True Crime Conversations · Mamamia Podcasts

The Real Story Of Ed Gein: The Original Psycho

·42 min·2 clips

Police found Bernice Warden “strung up beheaded” and a box full of silver-painted vulvas.

1. True Crime Conversations covers Ed Gein and the Netflix series The Ed Gein Story under Ryan Murphy’s Monsters label. 2. Claire Murphy hosts, and Harold Schechter joins as the author of Deviant, the book he says first told the Gein story in detail. 3. The episode asks what the real Ed Gein case looked like and how far Monster departs from historical record. 4. Schechter says Ryan Murphy’s series is “90% fabrication,” and he says he saw that mismatch from the opening scenes. 5. He describes George Gein as an abusive alcoholic and Augusta Gein as the dominant force in the household. 6. Augusta, he says, treated the world outside the farm as dangerous and repeated Biblical warnings about women. 7. Schechter says the family lived on an isolated farm outside Plainfield, Wisconsin, after time in La Crosse. 8. He says Augusta wanted a daughter, and that Ed was pushed into a more feminine role as a child. 9. Schechter argues that Henry Gein tried to pull away from Augusta, while Ed remained tightly bound to her influence. 10. He says neighbors’ memories of the family became unreliable only after Ed Gein’s crimes were exposed. 11. Schechter dismisses the show’s version of Adeline Watkins and says there is no evidence of a serious 20-year relationship. 12. He also says the series invents Ed Gein’s connection to Nazi photographs and Ilse Koch through Adeline. 13. Schechter says Gein may have read sensational men’s magazines that included stories about female Nazis and human-skin lampshades. 14. He says Gein’s motivation centered on his dead mother, Augusta, and on trying to reconstruct her body from other women’s remains. 15. He rejects the label serial killer and calls Gein a necrophile whose victims were killed quickly rather than abducted and tortured. 16. Schechter describes the farmhouse search and lists items police found, including a mammary vest, skull-cap bowls, and silver-painted vulvas. 17. He says the tone of the story is bleak but analytical, with Claire Murphy repeatedly checking claims against the Netflix series. 18. The format is a straight interview, with Schechter answering detailed questions and correcting specific scenes one by one. 19. People interested in true-crime history, Psycho, and horror origins. 20. Viewers wanting dramatized killer biographies over source-based correction.

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