by Ann Rule
Like almost all sexual predation, Glatman’s voyeurism progressed to a point where he actually confronted women in their bedrooms at night. Harvey didn’t rape them, but he now tied them up, rather than himself. He used a gag to quiet them—a new twist that would become a part of his scenarios that gave him orgasms. Once the women he chose were helpless to fight back, he put his hands on the most private places of their bodies.
Harvey was still in high school.
He touched some young women in the darkness of their bedrooms, but he actually abducted a woman when he was 17, took her to a desolate spot, tied her up, and felt her body. He was still too timid to commit rape, and he took her back to her house before the sun came up.
This time he was caught, charged with some of his burglaries and with molestation, and sent to the Colorado State Prison for a year.
A detective at that time didn’t take Harvey’s sexual fumblings very seriously; he characterized the crimes as “girl trouble.”
When the teenage Glatman was paroled in Colorado, his mother quickly spirited him off to Yonkers, New York, and found him a nice little apartment. She enrolled him in a course in television repair. Then she went back to Denver, sure that Harvey’s troubles were over. Actually, they were only beginning. His need for bondage and sexual attacks grew, and he was never without a length of rope and a small handgun in case he spotted a woman who attracted him. He still was too fainthearted to actually rape the women he tied up until they were completely helpless. But each incident made him bolder, and it took more and more invasion of their privacy to turn him on. On occasion, he even confronted couples—but he only tied up the man so he could have pleasure from the woman.
He was caught again, and this time he was sentenced to five to ten years in the New York prison facilities of Elmira and Sing Sing. Psychiatrists who examined Harvey concurred that he wasn’t out-and-out crazy at all, but suggested that his sociopathy be treated—something that has yet to succeed with any antisocial subject. It was a naive and misguided suggestion. It just doesn’t work.
Sociopaths have no conscience, no guilt, no empathy, and no remorse. Harvey Glatman had never been able to identify with the emotions of other human beings. He’d always taken what he wanted and what gave him pleasure. Still, like most sociopaths, he was an easy prisoner and earned a lot of “good time”—so much good time that he was out of prison in less than three years. According to his parole restrictions, he had to live with his parents.
The elder Glatman continued to drive a cab in Denver, and he died in the driver’s seat in October 1952, when Harvey was 24.
But by the fall of 1956, Harvey Glatman, 28, was finally off parole and on his own. He headed to California to seek his fortune and find the fame that had always eluded him.
Although he had never dated, his thoughts were still completely consumed with women—with controlling women, touching them, and maybe even having sex with them in a situation where he was the powerful one. Not surprisingly, Glatman’s demeanor turned women off, and the suspicious ones who simply turned away from him survived, never knowing how lucky they were.
Harvey supported himself with his TV repair business. It could be quite lucrative in the late fifties. Most families had only one television set and they were lost when something went wrong, which happened often.
For his entertainment and pleasure, he used his camera and his visits to the studios in West Hollywood, where he was pleased to find there were women who would take their clothing off and let him “shoot” them for $30 an hour. For a while, that was enough.
Clearly, he had gone over the edge. While some masochists are satisfied with mutilating and scarring only themselves, it is not unusual for them to transfer their aberration to hurting other people. The line between masochism and sadism is very thin. Harvey crossed that when he moved to Los Angeles. Pierce Brooks realized that if Lorraine Vigil hadn’t been able to get away from Glatman, he would undoubtedly have continued to abduct and murder hapless women.
• • •
Captive now, and once he was cleaned up and shaved, Glatman looked just like the artist’s sketch done from witness descriptions. But, more than that, Harvey resembled Eddie Fisher, who was at the height of his popularity in the fifties. The resemblance was almost uncanny. Even so, the features that made teenage girls fall in love with Fisher didn’t quite match up in Glatman. His cheeks were a little fuller, his hair not as wavy. And he certainly didn’t have the expansive self-esteem that Eddie did. What’s more, his personal hygiene left a lot to be desired.
