Did Ed Gein Really Help Capture Ted Bundy? How Monster Season 3 Connects to Another Popular Netflix True Crime Show
It’s all conected. The final episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story shows a hair-raising scene with different serial killers, but like the events in the whole show, was one involving notorious serial killer Ted Bundy real?
Ed Gein was a serial killer who was active in the 1950s and was accused of cutting up women who reminded him of his deceased mother and preserving parts of them both “to bring her back to life and have her with him always, and to destroy her as the cause of his frustration,” according to TIME. He was later diagnosed with Schizophrenia and was unfit for trial. Gein was sent to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and later transferred to Mendota State Hospital.
Related: Here’s Whether Ed Gein Really Killed a Nurse in Real Life After Netflix’s Monster Showcased His Schizophrenic Episode
In Episode 8 “The Godfather,” real FBI agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler inquire Ed Gein for his help on knowledge about the Northwest Killer, who is later to be revealed as Ted Bundy.
Did Ed Gein really help capture Ted Bundy?
The simple answer is no. Ed Gein had nothing to do with the Ted Bundy case. There’s no FBI record of any agents approaching the convicted killer in the hospital.
Ted Bundy was eventually caught on February 15, 1978, after he was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, by local police after he was stopped for speeding while driving a stolen vehicle.
For those who are die-hard true crime fanatics, they might have also seen the connection to another popular Netflix series based on FBI agents inquiring serial killers: Mindhunter. “We wanted to underline the last thing tonally that through Silence of the Lambs, he really influenced Mindhunter as well,” showrunner Ian Brennan told Netflix’s Tudum. “That would be a fun way to put a cap on it, to use this other filmic vocabulary and then talk about the ways that he was part of those early days of FBI profiling.”
The last episode had another plotline in mind, but Ryan Murphy had another route in mind. “The finale of this show was [originally] called ‘Momma’s Boy.’ That was going to be the brilliant Laurie Metcalf visiting [Ed] in the asylum,” he told Tudum. “We quickly abandoned that and came up with the kind of All That Jazz tribute. And also we wanted to talk about, yeah, it was a dark legacy. There were many, many dark creatures in our world — Richard Speck, Ted Bundy — who were influenced and obsessed with Ed for all the wrong reasons.”
In the minutes leading up to the end of the show, Gein has a vision of several serial killers ushering him to the afterlife. “It’s the most tonally challenging part of the show to me in that he’s not horrified by it,” Brennan said. “He sort of loves the fact that he made a mark.”
