American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Glatman told Judy he had an assignment to shoot a true-detective magazine cover. He would need to tie her up, gag her and pose her in various stages of disheveled clothing, gradually hiking her skirt up and over her waist, exposing her in her underwear, garters and stockings. He selected from Judy’s wardrobe a pleated skirt and a cashmere sweater top, under which she was to wear a frilly slip, nylon stockings held up by a garter belt and open-toed pumps. He instructed her to pose with a look of fear and submission, like all the models on true-detective magazine covers.

  After tying her hands behind her back and gagging her, he seated her in an armchair and shot a series of photos in which Judy feigned fear and distress. He bound her legs, at first just above the ankles. As he shot his sequence of photos, he pulled Judy’s skirt higher and bound her legs with another cord just above her knees. He then pulled off her skirt, laid her facedown on the floor and took more pictures.

  Judy was probably familiar with true-detective magazine covers and fetish bondage photos and perhaps even posed for them for other photographers. The photos that Glatman shot of Judy are often posted on the Internet with a set of harder abduction bondage photos of a blond model who resembles Judy Dull, posed in a storeroom setting and in a different wardrobe. One photo has her tied topless spread-eagle to an X-frame. The websites stupidly claim that the photos are among those that Glatman took of her. In fact, they were shot and published by fetish photographer John Willie in Bizarre magazine. The model, however, maybe was Judy. Her resemblance is striking, although the soft blond Marilyn look Judy cultivated was one that many girls chose in that epoch. But if Judy did indeed previously pose in John Willie bondage photos, it helps explain why she so readily allowed herself to be bound and restrained by a photographer she had only met an hour previously.

  In his confession, Glatman recounted how after some time passed, Judy became increasingly uncomfortable, restless and anxious and how that excited him. When he began fondling her, he crossed the professional line between photographer and model. Now Judy became fearful that she might be in real peril.

  Glatman had acquired a Browning .32 handgun, and he threatened her with it, telling her he was going to keep her for a while and have “some fun” with her. As Judy lay helpless, she motioned for him to take her gag off, then assured him that whatever he wanted, she would go along with. There was no need to hurt her; her worst fear was her husband finding out about this and making it an issue at the upcoming custody hearing. She assured him she would not tell anybody of this incident. But Glatman was only beginning.

  Glatman kept her tied up on the floor. He went into the kitchen and ate an apple and drank a glass of water, relishing the sight of the bound woman struggling on the floor. Eventually, he untied her and ordered her to undress. Glatman then raped her twice on the couch, at long last losing his virginity. Glatman was still testing the limits of his fantasies. He was turned on by bound and gagged women, but he would untie them to complete the sex act, probably still testing and trying the transition between his fantasies and their realization into reality. Often that is the addictive cyclical nature of serial murder, a constant attempt to perfect and narrow the gap between fantasy and reality, between disappointment and fulfillment.

  After being raped, Judy did her best to remain calm and collected, again reminding Glatman that the only thing she was concerned about was her husband finding out about this. If he let her go, she wouldn’t breathe a word of what just happened, she told him repeatedly.

  According to his confession, Glatman was undecided about what to do with her. Killing was not part of Glatman’s fantasy; binding and gagging women and putting them under his absolute control were his fantasy. It was now approaching six o’clock, and Glatman knew that Judy had missed her appointments. People by now must have been calling the fake number he had left with Lynn Lykels. While he wanted to believe that Judy perhaps would keep her mouth shut, the same could not be said for the others. The one thing that Glatman feared the most was being arrested and sent back to prison, not so much for himself, as for what it would do to his trusting mother.

  It is unclear exactly when Glatman decided he would coldly kill Judy. They now calmly sat together on the couch like a couple from 6:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., watching TV as Glatman waited for nightfall. We don’t know what they watched, but that evening the TV shows on air in the Los Angeles area included Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Amos ’n’ Andy, The Little Rascals, The Mickey Rooney Show, The Lone Ranger, The Best of Groucho, Dragnet and the movies Judge Hardy’s Children with Mickey Rooney, Night Song with Dana Andrews and Conquest starring Greta Garbo.

  When it became dark, Glatman calmly told Judy that he was going to drive her out into the desert and leave her there with some bus fare while he made his escape. She was not thrilled at the premise but had no choice. He drove her out at random to the desert and parked on a remote dirt road. He gathered up a blanket and strands of rope and walked her into the desert with her hands bound behind her back, telling her he wanted to have sex one more time before he let her go.

  He spread the blanket on the ground and laid her on it facedown. He tied her ankles together with one strand. He then took a five-foot length of cord, tied it around her pinioned ankles, pulled on it hard, bending her legs back at the knee, and then quickly wound the other end of the cord around her throat. The spring tension of her legs as they pulled to unbend tightened the line around her throat; the more she struggled, the more it tightened. As she weakened and stopped struggling, the tension in the bind slackened. Glatman drove his knee into Judy’s back, pulling hard on the cord to finish her off. He later recalled it took about five to ten minutes before she stopped moving. He said he did not shoot her because it would have been “too messy” and he also worried about leaving ballistic evidence.