Pierce Brooks was never the tough, confrontational interrogator. He was far more interested in finding the remains of Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado—and who knew how many other victims—than he was in frightening his suspect. They had Glatman—he wasn’t going anywhere—and Brooks had a lot of questions to ask the killer who had eluded him for sixteen months. He also wanted to know what made Harvey Glatman tick.
Because Harvey Glatman/George Williams/Johnny Glenn/Frank Johnson, et al. had planned his meetings with his victims and the scenarios that followed with infinite care, no one had had any idea that he was a man acting out his darkest fantasies. And, because no one knew, he’d continued. He took care of every detail from the food they would eat, the name he would use, and the murder weapons, to the route to the desert, the cameras, and the film.
Glatman slipped when he assumed that Pierce Brooks and his fellow detectives knew about the stash of photos he kept hidden in a toolbox in his apartment. Once he mentioned that, his confessions bubbled up like geysers.
And the photo souvenirs he had kept to remind him of the power he’d had over his victims were probably the most shocking any of the California investigators had ever—or would ever—see.
Looking at the awful pictures, they noted that Glatman had kept a visual timeline from the moment his unsuspecting model victims had begun to pose for him. Ruth Mercado and Judy Dull didn’t look afraid in the beginning, but gradually fear dawned in their eyes as they realized they were actually tied up and could not get free.
Judy Dull in her long skirt and neatly buttoned sweater, and then with her skirt pulled up and her slip showing, her sweater opened and her bra visible. The next sequence showed Judy lying on Glatman’s floor on her face, literally hog-tied. And the worst photos of all were when she sat almost naked, her face bloodied, her eyes betraying shock and hopelessness.
Harvey Glatman’s long confession explained the sequence of events of that afternoon and night. He bragged that he had untied her to rape her, tied her up again, and repeated the process several times. He had even promised that he was going to let her go if she would behave and do as he said.
But, of course, he hadn’t meant it. He had taken Judy Ann Dull to the desert close by Indio and strangled her with the ropes that had bound her, leaving her to the animals who would scatter her bones.
As for poor Shirley Bridgeford, there were no “modeling” photos. He had been somewhat disappointed in her appearance. He had expected more for his $10. Harvey said he had simply driven her farther and farther from home, making excuses about why they weren’t going to the dance after all, until she realized they were in the desert. He said he had considered just taking her home, but they had driven so far that he decided to kill her too. He saved pictures of Shirley, taken after the sun rose. She sat on her tan coat, in various stages of undress, her hands bound behind her, her ankles lashed together too, and a tight gag in her mouth. Her eyes showed her fear.
“Where is she?” Pierce Brooks asked.
“I can show you,” Glatman said. “She’s out in the desert, just east of Banner.”
And Ruth Mercado. Her photos showed that she was tied up in the same manner as the other women, hands behind her back, knees and ankles bound tightly. She wore a pretty white slip with lace at the bottom. With the desert vegetation behind her, Ruth Mercado had a defiant look on her face, although she clearly didn’t look hopeful. It was as if she would not let this
creepy little man know that she was afraid.
Glatman said that he had left her in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park too. She was, by his estimation, south of Agua Caliente Hot Springs—but before you got to Coyote Wells or Plaster City.
Looking at a map, Pierce Brooks saw that Mercado’s body had been cruelly thrown away very close to the Mexican border. He wondered if they would find anything left of the mortal remains of Harvey Glatman’s victims.
It was a solemn procession of investigators who headed east of Riverside on October 30, 1958, having no idea what they would find. They had seen the terror in the eyes of the women who knew they had no hope. Usually, homicide detectives could only imagine what the moments before victims’ deaths had been like for them. This was far worse than looking at the decomposed bodies they routinely saw.
It was hard for them all: they wished so much they could somehow go back and stop the action that came next. But it was much too late.
