Did Ed Gein catch Ted Bundy? What's fact and what's fiction in Netflix's Monster series.

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This article contains spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

Ryan Murphy is back with another instalment of the Monster anthology — and this is by far the grisliest story yet.

Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan's Monster: The Ed Gein Story follows "the godfather of serial killers," whose harrowing acts inspired countless horror movies.

Gein became infamous for his crimes in rural Plainfield, Wisconsin, earning him the name the "Butcher of Plainfield".

Watch the trailer for Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Post continues below.

Gein's atrocities came to light when a local hardware store owner went missing, leading authorities to Gein's door. Inside, they found her mutilated body — but that wasn't all.

Police discovered Gein had robbed graves and collected women's body parts, which he used to make furniture and clothing. He also fashioned a "woman suit" from human skin that he could wear.

Despite only being convicted of one murder, he was suspected of many more.

In true Murphy fashion, this season is deeply disturbing and brings with it plenty of questions... like did Gein really kill his brother?

We have all your answers. Here's everything to know about this grim story.

Beware, spoilers ahead.

Did Ed Gein kill his brother?

In the show, Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam) kills his older brother, Henry, in episode one after Henry says he wants to get away from their domineering mother, Augusta. Gein strikes his brother with a piece of wood before dragging his body into the woods and staging a fire.

The real-life story is murkier.

Biographer Harold Schechter wrote in his book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Original 'Psycho' that the brothers had a "good relationship" but disagreed on one thing: their mother. He says Gein was shocked by Henry's criticism of her.

Schechter says the "single indisputable fact" about Henry's death was that it happened on May 16, 1944. And the rest? Well, that's up for debate.

That day, Gein was burning marsh on the property when the fire got out of control. It was only after local firefighters had extinguished the blaze and left that Gein reported his brother missing.

Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein. Image: Netflix.

Schechter wrote that at first, Gein claimed that when the fire got out of control, he lost his brother. However, he was later able to lead searchers directly to his body, which was lying on the ground. Henry had suffered no burns. Schechter reported that Henry had bruises on his head.

Ultimately, Henry's cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation and no further investigation was conducted.

It wasn't until 1957, when Gein was questioned about another death, that state investigator Joe Wilimovsky brought up questions about Henry's death.

While Gein never admitted to having played a role in his brother's death, in the 1981 biography Edward Gein: America's Most Bizarre Murderer, experts who studied Gein drew "possible and likely" similarities between him and his brother and the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, in which God favoured Abel over Cain, driving him to murder his brother.

Did Ed Gein really have a girlfriend?

In the series, Gein's relationship with Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) is front and centre, with the couple even getting engaged.

Watkins is the one who introduces him to real-life Nazi Ilse Koch, nicknamed "the Bitch of Buchenwald," whose barbaric work inspired his own atrocities.

Ed Gein (Charlie Hunnam) and Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) together. Image: Netflix.

The portrayal has left viewers wondering where the line between fact and fiction is drawn.

Information about the real Adeline Watkins is thin, but what we do know is this.

In a 1957 interview, just days after Gein's arrest, Watkins famously claimed she had a decades-long romance with the murderer, describing him as "good and kind and sweet".

"I loved him and I still do," she told the Minneapolis Tribune. According to Watkins, their dates usually involved going to see a movie and the pair shared a love of reading.

Watkins also told reporters the pair often talked about crime.

"I guess we discussed every murder we ever heard about," she said. "Eddie told [me] how the murderer did wrong, what mistakes he had made. I thought it was interesting."

She also claimed they shared their last date on February 6, 1955, when Gein proposed, but she turned him down.

The real Adeline Watkins. Image: Getty.

The story made national headlines. But days later, Watkins retracted her statements, denying she was the serial killer's "sweetheart" and clarifying they were just friends. She also refuted claims that she and her mother considered Gein "sweet."

Co-creator Ian Brennan has defended her inclusion in the series, telling Netflix's Tudum: "[What] we do know is that she came out at first talking about how they were an item, and they were going to get married. And then she came out like, 'No, I made that all up.'"

Was Ilse Koch a real person?

Yes. The series Monster: The Ed Gein Story introduces a connection between Gein and the German war criminal Ilse Koch. The story portrays Gein first encountering Koch when his girlfriend, Adeline, gifts him a box of items and photos from a concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Among these is a comic book called The Bitch of Buchenwald, Koch's notorious nickname, which detailed her atrocities, which in real life, included her owning a lampshade made of the tattooed human skin of Jewish prisoners.

Gein takes the book home, becomes fascinated with Koch, and hatches the idea to recreate the crimes detailed within the comic.

Koch was a real war criminal who died by suicide in prison, but there was no record of Gein ever saying he was inspired by her crimes.

Did Ed Gein actually know Ilse Koch?

No — at least, not personally. It's unknown whether Gein actually knew of Koch or her crimes but they definitely never met, or had a radio call with each other, as depicted in a dream sequence in the Netflix show.

What about the babysitter Evelyn Hartley?

The third episode introduces babysitter Evelyn Hartley (played by Addison Rae), who Gein kidnaps and kills in the show.

In reality, the 14-year-old went missing on the night of October 24, 1953, in La Crosse, Wisconsin — relatively far from Gein's Plainfield home. She has never been found.

Addison Rae as Evelyn Hartley. Image: Netflix.

Gein was questioned about Hartley's disappearance because he had been seen visiting relatives in the area around the time she went missing. However, following his arrest, he continued to deny any involvement and even passed two lie detector tests.

