Killer Notion

Wanna trade a Jeffrey Dahmer for a Ted Bundy? Ed Gein? Charles Manson? Or, on a lighter note, a Pretty Boy Floyd for an Al Capone? True Crime Trading Cards, due in stores in May from Northern California-based Eclipse Enterprises, come in two 55-card series that both inform and exploit the current fascination with murderous rampages. (Dahmer is their star card, but its text will be amended after his trial.)

Selling in packets of 12 for about $1, Series 1 depicts Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; Series 2 is Guns and Gangsters. Valarie Jones, who cowrote the cards' text, acknowledges that the idea is ''ghoulish'' but adds that the company's goal was to be analytical. ''This is an epidemic,'' she says. ''We need to know how the killers operate, and how they came to be.''

Maybe that's why the cards include life synopses that show a certain consistency: the killers' childhood torture of animals, for example. Kinda makes one nostalgic for when cards just sported heroic sluggers.