In the early 1990s, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office held a seminar about forensics for those working in the industry. The symposium was a fairly run-of-the-mill affair, save for the souvenir coffee mugs that participants received at the end, which prominently featured the department’s logo. The mugs became a surprising hit, and the following year, the same conference jazzed up the souvenirs even further for seminar attendees: They now featured a skeleton named Sherlock Bones, gussied up in the same garb as his detective namesake, that had been drawn by department investigator Philip Campbell. The mugs flew off the shelves.
Despite the industry attention during this time, larger financial struggles plagued the department. One of its programs — which aimed to dissuade young people convicted of driving under the influence from doing so again by showing them the victims of crashes in the morgue, was under threat of elimination due to budget cuts. But following the mugs’ success, Marilyn Lewis, the coroner’s secretary who’d come up with the idea for Sherlock, had an idea: Why not open a gift store adjacent to the coroner’s office, where employees and visitors alike could grab merchandise that would help fund the imperiled program?
Origin stories vary, but sometime around 1993, the department (now formally titled the County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner) decided to give the idea a shot, opening its in-house gift shop named (what else?) Skeletons in the Closet. The place was a bizarre mix of dark humor and everyday trinketry, selling beach towels with chalk outlines, piggy banks shaped like the 1930s-era “Black Mariah” hearse van and toe tag keychains.
The macabre gift shop did modest numbers in its first year, about $15,000. Then the Associated Press ran a story about Skeletons in the Closet. Within days, the international media had come calling, and people clamored to snap up tote bags with Sherlock Bones’ visage on them, either in person or through the store’s popular mail-order catalog…