True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was recorded on.

When moviegoers headed into cinemas across America on September eight, nineteen sixty, they had no idea what was about to happen to them.

The movie Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock's all time greatest creations, was new to cinemas.

It was a story of Norman Bates, the man with a split personality and an unhealthy relationship with his mother, whose type of depravity had never been explored on the big screen before, a true American monster, his violence culminating in the stabbing murder of Marion Crane, played to screaming brilliance by Janet Lee as she was confronted by the knife wielding maniac while showering.

Now.

That scene reportedly led to trauma so deep that many who'd seen it became terrified of entering their bathrooms unaccompanied.

The soundtrack to that moment is still used to depict violence and horror.

But Psycho wasn't all fiction.

It was actually based on the very true story of a simple Wisconsin man, a man whose mother's love was all he ever wanted, and when he could no longer get it, would go to extreme and horrifying lengths to recreate it, events that would lead to that man ed Gean, being tagged as the Butcher of Plainfield.

I'm Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them.

When police rated ed Gean's property in November nineteen fifty seven, they would have to spend days sorting through the trophies he'd collected.

Body parts were everywhere, but I'm closer.

Inspection investigators realized that that waste basket in the corner it was made out of human skin.

In fact, several chairs had also been upholstered in human skin.

The lampshade that was a human face.

The horror of what ed Dean had left behind in his family farmhouse led police to believe that he'd maybe murdered a dozen people to create this twisted set of homewares, But the reality was much much darker.

Ed Dean and his influence on pop culture remains to this day, with the recent release on Netflix of Ryan Murphy's third series of Monsters.

The ed Gen Story when allther Harold Schechter saw it was being made, he wanted to find no one in Ryan Murphy's camp had reached out to him.

After all, his book is the leading source of information about the Gan family and the events leading up to Ed Dean's arrest and subsequent conviction, where the court found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

But when we sat down with him to discuss Gan's crimes, he says, as soon as he saw the opening scenes of Monsters, he knew they hadn't based the story on any of his work.

Harold joins us.

Now, Harold, thank you so much for joining us today.

Your name has come up pretty much in every conversation around ed Gain seeing as he's back in the headlines from Ryan Murphy's Monster's version on Netflix.

Have you seen it yet?

Yes, I have.

I saw it as soon as it dropped.

What are your thoughts?

Well, you know, initially, when I first heard Ryan Murphy was going to be making an Ed Gaan documentary and no one had reached out to me because I don't want to sound its modest, but you know, my book, Deviant really told the Gaen story for the first time, and yeah, I felt that no one could really make a series about Gain without referring to or using my book.

Then, as soon as I started watching the series, I was upset because so little of it had to do with my book, and I dropped the whole idea of any kind of legal action because the series deviates, if I can use that word, so far from the historical tree truth.

Now, I've been upset because millions of people are going to think that they've seen the actual story of ed Gean when what they've seen is I would estimate ninety percent fabrication, possibly more so.

Yes, So that's my response to it.

Well, let's talk about the real story of ed Gain then, and we'll keep referencing back to monsters just to see where it does.

Dbaight, But I think to best understand ed Gain, you have to understand his family background first.

Can you give us a little understanding on who his parents, George and Augusta were.

Well, one thing I discovered The Deviant was my first true crime book, and I've encountered the same thing in many books I've done since is that there were such obscure people that there's almost no record of what was going on really in the household.

I mean, we know that the father, George, was apparently an abuse of alcoholic.

We know that Augusta was a dominant figure in the household in terms of running a business.

They originally had a lacrosse before they moved to Plainfield.

We know that she totally dominated Ed's life, That she was a religious fanatic who drilled into him the sens that the world outside their little farmstead was kind of a sodom and gomorrah, that women were evil, that Ed had to protect himself from the dangers of strange women.

You know that she would hector him constantly and read to him biblical passages about the evils of womanhood.

Pretty much.

That's really all we know about his parents and his relationship to his parents.

