Ed Gein biographer slams Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monster’ Season 3: ‘Pure fabrication’

Ed Gein biographer slams Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monster’ Season 3: ‘Pure fabrication’

Well, my first reaction was surprise that no one had reached out to me you know in the past uh when such things have happened in fact it’s just happening now you know people might option my books or whatever um so for a long time now really ever since I heard that Murphy was planning to make Gene the subject of his third season I have been feeling uh a grieved and resentful because I worried that uh Ryan and his co-creator Ian Brennan were going to kind of rip off my book uh you know under the under the pretext that it was all in the public domain you know that Gene was this public figure and and there are things you know when I when I wrote Deviant back in 1987 true crime name was considered a kind of pulpy subliterary genre and the model that I was using was Truman Capot’s in cold blood which he called a non-fiction novel by which he meant you know applying novelistic techniques to telling a true story that has since become known as creative non-fiction and I I was very consciously writing in that mode when I did deviant you know I tell people uh that my motto at the time was taken from the last line of the first chapter of Ken Keezy’s one flu of the cuckoo’s nest where the narrator the big chief says it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen. So there are certain scenes in my book primarily having to do with Gene’s interactions with his mother because there are no real I mean other than the few things I’d said about said about it in his confessions uh you know we don’t really know what what went on between them. Uh so they were sort of imaginative reconstructions on my part. So my main worry at the time uh and going up to the moment I watched the show was that uh there was going to be a lot of unauthorized use of my book 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. Mhm. So much of it is pure over-the-top fabrication. Okay. that now I’m mostly upset that all the people who watch the show are going to think they’re seeing the true story of Edge Gene which you know there you know they’re obviously in in terms of broad outlines you know his relation to his doineered mother the grave robbery you know the making of these ghastly objects out of the body parts and so on you know those are pretty accurate But a very large percentage of the show is just is just made up. Yeah, Ryan Murphy does have a trend of dramaticizing his projects. Were you did you watch the Jeffrey Dmer and the Menendez brothers uh seasons as well before this? You know, so much of my time is spent researching and writing about crime that I don’t watch a lot of true crime stuff. Yeah. Well, Ryan Murphy, you know, Ed Geen has become a kind of mythic figure. And on the one level, you know, Ryan Murphy has every right to treat the story uh dramatically. I mean, I I think I made my book dramatic, but I did it with stick sticking with the facts. I mean what Murphy has done I haven’t seen the other shows but certainly in this case well either Murphy or Ian Brennan who wrote it uh just in you know invented these outrageous things which have no relationship to the truth you know the true facts of the Ed Gen story. What was the most outrageous to you in terms of the entire show? Was there one specific storyline or one character betrayal person human betrayal that you Well, I mean it’s you know even when I watched the very first scene where you see Ed engage in auto erotic asphyxiation I’m like where did that come from? You were like oh this is going to be a interesting journey. We’re starting off with the first scene like this. Yeah. But it has no there’s no evidence Yeah. whatsoever that Ed ever enjoyed that particular activity. Um but then you know the way he treat the character of Adeline Watkins you know the real who is this beautiful young woman who’s very close to I mean the real Adelyn Watkins uh first of all I don’t want to seem cruel but if you see photographs of her you know she bears a striking resemblance to Margaret Hamilton and the Wizard of Oz. Okay. Um and and their relationship I I’m pretty convinced didn’t really consist of anything more, you know, than possibly maybe Gene once asked her roller skating or something. They didn’t really have a relationship. You know, she was kind of a publicity hound. When all the media descended on Planefield after the discovery of the crimes, she suddenly came forward as Ed Gene’s girlfriend. But, you know, the notion that Ed Gene uh, you know, helped solve the Ted Bundy murder. The other thing, I mean, I had many questions about that because I didn’t feel like that was entirely accurate. I assume it wasn’t. Not only was it not entirely accurate, thing I was like, huh? No, it’s wildly wildly made up. The other thing that’s made up very, you know, importantly, is that Gene wasn’t a serial killer. Yes. you know, right? By definition. By definition, he was not a serial killer because the term serial killer was specifically coined to describe a certain kind of psychopathic sex murderer, an extreme sexual satist like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gasey who derived erotic pleasure from torturing and then killing victims. That was not that was not what Gene was about. I mean, he did kill these two women, but he, you know, he executed them very swiftly. He was basically just interested in bringing their corpses home, you know, so he could dissect them. He was not a serial killer. And the notion that all these serial killers at the end uh Brutus I forget, you know, were inspired by Gene a Richard Speck. I mean I I feel pretty confident that none of them even knew who Gene was, right? They wouldn’t have been inspired by them because he was not a serial killer, right? So, you know, my jaw dropped at, you know, how how how shameless uh the whole production was.

Harold Schechter did not have a killer time watching “Monster: The Ed Gein Story.” NY Post Entertainment Reporter Eric Todisco shares this story.

Schechter, a true crime historian and author who wrote the definitive book about Gein, “Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho,” told The Post that he’s unhappy with the third season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, which focuses on Gein and his crimes.

“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,” Schechter, 77, said.

Read more at https://nypost.com/2025/10/08/entertainment/ed-gein-biographer-harold-schechter-slams-monster-season-3-ryan-murphy/

#edgein #ryanmurphy

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