When the story of Ed Gein, the “Butcher of Plainfield,” horrified the nation in 1957, the public was desperate to understand the man behind the crimes. Into this void stepped a local woman named Adeline Watkins, who presented a shocking narrative: she wasn’t just a neighbor, but Gein’s longtime girlfriend who had once rejected his marriage proposal.
Her story offered a glimpse of a “good and kind and sweet” man, a bizarre contrast to the killer known for crafting objects from human skin. However, the tale of Adeline Watkins is itself a mystery, one built on a public claim and an equally public retraction, leaving us to wonder about the true nature of her relationship with one of America’s most infamous serial killers.
The initial story was sensational. In a 1957 interview with the Minneapolis Tribune, published just after Gein’s arrest, Adeline Watkins claimed the two had a romantic courtship that spanned over twenty years. She described a man who preferred milkshakes to beer, enjoyed books about lions and tigers, and always had her home by her mother’s 10 p.m. curfew.
Perhaps most hauntingly, she revealed that they often discussed murders in the news, and that Gein would explain the mistakes the killers had made. The story reached its climax with the revelation that Gein had proposed to her on their last date in 1955. “I turned him down,” she said, “not because there was anything wrong with him. It was something wrong with me.” She even insisted, “I loved him and I still do.” Her mother corroborated the account, affirming that Gein was a “sweet, polite man.”
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A Story Retracted
The compelling narrative of a two-decade romance lasted only a few weeks. Shortly after the first article appeared, Adeline Watkins gave a second interview to the Stevens Point Journal in which she completely changed her story. She declared the original report was “exaggerated…blown up out of proportion to its importance and containing untrue statements.” The reality, she clarified, was far less dramatic.
What’s the general consensus on Adeline Watkins?
Did she really have a 20 year courtship w/ Ed Gein, only go on a handful of dates, or make the whole thing up?
Most recaps of Gein completely leave her out. And people back then were weird enough to lie about stuff like this. pic.twitter.com/uGzpTC7iHP
— Buy My Girlfriend’s Poetry Book! (@JohnnyBud) February 28, 2023
While she had known Gein for twenty years, their romantic involvement was brief and intermittent, lasting only about seven months. Their outings consisted of him stopping by her home occasionally or them attending shows at the Plainfield Theater “a few times.” She also refuted the claim that she or her mother ever described Gein as “sweet,” though she did concede he was quiet and polite. Most importantly, she asserted she had never once set foot inside his nightmarish home. For his part, Ed Gein never spoke publicly about Watkins at all, leaving the true nature of their connection forever unverified.
Adeline Watkins On Screen
The mystery surrounding Adeline Watkins has made her a fascinating character for storytellers. In Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story, her role is significantly expanded, portrayed by actress Suzanna Son as a major character and a kindred spirit to Gein. The show imagines her not just as a companion, but as an active participant in his descent into darkness, introducing him to infamous figures like Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch and even joining him on his grave-robbing excursions.
The show’s creators have openly admitted that this is a dramatic fictionalization. In fact, Charlie Hunnam, who plays Gein, shared that his own interpretation was that Adeline was “in a large part a fantasy of Ed’s.” The real Adeline Watkins likely never knew the full horror of Gein’s actions, and her own story serves as a cautionary tale about how easily truth can be distorted, first by sensational journalism and later by the lens of popular culture.
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The story of Adeline Watkins is ultimately a puzzle with missing pieces. We are left with two contradictory accounts from the same woman and no clarification from the man at the center of it all. Was her first interview an attempt to insert herself into a sensational story, or was the retraction made under pressure from a community shocked by Gein’s crimes? We will probably never know. What remains is the enduring image of a woman who was, for a brief moment, linked to a monster, and whose own real story was lost somewhere between fact and fiction.
