Adeline Watkins and Ed Gein: Separating Fact From Fiction

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In November 1957, a woman in Plainfield, Wisconsin told reporters she'd been dating Ed

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Gein for 20 years.

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She said he proposed.

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She said they talked about murder all the time.

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Two weeks later, she changed her story, said almost none of that was true.

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So what was real?

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If you've watched the Netflix series Monsters about Ed Gein and you're wondering who is

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Adeline Watkins?

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Was she really his girlfriend?

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How much of the story that we saw is made up and how much is real?

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This episode is going to clear it up.

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When police arrived at Ed Gein's house, November 1957, they found something inside his farm

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house that would rewrite the American understanding of horror.

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Human remains turned into household objects.

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Skin fashioned into clothing.

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A body hanging in a shed like a deer carcass.

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The hardware store owner he'd just killed, Bernie's warden, was only the beginning.

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Gein confessed to murdering another woman three years earlier and admitted to robbing

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graves across Plainfield for nearly a decade.

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The nation was desperate for an explanation.

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How does someone like this exist in this world?

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How does a killer, so-to-preved, live among regular people without anyone noticing?

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And that's when Adeline Watkins stepped forward.

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A November 21, 1957, just days after Gein's arrest, newspapers across the country ran a

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story that stopped everyone cold.

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The headline in the Wisconsin State Journal read, "Plainfield woman nearly wedded Gein."

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Adeline Watkins, 50-year-old woman who lived with her widowed mother in a small Plainfield

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apartment, told the Minneapolis Tribune that she and Ed Gein dated for 20 years.

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She said they went to the movies together.

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They visited taverns.

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They bonded over books about lions and tigers in fire-way places like Africa and India.

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And here's the part that made everyone's skin crawl.

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She said they discussed murder cases together.

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Ed would talk about the mistakes the killer made and why he thinks they got caught.

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But they could have done better.

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And then came the proposal.

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According to Watkins, Gein asked her to marry him during their last date in February 1955.

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She turned him down, but not because she was afraid of him.

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She said she didn't think she could live up to his expectations.

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Which is a wild statement to make.

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Her mother even backed her up, calling Gein a sweet polite man who always made sure Adeline

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was home by 10pm curfew.

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A grown woman with a curfew.

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Watkins herself described the mass murderer as good and kind and sweet.

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For the press, this was gold.

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Here was proof that even a monster could seem normal.

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That evil could take you to the movies and walk you to your door and say goodnight like

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a gentleman.

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It was the story everyone needed to make sense of the senseless.

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Except maybe it wasn't true.

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Let's do the math.

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If Watkins and Gein had been dating for 20 years by 1957, that relationship would have

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started around 1937.

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And in 1937, Ed Gein was living under the absolute control of his mother, Augusta.

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Augusta Gein was not a woman who encouraged her son's to date.

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She was a fire in Brimstone, religious extremist who believed all women, except for herself, of

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course, were sinful and corrupt.

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She forbade both Ed and his brother Henry from having any romantic relationships.

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And Ed obeyed.

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Living in his life revolved around pleasing his mother.

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When Henry once mentioned the possibility of moving out to be with a woman, Ed flew into

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a rage.

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The idea of defying their mother was unthinkable to Ed.

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So the notion that Ed Gein carried out a public 20-year courtship while his mother was still

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alive, psychologically pretty impossible, historically impossible.

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The timeline doesn't work for this.

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Something was very wrong with this story.

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And two weeks later, Adeline Watkins admitted it.

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On December 3rd, 1957, the Stevens Point Journal published a follow-up article with a much less

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exciting headline.

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Woman declares Gein romance was exaggerated.

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In this second interview, Watkins walked back almost everything.

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She said that the original Tribune story was blown up out of proportion and contained

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untrue statements.

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Yes, she had known Gein for 20 years, but only as a neighbor.

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The actual social interaction only happened after 1954 when Augusta had been dead for nearly

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a decade.

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The so-called courtship?

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Seven months.

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And it wasn't even consistent.

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Gein called on her intermittently during that time.

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The frequent trips to the movies and taverns?

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A few visits to the Plainfield Theatre.

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That's pretty much it.

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Watkins also corrected the record on Gein's character.

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She never called him sweet.

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She said he seemed quiet and polite.

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She's very different from good and kind and sweet.

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And most importantly, she clarified something that should have been a red flag from the start.

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She said she was never inside the Gein farmhouse, not one time.

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That's a critical detail because the Gein farmhouse was where the horror lived.

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It was the epicenter of his madness.

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The fact that Watkins never crossed that threshold tells you everything about the nature of their

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relationship.

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It was surface level.

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Transactional.

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Distant.

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Never close enough to see what he really was.

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So if the 20-year romance was fiction, what was the reality?

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Based on Watkins' corrected timeline, Gein reached out to her sometime after 1954.