Pierce Brooks’s map of San Diego County as it was in 1958 is markedly different from those found in current atlases. Many communities have sprung up since then. The old map still has Brooks’s arrows indicating where the women’s bodies were found, written in red pencil, and the distances they were placed from narrow little roads, labeled in blue pen and in his familiar sprawling printing.
After leaving Indio, heading south on Highway 99 past the Salton Sea, they turned east on the road to Ocotillo and then south again to a spot near the Vallecito Mountains. There, Glatman led them to where he had left Shirley Bridgeford. Her pastel dress was still there, torn and faded in the sun now.
His hands cuffed in front of him, Glatman stood beside Pierce Brooks and pointed to Shirley’s decomposed remains. His face was nearly expressionless; it was the lack of affect so common with sadistic sociopaths. Brooks, who had seen it all, looked sickened.
Glatman seemed almost pleased with himself as he led detectives out into the California desert and to the bleak landscape where he had left Judy Ann Dull, Shirley Bridgeford, and Ruth Mercado, and where he had been heading with Lorraine Vigil.
“He was as interested as we were,” Pierce Brooks recalled as he pointed to police photographs of the search crew in the desert. “That’s Harvey kneeling beside me as I’m looking at what was left of Shirley Bridgeford.”
Except for Judy Dull, whose skull had been found earlier, the victims were still out there in the desert. The clothing they wore in the pictures in Harvey Glatman’s “collection” was rotted by the sun and scattered by animals, and the victims themselves were reduced to skeletons.
There was very little left of the bodies, but Shirley’s coat was there, and the California investigators gathered most of her bones. They would be arranged on a medical examiner’s table, making almost a complete skeleton.
The burning sun was descending over the desert when the detectives continued their search south on the ever-narrowing road in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to the Carrizo Mountain area.
By the time they had spent hours of tedious labor at the Bridgeford body site, they had to finish the search for Ruth Mercado by flashlight. It was an eerie sensation to realize that Glatman’s victims had spent hours of torture out here in the darkened desert too.
They found what was left of Ruth Mercado beneath a shaggy yucca tree.
Harvey Glatman was formally arraigned in Case #255504 on November 3, 1958.
Justice came far more swiftly in California almost fifty years ago. Glatman pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and the only decision left was his punishment. In the punishment phase of the proceedings, Judge William T. Low sentenced him to die in the gas chamber.
Anyone who had listened to the tapes of his detailed confessions might have done so. The years-long delays and postponements of carrying out the death penalty that are familiar today didn’t happen often in the late fifties.
On September 18, 1959, Harvey Glatman entered the glass-walled cubicle and was strapped into the death chair. As cyanide capsules were dropped into an acid vat beneath that chair, he inhaled the fatal fumes. He was dead in less than ten minutes, and was probably unconscious long before that.
• • •
How many victims did Glatman take? No one knows for certain. There was at least one woman who listened to her gut instinct and backed away from him in time. There were probably others who were afraid to come forward. From what we know about serial killers today, they approach dozens of women for every one who falls for their ruses and devices.
In a sense, Harvey got his wish to become a celebrity; he was never famous but he became infamous, and he made headlines.
Pierce Brooks was present in 1959 when Harvey Murray Glatman died in California’s gas chamber. From that point on, he worked to set up a tracking system to allow police agencies to share information on serial murder, the term he chose to describe killers like Glatman. Pierce Brooks went on to be captain of the Los Angeles Police Department’s homicide division for a dozen years, and chief of police in Lakewood, Colorado, and Springfield, Oregon. More than twenty years later, Brooks saw his dream come true when the first task force meetings on VICAP took place at Sam Houston State University in 1981. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program became operative in June 1985 after Brooks testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and he spent a year in Quantico at FBI Headquarters as head of the program.
