Buying crimes
Who wants to own part of a historic crime? Museums have been debating the question for decades.
“We have to ask: Does this particular thing add an angle or interesting context to our understanding of anything? Does it seem potentially useful to someone doing research? Or would having it be more like shock value? We find ourselves always circling back to ethical issues.” — Will Hansen, curator of Americana at the Newberry Library
The other day I spoke to a guy in Los Angeles who was selling, he said, an authentic sheet of fingerprints taken by Chicago police after the arrest of Leopold and Loeb, nearly a century ago this month. He said he was hoping to sell it to “someone very wealthy in the Chicago area.” He wants $137,500 (“non-negotiable”). This guy, Gary Zimet, a longtime dealer of historical artifacts and spectacularly unsettling memorabilia, assured me the piece is genuine. Nina Barrett, author of a 2018 history, “The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most infamous Crimes” (not to mention, owner of Evanston bookstore Bookends & Beginnings), couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of the fingerprints but said that official paperwork connected with the crime has a long history of circulating among collections. Indeed, the special collections department at Northwestern University’s Deering Library maintains more than 50 boxes of Leopold and Loeb artifacts, including fan mail to the murderers and a ransom note sent to the parents of the boy they killed.
So let’s assume those fingerprints are authentic.
Here’s a better question: Who wants to own part of a historic crime?
Chicago institutions have been considering and debating this for decades. Typically, museums and libraries and universities don’t buy such artifacts (or any artifacts) — they receive donations of papers, manuscripts and ephemera from collectors, researchers and families. For instance, in 1925, a year after Nathan
Leopold and Richard Loeb — University of Chicago students, wealthy suburban Illinois sons of privilege — were convicted of murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks ( just to see if they could), Leopold’s brother offered the Field Museum a donation: Nathan’s smart, impressive collection of preserved birds. A few weeks later, according to correspondence, the Field said ... sure!
The birds are still in the Field archives but never exhibited, said Ben Marks, the museum’s collection manager for birds. “I kind of wish I knew what the Field president then was weighing in his head when he decided to take the birds of Nathan Leopold.” What’s that you say?
It was another time? The thinking was different?
There’s no way the museum could have misunderstood what it was accepting, Marks said. The Cook County trial of Leopold and Loeb was known then as “the Crime of the Century.” None other than Clarence Darrow lead Loeb’s defense. And yet, Leopold was also a well-known bird watcher and naturalist who had done significant research on warblers. In letters between the Leopold family and the Field, murder is not mentioned.
That said, you could argue those stuffed birds tell more about the story of Nathan Leopold than a sample of fingerprints. His birds, in an odd way, are a
significant artifact.
Situations like this still happen, though very occasionally, said Will Hansen, curator of Americana at the Newberry Library, which for years thought it had a book made of human skin in its historic collection. Turns out, after a bit of testing, it’s just an ugly book.
“But this is why we developed policies for what we collect,” he said. “We have to ask: Does this particular thing add an angle or interesting context to our understanding of anything? Does it seem potentially useful to someone doing research? Or would having it be more like shock value? We find ourselves always circling back to ethical issues.”
The Newberry has been offered letters written by serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and early photographs of slain Native Americans. When a donation of racist material is offered, Hansen said, citing an example, “you find yourself on a very fine line between wanting to bear witness but not wanting to be a repository of supremacist literature.”
Zimet, as a dealer of rare papers and manuscripts and general weirdness, said he asks those same questions about artifacts that he’s offered to sell. He’s just not in the donation business.
“I’m in the selling business.”
His business, Moments in Time, has been around for years, dealing partly in the kind of historical whatnots you would expect: a Babe Ruth contract, a Louis Armstrong autograph, presidential knickknacks. He’s sold Al Capone’s fingerprints and letters from John Dillinger. And yet even a cursory glance of old headlines suggests that Zimet has a talent for dealing in the attention-getting head-shaker of disputed authenticity. Last year he began offering the Bible that Donald Trump held up during his infamous photo-op/tear-gassing incident — autographed by Trump. (The White House denied it was authentic.) He once tried to sell a tape box that supposedly held proof that the Beatles had secretly reunited once. (Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono denied it was real.) Zimet once sold a bulletdented medallion supposedly worn by Tupac Shakur during his 1996 murder ($125,000). He told me that he once sold the very album that John Lennon signed for Mark Chapman just moments before Chapman shot the Beatle to death ($922,500). Of course, he’s also been sued — according to the New York Post, McCartney himself once sued Zimet for selling a sheet of lyrics that had been stolen from McCartney’s home in the late 1960s.
