A house where a string of sexual torture slayings occurred six years ago has become a macabre magnet for the curious, and neighbors want it torn down.
The yellow-and-brown 19th-century house that sits boarded up in the Hyde Park district of Kansas City was the home of Bob Berdella, who is serving a life sentence without parole for the ritual slayings of six young men."It's like a dark cloud over the neighborhood, and everybody would like to see it gone," said Stephanie Smith, a member of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association.
But Smith concedes there is little she and other neighbors can do although they have asked the owner and the city to tear the building down.
Berdella, who owned Bob's Bizarre Bazaar, a boutique that sold artifacts of the occult, confessed to the serial murders in 1986. A jury this year awarded $5 billion to the family of one victim, the largest such award ever in the United States.
After Berdella went to prison, the three-story house where the victims died was bought by Kansas City millionaire Delbert Dunmire.
But it has sat vacant over the years, drawing the curious, who have their pictures taken on the cracked and broken concrete steps that lead up to what has become known in Kansas City as "The House of Horrors."
"It's just got a bad aura," Mike Kane, a neighbor, said. "It has bad vibrations . . . it shouldn't be there; nobody's ever going to buy it to live in."
Tom Jackman, a crime reporter for The Kansas City Star and co-author of "Rites of Burial," which chronicles Berdella's murders, said the home has become a magnet for the curious.
"It's a voyeuristic pleasure. It's the best known sight of the most luminous evil this town has ever known," Jackman said.
"If the house went away, I think the curious would go away with it," he added.
But the fate of the house is uncertain. Dunmire has never indicated his intentions since buying the property three years ago, and repeated attempts to reach him for comment went unanswered.
Neighbors have also attempted to contact Dunmire, who has used his money in the past to buy guns for drug enforcement agencies and prairie dogs for the Kansas City Zoo.
Rumors have circulated that he planned to turn the structure into a museum of the macabre or sell property rights to Hollywood producers who might want to make a film of Berdella's story.