  Once he thought Judy was dead, he undid all the rope ligatures and put them in his pocket so as not to leave evidence behind. Afterward, he scooped out a shallow grave with his hands and buried Judy Dull in the desert.

  That’s how twenty-nine-year-old Harvey Murray Glatman finally lost his virginity.

  Now he wanted more.

  The Murder of Shirley Bridgeford: “GIRLS—GIRLS—GIRLS”

  Despite the immediate hue and cry in the media over Judy Dull’s disappearance, nobody got a fix on the mysterious jug-eared “Johnny Glynn.” Glatman was clever. Following the murder, he gave up his apartment and drove back to Denver to lie low for a few months at his mother’s house before returning to Los Angeles. Although there was nothing he could do about his big bat ears, he changed his glasses and grew a mustache.

  Glatman also changed his MO. He had noticed a classified advertisement for a “lonely hearts” dating service: “GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS—Call Patti Sullivan Club for introductions.” Harvey now adopted a new name—George Williams—and appeared for the required personal interview at the Patti Sullivan Club office on South Vermont Avenue. He claimed to be a wealthy single plumber living in Pasadena. He gave them his fake name, a fake phone number and a fake address, paid a ten-dollar fee, and without confirming any of the information, the dating service obligingly handed him the names and phone numbers of two divorced women who had recently enrolled with them.

  The first date Glatman called up was a disaster. She was a twenty-six-year-old Hollywood secretary with a son. She immediately fell for him, huge ears and all. She seated him on her couch, doted on him, brought him tea and cookies, coffee and cake, babbled and giggled flirtatiously and by the end of the evening she was ready to sweep Harvey Glatman off his feet into her bedroom. She told him she loved a smart man who was also good with his hands like a plumber. Glatman found her so intimidating that he must have rushed out of her apartment, coffee cup still in his hands. She was exactly what he did not want.

  Later she said of her date with Glatman, “I found him to be very pleasant, and a perfect gentleman.” She was a little miffed that he never called her again.


  His second date was with twenty-four-year-old Shirley Ann Loy Bridgeford, a divorcée in Sun Valley with two young sons. Shirley had just enrolled in the dating service at her friend’s urging. Glatman called and invited her to go square-dancing at the Sun Valley Rancho, an urban cowboy club and banquet hall, about a mile and half from where she lived. It sounded like fun. This was going to be Shirley’s first date in over a year.

  For the occasion, Shirley chose a blue-and-green dress cinched at the waist with a wide, big-buckled belt, seamed stockings and her favorite black suede heels. Being March, it was cool, and she borrowed her mother’s long tan coat with big, flat buttons. From her sister she borrowed a pair of sexy bright red underwear.

  Much would be made of the red underwear, which became key in the identification of Shirley’s remains. It was a precursor to an attitude that many female victims would be subjected to in the decades to come in which their “sexual promiscuity” became the explanation for why they were raped, killed and mutilated.

  On Saturday, March 8, 1958, Glatman rang the bell of Shirley’s home on Tuxford Street, where she lived with her mother and sons. A house full of people was waiting there to give Harvey a look-over. There were her two sons, aged three and five; her mother babysitting them; her two sisters; and the husband of one of the sisters. They spoke with Glatman for about fifteen minutes while Shirley finished getting ready.

  They described him as at least six feet tall with blue eyes, but Shirley’s mother was later unable to recognize photos of Glatman. They commented that he seemed reserved but pleasant. He wore a blue jacket and gray pants, which one of the sisters remarked made him look a little shabby. They all agreed on one thing: he had enormous ears.

  As she left with her date, Shirley asked her mother for a quarter for cigarettes.

  That was the last time anybody saw her.

  On this occasion, Glatman had packed some water and candy in his car, for the eventual trip into the desert. As soon as they got into his car, he asked Shirley if she’d mind skipping dancing and instead take a moonlit drive down the coast for dinner. She agreed. Glatman found her suitably compliant. In his confession, he said they stopped for dinner and then they necked and petted in his car in the restaurant parking lot. When he attempted to have sex with her, she demurred and asked him to drive her home. Without Shirley realizing it at first, Glatman instead drove them in the opposite direction, southeast into San Diego County. When she saw that he was not driving her home and began to protest, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and raped her at gunpoint in the back seat. Afterward, he drove out at random into the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park where he parked at a secluded spot, unloaded his camera equipment, blanket, and lengths of cord and gags, and walked Shirley out into the desert. He bound and molested her while waiting for dawn so that his photographs would be better lit. Shirley reminded him she had two children, and he assured her that he would not hurt her. As the sun rose, he set up his Rolleicord and photographed her in various stages of bondage. Then he tied her just as he did Judy Dull, attaching her pinioned ankles to a cord wrapped tightly around her throat, and watched her strangle to death in the desert dawn’s early light.

  Glatman would later state he felt “sorry for her” and regretted killing her because of her two children and because she wasn’t as “pretty” as the other girls and did not “deserve” to die. But he wasn’t going back to prison and therefore he “had to” kill her.

  He rolled Shirley’s body into her mother’s tan coat and tore off its buttons, concerned he might have left fingerprints on them. He left her there under a Joshua tree but took the quarter her mother had given her.

