Robert Berdella-the curio merchant, art collector and confessed murderer- needed cash.
Last summer he pleaded guilty to the slaying of Larry Pearson, a 20-year- old boarder he had taken in. Berdella, 40, was sentenced to life in prison, and he still faced charges in a second murder of another young man whose skull police allegedly found inside Berdella`s buff-colored house on Charlotte Street here.
Naturally, Berdella`s legal expenses were mounting every day, even as he languished in the Jackson County (Mo.) Jail. For the last several weeks, he has sued, engineered, manipulated, cajoled and hired people to help him stage a series of auctions offering his mind-boggling accumulation of about 2,000 rare antiquities, ordinary household goods and an uncountable assortment of egregious junk.
”This is the largest collection of its kind I have ever seen,” said R. Bond Blackman, the arts and antiques appraiser who compiled the catalogue in time for a two-weekend series of auctions last month. First the rare pieces and furniture works would be auctioned. A week later, Berdella`s vast stores of costume jewelry, household items and inventory from the store he used to own were to be auctioned.
For years, Berdella had been known around this city`s bohemian enclaves as a community-spirited, somewhat artistic purveyor of artifacts. His little shop with skulls in the window, Bob`s Bazaar Bizarre, anchored an informal indoor shopping mall/saloon/swap meet called the Old Westport Flea Market.
In his nearby neighborhood, Hyde Park, Berdella led a campaign to rid the area of street crime. As a former chef at private clubs, he invariably brought the best covered dishes to the block parties.
THE PRIVATE SIDE
Neighbors, however, had virtually no idea how Berdella spent his private moments. Then, on April 2, Christoper Bryson, 22, leaped from a second-story window at the Berdella residence. Bryson, who wore only a dog collar at the time of his escape, told police Berdella had knocked him out, tied him up and then tortured and sexually abused him for three days.
The subsequent investigation turned up not only the skulls of two men who allegedly had been murdered but photographs and paraphernalia that police said indicated Berdella had been acting savagely for a number of years, picking up young men in a bleak section of downtown known as the ”meat rack” and forcing them to endure bizarre and painful acts far beyond their expectations or even their most vivid nightmares.
In piecing together this information, police encountered a remarkable cache of worldly goods in the Berdella abode. Rooms had been stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes and bags filled with jewelry, African masks, Roman glassware, New Guinea woodcarvings, pottery, candlesticks, coins, beads and other treasures.
Prosecutors seized the trove under a state law called the Criminal Activity Forfeiture Act. Sharlie Pender, Berdella`s lawyer, persuaded a judge to release Berdella`s formidable collection, arguing it had been seized before any wrongdoing had been proven or confessed and that the goods were not connected with the commission of a crime.
ORCHESTRATING AN AUCTION
Shortly after getting his stuff back, Berdella decided to sell his collection and appointed Pender to make the arrangements. Pender hired estate auctioneer Gary Ryther of suburban Excelsior Springs, and Ryther hired appraiser R. Bond Blackman. Berdella, meanwhile, conducted operations from jail, where apparently he had virtually unlimited access to a telephone.
He peppered his representatives with so much advice and so many orders that Ryther and Blackman began to take on a haunted look, and on the eve of the first auction weekend, Pender resigned, saying, ”I just can`t take any more of this.”
Someone asked him if the collection represented a particular passion of Berdella`s. ”It is now,” Pender sighed.
Ryther, Blackman and their crews removed the accumulated goods from police storage-1,000 boxes of little items, plus a truckload of furniture and a semitrailer filled with mundane articles that they had no time to unload. They took the mountain of things to the hastily rented auction site, a green 5,000-square-foot warehouse in the West Bottoms section of town. Ryther kept the place secret for more than a month, fearing crowds of curiosity-seekers.
West Bottoms, an area made up of loading docks stitched together by railroad tracks and perfumed by stockyards, can be reached by car, but even most native citizens would need a roadmap and clear directions to find the Berdella collection. The most prominent landmark was a large electric sign attached to an old warehouse that an entrepreneur had tricked up as a
”haunted house” for the Halloween season. The sign said, ”Edge of Hell.”
A DISCREET ANNOUNCEMENT
Auctioneer Ryther announced the auction site quietly, in a brochure discreetly advertised in publications read by serious collectors and dealers. Blackman was certain those people would be impressed. Berdella had been collecting since the mid-`60s, and the appraiser came upon Syro-Roman glass, ancient beads, Tibetan bronzes, Greco-Roman pottery, Indonesian puppets, African tribal costumes. . . .
”We had 57 pieces of Roman glass alone, some of it as thin as paper,”
Blackman marveled. ”You look at it and immediately feel a kinship with craftsmen who worked 2,000 years ago. The police must have exercised great care when they packed those boxes.”
