🩸 "Death Collectors: Inside The Serial Killer Artifact Trade"

💰 Murder weapons selling for $50,000. Manson's hair at $10,000 per strand. Welcome to murderabilia—where death equals dollars. 🎨 Exclusive access to private collections: Gacy's clown paintings, Bundy's letters, and Dahmer's prison glasses. 🏠 Inside secret auctions where collectors bid thousands for killers' possessions. 🌍 Global investigation reveals how murderers profit from their crimes through underground sales. ⚰️ From eBay bans to dark web deals—the controversial world of death collecting. ⚠️ Warning: Contains disturbing artifacts and killer correspondence. 😱

🎙️ CONNECT WITH CRIMINAL EMPIRE:Follow us for exclusive content, breaking news, and behind-the-scenes access:
📱 Facebook: Mk-Ultra CAST
➡️ https://www.facebook.com/FREEBRENTCIRCLE🐦 X (Twitter): @MkUltracast
➡️ https://x.com/MkUltracast🎧 LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE:
• Spreaker (Premium Content)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Amazon Music
• iHeart Radio
Mondays & Thursdays @ 9PM EST⚠️ Got a case suggestion or feedback?
Hit us up on social media!Remember to rate, review, and share—help expose these criminal empires to the world.#CriminalEmpire #MafiaHistory #SerialKillers #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast*All episodes contain graphic content. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Fascination with serial killers is an American pastime, spurring a
profitable underground trade. Some people are so obsessed with the
subject that they carry on correspondence with men behind bars,
designing trading cards or board games, or indulge in a
more expensive hobby, purchasing art made by killers or depicting

(00:56):
their murders. Several collectors have expressed the the idea that
having something a murderer made protects them in some way.
The market serves both sides. Imprisoned killers have time on
their hands, and some have turned to art as a
way to express themselves, to explore their creativity, and even
to make money. People on the outside often act as

(01:18):
their agents. With the popularity of eBay and Anything Goes
Internet sites, it's not difficult for the most violent offenders
to find an audience or buyers. Gerard Schaeffer, who was
convicted of two nineteen seventies murders, suspected in thirty four
and confessed to more than eighty published a collection of
short stories thanks to his former girlfriend Sondra London. A

(01:43):
few killers have made art part of their crimes. California
Zodiac killer drew sketches and devised codes for his intricate game,
but such expressions are rare. Those who do communicate generally
only write letters or leave scrawled messages. Forms of art
done by killers after incarceration ranged from poetry and fiction

(02:03):
to sculpture and painting. Once part of a killing team
in California with Leonard Lake, Charles Zang reputedly does origamy.
Lawrence Bittaker, another team killer, creates greeting cards, and cult
leader Charles Manson offers sock puppets. Sometimes the art is
just a doodle on an envelope or a letter, as

(02:23):
Jennifer Furio illustrates in the Serial Killer Letters. Still, some
murderers have shown genuine, ongoing talent. They may not be
artists in the Michelangelo sense, but they've acquired some skill
with pencil, charcoal, or paint. Gary Gilmore, made famous when
he refused to go through a death penalty appeals process

(02:44):
in nineteen seventy seven after murdering two young men, actually
had such artistic talent that he won prizes and earned
an early release with an IQ of one hundred and thirty.
He had educated himself in literature, poetry, and drawing for
his improving talent. He was allowed to live in a
halfway house in Eugene, Oregon, in nineteen seventy two to

(03:06):
attend art school at the local community college. While he
welcomed the opportunity, it intimidated him. Rather than show up
to register, he got drunk. Within a month, he had
committed armed robbery and was arrested and sent back to prison.
Whatever talent he had was lost in the anger that
drove him to lash out later with murder. In nineteen

(03:28):
seventy eight, he was executed in Utah. Prison wardens are
usually pleased when otherwise aggressive prisoners turn to artistic outlets.
It makes these men more manageable, and as long as
they're not breaking the law, no one is going to
stop people like Ing or Manson from indulging in a
little creativity. But the market for this type of art

(03:50):
does meet with resistance. Both law enforcement members and families
of victims are outraged by killers making a profit from
their notoriety, and they want laws enacted to stop it
for now. However, if they're doing nothing illegal or expressly
forbidden by prison rules, they can ply their trade. Let's
look at the different angles of this business. Some killers

(04:14):
turned to writing as their preferred art form, such as
the book Ian Brady wrote while in prison. The Gates
of Janus, came about from Brady's contact with noted crime
writer Colin Wilson. Brady wrote him hundreds of letters about
the nature of killing, offering his insights into other murders,
and affirming Wilson's classification of him as a self esteem killer.

