Amy McRary

USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee

Pigeon Forge – The Alcatraz East Museum opening Dec. 16 in Pigeon Forge has O.J. Simpson’s gloves.

No, not THOSE gloves.

These gloves are innocent-looking golf gloves --- one white, one black. They’re displayed with a golf bag and clubs once owned by the football player-turned-accused murderer.

Since they’re not the gloves key to Simpson’s 1995 trial, they could be overlooked in a two-story attraction devoted to crime and punishment. But it’s impossible not to notice the museum’s most famous O.J. item – that white Ford Bronco. Simpson, before his arrest for double murder, cowered in the back seat of the Bronco driven by friend Al Cowlings in a slow-speed Los Angeles police pursuit.

The car is among four at the 2757 Parkway museum. There’s also a roadster from the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde”; real-life gangster John Dillinger’s shiny red 1933 Essex Terraplane; and serial killer Ted Bundy’s 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.

They’re among 600-plus owned or loaned artifacts in the 25,000-square-foot museum whose 19th-century prison design was inspired by the real Alcatraz and the Tennessee State Prison closed in 1992. The building’s easy to spot. A stripe-wearing convict mannequin scales the exterior faux stone wall as an armed guard mannequin watches from a tower.

This is an expanded version of the National Museum of Crime and Punishment that closed in 2015 after seven years in Washington, D.C. Businessman and attorney John Morgan began that museum after a visit years ago to the original Alcatraz, says Janine Vaccerello, Alcatraz East's chief operating officer. The museum hopes to attract an annual 400,000-plus visitors.

Why a crime museum? “It’s America’s favorite subject,” she says.

“Every time you turn on the news, almost every news story is about crime. Movies, books, everything is about crime or law enforcement,” Vaccerello says. “People are fascinated by it. People either want to be the investigator, they want to figure it out, or they are psychologically fascinated by how could a criminal be so bad?”

Twenty-eight display areas are designed around five broad themes. Tours begin with the history of American crime and its consequences, move to forensic science and crime fighting and end with counterfeit products and pop culture-related crime. But artifacts like Simpson’s Bronco may be the main draw. Artifacts range from a medieval head cage torture device to 20th-century gangster Al Capone’s rosary to a display of law enforcement badges and uniforms to a baseball signed by serial killer Charles Manson.



In Washington the most popular object was Bundy’s Volkswagen, Vaccerello says. It’s missing its front passenger seat; Alcatraz East Director of Artifacts and Exhibits Rachael Penman says that’s where Bundy placed some victims’ bodies. Another Bundy item – a dental mold of his teeth – is new. That mold convicted Bundy in the death of a Florida State University coed.

Wild West fans will be drawn to the displays about outlaws like Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy. They’ll see Jesse James’s gun shoulder holster and blood-stained floorboards from the home of a James relative. It’s said Jesse James bled on the floor while recovering from a gunshot wound.

Other items belonged to 20th-century gangsters. A death mask of Dillinger’s face made after he was killed in 1934 by law enforcement is one of four. Another case holds bits of gunshot-shattered windshield from the death car of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, a Parker-typed poem and typewriter. Pop culture blends with reality; gangster-styled guns shown include props from “The Godfather” film.

But items in the room focusing on serial killers can be very real and, for some, uncomfortable to view. A tall gray wall divides a corner of the room. Visitors who walk around the wall see items used by John Wayne Gacy, executed for 33 murders in 1994. That includes two clown costumes Gacy wore to charitable events, his prison paint set and an unfinished clown self-portrait.

More openly shown is the scoped Remington rifle Charles Whitman used from the University of Texas’ clock tower in 1966 to kill 16 people. The deaths were the first recognized mass shooting at a U.S. school, says Penman. The museum also memorializes more recent killings, from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook.

Alcatraz East is part museum, part interactive attraction. Visitors can sit in a police car, be a thief dodging laser beams to steal a precious item or a police officer on the firing range. They can crack a safe in an exhibit detailing white-collar crimes from Revolutionary traitor Benedict Arnold to 21st-century financier Bernie Madoff. In one corner of the room a D.B. Cooper mannequin prepares to jump from a plane. In 1971 the real Cooper, wearing a parachute and money-filled bank bag, jumped from a plane north of Portland and was never found.

With areas designed as a police station, courtroom and prison cell, the museum also focuses on the American judicial system. Visitors can get booked and fingerprinted, stand in a lineup and take a polygraph. They can be judge, witness, attorney or defendant in a small courtroom replica. They can stand – and escape from – a small jail cell.

Displays, photographs, wall panels and room scenarios focus on topics as varied as ballistics and fingerprinting, court trials, law enforcement training, prison life, cold cases, identity theft, presidential assassinations and domestic terrorism. Retired University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist and Body Farm founder and author Dr. William Bass is the subject of a crime detection exhibit. Nearby stands a pretend medical examiner’s autopsy table whose mannequin victim shows signs of multiple fatal injuries. “He had a very bad night,” says Penman.

But the museum’s best crime deterrent may be its display of society’s instruments of death. They include an 18th-century European beheading ax, dunking stool, guillotine, gas chamber, lethal injection machine and Tennessee’s Old Smokey electric chair. Old Smokey, used at the state prison in Nashville from 1916 to 1960, moved from Washington back to Tennessee with the museum.

Alcatraz East

Address: 2757 Parkway, Pigeon Forge

Hours: 10 a.m.-8 p.m. daily

Admission: $24.95 adults, $14.95 ages 12 & younger, free ages 5 & younger