American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Once they were on the road, he announced that Diane had double-booked the studio and that instead they would drive to another place in Anaheim, about forty minutes away. Even though Lorraine’s intuition was warning her that something was off, she needed the fifteen dollars and did not want to disappoint the agency on her very first assignment. She reluctantly agreed.

  As they drove on the Santa Ana Freeway south toward Anaheim, Glatman chatted about the photo assignment and how he hoped it would be a cover photo for a magazine. But once they passed the Anaheim turnoff, Glatman became menacingly silent. Lorraine now became alarmed. She began contemplating leaping from his car, but they were moving too fast. When they reached Tustin, Glatman took the off-ramp and pulled to the side of the road. He produced his handgun and threatened to kill Lorraine if she did not comply with his orders. When he attempted to tie her hands behind her back, she realized he had put the handgun down and began resisting. She tussled with him in the car as Glatman yanked at her wrist, grabbed her by the throat and punched her in the face. But he was unable to deliver a knockout blow. He picked up his handgun, but Lorraine began grappling for it. The pistol went off in the struggle, a single round penetrating Lorraine’s skirt and grazing her thigh. Glatman was surprised by the gunshot, while Lorraine took the opportunity to throw the door open and began to run. Glatman quickly overtook her and tackled her to the shoulder of the road. Cars with their headlights blazing passed by the couple as they struggled on the ground. Nobody stopped, except for California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer Thomas Francis Mulligan on his way to the station at the end of his shift. The parked car with its opened door and dome light on caught his attention. As he rode by it, he spotted a man and woman struggling in the dirt. As Mulligan turned his bike around and pulled up behind the vehicle, the woman broke free and came running toward him.

  It was over for Glatman. He was arrested at the scene.

  Glatman was booked and turned over to Orange County Sherriff’s Department detectives in Santa Ana to be questioned. The detectives determined that the abduction began in Los Angeles, so they notified the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department and the LAPD.

  Lieutenant Marvin Jones in the LAPD noted Glatman’s address and realized it was near that of the missing Ruth Mercado. On a hunch, he added the name of Shirley Bridgeford to the mix and sent two of his detectives to Santa Ana to question the arrested suspect. One of them was LAPD detective sergeant Pierce Brooks, and that was how he first became involved in the case of Harvey Glatman and the Glamor Girl Murders.

  The Legend of Pierce Brooks and ViCAP

  Accounts of the Glatman case often segue into the story of Pierce Brooks and his idea for what would become ViCAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—a national database of violent crime incidents and their case characteristics, intended to match and link similar cases across multiple jurisdictions to a single migratory perpetrator. The late Robert Ressler’s account of his FBI career profiling serial killers (coauthored with Tom Shachtman), Whoever Fights Monsters, is probably where the legend comes from. Simplifying the story of Pierce Brooks, Ressler wrote, “Brooks was the man put in charge of the investigation of two seemingly unrelated murders of young women in the area.” According to Ressler, Brooks had to go to a library and read through newspaper accounts of similar murders in different jurisdictions “to see whether other murders had been committed that matched the MO of the killer he believed he was chasing” and that this “eventually led to the conviction of Glatman, who when confronted with the evidence confessed to the murders.”9

  According to the story, in an age when nobody understood computers and what they can do, Brooks proposed a networked computer system linking various police jurisdictions on which individual crime characteristics could be compared and connected to one another, in order to overcome what is known as “linkage blindness”—a daunting problem for multiagency/multijurisdictional investigations. (A problem, as recent as 9/11, with a lack of comparative communications between the FBI and CIA.) Pierce’s idea was dismissed by his old-school Luddite superiors and remained fallow for twenty-five years until the 1980s “serial killer epidemic,” when Pierce got a Justice Department grant and partnered with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit to create ViCAP. That, at least, is the legend.

  There is this great line in the John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  Ressler simplified the story into its legendary form, and even I printed it as I heard it from him in my first book on the history of serial homicide, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters.

  It’s Michael Newton in his book Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman who points out that nobody was investigating any murders before Glatman’s arrest. Nobody knew that Judy Dull, Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado were murdered until Glatman was arrested attempting to abduct Lorraine Vigil and subsequently confessed; they were all missing persons cases and did not involve Brooks as a homicide investigator.

  When Brooks eventually did interview Glatman, it was about the abduction of Shirley Bridgeford; her murder was collateral to the abduction. Murders are prosecuted in the county where they are committed, and in Glatman’s case that was in Riverside County in the murder of Judy Dull and San Diego County in the murders of Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado. Los Angeles County, where the abductions occurred, and Orange County, where Glatman was arrested, deferred to San Diego County to prosecute Glatman for the two murders there.10 (Judy Dull’s murder was never formally prosecuted once Glatman was convicted in San Diego.)

  Newton suggests that Ressler may have been referring to a different set of “two seemingly unrelated murders of young women” that Brooks was investigating, or that the Glatman case later inspired Brooks to propose the information network. In any case, it is true that after Brooks’s proposal was dismissed, he put it aside for nearly twenty-five years until it came to life in the 1980s when he secured a grant, partnered with the FBI and testified before Congress advocating for what would become ViCAP.

