How Did a Nice Banker Become Involved with Serial Killers?

It wasn’t that I was fascinated with serial killers. Before writing MURDERABILIA, my previous thrillers had more to do with the financial services industry and the countries I know like Colombia, Canada, and Algeria. But then I started playing the What If game and combining ideas. Things got weird fast.

It all started with a secret. Everyone has at least one. A secret can be the center of a novel and often drives the plot forward. I wondered what a private banker for the very wealthy might keep hidden. What if his father was a killer? That could be a something he didn’t want his colleagues to know about. What if it was worse than that? Suppose his father was a serial killer. That’s more scandalous for my tony banker. But even better—suppose his father is notorious. Maybe he’s as well known as Dennis Rader, Jeffery Dahmer, or Charlie Manson. He’s so creepy that deranged fans revere him and create internet sites about him.

So why is the father so notorious? Well, a real killer, Harvey Glatman, took photos of his victims. That’s promising (for a crime writer, anyway). Suppose my protagonist’s serial killer father went one step further. What if he took artsy black and white photos of the re-arranged bodies of his victims with props? Suppose they were well-composed and professionally lit.  What normal person would admit being related to that psychopath? So you’re his son? You inherited his genes?

Another author once told me that to be creative in fiction doesn’t require a revolutionary new idea. You just have to combine two or three existing ideas in a way that no one has done before. I had several: private banking, son of an infamous serial killer, and victim photography. But there was something else I could combine.

In researching serial killers, I discovered there is actually a market for their art called “murderabilia.” Paintings by Charlie Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and a hundred others are traded through brokers and dealers who advertise on the web. This is real stuff. And it’s creepier than anything I could make up. Clown paintings by John Wayne Gary go for more than a hundred thousand dollars. One dealer said that a mother bought “a Gacy” for her twelve-year-old on his birthday.

What if the serial killer father in my book became so famous that people bought and sold his photographs? Suppose those photographs started the “murderabilia” market and some are even on display in museums. Now I was starting to get ideas about the tortured past of his son, my protagonist. My private banker wouldn’t want anyone to even suspect who his father was. All kinds of character flaws and motivations emerged. He’d feel as if he could never escape his father’s horrible legacy.

But I wasn’t done. I grew up a Christian Scientist. I left the religion when I went to college. Christian Science is so unusual I always wanted to make it an element in a book. Hmm. It’s a very philosophical religion. Evil is regarded as a false conception. If a person stops believing that evil is inside him or herself, or inside another person, if they understand that people really reflect God’s perfection…then the evil will cease to exist. Now there is a great religion for the wife of a serial killer. Especially if she is fanatical about her devotion. Just imagine how that would enable her husband to pursue his photography, and how it would mess up her children.

There was only one thing left. I am not a photographer. What if I learned something about it? I got an instructional DVD from a National Geographic photographer and bought some books on the history of photography. A side benefit was that I got interested in it. I’m going to a photography class every week.

So you see how weird even an analytical banker can get when he starts playing the What If game and combining ideas. The people I worked with thought I was so conservative and normal. (Well maybe not completely normal.) If they only knew. What if they really had known?