What happened to Evelyn Hartley, Addison Rae's character in Monster: The Ed Gein Story?

We're introduced to Rae's Evelyn Hartley in the third episode, which is titled The Babysitter. The episode focuses on Ed's growing relationship with Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son), with the pair starting to discuss having sex.

But Ed has been led by his puritanical mother to believe sex is a sin and that he should fear having children. Adeline has an idea to get him more comfortable around children and introduces him to a family so that Ed can be their babysitter.

Once in the family home, Ed is told that their former babysitter – who the children loved – is sick with polio and so they're looking for her replacement. It turns out the babysitter in question is Evelyn and when Ed is fired, he angrily confronts her.

By the end of the episode, we see that Ed has kidnapped Evelyn and has tied her up in his basement. The fourth episode opens with Evelyn, now dead, being wrapped in bandages and milk by Ed.

But who was the real-life Evelyn Hartley and what happened to her? Read on to find out.

What happened to Evelyn Hartley, Addison Rae's character in Monster: The Ed Gein Story?

Although it's depicted in Monster: The Ed Gein Story that it was Ed who kidnapped and killed Evelyn, the case of her disappearance sadly remains unsolved and Ed was found not to be connected to it.

Taking creative licence with the story, the Netflix series suggests Ed committed the crime out of frustration at losing his job as a babysitter when Evelyn recovered from polio.

In reality, Evelyn disappeared when she was 14 years old in October 1953 and didn't have polio. She was hired to babysit the 20-month-old daughter of a professor (Viggo Rasmussen) at La Crosse State College. Rasmussen worked with Evelyn's father, Richard. When she didn't call her parents as planned, Richard contacted the Rasmussen house but Evelyn didn't pick up. Fearing the worst, Richard drove there instead.

When he entered the house, he found Evelyn's broken glasses and each of her shoes in different rooms, with one of them in the downstairs living room and another upstairs. Having looked around, he didn't find his daughter. All the rooms in the house were locked but in the basement at the back of the house, there was further evidence of a struggle. As well as an open window missing a screen, there was a bloody footprint as well as blood being found both inside and outside the property.

Due to all the evidence pointing at a kidnapping, the police employed sniffer dogs to help locate just where Evelyn could've been taken. They were unfortunately only able to follow Evelyn’s scent for two blocks, losing her trail just northwest of the Rasmussen household. This led police to speculate that Evelyn had been bundled into a vehicle that was parked nearby.

Several days later, multiple blood-stained items of clothing were located including a bra, pants, a pair of men's trousers and a men's white shirt, which were found in the surrounding area.

One neighbour reported seeing a car circling the neighbourhood at 8pm that evening, while another local resident said that they heard screams around 7pm but assumed it was just the sound of children playing.

Some days later, another local man came forward to police to say that at 7:15pm on the night of Evelyn's disappearance, he almost hit a two-toned 1942 Buick which was speeding westward. He reported that he saw two men and a girl inside, noting that she was sitting in the back with her head slumped forward. He said that he saw the girl some moments prior, standing wedged between the two men but assumed she was drunk and they were helping her.

Evelyn's disappearance led to the biggest search in Wisconsin history and consisted of over 2,000 people getting involved in trying to locate the missing girl. Investigators questioned more than 3,000 people, with mass lie detector tests being run in the La Crosse area for teenage boys in the high school.

Was Ed Gein involved in Evelyn's disappearance?

In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Ed Gein is shown as the person who killed Evelyn – but there is no evidence to suggest that, and Gein wasn't convicted of any crimes related to Evelyn.

After Gein was arrested in 1957, he was questioned about the disappearance of Evelyn. He was initially considered to be a suspect on account of visiting family in the La Crosse area on the same evening she vanished.

Only a few blocks away from the Rasmussen household on the night in question, Ed maintained his innocence regarding Evelyn and was subsequently given two lie detector tests. He ended up passing them and no evidence of Evelyn's DNA was found at Ed's household when the police extensively searched his property.

In November of that year, the police announced that Ed had been cleared of any connection to Evelyn's case. They also cleared him of involvement in the case of Georgia Weckler, an 8-year-old who went missing from rural Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, in 1947.

Although Ed was cleared of any connection to Evelyn, many believed that he could have been involved somehow.

In 2004, an unexpected development came by way of a recording of Clyde “Tywee” Peterson, who claimed that he had kidnapped and murdered Evelyn with Jack Gaulphair and an unnamed third party. All three are now dead, with Peterson having died of a heart attack in 1974 and Gaulphair dying by suicide in 1967.

Authorities attempted to pursue the lead but because of the lack of physical evidence, no further progress has been made.

To this day, the case of Evelyn's disappearance remains unsolved.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix – sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.