World’s Largest Collection of Serial Killer ‘Murderabilia,’ From John Wayne Gacy to H.H. Holmes, Opens in Chicago
More than 2,000 items belonging or connected to some 150 serial killers from around the globe feature in a chilling new exhibition
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A harrowing curation of artifacts linked to the world’s most notorious serial killers—including the “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy and H.H. Holmes of The Devil in the White City infamy—anchors a new exhibition, now open in Chicago.
Spanning a massive, 21,000-square-foot space, “Serial Killer: The Exhibition” brings together more than 2,000 items that confront myth with true crime’s gruesome reality. Displays spotlight personal belongings, investigative evidence, authentic artworks and other “murderabilia” that offer an uncanny peek into the lives of roughly 150 killers from dozens of countries who devised and committed unthinkable crimes.
“These are all original,” exhibition consultant John Borowski, a filmmaker and an author who specializes in serial killer histories, tells Fox 32 Chicago’s Leslie Moreno. “Nowhere in the world are you going to see an exhibit like this with artifacts from so many serial killers under one roof.”
Perhaps Chicago’s most well-known serial killer, Gacy features prominently in the exhibition. Throughout the 1970s, Gacy—who worked as a birthday party clown alternately named Pogo and Patches—killed at least 33 teenage boys and young men after luring them to his home on the outskirts of the city, where he buried the remains of 29 of his victims in his basement’s crawl space.
Gacy was sentenced to death in 1980, though he spent the next 14 years appealing his sentence. While on death row, he became a prolific painter and made more than $30,000 selling his canvases, which often featured clowns and skulls, the Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Braun reported in 1994, the year Gacy was executed.
Some of Gacy’s paintings featured in the exhibition, on show for the first time, come from people who knew him personally.
“What can you do with them? I can’t display them. I’m not selling them, because I would hate to profit,” Karen Conti, a lawyer who was part of Gacy’s legal team during his death row appeals, tells the Chicago Sun-Times’ Selena Fragassi. “I just didn’t know what to do with them.”
For 30 years, Conti kept three paintings Gacy had given her face down in a closet. Two depict variations of clowns and skulls, while the third is a coastal landscape with a low-hanging moon and red trees beside open water. “He said it was mysterious, just like he is,” Conti says.
The exhibition dedicates displays to other local killers, including Holmes, who, as one of America’s first serial killers, used his “Murder Castle” hotel to claim victims’ lives during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Lesser-known featured Chicago killers include Richard Speck; the satanic Ripper Crew cult; and Tillie Klimek, known as Chicago’s “Black Widow,” who claimed to have had precognitive dreams of the deaths of her husbands, whom, in reality, she poisoned.
Did you know? Serial origins
Although Robert Ressler, an FBI investigator, is largely credited with having coined the term “serial killer,” Ernst Gennat of the Berlin Criminal Police used the German translation, “serienmörder,” in a 1930 article.
Billed as the world’s largest private collection of serial killer artifacts, the exhibition toured Europe before arriving stateside, where it made its first stop in Atlanta. More than 500,000 visitors worldwide have visited the installation. Its Chicago stop, which opened to the public over Labor Day weekend, runs through January.
“One thing that this exhibition, myself included, is totally against is anything glorifying or glamorizing” serial killers, Bill Kimberlin, a true-crime researcher and collector, tells WGN Radio 720’s Wendy Snyder. “Included in this exhibition, [visitors] are going to get inside the criminal mind, they’re going to see the psychology of it, they’re going to see the law enforcement aspects of it. There’s rooms that are dedicated strictly to the victims alone, and we’re reaching out to try to bring closure to more families.”
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