You Can Hear Serial Killer Ed Gein's Voice for the First Time in a Docuseries

Although people didn't start killing people en masse in the 20th century, Ed Gein was nonetheless one of the first people who came to be known as a serial killer. Although he is famous in the world of true crime, there are some things that Gein that were not super well-known to the public, including what his voice actually sounded like.

That all changed in September with the release of Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, an MGM+ docuseries that premiered on Sept. 17. The docuseries takes advantage of voice recordings of Gein that were first surfaced in 2019. Here's what we know about the new recordings.

Gein was first arrested in November 1957 in Plainfield, Wis., and found a horrific scene in his house and woodshed, where human skulls and other body parts had been made into everything from lamps to furniture. This kind of horror was almost unprecedented, and the recordings used in the docuseries were made by a local judge who was trying to understand Gein in the wake of what they had seen.

“Put yourself back in 1957,” executive producer and director James Buddy Day told The New York Post. “Ed Gein is arrested and the sheriff and deputies go into his house and never comprehended anything like what they were seeing … so they take him back to the jail and don’t know what to do so they call a local judge who lives down the road and he walks over with a recorder.”

“They start recording Ed as all this was happening and, when they were done, the judge didn’t know what to do with the tapes so he left them in his office in his safe and they made their way into a safety deposit box,” Day said. “Years after he died, his family felt they should do something with them because they’re history. That’s how they came to light in 2019.”

While Gein might not be the most well-known serial killer in the annals of true crime today, his crimes became the inspiration behind everything from Psycho to Hannibal Lecter, per The Los Angeles Times. It was a moment when culture became truly aware of one man's depravity.

“It’s really the first time in American history where a serial killer is caught … and becomes part of the culture,” Day said. “There were other American serial killers before — Albert Fish and HH Holmes — but that was before movies, TV, before mass media. Even the first true-crime book, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood [about the Clutter murders in Kansas] comes out in 1959 right after Gein is caught and right before Psycho comes out."

The tapes themselves help illuminate who Gein was. Crucially, though, it's hard for us to fully understand the minds of killers like this, which might be part of the reason they have been so endlessly fascinating.