American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Young beautiful women were (and still are) the currency of Hollywood, and thousands flocked to Los Angeles to try their luck. Their hope was to be “discovered” and raised to Lana Turner or Liz Taylor star status, but even getting steady employment in bit speaking parts was a victory over the odds. Most girls ended up doing other work: waitressing, clerking in stores or performing in lounges if they had any talent.

  Some struggling young women carved out a niche in the “glamor girl modeling” business, which ranged from legitimate modeling for catalogs, calendars or local advertising to the seedy gray market of “art photography,” where women self-advertised their availability for hourly rate “art modeling” and “figure studies” either in an improvised “studio” or in their own home or a client’s premises. Some girls even had cameras and film to loan out to the “photographer” if they did not have their own equipment. Many of the photos taken never made it to print.

  The “modeling” ranged from posing for amateur photographers and struggling wannabe professionals to seminude lingerie shoots, artistic nudies, “cheesecake pinups” and sometimes even outright porn if the girl was willing to go that far. Sometimes “modeling” included prostitution, especially if the model and client hit it off.

  Judith Ann “Judy” Van Horn Dull was one of those models, working under the name Judy Van Horn. Judy had just turned nineteen in June 1957, was the mother of a fourteenth-month-old girl and had recently separated from her twenty-two-year-old husband, Robert L. Dull, a newspaper printing room worker.

  Judy was beautiful in all the right ways for Hollywood: she was shapely, baby-doll wide-eyed and golden blond. She looked like a younger, softer and fresher teenage version of Marilyn Monroe. And like Monroe, Judy was willing to pose nude—most pinup models were. Her husband, Robert, did not approve, and one day he scooped up their daughter, Susan (or Suzanne), while she was at work and refused to return her. Judy was now in a bitter and expensive custody battle.

  Judy lived in an apartment in the landmark El Mirador building on the corner of North Sweetzer and Fountain Avenues in West Hollywood. The “bombshell blonde” Jean Harlow had lived there in the 1930s, and up-and-comers in the movie business still lived there. Judy shared the place with two other pinup models, eighteen-year-old Betty Ruth Carver, who had just arrived from Florida, and twenty-two-year-old Lynn Lykels, who had been around the modeling business for a while. All three were very busy and looked out for one another’s clients and bookings.

  “Johnny Glynn”

  On the evening of July 30, 1957, Betty Carver was alone at home with a male friend, a photographer, when an unexpected visitor knocked at the door. Standing there was a young, squirrel-faced nebbish with jug-handle ears and huge horn-rimmed glasses. She would later describe him as about twenty-nine, five feet nine, 150 pounds. Scrawny. Loser. Creepy odd but harmless.

  He introduced himself as Johnny Glynn [“Glenn” in some sources], a commercial photographer seeking her roommate, Lynn, for an “urgent” shooting assignment. He said he had worked with her before. Betty explained that Lynn was away on a shoot. He really should call first before coming by.

  Johnny was apologetic, but could he look at Lynn’s portfolio, just to confirm that she was the best for the assignment? With her male friend there, Betty didn’t hesitate to let the guy into the apartment. When Betty returned with the portfolio, Johnny pointed to one of the models’ photos displayed in the living room: “Do you have a portfolio for her?”

  “That’s Judy Van Horn. She’s not here either, but I’ll bring you her book.”

  His owllike eyes lit up as he went through Judy’s photos. She was exactly what he wanted for the shoot, he said.

  Johnny called the next day, Wednesday, but Judy was away on a shoot.

  Thursday, August 1, 1957, was a busy day for Judy. She had three appointments in the late afternoon and evening: a commercial photo shoot, a meeting with her estranged husband about their daughter, and dinner with her boyfriend.

  Johnny Glynn called at lunchtime, wanting to book her for an urgent afternoon shoot. He didn’t have a studio, so he’d like to shoot it at her apartment. Twenty dollars an hour for two hours—how could she say no?

