How much of what we watch in true crime entertainment is actually true? And what happens when a story is rewritten for the screen, replacing a family's painful, decades-long mystery with a neat, tidy, and conclusive fictional story?
The new season of Netflix's Monster is a global phenomenon. But in its telling of the Ed Gein story, it presents a young woman named Evelyn Hartley as one of his confirmed victims. It's a gripping narrative.
There's just one problem. According to the official investigation, it's not true.
My mission in this episode is to tell the true, unresolved story of Evelyn Hartley's disappearance, to reclaim the facts from the fiction, and to remember the girl who vanished long before she was ever a character on a screen.
14-year-old Evelyn Grace Hartley was last seen on October 24, 1953, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She has brown hair and blue eyes. At the time of her disappearance, she was 5’6” and weighed approximately 126lbs. She was last seen wearing red jea...