  After his arrest seven months later, Glatman was able to lead police to her body. After hiking through the desert, they came upon the tan coat and scattered bones, a shoe and scraps of blue and green dress material. There was little left of Shirley Bridgeford. When police lifted up the coat, they found the pair of red panties that her sister would later identify. Although he had admitted to abducting, binding, gagging, photographing, raping and murdering his victims, Glatman absolutely denied stripping off her panties. He insisted that they ended up under her coat “due to natural action or animals, or something that may have . . . I understand there are coyotes that are . . . whatever some of those kind of things in that area . . . and possibly they had picked at the body, or something like that.”

  Serial killers are touchy about odd things. Edmund Kemper, who confessed to abducting, murdering and decapitating female victims, said that he apologized to one of his victims as he was stabbing her when his hand accidentally brushed her breast. He told police that he never “touched inappropriately” any of his victims; at least, not while they were alive.

  The Murder of Ruth Mercado: “She Was the One I Really Liked”

  Ruth Rita Mercado, twenty-four, had made her way from New York to Los Angeles, seeking fame and fortune, but was surviving by stripping under the name Angela Rojas and advertising herself as a model with her own studio available for both professional and amateur photographers. She lived in a warren of apartments on 3714 West Pico Boulevard and had a back room that served as the “studio.” Glatman saw her ad in the paper and called her. They made an appointment for the late evening of July 22. He packed bread, peanut butter, fruit, candy, water, rope and blankets and drove over to her place, but when Glatman appeared at her door, Mercado apologetically canceled the appointment, stating she was not feeling well. Glatman in the meantime took note of the apartment doors and the street.

  On the next day, July 23, 1958, he returned, this time unannounced. He parked his car several blocks away and walked over to Mercado’s apartment with his handgun, some lengths of rope, a cloth gag and a pair of red rubber dishwashing gloves in his pocket. Glatman was, as they say, “forensically aware.”

  Mercado was surprised to see him but recognized him as a wannabe client from the night before and allowed him to enter. Glatman closed the door and locked it and then drew his handgun. He ordered Ruth Mercado into her bedroom and then gagged her and tied her hands and legs and fondled her for a while. Then he undid the rope binding and raped her on the bed (or at least he claimed to have removed it).

  It was after 11:30 p.m. now. Glatman told Mercado he wanted to keep her a little longer and take her out on a drive for “a picnic” and more sex. He ordered her to get dressed in “street clothing,” robbed her of about twenty dollars and then walked her out at gunpoint down deserted Pico Boulevard to his car, her hands bound behind her back but covered by a coat he draped over her shoulders. He drove in the same direction he took Shirley Bridgeford, toward Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Along the way he stopped several times to eat a sandwich and fondle and rape his victim again.

  He kept Mercado captive in the desert all of the next day. Eventually, he laid out his blanket, bound her like the others, took photographs of her and then strangled her in the same way. He made no attempt to conceal Mercado’s body. He took her stockings, slip, wristwatch and identification as souvenirs and returned to Los Angeles in the early-morning hours with a fresh new batch of photographs. Glatman would later say, “She didn’t suffer much. I really didn’t want to kill her, she was the one I really liked. But she could have identified me.”

  It was the landlord who several days later noted Mercado’s absence and reported it to the police. Since Mercado was living alone and worked independently as a striptease dancer and model, there were no leads or suspects in her disappearance. Because of her profession, her absence did not set off any alarms and her disappearance was noted but made a low priority. No mention of it was made in the newspapers in the way it was of Judy Dull’s and Shirley Bridgeford’s disappearances.

  Captured

  Calling himself “Frank Johnson,” Glatman responded to an ad for Diane’s Studio at 5353 Sunset Boulevard offering pinup models for private and professional photographers at hourly rates. He booked
Diane herself for several sessions at $22.50 for the use of the studio plus $15.00 an hour for modeling.

  Diane thought him harmless but creepy and was put off by his increasingly disheveled state and unpleasant body odor. When he appeared at her studio at around 8:00 p.m. on Monday, October 27, wanting to book a session with her, Diane didn’t want to do it. She did, however, have a new model for him, and the studio was available if he wanted to shoot her. Glatman agreed.

  Diane called twenty-eight-year-old Lorraine Vigil, a pretty, almond-eyed secretary who was looking to branch out into modeling. Was she interested in a modeling assignment at the studio that night? The photographer would come by her place and pick her up. Lorraine agreed. Before hanging up the phone, Diane warned her, “It may be nothing, but he’s sort of creepy. Just watch yourself, all right?”

  “Frank Johnson” soon appeared at her door. Lorraine asked to see his identification, but he told her he had left it at home. Not wanting to lose the fifteen dollars, she reluctantly agreed to accompany him to the studio. The man appeared rumpled, seedy and indeed creepy, with big glasses and protruding ears—but otherwise harmless. She asked for her fee up front. He rummaged around in his pockets and produced a ten-dollar bill, telling her he’d get change for the other five he owed her. Lorraine told her landlord that she was going for a photo session at Diane’s Studio and gave the address, making sure that the photographer heard her. She thought it would be an “insurance policy.”