We Built the Butcher

The names first. The archive insists.

Mary Hogan. Bernice Worden.

Mary kept a tavern at Pine Grove. She was fifty-four when she disappeared in December 1954. Accounts of her life describe a woman who had come from Germany, been married twice, and kept her tavern open during the day because she feared strangers. Blood and a spent casing were left behind. Her disappearance remained unresolved until the discoveries at Gein’s property three years later.

Bernice ran the hardware store in Plainfield. On November 16, 1957, she disappeared from it. Her son Frank, a deputy sheriff, suspected Gein. She was fifty-eight.

Two women in their fifties. Both running businesses in small Wisconsin towns. Both with lives that existed before the man who would make their names a footnote to his.

Everyone knows the name of the man who killed them. That is not what this entry is for.

THE RECORD

Some places don't let go of what happens on them. Plainfield is one of them.

You can drive through it now and miss it. A flat ribbon of central Wisconsin. But the dirt under that town has been sitting on a story for nearly seventy years, and the story is not done telling itself.

Even the grave became material. In May 2001, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that police had seized a marker promoted as Gein’s stolen tombstone at a touring show. The promoter said it was a fake. Either way, the attraction had already been advertised.

Even the stone could sell the show.

In November 1957, investigators searching Gein’s property found Bernice Worden’s body. Gein confessed to killing her and Mary Hogan. Eleven years later, his trial concerned Worden’s death. Arrest and judgment were not the same moment.

What was in the rest of the house, I am not going to itemize for you. Other writers have made a circus of it for seventy years, and the circus is part of the problem. What you need to know is this: when they opened the rooms Ed had been keeping, they found a workshop made of women. Not bought. Not bartered. Dug — out of the cemetery down the road, where the families of Plainfield had put their dead in the reasonable expectation that the dead would stay put.

The murders and the grave robberies belong to the same record, but the women taken from graves were not all people he had killed. That distinction gets lost when a body count becomes part of the sales pitch.

The inventory is where a retelling can turn into a show.

The archive asks what happens after the inventory. Who gets remembered as a person, and who gets turned into material.

THE FARM WAS BUILT FROM SOMETHING OLDER

Accounts of Gein’s childhood return to Augusta, his mother: a household organized around religious condemnation of lust and desire. It is easy to make her the whole explanation, as though one woman invented the idea that women’s bodies are unclean.

She did not invent that idea.

This is where I read an inheritance. The shame attached to a woman’s body did not begin at that supper table. Augusta is one place the story concentrates it, one figure a retelling can give us to blame.

That does not make a biography into proof of a two-thousand-year chain of cause and effect. It makes me wary of the convenience of the explanation: put the mother in the frame, close the frame around the farm, and leave everything outside it unexamined.

I want to keep that frame open. A culture’s ideas about women deserve examination even when they cannot explain one man’s crimes.

A mother can be part of a story without becoming its entire explanation.

The spell is the explanation that feels complete before we have asked what it leaves out.

Augusta died in 1945. Accounts describe Gein preserving her room while the rest of the house deteriorated. The room stayed. She did not.

And the cemetery entered the story.

I read the preserved room and the violated graves as a terrible refusal of death. That is my reading, not a recovered thought from inside his mind. Grief alone cannot tell us why he did what he did. Neither can the shape a drama gives it.

It looks, to me, like a resurrection attempted with the wrong tools.

It did not work. It does not work. The dead don't come back.

But they do walk. Anyone who has sat with real grief in the kitchen at three in the morning already knows that.

THE PRESTIGE NECROMANCY

Monster: The Ed Gein Story premiered on Netflix on October 3, 2025. Eight episodes. Charlie Hunnam as Ed, Laurie Metcalf as Augusta. Netflix reported 12.2 million views in its first three days, then 20.7 million during October 6–12, when it led the English-language television list.

I will tell you what prestige true crime actually is, and I will only say it once.

It is necromancy. It is calling the dead up out of the ground in front of an audience.

We call the dead back in 4K, give them a score, and call it a limited series.

And here is what makes this particular season unbearable rather than merely tacky. The violated bodies became material in Gein’s house. His story became material for a franchise. The acts are not equivalent. The question I hear in both is what the living believe they are entitled to take from the dead.

The season knows something about the problem. It keeps circling the audience that grew the story into Norman Bates and Leatherface and Buffalo Bill. Its official trailer ends with Hunnam’s Gein addressing the viewer: “You’re the one who can’t look away.” Then the franchise gives us eight episodes to keep looking.

It wanted to be a mirror. It kept becoming a window — looking out at the same field of bones it was supposed to make us look at ourselves in.

WHAT THE ARCHIVE KNOWS

In true crime, the audience is part of the haunting.

We watch. We pick a favorite killer. We argue about adaptations. One year we're defending the Menendez brothers in comment sections; the next we're studying Charlie Hunnam in a moth-eaten cardigan and calling it cultural analysis. The algorithm watches us watch. Another season gets greenlit. Another grave gets opened.

I watched the whole thing.

There is a scene where schizophrenia enters the room as a human wound instead of a horror device. I cried. Hunnam’s performance let me see a sick and terrified man sitting in a chair. It was a performance. My response to it was real, but it was not evidence about the historical man.

That is what makes this difficult. I love this stuff too.

I love the dark rooms and the old cases and the psychology and the question of how a person becomes what the world later calls a monster. I love the locked door. I love the file. I love the terrible little chill of finding out what was in the house.

So this is not me standing outside the window with clean hands.

I am in the room. That is exactly why I think we have to be honest about what the room is.

THE ARCHIVE'S VERDICT

The conversion happened quickly. Robert Bloch’s Psycho appeared in 1959. Hitchcock’s film followed in 1960. The story moved from a Wisconsin crime into fiction and then onto the screen. Later films borrowed other elements. The killer became a blueprint that could be used again.

By 1960 a man in a state hospital in Wisconsin had become a product.

We built the butcher. We are still building him.

And we have already started on the next one.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premiered on September 17, 2026. It is streaming now. The franchise has moved on to its first female subject, played by Ella Beatty.

The next season does not settle what the Gein season meant. It shows how easily a franchise can absorb criticism and continue.

One season tells the audience to examine its appetite. Another offers something new to consume.

The confession can become part of the product.

And look at what is being sold this time. Netflix’s official synopsis frames the story through repression, revenge, and a woman making her own legend. It ends on “gloriously free.”

Gloriously free.

Lizzie Borden was acquitted in 1893. The killings remain unsolved. Two people died in their own house on an August morning, and their names were Andrew Borden and Abby Borden. Whatever a drama invents about freedom, those deaths are not its proof.

I am not telling you not to watch it. I watched the last one. I am telling you to watch it the way our grandmothers sat a wake — candle lit, salt on the sill, and the bone-deep understanding that what gets called up does not always lay back down.

A mother becomes an explanation. A house becomes a legend. A killer becomes a blueprint. The country is handed a story and keeps selling it back to itself.

The names can disappear inside that machinery.

That is what I do not want to pass on.

Mary Hogan. Bernice Worden.

Updated 5 October 2026Historical shorthand narrowed, interpretation distinguished from the record, viewing figures sourced, and the Borden reference updated. Originally published 4 May 2026.