  Photographic Confessional

  After his arrest, Harvey Glatman confessed and described in excruciatingly helpful detail the murders of Dull, Bridgeford and Mercado. He led police to the exact site near Indio where unidentified bones were found the previous December, which finally led to the conclusive identification of Judy Dull. He also led police to the remains of Bridgeford and Mercado on the opposite ends of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in San Diego County. He had to twice tell the police to look in a metal toolbox in the garage of his Norton Street apartment, before they found the twenty-two black-and-white photographs and color transparencies of his three victims that he had squirreled away.

  After Glatman’s arrest, dozens of inquiries came in from police departments regarding other possible homicides. Glatman responded, “Aren’t three enough?” While confessing freely to the three murders, he steadfastly denied committing any others and even agreed to submit to polygraph examinations, which returned no evidence of deception.

  Despite his mother’s urging, Glatman refused to claim insanity and insisted on pleading guilty and accepting a death sentence. Police had kept quiet about the existence of his photos, but after he was sentenced to death on December 17, 1958, the San Diego County prosecutor released three of the photos to the press. Newspapers across the country ran the horrific photos of the bound women on their front pages; even sober Time magazine printed the photos. Nobody, other than other serial killers, had ever seen anything like it in the annals of murder. Eventually, several other photos of Glatman’s victims leaked out, and all of them are salaciously circulated on the Internet today.

  Justice moved fast in those days. On September 18, 1959, eleven months after his arrest, Glatman was put to death in San Quentin State Prison’s gas chamber for the two murders he committed in San Diego County.

  Hea
ring of his crimes, his mother, Ophelia, said, “Oh, my God in Heaven! Not my boy! He was always so good—so dependable! He never hurt anybody!” When she died in 1968, she left a $10,000 endowment to the University of Denver “to perpetuate the memory of my son Harvey”: the Harvey M. Glatman Memorial Scholarship for accounting students. In 2006, after it was revealed the university was awarding a scholarship in the name of a serial killer, Denver University changed the name to the Ophelia Glatman Endowed Memorial Scholarship.11

  Boulder Jane Doe: Dorothy Gay Howard

  One piece of unfinished business from the Glatman case is the question of whether “Boulder Jane Doe,” found murdered in Boulder Canyon on April 8, 1954, was one of his victims.

  The young woman was found by hikers, stripped of all her belongings except for three hairpins. She had been so battered by her killer and ravaged by animals that she was unidentifiable, but it was estimated that her body had been there for at least a week. No precise cause of death could be determined other than a general finding of “shock”—but it was probably due to blunt force trauma. One of her wrists had a trace of a ligature mark. The Boulder community adopted the young victim and raised the money to bury her. She would be known as “Boulder Jane Doe” for the next fifty-five years.

  Through brilliantly relentless research and interviews by Boulder historian Silvia Pettem and Boulder County Sherriff’s Office investigator Steve Ainsworth, Boulder Jane Doe was, amazingly, identified in 2009—fifty-five years after the discovery of her remains—as eighteen-year-old Dorothy Gay Howard, a troubled, restless, twice-married teenager from Phoenix, Arizona. How and why she ended up in Boulder remains a mystery.

  Having identified the victim, Pettem and Ainsworth, however, overreached when concluding Glatman murdered her. When Howard was exhumed in 2004 in a renewed attempt to identify her, she was discovered to have a knee fracture injury that was not in the original autopsy report. The account of how Lorraine Vigil had escaped Glatman’s car with one wrist bound inspired Ainsworth to measure the height of the bumper on a 1951 Dodge Coronet (the model that Harvey drove) to the height of Howard’s knee. It matched, although so did some other car models. Ainsworth and Pettem speculated that perhaps, like Vigil, the victim in Boulder had fled from Glatman’s car and was run over by him. Further fueling this speculation was Glatman’s strange response during his police interview in California when asked if any of the women he photographed in Colorado were dead. He said no, “unless they’ve been run over.”

  Pettem pointed out that when Glatman was driving his victims to the desert sites where he would kill them, he took great care to bind their hands behind their backs. Was this because back in 1954 Dorothy Howard managed to escape from his vehicle?

  Glatman was indeed questioned and polygraphed on several unsolved cases including Boulder Jane Doe and two others from the Denver-Boulder area. While readily confessing to the three California murders, Glatman vehemently denied killing any other victims. He passed the polygraph. True, polygraphs can be unreliable, and true, serial killers sometimes have an incomprehensible scale of values as to what they will or will not confess to. It is possible that for the sake of his mother, Glatman did not want to confess to having murdered women while he lived with her.

  But in the end, there is no hard evidence that Glatman murdered Dorothy Howard, and Pettem sometimes stretches the evidentiary links further than she should. For example, she claims in her otherwise excellent book Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe that “the ligature marks shown in the victim’s morgue photographs are strikingly similar to the marks left on the three corpses of the women he later murdered in California.”12 Yet no ligature marks could have been discerned on Judy Dull’s wrist; nothing was found of her but bones. Nor is a wrist ligature on a murdered abduction victim highly unusual. Moreover, Dorothy Howard was found without any of her clothing. Glatman’s victims were all found with their clothes, which had been part of the signature fantasy that Glatman was engaged in. Nor was a cache of female attire found among Glatman’s trophy collection after his arrest.