  Glynn arrived a little early for their 2:00 p.m. appointment. Now he told her he’d managed to secure a studio. It was only a ten-minute drive away. When they finished, he would give her a ride to her next job. Judy and Lynn exchanged glances. Lynn did not remember shooting with Johnny Glynn, but she had heard his name at the studio where she worked, and he looked familiar—the big ears and glasses. He was legit, she nodded to Judy.

  Judy reluctantly agreed. As she gathered up her clothing changes, including the one for her next shoot, she asked Glynn to give her roommate his phone number where she could be reached. Lynn jotted down the phone number as he and Judy went out the door.

  That was the last time anybody saw Judy alive.

  After she failed to appear at her appointments, calls flooded in to the number Johnny Glynn had left: it was a pay phone in a parking garage. The next day, California newspapers were reporting on their front pages: “Pinup model missing in L.A.” with a huge studio headshot of Judy. Had Judy been able to return from this, having her photo out there like that might have been a huge career break. But she wasn’t returning. She was dead.

  Her bones were found four months later, 120 miles away, in the desert between Thousand Palms and Indio, so bleached and animal ravaged that nobody recognized her. The local pathologist estimated the victim to be in her mid-thirties and the bones at least a year old. Judy’s name was removed from the list of victims possibly linked to the bones.

  Two more women were going to die before Judy’s killer was apprehended.

  “Johnny Glynn” was really twenty-nine-year-old Harvey Murray Glatman of Denver, Colorado, an ex-con who had served time for abductions and assault. Glatman was still a virgin on the afternoon he abducted Judy Dull, despite his record of assaulting women. On the Tuesday night when he first appeared at the girls’ door, he had planned on ridding himself of his virginity by raping Lynn Lykels in her apartment, but he did not count on her having roommates. Once he saw Judy’s portfolio, all his desire and attention shifted to her.

  The Squirrel

  Harvey Glatman was born on December 10, 1927, in New York to Albert and Ophelia Glatman, both employees in the garment business. Ophelia was thirty-nine years old when she had Harvey but reported no unusual problems in the birth. Harvey had the usual childhood illnesses, including a bout of whooping cough and a tonsillectomy. Albert in the meantime attempted to establish a stationery store in New York, but it failed in the Depression years, and in 1937, the Glatmans closed out the business and moved to Denver, where Ophelia’s sister lived. They settled into a modest bungalow in the Montclair district, 1123 Kearney Street. Albert went to work driving a taxicab.5

  None of the typical childhood traumas or abuse frequently reported by serial killers were evident in Harvey’s childhood, but Albert was said to be a strict and often disapproving father, while Ophelia was highly protective and always indulgent of her son. She would remain so to the bitter end.

  Ophelia did later report one unusual and alarming thing about their boy: he was obsessed with rope and genital play and masturbation. Harvey was three or four years old when she caught him tying a string around his penis to a door handle. His parents would both admonish him about his frequent masturbation. By the time Harvey was twelve, he had developed a dangerous compulsion to combine masturbation with autoerotic asphyxiation—popularly known as “gasping” (or “strangubation,” “head rushing,” “chokey strokey,” and “scarfing”). It is not an exceptionally unusual practice in adolescents both male and female.* Harvey would draw a warm bath, get into the tub and tie a noose to the faucets slowly choking off his oxygen supply to bring himself into a euphoric state as he masturbated. One day his parents noticed a deep rope burn around Harv
ey’s neck and became alarmed enough to take him for professional help. The physician told them he’d grow out of it. He never did.

  According to former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood, Glatman continued the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation into adulthood, combining it with self-bondage and transvestism.6 The combination of these paraphilias is not unusual.

  Harvey was intelligent and did well at school, but he was painfully shy. Although he was not subjected to bullying, his nicknames at school were “squirrel” and “weasel.” There would be no dating for Harvey; his mother described him as “girl-shy,” reporting that he would cross the street rather than walk by a girl. Otherwise, Harvey appeared on the surface to be a well-adjusted teen, going on Boy Scout outings and holding a string of after-school jobs.

