Recently, I was asked to comment on color drawings of the Beatles that “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson had sent to a NewsNation anchor. They wanted an opinion because the eyes in each depiction looked “dead.” Is this what serial killers do? (I thought it was likely just an amateur’s inability to draw a three-dimensional eye.) This exchange reminded me of some writing I’d done about the creative expressions of incarcerated offenders.
Years ago, Jesperson reproduced copyrighted photographs with colored pencils to make wildlife drawings. He sold them for $10 to $25 a piece, making about $1000. The prison superintendent brought him up for a disciplinary hearing and the photographer who owned the photos ordered Jesperson to cease and desist. However, he continues to be a prolific copyist.
A few years ago, the Wichita Eagle ran an article that featured bookplates that Dennis “B.T.K.” Rader drew for fans of Confession of a Serial Killer that included depictions of torture instruments. He’d numbered them, believing they’d become collectors’ items. Before he was arrested, Rader spent hours drawing fantasy victims subjected to stabbing, torture, and bondage. From his prison cell, he draws “cave monsters” for correspondents who request them.
Quite a few serial killers developed a talent for art while in prison. Most renowned, perhaps, is “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 33 young men and buried most in the crawlspace under his house. We often see his Pogo the Clown self-portraits on serial killer auction sites, along with his “Hi Ho” series of Disney characters. [He also was ordered to cease and desist using Disney images.]
Incarcerated offenders have time on their hands and some use art to express or enrich themselves. Regardless of actual talent, if they’re infamous, they attract agents and buyers. Gacy was said to have made over $100,000 from his paintings, many of which went on display at “Killer” art shows.
Elmer Wayne Henley, who as a teenager assisted “Candyman” Dean Corll with the brutal murders of adolescent boys in Texas, said in an interview for The Collectors that art had calmed him and made him think about God. Thus, it had elevated him. He liked to draw seascapes and surrealistic pictures. An outraged victims’ advocate succeeded in shutting down the art room at the prison.
Herbert Mullin, a California spree killer with psychotic delusions, had also painted landscapes, although he reportedly has no eye for perspective. He believed his 13 murders saved California from a destructive earthquake.
Gary Gilmore showed such talent with sketching while in prison for armed robbery that he was granted conditional release. He was supposed to live in a halfway house and study art at a community college, but he never registered. Instead, on day one he committed an armed robbery. After more prison stints, he was released again and ended up killing two men.
Death row inmate Derrick Todd Lee, the “Baton Rouge Killer,” found a way to sell his art online. His pencil drawing of a pair of swans sold in one day. The couple who ran the website had discovered a lucrative occupation in dealing in art from killers. Among their customers, they said, were doctors, actors, attorneys, and soccer moms.
Massachusetts grappled with this issue in 2005 when sexual predator and serial killer Alfred Gaynor’s art turned up in an online auction. Gaynor was serving a life sentence for sodomizing and choking to death four women, and his pencil sketch of Jesus Christ kneeling – “A Righteous Man’s Reward” – provoked a debate over his rights.
Not all states have laws about it, but Rochester-based killer Arthur Shawcross came up against New York’s policy against profit from murder when he attempted to sell artwork via associates on eBay. He was sentenced to two years in solitary and barred for five years from crafts privileges.
“Celebrity” serial killers like Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles “Night Stalker”, maintain their reputations for being bad by drawing devils, dismemberments, and stabbings. Gerard Schaefer, convicted of two 1970s murders but linked to many more, published a gruesomely illustrated collection of short stories. Police believed they amounted to a voyeuristic autobiography. Gainesville Ripper Danny Rolling also made violent drawings which were published by a serial killer groupie.
Online, there’s quite a collection of art from killers past and present, but the famous ones command the highest prices. Ottis Toole’s pencil sketches fetch more than Gary Heidnik’s, but the art from Toole’s killing partner, Henry Lee Lucas, is most valuable.
Aside from collectors who want to own such piece, many people find it offensive that killers can make and sell art, especially violent depictions. They say it poisons the memory of the victims. Some buy the art to destroy. “What people have found so reprehensible about art produced by serial killers,” says true crime writer Harold Schechter, “is not the subject matter itself…. What inspires such widespread disgust is the mere notion that convicted lust killers are allowed to be treated like minor celebrities and enjoy the ego gratification of having their work put on display.”
This list is by no means exhaustive. It’s just a sampling. Most of the so-called art is no more than childish sketches, but here and there we find talent. Whether one thinks the creative streak that arises from some killers should be stifled, cultivated or ignored (there are advocates for each position), it’s hard to deny that within some individuals we deem society’s worst is the potential for imaginative skill.