Netflix's Monster: The Ed Gein Story picked up seven nominations for the 2026 Emmy Awards, recognizing the third season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's true crime anthology series, which stars Charlie Hunnam as the Wisconsin farmer whose crimes inspired some of horror's most famous villains.
The nominations include acting nods for Hunnam and for Laurie Metcalf, who plays Ed Gein's overbearing mother, Augusta Gein. The season, which premiered in October, followed Murphy and Brennan's previous Monster installments about Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers.
Gein killed at least two women, but his crimes went further: he also dug up corpses and fashioned household items out of bones, skin and other body parts. His story inspired the killers in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
Murphy said in a Netflix interview that he thought of Hunnam for the role after seeing a "haunted" paparazzi photo of the Sons of Anarchy actor and thinking there was "something very Ed about him." Hunnam responded, "I must have been having a bad day."
Who was Ed Gein
Edward Theodore Gein was born Aug. 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the second son of George Gein and his wife, Augusta, who according to Harold Schechter's 1989 book Deviant had been hoping for a girl. The family moved to a remote 195-acre farm in Plainfield, a village of around 700 people, in 1914.
George was an abusive alcoholic, and Augusta was overbearing, making her sons swear they would keep themselves "uncontaminated by women," Schechter wrote. Ed and his older brother, Henry Gein, remained on the farm after their father died in 1940.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. N.G. Berrill discussed the dynamic in the 2023 docuseries Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein. "When you have someone who's chronologically an adult male, but they're psychologically fused with their mother, the worst-case scenario is a kind of psychological incest," he said. "How did they come to be so close and why was he unable to extricate himself from this relationship?"
Henry died of an apparent heart attack in 1944 at age 42. Ed then lived alone with Augusta until she suffered a massive stroke and died in 1945, a loss that devastated him. "Ed was a very extreme pathological form of what used to be called a mama's boy," Schechter said. "Augusta was a saint who could do no wrong. Whenever he spoke about her after his arrest, he burst into tears."
The murders of Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan
On Nov. 16, 1957, Frank Worden returned to his family's hardware store after a day of deer hunting and found a trail of blood leading from the sales counter to the back door, along with spent22-caliber shell casings. His mother, 58-year-old Bernice Worden, was missing.
A receipt showed a sale of anti-freeze at the register, and Frank remembered Gein had come in the day before to ask about the product. Deputies went to the Gein farmhouse and, in a woodshed, found Bernice's headless body hanging from the roof bars, according to The Lost Tapes. Her heart was found in a plastic bag.
Ed was arrested that night at a neighbor's house. As investigators kept searching his property, they found the head of Mary Hogan, a 54-year-old tavern manager who had been missing since 1954, inside a paper bag. Bullet casings, blood stains and signs of a struggle had been found at her tavern the night she disappeared, and Ed had joked to townspeople that he had her "down at his place," though no one took him seriously.
In a post-arrest interview with authorities, Gein confessed to killing both women and admitted to digging up corpses and keeping body parts in his house, though he denied digging up his own mother's grave. He said he found fresh graves by reading death notices in the newspaper, and spoke evasively about the killings, saying at one point that he "must have used a knife" on Bernice. Asked what he did with women's body parts found in his home, he replied, "I wouldn't enjoy it or anything."
The Evelyn Hartley mystery and Adeline Watkins
Monster suggests Gein murdered 14-year-old Evelyn Hartley, played in the series by Addison Rae, but he was never definitively linked to her October 1953 disappearance. Evelyn vanished while babysitting; her father found an open basement window and blood spatter near the window and on the lawn, according to the Spokesman-Review. Gein denied involvement and passed two lie detector tests, per Schechter.
After his arrest, 50-year-old Adeline Watkins, played by Suzanna Son in Monster, came forward claiming to have been his girlfriend. "I loved him and I still do," she told the Minneapolis Tribune, per the Wisconsin State Journal, calling him "good and kind and sweet." She said their last date was Feb. 6, 1955, when she turned down his marriage proposal, explaining, "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." She also recalled, "We discussed every murder we ever heard about. Eddie told how the murderer did wrong, what mistakes he had made. I thought it was interesting." Watkins later told the Stevens Point Journal that the pair had actually only dated "intermittently" for about seven months, and that she never visited his house.
Gein's trial and death
Gein was charged with Bernice Worden's murder in November 1957 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Found unfit to stand trial, he was committed to a state hospital until 1968, when he was granted a bench trial. His defense argued the fatal shooting was accidental. Judge Robert H. Gollmar found him guilty of murder, but a second trial on his sanity sent him back to the state hospital. Gein died at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984 at age 77.
He is buried beside his parents and brother at Plainview Cemetery, though his grave has no headstone. His original tombstone was chipped away by souvenir hunters over the years before someone stole it entirely in 2000. Authorities recovered the stone but keep it in storage to discourage visitors, who have since taken to breaking pieces off his mother's headstone instead.
Hunnam joins a long line of actors who have won award recognition for playing real-life serial killers on screen, including Zac Efron as Ted Bundy, Jeremy Renner and Ross Lynch as Jeffrey Dahmer, and Charlize Theron in her Oscar-winning role as Aileen Wuornos, among others. The 2026 Emmy Awards air Sept. 14 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC and stream on Peacock.