We see amongst his Augusta kicking George out of the family home, which obviously isn't true.

I mean, for many reasons we can fill in the blanks.

Because Augusta was such a devout Lutheran, divorce or separation wouldn't have been on the cards for her.

Yeah, so what do we know of George's fate?

Did he was he kicked out of the home?

No, No, absolutely not.

I think he became increasingly a burden to Augusta because again his problem with drink made him increasingly unreliable and unable to perform a lot of the chores around the farm.

But he died at home and read his obituary in the local newspapers.

So that is just one of I would have to say, almost countless fabrications that the Ryan Murphy series presents.

Well, let's talk about Augusta, because she does play a pivotal role in both monsters.

But in ed Gane's life, we know that, as you mentioned, she was quite domineering, and you in your book step out how you've seen her role increase over time, in that she becomes the named proprietor of the business that they run, that she is the name on the deed of the farm first and second farm that they.

End up purchasing.

Why do they end up in such an isolated place because Plainfield itself is a very small community.

There's only several hundred people who live there.

But the farm on which they lived was outside of that too, and in the early nineteen hundreds there wasn't a lot of you know, road traffic outside these farms.

It would have been weeks for people to head out and visit them, and then you know, they would then have to head into town for supplies.

But why isolate her family from everybody?

Well, again, as you Sam, and it's a very part of Wisconsin, everybody's pretty isolated from each other.

I think they moved there because there was this available farm with a you know, a very de sensive piece of property.

They thought they could make a go of it.

After living in the city Lacrosse, she wanted to get away from the city because again she felt cities were hell holes of corruption and depravity.

You know.

The isolation I think suited Augusta because again she was very, very wary of all the people around her.

Possibly she felt she could exert a more domineering influence over the lives of her family members if they lived farther apart from the community.

But in general, people lived isolated lives.

I mean, the Games were an extreme case, but that part of Wisconsin is very sparsely populated.

Even when I went up there in the nineteen eighties, you could drive through very long stretches of that part of the state and never, you know, pass another car on the road.

So they're out there on this isolated.

Augusta is in charge of educating her two young boys, Henry and Ed.

We understand, as you've mentioned that she's very strict on them as far as her religion is concerned, but she's also instilling in them, as you've also mentioned this fear and distaste of women in general.

It does seem that at some stage Henry does try to kind of move away from that.

But Ed is a little bit different, he seems, and this is also mentioned in your book where her school friends are concerned that he seems like a sweet enough boy, but he struggles to make connections with people.

And it turns out that his mother is also playing a role in that, in that every friend that he makes, she tells him that something wrong with that child's parents or the father.

Is immoral or whatever it might be.

So what kind of mental state do you think ed Geen is in as he's growing up under the influence of his domineering mother.

Well, again, from what we know, for whatever reason, Augusta apparently wanted to have a daughter and there was something and when Ed came along, you know, she was very disappointed that she hadn't given birth to a girl.

Her first child was a son, Henry, and I think she part of the stranglehold she kept on him involved his turning her into a more feminine kind of person.

You know, there's always something from what I understand from having interviewed people who had known him, which I did when I did my research in Plainfield, a little bit of feminine about Ed.

You know, that made him a bit of a not a laughing stock, but you know, sometimes a butt of cruel teasing.

So yeah, I mean, she she kept, you know, this emotional stranglehold on him.

You know, the expression tied being tied to her apron strings.

I mean, he was really bound to her.

That expression doesn't really capture the extent of her of her hold on him.

I mean, she just kept him kind of attached to her own by his umbilical court to her and Henry.

You know, there is evidence that Henry was trying to pull away.

Henry had, you know, saw the kinds of conditions that his Brotherred was living under, did urge him somehow to try to achieve some kind of independence from from Augusta.

Again, we don't really know all the details of some indication that it created a certain amount of tension between them, which then after Gan's crimes were exposed, led people to believe he murdered Henry, which I'm quite sure he did not.

