Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  In 1973 a new statutory maximum of 300 years was introduced and he became eligible for parole in 1977, but his requests were denied seven times in the following thirteen years.

  In Stateville Prison, in Joliet, he was known as ‘birdman’ after the Birdman of Alcatraz, due to the fact that he kept a pair of sparrows that had flown into his cell. He was often caught with drugs or distilled moonshine, however, and was far from a model prisoner. Punishment for such breaches never phased him. ‘How am I going to get in trouble? I’m here for 1,200 years!’

  He spent less than twenty years inside, however.

  A massive heart attack killed him on December 5, 1991. No one claimed his body. He was cremated and his ashes were dispersed in an unknown location.

  Harvey Glatman

  Harvey Glatman was a serial killer before the term was coined by the author John Brophy. A rapist and killer, he was a complex human being who hated women because they threatened him and represented what he could not understand about himself. Violence and force were his only ways to get close to them and establish control over them.

  Harvey had been different from birth. He was slow and never had any friends, but the first real sign his mother Ophelia had that there was something not quite right with her son, was when he was four years old. She walked into his room to find that he had tied a length of string around his penis, put the other end in a drawer and leaned back against the tugging string. The parents dismissed this as a bit of childish experimentation, but it was a lot more than that and, later, rope would replace string and become his means of conquest.

  At school, Harvey was called names on account of his large ears and buck teeth. But, above all, he was afraid of girls and never joined in activities and games after school. He would rather go home and play his own game which involved his beloved rope. He would tie it round his neck, throw it over a pipe or rafter and pull on it while masturbating. He had discovered auto-erotic asphyxiation at an early age. When he was eleven, his parents found out about the game and took him to a doctor who just put it down to growing pains.

  He did well at school, but girls were still an alien life form; he stammered and blushed whenever any came near him. Moreover, his confidence was not helped by a very bad case of acne. So, to get his thrills, he started to break into houses and take things, but not particularly for gain; more for the excitement.

  His breaking and entering soon graduated into something different. He would follow a woman home from the centre of Denver, break into her house, force her into her bedroom and tie her with the rope he carried everywhere with him. He would also gag her with a piece of cloth. He had stolen a .25 pistol during one of his burglaries and it came in handy. The woman was at his mercy and he was free to touch her as he pleased. He would unbutton clothes and fondle their bodies, doing the same to himself. He never fully undressed them or raped them. However, it made him feel like a real man and not the loser he really was.

  In May, 1945, however, when he was seventeen, he was finally caught breaking into a house and the police discovered the rope and the gun on him. He confessed to some of the burglaries he had committed, but was careful to leave out the ones that had involved the women. Seeming not to have learned his lesson, although perhaps not able to control his desires even if he had, while awaiting trial he abducted a woman called Norene Laurel, tied her up and drove her to Sunshine Canyon. He performed his usual acts and then let her go. At the police station, she recognised his face in an album of mugshots and he was arrested again, this time without bail. He was sentenced to a year in Colorado State Prison but was paroled after eight months.

  Ophelia, Harvey’s mother wanted him to make a fresh start and set him up in a flat in Yonkers. He got a job as a TV repairman, a trade he had learned in prison, and she returned to Denver. Harvey, meanwhile, was on the lookout for excitement. He bought a toy gun – possession of a real one would mean a long prison-stretch if he was caught with it – and he carried his pocket knife and his trusty length of rope, made of the finest hemp.

  At midnight on August 17, 1946, Thomas Staro and Doris Thorn were accosted by a man with a gun. They were marched into a grove of trees and the man tied Staro’s legs together and made him lie down. The man with the gun began to touch Thorn’s breasts. However, unknown to Glatman, Staro had worked himself free of his ropes and was tiptoeing up behind him. There was a struggle and Glatman slashed Staro’s shoulder with the knife before running away into the night.

  He fled to Albany where he rented a flat and prepared for his next attack. It came on the night of August 22. He pushed off-duty nurse Florence Hayden into a yard where he bound her wrists together. As he did this, however, she screamed and Glatman fled. Next evening, he tried it on with two women walking together, but lost his nerve, eventually just taking their purses.

  The Albany Police Department was, by this time, becoming interested in this man who targeted women. The descriptions given by the women all matched; so they knew the crimes were being perpetrated by the same man.

  Within two days, he was arrested and he confessed. In spite of the pleas of his mother who all this time had believed him to be leading a quiet life in Yonkers, he was sentenced to five to ten years in prison; he was in the big league now. At Elmira, where he spent the first two years of his sentence, he was diagnosed as a ‘psychopathic personality – schizophrenic type’. He was then moved to maximum security at Sing Sing. As is reported often to be the case with sociopaths like Glatman, he played the system well and got time off for good behaviour, being released after serving only two years and eight months. There were conditions though; he had to return to the care of his mother, get a job and be under court supervision for four and a half years.

  He behaved himself, and in 1956 he was free of all restrictions. He moved to Los Angeles and went crazy.

  Harvey had enjoyed photography in his art classes at high school and now he took it up again, but with a more sinister purpose. He intended to use it to photograph girls from the modelling studios that had sprung up everywhere in LA. Girls who had arrived in Hollywood dreaming of being stars like Marilyn Monroe offered themselves to be snapped clothed, semi-clothed or naked, according to how much they were paid.

