In the spring of 1994, with John Wayne Gacy’s execution days away, a dealer announced that 15 of his paintings would go under the hammer on May 14, five days after the date the state of Illinois had set for his execution. The seller expected the lot to bring as much as 25,000 dollars. United Press International, reporting the sale, noted the obvious arithmetic of the market: once Gacy was dead, there would be no more Gacy paintings. A clown in oils, painted by a man convicted of 33 murders, had become a commodity whose price rose as its maker’s life ran out.
The trade has a name now. Andy Kahan, a victims' advocate for the City of Houston, coined the word murderabilia, The Marshall Project reported in 2015, for the letters, artwork, clothing and personal property of convicted killers that are bought and sold by collectors. American law has spent half a century trying to keep the profits away from the people who committed the crimes. The first attempt was aimed at book contracts, and the Supreme Court struck it down. Later laws went after objects, and prison administrators acted on their own. In one case the federal government did the selling itself, and the victims got the money.
The modern history begins in New York in the summer of 1977. David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers, had shot 13 people in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn between July 1976 and July 1977, killing six. He called himself "Son of Sam" in letters to police and to the columnist Jimmy Breslin. He was arrested in Yonkers on August 10, 1977, and on May 8, 1978, against his lawyers' advice, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder.
Before he ever stood in a courtroom, there was talk that his story would be worth a large sum. The New York Legislature responded in 1977 with what the ABA Journal later called the nation’s first law to keep criminals from profiting from the sale of their stories. Under the statute, money owed to an accused or convicted person for a book, film or other account of the crime went instead to the state Crime Victims Board, which held it in escrow for five years for victims who won civil judgments.
The law never touched the man it was named for. As the Supreme Court later observed, it then reached only people actually convicted of a crime, and Berkowitz had first been ruled incompetent to stand trial. According to the Board, he paid his share of the royalties from the 1981 book Son of Sam to his victims or their estates voluntarily. Over the following decade the Board used the law only a handful of times. Its targets included Jean Harris, Mark David Chapman and R. Foster Winans, a former financial columnist.
The idea spread fast. Texas passed its own Son of Sam law in 1979, named, Texas Monthly noted, for the Berkowitz case. Kansas adopted one in 1986. By the time the ABA Journal took stock in 2007, more than 40 states had statutes of the kind.
The New York law came apart over a mobster. In 1986 the Crime Victims Board went after the publisher Simon & Schuster over Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi’s book about the mobster Henry Hill, and ordered the publisher to turn over the money owed to Hill. Simon & Schuster sued.
On December 10, 1991, in Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, the Supreme Court struck the law down. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the Court, held that the statute singled out income from speech on a particular subject and imposed a financial burden on it because of its content. The state had a compelling interest in compensating victims from the fruits of crime, she wrote, but the law was not narrowly drawn to serve it. It reached any work in which an author expressed thoughts about a crime, even an author who had never been accused or convicted of one. Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy concurred in the judgment. Justice Clarence Thomas took no part.
The decision did not end the movement. It changed its shape. New York wrote a narrower law, and other states redrafted theirs. The Kansas statute, as it stands in the state’s official code, is a good example of the genre. It requires anyone who contracts with an accused or convicted person to use the crime, or the person’s thoughts and feelings about it, in a book, magazine, movie, radio or television presentation, or live entertainment to pay the money instead to the state’s crime victims compensation board, but only where the work deals principally with the crime. Victims are then notified and may claim the funds by winning a money judgment. The statute was passed in 1986 and amended in 1989 and 1992. It says nothing at all about objects.
That gap mattered. A Son of Sam law follows the money paid for a story. It does not stop a prisoner from selling a painting of a clown, a letter, a lock of hair or a signed envelope, and it does not reach a third party who buys such things cheaply and sells them dear.
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in March 1980 of murdering 33 young men and boys in Cook County, Illinois, between 1972 and 1978, with other charges. The Supreme Court of Illinois affirmed the convictions and death sentences in 1984. He spent most of the next decade on death row, and he spent much of that time painting.
By UPI’s count, he produced as many as 2,500 paintings. Many showed clowns, a fascination for a man who had once performed at parties as Pogo the Clown. Others showed the Seven Dwarfs, Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ. He made a set of three cardinals for his mother. The pictures were sold through many channels, and as the execution approached, the market grew hungrier. There were also doubts about what was being sold: UPI reported in 1994 that many of the paintings attributed to Gacy had in fact been done by other inmates. "We are convinced the items we are selling are legitimate," a seller insisted.