(04:37):
By that he means that some murderers are fueled primarily
by the need to prove their sense of self as superior.
In other words, for Brady, killing appeared to be a
creative expression of his nihilistic ideas about life. Convicted Felon
Jack Abbott became a celebrity from his book In the
Belly of the Beast, which became a bestseller and garnered

(04:59):
a great deal of support among America's literati. It had
developed from a series of letters he had written to
Norman Mailer during the nineteen seventies. Mailer had helped him
get the collection published. Mailer then championed Abbot's release before
the parole Board, with the assurance that Abbot was a
powerful and important writer. In nineteen eighty one, Abbott got

(05:21):
out of prison and received numerous invitations to dinner parties
and television shows like Good Morning America. He was celebrated
as a reformed man thanks to his ability to rechannel
his thoughts into the more spiritual literature form. Yet no
one seemed to notice that he had dedicated the book
to the international predator Carl Panzram, an unrepentant rapist and

(05:44):
multiple killer who bore extreme hatred for anyone and had
described himself as the spirit of meanness personified. Abbot disappointed
his supporters when he stabbed Richard Adnan, a twenty two
year old waiter, to death, six weeks after his release.
Then he dismissed the killing as necessary in a sequel

(06:05):
my return, and said that Adnan didn't have much talent anyway.
In other words, this literary giant had no concern for
another person's life. Art had not bettered him. More devious
was Austria's Jack Underwegger. He killed a woman and was
sentenced to life in prison. But this illiterate man learned

(06:27):
to read and then write. He penned a self pitying
work about being in prison, hailed by fellow writers as
high art. They petitioned for his release from prison, and
he too, made the rounds of talk shows and parties.
He also wrote plays and watched them being performed, and
on the side he started killing again. More ingenious than Abbot,

(06:50):
he covered these murders as a journalist, criticizing the police
for their bungled efforts, and on an assignment to Los Angeles,
actually got the police there to ass in finding his
next victims. Unwittingly, he managed to kill eleven women before
he was stopped. Even then, he utilized his celebrity to

(07:10):
keep his supporters on his side, and few could believe
that this charming, talented man could be a serial killer.
But he was yet. Elmer Wayne Henley, who as a
teenager assisted Dean Coral with the brutal rape and murder
of twenty seven boys in Texas, insists that art has
calmed him and made him think about God. He likes

(07:32):
to draw seascape and surrealistic pictures, but does indulge now
and then in depictions of what got him in prison
in the first place, nude boys. What many killers and
artists who support them fail to understand is that when
they're in an environment in which the typical triggers to
their murders are lacking, they will likely feel less inclined

(07:53):
to kill, or not feel it at all. To believe
that art has cured them just because they aren't feeling
the aggressive drive that had inspired their earlier behavior is
a naive comprehension of both art and murder. Best Selling
novelist Patricia Cornwell has received much attention for her nonfiction
book Portrait of a Killer Jack the Ripper Case Closed,

(08:16):
because she claims to have solved the mystery that has
kept other experts guessing for over a century. She has
identified the man who committed the Whitechapel murders. According to her,
Red Jack is British artist Walter Richard Sickert. Jack the
Ripper's true identity has been to crime enthusiasts what Shakespeare's
play's authorship is for literary buffs. The truth about Red

(08:40):
Jack comes out nearly every decade, but what do we
really know? In eighteen eighty eight, in London's distressed East End,
a shadow figure savagely murdered five prostitutes. Growing increasingly frenzied,
he sliced open the victim's throats and disemboweled three. Many
experts say the murders then abruptly stopped, while others add

(09:03):
a few more both before and after. The killer was
never caught, but he left tantalizing clues. Ripperologists have offered
numerous candidates, including Sicart, who has since been dismissed. While
Cornwell offers plenty of detail on Sickert's personality and motives,
what supposedly sets her apart from other speculators is physical evidence.

(09:27):
She spent six million dollars on evidence analysis, using a
team of top forensic experts to interpret the findings. She
bought Sickert's desk and forty five of his paintings to
examine for clues, specifically DNA traces. She also had an
expert compare writing on many of the hundreds of Ripper
letters sent to Scotland Yard during and after the murder spree.

