Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  He explained to Judy that he had been commissioned to take pictures for a fact-detective magazine. All the covers featured women in jeopardy. So he would have to tie her hands and ankles and put a gag in her mouth, and she would be required to act a little and look frightened. She agreed to the first poses. It wasn’t as if she was half-nude; she wore a long tailored skirt, a sweater that buttoned up the front with two dozen tiny buttons, open-toed pumps with four-inch heels, and nylons with the usual seam in the back.

  The first pictures of Judy weren’t disturbing. The gag in her mouth looked loose, and so did the white rope binding her ankles. At Glenn’s direction, she opened her eyes wide and looked up to her left as if she were watching someone warily.

  It would be a long time before anyone saw Judy’s photos, and they would never appear on the cover of True Detective magazine, although some pictures of her would be printed inside the fact-detective monthly . . . .

  The pictures “Johnny Glenn” took still exist. Initially, Judy Dull’s expression of horror is plainly bad acting. In later frames, the gag in her mouth has been cinched tight, her knees are bound together, her sweater is unbuttoned to show her bra, and her skirt is gone: she wears only a half-slip. Even so, she showed far less skin than most starlets do in 2004. But, later, there is no question that Judy has realized she has made a terrible mistake.

  At the end of the roll of film, she is naked except for her nylons, which fall below her knees, her nose is bloodied, and her expression is all too real. She is clearly a captive, caught in a bondage scene that wouldn’t be publishable in the kinkiest magazine. Judy Dull’s expression is one of dread resignation, as if she has been raped and she knows she is going to die.

  When Pierce Brooks read the file on Judy Dull’s disappearance, she was still missing. And he had no way of knowing then that the ghastly photographs of her even existed. All her roommate had been able to tell detectives who worked the West Hollywood district was that Judy hadn’t come back from an appointment with a magazine photographer named Johnny Glenn.

  The roommate described Glenn and cooperated with a police artist who came up with a sketch of the man Judy was supposed to meet on August 1. He looked like an accountant with his short hair and horn-rimmed glasses. And he had large ears that stood out from his head like the open doors of a car.

  Nobody seemed to know who he was. He’d shown up at a few low-budget studios where photographers could pay by the session to take pictures of the models that were available to pose there, many of them nude or nearly nude.

  There was a seven-month time span between the disappearances of Judy Dull and Shirley Bridgeford. The victim type was completely dissimilar, of course. The artist’s sketch, however, matched the description witnesses had given in each case. One man had gotten a name from a lonely hearts dating service, and the other from a modeling agency. They were both stranger-to-stranger encounters.

  It was only four months after Shirley Bridgeford disappeared that another woman agreed to model for a stranger. Ruth Mercado, 24, who sometimes went by the name of Angie or Angela Rojas, didn’t look like either of the first two missing women. She had olive skin and long black hair that she usually wore pulled back, leaving tendrils curling around her face. She had classic features and an opulent figure. Ruth Mercado had come to Los Angeles from New York, and she was a bit more worldly-wise than Judy Dull, and nowhere near as naive as Shirley Bridge-ford.

  In the middle of July 1958, Ruth Mercado, using the name Angela Rojas, advertised in the Los Angeles Times seeking modeling jobs. A man named Harvey called and arranged to meet her at her apartment at 3714 W. Pico Boulevard. They settled on a price and she agreed to pose for him as long as their photo session took place in her apartment.

  When he showed up, he wasn’t very professional looking, although you couldn’t really tell with photographers: some of them weren’t at all concerned with how they looked. It was the models they were fussy about. And this guy had a state-of-the-art Rolleiflex camera around his neck.

  Ruth let him in, and bought his story about shooting covers for the detective magazines. Only after he had bound her hands behind her, tied clothesline around her ankles, and had a gag in place in her mouth, did she realize why he had really answered her ad.

  He would spend the night and the next day and night alone with her. And then the apartment on Pico was left unoccupied, and Ruth Mercado was never seen there again.

