by Ann Rule
His earliest possible release date is January 22, 2007.
He will be almost 60.
Mallory Gilbert returned to life outside media headlines. She, too, would be in her mid-fifties now.
The Lonely Hearts Killer
Although the phenomenon of serial murder was not widely recognized until the early 1980s—when it was embraced enthusiastically by the media—the first significant modern-day killer of this genre was largely ignored, at least outside the boundaries of Los Angeles, California.
Jack the Ripper was a serial killer. So were Albert Fish, who killed children, and the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo—who some believe was not as prolific a murderer as he is usually portrayed as being—convicted of killing mostly elderly women in the nursing or music professions. There have been many other murderers whose victim tolls were high but who failed to garner sweeping headlines. Even so, all multiple killers were referred to as mass murderers.
That was the term used by even the most sophisticated criminologists—until Pierce R. Brooks, a Los Angeles detective doing research on his off-duty hours, focused on the kind of murderer who picks a specific victim type and literally becomes addicted to murder, taking one or two victims at a time, over a long time, until he is either caught or dead.
The Harvey Glatman case is a classic, made more so because it predated the Boston Strangler—considered by most experts to be the first serial killer in modern culture. Glatman’s murders made headlines in Los Angeles and Southern California, but they were largely eclipsed nationally by coverage of Charles Starkweather, the spree killer who traveled west in the late fifties with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, killing anyone who blocked his path or had something he wanted. Starkweather was not a true serial killer: he fell into the category of a “spree killer.” Neither was William Heirens of Chicago, the young premed student who killed two adult women and 5-year-old Suzanne Degnan in 1943, scrawling on the wall of one victim in her own lipstick “Catch me before I kill more!” Heirens’s victims had no particular profile that singled them out as fitting within certain descriptive parameters.
Pierce Brooks, who may be better known as the prime investigator in the “Onion Field murder” of a fellow law enforcement officer, was never a man to toot his own horn, but I believe he did more to help both police officers and laymen understand the threat of serial murder than anyone I ever knew.
I consider Pierce Brooks my mentor, an outstanding detective whom his subordinates admired, a quiet man whose mind was always working. It was Brooks who called me out of the blue in 1983 and said, “This is Pierce Brooks—you may have heard of me.”
I had, but I certainly never expected that a man as revered as he was in law enforcement circles would be calling me. Brooks invited me to participate in the task force that was being formed to set up a tracking system to catch serial killers. It would be called VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and representatives from the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, and law enforcement agencies in every state in America were prepared to meet at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and see that it succeeded.
One of the biggest problems lawmen faced was the growing mobility of roving killers. There had to be a better way to keep track of murderers who were clever enough to kill their victims in one police jurisdiction, leave the bodies in a second jurisdiction, and then move on to a new killing ground.
In the eighties, most police departments didn’t routinely use computers as a large part of their investigations, and identification based on DNA was on a distant horizon, but Pierce Brooks believed the only way to catch the most elusive slayers was to recognize the patterns of serial murder, and to make it easier for far-flung law enforcement agencies to communicate.
I became part of that VICAP task force at Brooks’s invitation after I presented a four-hour seminar on the fatal travels of Ted Bundy, who had taken victims in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Florida, and probably in other states.
Bundy may have been the “poster boy” for serial murder in the eighties as the concept became known, but it was a sadistic sociopath named Harvey Glatman who raised Pierce Brooks’s antennae and his curiosity back in the late fifties.
Glatman was Brooks’s prototype as the detective read scores of books, journals, and periodicals, looking for other murderers who operated in a serial manner. No matter how many criminologists and detectives claim that they were the first to recognize the dark phenomenon of serial murder and coin the term serial killer, the truth is that it was Pierce Brooks.
When the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was formed, many of the astute special agents had also detected the similar patterns of an especially deadly kind of killer. Howard Teten, Roy Hazelwood, John Douglas, Gregg McCrary, and Bob Ressler were seeing commonalities in the multiple murderers they profiled and interviewed—people like Edmund Kemper, Coral Eugene Watts, and David Berkowitz. Good fortune and shared ideas brought them together with Brooks and Bob Heck of the U.S. Justice Department in working to establish VICAP.
My assignment in the VICAP task force was to work with a New York detective who had been instrumental in capturing Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer. We did the first mock-up of a questionnaire that would be sent to any police agency requesting help in closing unsolved murder cases that fit within the parameters of those committed by sadistic sociopaths.
There were so many aspects to consider: victim description, method of murder, posture of the corpse, day of the week, time of the month and year, season, weather, topography, occupation of victim, sex of victim, age, “souvenirs” probably taken from the body site by the killer . . . Each aspect we thought of seemed to bring three more that needed to be added to the questionnaire. Long after I left the task force, the final form consisted of scores of pages.
VICAP was Pierce Brooks’s vision of how to track and trap a serial killer come true.
And Harvey Glatman was the macabre inspiration who began it all thirty years earlier.
A Los Angeles detective in 1957 had to get his satisfaction from a job well done; an honest policeman wasn’t going to get rich. In December of that year, the Chief of Police made $18,500, A detective sergeant grossed $575 a month. That was less than the one “City Mother” who cared for abandoned children and made $641.