(09:50):
The result is that Cornwell found a watermark on two
Ripper letters that matches a watermark on two of Sickert's letters.
Yet were faced with three apparent problems. First, we wouldn't
know if any of the Ripper letters were sent by
the murderer, let alone these two. Second, the stationary could
have been in wide use in London. And finally, It's

(10:13):
possible that Sicert hoaxed some Ripper letters, a strange fad
in those days, to further weaken her case. Her DNA
analysis is incomplete. Cornwell had a specialist compared DNA from
saliva on stamps and envelopes from a Ripper letter to
DNA from a Sicret letter and items that Sicret owned,
such as as coveralls. She claims to have a near

(10:36):
match between the two men that rules out all but
one percent of London's population at that time. However, she
used mitochondrial DNA, which is less individualizing than nuclear DNA,
and one sample is from traces of saliva over a
century old, which might not have even come from Jack
or Sickert. Some experts say that this one percent estimate

(10:58):
on such meager soundimples may be as inclusive as ten percent.
In other words, the DNA sequences could be from anyone
from among four hundred thousand to four million people. Also,
Sicret's items for DNA sequences from several people. Since he
was cremated, his DNA cannot be distinguished. To make a

(11:21):
DNA case, we need a sample for comparison, which means
we need to have a letter containing DNA that is
genuinely jacks. We have no such thing. Without a physical
piece of individualizing evidence that links a crime scene to
one person, and only one person, we can't convincingly solve
the case. Beyond that, Cornwall says that Sicard painted several

(11:44):
prostitutes in a way that resembled the dead Ripper victim's photographs. Still,
those photos were taken at the morgue, not the crime scene,
and were published in books to which Sicard had access.
He also painted those scenes two decades after the murders,
and the women depicted were not necessarily dead. Yet, what

(12:04):
about dried blood on a ripper letter turned out to
be the artist's medium. That still does not tie it
to sicicart Taking a stab with psychology, Cornwall believes the
macabre paintings he did of menacing men sitting with murdered
prostitutes is a reflection of his crimes from two decades before,
sublimated for a while to avoid attention. Cornwell leaves no

(12:28):
room for the motive of simply being interested in bringing
attention to his art by depicting sensational subject matter. Cornwell
admits that conclusive physical evidence is lacking at this time,
but insists that the many links she has made between
Sicicret's life and the Ripper crimes just cannot be denied.
He was a master of disguise, His initials match those

(12:50):
on some of the Ripper letters. He had quirky handwriting
like Jack, and as a boy, he had sketched naked
and bound women. They are among the reasons why she
says she has closed the case, but in fact she
has merely begged the question. She appears to have assumed
Siicret is Jack, and to have made the right facts

(13:12):
align nicely with this thesis, thereby proving it, But she
hasn't proved anything. The records are incomplete, the remains are gone,
the crime scenes have long been contaminated, and the evidence
is missing or wiped away. Thanks to Cornwell, Sicret can
be restored among the usual suspects. Still, she offers no

(13:35):
scientific basis for tapping him as the infamous Red Jack.
Even so, there is evidence that some art does serve
as a rehearsal for murder. Teachers are often worn to
watch for budding antisocial behavior in the things that children
draw when assignments inspire. Bloody knives, beheadings, hangings, or dismemberment,

(13:58):
there may be cause for concern. While they might be
imitating what they've seen on television, they might also be
offering the contents of their daydreams. Such children are getting
used to images of violence. Should they develop impulse control
or anger management problems, they may then channel their conflicts
into those behaviors with which they've become familiar stabbing, bombing, violation,

(14:22):
or strangulation. Other actions must also be evident to signal
actual pathology. Still, a child's raw expression can reveal those
things that obsess them. On February the eleventh, nineteen eighty seven,
in Fort Collins, Colorado, thirty seven year old Peggy Hettrick
was found dead in a field. She had been stabbed

(14:45):
once in the back and her vaginal area was severely mutilated.
Tim Masters, age fifteen, lived in a nearby trailer. While
several knives were found in his bedroom, none could be
linked to the murder. More than fifteen teen notebooks full
of his writing were discovered, along with sketches depicting decapitation, death,

