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Monster: The Ed Gein Story premiered on Netflix and immediately put a fresh spotlight on the Plainfield, Wisconsin case that shaped modern screen horror. The season revisits a 1950s investigation that stunned local police first, then the nation, and finally filmmakers who borrowed its grisly details for decades.
Ed Gein was a reclusive handyman whose name became shorthand for a certain kind of American nightmare. Arrested in 1957 after a local shopkeeper went missing, Gein later confessed to two murders and admitted to digging up graves.
Case background of Monster: The Ed Gein Story
Plainfield was a small community in the 1950s. Gein kept to himself, did odd jobs, and lived alone after his mother died. On November 16, 1957, Bernice Worden disappeared from her store. A receipt for antifreeze written that morning led deputies to Gein.
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Investigators searched the farm that night. In a shed, they found Worden’s body. Inside the house, they cataloged human remains and items fashioned from skin and bone. These findings turned a local search into a national story.
Gein was first ruled unfit for trial and sent to a state hospital. In 1968, a judge found him guilty of Worden’s murder, then ruled him not guilty by reason of insanity. He remained in psychiatric care until he died in 1984.
5 key details about Ed Gein’s case that frame Monster: The Ed Gein Story
1) The 1957 farm search changed the case overnight
Deputies who entered Gein’s shed and home recovered the body of Bernice Worden and documented multiple items made from human remains. The scene, photographed and inventoried by authorities, turned a missing-person case into a confirmed homicide and revealed evidence of grave-robbing in addition to the murder.
2) Two confirmed murders and admitted grave exhumations
Gein confessed to killing tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and shopkeeper Bernice Worden in 1957. He also admitted to robbing graves and keeping or repurposing parts of the exhumed remains. The combination of two known murders and admitted grave desecrations is central to the historical record, per Encyclopaedia Britannica.
3) The legal outcome turned on mental state, not on disputed facts
After years in state care, Gein was found guilty of Worden’s murder in 1968, then ruled not guilty by reason of insanity and committed indefinitely. The insanity ruling explains why he was not sent to a standard prison; a second trial for the Hogan killing was not pursued due to prohibitive costs.
4) A direct line to film history
Although the case involved two known murders, the recovered artifacts and the “woman suit” idea echoed across fiction. Elements fed into Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Those titles are the reason the case looms so large in pop culture discussions of serial killers, according to USA Today.
5) Henry Gein’s death remains a point of debate, not a proven crime
Gein’s older brother, Henry Glen, died in 1944 during a brush fire. After 1957, townspeople and later writers questioned whether the death might have been foul play.
Officials at the time ruled otherwise, and Gein never faced charges related to Henry’s death. The suspicion persists, but it remains unproven, per reporting from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s regional coverage and follow-ups on the case history.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story can be streamed on Netflix.
