Who Was Adeline Watkins?
Almost immediately after his 1957 arrest, a Plainfield resident named Adeline Watkins gave an exclusive interview to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, almost boasting she’d been Gein’s girlfriend for two decades and that he was “good and kind and sweet.”
Watkins, who was 50 at the time, characterized her connection with Gein as innocent, simple and endearing. She claimed they shared a love of reading and discussed books, though never the same ones. They went to movies regularly and visited a nearby tavern where she drank beer, but Gein preferred milkshakes.
Even Watkins’ mother told the paper that Gein was a “sweet, polite man” who always had her daughter home by curfew. Watkins even suggested Gein proposed to her, but she said “no.” “I turned him down, but not because there was anything wrong with him,” Watkins stated. “There was something wrong with me. I guess I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to live up to what he expected of me.”
But she divulged eerie details in the interview, too, including that she and Gein often discussed murders. “I guess we discussed every murder we had ever heard about,” Watkins said. “Eddie told how the murderer did wrong, what mistakes he had made. I thought it was interesting.”
Despite knowing his heinous crimes, Watkins told the Tribune, “I loved him and I still do.” When she was asked about the last time she’d seen Gein, Watkins said in 1955–two years earlier. “That night he proposed to me,” she said.
Watkins’ claims about a 20-year affair with Gein quickly made her famous. The story was picked up by other papers across the United States and her photo was splashed across front pages everywhere.
Did Adeline Watkins Know About Ed Gein’s Crimes?
Almost immediately, Watkins tried to distance herself from the article—and Gein. In a second interview with a local Wisconsin paper, Watkins didn’t heap praise upon Gein and his gentle nature and love for reading; this time she disavowed her comments from weeks earlier.
She denied the two had a romantic relationship, admitting only to a friendship with Gein. Watkins claimed the piece “was an exaggeration blown up out of proportion to its importance and containing untrue statements,” but reiterated that Gein was always quiet and polite. She admitted she’d known Gein for 20 years, but he’d “called on her for only seven months, and then only intermittently.”
Gein’s relationship with Watkins clearly wasn’t as it appeared in her first telling. There’s no public record of Gein ever mentioning Watkins at all. But there’s no proof she ever knew about his crimes, either. Watkins denied ever going to or being inside Gein’s home where he kept the body parts and human remains. After the second article was published, she maintained her silence about the case for the rest of her life. She died in 1992 at age 85 and was buried in her hometown of Plainfield.
As for Gein: He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and in 1968 found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. Gein died at age 77 on July 26, 1984, after spending his life in psychiatric hospitals.
