Objection! (15 page)

Keep all the above in mind and get ready for this: an auction Web O B J E C T I O N !

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site once listed Bittaker’s fingernail clippings, with bids starting at $9.99, and described them as being “direct from the murdering hands of this fiendish killer.” The description of the item featured this enticing sales pitch: “Collect ’em or use them in rituals to summon the dead. . . . Own some pieces of Larry now, ’cause once they execute him, there won’t be enough of Larry left to go around.”

Another disturbing online offer involves cannibal serial killer Arthur Shawcross, now serving 250 years behind bars for the murders of eleven women in Rochester, New York. In just one more instance of justice gone wrong, Shawcross was released from prison in New York after serving fifteen years for the murders of two young children. After his inexplicable early release, Shawcross relocated to Rochester in the 1980s. He went on to murder and cannibalize eleven victims. As of this writing, a sample of Shawcross’s hair goes for $20 online.

Some of the most popular “killer” items for sale online are from Jeffrey Dahmer, convicted and sentenced to life for raping and murdering boys (some as young as thirteen) before cannibalizing them. Once in prison, Dahmer died at the hands of a fellow inmate, causing his murderabilia to skyrocket in price.

Actual crime-scene photos are linked online as well, complete with shots of murdered victims in various stages of undress. Morgue photos are not exempt. Web sites list the Charles Manson–Sharon Tate murder-scene photos, apparently laser-copied from the originals taken of the August 1969 slayings. As of September 2004, even copies of the autopsy report of murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson could be purchased online. Can you imagine how powerless the Browns feel, now forced to sit by, helpless, as a cold-blooded predator makes money off their daughter, their sister?

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T H E W O R L D ’ S

M O S T

T W I S T E D T O Y S T O R E

There is also a
whole new genre of action figures available online, and I’m not referring to G.I. Joes or Power Rangers. I’m talking about serial-killer action figures, sold in toy stores and online. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ed Gein are some of the serial-killer action figures created by Dave Johnson of Denver. They start at $39.99

apiece, and one site promises that the Columbine killers will soon be available.

Speaking of Columbine, last year I learned that a Texas man was peddling a card game based on the Columbine shootings, with players enacting the sickening roles of teenage shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The goal is to achieve “divine retribution” against high-school classmates and teachers. Harris and Klebold murdered a dozen students and a teacher, wounding more than twenty others at Columbine’s local high school on April 20, 1999. The two then killed themselves in the school library. Although the game’s creator insists he’s not trying to get rich, his Web site sells the game for $20. The box cover bears a shot of Klebold that was taken by a Columbine security camera. In it, Klebold is wielding the TEC-DC9 pistol he used at the school. The game states, “You are armed with guns and bombs . . . and your goal is to kill everyone, for that ultimate goal of immortality in the minds of men, with nothing more to sacrifice than a life with which you would have never done anything bigger than this, anyway.”

Serial-killer trading cards are available online, much like a kid’s baseball cards, offering the killer’s vital stats, photos, correctional facility, and body count. Can you bring yourself to consider the pain this will cause the families of innocent victims? To live through the death and the funeral of their loved ones, and then the trial of their killer, only to endure a slap in the face from an online huckster in league with O B J E C T I O N !

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a murderer? Serial-killer cards are offered by companies in New Jersey and California and by many other online sites.

The purpose of sites that promote their wares with phrases like

“death,” “dementia,” or “serial killer,” complete with sponsors listed, is clear: to profit from the pain of others. In that vein, a serial-killer museum is set to open soon. The band Korn’s front man, Jonathan Davis, wants to put his collection of serial-killer murderabilia on display. According to MTV online, Korn is working with archivist Arthur Rosenblatt to create a museum in Los Angeles to display his extensive collection of items from convicted mass murderers. Items include the Volkswagen that Ted Bundy used to search for his victims, clown suits worn by John Wayne Gacy, and drawings by “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez. Another site proudly announces that it “deal[s] with the devil himself ” and hawks, among other things, T-shirts featuring Railway Killer Rafael Resendez-Ramirez’s own artwork created in his cell at San Quentin.