Each object comes to him through long-cultivated sources kept anonymous, Zimet said. And he won’t sell just anything. He turned down Charles Manson’s nonsensical prison writings. He said he was offered to buy the gun George Zimmerman used to shoot Trayvon Martin. He passed.
I asked why he would sell Leopold and Loeb’s fingerprints but not Manson’s letters?
He said Manson was “street trash” and Leopold and Loeb were “brilliant, but psychopaths.” On the other hand, he did recently buy Manson’s fingerprints, taken after the killing of Sharon Tate.
The line, to be generous, looks blurry.
Then again, that line gets blurry even when lurid artifacts find their way to an institution, said John Russick, senior vice president of the Chicago History Museum. They consider authenticity, legality, but perhaps most important, they consider an object’s historic worth against whether acquiring it “trades on someone else’s pain.” Which is a hard thing to calculate.
The museum, he said, has had internal debates about whether to acquire guns associated with the Capone family, as well as a police model used during the trial of Richard Speck, who murdered and tortured eight student nurses in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood on the South Side in 1966. Speck, however, would fit neatly into an exhibit on how Chicago serial killers became everyday pop culture. As for Capone: He’s arguably the most famous Chicagoan ever, Russick said, “yet there are strong feelings inside the museum about whether a Capone show would glorify gangsterism. I’m of two minds myself.”
In its collection, the museum has the bed that Lincoln died on, and the arc light that started the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903, which killed more than 600, mostly women and children. Both objects, he said, feel grounded in historical value. The faulty light, for instance, led to major changes to nationwide fire codes. They also have the lock that prevented many of the victims from escaping the Iroquois. “In our evidencelight world, hard proof seems important,” he said.
So I asked if the museum would ever have a show about the police killings of Black men and whether, to tell that story, someday, they should gather artifacts from the slayings?
“Do you mean, in a way — though it happened in Florida (and he wasn’t a cop) — would we ever buy George Zimmerman’s gun? I would have to ask under what premise do you take something like that? Then how is it shown? You want to document what happened. Again, you want to show proof — you don’t want to run the risk of a community being ignorant of its history. But you also don’t want someone’s life represented by a violent end. Still, if you don’t make the case, are you providing an opportunity for people to be willfully ignorant? These are questions to wrestle with.”
The museum does have a pair of eyeglasses once owned by Leopold, the eyeglasses that were found where Leopold and Loeb hid the body of Franks, the evidence that eventually implicated them. About 15 years ago, the museum had a show about the Leopold and Loeb murder.
What then is the value of Leopold and Loeb?
Historians have spent a century placing the case in a broad array of contexts: It was among the first major trials to delve into psychiatry, its defendants became celebrities in a very contemporary way, it dovetailed with an early 20th-century feeling of existential nihilism. It’s also, Barrett said, “about white privilege” — which may be why the Field Museum felt OK in 1925 to accept stuffed birds from a well-educated, well-connected sociopath with millionaire parents.
But once again, would you buy his fingerprints?
Adam Rust, co-owner of the Woolly Mammoth curiosity shop in Andersonville, said he’s been offered the door to the Norwood Park crawl space where John Wayne Gacy hid victims. The more questions he asked, the less responsive the seller became. But he didn’t dismiss the offer. After all, on the Woolly walls, there’s a Gacy painting of Hitler and a probably authentic tintype of Lizzie Borden. Neither are for sale. Rust thinks of the store as a kind of museum, as a place for the macabre to be experienced without judgment. But then, he wouldn’t hang a Gacy at home. When I mentioned Zimmerman’s gun being offered for sale, he audibly flinched on the phone.
What makes one item OK and another offensive?
“I hear you — why Gacy and not Zimmerman? Maybe it has to do with the buffer of time? I don’t know. That’s a hard question. Family connected to Gacy’s victims are still around here. That pain is very real, too. Yet when will it be OK to buy the gun that killed Trayvon Martin? How much time needs to pass? Right now I can’t imagine how much. I doubt I could live long enough to find out.”