But the interesting thing is, until these sensational murderers become known to the public anonymous, obscure figures, they're complete non entities.

So there's no reason there would be any real biographical information about their past lives other than what they themselves, you know, as zed Gain did later tell psychiatrists or law enforcement officials.

And the accounts of neighbors are very unreliable.

Once it is revealed to be this monstrous kind of figure, everybody suddenly, you know, is recalling and I put that in air quote dealings with the family.

They always knew something was really weird going on in that household.

But you know, you can't take a lot of those accounts face value.

I guess we can attribute that to Adeline as well, who is also featured in Monsters.

Adeline initially when she's spoken to about and if you haven't seen Monsters, she's essentially Edgain's girlfriend in Monsters, who's seems almost complicit to a point in the crimes that he's committing.

She's interviewed back after he is arrested in the fifties, and she says, yes, they had a twenty year long relationship and he seemed like a sweet, nice man.

But then he's interviewed not long after that and says completely the opposite and that she never had a long relationship with him, and on he dated him for a short period in the fifties.

So those recollections, they contradict themselves even at the time of his arrest.

Well again, as relationship with Adeline, as is portrayed in the TV show, is one of its more egregious features.

I don't mean to seem cruel about this, but if you look at photographs of the actual Adeline Watkins, she bears a striking resemblance to the actress Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard of os She was apparently a little bit of a publicity hound when the media descended on Plainfield the discovery of Ed's atrocities.

I think she enjoyed the attention she was getting by claiming she had been Ed's girlfriend, which, as you say, she later attracted.

There's no evidence they had much of any kind of relationship at all.

I mean, he might have one time asked her to go up roller skating, which was a favorite pastime of his.

But that's what all it amounted to.

You know, she was not this twenty something blonde hottie who is portrayed as means accomplice and conspirator and so on and so forth.

That just didn't happen.

Well, another thing I'm guessing that didn't happen is Monsters tries to explain the motivation for Ed Dean doing what he did through Adeline, in that she gives him a box with photographs from Nazi concentration camps of the bodies of Jewish people and a comic book that is basically a fictionalized dialog somewhat fictionalized tale of ilsa cook who was a German war criminal who worked in the concentration camps and committed atrocities against Jewish people.

Was any of that even vaguely true?

Was he all influenced by what was happening during the Second World War?

Well he might have.

I mean, Gan was a voracious reader, not of comic books, but of these sensational, lurid men's magazines at the time, and many of them did in fact feature stories about hot Nazi bebes torturing, not even so much committing, you know, committing those kinds of death camp atrocities.

There are stories where they're whipping prisoners of war.

So there is evidence that Ed was fascinated by some of those accounts that he came across the magazines.

We don't know specifically that he really know anything about Ilsa Koch per se.

There were a number of those female Nazis who very notorious for having made lambshades out of human skin.

You know.

Again, the whole notion that he was introduced to this by Adeline Watkins, you know, is just made up, but it is true.

You even can see there are some photographs that were published in Life magazine back in nineteen fifty seven when the Gaenes story broke, and there were photographs of the inside of his house and you know, the incredible chaos and squalor, and there's one shot actually of a cardboard cartan filled with these men's magazines.

So yes, he might have read about it and probably did read about him there.

Yeah.

Listening to True Crime Conversations with me clam Eurphy, I'm speaking with true crime writer Harold check about the life and crimes of ed Gan up.

Next, I asked Harold, if Edgin had succeeded in digging up his mother Augusta's body, would he still have gone on to commit his horrific crimes.

Well, his initial foray into.

Utilizing dead bodies for his crimes was after the death of his mother Augusta, which he seemed to take pretty hard.

And if she was as dominant a force in his life as we believe she was, then that would have been a terrible blow for him because at that stage, his father has died, Henry has died, and now his mother has died, so he's left on his own, and he does try to dig up her body, but he can't access her because due to the soil conditions in that part of Wisconsin, they sometimes will put concrete over the top to stop them from sinking down.

