In 'Monster,' Ed Gein Helps the FBI Catch Ted Bundy — Here's What Really Happened

For the third season of the wildly popular true crime series Monster, creator Ryan Murphy chose Ed Gein as his subject. The Butcher of Plainfield's crimes would go on to inspire the book Psycho, as well as the movie adaptation, and other films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs.

Gein was arrested in November 1957 but was initially deemed mentally unable to stand trial. He eventually saw his day in court in 1968 and was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

A decade after Gein was committed to a mental institution, Ted Bundy was arrested. In the series, two FBI agents visit Gein prior to Bundy's capture because they believe the person responsible for his crimes was inspired by the soft-spoken serial killer. Did Gein actually help them?

Here's what we know.

The FBI agents who visit with Gein are actors portraying John Douglas and Robert Ressler, two real-life members of the agency's Behavioral Science Unit. Douglas would go on to write the book Mindhunter, on which the Netflix series was based.

In Douglas' book, he dedicates four pages to Gein and doesn't mention Bundy at all in any of those pages. The former FBI agent mainly discusses the moment he had to break the wax on sealed crime scene photos of Gein's house, and the horrific images he saw.

In March 2017, Douglas spoke with Roel Haanan of The Flashback Files, who asked the criminal profiler about Gein. He told Haanan that after joining the FBI in 1970, his second office was in Milwaukee, Wisc., where he first heard about Gein.

Douglas was also pulling double duty in graduate school and learned even more about Gein there. That's when Douglas decided he wanted to study Gein, which meant visiting him in prison.

"Now, what’s really good about being an FBI agent is that it’s easy to get into prisons to conduct interviews," said Douglas. "I had the opportunity to briefly meet him, but Gein was so psychotic that it really wasn’t much of an interview."

Douglas went on to say that Gein was working in the leather shop of the Mendota State Mental Institution, pointing out that the killer had made "body suits and face masks out of his victims."

Douglas was very clear about one thing: what Gein did to his victims, and the bodies of the corpses the killer dug up made him one of the most bizarre cases the profiler had ever come across.

"I’ve never quite seen one like that, where the subject would peel the skin off and wear body suits and look at himself in the mirror," recalled Douglas.

In this interview, Douglas compared Gein and Bundy in terms of their intelligence. He said Bundy was an extremely smart, organized killer, while Gein was not.

The Butcher of Plainfield was described as being a disorganized killer, which is marked by a lack of planning and chaos in their crimes.

As far as we know, the only connection Bundy and Gein have is inspiring the work of Thomas Harris, who wrote the Hannibal Lecter novels.