Who Was Ed Gein’s Girlfriend, Adeline Watkins?

Discover the true story about one of Monster’s most talked-about characters.

Written by

Amy Tikkanen

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

The 2025 installment in Netflix’s Monster series tells the story of one of the United States’ most notorious criminals: Ed Gein. In the 1950s he gained worldwide notoriety after it was discovered that he had murdered two women and robbed graves, using body parts to make household items. Although Monster: The Ed Gein Story focuses on these well-known crimes, it also introduces Adeline Watkins as his girlfriend. In the series, Watkins is shown as encouraging Gein’s crimes and even helping him rob graves. Was she real? And what was her connection to him?

Soon after Gein’s arrest in 1957, a 50-year-old woman named Adeline Watkins came forward to say that she had been Gein’s girlfriend for some two decades. In an interview with the Minneapolis Tribune (reprinted in the Wisconsin State Journal), she described Gein as “good and kind and sweet” and claimed that the couple shared a love of reading. They also “discussed every murder we ever heard about,” and Gein would speculate on what the killer had done wrong. On a date in February 1955, Watkins recalled, “he proposed to me. Not in so many words, but I knew what he meant.” However, she declined because she couldn’t “live up to what he expected of me.”

Several weeks after the interview was published—and picked up by news outlets across the United States—Watkins offered a very different version of her relationship with Gein. In an interview with the Stevens Point Daily Journal, Watkins denied much of what was written in the Tribune article. According to Watkins, she and Gein had casually dated over the course of seven months in about 1954. They had gone to the movies several times, and he had occasionally visited Watkins at her home. For his part, Gein never publicly mentioned Watkins, and there is no factual basis to support Monster’s portrayal of her as complicit in his crimes.