The show you're about to listen to may contain themes of violence, occult activity, strong language, and other sensitive material.

With an emphasis on cult's murder and other adult matters, listener discretion is advised.

On cult leader, I strive for telling stories in a truthful matter, though press, media, and other resources cannot always be verified.

Sources can be found in the show notes. Hello and welcome back to cult leader.

I'm your cult leader, Spencer Henry, and this week,

we are talking about the one, the only, Ed Keen. No, Colt Babes, you're not having deja vu. I did

in fact cover this story years ago, like six years ago, but after watching the new season of Monster

on Netflix, I knew I had to come back and give

you the full story because there's one, a few things I missed in that early episode, and there's

also a lot of discrepancies in the Ryan Murphy retelling. So today, we're talking about

everything. And I actually went back to my episode from 2019,

and it was an experience. I'll tell you that. I do in fact call him Ed Gain the entire time.

He was an amateur sleuth, okay? But aside from the nostalgia of the old theme song,

I will say there was a lot of good information in that episode, and it kind of took me

back to a place, a mindset, a moment in time, the early days of cult leaderhood. And it made me feel

really good and happy to listen to. I wasn't cringing the whole time. What struck me then and what

strikes me now is really the empathy that I felt for, of course, the victims, but also Ed himself.

I was hearing a lot of people really surprised that they felt some waves of sympathy for Ed when they were watching the monster series on him.

And I think people were really just surprised to learn about his story and his upbringing,

when really that's the thing about true crime. It's rarely just, oh shit, somebody snapped out of

nowhere one day and went on a killing spree. More often than not, when you learn about a case like

Ed Gein's, and you learn about their childhood traumas, you can start to piece together why

...