Coffin Conversations - by dementia

The knowledge that her daughter died at the hands of one of America’s most prolific serial killers was painful enough for Harriet Semander. Then she found that his prison jottings and autograph were being auctioned online as souvenirs.

But the grieving mother from Houston, Texas, discovered that this was just the tip of a macabre industry in which anything from convicted killers’ toenail clippings to tapes of their victims’ final screams for mercy, is for sale.

“It sickens me. My daughter’s killer shouldn’t be turned into a celebrity, no one should be making money out of her loss,” said Mrs Semander, 74, whose daughter Elena, 20, was strangled by Coral Eugene Watts in 1982.


Watts, now 53, is serving a life sentence for 12 murders, but he is thought to have carried out as many as 100.

Now, the US Congress is to consider passing legislation that aims to drive the purveyors of “murderabilia” out of business. It follows a seven-year campaign by Andy Kahan, who spent years as an undercover buyer researching the ghoulish trade. “I have purchased killers’ hair samples, fingernails, foot scrapings, bottled fluids, artwork, you name it,” he said.