If I hadn’t seen the glorification and marketing of killers online with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. I can’t help but wonder just who would buy fingernail clippings or hair samples of killers, knowing full well that victims’ families have only photographs, high-school yearbooks, and memories to remember them by. The level of victimization is so intense it is sickening, yet it is allowed to thrive under the current laws of nearly every state in this country.

You may, as I do, wonder not only who buys these items but who sells them as well. They go by monikers like Supernaught and Drfixa-tor. Others have more gruesome, crime-obsessed names that I won’t list here because I refuse to give these ghouls the attention they crave. The names, created by the sellers as their online pseudonyms, reveal these people’s aspirations and in themselves, speak volumes. You may be surprised that anyone would visit such a Web site, much less spend money on such repulsive offerings, but the reality is that bidding is lively. I was horrified to learn sales double at Christmastime.

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Killers and their online pimps are reaping a windfall off the lives of murder victims. The general consensus among website purveyors is that they are not the morality police, and until the law stops them, they will continue. In my mind, that makes them accessories to the further victimization of those now dead, unable to speak for themselves.

These sites take no responsibility and refuse to shut down the serial-killer auction site, blaming the marketplace. Remember, the dealers, their advertisers, and their buyers/enablers profit from every online sale, including sales of murderabilia. If these entrepreneurs won’t close down their sites, why won’t they give the proceeds from these sales to victims’-rights groups? When asked this question by various victims’-rights advocates and others, they declined to respond.

Believe it or not, it’s all legal.

L I T E R A R Y L O O P H O L E S

Not so long ago,
it appeared that crime victims were protected by the Son of Sam laws. David Berkowitz got that moniker when he became known as one of the most feared killers in New York City in the 1970s.

His pent-up rage and frustration culminated in the murders of six people, injuries to seven others, and resulted in the largest manhunt in New York City history. During his reign of terror, he stalked lovers’

lanes looking for victims and held the entire city hostage. When he was finally captured, the country was shocked to learn that the evil madman terrorizing the city was a chubby-cheeked postal worker with a deceptively sweet smile. Once in police custody, Berkowitz confessed to all the crimes and begged a trial judge to lock him away forever so he could never kill again. He is currently serving a 365-year sentence at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York.

The possibility Berkowitz might write a screenplay and capitalize on the terror he’d caused galvanized the country. The Son of Sam laws went into effect in New York in 1977 and were originally enacted to stop O B J E C T I O N !

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Berkowitz from profiting by selling his story. The laws prevent criminals from receiving profits for recounting their crime, including books, movies, screenplays, and television deals. The laws also require that the contracting party pay any proceeds directly to the actual victims or, as an alternative, to a state victims’-compensation fund. Following New York’s lead, forty-two additional states and the federal government enacted similar legislation.

Since then, the country has been lulled into the belief that our justice system would never allow criminals and their “dealers” to make money off the suffering of crime victims. Not so.

The Son of Sam laws were actually reversed by the Supreme Court back in the case of
Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. New York Crime Victims’

Board
, 112 S.Ct. 501 (1991). The case arose after convicted gangster Henry Hill detailed his life of crime with the mob in a book titled
Wiseguy
. New York columnist Jimmy Breslin praised the book, which became the basis for the movie
Goodfellas,
calling it the “best book on crime ever written in America.”

The Supreme Court allowed
Wiseguy
to be published. They declared the Son of Sam laws unconstitutional, claiming they violated criminals’ First Amendment right to free speech. The Court held that the laws must be narrower because they included those charged with a crime in addition to those convicted. The justices wrote in their decision that the laws did not distinguish between works substantially about the crime versus those that mentioned the crime tangentially. For instance, Malcolm X had been behind bars, yet his works were not about his crimes but about his vision for societal change. Under the original Son of Sam laws, those works would have been banned.