  While it is entirely plausible that Glatman could have murdered Dorothy Howard in 1954, there is no conclusive evidence that he did.

  Photographic Totems and Freeways of Death

  In several ways, Glatman was a sign of things to come in the world of serial murder. Of generations of serial killers in the future who will take photographs, Polaroids and videos of their victims, alive and dead, “capturing” them forever for themselves, Glatman was the first.

  Partly it was a technological factor; the ability to process and print photographs in home darkrooms became easier in the 1950s as amateur photographers embraced the hobby; and partly it was a cultural factor, the rise of mainstream true-detective and men’s adventure magazines that featured the kind of photos Glatman felt compelled to shoot for himself.

  There is nothing in Glatman’s photos that could not be seen in the thousands of photos in true-detective and men’s adventure magazines available at newsstands and supermarket racks. In fact, there were flaws in the narrative logic of the photos he took: the victims were gagged even though they were posed in a remote desert where nobody could hear them scream. The gagging was ritual. For Glatman it was not the photo itself as an object of his desire, but the knowledge that the victims in the photos had been his, that he was there standing behind the camera. These weren’t just photos clipped from magazines taken by somebody else of somebody else. They were his darkest memories frozen on film. Glatman put himself a single quantum dimension away from his victims forever. He had captured the direct light reflected from his victims frozen to negative film with his own camera held in his own hands. He then printed the image himself from that negative to a positive first-generation print. I can imagine him all by himself, owl-eyed crazy in those horn-rimmed glasses, bathed in the red light of his improvised darkroom, immersing the exposed but still blank photo paper into the developer fluid, swishing and tapping it with his rubber-tipped bamboo photo tongs, coaxing out the image of his victims to its desired contrast and resolution, before putting it into the stop bath and fixer to be forever his. It was a metaphysical perpetuation of the capture and murder, more than just memory; it could be held in his hand, the captured light from his murders.

  The other thing that characterizes Glatman’s murders and those of serial killers to come is the role of his car and the interstate freeway system that began expanding after World War II at a cancerous rate. Glatman is among the first serial killers to routinely use the freeway system to quickly transport the victims he abducted in Los Angeles to different, distant and opposite locations, over a hundred miles away, where he would kill them and leave their bodies. As car ownership became ubiquitous, the car and the freeway became tools for serial killers to arrive at their victim’s door, to troll for and transport them, and finally to move on as migratory predators, sometimes hunting for victims right on the freeways and their rest stops and towns along the way. When the FBI in 2009 launched its Highway Serial Killings Initiative, there were more than five hundred unsolved homicides linked to interstate freeways, appearing to confirm this sense of the US highway system as “circulating” serial killers like bad blood in the body of the American nation.

  Essayist and environmentalist Ginger Strand argues that the freeways, because of the way they were built in the 1950s and 1960s—tearing through lower-income neighborhoods—contributed to rising serial murder, not by mobilizing killers, but by increasing the less-dead victim pool.13 The freeways’ construction destroyed unwanted (“blighted”) inner-city, often minority, communities and scattered people into soulless and degrading public housing ghettos. Strand writes, “In its first decade [1956–1966], the interstate highway program destroyed some 330,000 urban housing units across the nation, the majority of them occupied by minorities and the poor. After that the pace picked up. No one knows the exact number, but estimates are that the highway program dis
placed around a million Americans.”14 This had dual consequences; the displacement of poor and minority communities created a pool of less-dead victims, while the chaos and degradation destabilized families and spawned serial killers.

  Strand recounts how a thriving and prosperous Bronx was destroyed in the 1950s when vibrant low-income neighborhoods were razed to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway and its dispossessed residents were packed into high-rise public housing complexes. In Atlanta too, the vital and prosperous Auburn Avenue neighborhood known as Sweet Auburn, pronounced by Forbes magazine in the 1950s “the richest negro street in the world,” was ripped apart by an elevated interstate freeway in 1966. Vibrant African American–owned neighborhood businesses, cultural institutions, churches and family homes were destroyed, forcing low-income residents into bleak, anonymous, high-density public housing complexes.15

  The expropriation and destruction of Sweet Auburn would give serial killer Wayne Williams his vast victim pool of vulnerable children a decade later. Strand writes, “I-20 would play a key role in Atlantans’ understanding of why, in the late seventies, their children began to disappear.”16

  The destruction of families and communities wrought by the building of highways through the hearts of poor and minority communities in New York, Miami, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles and other cities, along with the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1990s, took its toll and is still taking it. Devastated, broken and degraded families can produce serial killers.

  The decades-long process of destroying inner-city minority communities and families has produced a new pool of both serial killers and victims. While in the past serial killers were believed to be predominately white males, Eric Hickey’s survey shows that from 2004 to 2011, 57 percent of all serial killers were African Americans; while the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database indicates that in the 2010s, almost 60 percent of serial killers were African Americans (even though African Americans make up only 13.2 percent of the American population).