A good many professionals and serious amateurs wanted to take a look, Blackman reported. ”We had calls from all over the United States, from as far as Hawaii. We had to make the seats reserved-only. I understand that some of these people are willing to pay up to $500 and $1,000 for one rare bead.”
When the doors opened on the first morning of the auction, the people who trooped in appeared to be more shrewd than that. They moved slowly past tables laden with coins, jars, Roman tear vials (originally filled with tears and buried with the dead), and all the flotsam, jetsam and treasure of a dozen cultures. Some made notes in their catalogues or consulted antiques reference books. Others merely nodded sagely.
Few of them realized that the dramatically lit, art-laden arrangement of tables had been approved by Berdella himself. He had orchestrated the whole thing with the aid of videotapes taken by Ryther`s assistants.
EVEN A SHOPLIFTER
Ryther`s 20-odd helpers, most of them relatives and all of them dressed in black skirts or trousers, white blouses or shirts and bright red ties, kept a wary eye on the browsers who had wandered in. Within minutes of opening, assistant auctioneer Wally Sims had spotted the familiar face of a
professional estate-sale shoplifter, and he swiftly escorted him toward the door.
Charlyn Yeaman, another assistant, marveled at the quality of the largess and pondered its source. ”It makes you wonder what kind of person this might have been who collected it,” she said. ”I guess he`s somebody very intelligent but with a quirk in his personality.”
The crowd seemed to share Yeaman`s rather casual assessment of the situation. They filled about 200 folding chairs and murmured mostly about the arcane details of their collecting and merchandising interests.
Monique Scofield, a Kansas City-based collector of Egyptian and Roman antiquities, seemed not at all squeamish as she peered into some locked glass cabinets containing jewelry from the Nile. ”What I find so difficult in understanding is that when you`re in Egypt, you can`t find any of this stuff to buy,” she complained. ”And yet they have a very good collection here.”
Faye, her husband, smiled. ”The collectors have already got all of it,” he said. ”They took it out of Egypt a long time ago.”
CONNING AND CAJOLING
Soon Ryther began his yammering, incessant auctioneer`s chant, a combination of con-man silkiness and high-speed cajoling in which every increment of $100 is invariably described as ”a hundred-dollar bill.”
Those $1,000 and $500 bills stayed deep in bidders` pockets as they picked off most of the rarest of the antiquities for $200 or less. ”You`re really stealing some of this stuff,” Blackman groused at one point. ”This next piece is so important that I`m going to start it at $100 myself.”
Bidding soon exceeded Blackman`s $100 bill, but not by much.
Blackman and Ryther glared down from the podium, their black tuxedo jackets adding authority to their white shirts and red bow ties. They made frequent references to how much certain items would fetch at Christie`s or Sotheby`s, the great auction houses.
When a Roman-Syrian vase, light green with traces of iridescence, arrived on the block, Blackman intoned, ”You will not see this again in your lifetime in an auction in Kansas City.” After the bidding for the vase stopped at $550, he lamented, ”There goes $2,000 worth of glass.”
Ryther`s face began to sweat as he sprayed his machine-gun voice through a few more items. ”Everybody`s seen this jacket, haven`t they?” he asked, shrugging out of his tuxedo coat. ”Now I`m going to take it off.”
Most of the onlookers and active bidders stood even less on formality than Ryther did. They wore denim jackets, ski clothes, $500 sweaters or $3 T- shirts.
RESALE VALUE
A baseball cap shaded the eyes of Denver antiques dealer Henry Johnson, 57, who diligently annotated every line in the catalogue. Johnson figured he would probably spend no more than $1,500 and make a tidy, if not spectacular, profit when he resold his purchases back home.
The identity of the immediate past owner of the artifacts left Johnson unfazed. ”I didn`t know the story behind this collection until I drove over here,” he said. ”I just saw an advertisement in the Denver Post. I don`t think the story behind it will travel with most of this stuff.”
Johnson, for one, found the prices unexceptional. ”These guys have a good line,” he said, referring to Ryther and Blackman`s occasional scoldings, ”but I read the Sotheby`s catalogues, too. These things are selling for just about what they should.”
At 9 p.m., after the last bidder had left for the day, Blackman still fumed. ”Did you see them steal that Roman stuff?” he asked the weary auctioneering team. ”I couldn`t believe those prices.”
Ryther talked quietly and seriously into a portable telephone. A smile flashed across his broad face as he hung up.
”I just talked to Mr. Berdella, and he`s very happy,” Ryther announced to the assembly of employees and relatives. A count two hours before had pegged the proceeds at $62,000, or an average of $100 an item.
