Ashley Camp and her fiancé, Cody Wallenius, have an anniversary tradition of going to the gravesites of famous tattoo artists to get rubbings.
Tuesday, the couple, who own Easy Tiger Tattoo in Merrillville, ventured to Watseka, Illinois, as they did a few years ago, to visit the gravesite of Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper, the legendary tiger-owning owner of The Badlands at 3844 Broadway in Gary.
“We knew where it was,” Camp said of Cooper’s headstone, which features a tiger and the quote, “3 can keep a secret if 2 are dead.”
“We walked right over to it and we’re walking around and we’re like, it’s not here,” Camp said, adding they thought maybe Debra Cooper, Roy Boy’s ex-wife and business partner, moved it. They noticed that the headstone for the Coopers’ son, Diamond Cody Cooper, who died four years after his father at age 19 in a wreck, had also been disturbed.
Camp said she and her fiancé sought out the cemetery caretaker and then they sent a message to Debra.
“It kind of sank in slowly,” Camp said. “This is a really big deal. Where do you go from here? What does somebody do with a headstone?”
Debra Cooper said Roy Boy was buried in a Grand Army of the Republic cemetery with other members of his family because his great-great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran.
The headstone was made by Roy Boy’s sister Candy, who has since died, Debra Cooper said, adding her late sister-in-law also made her son’s headstone. Candy is buried in the family plot as well.
Camp, she said, sent her pictures of the spot where Roy Boy’s headstone once lay and said it was gone.
“I’ve got my memories, I’ve got my soul, I’ve got this shop,” Debra Cooper said of The Bandlands, which she took over after her son died. The studio first opened in 1973, though it moved across Broadway after it burned down in a 2008 fire.
The tigers, which included two white ones, a gold Bengal and a gold Siberian, according to Post-Tribune archives, are long gone after officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture raided the shop in May 2010, just a few months before Roy Boy died.
Tigers had been a fixture of The Badlands for years until the raid, which came after unsatisfactory inspections by the USDA, according to Post-Tribune archives. During a USDA visit in the days before the raid, inspectors said they found the tigers were underweight and lethargic.
The tigers were taken to a USDA-licensed sanctuary after they were removed from the tattoo studio.
These days, Debra Cooper keeps honeybees and chickens instead of the large cats that helped make the studio famous.
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A Facebook post offers a free tattoo from Debra “Dangerous Deb” Cooper to anyone who locates or returns the missing headstone, with no limits.
“The headstone isn’t just a marker — it’s part of our family, our history, and a 50-year legacy. No questions asked. We just want it back. Help us keep the legend alive. Bring Roy Boy home,” the post notes. Anyone with information is asked to call the studio at (219) 884-4965.
Debra Cooper said the offer hasn’t yielded any information yet, but she’s gotten a lot of response from the tattoo community. She said she doesn’t think the headstone will ever reappear.
“It’s not about the stone. It’s about the legacy, but I’m over it,” she said, adding she might replace it.
The cemetery’s caretaker, Dave Farris, said he found out Tuesday the headstone was gone when Camp and her fiancé approached him about it.
“I went down and looked and it was most definitely gone,” he said, adding he last saw it about a month ago. “I have never had a headstone missing. I’ve been here 24 years and nobody has taken a stone.”
He remembered putting it in place when Debra Cooper got it and said it was heavy but he could pick it up. Carrying it, he surmised, would take two people, “or one big guy.”
He provided Debra Cooper with the phone number for the Iroquois County police and she gave them a call. Farris met with them Wednesday night, but he doubts the headstone will ever be returned.
“It’s just sad people do this. We’ve got cameras, but they don’t go out that far,” he said.
Camp is mystified over what someone would do with Roy Boy’s headstone and added that stealing a headstone is “a big boo-boo.”
“It’s not only that Roy Boy was huge,” she said. “I would hate to have that ghost following me around.”