(15:06):
and dismemberment. Tim clearly had a problem. Nine years went
by before doctor Reid Maloy, an expert in sexual homicide pathology,
was asked to evaluate the journals and drawings. He said
that he'd never seen such a voluminous production by a suspect.
It was enough to bring Masters to trial despite a

(15:28):
lack of physical evidence. Malloy focused the jury's attention on
two sketches in particular. The first depicted a figure being
dragged across the ground, just as the victim had been.
Masters had admitted to drawing the picture the day after
Hettrick was killed. mLOY then moved to the second drawing,
dated the month before the murder. Its details closely resembled

(15:51):
the victim's sexual mutilation. Mlloy said that it represented a
rehearsal fantasy of how Masters wanted to mutilate someone sexually.
The similarities between this drawing and Hettrick's attack were uncanny,
so in nineteen ninety nine, the jury found Masters guilty
of first degree murder. Jason Massey too filled journals The

(16:51):
Slayer's Book of Death, with writings and sketches about how
he would fulfill his ambition to become the world's most
prolific serial killer. Finally, in nineteen ninety three, he consummated
his fantasies in Texas with the Double murder of two teenagers.
The journal entries began in nineteen eighty nine and ended

(17:11):
in nineteen ninety three, the month in which the kids
were murdered. Inside. Among other things, Massey described the episode
in which he had killed the dog of a seventh
grade girl, smearing the blood on her car. He also
stalked the girl and wrote threatening letters. More tellingly, Massey's
recorded desires directly reflected the precise acts committed against the

(17:35):
female murder victim. It was like the signature and artist
leaves on his work. Harvey Glatman made artistic expression part
of his emo. Photography was his hobby, and in nineteen
fifty seven he used it to commit murder. Glatman posed
as a photographer from a detective magazine, and once he

(17:56):
had his model bound and gagged, he raped her, But
he was a convicted felon already, so he decided he'd
have to kill her. He strangled her with a cord
and left her in the desert. Then he used a
lonely hearts club to find his next victim, Shirley Anne Bridgeford.
He pretended to be a plumber as he arranged a

(18:17):
date and took her out to the desert. He persuaded
her to pose for pictures and then completed his deadly ritual,
burying her there. He picked up the next victim from
a nude modeling agency in nineteen fifty eight. He bound
and raped her and then took her for a picnic
near where he had left his second victim. He raped her, repeatedly,

(18:40):
photographed her, bound and gagged, and then killed her with
a length of cord. Four months later, he was starting
on his fourth victim, but she successfully escaped him and
flagged down a motorist. The police arrested Glatman, and he
confessed to the crimes and pointed out where he had
buried two of the women. Hitchhikers at our found the
bones of his first victim in short order. Glackman was

(19:04):
convicted and executed in nineteen fifty nine. While the stereotype
of a killer's mentality seems to preclude an artistic temperament,
any human being can find some purpose in creative outlets.
Let's examine how art may serve someone with murder in
his soul. Some people collect the artifacts of murderers to

(19:25):
understand the criminal mind. A story in The Eagle Tribune
describes the effort of John as Luski of Salem, Massachusetts
to develop correspondences with dozens of serial killers and collect
their artwork. He says that he is writing a thesis
on what these artifacts reveal about the person and his
offense for his master's program in psychology. Lana Watchniak, a

(19:48):
sociology professor at Kansas State University, was featured in the
Atlanta Journal Constitution for her efforts to compare the art
of killers to their crime scenes. She's looking for some
insight into their minds that both types of behavior might reveal. Specifically,
she's looking for what kinds of impressions they are trying
to convey, and speculated that the more normal the artwork,

(20:12):
the more orderly the crime scene would be. Yet she
does not address the fact that some killers, such as
Arthur Shawcross, may draw a range of subjects from gruesome
death's heads to pretty images of Princess Diana. Gaysey painted clowns, birds,
and dwarfs, but he also drew scenes of torture. It's

(20:34):
likely that, like the FBI, with its dichotomy of organized
and disorganized, Watchniak will find out that most killers are
a mix of several elements Gaysey may have buried victims
neatly under his house, but he also tossed five into
the river. Killers may be no more classifiable in this
manner than other artists are. Although neither scholar reveals to

(20:58):
reporters what they made of the artwork, it's not difficult
to offer educated guesses from what's available online and in
books for those offenders who engage in this activity. Art
can serve many purposes, such as an expression of anger,
a need to relive the violence, a continued attack on society,

