According to Monster Season 3, other than his mother, the big woman in Ed Gein’s life was Adeline Watkins – but how much of this is real? The killer’s biographer has spoken out and slammed the ‘wild’ Netflix show.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story stars Charlie Hunnam as the titular killer who changed the horror landscape, with his crimes inspiring the likes of Psycho’s Norman Bates, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs’s Buffalo Bill.
Although Monster is a true crime series, this latest chapter from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan blurs the line between truth and reality. For instance, Gein never helped police hunt down Ted Bundy.
A significant reason for this is to show Gein’s descent into delusion, having been diagnosed with schizophrenia after his arrest. But given the significance of Adeline (Suzanna Son), there are naturally questions surrounding her character. Warning: some may find this content distressing.
Was Adeline Watkins real?
Yes, Adeline Watkins was a real resident of Plainfield, Wisconsin. But while reports initially stated that she was in a romantic relationship with Ed Gein for 20 years, she later challenged the claims and said elements of her story were “exaggerated”.
This is highlighted in Deviant: True Story of Ed Gein – The Original Psycho, a ‘90s book written by true crime author and serial killer expert, Harold Schechter. The pages point to a rare interview Watkins gave to the Minneapolis Tribune in 1957, shortly after Gein was arrested.
The report said Watkins, who was 50 years old at the time and lived alone with her widowed mother, recalled her last date with Gein on February 6, 1955. “That night, he proposed to me,” she said.
“Not in so many words, but I knew what he meant. I turned him down, but not because there was anything wrong with him. It was something wrong with me. I guess I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to live up to what he expected of me.”
When asked about what activities they did together, Watkins replied, “Eddie and I discussed books. We never read the same ones, but we liked to talk about them anyway. Eddie liked books about lions and tigers and Africa and India.”
In the leadup to the alleged proposal, Watkins claimed she and Gein would go on dates on an average of “twice a week”, often to the cinema. Her mother, who was present during her interview, reportedly added that Gein was the “soul of politeness”.
Watkins continued, “I liked to drink beer sometimes, but I would almost have to drag Eddie into a tavern. He would much rather have gone into a drugstore for a milkshake.”
She insisted that the breakdown of their relationship was down to her, stating, “Eddie was so nice about doing things I wanted to do that sometimes I felt I was taking advantage of him.”
Despite the horrific crimes Gein had committed, Watkins was quoted as saying, “I loved him and I still do.” Schechter wrote that the interview made “quite a splash” in Plainfield as “no one could remember Eddie Gein’s ever having been involved with a woman.”
“Indeed, within days of the interview’s appearance, Watkins contacted Ed Marolla of the Sun to offer a radically different version of her relationship to Gein,” he added.
In an article published in the Stevens Point Journal, Watkins accused the Tribune story of being “exaggerated”, “blown up out of proportion”, and “containing untrue statements”.
“Actually, Miss Watkins declared, Gein had called on her for only seven months, and then only intermittently,” the report stated. “She said Gein during this short period stopped at the Watkins home on some afternoons or evenings and that the couple had attended shows at the Plainfield Theater ‘a few times.’”
What’s more, unlike what’s depicted in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Watkins claimed that she never visited Gein’s home, let alone was confronted with the body parts he’d collected.
As stated by Schechter, “In short, Adeline Watkins wanted the public to know that there was not a shred of truth to the highly sensationalized account of her love affair with the little man who stood accused of the grisliest crimes in Wisconsin.”
Ed Gein biographer slams ‘wild’ Monster Season 3
Although Adeline Watkins is no longer around to share further details, Schechter is alive and well, and he’s now slamming Monster Season 3, saying the Netflix show “veers so wildly” from the reality of the true crime case.
“Ever since I heard that Murphy was planning to make Ed Gein the subject of his third season, I have been feeling aggrieved and resentful because I worried that Ryan and his co-creator, Ian Brennan, were going to kind of rip off my book under the pretext that it was all in the public domain,” he told the New York Post.
“After watching the show, I mean there is some unauthorized use of my book I feel, but the show veers so wildly from the reality of the case,” Schechter continued.
“So much of it is pure, over-the-top fabrication. Now I’m mostly upset that all the people who watch the show are going to think they’re seeing the true story of Ed Gein.”
Schechter said some of the widely known elements of the case, such as Gein’s domineering mother, the grave robbery, and the fact he made “ghastly objects” out of body parts, are accurate, “but a very large percentage of the show is just made up.”
While many moments in the series stick out to Schechter, the depiction of Watkins is particularly noteworthy. Schechter points out that she’s shown as “this beautiful young woman” in Monster.
“The real Adeline Watkins, first of all, I don’t want to seem cruel, but if you see photographs of her, she bears a striking resemblance to Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz,” he continued.
“Their relationship I’m pretty convinced didn’t really consist of anything more than possibly, maybe Gein once asked her roller skating or something. They didn’t really have a relationship.
“She was kind of a publicity hound. When all the media descended on Plainfield after the discovery of the crimes, she suddenly came forward as Ed Gein’s girlfriend.”
Schechter also said the scene suggesting Gein helped police to hunt down Ted Bundy is “wildly, wildly made up.” The same goes for the description of Gein as a serial killer.
“The term serial killer was specifically coined to describe a certain kind of psychopathic sex murderer – an extreme sexual sadist like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy who derived erotic pleasure from torturing and then killing victims,” the writer commented.
“That was not what Gein was about. I mean, he did kill these two women, but he executed them very swiftly. He was basically just interested in bringing their corpses home so he could dissect them.”
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