Plenty of others. Searching the Web, he identified a dozen sites trafficking in what he calls "murder-bilia"—gruesome mementos from crime scenes and personal items that once belonged to convicted killers. Among the awful trophies: morgue photos of Manson Family victim Abigail Folger; dirt from where John Wayne Gacy buried some of his 33 victims; serial-killer trading cards and strands of hair from "Railroad Killer" Angel Maturino Resendiz, who has confessed to slaying 11 people in four states. Prices ranged from $4 for photos to more than S4,000 for an electric chair.
Appalled, Kahan quickly bid a few hundred dollars of his own just to get some particularly offensive items—such as a snow globe featuring "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez—out of circulation. But he realized it was a futile gesture. Despite the fact that New York State's so-called Son of Sam law forbidding criminals from profiting from their crimes had been struck down as unconstitutional, Kahan knew the law would have to step in if the flow of murderbilia were to be stopped.
For help he turned to his friend and fellow victims' rights advocate Marc Klaas, the father of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, who was abducted from her Petaluma, Calif., home and murdered in 1993. "As we got deeper into this," recalls Klaas, "I was dreading the question I had to ask: 'Is Polly's killer on a list?' " Indeed, he found letters, a photo and other items from his daughter's murderer, Richard Allen Davis.
Enraged, Klaas began an e-mail campaign contacting California state legislators; State Sen. Adam B. Schiff responded. The result was the state's first Notoriety for Profit bill, which became state law Jan. 1 and allows police to seize any profits from the sale of goods once owned or made by criminals—as long as it can be shown that the value of the items is enhanced by their connection to a crime. Kahan isn't worried about a court test. "I'd rather have something on the books to be challenged than our current situation, which is nothing," he says. Kahan hopes to see a bill leading to a similar law sponsored in Texas this year.
Kahan's fascination with criminal justice goes back to his youth in Rochester, N.Y., where his father, a high school principal, taught in reform schools during the summer. At camp when he was 13, Kahan met his first crime victim, a boy whose father had been killed at Attica state prison while working as a guard. "It really made me think," says Kahan. " This kid has to live the rest of his life without a father.' "
He wrote papers on capital punishment while in high school and went on to study criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston. Taking a break after his second year, he visited Texas and liked it so much he stayed, enrolling in the University of Houston. There he met his future wife, Christine Contreras, now 44 and a marketing consultant. "I saw this girl [in class] and sat next to her, and she immediately moved," he recalls with a laugh. Eventually he caught up to her. The couple wed in 1983 and have a son, Kyle, 11.
While working in parole and probation offices in the early 1990s, Kahan volunteered with local advocacy groups that work toward gun control and probation reform. So when Houston Mayor Bob Lanier moved in 1992 to create a new position whose sole focus was victims' rights, Kahan seemed an ideal choice.
His campaign against murderbilia is, he says, a logical extension of victim protection. When criminals and dealers profit from victims' pain, he explains, it is as if those who have been brutalized have suffered a second assault. "If I sit back and allow this industry to thrive," he says, "then I am just as guilty-as the ones who are making money off it."
Florestine Purnell
Bob Stewart in Houston
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
