Monster: The Ed Gein Story Ending Explained — What Ed Really Told Adeline on His Deathbed

Spoiler alert: this digs into the ending of Monster: The Ed Gein Story and the whole Adeline situation. If you haven't finished the show, maybe save this for later.

Netflix's new season goes big on style and even bigger on blurring lines between fact and fantasy. And yeah, it takes some swings. The most debated one: Adeline Watkins. The show frames her as Ed's neighbor, girlfriend, and accomplice who may or may not be a projection of his unraveling mind. Let's talk about what the series actually does, what's grounded in real reporting, and how that surreal finale lands.

Adeline Watkins: in the show vs in real life

On screen, Adeline (played by Suzanna Son) is close to Ed Gein. She knows things. She even participates. The catch: the series keeps nudging you to ask if she's real or just living rent-free in Ed's head. By the end, that question becomes the point.

There was an actual woman named Adeline Watkins. She did know Gein. Early coverage around his 1957 arrest included an interview attributed to her (in the Minneapolis Tribune, later repeated by Marie Claire) where she described him as gentle, said they went to the movies, and even claimed he proposed. Then, two weeks later, she walked almost all of that back: she said they'd only known each other for about seven months, they weren't close, and she had never set foot in his house. Gein himself never publicly talked about her.

The show's take on the ending

Charlie Hunnam's Ed, the Butcher of Plainfield, spends the last chapter slipping fully into his own fantasies. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan apparently had another ending on the table, but changed course and went with something they felt their subject would have wanted. You can see the logic: it plays like a curtain call inside his mind.

In the finale, Ed is ill with cancer and diagnosed with schizophrenia, confined to a mental institution. That's where he encounters Adeline again. She tells him she'll keep his work alive after he's gone. He rejects that and walks away. The show tips its hand here: that final exchange is a hallucination, not a confession.

From there, it leans all the way into the dream. Ed is ushered down a long hallway by serial killers he inspired, praised like a dark patron saint. The scene morphs into a musical delirium with dancing nurses, then a staircase to a reunion with his mother, Augusta, waiting at the top. Later, a group of teens tries to steal his gravestone, hears his echoing presence, panics, and flees. Ed watches from a distance and smiles. Before the credits, we return to him sitting with Augusta for one last, cold benediction:

"Only a mother could love you."

What's real here, and what's the show inventing?

• Adeline Watkins existed and knew Ed Gein, but how well is muddy: an early interview painted a years-long relationship, a follow-up from Watkins herself cut that down to months and said they weren't close; Gein never publicly acknowledged her.
• The series makes Adeline a participant in (and fascinated by) Gein's crimes; there is no evidence of that in the historical record.
• Ed's final meeting with Adeline in the institution is depicted as a hallucination; that is the show calling its shot about fiction vs reality.
• Gein's deteriorating health at the end includes cancer and schizophrenia diagnoses in the show; his real death came after years in state custody and declining health.
• The parade of inspired killers, the musical sequence with nurses, the stairway to Augusta, the spooky gravestone coda — all stylized, subjective flourishes to end inside Gein's head.
• Behind the scenes note: Murphy and Brennan reportedly had a different ending at one point, then pivoted to this version they felt Gein would have wanted.

Is it a bold artistic swing or too much creative license? Depends on your appetite for true-crime turned surreal theater. As a character study, it's confident and unsettling. As biography, it's intentionally slippery — and the show knows it.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix.