not been working the whole time, and yet he had held long and detailed conversations with two of his idols through it. The doctor explains that this is further proof of Ed’s worsening schizophrenia, and that he had been overheard by the nurses carrying out both sides of the conversations. This means that Ilse and Christine’s words, claims, and advice for him are really coming from his own mind and from the multiple sides of his split psyche. Ed is told that his mind is like a shattered piece of glass, with each small piece being a different identity and persona. These strange experiences, as well as the harrowing truth of the diagnosis, are too much for Ed Gein to digest, and so he obediently starts to take pills prescribed by his doctor in order to put his mind to rest.
