MUSEUMS - UNITED STATES

Washington gives crime a museum

Sunday 25 May 2008

The Museum of Crime and Punishment has opened in Washington. Housing 400 objects, it aims to retrace the fascination of Americans with gangster culture, as well as show the reality of the death penalty.

There are bank robbers, mafiosi and serial killers in one hall, while nearby, civilians are exploring a police forensics lab and joining in an FBI shoot-out.

Happily, it's not another ordinary day in Washington, but opening day at an extraordinary new museum in the US capital, the Museum of Crime and Punishment.

"In no way do we glorify crime. On the contrary, we give the message that crime doesn't pay and there are consequences to your actions," the museum's co-founder John Morgan said.

Included in the three-storey, 28,000-square-foot (2,600-square-meter) museum is a studio where the popular series, America's Most Wanted -- hosted by the museum's other co-founder, John Walsh -- will be filmed.

Museum guests will be able to watch as the program is recorded and as operators on the America's Most Wanted hotline take telephone and email tips about wanted felons, and hand them over to law enforcement agents.

For Walsh, the museum is the latest step in a personal crusade against crime which began 21 years ago, when his six-year-old son Adam was kidnapped from a shop in Florida and murdered.

In an interview published last month in The Washingtonian magazine, Walsh said his favorite part of the museum was "the corner for the National Center for Missing and Exploited children, where people can learn how to make their children safer."

He also singled out "the interactive stuff", including crime scene investigation labs, safe-cracking, and high-speed chase simulators.

But, Walsh stressed that the museum's aim was not to glorify crime.

"We don't show just the infamous bad guys but the heroes of law enforcement," he said.

Among the history of crime artifacts on display at the museum is the red 1933 Ford that infamous bank robber John Dillinger used as a getaway car.

The museum, in the heart of Washington, also houses the car used by Bonnie and Clyde -- or at least by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the movie about the criminal couple -- and numerous items that once belonged to them.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were suspected of having committed 13 murders and several robberies and burglaries during a two-year crime spree in the early 1930s.

They were shot dead by police officers in an ambush in the southern state of Louisiana on May 23, 1934 after what the FBI describes as "one of the most colorful and spectacular manhunts the nation had seen up to that time."

Old newspapers from the 1930s to the 1970s recall some of the more infamous crimes that have shaken America to the core: the tragic 1932 kidnapping and murder of the son of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.

The cuttings also feature the story of the abduction in 1974 of media heiress Patty Hearst, who after months in captivity took up the cause of her kidnappers, a revolutionary group called the Simbionese Liberation Army.

On a lighter note, there are the mugshots of American stars who have had run-ins with the law -- such as a young Frank Sinatra, who was arrested for "seduction" because he was seeing a married woman; and Doors singer Jim Morrison, written up for obscenity after urinating in public.

Law enforcement has an entire floor to itself, on which visitors can view the tools of the trade of a US policeman throughout the ages, from billy clubs to modern day Taser stun guns.

And because this is the United States, where 42 convicts were executed last year, the museum has a real electric chair, a table where lethal injections are administered and even a gas chamber on display.

While the museum drives home its message that crime doesn't pay, those hoping to gain entry to this newest museum in the US capital will.

It costs 18 dollars (11 euros) to get in to the privately owned Museum of Crime and Punishment, a high price to pay in Washington where many museums are free.