The Dark Market Of 'Murderabilia'

"The main benefit of the federal bill is not the extra few years it will tack on to their sentences, but that it will restrict their ability to mail things out, which puts a dent in the dealers' business," says Kahan. "If they can't get the items, they can't sell them."

Families of murdered victims certainly hope so.

"Once a child is murdered, you have no control over anything," says Nancy Ruhe, executive director of Parents of Murdered Children, a national advocacy group based in Cincinnati. "But these murderers, they make money, they become famous, kids look up to them. It's incredible."

She makes the point that Americans hold murder up as a uniquely entertaining crime. Manson masks for Halloween, Ted Bundy action figures.

David Schmid, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and author of "Natural Born Celebrities," a study of serial killer popularity, agrees. But, he says, it's pretty rich for a nation that regards Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" as a work of art and that treated the O.J. Simpson case as a soap opera to then turn on collectors of crime memorabilia as if they were, well, criminals.

'Very Evil Sociopaths'

Todd Bohannon is on the phone.

He runs Murderauction.com from his home in Cornelia, Ga. He says he's in his 30s and that he teaches kindergarten as a day job. He says he's been collecting things from high-profile killers ever since Manson sent him a poem 17 years ago. He's one of the few collectors who talks to reporters, but he sounds sullen. He says he got 300 death threats after one news story about him and it left a bad taste.

It didn't put him off the trade.

"You got to man up. You got to be who you are. You can't let people's negative feelings affect you."

He's saying there's really no money in the crime memorabilia industry. He says there's no reason for a bill to be pending in Congress that makes it a crime for inmates to sell the stuff. He doesn't like, for obvious reasons, the laws in five states that seize profits from dealers. He points out a Gainesville Sun story from a few months ago showing that the highest amount an inmate in Florida had received from crime collectors was about $350 over a two-year period.

"See? There's just nothing there. I don't know why they want to make a law about this. I don't feel that I'm really bothering anybody."

Louisiana's Staton is recognized as one of the guys who made crime memorabilia a business. In the late 1980s he started writing "famous" killers, getting them to send drawings and poems, and then selling them for a few bucks. His day job was working as an undertaker.