May 10, the scheduled date of John Wayne Gacy’s execution, should be a special day for Dan Kelly. After all, Kelly puts out a true-crime zine called Evil, and in the subculture that follows the exploits of serial killers he’s considered quite an expert. “To be honest, I don’t like being known as the death guy or the murder guy,” says Kelly. “I just like to collect books.”
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Evil number six includes plugs for other killer zines and the number for a 900 line where you can hear a recording of Gacy pleading his innocence. Kelly also reviews several books, including Satanism: The Seduction of America’s Youth, which he calls “a good chuckle”; Final Truth, by now-executed serial killer Donald “Pee-Wee” Gaskins, which he considers “a true classic in the genre”; and Monsters of Weimar, a compilation of “two classics of crime lit” about two of Kelly’s favorite German killers, Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kurten.
“Evil was started because I wanted to see if there were other people out there who collected true-crime books,” says Kelly, who otherwise works as an ad copywriter. “I started out saying, ‘I like the books; does anyone else collect anything on the subject?’ and just amazingly, this thing sprang up. There was just this explosion.”
Good true-crime books are hard to come by, Kelly says. “It’s easier to find books these days because of sheer proliferation,” he says, “but the best-written books on the subject, and there are damn few, are by Michael Newton.” Newton is the author of Hunting Humans, the seminal serial-killer encyclopedia, as well as Bad Girls Do It!, a book about female killers, and several other definitive texts.