Los Angeles was a different world in the late 1950s. There were still orchards full of blooming orange trees in between the buildings, there was no graffiti, no gang-bangers—no gangs as we know them now for that matter—and most citizens respected their police department. In 1958—in the entire year of 1958—Los Angeles policemen seized only 4,523 barbiturate tablets, 37 capsules of cocaine, and 148 pounds of marijuana.
In 1957, Pierce Brooks was a handsome detective in his mid-thirties who wore a fedora and chain-smoked. He was the epitome of what television viewers expected an LAPD detective to be. He even served as a technical adviser to Jack Webb and the immensely popular Dragnet series. Brooks made sure that Webb’s fictional depictions, based on actual cases, rang true. He was also a certified blimp pilot and had his picture taken once as he piloted a blimp high above Los Angeles: his passenger that day was Howard Hughes’s discovery, Jane Russell. One day, he would be featured as the detective sergeant whose interrogations tripped up the cop-killers in Joe Wambaugh’s The Onion Field.
Pierce Brooks worked scores of homicide cases; it was in 1958 that he found himself working concurrent unsolved cases—one that involved multiple murders and one with a series of violent rapes. It seemed to him that there had to be some way to find out if there were other jurisdictions working similar cases.
Somewhat naively—because he was so far ahead of technology—Brooks went in to talk to the Chief of Police. He asked if the Los Angeles Police Department might be able to buy a computer. The chief checked it out and called Brooks in. “For one thing, Pierce,” he began, “a computer would cost our entire budget for a whole year. For another, it would be so huge that it woul
d fill up the police building and there wouldn’t be room for anything else.”
Chastened but determined, Pierce Brooks began his own primitive “human computer” project. Every day after his shift was over, he went to the Los Angeles public library’s media room, where he perused out-of-town newspapers for an hour.
“It wasn’t a bad deal,” he recalled. “I avoided the traffic and I found out what crimes were happening outside Los Angeles. I found my rapist that way. But I didn’t find Shirley Bridgeford’s killer—not then.”
Shirley Ann Bridgeford haunted Brooks. She was a 30-year-old divorcée with two little boys. She had virtually nothing going for her beyond her extended family who loved her. Shirley was plain—even a little homely. She’d given herself a home permanent and it left her with curls that were too tight, making her bad haircut even worse. She was thin and flat-chested and her elbows and knees were knobby. Her nose was a little too large for her face, and her complexion was flawed. Shirley just wasn’t the sort of woman that men would approach for a date. Any money she made went to support her two little boys, so she did the best she could without spending it at a beauty parlor.
Shirley Bridgeford was very shy and she was poor enough that she couldn’t even think about affording an apartment for herself and her sons. For the moment, she had to live with her sister’s family, but she still had romantic dreams of remarrying someone who would be kind and caring and provide a nice home for all of them.
She had answered personal ads, but nothing came of it. Then she signed up with a lonely hearts club on S. Vermont Street. It was called “Patti Sullivan’s Lonely Hearts Club.” “Patti”—whose real name was Irby Lameroux—would give out the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three women to any man with ten dollars and a driver’s license, ostensibly to verify that he was who he said he was.
Shirley wasn’t expecting Prince Charming; she hoped instead for a Nice Guy. Early in March 1958, she received a phone call from a man who said his name was George Williams. Patti Sullivan had given him Shirley’s name and phone number. He sounded kind of shy and stammered a little when he said he was a plumber.
Well, that was okay. Plumbers weren’t exactly exciting, but they made a good, solid living. Shirley agreed to go dancing with Williams on Saturday night, March 8. She hoped that he was a little more interesting in person than he had sounded on the phone.
Shirley dressed carefully for her date, playing up her good features, like her slender waist. First the undergarments: a lacy slip and a panty girdle—which all women wore in the fifties—along with a garter belt that held up her nylons. She chose a pastel dress with a bertha collar, draped at the neckline. The extra flounces of material made her look bustier. Her belt was black with a huge gold buckle, and she wore black high heels.
George Williams showed up about half an hour early, while Shirley was still getting dressed. That made her nervous. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him in the living room talking to her family as she threw on her clothes more hurriedly than she’d planned.
When she walked out, her heart sank. She met her sister’s eyes and both women silently agreed with their raised eyebrows that Williams was not the kind of man they’d been hoping for. They excused themselves for a moment and went into the kitchen to talk.
Later, Shirley’s sister told Pierce Brooks that Shirley didn’t want to go on the date at all. “But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” Shirley’s sister said. “She’s like that. He didn’t look very attractive, and he certainly didn’t smell very good, but she couldn’t think of an excuse not to go. She decided she would go for an hour or so, and then make an excuse so she could come home early.”
George Williams hadn’t seemed very taken with Shirley, either, but his conversational abilities were so lacking that it was hard to tell what he was thinking. Shirley Bridgeford shot her sister a last despairing look as she slipped into her coat.
