Established | 1995 |
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Location | 6031 Hollywood Boulevard Hollywood, Los Angeles, California |
Coordinates | 34°06′06″N118°19′16″W / 34.1018°N 118.3212°W |
Founder |
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Website | museumofdeath |
Museum of Death is a museum with locations on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. [1] It was established in June 1995 by J. D. Healy and Catherine Shultz with the museum's stated goal being "to make people happy to be alive." [2]
The museum was originally established in 1995 in San Diego, [3] in a building the owners claimed was the city's first mortuary. It began as a hobby of the founders J. D. Healy and Catherine Shultz. They would write to serial killers they were interested in, and then show off the artwork their pen pals had created once a year at a specialist show. In 1995, after a few years of exhibitions, the collection, and many other materials, were made into a museum. [4]
In late 1999, the couple attempted to acquire a large amount of materials from the Heaven's Gate cult suicides. Although they had been able to purchase many items prior to the main police auction, their interest in buying enough merchandise to recreate the scene in its entirety, led to enormous press interest and publicity. They were subsequently evicted by their landlord, and moved to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. [2]
Prior to the new Los Angeles building becoming a museum, the building was the home of Westbeach Recorders, and prior to that, Producers Studio, [1] [5] where Pink Floyd and others recorded. [6] The walls include deadening agents to help with recordings, which now serve to lend a quiet acoustic setting for the various exhibitions. [1]
Established | 2014 |
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Location | 227 Dauphine St. New Orleans, Louisiana |
Coordinates | 29°57′22″N90°04′11″W / 29.9560°N 90.0698°W |
As of 2014 [update] , the couple had opened up a new branch of the museum in New Orleans called "Musée de Mort Orleans." [7] [8] The new museum branch will have around 12,000 square metres of space, which will allow more of the collection to be displayed. The limited space at the California museum means that only a third of the items available can be shown at one time. [9]
The museum displays a wide variety of art and artifacts surrounding the subject of death. Baby coffins are in one section, letters and artwork from various serial killers in another. There are films regarding autopsies as well as explicit photographs of crime victims. There is also a room filled exclusively with taxidermy of various types of animals. The museum's recreation of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide includes the original beds. [10] However, the most notable item at the museum is the head of Henri Landru. [1] In 2014 the museum also acquired Thanatron, one of the original suicide machines built by Jack Kevorkian. [7]
Once a year, the museum holds a Black Dahlia look-alike competition, where contestants have to dress as both pre- and post-mortem Dahlia. [11]
A 2001 attempt to procure a real electric chair was unsuccessful. [12]
Hollywood is a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles County, California, mostly within the city of Los Angeles. Its name has come to be a shorthand reference for the U.S. film industry and the people associated with it. Many notable film studios, such as Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Universal Pictures, are located near or in Hollywood.
Murad Jacob "Jack" Kevorkian was an Armenian-American pathologist and euthanasia proponent. He publicly championed a terminal patient's right to die by physician-assisted suicide, embodied in his quote, "Dying is not a crime". Kevorkian said that he assisted at least 130 patients to that end. He was convicted of murder in 1999 and was often portrayed in the media with the name of "Dr. Death".
San Quentin State Prison (SQ) is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Elizabeth Short, known posthumously as the Black Dahlia, was an American woman found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 15, 1947. Her case became highly publicized owing to the gruesome nature of the crime, which included the mutilation of her corpse, which was bisected at the waist.
Grauman's Egyptian Theatre is a historic movie theater located on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Opened in 1922, it is an early example of a lavish movie palace and is noted as having been the site of the first-ever Hollywood film premiere. From 1998 until 2020, it was owned and operated by the American Cinematheque, a member-based cultural organization.
Answer Me! was a magazine edited by Jim Goad and Debbie Goad and published between 1991 and 1994. It focused on the social pathologies of interest to the Los Angeles–based couple.
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John "Jonathan" Gilmore was an American author and gonzo journalist known for iconoclastic Hollywood memoirs, true crime literature and hard-boiled fiction.
Black Sunday is a 1975 novel by American writer Thomas Harris.
Highland Avenue is a north–south road in Los Angeles. It is a major thoroughfare that runs from Cahuenga Boulevard and the US 101 Freeway in Hollywood from the north end to Olympic Boulevard in Mid-City Los Angeles on the south end. Highland then is a small residential street from Olympic Boulevard south to Adams Boulevard. For through access, Highland swerves west into Edgewood Place which accesses La Brea Avenue.
Javed Iqbal Mughal was a Pakistani serial killer and pederast who confessed to the sexual abuse and murder of 100 young boys, ranging in age from 6 to 16. Iqbal strangled the victims, dismembered the corpses and dissolved them in acid as a way to conceal the evidence. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in the same manner that he killed the boys, being strangled first, then cut into a hundred pieces, in front of the parents of the victims, one piece for each victim, then be dissolved into acid; Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haider, stated that such a punishment would not be allowed. Iqbal died by suicide before any sentence could be carried out.
Angel is a 1984 American exploitation thriller film directed by Robert Vincent O'Neil, written by O'Neil and Joseph Michael Cala, and starring Donna Wilkes, Cliff Gorman, Susan Tyrrell, Dick Shawn, and Rory Calhoun. Its plot follows a teenage prostitute in Los Angeles who faces danger when a serial killer begins stalking and murdering young sex workers.
Many Black Dahlia suspects, or persons of interest, have been proposed as the unidentified killer of Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the "Black Dahlia", who was murdered in 1947. Many conspiracy theories have been advanced, but none have been found to be completely persuasive by experts, and some are not taken seriously at all.
You Don't Know Jack is a 2010 American made-for-television biopic written by Adam Mazer and directed by Barry Levinson. It stars Al Pacino, John Goodman, Danny Huston, Susan Sarandon, and Brenda Vaccaro.
Michael Thomas Gargiulo is a convicted American serial killer. He moved to Southern California in the 1990s and gained the nickname The Hollywood Ripper. He was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death on July 16, 2021. He is currently incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison.
Michelle Eileen McNamara was an American true crime author. She was the author of the true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and helped coin the moniker "Golden State Killer" of the serial killer who was identified after her death as Joseph James DeAngelo. The book was released posthumously in February 2018 and later adapted into the 2020 HBO documentary series I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
Juan Chavez was a Mexican serial killer who, between 1986 and 1990, killed at least six gay men in three cities in Los Angeles County, California. Chavez claimed to authorities that the murders were an attempt to terminate AIDS, which, in the 1980s, received worldwide panic. On June 21, 1999, he was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, but died from suicide by hanging in his cell at Folsom State Prison shortly after.