The state looked at the money. Illinois had laws prohibiting inmates from profiting from their crimes, and the Illinois Attorney General’s office had been interested at one point in suing Gacy for whatever he might have made. The question, UPI wrote, was how much of the money that ran through his prison account, if any, had come from art sales. No case reached a judgment. Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center early on May 10, 1994. Whatever the paintings brought afterward, UPI reported, his estate would not benefit.
One remark in the UPI story carries the whole argument of the next three decades. "There’s that ghoulish factor among some people that would inspire them to buy stuff like this," one observer said. Another put it more simply: "To me, it’s ludicrous to want that stuff just because he’s a killer."
New York’s answer to prison art came from the corrections department, not the Legislature, and it came because of Arthur Shawcross.
Shawcross had served about 15 years for the 1972 manslaughter of an eight-year-old girl in Watertown, New York, to which he pleaded guilty. Paroled in 1987, he settled in Rochester. On December 13, 1990, a Monroe County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of ten counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of women killed in the Rochester area between 1988 and 1990. He pleaded guilty to an eleventh murder in Wayne County in 1991. The Appellate Division affirmed the Monroe County judgments in April 1993.
In prison he drew and painted. For 35 years the state Department of Correctional Services had held an annual show of inmate work, Corrections on Canvas, in the Legislative Office Building in Albany. Inmates bought their own supplies and kept half the proceeds from sales during the nine-day show; the other half went to the Crime Victims Board. In 2001, the Associated Press reported, ten sketches and paintings by Shawcross sold there for as much as 540 dollars each. One was a portrait of Princess Diana. Relatives of his victims were outraged.
Governor George Pataki directed the corrections commissioner, Glenn Goord, to review the rules to bar the best-known violent criminals from taking part. Goord went further. In March 2002 he ordered, effective immediately, that none of the state’s more than 67,000 inmates could profit from art or handicraft, though they could still make it, and the Corrections on Canvas show was abolished. A department spokesman, James Flateau, said the show had been meant to let inmates demonstrate that they were using their time in positive ways, but that in recent years some had come to see it as the state providing a forum for inmates to profit from their crimes. The year before, the Board’s share of sales had come to 5,395 dollars, and more than 45,000 dollars over 16 years.
The ban had critics. Robert Gangi of the Correctional Association of New York called it a blow to rehabilitation, at least for those inmates who produced attractive art, and said most prison artists were neither predatory nor dangerous. The rule stood. Shawcross remained in prison until his death in state custody in November 2008, at 63.
Not every sale tied to a famous case involves keepsakes of the crime. Robert Berdella ran a booth in a Kansas City flea market, selling replica skulls and ornaments from other countries, and he collected antiques and art. In 1988 he pleaded guilty to killing six young men in Kansas City between 1984 and 1987; the first plea, on August 3, 1988, was to first-degree murder in the death of Larry Pearson, and it brought a sentence of life without parole.
His property went on the block that November. Over two days more than 2,000 objects were offered, among them Roman glass, terra cotta figures, African and Tibetan ceremonial masks, ancient Egyptian jewelry and carvings from New Guinea, the Deseret News reported, and dealers and collectors were expected from across the country. "There has never been an auction of this type and dimension in the Midwest," the appraiser, R. Bond Blackman, said. The masks and the Roman glass were his to sell, and nothing in the Son of Sam laws of the day reached them. Whether the buyers came for the antiques or for the name on the sale bill was a question no statute asked.
The appetite was older than any statute. Ed Gein was arrested in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in November 1957 and admitted two killings, of women who died in 1954 and 1957. In January 1958 he was ruled unfit for trial and committed to Central State Hospital at Waupun. He was tried for one killing in November 1968, judged guilty of first-degree murder and insane at the time, and committed again. He died at Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison on July 26, 1984. He was never held criminally responsible for any death.
His property was another matter. The farm and its contents were set for public auction in the spring of 1958. Residents were angry that the sale fell on Palm Sunday, and they feared that a buyer would turn the farmhouse into a museum. Several days before the auction, the house caught fire and burned. The sale went ahead. Gein’s car was bought and shown at county fairs as a sideshow attraction, under a billing that named it for the case, Isthmus reported in a long retrospective in 2007.
Nearly half a century later, the story came round again. In April 2006 the remaining 40 acres of the property were offered online for 250,000 dollars. Bidding was thin, and after five days the listing was removed under eBay’s policy against murder memorabilia. Most of the land is now planted in pines.
The eBay rule that pulled the Gein listing had been in place for five years, and it came from the same Houston office that named the trade. In 2000 Andy Kahan wrote to 20 serial killers in prison and asked whether they knew their belongings were being sold online. Only one answered with support, the Associated Press reported in 2009. It was David Berkowitz.
