23.

Rick Staton warmly welcomed me into his Baton Rouge home. He looked much younger than his age, which I knew to be about fifty-five, give or take. He wore a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, faded jeans, and white sneakers. His longish hair, dark brown tinged with gray, was slightly unkempt.

He gave me a brief tour of his home, a bungalow turned Gothic museum. In the foyer was a glass display case containing artifacts related to Ed Gein, including an antique jar that was buried on the killer’s ghastly Wisconsin property, a letter he sent from the psychiatric prison where he did his time, and spooky photographs of the grave robber in his doddering old age. To the right were bookshelves crowded with true crime volumes, some of which were signed by their authors. Leaning amid the books were ’80s Polaroid shots of Rick smiling beside a pale, bloated, and sullen John Wayne Gacy. The living room featured bins of old albums, mainly the surf music that Rick adored (think Dick Dale) and also some Zombies records with movieland monsters on the covers. Around the walls were vintage posters of monsters: Frankenstein’s creature, the Wolfman, Dracula. Also hanging was a painting by Joe Coleman, a friend of Rick’s. It depicted Vietnamese prostitutes soliciting business in a squalid, sinister city. And then there were the relics and works of the killers—about fifteen hundred pieces scattered throughout the house, including a Miro-like painting by Manson, a Gacy drawing of Rick’s young son, a letter from Richard Speck (who murdered eight student nurses in one night), and a Christmas card signed by Bundy. Later I would see what Rick had hidden in his garage: nineteenth-century wooden coffins, small, designed for dead children, with glass windows to reveal their faces.

This was the sanctum of a true “gore-hound,” as Rick later called himself. Clearly these morbid collectibles reflected a substantial part of Rick’s being. He had been into horror movies from a young age and had even interrupted the honeymoon of his first marriage to watch the premiere of Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He had written letters to some of the most heinous killers of our generation, regularly visited one of the most monstrous (Gacy) in prison, fielded many phone calls from psychopaths, and visited sites of terrible tragedy, including the Tate mansion. He had spent most of his adult life as a mortician, though he was now retired.

Rick’s macabre compulsions did not make him dour. He was extremely friendly, high-energy, and funny as hell. Within minutes of our meeting, we were talking excitedly about horror films (especially those of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), old rock music, and the mortuary arts.

The conversation turned to murderabilia. Rick painted chilling portraits of the unrepentant Manson and Gacy; he gave a quietly respectful account of Elmer Wayne Henley, a deeply remorseful murderer who now creates somewhat accomplished landscape paintings; and he recounted tales of how people clamored for the wares he was selling—how thousands, some of them big-name celebrities, were willing to pay good money for the ridiculously bad art of hardened killers.

Schmid, it seemed, was right: though Americans on the whole vociferously condemn repetitive killers and the brokers who capitalize on their crimes, multitudes of these same moralizers—justified moralizers—are nonetheless fascinated by the monsters and their peddlers. As Rick said, many over the years have denounced his habits, but they’re dying to see what he’s got in his collection.

He knows why. Celebrity criminals like Manson and Gacy are, in spite of their atrocities, pop cultural icons, shapers of collective experience. They occupy places in our psyches next to JFK or Michael Jackson. To stand near a famous murderer, Rick confessed, was like touching history itself.

Celebrity can’t erase the evil. Fame won’t revive those murdered. Rick emphasized this. In spite of his desire to be close to the notorious, he recognized that the murderers with whom he had contact were the worst sorts of people: vile to the core, incapable of basic humanity. Rick loathed Gacy the most, finding the “Killer Clown” to be deceitful, selfish, childish, lewd, rude, trivial, petulant, cowardly, and dumb.

Over time, Rick’s disgust with Gacy and those like him pushed him away from the murderabilia trade. He no longer wanted to associate with such malignant losers. But something else encouraged Rick to retire as well: the outrage of victims’ families. Once Rick had a son of his own, he sympathized with the pain of those who had lost children to the killers profiting from his labors. He concluded that if he were the parent of a victim, he’d hate Rick Staton.

Rick now occasionally does freelance mortuary work, plays bass guitar for the choir in his church, and enjoys spending time with his son and his second wife. But he won’t part with his collection. He still keeps coffins on the premises.