Ryther, usually old-pro cool, made no attempt to disguise his profound relief. ”This has been hanging over me for a while,” he confessed.
The next day, another large, no-nonsense crowd turned up and cheerfully but judiciously bid through the remainder of the antiquities and into the furniture and household goods.
WHO`S THE BUYER?
By midmorning, everyone realized that one man seemed bent on acquiring almost everything still unsold. Of course! Local flamboyant millionaire-industrialist Del Dunmire stood near the back with his 9-month-old son in his arms and, nodding toward the podium from time to time, topped every bid.
A few outsiders seemed puzzled by the intrusion, but the Kansas City residents knew what was happening and they all knew his story. Dunmire, clad that day in brown leather vest, brown plaid shirt and scruffy jeans, once robbed a bank in Abilene. After his release from the Kansas State Penitentiary in 1960, Dunmire worked as a machinist and-with considerable help from kindly citizens-eventually put together Growth Industries Enterprises, a supplier of aftermarket replacement parts for the aviation industry.
Dunmire had walked into the warehouse with a little entourage consisting of a high school chum, Bob Shermer, and his wife; son Josh; and Dunmire`s ex- wife Debbie. The cognoscenti immediately recognized that the auction of the Robert Berdella Collection had become a huge public event. Dunmire`s presence confirmed it.
”Dunmire keeps a profile about as low as a big red zit,” one local businessman remarked. The millionaire drives around town in a crimson Rolls and throws major money at every charity. Last year, he took his entire Punxsutawney (Pa.) High School class on a Caribbean cruise for a 35th anniversary reunion. For his wedding, he rented an entire downtown hotel and invited all of Kansas City to the reception (4,000 showed up).
THE BEDS, TOO
Nodding his head or slightly raising his hand, the bearded Dunmire worked his way rapidly through Berdella`s household goods-stained glass, Oriental rugs, a rare print, tables, chairs, desks, lamps. . . . And, during a hushed moment, providing the capper that several members of the news media had been waiting for, Dunmire bought Berdella`s two large beds as well.
”Those should be going to some kind of museum of the macabre down in southern Florida,” cracked a spectator. Dunmire told a bystander that a public relations consultant had advised him to skip the beds. ”But what can the media do to me that they haven`t already done?” Dunmire reasoned.
He had just dropped perhaps $15,000 in the course of an hour or two. If the items were the steals that the auctioneer and appraiser claimed them to be, he could turn around and sell his acquisitions at a huge profit, Dunmire figured. Then he probably would hand over the proceeds to charities.
”I was thinking maybe I could give this stuff a better definition,” he said. ”I teach kids, from experience, not to rob banks. You can make more money with a pen.
”Everybody has defined these things as bad,” Dunmire continued, gesturing around the assembled Berdella Collection. ”But I think good can come out of anything. There`s an old saying, that the evil know not the good they do.”
EVIDENCE OF WITCHCRAFT?
Occultist Josef Lubin, a Kansas City practitioner of the psychic arts, had been one of the first customers to arrive on that first Saturday and, on Sunday, one of the last to leave. Dressed all in black with a clipped beard, he looked upon the proceedings with a mixture of amusement and amazement.
”A publication-I`m not at liberty to disclose which one-assigned me to come here and see if they were selling anything that dealt with witchcraft and satanism,” Lubin said. ”I haven`t found anything like that.”
But Lubin seemed to enjoy himself, frequently cocking an eyebrow as he observed the passing scene. During a particularly frantic period of bidding, Lubin chortled, ”Murder may be bad, but look what greed will do.” Even so, he admitted he had dropped around $500 of his own money for some African masks and a few trinkets.
”Things gather energy as they get new owners,” he said with an air of mystery. ”There are a lot of things coming together here. It`s possible, maybe in 10 to 15 years, that this will turn out to be the most important auction of the century. This is a real, real important event.”
Bidding resumed on the following Saturday, as auctioneer Ryther disposed of inventory from Berdella`s store. But with hundreds of household items remaining to be sold, Ryther canceled the remaining auction day, explaining that a single individual, whom he wouldn`t name, was negotiating to buy the entire lot. A rumor circulated that the same anonymous person had been bidding on Berdella`s house. Speculation centered, of course, on Kansas City`s favorite millionaire.
”It`s not personally me, but it may be one of my people,” the irrepressible Dunmire admitted last week. ”I`m not allowed to confirm what, where, why or when.”
He did reveal that any further Berdella acquisitions would have ”the same ramifications” as they did when he dominated the second auction day.
”I`m assuring everybody that it will be to the city`s benefit,” he said.
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