Netflix’s Monster Shows Ed Gein Killing a Nurse—But Did It Really Happen?

Heads up: spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story ahead, plus discussion of real-world murders.

Ryan Murphy is back in true-crime mode, this time zeroing in on Ed Gein with Charlie Hunnam front and center. The show digs into Gein's childhood, the suspicious death of his brother, his fixation on German war criminal Ilse Koch, and even floats the eyebrow-raising idea that Gein somehow helped bring down Ted Bundy. So yeah, it is very much a Murphy remix of history, and people are understandably asking what parts actually happened.

The quick answer

About that brutal bathroom scene in the penultimate episode: no, Ed Gein did not kill a nurse in the hospital. The entire sequence is presented from Gein's delusional point of view and is not based on a real murder.

What the episode shows vs. what really happened

• On screen, the penultimate episode is titled Ham Radio. It follows Gein inside a psychiatric institution after he has been declared insane at sentencing, and the whole hour is essentially a hallucination.
• Gein starts chatting on a ham radio with Ilse Koch (played by Vicky Krieps) and Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby). With Jorgensen, he talks through his gender confusion; she labels him a gynephiliac (attracted to women), which is the show's way of reframing his self-image rather than diagnosing him.
• Enter Nurse Roz (Linda Reiter), the new head nurse, who shuts down Gein's privileges and lays down strict rules: escorts everywhere, room locked at all times.
• She needles him with a line that sums up how the episode sees him:

"You are not crazy. You are clever."

• From there, things spiral: a voice whispers "kill them all," a nurse hands Gein keys so he can sneak around, and in a late-night bathroom showdown, Gein appears in his plaid jacket with a chainsaw and murders Nurse Roz. Blood down the drain, shower scene, the works.
• Then the show pulls the rug: Gein's doctor tells him he is schizophrenic and experiencing hallucinations. Translation: the ham radio conversations and Nurse Roz's chainsaw death did not happen.
• In real life, Gein did not kill a nurse in the hospital. He also was not a chainsaw killer; his actual weapon in the confirmed murder was a .22 caliber rifle.
• As for the real timeline: Gein was ruled competent to stand trial in 1968 and found guilty of Bernice Worden's murder. Because of budget constraints, prosecutors tried only that one case, so he was never tried for Mary Hogan's murder.
• Despite the guilty verdict, he was judged insane at sentencing and sent back to a psychiatric institution, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
• Gein died in 1984 at age 77 at Mendota Mental Health Institute from complications related to lung cancer and respiratory illnesses.

Why this episode throws people

Monster: The Ed Gein Story loves to stitch documented facts together with speculative flourishes, which is why you get big swings like the Koch influence, the Bundy nod, and the brother's death getting a side-eye. The bathroom kill is one of the bolder swings, but the show itself admits it is a hallucination. Consider it a stylistic play to get inside Gein's head rather than a reenactment.

Bottom line

The bathroom chainsaw murder is fiction. The show is candid about that within the episode. The real Gein's crimes were horrific enough without adding a hospital kill to the list.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is streaming now on Netflix. Charlie Hunnam plays Gein, with Vicky Krieps as Ilse Koch, Alanna Darby as Christine Jorgensen, and Linda Reiter as Nurse Roz.