Killer Obsession

A tattoo parlor in Los Feliz advertises its services with a large sticker that features a famous photo of Charles Manson with an X carved between his glaring eyes. “Fun for the whole family,” the flier proclaims.

“I admit I put it in there just to push buttons,” says Bob Vessels, tattoo artist at Funny Farm. At the store, an uncut version of Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” plays on a television, and covers of Rolling Stone and Life magazines featuring Manson hang on the wall. “I would have to agree that it’s inconsiderate,” says Vessels, shrugging a heavily tattooed shoulder. “But the world is ugly.”

The world has gotten a lot uglier for Susan Fisher, whose sister was murdered several years ago.

“It’s unconscionable that we place so much entertainment value on these people who have wreaked so much havoc,” she says. “Seeing [my sister’s killer] on TV all the time was like being punched in the stomach every time.”

Fisher, now executive director of the Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau in Sacramento, knows she faces an uphill battle in trying to stop the glorification of murderers. (The bureau was named after the late mother of slain actress Sharon Tate.)

In a world in which the coroner’s office sells toe tags and chalk outline T-shirts, it should be no surprise that serial killers are the subjects of comic books and trading cards, artworks and rock songs. Jeffrey Dahmer’s signature, photos of Ted Bundy crime scenes and Manson’s personal letters can be ordered online or by catalog.

And in popular alternative culture, killer imagery and ephemera pay off in notoriety, if not cash. Rock bands Guns N’ Roses and Redd Kross have recorded songs written by Manson. Local musician Glen Meadmore used a portrait of himself painted by John Wayne Gacy on the cover of his latest CD. And Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails sang about “pigs” on his “The Downward Spiral” CD, recorded while Reznor was living in the house where Sharon Tate and her companions were killed by Manson and his followers 30 years ago Sunday. (“Pig” was one of the words found written in blood on the wall after the murders.)

If this shocks you, then steer clear of John Aes-Nihil’s art opening at Zero One Gallery in Hollywood. “Healter Skelter Avant Apocalypse ‘99” opens Friday with death scene photos from the Tate murders and paintings of American presidents altered to look like Manson.

“If you listen to the uncut interviews, Manson’s inclined to be quite brilliant. He’s the greatest philosopher since Nietzsche,” Aes-Nihil says.

Examining the Deeper Meaning for Society

Most artists and musicians who employ killer images or ephemera in their work say their intention is to examine what the images say about society.

And what does this fascination say about society?

“If you live your life in a formal, conformist way, respectful of authority, there’s a piece of all of us that gets intrigued by ‘What’s the other side like?’ ” says Dee Shepherd-Look, a professor of psychology at Cal State Northridge. And people have always had a fascination with the bizarre, the abnormal, and they wonder if that could happen to “normal people--to me,” Shepherd-Look says.

Others who have studied the phenomena say the killers appeal to humans’ admiration of power.

“At the bottom of our fascination with these ‘monsters’ is their aura of power,” says Richard Tithecott, a USC staffer whose book “Of Men and Monsters” (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) deals with the subject. “If power is an aphrodisiac in our culture, it’s no wonder these omnipotent killers attract groupies, front page headlines, media immortality.”

James, the 28-year-old one-name publisher of Pop Smear magazine, wasn’t even alive when the “hippie cult murders” changed America’s attitude toward the Love Generation. But his current issue features Maynard Keenan of the band Tool made up to look like Manson. “Everything is so lame and so tame and so driven by corporations,” James says. “But it hasn’t been possible for them to take over and use the images of serial killers. It’s the only thing that’s still truly underground and alternative.”

Others, however, say the imagery can go too far.

“When you take it to the level of collecting cards and books, get a life,” says John Roecker, who is working on a film in which puppets act out the Manson story. “We used to go to El Coyote [where Sharon Tate ate her last meal] and to the Spahn Ranch [where the Manson Family lived]. But that was in high school.”

The contemporary art world was rocked with two controversies involving serial killer imagery.

In London, the show “Sensation” caused just that in late 1997 when Marcus Harvey showed a painting reminiscent of a police photo of British serial killer Myra Hindley. Protesters defaced the painting with egg and ink, after which it was restored and guarded for the remainder of the exhibition. Debates over shock value versus deeper meaning raged in the British press, only to be repeated here in May, when Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley was jettisoned from a show at the Seattle Art Museum because he was planning to use a killer’s artwork. (Kelley’s installation piece “Pay for Your Pleasure,” originally created in 1988, featured work by “Freeway Killer” William Bonin when it was exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. When the show went up to Chicago, it included a painting by Gacy.)

Why lionize killers?

“I have collected clippings and so forth about serial killers for years, just out of morbid curiosity,” says Tony Mendoza, a painter in Los Feliz who has featured Manson, Dahmer and Richard Ramirez in his work. “I find it hypocritical when people say, ‘How can you use the Manson picture?’ when ultimately, the railroad killer who just got caught, he’ll be in the news every day for two months. That is giving in to the obsession too.”

Mendoza’s Web site, perhaps the most comprehensive archive of information on serial killers on the Web, receives 20,000 to 30,000 hits every day. Mendoza believes that many people who say they are offended by his art can’t deny that it has an allure.

“My mother’s always been freaked out by what I do,” Mendoza says. “But when I gave her a printout of the crime archives [from the Web site], she remembered a lot of the older cases from the past. She was interested in them back then even though she pretended not to be.”

Victims rights groups say all the hoopla is repulsive.

“It’s an insult to the memory of thousands,” says Ralph Meyer, a member of Parents of Murdered Children, a support group that takes an active role against the glorification of killers. “We try to protest things like that movie ‘Summer of Sam’ to no avail. And with the Mark Barton massacre that just happened in Atlanta, there will be movies, book deals. . . . It’s an affront.”

Fisher says Web sites and TV shows make it easy for serial killer imagery to be used by people who want to attract attention or for stations seeking ratings. Her organization is lobbying against repeal of a bill that limits media access to prisoners.

“We see it as another means of making them TV stars,” Fisher says. “But we have to be concerned about if our entertainment is causing someone unnecessary grief.”