Of all the merchandise sold at the Los Angeles Coroner’s “Skeletons in the Closet” gift shop, nothing captured the public imagination quite like the body outline beach towel. A full-sized white beach towel printed with a chalk-style body outline — the kind seen at crime scenes in movies and television — it became the shop’s all-time bestseller and one of the most recognizable novelty items in Los Angeles.
The Design
The towel was designed by Marilyn Lewis, a coroner’s office employee, in 1993 when the gift shop first opened. The concept was deceptively simple: take the most universally recognized symbol of death investigation — the body outline — and put it on the most carefree object imaginable — a beach towel.
The result was pure LA: morbid humor meets sunshine. Lay the towel on the sand at Venice Beach and you were sunbathing inside a crime scene.
Why It Worked
The body outline beach towel succeeded because it tapped into something specific about Los Angeles culture. This is a city where the entertainment industry has turned crime and death into content for over a century. The towel acknowledged that reality with a wink — it said that in LA, even the morgue has a sense of humor.
Tourists bought them by the thousands. The towel appeared in travel guides as a quintessentially LA souvenir, alongside Hollywood star maps and Griffith Observatory postcards. It was featured in news segments, magazine articles, and late-night television jokes.
The Coroner’s Brand
The beach towel was part of a broader merchandising strategy that turned the Los Angeles Coroner into an unlikely brand. Every item in the Skeletons in the Closet shop carried the official coroner’s seal — a detail that gave the merchandise an air of authenticity that knockoffs couldn’t replicate.
The proceeds funded the Youthful Drunk Driver Visitation Program, giving the shop a public-service justification that helped deflect criticism from those who found the concept tasteless.
A Cultural Artifact
The body outline beach towel endures as a cultural artifact — a product that could only have come from Los Angeles, a city where death, celebrity, and commerce have always been intertwined. It sits in the collections of pop culture museums and remains one of the most sought-after pieces of LA memorabilia.
For the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office, it proved something unexpected: that an institution dedicated to investigating death could also, in its own dark way, celebrate life in Los Angeles.