So do you think had he been able to access Augusta's body and dig her up at that time, do you think he would have gone any further?

Because he does then start digging up other people around her.

Do you think he.

Would have gone further had he been able to access his mother's body Initially.

I've never thought of that.

Well, very possibly, no one of the major problems I have with the TV series is it portrays Ed Green as a serial killer, and Ed Gan was not a serial killer.

The term serial killer, so I'm sure you know, was coined specifically to apply to people like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy.

You know what used to be called lost murderers in the old days, extreme sexual sadus who derived their perverse ecstatic pleasure from abducting and torturing and then murdering victims.

That was not Ed's m Ed was essentially a necrophile.

The two women he killed, Mary the tavern keeper Mary Hogan, and the hardware store owner Bernice Warden, he executed very swiftly.

You know, there's no kid and torturing them.

He just wanted their bodies to bring back home.

So his major motivation seemed to have been this effort to resuscitate his mother.

Well, there's a dual motivation.

He's acting out this again to play armchair for adian psychoaalysty.

You know, this deep ambivalence towards this woman, towards his mother.

The one hand, he consciously sees her as his saint, his only friend, and he wants to bring her back to live with her.

At the same time, he's obviously acting out these homicidal impulses towards the body in terms of the mutilations he performs.

So all his efforts, as you know, had to do with getting his mother's body back, and since he couldn't access it, trying to somehow reconstitute it from the body parts of these other women.

So whether or not he would have been satisfied if he had been able to bring Augusta back again, I thought of that, it's an interesting question.

Again we can always speculate, well.

Can we talk a little bit about the things he was doing with the bodies.

You say it was to reconstitute his mother essentially, But in amongst all of that, in the Monsters series, there is a big connection with femininity.

And as he mentioned, he was a more effeminate young man and potentially his mother had almost groomed him into being the daughter that she actually wanted.

And there's this exploration of his gender and his obsession with women's underguments and women's bodies, and the fact that he does essentially make a skin suit out of women's body parts that he has allegedly worn at some stage.

There is also a conversation in Monsters that he has a fictional conversation with a transactivist who explains he's not trans, but he's actually just obsessed with femininity and women's bodies.

But do you think that was true in that he was very.

Concerned about what gender he was supposed to be and that kind of navigation of who he really was, and that's what he was doing with those bodies too, Well.

It's probably part of it, you know, when you're say Gene made a skin suit.

Of course, that's where Thomas Harris got the idea for his Buffalo Bill character and signs of Lambs.

There wasn't a whole suit.

The investigators who first were digging up all these horrible body parts and so on in his farmhouse came upon what they called a mammary vest.

So he had apparently flayed the top part of a woman's torso with the breast and strung it with some kind of cords that he could put on his own body, which definitely suggests that.

Obviously in my book they say that he was somebody who dressed up in women's skin and steff to women's clothing, So, you know, Freud uses the term over determined, which means that there's no one simple cause of behavior.

You can see in that again, both his evidence to recreate his mother as well as to be you know, the girl that his mother always wanted to have, the thing about ed Geen.

I was talking about this actually to somebody the other day.

It's impossible to explain his behavior.

Ultimately, we all want to, in a way reduce this unimaginable kind of human behavior to something we can grasp with our rational minds because it gives us a sense of control over But I'll often say this is hard to understand ed Geen, as it is to understand Mozart.

That there are certain human beings whose minds and motivation are just beyond the ability to understand.

So all those factors obviously played into creating the creature we know is ed Game.

Trying to reduce it to some kind of simple explanation is just not possible.

That the conditions of his life caused something to crack in his psyche, and all this archaic stuff having to do with flaying victims and wearing their skins and making trophies out of body parts, you know, things you see in archaic religions somehow flooded out in that little Wisconsin farmhouse.