  Harvey would later confess to a secret thrill-seeking life that he started to engage in at the age of seventeen. Like William Heirens, Glatman began prowling and breaking into apartments of single women. He suddenly became unusually aggressive and hostile toward girls in school. He acquired a handgun in one of his burglaries and escalated to accosting women in the street.

  On the night of May 4, 1945, in Denver, seventeen-year-old Harvey Glatman committed his first known assault, on seventeen-year-old Eula Jo Hand. She was returning home on the bus from the movies, and Glatman was riding on the same bus. When she got off at her stop about half a block from her home, Glatman followed behind her. He thrust a handgun into her back and forced her into a backyard where he tied her up and gagged her. He struck her hard on the head with the handle of the handgun and stole the money she had in her purse. He took off Hand’s jacket and fondled her. When somebody appeared, Glatman ran off. Although she did not know his name, Eula recognized Glatman as a student at the high school she used to attend.

  Two weeks later, on May 18, Glatman was arrested and charged with armed robbery. Police had reports of several similar assaults and robberies but could not conclusively link them to Glatman. Ophelia posted a two-thousand-dollar bail bond and took him home.

  On July 15, while out on bail, Glatman took a forty-five-minute bus ride north to Boulder. Twenty-four-year-old Norene Laurel, a mother of two, was returning from the movies when Glatman forced her at gunpoint into a dark alley. He bound and gagged her and then walked her miles outside of Boulder’s city limits into the foothills. He kept her there all night, fondled her, but did not rape her. In the morning he took her money, hailed a cab and instructed the driver to drop him off at the bus depot and take Laurel home. He was arrested two days later in Denver and brought back to Boulder and charged with armed robbery. Again, Ophelia paid his bail, this time five thousand dollars, but as soon as Glatman was released, he ran away from her. A few days later, a court ordered Glatman to be confined for evaluation in a psychiatric facility. A psychiatric evaluation from Dr. J. P. Hilton reported:

  Harvey Glatman first came to see me in August of 1945 at the age of seventeen. At that time he had a history of having bruised his neck by tying a rope around it. He was sullen, morose and very disrespectful and for several years had felt that everyone was against him including his parents. He had been shy with girls prior to the past year when his attitude changed completely, and he became aggressive with women.7

  Eula Jo Hand, Glatman’s first victim, married shortly after the assault, and when it came time to bring him to trial, her mother-in-law demanded she refuse to testify as it would be “embarrassing” to the family. Glatman in the meantime was arrested a third time in September, again for accosting and binding women.8

  Glatman finally stood trial in December and was sentenced to a one-to-five-year prison term for robbery but paroled after eight months in July 1946, judged to be a young, compliant and cooperative “model inmate.” Ophelia would later claim that psychiatrists recommended a trip out of state and dancing lessons to increase his confidence with girls. While Albert remained in Denver, Ophelia took Harvey to Yonkers, New York, where Harvey immediately purchased a knife and a realistic-looking toy pistol.

  On August 17, 1946, Glatman confronted a woman walking on the street without realizing her boyfriend was coming up behind her. In the confrontation, Glatman slashed the boyfriend with his knife and escaped.

  Glatman immediately left Yonkers for Albany, New York, where in a two-day spree he accosted three women in the street and robbed them of their purses. He was apprehended on August 27. Because the youthful Glatman presented a mild-mannered, geekish persona, charges of first-degree robbery were reduced to larceny. The district attorney commented that Glatman showed potential to be rehabilitated. In October 1946, Glatman pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of five to ten years in the New York State correctional system.

  Glatman earned positive reports on his conduct and progress as an inmate and was enrolled in a radio and television repair program. On April 16, 1951, after serving five years, he was paroled and subject to supervision until September 1956. He returned to Denver to live with his parents.

  In 1952, Albert passed away and left him his 1961 black Dodge Coronet sedan, the one that would become a key instrument in his murders. He continued taking courses in television repair while working at a string of casual jobs. In 1954, he moved into his own apartment after unspecified difficulties with his mother. His mother would help him with the rent if his part-time work was insufficient.