  Now there were more similarities. Two of the missing women had been models who had agreed to photo sessions with photographers they didn’t really know. There were no witnesses to Ruth Mercado’s meeting with the photographer, and she had made her own arrangements with him when he phoned in response to her ad. So no one knew who she had left with, or even if she had met the man at her apartment or someplace else.

  They were the most difficult kind of case to solve: the women didn’t know each other, the cameraman hadn’t seen any of them before he met them, and there were no bodies to discover and, consequently, no evidence to be gleaned from them. No one could be sure that Shirley, Judy, and Ruth/Angela were dead. In Hollywood, women moved on every day, disillusioned by unfulfilled expectations, broke, and ready to try their luck in another city.

  But Pierce Brooks doubted that Shirley Bridgeford would have deliberately left her two little boys behind. And Judy Dull, for all her dreams of stardom, had been trying so hard to regain custody of her child. Only Ruth Mercado was a free agent.

  The man with the big ears and glasses who stared back at Brooks from the sketch drawn by the police artist looked like thousands of other guys in Los Angeles. Who was he? And where was he?

  Or was he, perhaps, three different men, all of them nondescript?

  As Brooks checked out every report on sexual attacks and missing women that came into the Los Angeles Police Department, a man named “Frank Johnson” started showing up at a modeling agency on Sunset Boulevard. The women who posed were neither starlets nor prostitutes; they were looking for legitimate assignments to pose for ads or magazine still shots.

  Frank Johnson’s hair was greasy and dirty, and he smelled rank, as if he wore the same clothes day after day and perspired a lot in the hot southern California sun. But he became a familiar figure at the studio and he had the thirty to fifty dollars it cost to hire a model for an hour or two. The studio had their own rooms and studios where photo sessions could be held in relative privacy.

  Lorraine Vigil hadn’t been with the studio long, and she was anxious to build a regular clientele of photographers who would ask for her. She was an attractive woman, with Hispanic coloring and features. Sonya,* the proprietress of “Sonya’s Still Shots,” sometimes worked as a model herself, but she didn’t like the hinky feeling she got from Frank Johnson, and she gave him an excuse when he sought to hire her to pose for him. Instead, she suggested Lorraine Vigil.

  Lorraine was initially pleased to get the assignment and gave Johnson her address. They agreed that he would pick her up on the evening of October 27, 1958. He said he would drive her to Sonya’s studio and would probably need her for a two-hour session.

  Sonya felt slightly guilty about pushing Johnson onto Lorraine Vigil, so she warned her new model that Johnson was a little weird, although she was hard put to say what it was about him that bothered her—except the way he smelled. The minute Lorraine was in Frank Johnson’s car, her nose told her that Sonya had been right. It was a junker of a car, too, the cheapest Dodge model of several years earlier.

  Lorraine had already accepted $10 in advance and so she didn’t argue with him as he turned in the opposite direction from where Sonya’s studio was located on the Sunset Strip. Instead, he headed down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the freeway that led south into Orange County, explaining that there’d been a change in plans. He told her that Sonya’s studio was already booked, but he had another location that would work even better.

  Lorraine got more and more suspicious as they left Los Angeles far behind. They were at le
ast forty miles south, and whizzing past exits that led to Anaheim and Santa Ana. She saw a sign that said Tustin, which wasn’t far from Santa Ana. Any farther and they would be in the desert, a lonely place where nothing much survived beyond yuccas and rattlesnakes.

  He had told her that he lived past Anaheim. But the skin on the back of her neck prickled when he took an off-ramp that seemed to lead to nothing but orange groves.

  Serial killers then—and now—are invariably caught by accident. Either something goes wrong with their carefully executed plans or they are tripped up by a minor traffic violation, defective equipment, or, rarely, a victim who does not react as the killer expects. Unlike the other women, Lorraine Vigil shouted at the man behind the wheel, demanding to know where he was going. Rattled, he wrenched the wheel and skidded into a narrow turnout beside the road. Frank Johnson reached beneath his seat and pulled out a gun, instructing her not to fight him. “Don’t cause any trouble,” he said. “I probably would shoot you if you do.”