Berkowitz gave Kahan a notarized statement disavowing any part in the trade in killers' memorabilia. The two exchanged dozens of letters over nine years. Kahan credited him with helping persuade eBay to ban the sales, which it did in 2001 under pressure from Kahan’s campaign, according to The Marshall Project. "I would give my life if I could go back into the past to have prevented this from happening," Berkowitz wrote to him. He told the advocate he had never planned a book about his crimes.
The same year, Texas extended its 1979 Son of Sam law. A 2001 amendment banned the sale of murderabilia by offenders, Texas Monthly reported, so that the trade itself may be illegal in the state where Kahan worked. Other states followed with their own versions. By 2015, The Marshall Project counted laws of this kind in Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey, Utah, Michigan, Alabama and Montana.
Berkowitz himself would test the original idea from the other side. In 2006 he sued his former lawyer, Hugo Harmatz, who he said had used letters, photographs and other items entrusted to him for safekeeping in a book called Dear David. Berkowitz joined a January 2006 hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court by speakerphone from prison, the New York Sun reported, and in May his lawyers said he wanted to use the law that bears his nickname to strip the author of his profits. The outcome was not reported. The man whose case created the Son of Sam law had become, three decades later, a prisoner invoking it against someone else.
He is still in prison. After his 12th appearance before the New York parole board, on May 14, 2024, he was again refused release, CBS News and the Associated Press reported. He was 70 and held at Shawangunk Correctional Facility.
Federal law never caught up. Senator John Cornyn of Texas introduced the Stop the Sale of Murderabilia to Protect the Dignity of Crime Victims Act in 2007. It died in committee. He revived it three years later with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as a cosponsor, and it met the same fate. He introduced it again in 2013, after a letter written by Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood gunman, was sold, Texas Monthly reported. The pattern held: state legislatures acted where Congress would not, and the trade moved to wherever it remained legal.
The case that turned the logic of murderabilia inside out belonged to Theodore Kaczynski.
Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained mathematician who left a Berkeley professorship in 1969 for a solitary life near Lincoln, Montana, built and sent the bombs in the case the FBI named UNABOM between 1978 and 1995. Three men died and more than 20 people were injured. On January 22, 1998, in federal court in Sacramento, he pleaded guilty to bombing counts covering the killings of Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser and Gilbert Murray and the injuries to Dr. Charles Epstein and Dr. David Gelernter. On May 4, 1998, he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years and ordered to pay 15,026,000 dollars in restitution to four victims.
He never paid it. What the government held instead was his property: the journals, the typewriter, the papers and the tools seized by the FBI in 1996. A long fight followed over what to do with them. The district court ruled that the government’s restitution lien gave it a superior claim, and in 2005 the Ninth Circuit held that the government could sell what was needed to pay the victims, provided it used a commercially reasonable plan. The government proposed an internet auction, with his writings redacted at the victims' request to remove the names of actual and intended victims and their families.
Kaczynski argued that the plan violated the First Amendment, the same ground on which Simon & Schuster had won in 1991. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. On January 9, 2009, in United States v. Kaczynski, it held that the redactions protected the victims' privacy and noted that he kept complete copies of his writings, so that nothing he had said was suppressed. It also upheld the government’s decision to destroy bomb-making materials rather than return them to him.
The U.S. Marshals Service and the General Services Administration ran the online sale from May 18 to June 2, 2011. Collectors paid 232,246 dollars for 58 items, the Associated Press reported. His journals brought 40,676 dollars, the highest price for a single lot. A Smith Corona typewriter sold for 22,003 dollars and the manifesto for 20,053 dollars. A hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses went for 20,025 dollars. The money went to the victims.
Not all of them welcomed it. Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist who had been injured in 1993, had filed a letter objecting to the plan in 2005. He told the Yale Daily News he thought the idea "revolting," while acknowledging that the victims deserved whatever restitution they could get. His position captured the bind that every murderabilia law tries to resolve. The auction made the trade respectable for two weeks, with a federal agency as its broker, and it also put money into the hands of the people the trade had always left out.
Kaczynski died in federal custody at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, on June 10, 2023, at 81.
Dennis Rader’s case shows how far the laws reached in the 2000s, and where they stopped. Rader, a Park City code enforcement officer and church council president, pleaded guilty on June 27, 2005, to ten counts of first-degree murder for killings in and around Wichita between 1974 and 1991. On August 18, 2005, District Judge Gregory Waller imposed ten consecutive life terms. Kansas had no death penalty in force for crimes committed in those years.