Amazingly, after the reversal of the Son of Sam laws made criminal profiteering easy, few states took action. Most have not revised their laws to address the Court’s
Wiseguy
ruling.

In 2000, Mary Kay Letourneau—the former elementary-school teacher from Seattle, Washington, who had a sexual relationship with one of her sixth-grade students, then-twelve-year-old Vili Fualaau—was 1 0 2

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legally allowed to help publish a book chronicling the “affair” despite being sentenced to jail in 1997 on a statutory-rape charge.

The State of Washington’s State Court of Appeals ruled that Letourneau could not be barred from profiting from her story as part of her sentence, despite a Washington State law that allows for the confisca-tion of profits made by criminals in describing their crimes. At the time, attorney James Lobsenz cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision ruling that convicts have a constitutional right to profit from book sales and movie rights, saying, “Is there any possible way we can argue with a straight face that our law is meaningfully different than the Son of Sam law in New York that was struck down?”

A French publishing house contacted Letourneau’s attorney, who brokered his client and her underage lover a $200,000 advance for their story. The title of this page-turner?
Un Seul Crime, L’amour—

Mary Kay Letourneau & Vili Fualaau
, which translates into—buckle your seat belt—“Only One Crime—Love.” The book even included a defense of Letourneau penned as a prologue by Fualaau’s mother, Soona.

The opportunity for criminals to cash in on their crimes must be stopped once and for all. The fix? Address the Supreme Court reversal in the
Wiseguy
case and carefully specify what is allowed and what is not. Works that deal with a crime and profit from that crime specifically would be allowed—but all the money would go to the victims. The revised law would not suppress criminals’ right to speak but would prevent them from making money off a work that is substantially about the crime. This is a sane and sensible solution.

The issue came to the forefront again when a California judge ruled against Sharon Rocha, the mother of Laci Rocha Peterson, in 2004.

Spurred on by reports that Scott Peterson was planning to profit from his own account surrounding the events of the murders of Laci and their unborn son, Conner, Rocha filed a lawsuit in Stanislaus County Superior Court. She asked for an injunction to transfer any income Pe-O B J E C T I O N !

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terson may receive from books or movies to a protected trust until a verdict in the case was reached.

In the lawsuit, Rocha claimed that Peterson and unnamed others

“have solicited, arranged payment for, received or will in the future receive ‘proceeds’ from the sale of rights to or materials that include or are based on the story of a felony for which Peterson is charged . . . and

[of which he] may ultimately be convicted.”

With no Son of Sam protections, such civil lawsuits must be filed by relatives of a homicide victim to block defendants from profiting in the case through lucrative media interviews and movie and book deals.

California also had a Son of Sam law, ordering outright that felons pay their victims any money they got from selling their stories. Since the
Wiseguy
reversal, victims’ families must now go to civil court at great personal cost and file an additional wrongful-death suit against criminals, as the Brown and Goldman families did against O. J. Simpson. A jury awarded the families $33.5 million in judgment, but they’ve seen precious little of it.

This isn’t unusual. Efforts to collect from defendants in such cases are usually fruitless. In order to do so, victims’ families have to track a defendant’s moneymaking activities themselves or pay someone else to do it. The process costs them inordinate amounts of time, money, and effort. The cases can drag on forever, allowing the accused time to dispose of or hide the assets. It’s no secret that O. J. Simpson made plenty of money signing sports memorabilia at various fairs around the country. In the summer of 2004, during interviews that commemorated the ten-year anniversary of Nicole Brown’s murder, he even announced on national television that he’s in “talks” to star in his own reality show, called
Juiced.
The premise: Simpson pulls stunts on unsuspecting people. Sound familiar? Believe you me, if Simpson does wind up doing this disgusting show, he won’t be doing it for free. If he does profit from this ridiculous scenario, even if it’s just one dollar, that money belongs to the Browns and the Goldmans.