  Bizarre Magazine

  Harvey seemed to be staying out of trouble. But secretly, Glatman was scripting his fantasies and compulsions through his consumption of a postwar boom of new sexual paraphernalia in the form of mail-order fetish bondage comics, photos and stories, 8 mm film loops and magazines, produced by artists like John Willie, the editor of Bizarre magazine, and publisher Irving Klaw of Nutrix. Bettie Page became and remains to this day the queen star of these publications.

  Intended for mail-order distribution, there were no nudes or explicit depictions of sex to draw the ire of postal inspectors. Models were featured wearing exaggerated “elegant” fetish lingerie, hosiery and footwear and were posed gagged and restrained in elaborately knotted rope bindings or custom-made leather restraints. Irving Klaw’s Nutrix publications would advertise photo sets: “114 4x5 bondage photos for $42.00; 26 spanking photos for $9.50; 160 different Fight Girl photos divided into 3 different fights at the rate of 10 Fight photos for $2.50; 36 bound and gagged photos; 26 tied but not gagged; 40 different High Heel photos; 26 different specially posed knee-length laced boot photos of dominant Maria Stinger in shiny silver metallic threaded toreador pants (many holding whip in hand) . . .”

  By the standards of the 1970s and 1980s, or today, the photos were naively erotic despite the bondage theme. Men were mostly absent from the photos. Just like in true-detective magazines, the models often looked off the page into the camera, meeting the viewer’s gaze.

  The Klaw bondage magazines featured two basic types of scenarios. There were the coy, playful bondage scenes where consent was implicit, set in living rooms and bedrooms, and the smiling model wore exaggerated sexual lingerie and ultra-high-heeled fetish footwear. The message was she came dressed to willingly play bondage fantasy “games” on her own accord. There was often a lesbian twist with another female dominating the submissive model in restraints.

  The other type of scenario was a darker abduction theme: frightened-looking models gagged and bound also in intricately knotted cords and restraints, but in basements or warehouse storerooms, women often in formal office clothes and everyday shoes, thrown down onto a dirty warehouse floor, tied or shackled to a basement post, their garments in disarray, skirts raised above the welts of their nylon stockings, legs bare to the garter line.

  Glatman purchased camera equipment and lights and began tentatively seeking out models to pose for his own bondage pictures. His first approach was to hire two models at the same time and have them tie each other up. That way, he calculated, the models would feel safe. Soon, Glatman began to realize that his dema
nds were not all that bizarre or unusual in the models’ experience, even in Denver, and that many had no objection to being gagged and bound. The only problem was, Glatman wasn’t turned on by women pretending to be bound into submission; he wanted them to be in actual bondage, in a state of real fear and dread, under his complete and actual control.

  On September 7, 1956, Harvey Glatman completed his term of parole and was now completely free of supervision. Noting a Los Angeles return address for many of the photos he was ordering by mail, Glatman headed out to Hollywood to start a new life.

  In Los Angeles, Glatman found a bounty of pinup models, many quite ready and willing to be bound and gagged in staged poses. But Glatman wanted it real. And there was something else. Glatman was turning twenty-nine (near the average age at which male serial killers first kill), but he was still a virgin. He resolved to experience actual “sexual intercourse” (the only term he used in his police interview). And he was going to have it forcibly, in the kind of bondage scenario he was obsessing over.

  That is how he ended up calling on Lynn Lykels and eventually settled on her roommate, Judy Dull, instead.

  The Murder of Judy Dull

  After picking up Judy, Glatman drove her to his “studio” in his apartment on Melrose Avenue, where he had set up his Rolleicord f/3.5 medium-format camera and some lights. Glatman’s Rolleicord was a cheap consumer version of the higher-end professional Rolleiflex camera, but a lot of the models didn’t know it (or care). Glatman had also learned how to develop and print his own photos, setting up a darkroom in his washroom. He wasn’t going to risk taking his photos to the drugstore to be developed and printed.