For years he had taunted police and the press in signed letters, and those letters, his drawings and his writings were exactly the kind of material collectors want. The Kansas statute stood ready if he tried to sell his account of the crimes to a publisher or a producer. Any money owed under such a contract would go to the crime victims compensation board, and from there to families who won judgments against him. But the statute, in the words it has carried since 1986, covers publications, films, radio and television and live entertainment. It does not mention letters sold one at a time, or drawings, or anything a prisoner might hand to a correspondent who then sells it.
Rader was taken to El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County the day after his sentencing, and he was reported there in August 2025, twenty years into his sentence. His case was a demonstration of the limits of the older laws. A statute written on the model of the 1977 book contract follows payments for a story; it was never drafted for a letter passed from a prisoner to a correspondent and on to a buyer.
Read in sequence, the cases trace a slow shift of target. New York’s 1977 law aimed at publishers and the killer’s own story, and the Supreme Court held in Simon & Schuster that the state could not burden speech on a particular subject so sweepingly. The narrower laws that followed, in New York, Kansas and more than 40 other states, still followed the money for words. Objects slipped through. Gacy’s paintings sold by the hundred while Illinois considered whether to sue. Shawcross’s portrait of a princess sold at a state-sponsored show, with half the money going to victims, until the outcry closed the show for every inmate in New York.
The next wave aimed at the object itself and at the marketplace. Kahan’s letters to 20 prisoners brought one ally, Berkowitz, and helped push eBay to ban the sales in 2001. Texas, the same year, banned offenders from selling murderabilia, and other states followed. Congress considered a federal ban three times and passed none.
The Kaczynski auction stands apart. It took the instinct behind every one of these laws, that a criminal should not profit from the crime, and turned it on its head. Rather than forbid the sale, the government ran it, cut the victims' names from the pages and sent the proceeds to the families. The collectors who paid 40,676 dollars for the journals were buying the same thing collectors had always bought. What had changed was where the money went. One of the men those journals described still called the idea revolting. The trade has outlasted every law aimed at it, and what the courts and legislatures have mostly decided, case by case, is who gets paid.
• November 1957: Ed Gein is arrested in Plainfield, Wisconsin.
• January 1958: Gein is ruled unfit for trial and committed to Central State Hospital.
• Spring 1958: the Gein farm and its contents are sold at public auction, days after the house burns.
• November 1968: Gein is tried, judged guilty of first-degree murder and insane, and recommitted.
• July 29, 1976, to July 31, 1977: the shootings in New York later charged against David Berkowitz.
• August 10, 1977: Berkowitz is arrested in Yonkers.
• 1977: New York passes the first Son of Sam law.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder.
• 1979: Texas passes its Son of Sam law.
• March 1980: John Wayne Gacy is convicted of 33 murders.
• 1986: Kansas enacts K.S.A. 74-7319; the New York Crime Victims Board moves against Simon & Schuster over Wiseguy.
• August 3, 1988: Robert Berdella pleads guilty to first-degree murder in Kansas City.
• November 1988: Berdella’s collection of more than 2,000 objects is auctioned over two days.
• December 13, 1990: a Monroe County jury convicts Arthur Shawcross of ten counts of second-degree murder.
• December 10, 1991: the Supreme Court strikes down New York’s original Son of Sam law in Simon & Schuster.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy is executed; an auction of 15 of his paintings follows on May 14.
• January 22, 1998: Theodore Kaczynski pleads guilty in Sacramento.
• May 4, 1998: Kaczynski is sentenced and ordered to pay 15,026,000 dollars in restitution.
• 2000: Andy Kahan writes to 20 prisoners about online sales; Berkowitz alone supports him.
• 2001: eBay bans murderabilia sales; Texas amends its law to ban sales by offenders; Shawcross artwork sells at New York’s prison art show.
• March 2002: New York’s corrections commissioner bans the sale of inmate art and ends the Corrections on Canvas show.
• June 27, 2005: Dennis Rader pleads guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder.
• August 18, 2005: Rader is sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
• 2006: Berkowitz sues his former lawyer over the book Dear David; the Gein land is listed online and pulled after five days.
• 2007: Senator John Cornyn introduces a federal murderabilia bill; it dies in committee, as do later versions in 2010 and 2013.
• November 2008: Shawcross dies in state custody.
• January 9, 2009: the Ninth Circuit upholds the plan to auction Kaczynski’s property.
• May 18 to June 2, 2011: the Kaczynski auction raises 232,246 dollars for the victims.
• June 10, 2023: Kaczynski dies in federal custody.
• May 2024: Berkowitz is refused parole after his 12th appearance.
• August 2025: Rader is reported at El Dorado Correctional Facility, 20 years after his sentencing.