Netflix Debuts Monster The Ed Gein Story, Eight Episodes

Netflix on Friday released Monster The Ed Gein Story, an eight-episode dramatization of the life and crimes of Edward Gein, the Wisconsin farmhand whose 1957 arrest exposed grave robbing and grotesque trophies fashioned from human remains. The installment, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, stars Charlie Hunnam as Gein and Laurie Metcalf as his mother, Augusta, and frames the case as both a portrait of a disturbed man and an examination of the cultural aftershocks his actions produced.

Gein, known historically as the Butcher of Plainfield, confessed to killing two women, tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957, and investigators documented multiple cemetery exhumations of recently buried women. Authorities who searched his farmhouse found human remains and objects made from body parts, which prosecutors and judges have cited in accounts of the case. After his arrest Gein was diagnosed with schizophrenia; he was declared unfit to stand trial in 1958, later found fit for trial in 1968, convicted of Worden’s murder but judged legally insane and returned to psychiatric custody. He died in institutional care in 1984 of respiratory...