The third episode of Netflix’s The Ed Gein Story introduced us to Evelyn Hartley, a fifteen-year-old honor student at Central High School who occasionally babysat for family friends in her neighborhood. On October 24, 1953, Evelyn had taken a gig looking after a twenty-month-old girl, Janis, the daughter of Viggo Rasmussen. He was a colleague of Evelyn’s father, Richard Hartley, who worked as a professor at Wisconsin State College in La Crosse. Usually, Evelyn would check in with her parents in the evening, but on that fateful day, she didn’t make any contact. Shortly before nine, Richard tried calling his daughter at the Rasmussens’ house, but Evelyn wouldn’t answer. A worried father quickly drove to the location, only to find Evelyn’s eyeglasses and one of her canvas loafers in the living room. Evelyn had disappeared without a trace, and no one knew what exactly had happened to her.
Spoiler Alert
Ed And Evelyn Didn’t Babysit At The Same House
In Netflix’s show, we came across a similar incident where the central antagonist, Ed Gein, started following Evelyn, accusing her of stealing his babysitting job, which he was going to use to fund his wedding. Well, it’s true that Ed and Henry picked up odd jobs in the neighborhood and sometimes babysat for a quick buck, but there’s no evidence to suggest that he was ever hired by Viggo Rasmussen. In Netflix’s Monster, Ed was hired for a day by a woman named Mrs. Heller to look after her kids, Frank Jr. and Enid, who certainly didn’t look like twenty-month-olds to me. So, you know that the makers of Netflix’s show have fictionalized the whole incident. Also, there’s no hard evidence to suggest that Evelyn Hartley was diagnosed with polio or wore a knee caliper brace on one of her legs, and used a cane to walk.
Evelyn’s Body Was Never Found
As per Harold Schechter’s “Deviant,” the police and sheriff’s officers thoroughly searched the Rasmussens’ house and found traces of blood at multiple locations. They found the basement window open, and underneath it were footprints stained with blood leading away from the house. Evelyn’s other shoe was also found lying on the basement floor. The picture was clear. Someone had hurt Evelyn and taken her away. While no one really knows what happened to the young girl, the police theorized that she might have heard a noise in the basement and gone to check on it, which must have been when she encountered her abductor, but before she could run away or alert the neighbors, she was overtaken by the perpetrator. This scene was similar to what we see in Netflix’s Monster, where we saw Ed Gein entering the Hellers’ house through the basement door. Evelyn heard a banging sound and went downstairs to check on the noise, and Ed grabbed her from behind and brought her to his farmhouse. So now you know where the inspiration for this scene comes from. All this was just a running theory coming from an officer who was trying to make sense of Evelyn’s disappearance.
Coming back to the real story, Police Chief George Long told the local reporters that the teenage girl was abducted; however, the kidnapper didn’t ever contact the parents, nor did anyone ever ask for a ransom. This made everyone believe that Evelyn was likely killed by her kidnapper, and therefore the search was directed toward turning up a corpse. Unfortunately, Evelyn’s body was never found. However, you might be wondering how Ed Gein got embroiled in the mysterious disappearance of Evelyn Hartley.
The Police Suspected Ed Of Evelyn’s Murder
Shortly after Ed Gein was arrested for the murder of the hardware store woman, Bernice Worden, the local police officers searched his house, only to find all sorts of grotesque and gruesome items under his roof. They found furniture made of human skin, along with numerous human skulls and bones scattered all over the house, which made them believe that this psycho was capable of having killed more than 11 people. The nature of his crimes compelled the officers to connect Ed with every unexplained disappearance and murder that had taken place in Wisconsin over the past 10 years. And one such case was of babysitter Evelyn Hartley, who had disappeared some three years before Ed Gein’s arrest. Now, there were many rumors that tried to link Ed to Evelyn’s case, but none of them were actually true.
One of the cellophane-wrapped heads in Eddie’s collection seemed to belong to a younger woman of Evelyn’s age, but Lieutenant Vern Weber, chief of detectives of the La Crosse Police Department, dismissed this rumor, believing that the face bore no resemblance whatsoever to her. They even tried to match Evelyn’s dental charts with the heads and skulls collected from Ed’s house, but unfortunately, they weren’t a match either. Ed was suspected of killing Evelyn because the police had picked up a mountain of newspaper articles on the babysitter’s disappearance. However, it is to be noted here that Ed purchased the dailies in order to find out about the recent deaths in town so he could dig up the fresh corpses for his collection.
After his arrest, crime lab director Charles Wilson took a polygraph test of the Butcher of Plainfield and interrogated him about the disappearance of Evelyn Hartley, along with other related crimes, but the result of his lie detector test excluded him as a suspect, and therefore the police had no incriminating evidence against him to accuse him of murdering the girl. However, the people of Plainfield are still convinced that Ed was responsible for the disappearance of the teenage babysitter, as on the day she went missing, Ed had visited relatives who lived in the same neighborhood. However, his involvement was never legally proved.
In Netflix’s Monster, these hearsay and rumors centered around Evelyn’s disappearance were visualized as a fact when we saw Evelyn tied up inside Ed’s tool shed, where he ruthlessly struck her in the head with a hammer to kill her. While none of this might have actually happened in real life, the makers of the show took inspiration for this particular sequence from the first part of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film that itself is inspired by the real-life crimes of Ed Gein. This scene further highlights that Evelyn’s murder is a mere work of fiction.
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