Brooks, whose book Officer Down, Code Three had already saved countless lives of law enforcement officers by forewarning them of situations where cops can get killed—and giving them instructions that would become ingrained reactions to save themselves and others—left several vitally important legacies. VICAP was only one of them.
He was a gentle man, a brilliant man, and “a cop’s cop.”
The Captive Bride
Certainly, there are women who die—either at a lover’s hand or by their own—because the men they’re involved with don’t love them enough. When most of us cry over love, it’s because we can’t be with the person we think we must have to be happy. It seems sometimes that all the love songs ever written are about unrequited passion. There are few people who don’t remember at least one broken heart. But there is something far worse. Any woman who has ever been entrapped in a relationship where she has become a possession and the focus of obsessive jealousy would agree that being alone—and free—means more than any romantic affair.
There may be a basic difference in the way in which males and females react to rejection. When love has gone, women tend to cry and beg a lover to come back. Rarely do they react with violence. A man who has been cuckolded—or thinks he has—is much more likely to seek to destroy the very woman he has claimed to love.
Throughout history, men have cried, “If I can’t have her, then no one can!” A woman who is “loved” by such a man is caught like a butterfly, beating her wings helplessly against an invisible web of ownership. At some point she has stopped loving the man who trapped her and she can’t talk herself into loving him again. Neither can she get away.
A young woman named Kaitlyn Merriam* lived in fear for her life because a man loved her too much. Although hers was the very first story I ever wrote about such a phenomenon, I would encounter hundreds of all-too-similar cases over the years. Kaitlyn’s fate plays over and over in my mind every time I do. Her life is a classic example for me every time I think of domestic violence. To this day, I wish I could go back and change the ending of her story.
In spring 1978, Kaitlyn Merriam found herself a virtual prisoner of love. She was a beautiful young woman, just past her twentieth birthday; she had a loving family, a good job, and the future that seemed to promise a long life of happiness. Instead, she would come to live in utter terror, afraid of the man who had been everything to her since she was barely 15 years old.
She made only one mistake: she fell out of love.
She was Kaitlyn Welles* when she met a tall, handsome fellow sophomore in September at a Seattle high school. She soon had a crush on Wa
yne Merriam.* By December, they were going steady. She scribbled his name on her book covers and talked about him continually to her girlfriends. She believed she was in love, but later she would come to realize what she felt was only a crush. Looking back, Kaitlyn would define what she felt as “only puppy love.”
The vast majority of couples who begin dating at 15 soon break up, and they date dozens of others before finally deciding on a mate for life. But Kaitlyn and Wayne stayed together. Nobody ever thought of one without the other. Kaitlyn-and-Wayne were a couple, always referred to in one breath as if they were joined at the hip. At first, that seemed wonderful. Kaitlyn never had to worry about having a date for a prom. Her friends actually envied her because Wayne was so crazy about her. They all thought he was “cute” and told her she was lucky.
Even she couldn’t remember when she began to feel a little bit smothered. There were times she would have liked to go to a slumber party or to the movies with her friends, but Wayne disapproved of that. Why would she want to do that when she had him? She couldn’t come up with a really good reason, because she did want to be with him, at least most of the time. The only time they ever argued was when she suggested they should have interests of their own. He, however, saw no need for that.
If Kaitlyn ever felt misgivings—and she did—she was dissuaded by Wayne’s arguments. He was afraid that they would drift apart like some of their friends if they started “going in different directions.” That wasn’t what she meant at all, but he saw her need to expand her horizons a little as a threat. Wayne told Kaitlyn how much he loved her, and that he would never love anyone else. He said he couldn’t bear it if they broke up.
Kaitlyn wanted to experience a little more of life before she married and settled down for good. Now, she sometimes thought it might be fun if they dated other people, but her suggestion upset him more than she imagined it would. Wayne wouldn’t even discuss her dating other boys. She belonged to him; he didn’t want anyone else and he couldn’t see why she should. Time after time, she gave in to his wishes.