  “Do you want to rape me?” Lorraine Vigil asked.

  “Maybe I will. Maybe not.” He hadn’t expected such a direct question.

  “Well, you can rape me,” she said with a hardness in her voice. “But don’t shoot me.”

  In his previous three encounters with his chosen victims, he had felt entirely in control, but Lorraine Vigil threw him off balance. “I had a piece of rope in my pocket and I wanted to get more assured of my control over her,” he said later. “I wasn’t too sure of her at this point. She seemed kind of edgy, so I told her to put her hands behind her back and I started to make a little loop and I put it over one wrist. I had laid the gun down on the seat because I needed both hands for this, and she seemed to be very balky . . . ”

  She fought him, kicking and clawing, desperate to get out of the car. She was not going to go quietly. There beside the Santa Ana Freeway, she screamed and tried to shatter the windshield with her heel. Yes, he had a gun in his hand, but that didn’t stop her from struggling to get away from him. In their fight over the gun, it went off, leaving a grazing wound on Lorraine’s thigh as it narrowly missed doing internal damage.

  But it must have scared Frank Johnson, too, because he lost his grip on his handgun and she grabbed it away from him. She ran into the road, preferring to be run over than face whatever he had planned for her. He chased after her blindly and then realized that the tables were turned: she was pointing his own gun at him.

  California highway patrolman Tom Mulligan had already slowed his patrol car when he saw the car parked diagonally beside the busy road, and then he saw the woman in her torn clothing and the man who still threatened her. Lorraine Vigil had uncommonly good luck that warm night just before Halloween when Mulligan rescued her and arrested the man who had kidnapped her.

  His name wasn’t George Williams or Johnny Glenn or Frank Johnson—or any of the other common names he had given to people he didn’t want to remember him. His name was Harvey Glatman.

  He was taken to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in Santa Ana, and it wasn’t long before L.A. detectives Pierce Brooks and Elmer Jackson heard about his arrest. Lorraine Vigil’s description of what had happened to her answered a lot of their questions. She had almost become the third model to disappear after making an appointment to pose for a stranger. Her captor was clearly heading for the desert with her, and Brooks doubted that she would have been with Glatman on the trip back.

  He and Jackson set out immediately to talk with the prisoner.

  With skilled interrogation by Brooks and Jackson and San Diego County detectives Lieutenant Tom Isbell and Sergeant R. B. Majors, the most detailed confession they had ever elicited emerged.

  They knew where Judy Dull was. Her scattered remains had been found more than a hundred miles from Los Angeles, in the desert between Palm Springs and Indio in the autumn of 1957. Still, it had taken months to identify her through dental records. There was a commonality here. Brooks figured that if Judy had been left in the desert, and Lorraine Vigil and Harvey Glatman were headed into another desolate section more than an hour away from Los Angeles, there was a good chance that that was where they would find Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado.

  Still, there were so many square miles of desert stretching south and east of Los Angeles County, Brooks doubted that they would ever find the missing women unless Harvey Glatman chose to tell them exactly where he had left them.

  In custody, Harvey Glatman lost any power he might have had. He had shown himself to be an extremely dangerous sexual predator—but that was only when he faced helpless women. Now he was up against investigators who had been frustrated at the ease with which he spirited women away, and Harvey wasn’t so tough.

  • • •

  When Pierce Brooks checked Glatman’s background, he realized that the man in custody had been a walking nightmare since before he entered puberty. He was exactly the kind of killer Brooks had been tracking: a sadistic sociopath who had managed to avoid the attention of police many times because he left one jurisdiction for another—and before 1985, there was no central clearinghouse for detectives across the United States to follow the bloody trail of killers like Glatman.

  Thirty years old at the time of his arrest in 1958, Harvey Glatman would become the archetype for every serial killer who came after. Although it was to take him three decades, Brooks was determined to see that killers who were addicted to murder would be stopped before they ran up horrendous tolls.