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That places their brief interaction nearly a decade after Augusta's death in 1945.

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This is important because those years after Augusta died were the loneliest and most disturbed

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period of Gein's life.

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He was living alone on that isolated farm spiraling deeper into grave robbing and obsession.

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By 1954, he'd already murdered Mary Hogan.

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His crimes were escalating.

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And yet, during this time, he made what appears to be his only adult attempt at genuine human

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connection.

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That's what makes this so unsettling.

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Gein didn't reach out to Watkins before he became a killer.

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He reached out during.

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While he was actively robbing graves while he was murdering women.

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While he was filling up his house with human remains.

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That seven-month period Watkins described wasn't a romance.

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It was maybe a last awkward grasp at normalcy by a man who had already abandoned it.

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And if he really did propose, which Watkins never fully retracted, it suggests that he was

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just trying to anchor himself to something stable.

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I think something ordinary.

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Maybe he thought a wife could save him from himself.

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Or maybe he just wanted to see if he could still pass as normal.

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Either way, Watkins' rejection would have confirmed what Gein probably already believed.

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He was too far gone for a normal life.

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So why did Watkins tell the first story at all?

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Why claim a 20-year romance that never even happened?

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The answer probably lies in the chaos of the moment.

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When Gein was arrested, Plainfield exploded.

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National reporters descended on the small town.

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Everyone wanted answers.

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Everyone wanted a story.

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And Watkins was one of the few people who could claim any kind of personal connection to

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the man that everyone was talking about.

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It's possibly the exaggeration started with the reporters themselves.

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They may have heard that Watkins had known Gein for 20 years and assumed that meant that

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they'd been romantically involved for 20 years.

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Or maybe Watkins overwhelmed by the sudden attention played up the connection to make

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herself part of the story.

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People do strange things under pressure.

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Being linked, even tangentially, to one of the most infamous killers in American history creates

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pressure most people can't imagine.

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What we know for sure is two weeks later, Watkins felt compelled to correct the record.

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That tells us something.

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Either her conscious got to her or she realized the story had spiraled out of control.

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Either way, the truth was far less dramatic than the headlines suggested.

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Here's what makes Watkins' story valuable, even with all the exaggerations stripped away.

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She confirms that Ed Gein was really good at seeming normal.

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He could show up at someone's house, make polite conversation, take a woman to the movies,

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and never once raise suspicion.

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Watkins described him as quiet and polite.

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Her mother approved of him.

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He respected curfews.

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He was, by all outward appearances, harmless.

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That's how he got away with it for so long.

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Gein's horror was entirely internal and entirely hidden.

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His public persona was so effective that even the woman who spent the most time with him

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during his killing years never suspected a thing.

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She never felt unsafe.

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She was never invited into the farmhouse where the evidence of his crimes was stacked in

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plain view.

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He kept those worlds completely separate.

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And that's the real takeaway from Adeline Watkins.

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She wasn't Gein's girlfriend.

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Necessarily, she wasn't his confidant.

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She was the proof that monsters don't always look like monsters.

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They look like the quiet guy who asks you to the movies, the polite neighbor who waves

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hello, the man who makes sure you're home by 10.

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Watkins was close enough to become part of the story, but she was never close enough to

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see the truth.

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And in a way, that's the most terrifying part of all.

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[Music]

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories.

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My name is Joe, I'm the host, and if you're a new listener to the podcast, welcome in.

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Make sure you hit subscribe.

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Go to 10minutemerder.com if you want to catch up with everything that's going on with

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the podcast or to reach out, send me an email, you can do that there.

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Here's one of those emails.

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Hey, Joe, I started listening to your podcast a little over two months ago.

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I just got all caught up this morning and I don't know what I'm going to do with my life.

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I'm a stay at home mom of three, and I started listening at night when cleaning the kitchen

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before bed, then in the mornings before my kids woke up, and then really any spare moment

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I could.

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I've started 10 Minute Mystery, so that will hold me over until I can get my murder fix.

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I've wanted to ask you so many questions, but I never wrote them down so I can't remember

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any, but this morning I realized I haven't heard you talk about your dog Harper recently.

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Where is she?

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Is she okay?

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Hopefully I can remember some better questions, but for now that will have to do.

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Love your podcast, Bailey from Goldsboro, North Carolina.

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Bailey, I appreciate your commitment to the podcast, listening to all the episodes within

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a couple of months.

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That's an Olympic record probably.

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I really do appreciate it.

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To answer your question, I haven't talked about Harper my dog in a couple of years because

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she passed away.

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I had a pretty tough time with it, and I just didn't mention it here because frankly I

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didn't want to talk about it, but we are a couple years now after the fact and I can say

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it without crying now.

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Okay, that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Again, thank you so much for listening to 10 Minute Murder, and I'll see you again next

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time.

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[MUSIC]