(21:20):
a way to relieve or externalize internal conflicts, a way
to explore feelings that can't be easily verbalized, a joke
against society, and making money off the same victims that
they enjoyed killing, shock value, exploration of other forms of
personal expression, enjoyment or the easing of boredom, or redemption

(21:43):
and spiritual exercise. LUSTMRD, a book about the writings of
lust Killers, begins with a quote from philosopher Frederick Nietzsche
to the effect that while people may find poems and
short stories by murderers reprehensible, especially if those expressions self
serving excuses or just a way to keep the violence alive,

(22:04):
one ought not to limit what may be regarded as art.
In human all too human, Nietzsche says, one is limiting
art much too severely when one demands that only the
composed soul, suspended in moral balance, may express itself. There
there is in music and poetry the art of the

(22:26):
ugly soul, And in achieving art's mightiest efforts, breaking souls,
moving stones, and humanizing animals, perhaps that very art has
been most successful. West Palm Beach recently made some noise
over an art exhibit that featured nineteen paintings done in
prison by John Wayne Gacy. During the nineteen seventies, Gaysey

(22:50):
lured and killed at least thirty three boys and young men,
bearing most of them in the crawl space beneath his house.
While in prison awaiting his execution, which occurred in nineteen
ninety four. His artistic output was prodigious. According to Steve
Soe in The Oregonian, he amassed over one hundred thousand

(23:10):
dollars from his artwork. So reports that prison officials were
going to take the money, but decided against proceedings that
might delay Gaysey's execution date. His subjects reigned from Elvis
Presley to Pogo the clown, the persona he'd used to
entertain children to fellow killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the controversial

(23:31):
art show, reported the Associated Press, his painting of a
bird was offered for one hundred ninety five dollars, while
his depiction of a baseball game between Dwarfs and the
Chicago Cubs, autographed by baseball players was going for nine thousand,
five hundred dollars. The sketch of Dahmer was reportedly for
sale on eBay for forty one dollars. Gasey's agent, Steve Koschel,

(23:55):
also an autograph expert, had collected some two hundred of
these paintings as part of his three year correspondence with
the condemned killer. It was he who suggested they offer
the paintings for sale. It wasn't long before he found
a diverse market, ranging from celebrities to professionals to homemakers.
There's a huge demand, he says. But a new prison

(24:18):
warden stopped Gaycy from painting a year before he was executed,
Yet his death only made the items more valuable. In
nineteen ninety seven, writes Harold Scheckter in The Serial Killer Files,
an exhibit called Sensation, included a sizeable black and white
depiction of Myra Hindley, one of the teams of child

(24:39):
killers known as the Moore's Murderers. What made this piece
by Marcus Harvey so controversial in England was that it
was created from children's hand prints. However, Scheckter points out
such an exhibit has a long tradition in the history
of art. Medieval depictions of bloodied saints and human atrocities

(25:01):
featured by painters such as Goya and Sizan have always
been part of the art world. Whether the artist uses
savagery to make a point about humanity or is himself
or herself a criminal offender. Art is about human expression,
not about what pleases others. A state sponsored art show

(25:22):
for inmates in two thousand and one, Corrections on Canvas,
drew protests when it was learned that Arthur Shawcross, the
killer of eleven women in Rochester, New York in the nineties,
was offering ten pictures, including a pencil sketch of Princess Diana.
He would get half the proceeds from any sale, and
his work commanded from five hundred dollars upwards. Chacross had

(25:46):
already been punished two years earlier with solitary confinement for
giving his poems and paintings to people who had put
them on eBay. In response to the protest, the New
York State Senate quickly passed a law against inmates getting
any of the money. According to BBC News, Governor Partake
took steps to keep violent felons from exhibiting in the

(26:08):
future in such shows. In two thousand and two, Korn
singer Jonathan Davis, a former mortuary student, announced he was
planning a serial killer museum to display artifacts associated with
multiple murderers and their crimes. Still, his announcement drew the
ire of partner Arthur Rosenblatt. As reported by numerous news agencies,

(26:31):
including Yahoo News, Rosenblatt had a completely different understanding of
their venture. Rosenblatt is a collector of criminal artifacts, including
Ted Bundy's Volkswagen. He believed they were opening a museum
associated with the criminal justice system. He also said he
never received any funding, though he had loaned Davis the

