A $3 Ticket in 1995 Built a Death Museum Empire Now 'Skyrocketing'

The Museum of Death opened in June 1995 with $3 admission; today its tickets cost roughly $23, and co-founder JD Healy says business has been "skyrocketing." That is a striking run for a business built on guillotines, serial killer artwork and a bunk bed from a mass suicide. But the trajectory was anything but smooth — the Hollywood location once sat shuttered for about seven years.

How did a hobby become a business?

Cathee Shultz and JD Healy met 44 years ago while working at a cafe in Arizona. She was the "cappuccino girl," and he was the baker. The two artists married two weeks later. They went on to open the Rita Dean art gallery in San Diego — named after their middle names — showing "against the grain" work on death, sex and politics.

The material came partly from Healy's macabre sideline. "I started writing to serial killers and visiting them on death row," Healy says. "I accumulated this large collection of serial killer artwork. And being an artist, I also like building things. So I used to build full-size guillotines, gallows. Anything that deals with execution devices."

The couple noticed a pattern that decided their commercial direction: death-themed shows drew the biggest crowds. "People are fascinated by death," Shultz says. "You want to look at it, but not do it."

What did the first museum look like?

By 1995, Shultz and Healy ran their gallery on the ground floor of a three-story San Diego building. Upstairs, a "freak farm" displayed rare live animals, including two-headed and albino turtles. The upkeep killed that idea. "Since they were alive, I had to keep them really clean, and it was a lot of work," Shultz says. "So we decided that wasn't going to be our avenue."

The basement became the first Museum of Death. It opened in June 1995 at $3 per person — ticket prices today run about $20 higher. The current Hollywood and New Orleans locations display serial killer artwork, antique funeral ephemera, mortician and coroner instruments, Manson Family memorabilia, pet death taxidermy and crime scene photographs. None of it is replica material.

The takeaway: demand for death artifacts outlasted two live-animal exhibits and three changes of venue.

Why did the museum move twice?

On March 26, 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult were found dead in Rancho Sante Fe, an upscale suburb north of San Diego. Shultz and Healy began acquiring related items. The growing Heaven's Gate collection generated controversy and landlord problems, pushing the business to a larger Hollywood space in 2000.

The reprieve lasted 18 months. New landlord troubles forced the museum to close for roughly seven years — a gap that would have ended most small businesses. A generous loan from a friend reopened the doors, and Healy says business has climbed ever since.

A second location followed in New Orleans in 2015. "I wanted to prove to ourselves that it wasn't a fluke," Healy says. "Within a year, that place was just cranking too."

How cheaply did they acquire the headline exhibits?

Acquisition changed once the sign went up. "Once we hung up the sign for the Museum of Death, it became a magnet," Healy says. "Everything just started flowing in our way."

A mortician friend sold the couple unwanted Heaven's Gate items — including clothing and a bunk bed — for $100, enough to build a diorama. The bigger prize was the Thanatron, the "death machine" built by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan physician who helped upward of 100 terminally ill people end their lives in the 1990s. The device let patients press a button releasing drugs that induced a coma and stopped the heart. Kevorkian was convicted of murder in 1999 in the death of a 52-year-old man with ALS after broadcasting the lethal injection on 60 Minutes.

The museum's negotiating record on that item is worth noting. The Thanatron failed to sell at auction in October 2011 with a $250,000 asking price. A gallery exhibit of Kevorkian's paintings then sought $150,000 — money Shultz says the couple did not have. Roughly two weeks after they told Kevorkian's niece to call if the items went unsold, she did. The final deal: the Thanatron, one painting and Kevorkian's briefcase for $12,500 — about 5 percent of the original machine's ask.

What is the endgame?

Healy credits streaming's glut of true crime and fictional gore with making audiences somewhat more comfortable with death, though he is candid about the limits. "But it's still a long haul," he says. "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."

The couple frames the mission in life-affirming terms. "You should say hello to people on the street and realize that you never know when your ticket's going to be punched," Healy says. "If people had a little bit more of an appreciation for death, then maybe we could have a little bit more appreciation for each other."

The claim is theirs to make; the evidence is the turnstiles. After 30 years, two locations and one seven-year closure, the audience keeps coming.