An hour passed, and then two. As midnight came and went, Shirley’s family began to worry. What had seemed only a disappointing blind date was turning into something far worse. In fact, the last time anyone ever saw Shirley Bridgeford alive was on that Saturday night, just as spring came to Los Angeles in 1958.
• • •
It was to be a spring full of portents and shocking news, rife with headlines, many of them centering around Los Angeles. Show business entrepreneur Mike Todd’s plane crashed in a violent storm and Elizabeth Taylor mourned; Lana Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl, confessed to having fatally stabbed Johnny Stompanato, her mother’s gangster lover; and Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army—all within the space of two and a half weeks.
Pierce Brooks scarcely noticed. He was working around the clock trying to find Shirley Bridgeford. All her family knew for sure was that she had left on a blind date with a man referred by Patti Sullivan’s Lonely Hearts Club. They described him as being about 30, Caucasian, with dark hair. He was about five feet ten but couldn’t have weighed more than 145 pounds. “He had a large nose,” Shirley’s brother-in-law said, “and it was kind of bulbous on the end.”
“He’s a plumber named George Williams,” Shirley’s sister said. They had no idea where he lived, and they weren’t sure what kind of car he drove. “He’s got big ears, though,” a family member said. “Really big ears, but it wasn’t just the way he looked. Shirley just didn’t want to go out with him.”
As Pierce Brooks feared, Patti Sullivan knew nothing about “George Williams.” She’d barely glanced at his driver’s license. She had no address on file for him, and she couldn’t even remember what he looked like, or the names of the two other women on her list that she might have given him. For Patti, he’d been only a quick ten bucks. She promised to contact Brooks at once if “Williams” should return for more women’s names.
Of course, he didn’t.
Brooks found a lot of George Williamses in the Los Angeles area, and some were plumbers as Shirley’s blind date had said he was. But none of them looked like the description given for Shirley Bridgeford’s blind date. And they all had alibis for the night of March 8. The detective sergeant figured from the beginning that “Williams” had given both Patti Sullivan and Shirley Bridgeford a fake name.
Shirley was just gone, and as days and then weeks went by with no word from her, it seemed likely that she was dead. Still, none of the unidentified bodies of young women in the Los Angeles County Morgue resembled her.
In the end, Brooks would find her body, and he would chart a pattern as clear as a flight plan. But only in retrospect. And that would fill him with a fire to identify patterns of serial murder early on so that he could stalk the killers even as they stalked their victims.
For the thousandth time, he wished that there could be some central clearinghouse—like the computer that was still out of the question—where he could look for similar victims, suspects, and M.O.’s under investigation in other police agencies. Instead, he read through all the LAPD’s missing-persons reports involving women and then he went back to the library to pore through newspapers. He’d solved three cases through his library research already, so he kept spending at least an hour a day there.
One missing Los Angeles woman had virtually nothing in common with Shirley Bridgeford. Like thousands of other young women, she had come to Hollywood believing that her looks could propel her into the heady life of a movie star. If that had happened, the first thing powerful studio executives would have changed would have been her name: Judy Dull.
At 19, Judy Ann Dull was very pretty and she had a figure that would rival Marilyn Monroe’s. She was a blue-eyed blonde too. She found an apartment at 1304 N.
Sweetzer in West Hollywood, sharing the rent with a roommate. In the glory days decades before, many big stars owned homes on Sweetzer: Charlie Chaplin, for example. The brick houses were comfortable and cottage-like, with stucco interiors, dark oak beams and flower-filled courtyards. Later, they were divided into apartments that were far more utilitarian.
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br /> The fact that Sweetzer was close to Hollywood Boulevard was thrilling to Judy. She was as beautiful as Shirley Bridgeford was plain. Given other circumstances—a little luck and, hopefully, a new name—Judy Dull could have gone far in Hollywood, but so much of stardom is a matter of timing and luck, and Judy missed out on both. Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield already had a lock on the voluptuous-blonde image, and Sandra Dee was the leading sweet-faced blonde. So Judy took whatever jobs she could, and she was grateful for the chance to make $50 modeling for “Johnny Glenn,” a Hollywood freelance photographer. Johnny had met her roommate first, but he had quickly noticed some pictures of Judy and asked if he might meet and photograph her.
It was late July 1957 when Judy Dull heard from Glenn. She was divorced with a child who was living with her ex-husband. She wanted desperately to get custody, but she needed money for an attorney to do that. On August 1, Glenn picked her up at her apartment, although the arrangement had originally been that he would photograph her there. He explained quickly that the lighting in her apartment wasn’t suitable, and that his studio caught the light perfectly.
His “studio” was really his apartment. He lived at 5924 Melrose. Today, Melrose, which runs parallel to and a block away from Santa Monica Boulevard, is where the stars shop for trendy clothes, furniture, and antiques. It wasn’t quite as fashionable in 1957. Still, everything seemed all right to Judy Dull; there were lights and other camera gear set up. Johnny Glenn’s apartment was small, but it was neat enough. Some of his furniture was rather nice: classic mahoghany veneer—a round end table, a coffee table. But the chair he wanted Judy to pose in was a cheap-looking easy chair with the kind of stretchy cover sold at Sears, Roebuck to hide worn upholstery.