The Dark Market Of 'Murderabilia'

"It was really great for a while -- Manson and [Richard] Ramirez would call and leave messages on the answering machine. Gacy called about 80 times a day . . . but in the end, they're losers who live in a little cell and try to titillate guys like me on the outside. They're game-players, very evil sociopaths."

And here, how easy the law is to beat: When the state of Illinois stopped Gacy from mailing Staton his clown drawings, Staton simply drove up to the institution, accepted paintings as "gifts" from Gacy, resold them and happened to make a "gift" to Gacy's inmate account weeks later.

"I got a third of the profit and Gacy got the rest," he says. "I guess I made about $3,500, all put together." He says there's no doubt that some killers are 20th century American pop-culture icons, just like Andy Warhol and James Dean, and thus as worthwhile as anything else to collect.

"Manson's image, his name, is right up there with Coca-Cola and Hershey bars."

The Bazaar

The trade is almost all online now.

Web sites: Serial Killer Central, Murder Auction, Death Row Collectibles, Daisy Seven. The goods: Hadden Clark's handprints, autographed, $45. Daniel Siebert, a serial killer on Alabama's death row, has an "8 1/2 x 11 artwork of a topless woman with her dragon on a leash," offered at $75. A one-page letter from John Hinckley Jr., $395. An 8-by-11 glossy of Mark David Chapman praying, signed by the killer of John Lennon himself, offered at $150.

It is a trade that does not like outsiders.

"You have been denied access to this site."

This is on the computer screen.

It popped up less than two minutes after a Washington Post reporter created a user account on Daisyseven.com to monitor online bidding for Malvo's artwork.

There is no phone number listed on the Web site, which purports to be run by seven women. The Web site says someone named Robert Newsome deals with the media. A request for an interview lingered for two weeks before Newsome replied, "No comment."

Tampa's Ken Karnig, who runs Supernaught.com, did not return calls or e-mails and was hostile when a television crew conducted an ambush interview several years ago.

"We are not interested in entertaining those individuals who manipulate the facts, knowingly mislead the public, deliberately take things out of context and are only looking for sensationalism," he writes on his Web site, explaining his aversion to reporters.

A computerized records search shows that a Ken Karnig at his address has a criminal record for distributing drugs and a misdemeanor count of domestic battery.

His Web site has a lot of pornographic drawings by men who kill women.

He accepts most major credit cards.

Haunted to This Day

You know what people don't collect?

Pain. Suffering. Loss.

No one collects signed pictures of a mother weeping at her murdered child's grave on a sunlit Christmas afternoon, flowers going brittle in the cold. No one wants artwork from the dead Clutter children, the ones who were killed in "In Cold Blood."

Staton knows this. He says he's retired from active trading. He says he's a dad, unemployed, happily married, plays the bass for his church's choir.

"Victims' families must think I'm the worst creature who ever breathed air, and maybe in that sense I am. I am not ashamed of it nor am I proud of [collecting]. But I certainly wouldn't do it again. I remain haunted about it to this day."

But not so haunted that he doesn't still have about 1,500 pieces in his collection. One of which is Ken Bianchi's very own high school yearbook. The kid who would grow up to be one of the Hillside Stranglers was a hit with girls back then. "Dear Ken, you're the sweetest guy . . ." begins a typical entry.

Staton describes the irony as "kind of a hoot."

"People come in my house and they're disgusted and revolted, but damn . . . they sure do want to see what I've got."