Issac Zamora, shown as he appeared in court, was convicted of killing four people in 2008 and was found insane in two other killings. He is now confined at Western State Hospital.
Signed hand tracings of Washington convicted killer Isaac Zamora have turned up for sale on mass-murder memorabilia websites – and one of his surviving victims said Wednesday: “It just makes me sick.”
Four years ago, on Sept. 2, 2008, Zamora went on a rampage and killed six people in Skagit County. He shot Fred and Julie Binschus on their Sedro-Woolley property. Fred survived, but his wife died.
Binschus said in an interview Wednesday that the sale of her killer's belongings only worsens the suffering he's had to endure by losing his wife of 25 years and the mother of their two daughters.
“She was something special,” Binschus said. “Once you have the best, it's hard to move on really.”
And he said he still is struggling with the horror of that day.
“It just won't go away,” he said. “I'm still in the counseling but that don't help. It's just something that's going to be with me forever.”
Zamora pleaded guilty to four counts of murder. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity for two other deaths and was committed to Western State Hospital.
And now news comes that Zamora’s signed hand tracings are up for sale on three websites specializing in murder memorabilia.
“It just makes me sick,” Binschus said. “And I can't get no closure from it because it's just always something coming up.”
Washington has a law that requires any profits made from the retelling or re-enactment of a crime to go into a crime victims' fund managed by the state, but the law does not prohibit inmates from giving away personal items that end up for sale.
The owner of one website offering Zamora`s hand tracings for sale said he's not the bad guy and only gets a percentage from what he sells.
Eric Gein, the owner of Serialkillersink.net, said, "Although we understand that what we offer for sale is not for everyone, we have never and will never go out of our way to push these items in the faces of the victims or their families. We find it offensive ourselves that someone who calls himself a victims advocate continually goes out of his way to cause families further pain by showing them these items.”
“I think they’re sicker than any of them,” Binschus said of the website owners. “Why would you want something like that?”
William Harder, owner of murderauction.com, where other Zamora tracings are on sale, told the Seattle Times that his website did not create the market it serves.
“I didn’t make Charles Manson famous; the press and the media did,” Harder told the Times. “And the fascination with crime didn’t start with me.”
But that’s no comfort to Binschus.
“When I mow my grass and go by where she is laid out there, it's hard enough just to cope with it every day, let alone having this thrown in our face all the time,” Binschus said.
The state was unable to comment on how Zamora's hand tracings were acquired. But Zamora’s mother, Dennise Zamora, told the Seattle Times that her son told her he had sent some tracings to a “girl” who had written him and some to someone who claimed to be in the ministry and wanted to use them to “pray” for Zamora.
Dennise Zamora told the Times that when she told her son that they’d turned up and that they were for sale, “it broke his heart.” She said her son told her he is not getting any money from the sale of the items.
“He thought those people were his friends and that they cared about him,” Dennise Zamora told the Times.
On Wednesday, some of Zamora's right- and left-hand tracings were sold for $35 apiece.
