“A notorious East Harlem sex killer is shamelessly hawking disgusting handwritten accounts of his rape spree on the Internet. Arohn Kee, who is serving life in prison for three rape-murders, has created 20 revolting ‘rape cards’ that a Web site is selling for $19 a pop. ‘It’s very, very disturbing,’ said Gregory Washington, whose daughter Rasheeda was raped and strangled by Kee. ‘This is just an added insult.’ Rosa Castro, whose daughter Johalis was also murdered, couldn’t bear to hear the details of the online outrage. ‘I don’t want to reopen the wound,’ the mom said. ‘It is very painful. I don’t want to go back to the time of the murder.’ The 5-by-7-inch cards each include an explicit description of sex attacks and echo the shameless taunts that Kee leveled at his real-life victims. ‘Say, ‘I love it,’ ‘ he has written on one card. There’s also his ‘prison-worn’ T-shirt on sale for $99 and a color mug shot, both autographed by Kee, along with a hot-dog wrapper that he supposedly used behind bars. The Web site pulls no punches in exalting Kee’s brutal credentials. ‘Each Rape Card has violent sex written in his hand,’ the site boasts. ‘Signed In Full at bottom in bloody red ink.’ Kee, 35, was convicted in 2000 of carrying out a nearly decade-long rape and murder spree in his East Harlem neighborhood. He’s doing his time at Attica state prison near Buffalo. He killed three teenagers: Paola Illera, 13, in 1991, who lived in his building; Johalis Castro, 19, whose smoking corpse was found on a rooftop in 1997, and Rasheeda Washington, 18, who was raped and strangled in a stairwell in 1998. Even among the annals of murderous serial rapists, Kee stood out for his unrepentant arrogance. He taunted his half-dozen victims, telling one she was ‘lucky’ to be attacked by such a handsome rapist.” — New York Daily News (US)

Probably there has always been a cultish market for objects associated with high-profile criminals and their crimes. You can imagine ancient Romans hawking the knife that stabbed Julius Caesar or the hammer that drove the nails into the palms of Jesus Christ. Nowadays it’s the doodads that once belonged to Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy. Or perhaps Nazi memorabilia is the ultimate murder souvenir. Charles Manson didn’t kill six million people.

Ebay was already pressured a few years ago into prohibiting auctions of “murderabilia,” but where there is demand there will inevitably be supply. Prisoners, with their limited options for making money, have been only too happy to collaborate with the middlemen selling their trinkets. Probably it flatters their vanity as well. Meanwhile auction houses such as murderauction.com and prisonboundserialkillers.com have filled the void left by ebay. The items by Arohn Kee are being sold on daisyseven.com. Do a search on the site and you’ll find his “rape cards.”

The moral problems involved in murderabilia are obvious. But what about the aesthetic problems? Some years ago PervScan was at first stimulated and then disappointed to find samples of Ted Bundy’s poetry in Elizabeth Kendall’s memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. It just wasn’t that interesting, and indeed that’s the problem with most serial killer poetry, mass murderer art, rapist fiction, etc. It isn’t very good. (Exception should be made, however, for Charles Manson in His Own Words, a brilliant and energizing book.)

In general the killer-as-creator genre forfeits aesthetics for authenticity. All that distinguishes it is the fact that the author committed a crime. And really, what sort of achievement is that? Few are the crimes about which you can say that they are brilliantly conceived. Nevertheless, murderabilia is all the rage, and it makes you wonder if there won’t come a day when so many murderers and sex criminals write stories and paint pictures that those in the fiction business won’t have any credibility unless they actually kill or rape too.

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