(26:51):
car and other artifacts. As of June two thousand and four,
this museum is on hold whilst organizers figure out what
they're doing. Regardless, the killers will continue to produce. For many,
it's a way to keep affirming themselves and their deeds.
While some killers use art to turn away from their

(27:11):
antisocial deeds, others use it to fully indulge in that
which has been removed. Richard Ramirez, the knight stalker who
terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco during nineteen eighty four
and nineteen eighty five, was sentenced to death on nineteen
counts of murder. Those who have received artwork from him
report that his favorite subject is a beheading. He also

(27:34):
likes to paint horned devils, bloody knives, death's heads, red eyes,
and winged satanic goats. He appears to enjoy the reputation
that he is a poster boy for Satanic groups. He
may be using art to affirm it. Other killers like
to draw their actual victims. Gerard Schaeffer's work Killer Fiction

(27:56):
Tales of an accused serial killer, is suspected to be
a discous eyes for his actual crimes. He was convicted
in two murders, but suspected in many more. He insisted
that he was not the characters in my fiction, but
there is little doubt that the fifty pages of writing
and the many erotic drawings he produced before he was arrested,

(28:17):
detailing half clad females strung up by the neck, arose
from his sadistic fantasies. He protested at trial that he
was a trained writer, not a murderer, writing about his crimes,
but considering the evidence against him, his words then and
now ring false. When Dennis Nilsen was apprehended in London

(28:40):
in February nineteen eighty three for shoving hunks of human
flesh down a toilet, he opened up a ghastly case
of serial murder and necrophilia. He confessed to strangling and
dismembering fifteen or sixteen men in two different flats for
over thirty hours across several days, often keeping their body
parts with him in his apartment. He sometimes took them

(29:03):
into his bed or bathed in water in which he
had just washed a corpse. In a rather clinical manner.
He assisted the police in identifying the victims to whom
the body parts belonged. He explained his gruesome habit as
the unfortunate result of being disturbed about being abandoned. He
was just seeking company, he said, and in each case

(29:25):
he had hoped that everything would be okay in killing
for Company. Brian Masters offer some of his drawings sad
sketches that Nielsen included in the journals he wrote about
his behavior while incarcerated. Master's comments Nielsen is the first
murderer to present an exhaustive archive measuring his introspection. Indeed,

(29:48):
Nielsen seemed to enjoy drawing the body parts of various victims,
showing the bottom half from the waist down of Stephen Sinclair,
for example, or corpses crushed into closets. These were more
than just informative sketches. They seemed more aligned with how
some murderers indulged themselves in reliving their crimes. Nilsen also

(30:09):
seemed to be preparing himself for trial as he doodled
for psychiatrists hired to evaluate his state of mind for
an insanity plea. In the end, he received a sentence
of life in prison. Some serial killers liked to focus
on renditions of others, of their ilk or themselves. Gacy
had a pencil sketch of Jeffrey Dahmer which was on sale,

(30:31):
and did a self portrait in his clown suit. Danny
Rowling grabbed the opportunity to ramble about himself and his
pathetic life in the Making of a Serial Killer. Ramirez
has offered some demonized self portraits. He also wrote songs
and did detailed pennanting sketches which illustrate the book. Many

(30:52):
of these items can be found on various websites. Nicola
Nico Klaugh was a rested in Paris at the age
of twenty two on suspicion of murder. When the police
searched his flat, they found bones, teeth, cuman ashes, blood bags,
and surgical instruments. Still, he calmly explained that he had

(31:15):
desecrated cemeteries and stolen the blood from a blood bank
to consume. He once was a morgue attendant with an
obsession with cemeteries, and he developed a fixation on the
mutilation of corpses. In fact, during autopsies he claimed he
had removed strips of flesh to eat. He also confessed
to the murder in question, for which they had very

(31:36):
good evidence against him. Still, despite their attempt to pin
on him half a dozen more from around the city
with a similar mo perhaps because he had serial killer
tattooed down his arms, he admitted to no more. He
pleaded diminished capacity at his trial, finding ample psychiatric support,
and was sentenced to twelve years thousand and two after

(32:01):
only seven he set up a website on which he
displays the art of murder. In his posted bio, he
says that he started to paint well in prison. He
began to get commissions from collectors of murder bilia, but
he found some peace in the act of painting, and
he even waxed philosophical about it. There's a parallel between

(32:22):
art and murder, he said. They are both a quest
for aestheticism, and they both give me strange godlike feelings.
Art is creation and murder is annihilation. I have mastered
both of these tools. He thought this was the reason
why so many other killers turned to art during incarceration.