  He worked as a TV repairman again and rented a small apartment on Melrose Avenue, saving enough to buy a used 1951 Dodge Cornet and some expensive photography equipment. He invented a name, Johnny Glenn, for his photographer identity and spent months hanging around the modelling studios, taking thousands of photographs.

  But, it was not quite enough for Harvey.

  Judith Ann Dull was a nineteen-year-old divorcee working to fund a child custody battle she was waging with her ex-husband. Glatman called her on the morning of August 1, 1957, and asked if she would be interested in posing for a true crime magazine layout. She was wary, but agreed to pose for him at her own apartment at two o’clock that afternoon. He asked her to wear a tight skirt and sweater.

  Arriving at her apartment, he told her the light was not good enough and suggested they go to his studio. Once there, he explained that the pictures were to illustrate a story about bondage and she would have to be tied up. Innocently, she allowed him to tie her wrists and ankles, at which point he pulled a .32 Browning automatic pistol from his pocket. He undid the ties on her wrists and ordered the now terrified Judith to strip off, slowly. He photographed her all the while, barking out instructions as to how he wanted her to pose.

  He then raped her several times and forced her to sit beside him while he watched television. He said he would take her home afterwards.

  Of course, he had no intention of taking her home.

  When he told her he would drop her on the outskirts of town, she presumed that was to allow him to make his escape. They got in the car and he drove 100 miles out of town before stopping the car. He made as if to untie her and for a moment she must have thought it was going to be alright, but quickly he put the rope round her neck, pushed her down onto her knees and ran the other
loop of rope around her ankles. Pulling up on the rope, her neck snapped and she was dead. He finished the evening off by using his flash attachment to take photos of the dead girl, arranging her body in a variety of poses.

  He stuck the photos all over his bedroom walls.

  It was seven months before he killed again.

  He met twenty-four-year-old Shirley Ann Bridgeford, a divorced mother of two children, through the Patty Sullivan Lonely Hearts Club. ‘George Williams’ promised to take her square dancing on March 7, 1958. Williams – in reality Harvey Glatman – picked her up at her home where, to his surprise and concern, a houseful of people greeted him. He suggested to her that rather than go dancing, they go for a drive in the country and get some dinner somewhere en route. She agreed and they stopped in Oceanside.

  After dinner they drove on. Somewhere near Anza State Park he stopped the car and pulled his gun out, ordering Shirley to undress. He raped her and then took photographs of her. He then waited until the sun came up to take pictures of her in daylight before garotting her. As with Judith Dull, he then photographed the corpse in different poses. Four months later, it was the turn of Ruth Mercado, her body photographed and dumped near to Shirley Bridgeford’s remains.

  In the summer of 1958, Glatman went to the Diane Studio, one of the better agencies on Sunset Boulevard. It was arranged for him to work with Lorraine Virgil, a woman who had signed on with the agency only the previous week. He was to pick her up at eight that evening

  But the owner of the studio, Diane, was suspicious of the man with the big ears, unkempt hair and smelly body odour. She phoned Lorraine and told her to be careful.

  As soon as Lorraine got into his car and he started heading in the wrong direction alarm bells began to ring in her head. When she questioned him, he told her someone had already booked the studio and they were actually going to his own private studio.

  As they sped down the freeway, she became even more anxious. Again, she asked him where they were going. He said ‘Annaheim’. However, she knew that they had already sped past the Annaheim turn-off. As she became more and more concerned, he began to shout at her to shut up. He swung the car dangerously into an exit ramp, crossing two lanes to get to it. Off the freeway, he stopped the car and asked her to put her arms out. He told her he was going to tie her up to keep her quiet and to emphasise his point, he pulled out his gun. Lorraine reached for the door handle, trying to escape, but he grabbed her and they struggled. He tried desperately to wrap a coil of rope around her but, unlike the other women, Lorraine fought back.

  She grabbed the gun barrel and the gun went off, the bullet burning her thigh as it skimmed past. Suddenly, Glatman released his hold on her and she wrenched open the car door and fell out. He climbed out behind her, trying to haul her back into the car, but just as he grabbed her sweater, the pair were bathed in a pool of light. It came from the headlights of a patrol car.

  She stumbled towards them, still holding the gun and fell at their feet. Glatman, meanwhile, cowered by his car, sobbing and whimpering that it was not his fault.

  When Glatman’s mother left the prison after visiting her son, she said to the assembled press: ‘He is not a vicious man – he is sick.’ And that was his only hope of escaping the gas chamber; to prove that he was not of sane mind. Harvey did not want to be examined, though; he wanted to die. However, he was persuaded to undergo psychiatric tests. There was no point. The report said: ‘he shows no evidence of a psychosis. He knows right from wrong, the nature and quality of his acts and he can keep from doing wrong if he so desires.’

  Harvey pleaded guilty and on December 15, 1958, he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

  On September 18, 1959, he entered San Quentin’s notorious ‘green room’. The chamber door was locked shut at a minute past ten. He was strapped in by two minutes past ten. The cyanide pellets were released a minute later and by twelve minutes past ten, Harvey Glatman was dead.