It's one of the things that makes the case so endlessly fascinating is that in the nineteen fifties, in the midst of this bland bomby America that's been mythologized as happy days, everybody living in nice suburban houses around it with white picket fences and sitting around on Sunday nights and watching I Love Lucy, the American Heartland.

There was this person who the squalor and darkness of his little hovel was enacting you know, these archaic rituals like an Aztec priest dressing up in human skin, well like going back to our prehistoric ancestors dissecting the bodies of their victims, shrinking their heads, you know, keeping body parts as trophies.

So can we talk about the things that were found in ed Gain's house.

When he is finally arrested, he's arrested at a neighbor's house having dinner, and it's after he murders Bernie's which she's the local hardware store owner in the movie.

It suggested that they had a relationship, a sexual relationship, and then he in his schizophrenic state believes that she's given him a venereal disease and that's why he goes and murders her.

Which none of that is true, right.

Well, as far as we know, because we're not insided Gane's head at any stage, none of that is true.

Yeah, no, none of it True's complete, complete, outrageous lie.

And somebody said apparently Bernice Warden's relations to sentence very upset about that.

I mean, Gene had no contact with her at all.

I mean apparently the day before he killed her, he had come into the hardware store and sort of joshingly asked her she wanted to go out roller skating.

But the portrait, it's really kind of unconscionable what Ryan Murphy and his collaborator Ian Brennan did something like that where there still are family members.

I'm not even sure how they could get away with that with out being sued in sometain way.

But there's even a suggestion that Bernice's son is absent in her life and is not you know, and she's very sad and lonely.

But he wasn't He the local deputy and raised the alarm after she went missing, Like none of her story seems to be true.

No, none of it's true.

I mean literally none of them.

I mean, other than working in the hardware store.

That seems to be the only true thing.

Yeah.

So, after Ed kills her and takes her back to the property at the farm, police quickly find out that he is a suspect because the son does mention that he's come into the store and has kind of said a few things to her.

And they find him having dinner at a neighbor's house, and they arrest him.

And then they go and they raid his home.

What do they find inside the GameHouse?

Well, first of all, they find Bernice Swarden's body in the summer kitchen adjacent to the house, strung up, beheaded, strung up, dressed out like a deer, the body hollowed out of all its internal organs.

They find her head, which Geen had inserted.

He had taken a couple of nails and bent them to make them into hooks and inserted one in each ear with a rope between them.

He was apparently intending to hang that up as a trophy on his wall.

Inside the house proper, they found bowls made out of the caps of human skulls.

They found a box full of vulvas which had been painted silver.

They found a belt made of nipples, a shade pull made of human lips.

They found that mammary vests that we spoke about before.

They found a number of flayed faces, and had flayed the faces off of some of these corpses and tried them out and hung them on his bedroom wall.

Again, these incomprehensible, incomprehensible horrors.

They also at some point found Mary Hogan ed would sometimes choke around.

Oh she said, I got her at home.

You know, nobody took them seriously, but you know, they found her head in a paper bag.

I kind of imagine what they must have been like for the police who are investigating this.

Do they ever speak about the impact that finding all of these had on them mentally?

Well, I know that they spoke about the long term effect, but yeah, one can only imagine.

I think the horrors were so again incomprehensible, that they couldn't even really process what they were finding.

Gean is really unique as far as I know, not only in the annals of American crime, but in the annals of world crime.

You know, people have kept body parts is killers have kept body parts as souvenirs and so on and so forth, but nobody did what gain did I mean?

Gain?

Again?

He was essentially a necro file, but he was less a necro file who is interested in having sex with the corpses, although again Ryan Murphy's show does portray him as having sex with the corpses, which as far as we know, he never did, as somehow using their body parts as raw material for the home improvement project.

It makes a very American kind of necro file.

Next, Harold tells us what it says to police when he's finally arrested, and exactly how much detail he went into about his crimes When he's arrested.

What does he say to police?

How does he tell them what he's done?

Does he admit to it initially?

Well, no, not initially.

When you read gains confessions, his interrogators ask him all these leading questions, which he admits to.

