Harvey Glatman was a souvenir collector who used photography to record his murders for posterity – and to prolong the thrill of the kill. The source of his pleasure would be his undoing, but unfortunately it all came too late for the models he hired to pose for ‘magazine shoots’, whose bodies he dumped unceremoniously in the desert.
Although not as infamous as many later serial killers, the case of Harvey Glatman changed the way serial crime was investigated in America. It would be another ten years before the term ‘serial killer’ would be coined, and ten more before it entered the public lexicon, but the crimes Glatman committed were recognized as following a pattern and were investigated as such. The propensity of serial killers to take something from the scene of the crime, to remind them of the thrill of it, was also first noted with the Glatman case. Glatman was described as a souvenir killer – he took photographs of his victims before and after he killed them so he could relive the sexual pleasure the murders aroused in him.
One trait he didn’t share with almost every other serial killer was an abusive childhood. His mother could be described as being over-protective, but she comes across more as being deeply concerned and long-suffering over the trouble her son kept getting into. Glatman was born in 1927 in the Bronx. He was considered a good student at school, but found relationships with other students, particularly girls, difficult. He began to retreat into a fantasy world and, by the time his parents moved to Denver when he was eleven, was already showing signs of an obsession with ropes and bondage. At this early age he discovered auto-erotic asphyxiation, throttling himself with a rope to heighten the pleasure of masturbation. A bad case of acne, large protruding ears and a generally scruffy appearance didn’t help him with girls, who teased him as being a loser and a creep.
By the time Glatman was sixteen he was breaking into private residences. In one break-in he stole a handgun. From then on he stalked young women he was attracted to, following them to their homes, breaking in and forcing them at gunpoint to strip in front of him. One of his victims went to the police and picked him out of the mugshots they showed her. He was arrested and given a 12-month prison sentence. After he got out, his parents found him a flat in Yonkers, New York, to get him away from Denver and the stigma of being a sex offender. He got a job in a TV repair shop, but it wasn’t long before he was attacking women again. After a series of muggings, he was caught. There was no sexual element to the attacks, but, as he was a repeat offender, he was sentenced to five to ten years in prison. At first he was sent to a reformatory and then transferred to Sing Sing, the notorious maximum-security prison.
A psychiatrist described him as having a psychopathic personality, with possible schizophrenic tendencies, but he proved himself to be a model prisoner. After three years he was released on parole under his parents’ supervision. For the next three years he appears to have lived a relatively normal life, until the parole period was over. In January 1957 he moved to Los Angeles on his own and got another job as a TV repairman. He found an apartment, bought a car and joined a photography club. It all seemed normal, as if he was putting his past behind him. Then he bought some expensive professional photography equipment and, posing as a photographer called Johnny Glynn, phoned a modelling agency saying he had a commission from a true crime magazine and needed a model. They put him in touch with Judy Dull, a nineteen-year-old model who had recently arrived in Los Angeles. He phoned her and asked her to come over to his studio, in reality his apartment. When she arrived he told her the magazine needed pictures of a bound and gagged girl. She allowed him to tie her up and he took photographs of her. Then he raped her, took her out into the desert, raped her again, strangled her and photographed her dead body.
Six months later he joined a lonely hearts club and, through it, met Shirley Bridgeford. On their one and only date, he picked her up from her house and, under the pretence of going for a drive and dinner out of town, he drove her into the desert. The same pattern occurred as before. He tied her up, raped her, strangled her with a piece of rope and took photographs of the process. He left her body in a remote area of the desert for the coyotes. The thrill lasted for four months this time, before he hired another model, Ruth Mercado. He used a different false name, but the result was the same.
The next few attempts he made failed when the models refused to accept his offers of work. Lorraine Vigil needed the money and accepted. Her agency warned her to be careful and, when he began to drive her out of Los Angeles, she protested. He pulled a gun on her but, unlike his other victims, she fought back. She managed to get out of the car and flag down a passing police patrol car. Glatman was arrested and, after extensive questioning, he confessed to the three murders. The detectives questioning him tricked him into revealing the location of the photographs and persuaded him to show them where the corpses of his victims were. Once they found the bodies, they had Glatman banged to rights. He fell to pieces, asking for the death sentence and recording a long, taped confession, admitting to every detail of his crimes and how he had planned them.
The trial was over quickly. The taped confession had a chilling effect on all those who heard it. If there had been any doubts about whether he was of sound mind or not, the tape removed them. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. At 10am on 18 September 1959 he was strapped into a chair in the gas chamber in San Quentin State Prison. Sodium cyanide pellets where introduced into a solvent in the chamber, releasing cyanide gas, and, 12 minutes later, he was pronounced dead.