  He might have enjoyed it a bit more if he had been hung on the end of a rope of the finest quality hemp.

  Charles Manson

  By the time he was thirty-two years old, Charles Manson had spent less than half of his life outside prisons and institutions. In fact it is reported that when he was about to be released from prison in 1967, he pleaded with the authorities: ‘Don’t let me out, I can’t cope with the outside world.’ When questioned about this in a 1981 interview, he claimed that what he really meant was: ‘I can’t handle the maniacs outside, let me back in.’

  Had they complied with his request, the web of mayhem that he spun in the late 1960s would have been prevented.

  Charles Milles Manson was born in 1934 to sixteen-year-old Ada Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital. He took his name from a man to whom his mother was briefly married, but his biological father could have been any one of a number of men. Ada was feckless and promiscuous and a big drinker, and she may even have been a prostitute. When she and her brother were sent to prison in 1939 for robbing a petrol station, Charles was sent to West Virginia to stay with an aunt and uncle, returning to his mother when she was paroled in 1942. He returned to a life of alcohol and the comings and goings of his mother’s men, lived out in cheap, dilapidated hotel rooms.

  Ada tried, without success, to have Charles fostered, and he ended up in Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana. After ten months he fled, going back to his mother. But she did not want him and he had to rob a grocery store to get enough money to rent a room.

  Burglary and theft became his way of life, but he was soon caught and sent to a juvenile centre in Indianapolis. He escaped but was recaptured and placed in another institution from which he again escaped, this time with another inmate. They committed a couple of armed robberies as they made their way to the home of the other boy’s uncle.

  Captured once again, Manson was sent to the Indiana School for Boys from which he escaped in 1951 with a couple of other boys. The trio were caught in Utah, driving a stolen car after carrying out a string of robberies. Driving a stolen car across a state line constituted a federal crime and Manson was sent to Washington DC’s National Training School for Boys. He was illiterate and, as was noted by a caseworker, dangerously antisocial.

  In 1952, only a month before he was due to attend a parole hearing, Manson held a razor to the throat of another inmate and sodomised him. They moved him to the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia and, as he was now considered ‘dangerous’, he was transferred to a more secure institution in Ohio. He played the game there, winning parole in May, 1954.

  January 1955, saw him married to a hospital waitress, Rosalie Jean Wills. He worked at poorly paid jobs and supplemented his income by stealing cars. However, in March 1956 his career as a car thief caught up with him and he was sentenced to three years at Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. When he tried to escape, again shortly before a parole hearing, five years’ probation was added to his sentence and, needless to say, parole was denied.

  By the time Manson was finally paroled in 1958, Rosalie had divorced him and disappeared with the son, Charles Manson Jnr., who had been born shortly after he went to prison. He changed career and started pimping a sixteen-year-old girl, but it was not long before he was in court again, charged with trying to cash a forged US Treasury cheque. The judge was lenient, however, and Manson received a ten-year suspended sentence and the usual probation. Eventually, his problems built up – he was investigated for violation of the Mann Act, transporting women over a state line for immoral purposes and he had breached his probation. He was arrested and ordered to serve the ten years.

  In March 1967, he was released.

  He headed for San Francisco. It was the ‘Summer of Love’ and the city’s Haight-Ashbury was a mecca for hippies and drop-outs. Manson had learned to play guitar in prison and he busked around the area. Meeting a girl, Mary Brunner, who was an assistant librarian at the University of California in Berkeley, he moved in with her. He persuaded Brunner to le
t other women move in and soon there were no fewer that eighteen girls living in the house with them, most of them emotionally troubled young women rebelling against their parents and society in general.

  Manson was a charismatic individual and took on the role of a kind of guru to these young women, sprinkling his philosophy with bits of scientology and other religious references. He could manipulate them very easily and LSD, amphetamines and other drugs helped him establish further control over them.

  With a group of them, he took off in a renovated school bus and travelled to Washington State and then down through Los Angeles and into Mexico. Returning to the LA area, the Family, as they were calling themselves, settled in Topanga Canyon.

  While out hitch-hiking, one day, two of the girls were picked up by Beach Boy, Dennis Wilson. He took them back to his house and before long the rest of the Family had moved in, costing Wilson around $100,000 over the next few months. He even paid for studio time for Manson to record the songs he had written in prison and introduced him to music business acquaintances who might help him get on, one of whom was Doris Day’s record producer son, Terry Melcher.

  Wilson managed to clear the Family out of his house and they settled at Spahn’s Movie Ranch near Topanga Canyon before moving to a couple of ranches close to Death Valley.

  It was round about this time, December 1968, that Manson first heard the newly released Beatles’ White Album. He had been an obsessive Beatles fan when they first exploded onto the American scene and now he assimilated them into his philosophy, a philosophy that said that the blacks in America’s cities would shortly rise up and slaughter the whites.

  He described The Beatles as ‘the soul’ and ‘part of the hole in the infinite’, announcing to his followers that the album was predicting the social upheaval he had been telling them about – The Beatles were talking directly to the Family.