You know, So let's say, so Edd you we found this, we found this weird vest, you know, made out of the top part of a woman's body, and did you put it on and pretend you were your mother?

And he'd say, yeah, that sounds about right.

Late later on, when he was institutionalized and people would interviewed him, he would deny almost everything, without ever really explaining how all those artifacts ended up in his farmhouse.

He did admit, or at least he did not deny, that he had done all these things.

Well, Coman talk about a lot of the other things that Monsters claims he did.

There's a disappearance of fifteen year old Evelyn, who in the story was recovering from polio, and so ed Dean had stepped into babysit the children she normally babysit, but then she recovered and returned, and he resented that, and the Monster show suggests that he kidnapped and murdered her.

The only truth I can find to that is that he yes, at some stage babysat children to supplement income from for the farm, and that was about it.

Well.

Evan Hartley was a young girl who disappeared while babysitting.

After Gan's horrors were discovered.

As is often the case when some sensational murderers have been uncovered, police officers with unsolved cases flocked to Plainfield hoping to be able to close out these cold cases.

One of them was the avalent Hartley case.

But ye Gan evidently had nothing at all to do with the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley abducting teenage girls and torturing them and killing them.

Again, Gan was all about it was not his emma.

He was not a serial sex killer, which is what the show makes them out to be, and at the end of the show, it makes them out to be sort of the forefather of all these notorious serial killers who appeared back in the seventies and supposedly were inspired by Gain, which is again what can I say, you know, just get another complete fabrication?

Is that why we see that scene when he's confronted by two hunters in that little outhouse where you talked about Benice being strung up like a deer, and then he chases them into the woods with a chainsaw and murders them, which essentially tries to explain the influence on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.

But there's no evidence that that ever happened.

Right.

No, again, the two hunters, you know, hunters who are always getting killed during deer hunting season for one reason or another.

Yes, that's complete.

I guess I have to use the word lie there's no evidence Gan ever owned a chainsaw after the Gaen crime.

The Gaen crimes became known to most of America because shortly after they came to light Life magazine, which was essentially this photo journalistic magazine that at the time could be found in almost every middle class American household, did a big, big spread on the Green crimes, and supposedly Toby Hooper, who was young at the time, he would have been about he was sort of my age, would have been about nine or ten, you know, read about it and was kind of permanently traumatized by it and recollected the story when he went to make Texas Chainsaw the massacre.

But the chainsaw thing, yeah, that Gaan did not dismember any victims were chainsaws, and he didn't kill those two hunters.

So yes, that's another thing.

Yeah, most of it, you know, if they did, was what Murphy and Brennan did was take the broad outlines of the game story and then just fill it in with whatever they thought was going to t the late An audience for a few hours.

I sometimes think of it as a throwback to the kinds of biopics that were made of Hollywood back in the nineteen thirties and forties.

You know the story of Louis Pasteur, or you know the story of Thomas Edison or the story of whoever.

You know.

They take the very broad outlines and just make stuff up to keep the audience entertained.

So I mean monsters, I said, it's a particularly particularly egregious example of that kind of thing.

So little of it is based on historical fact.

You know, really you could name the few things that were based on historical fact, Like there wasn't Ed Gain he did, you know Rob Graves, he did have this weird relationship with his mother.

Actually, as soon as I turned it on the first scene which shows him engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation, as soon as I saw that, I thought, okay, I don't have a legal case anymore.

So that a lot of that what happened behind closed doors in that farmhouse, yeah, essentially has to be made up because we don't really know what life was like for them behind closed doors, right.

Well, the fact that he helped solve the Ted Bundy case, I mean, you name it, it didn't happen.

What was life like for ed Geen after he was arrested and institutionalized because they did find him insane, and I know they did try to bring him to court to trial, but again he was found insane.

So what was life like for him?

Did his mental health decline?

Did it stabilize?

What was it like for him when he was actually.

From what I know and they actually know at least one person who visited him in the institution and spoke to him.