(32:45):
The urge to create compensates for the desire to destroy.
Creation and destruction delivered by the same hands. Other inmates
taught him how to paint, and in this form he
found a way to express his inner torments. Once on
the outside, he continued to develop his talent as a

(33:05):
painter and illustrator and got to know other artists. On
Sundra London's website, he is quoted as saying there's one thing.
I'd like to paint corpses on the slab. I love
their colors, the post mortem lividities, the gradation of gray, purple,
and green. People began to collect his work. London used

(33:28):
it to illustrate her book True Vampires, including a portrait
of herself done by Clow. While other inmates were painting scenery, clowns,
and wildlife, he painted portraits of serial killers, especially those
who most inspired him with their brutal acts. He sees
himself as a reflection of society's obsession with consumerism. He

(33:52):
paints the killers as Greek gods what company has turned
them into. In other words, he appears to believe that
he is using art to bear the truth to society,
to hold up a mirror. Influenced by Nietzsche's ideas the
Crime of Urzebeth, Bathory and Cemeteries his childhood love, he

(34:13):
also paints crime scenes from photographs as evidence of the
killer's macabre composition. In a vampire manifesto, he claims that
he's proud of what he's done and that he intends
to honor the Neanderthal DNA in his veins that propels
him to want to kill and consume. Yet if art

(34:33):
serves to work out his inner torment, then he must
be evolving. Indeed, on his website entitled Eyes of a Vampire,
he offered a disclaimer that he is now a long
way from his past behavior. He has worked to improve
himself through art and does not encourage others to do
what he has done. Nevertheless, he displayed plenty of gore

(34:54):
and dismemberment, and there's no doubt the collectors still flock
to him for his notoriety as much as for his creations.
Perhaps he's just a creative vampire sucking it all up.
Japanese cannibal Issai Sagawa, too, operated a website devoted to
the crime for which he served a relatively short stretch

(35:16):
in prison. He had killed a female student in Paris
for the sole purpose of cooking and eating different parts
of her. He later wrote a novel about it, which
became a bestseller in Japan. As Brian King details in Lustmord,
he was a darling of the Japanese literati. He also
penned a comic book version. When he was free in

(35:38):
nineteen eighty five, he became a celebrity, showing up in
small time pornographic films, and on the cover of gourmet magazines.
The Rolling Stones were courted a song about him called
too Much Blood. Sagawa also displayed samples of his paintings
of nude females on his site. While neither Klo nor
Segawa are considered serial killer, it seems clear from their

(36:01):
delight in what they did that had they not been caught,
they would have killed again, perhaps many times. Another website
for looking at the art that serial killers have done
was serial Killer Central, which provided a long list of names.
Not all of them offered what one might call art,

(36:22):
but there may be no other place to see the
fullest range of expression created by killers, that is, unless
you see the following film. In a documentary by Julian P. Hobbes,
Collectors Killer Elmer Wayne Henley says that art is an
act of appreciating nature, which proves to me there's a God.

(36:46):
He's one of many characters featured because his charcoal sketches
are among those that the Central subjects collect. Interestingly, the
nineteen sixty three novel by John Fowls The Collector, inspired
numerous serial killers. Louisiana mortician Rick Stanton is one of
the collectors and he's made a name from his active

(37:08):
encouragement of incarcerated serial killers to produce pieces that he
could sell. He developed three successful death row art shows
for such exhibitors as Henley and Henry Lee Lucas. He
had a mailing list of several hundred interested parties. He
found some of the killers obnoxious, though he did send

(37:29):
a photo of his son to John Wayne Gacy to
do a painting. Admittedly, serial killers fascinate him. He acquired
pieces from Richard speck Otis, Toole, Lucas, Gasey Manson, and
Henley which he considered the best. His companion and business
partner Tobias Allen developed a serial Killer board game, which

(37:52):
has been banned in Canada. In a real life rendition
of California, these two were featured in the documentary collecting
it idea from infamous crime scenes, such as a brick
from the home where Sharon Tate was murdered. Also featured
is Joe Coleman, whose outsider art is in demand by
such celebrities as Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. And Coleman

(38:15):
also owns the infamous letter written by child killer Albert
Fish to Grace Budds's mother expelled from New York City's
School of Visual Arts, he has collected medical oddities and
torture devices. Over the years, he has devoted himself to
rendering the visages of the outcasts of life, including serial killers.

