Charlie Hunnam takes on his darkest role yet as murderer and necrophile Ed Gein in Season 3 of Ryan Murphy’s Monster.
Murphy, 58, announced that the Sons of Anarchy star, 44, will take on the terrifying role during a promotional event in LA for Monster Season 2, which focuses on the Menendez brothers’ murder of their parents, according to Variety.
The first season of the Netflix anthology series delved deeper into the atrocities of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, starring Evan Peters.
Gein, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Ghoul of Plainfield, was a murderer and corpse snatcher who dug up corpses from graveyards to make “skin suits” from the bones and skin of the dead.
After his arrest in 1957, he told police he had used the skin suit to become “his dead mother.”
Charlie Hunnam will play his darkest role yet as murderer and necrophile Ed Gein in season 3 of Ryan Murphy’s Monster
Gein’s life has inspired a number of horror characters, including Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
Edward Theodore Gein, the second son of George Philip Gein and Augusta Wilhelmine Gein, was born on August 27, 1906 in La Crosse County, Wisconsin.
His father was an unemployed alcoholic and his mother was a strict Lutheran woman. She had a dominant position in Gein’s life and tried to teach her children about the dangers of drinking and women, whom she considered tools of the devil.
Gein, a shy boy, left the farm alone to go to school, and teachers later remembered him as strange and prone to random fits of laughter. His mother punished him for making friends with “sinners.”
Gein’s father died of heart failure on April 1, 1940, so he and his brother Henry started doing odd jobs around town to earn money, including babysitting for families in the neighborhood.
After Henry’s death, Augusta suffered a paralytic attack and Gein, the ‘town idiot’, was given the task of caring for her as her health rapidly deteriorated. She died on 29 December 1945.
Gein was devastated by the death of his abusive mother and felt he had lost “his only friend and true love,” according to biographer Harold Schechter.
He continued to live and work on the farm, but had his mother’s rooms boarded up, while the rest of the house fell into disrepair.
The first season of the Netflix anthology series centers on the atrocities of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, starring Evan Peters
According to a biography by Judge Robert H. Gollmar, who presided over Gein’s trial, Gein became fascinated with the concept of cannibalism and began visiting local cemeteries two years after her death. It was there that he began his decade-long grave-robbing spree.
Despite his notorious reputation as a serial killer, it has only been confirmed that Gein murdered two victims, robbed graves, and violated the bodies of nine others.
Gein’s first victim, innkeeper Mary Hogan, was murdered in 1954, almost 10 years after his mother’s death.
No one connected Gein to her disappearance, when she vanished from work leaving nothing but blood behind.
The second murder victim, Bernice Worden, owned a hardware store in Plainfield and disappeared on the morning of November 16, 1957. Her son Frank Worden, a deputy with the local sheriff’s office, found the store’s cash register open and bloodstains on the floor around 5:00 p.m. that day.
Gein was arrested while the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department searched his farm and found the woman’s decapitated body in his barn.
Worden’s body was hung upside down from a wooden crossbeam and “slit open from vagina to sternum,” biographers wrote in Obsession.
Inside the house, officers found human skulls attached to the posts of Gein’s bed and Worden’s heart in a pot on the stove.
Hunnam played Jackson ‘Jax’ Teller on the FX series Sons of Anarchy for seven seasons between 2008 and 2014
Despite his notoriety as a serial killer, it has only been confirmed that Gein murdered two victims, while robbing the graves and desecrating the bodies of nine others
Police also found a garbage can made of human skin, human skin covering several chair seats, bowls made of human skulls, a corset made of a woman’s torso and leggings made of human leg skin.
Other items included the genitals of nine women in a shoebox, masks made from the skin of women’s heads, Mary Hogan’s face in a paper bag and her skull in a box, a belt made from female nipples, and a lampshade made from the skin of a human face.
Despite the filth and horror of most of the farmhouse, authorities discovered a closed-off, dusty but tidy section: Augusta’s bedroom, which Gein used as a kind of shrine to his deceased mother.
The amount of human trophies found in Gein’s home suggested that he had killed many more people than just Worden and Hogan. He admitted to both murders, although he claimed they were accidental.
Gein insisted he had not killed any other women and instead studied death notices so he could commit grave robbing.
He told investigators that he robbed graves as many as 40 times in the middle of the night to dig up the recently buried bodies of middle-aged women who he said resembled his mother.
Gein gave the researchers a list of the graves he had excavated, which turned out to be empty or contained mutilated remains.
Although Gein admitted to killing Hogan and Worden after his arrest in 1957, he was initially deemed incompetent to stand trial.
He was sent to a psychiatric institution and was found fit to stand trial in 1968. He was later found guilty of Worden’s murder.
However, he was also declared legally insane and sent back to the psychiatric institution.
He died on July 26, 1984, at the Mendota Mental Health Institute of respiratory failure.
Hunnam recently starred in Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and will star in the upcoming series Criminal on Amazon.
Waushara County Sheriff Art Schley, left, escorts Gein from Plainfield, Wisconsin to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane on November 23, 1957 in Milwaukee
A photo shows a close-up of a chair covered in human skin found in the home of murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin in November 1957
A photo shows a filthy room in the Plainfield, Wisconsin home of murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein in November 1957.
He played Jackson ‘Jax’ Teller on the FX series Sons of Anarchy for seven seasons between 2008 and 2014.
He was originally chosen to play Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey film series, but he dropped out just weeks before filming began and was replaced by Jamie Dornan.
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story chronicles the shocking murders of 17 young men and boys by the Milwaukee killer between 1978 and 1991.
Season 1 – starring Peters and Niecy Nash-Betts – scored record ratings and was praised by critics, but faced negative reactions, as viewers criticized Netflix for adding the LGBTQ tag to the series.
Many criticised the streaming platform, which has since removed the tag, saying they were “appalled” and “disgusted” by the choice.
The true crime series has also been at the center of criticism for the genre’s continued commercial success and the traumatic impact it can have on survivors.
Rita Isbell, the sister of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey, told Insider Sunday that Netflix never approached her about the show, calling it callous and careless.
“I think Netflix should have asked if we cared or what we thought about doing it,” she said. “They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it. But I’m not a money-hungry person and that’s what this show is about, Netflix is trying to get paid.”