G. William Harder, self-described Satanist, self-proclaimed good friend to bad people, collector of serial-killer letters and prison art, proprietor of the website murderauction.com and seller of “Got Satan?” T-shirts, stroked habitually at his chin. He gathered together the strands of dry brush that he calls a goatee and tugged them into a spike. He wore a white shirt, long baggy black shorts, a skinny black tie and a pentagram pin on his collar. A middle-aged man was telling him that he knew someone who knew someone who searched Jeffrey Dahmer’s house in Milwaukee — one of the police officers who raided the killer’s home in 1991 — and found a severed head in the refrigerator. Harder listened closely but did not look especially impressed.
Why would he?
Dahmer had only come up in conversation because the man was admiring a piece of original poetry from Dahmer that Harder had tracked down and acquired. The handwritten verse sat in a display between them. All this guy had was a thin connection to the infamous. And Harder had built a network of killer connections.
“Dahmer,” Harder said politely, “he was creative.”
Then Harder turned to another person who had a question about his collection. There were a lot of questions. A line of the curious snaked through the Buckingham Room of the Hilton Chicago Hotel on Michigan Avenue on Saturday afternoon.
At one end was a small exhibit of Bonnie and Clyde memorabilia with few visitors; at the other, Harder’s jaw-dropping, gut-twisting collection of serial killer paraphernalia. Which attracted a crowd. A man posed with a swastika-branded spider, a work of string art purportedly made by Charles Manson. A woman leaned in to study a self-portrait from Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the two snipers who terrorized Washington, D.C., in 2002.
Alan Hooker stood before a yellowing sheet of paperwork from the trial of Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. He winced and turned to his partner, Jeremy Aufderheide, who, in reply, crinkled his face in disgust. They turned stiffly in unison, as if backing away from a rabid dog, and left the room. This had been a Valentine’s Day trip, they explained. They’re fans of true crime, Hooker said, “but this — way over the line.”
And what did you do for Valentine’s Day?
The Mad Mobster True Crime & Horror Expo at the Hilton, the first Chicago gathering from the Los Angeles-based Mad Monster magazine and convention organizers, was not unlike other sci-fi and fantasy conventions.
All weekend there were merchants selling horror toys; panel discussions on “Friday the 13th” (on Friday the 13th); people dressed as Freddy Krueger, a woman carrying a Dracula purse and a boy hugging a Chuckie doll. There were character actors (Joe Polito, Charles Fleischer) from horror movies in a ballroom signing autographs for conventiongoers who themselves looked like character actors from horror movies. And so, not that different from annual Mad Monster conventions held in North Carolina and Seattle.
With one exception.
“The anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the fact of Friday the 13th, seemed like the right reason to try for more of a mashup in Chicago,” said co-organizer Eben McGarr. In other words, fictional frights alongside the Midwest’s long, sordid history of gangland mobsters, bank robbers and serial killers.
Which is why you could stumble on a panel discussion between actor William Forsythe, who played Chicago killers Al Capone and John Wayne Gacy, and an old childhood friend of Gacy’s. Or hear a lecture on Dahmer. Or browse art that married stuffed toys with molds of adolescent skulls. Or listen to a disabled survivor of the Columbine massacre doing a Q&A session (“Eben told me I was a celebrity and I’m not a celebrity”) before a hushed audience. Or, most perversely, run across a normal-looking man selling kitchen knives.
“People try to demonize people with morbid interests,” McGarr said, “but people used to pay a nickel to see Bonnie and Clyde crime scenes. In Chicago, people even dipped handkerchiefs in John Dillinger’s blood. You watch old episodes of ‘Dragnet’ and you are watching entertainment drawn from someone’s misery. I don’t want to call anyone a hypocrite, but how could you object to (this convention)? Watching a movie, we’re not cheering for the teenager to get away from the killer — we’re cheering for Jason to put a machete in a skull.”
Fittingly, Harder and his collection were stars here.
“I came for the Manson stuff,” said Judie Ann, a Chicago property manager. “I have a serial killer thing, I have this definite morbid fascination. Plus, I like to buy things that I don’t need, so this place is kind of perfect.”
“And I like it when horror is more imaginary,” said Shannon Connors, her friend, a Chicago nanny.
“And I feel a lot of this (true crime) stuff happened so long ago that, well, like, case closed,” Ann said.
Funny enough: Harder feels similarly.
A California guy with a sly smile, he is 37 and trim and talks very fast, and he explains that he got into serial-killer memorabilia — “murderabilia” is the nickname for the hobby — after becoming depressed when, he said, he learned that an old girlfriend was sleeping with his best friend.
So, 15 years ago, harboring a “deep fascination with true crime,” he began writing to Los Angeles serial killer Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez, who began writing back. Then Harder started visiting Manson in prison. Then killers started writing to Harder. “Some think I have a big racket going, that I sell their stuff (on his website), but it doesn’t work out that way. Some don’t get it. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam? Shut me off. He doesn’t want to deal with me at all.”
He walked a visitor though his exhibit.
Some prisons tolerate him, he explained. Texas, on the other hand, recently banned him from visiting anymore, accusing him of paying murderers for the memorabilia he gathers. He says this is not true. He said some inmates can sell stuff through the mail, and he said that he buys some items at prison gift shops. “I’ll tell guys I’m coming, they should put their stuff in the gift shop, then I buy all of it,” he explained. “And if an inmate sends me a nice piece of artwork, something that took time and effort, then I might ask if they need any art supplies.”
But most of this, he said, standing over a display frame cluttered with letters, comes from other collectors. He stepped over to a frame holding dozens of photographs of him posing with killers, many wearing loose-fitting prison clothes, nearly all of them smiling or clasping an arm around his back. “This was one of the Tool Box Murderers. This was the other one. The transcript of one of their killings, where they tortured this girl, it’s over there, but it’s pretty terrible. The thing is they are completely different now. That was 30 years ago. One of them is incredibly embarrassed by their crimes. This person just called me, about 20 minutes ago.”
He held up his cellphone. It showed calls from various correctional institutions, most made that afternoon.
“They call to shoot the breeze,” Harder said. “Over here, these paintings, the one of the Seven Dwarfs, the clown one, those are Gacy’s. You could get one online for about $3,000. That painting of the fish, that’s from (California mass murderer) Charles Ng. Terrible person, killed families. But great artist. You could sell that work and you wouldn’t even have to say it’s from a serial killer. This stuff is Manson stuff, obviously. These are letters from the (Manson Family). That’s a lock of his hair, that’s a prison shank. Those are CDs of Manson’s — profits go to his (environmental) nonprofit group. This, see it says his birthday is Nov. 11? Not until he was incarcerated was his birthday changed to the 12th. Prison didn’t want his birthday on Veterans Day. See the kind of hate this guy has to deal with in there? This person here is virtually unknown. I don’t just visit the Mansons of the world. I am a murder junkie, but when I visit we don’t talk about killing people at all.”
Asked if he found his hobby exploitative, he said no more so than a reporter doing a story about what he does.
He introduced his girlfriend, a small, formal woman who said she was engaged for a while to Ramirez. He said that she and Harder met because they “were going to the same prisons,” that she thinks victims rights groups have fair reason to not like Harder, but Harder himself is more defensive about that subject.
He doesn’t make his living on his collection, he said. He makes his living selling T-shirts with pentagrams and other Satanism-related items. In fact, he said, pointing to a table, that’s his wife selling the T-shirts now.
His wife?
Yup, he said.
So, uh, what was he going to do for Valentine’s Day?
He leaned in and whispered: “Two nice cards. Some flowers. Just a private evening. Nothing over the top.”
Twitter @borrelli
