Did Ed Gein Really Help Find Ted Bundy? The Truth Behind Monster Season Finale By Sean Neumann

They’re two of the most notorious killers in United States history, but just how connected were the lives of Ed Gein and Ted Bundy?

Netflix’s new season of Monster, which explores Gein’s tumultuous life and grisly crimes, also raises the question of whether “The Butcher of Plainfield” was involved in the arrest of “The Campus Killer,” who preyed upon and murdered at least 30 women and young girls in the Pacific Northwest between 1974 and 1978.

In the latest season of the Ryan Murphy-directed drama series, which began streaming this month, Monster includes a story plot that ties the two killers’ lives together.

In the eighth and final episode of the new season, Gein lends a hand to authorities as they track down Bundy, who evaded investigators for four years while hunting and killing what some believe to be upwards of 100 people (though he officially confessed to only 30 murders).

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But, as The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel points out, Murphy’s inclusion of the Gein-Bundy storyline is merely fiction and the director even places hints throughout the episode that the entire incident might just simply be a self-imagined scenario in Gein’s mind as he tries to claim responsibility for influencing other infamous killers throughout U.S. history. 

Although made up, Gein was around and able to see Bundy’s case play out in real time. Gein committed his first murder in 1954 when he killed tavern owner Mary Hogan and dismembered her body.

Over the next several years, Gein confessed to authorities that he robbed nearly a dozen women’s gravesites at nearby cemeteries and picked apart their bodies back at his Plainfield, Wisc., farm, where he turned skin into masks and lampshades, used limbs for table legs and turned skulls into soup bowls, among a number of other perverse uses.

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Gein was arrested in 1957 after police connected him to the murder of local hardware shop owner Bernice Worden through a copy of a receipt from a recent purchase he made at the store, as well as blood found at the scene.

The lonely farmer confessed to the two murders after he was arrested, though he was later found not guilty by reason of insanity and placed in a mental institution in Madison, Wisc., where he remained until his death in 1984 at the age of 77.

Bundy’s crimes took place throughout the mid-1970s, while Gein was incarcerated at the Mendota Mental Health Institute.

The serial killer was arrested in 1978 after a chance traffic stop, as the Sentinel points out — not because of information Gein gave to authorities that helped them track him down. Bundy was later executed in 1989 after confessing to 30 murders while on death row, just five years after Gein died from a respiratory ailment.