Yeah, life was much better for him once he was locked up in an institution before you know, the expression of three hots and a cop.

You know, he had, you know, meals that were much better.

You know, when he was living alone, he might open a I mean the series sort of got this part right, you know, open account of big beings, put it on the stove, the dump it into you know, the top part of a human skull, and need it.

So he was being fed, He had surrounded by people for the first time in his life.

He was given books to read, He had a correspondence with people who were very sympathetic towards him.

So his life was a good deal more pleasant than it had been up to that point.

What was life like at the end for ed Gina?

Did he pass away peacefully?

Was there I mean, unsolved things they were still trying to work out with him.

Was his life like at the.

End, Well, he had died of cancer.

I'd never really come across specific information about his last days.

I don't think he was apparently unaware of his influence on American culture.

The thing about Monster is they make it seem as though his major legacy was, as I said, the forefather of the serial killers who suddenly appeared back, which is totally false.

But he did have a major impact on American culture because Robert Block, who was a pulp horror writer, was living very close to Plainfield at the time the Gaen story broke.

Block was a protege of HP Lovecraft.

He had become known for these pop power stories.

When he read about the game case, he realized this would be great premise for a horror novel, he felt because I was I corresponded with Block when I was writing my book.

You know, his problem was knowing how isolated gen was.

Gan never traveled anywhere.

Where was he going to find all his victims?

So he thought, well, I'll have the victims come to him, And that's so he came up with the idea of the Bates Motel if you read the novel, when Norman Bates is finally arrested, he compares himself to Ed Green.

So there's a very very explicit connection.

And what I tell people, I grew up on the I'm a baby boomer.

I grew up in the nineteen fifties culture filled with All I did was go to horror movies and watch horror movies on TV, and read horror comic books.

And you know, the culture was full of monsters pop culture, but all the monsters were from other places, you know, Dracula from Transylvania, or the Werewolf of London, or Creature from Black Lagoon from deep in the Amazon, or Marsian Vaders.

Norman Bates was the first all American monster.

And insofar as Ed Dean stood behind Norman Bates, you could say that Gan kind of americanized the genre of horror.

And that's a major major impact.

And he also again through Psycho stands as you know, at some time people call the godfather of core.

You know, the psycho is the prototypical what came to be called slash or splatter movie.

So Gan did have a major cultural impact, but it was on pop culture, wasn't on you know, inspiring Richard Speck and Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper and so on.

So I guess the legacy that ed Gan has left behind continues then in pop culture, as much as it may have been fictionalized for this instance in Monsters.

Do you think we'll ever stop being fascinated by ed Gan in his story?

Well, one of the reasons I was interested in the game story when I first discovered it is that I was a professor college professor for forty two years, and I taught across called myth and archetype.

You know about these narrative patterns and archetypal figures that populate the folklore and literature of the world.

And I've always been very interested in why we need stories about monsters in our lives from our earliest years.

And Gean has become a kind of mythic monster at this point.

I mean in that sense again, you could say Ryan Murphy and his collaborator did what people have always done with mythic monsters.

If you look back at the history of American the American Frontier, there were these psychotic killers like Jesse James and Billy the Kid, and their stories have been incredibly mythologized by Hollywood.

So there's a sense in which, yeah, I mean, Green is such a myth monster at this point that any creator, you could say, is free to tell whatever kind of story about him they want to.

My main problem with the Ryan Murphy Show is that it presents it as true crime.

So I think, yeah, Gan will you know?

Gan will definitely remain an undying part of America's cultural mythology.

Thank you to Harold for helping us tell this story.

You can read more about his book Deviant, The Shocking True Story of Ed Gan, the Original Psycho at the link in our show notes.

If you want to see images from this story, head to our Instagram page at True Crime Conversations and give us a follow and have a look at our case explainers as well while you're there.

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True Chrime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman.

Thanks so much for listening.

I'll be back next week with another True Chrime Conversation