While Netflix's Monster shows Gein murdering Hartley, he was never definitively connected to her disappearance. The case remains unsolved.

What about the babysitter scene with the kids?

In one of the show's most harrowing scenes, in an effort to show Adeline he can be a good father, Gein took on babysitting duties, abducting two kids from their home to take them back to his house of horrors.

This… didn't happen. Yes, Gein was known to have babysat in the Plainfield community, but there was no record of him taking children back to his home.

Did Ed Gein kill those two hunters with a chainsaw?

Early in the series, Gein kills two hunters who had wandered onto his property after getting lost. Victor Travis and Raymond Burgess catch Gein in his farmhouse as he is mutilating a victim, and he chases them away with a chainsaw.

This whole storyline never happened and has seemingly conflated the events of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Gein's crimes.

Gein never confessed to using a chainsaw as a murder weapon — it was Tobe Hopper, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director, who told Interview Magazine in 2014 that he had conceived the chainsaw idea himself while shopping in a crowded department store during the holiday season.

Did Ed Gein have a relationship with mass murderer Richard Speck?

Nope — like, not at all. The Netflix series makes it seem like Richard Speck, a mass murderer serving a life sentence, had positioned Gein as his idol and had written to him to discuss Ted Bundy's crimes.

There is zero proof that this ever happened. Speck never said he idolised Gein. They didn't have a relationship.

This is one of many, many creative liberties taken in the new Monster series.

Are Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs based on Ed Gein?

Yes, Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock's horror classic Psycho was, in fact, inspired by Gein's crimes.

In his novel, Bloch drew directly from Gein's relationship with his mother for his portrait of Norman Bates, a motel-owning killer who develops a split personality and dresses in his dead mother's clothes.

Image: Netflix.

The plot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is largely fictional, but the character of Leatherface is based on Gein's crimes, as the serial killer wore a mask made of human skin.

The same went for psychological horror thriller Silence of the Lambs, which featured a cross-dressing serial killer named Buffalo Bill who murdered young women and removed their skin.

Gein's long-lasting pop culture influence is part of what drew Murphy to telling his story.

"He is probably one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and yet people don't know that much about him," Murphy told Tudum.

"He influenced the Boogeyman and Psycho. Norman Bates was based on him. He influenced The Silence of the Lambs. He influenced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He influenced American Psycho."

Did Ed Gein have sex with dead bodies?

In the Netflix series, Ed starts to have sex with women's corpses under the encouragement of Adeline, who flees to New York.

This isn't true.

The real Gein denied ever having sex with the corpses of his murdered victims or the bodies he exhumed. Why? He said it was because "they smelled too bad."

Did Ed Gein feed his victims to the neighbours?

There's a twisted scene that suggests in the series that Gein might have given cuts of meat from his victims to his neighbours. It's unclear exactly what meat this was, but this scene does reflect hazy accounts of that time.

According to locals, Gein did give his Plainfield neighbours meat that he claimed was venison, despite not being a known deer hunter. "Another resident, who was allegedly given 'venison' by Gein, politely but firmly closes the door in my face," Scott Hassett wrote in Isthmus in a piece published in 2007.

Did Ed Gein really talk like that?

Hunnam's portrayal of Gein is outright spine-tingling. His voice in the series is distinct, almost like that of a child — but is it what Gein really sounded like?

This one's a bit of a grey area.

Recordings of Gein were rare. Accounts reportedly described him as soft-spoken.

The voice "needed to be really specific," Hunnam told Variety.

He imagined a combination of Mark Rylance's reedy tone in his Tony-winning role in Jerusalem and Michael Jackson.

Ed Gein in court. Image: Getty.

The actor says he was able to get his hands on a tape made the night Gein was arrested that had not been legally admissible.

"It's about an hour-and-10-minute interview with him while he's in custody," Hunnam told Tudum. "A lot of the musicality, and his inflection, and his choice of words, and where his energy sat, I was able to extract from it."

The recording helped him nail the chilling voice we hear in the show.

"I started to see him through a series of affectations to please his mother. That's where the voice came from," he told Variety.

Did Ed Gein help catch Ted Bundy?

So this is one where fiction takes the reins a bit.

Gein was charged with the murder of hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1968, and also later admitted to the 1954 killing of tavern owner Mary Hogan. However, he was never sentenced to prison. He was deemed legally 'insane' and was remanded to a psychiatric institution, where he later died, aged 77.

In the final episode of Monster, we see Gein finding a "new purpose" in the hospital: helping the FBI catch serial killer Ted Bundy. FBI agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler (who are real people) visit Gein to get his help in understanding the psyche of Bundy.

It's left viewers confused about what actually happened. To put it simply, Gein had nothing to do with Bundy's capture. What Murphy and Brennan are trying to portray is Gein's schizophrenic personality and inability to distinguish between reality and fiction.

"We always knew that we wanted to climax our story with our exploration of the nature of mental illness and how it had affected Ed," Hunnam told Tudum.

"If he had gotten the right treatment sooner, [the question becomes] if he would've ever done the things that he did. I really wept inconsolably reading that scene for the first couple of times."

In reality, Bundy was arrested after attempting to flee a police patrol car, before authorities subsequently linked him to his crimes.

Was Ed Gein's tombstone stolen?

Yes. Like it was in the Netflix series, Gein's tombstone was stolen in 2000, as reported by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

You can stream all eight episodes of Monster: The Ed Gein Story on Netflix now.

Feature image: Netflix.