Why Ed Gein Was Not Interviewed in Mindhunter

Mindhunter featured some of the most well-known and infamous killers of all time, and the groundbreaking series looked set to introduce more. Mindhunter‘s last 60 seconds set BTK up as a formidable antagonist, before the show was canceled at the end of season 2 for budgetary reasons. Fans mourning Netflix’s best crime show have other options, but most take more creative liberties than Mindhunter.

The recent series Monster: The Ed Gein Story featured some interesting parallels with Mindhunter. Happy Anderson reprised his role as Jerry Brudos, and the show referenced Mindhunter‘s real story using actors resembling Holden, Wendy, and Bill. This was noted by reviewers who felt that Netflix remade Mindhunter in the worst way possible, especially considering the fact that Ed Gein was never in Mindhunter.

Ed Gein Is Not In Mindhunter Because The FBI Never Interviewed Him

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FBI agents interviewed incarcerated serial killers to see if they could learn to predict the behavior of killers who had not been caught yet, and this experiment was the birth of modern criminal psychology. The main FBI agent involved, John Douglas, interviewed many terrifying killers who did not appear in Mindhunter, including Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, but he did not formally interview Gein.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story presented Gein as being a key part of the FBI interviews, but this is fictional. John Douglas told The Flashback Files that while he had been fascinated with Ed Gein, he was not a main interview subject. He explained, “I had the opportunity to briefly meet him, but Gein was so psychotic that it really wasn’t much of an interview.”

Mindhunter Co-Author John Douglas Studied Ed Gein Years After His Death

While John Douglas did not use Ed Gein as a significant interview subject, he had been interested in the case ever since he had heard about it as a young agent. Douglas used his FBI credentials to see the crime scene photos, describing in the book, Mindhunter, how the clerk had to break a wax seal that had been in place since the 1950s.

Douglas still studied Gein after he died in 1984, using what he knew to teach other agents about his psychology and mental state. While the workshops were largely attended by law enforcement and FBI agents, crime authors were also fascinated by the case. This led one author to create what would become the scariest movie serial killer of all time, while linking Gein and Mindhunter.

Ed Gein Does Have A Connection With Mindhunter

The author Thomas Harris saw one of John Douglas’s presentations in which he discussed Ed Gein’s crimes. Harris, who was writing a crime thriller, based his main serial killer character on three different people, including Ed Gein. The character was known as Buffalo Bill, and the book was The Silence of the Lambs, which also gave us Hannibal Lecter.

The Silence of the Lambs follows Clarice Starling’s attempt to discover the identity of Buffalo Bill by interviewing Hannibal Lecter. This detail is based on the FBI’s study, and the character Jack Crawford is based on John Douglas. This connects Ed Gein with Mindhunter, and a Mindhunter season 3 could have referenced Gein, even without showing an interview that didn’t happen, as Monster inexplicably did.

Source: The Flashback Files