(38:37):
His artistic themes include violence, dementia, decay, and antisocial behavior.
For example, he once depicted the life of Carl Panzram,
one of the angriest and most brutal killers. Coleman has
said that such painful and disturbing things compel me to
try to calm my fears of it. In an interview

(38:59):
with Gates of Heck posted on his website, Coleman discusses
what this form of expression means to him. That's the
stuff I can relate to and understand, he says about
outsider art, because that's the stuff where the feelings are everything,
where the person is everything. They're not concerned with trends

(39:20):
or with sales in the art world, or making a
sophisticated statement in our history. They're desperate to put these
things down on paper. Now a cult figure himself, Coleman
appreciates controversy and searches continuously for the sordid dimension of
American society. An eleven year old female psychopath who killed

(39:41):
two boys, a self flagellating man who raped children and
stuck needles into his groin, a self appointed prophet who
sent his disciples out to slaughter Whitey. These are Americans, too,
Coleman seems to say, and he's willing to explore what
it means to offer that to others, even at the
expense of being reviled. Those who oppose the sale of

(40:05):
items for murderers say that the prophet made is blood money,
and the people should be ashamed of making money off
violent crimes. It revictimizes the victims and their families. Sometimes
the family members attend the exhibits purchased the art and
immediately destroy it. A few do so as a clear protest,

(40:26):
burning a painting in the streets. In June nineteen ninety four,
over three hundred people gathered in Naperville, Illinois, to participate
in or support the destruction of twenty five paintings that
Gaycy had done. The family members of nine of his
victims attended. Newton states that when Elmer Wayne Henley's work

(40:46):
was hung in a Texas gallery in nineteen ninety eight,
protesters showed up with signs reading hang Henley, not his art.
In Oregon, Happy Faced killer Keith Jesperson, murderer of eight
gott into truck when he reproduced one man's copyrighted photographs
with colored pencils to make wildlife drawings to sell. In

(41:07):
two thousand and two. He made about one thousand dollars
from drawings that went for twenty five dollars apiece. Not
only that Jesperson had failed to get permission from the
prison superintendent to pursue this trade. He was subjected to
a disciplinary hearing and chastised by the owner of the photographs,
who insisted that he stop. Andrew Kahan, director of the

(41:28):
Mayor's Crime Victim's Office in Houston, is an outspoken opponent
of serial killer art collectors. He wants states to enact
laws blocking offenders from making such profits, and he managed
to get a Son of Sam ruling in Texas. He
views the work not as real art, but as a
symbol of notoriety, evidence that they have murdered someone. He

(41:50):
mounted a crusade against eBay for its sale of murder bilia,
a term he coined, pointing out that they were selling
an oil painting by Henry Lee Lucas, dirt from Gaysey's
crawl space, and a newspaper clipping signed by railroad killer
Raphael Rissendi's. However, eBay can list anything legal to sell,
although some items are restricted from miners. Kayhanrich's families of

(42:14):
victims to be more outspoken about pressuring their representatives. The
Supreme Court certainly saw merit in the argument, as it
turned down an appeal in two thousand and four on
an Arizona decision to award the families of eight victims
of mob underboss Sammy the Bull Gravano with the royalties
from his autobiography. They split the four hundred and twenty

(42:35):
thousand dollars he had received and any further profits from
film or sub rights. While this may apply only to
crime related art or literature, at least some families were satisfied.
Many people who see such pieces as part of an
art exhibit call it tasteless, shocking, obscene, and exploitive. They

(42:56):
say it poisons the victim's memory and that it's a
sign of a culture in spiritual decline. What people have
found so reprehensible about art produced by serial killers is
not the subject matter itself. What inspires such widespread disgust
is the mere notion that convicted lust killers are allowed
to be treated like minor celebrities and enjoy the ego

(43:19):
gratification of having their work put on display. Be that
as it may, the collecting items that killers have touched
or owned as a sort of talisman effect, from John
Dillinger's blood to dirt from ed Geen's grave to Ted
Bundy's Volkswagen. There will always be an audience for lust
killers associated with violent death, and that includes artifacts created

(43:44):
by the killers themselves and you w