  • • •

  Harvey Glatman was the only child of a Jewish couple who had emigrated from Europe to the Bronx. When he was born in December 1927, his parents were eking out a spare living from the small stationery store they owned. Harvey’s mother, Ophelia, would recall later that she and her husband worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week.

  Harvey Glatman was an absolutely brilliant—but strange—child. Totally indulged by his mother, he would always be something of a loner and inadequate when it came to relating to females. Other children, male and female, sensed that he wasn’t like them; he seemed to have no interest in joining in their activities in school or on the playground. He was the skinny boy in corduroy knickers who stood at the edge of any group.

  Harvey was fascinated with ropes from the time he was three—and with masochistic masturbation. On one occasion, Ophelia Glatman was horrified to discover that her toddler son had tied a string to his penis, placed the other end in a drawer, and was leaning back to enjoy the sensation. Unable to deal with such “nastiness,” she put it out of her mind.

  Harvey’s father, Albert, never a success at business, finally gave it up in 1930 and moved his family from New York to Denver, where they had relatives. The best job he ever had was as a cabdriver in Denver.

  While they lived in Colorado, Harvey’s parents had to face the fact that he had severe problems. At 12, he returned home one day with rope burns on his neck. They were fearful that he was suicidal, but it wasn’t that: he had discovered a new way to reach a sexual high. He described to detectives later how he had hanged himself, deriving sexual pleasure at the moment he began to pass out. He was, of course, engaging in autoeroticism by strangulation, although psychiatrists who did early studies on his personality did not use the term.

  Autoeroticism is more dangerous to those who practice it than it is to anyone else. Experts like retired FBI Special Agent Russ Vorpagel, who presents seminars on this particular form of sexual aberration, have gathered scores of photographs of deceased subjects. They are usually dressed in either black leather or frilly feminine underwear, but they are all restrained by ropes, scarves, chains, and locks. Their addiction to an orgasm accentuated by being choked escalates to a point where being bound adds to the thrill. Some of them challenge themselves in a dark game where they have to get out of the locks and chains before it is too late.

  And, from the awful photographs taken by crime scene investigators, many of them obviously lost the race. Ordinarily, as they pass out from near-strangula
tion, it’s only for the moment. But some don’t come back at all: they die because they actually hang themselves when they are unable to undo their bonds or when they kick over the stool they stand on. Some come to after choking dozens of times, but then, one day, they don’t.

  Finding the body of someone who has died during an autoerotic episode is, of course, a horrible way for wives and families to discover a sexual secret they never knew about.

  The tragic victims who met Harvey Glatman some years later might still be alive if Harvey had suffered such a fate—but, despite his risky practices, he survived.

  Harvey Glatman’s parents had at least a partial idea of their son’s sexual preoccupation. Harvey and his father had bitter disagreements over masturbation. Harvey grew up totally obsessed with sex and females, and yet he was terrified of actually approaching girls to ask for a date. If ever a young male’s psychopathology predicted tragedy, it was Harvey Glatman’s.

  Harvey had a genius I.Q. and he was a talented musician and skilled in science. His constant dream was to become famous; he longed to be a celebrity, someone who would appear in the headlines of the newspapers and on radio—and, after it was invented, on television. He was so obsessed with the need for celebrity that it didn’t seem to matter to him if he was famous or infamous.

  Pierce Brooks found more and more indications that Harvey Glatman had apparently never been normal. His autoerotic asphyxiation obsession changed to something more dangerous by the time the Glatmans moved to Denver. He began—as William Heirens had in Chicago—breaking into houses, where the act of crossing a forbidden threshold or window sill gave him a sexual thrill. He stole things only as an afterthought, probably to take souvenirs.

  Next, like Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” and Jerome Brudos, the “Lust Killer”—both of whom came much later—Glatman looked for pretty girls on the street, watched them, and followed them, enjoying the sense of power that came with their ignorance that he had them in his “sights.”