Multiple marriages
Despite his aversion to porn, Glennon Engleman was apparently brilliant in bed. He would perform cunnilingus endlessly on his lovers and was equally keen to be fellated. He also had immense staying power and would orgasm twice in a sex session, even when he was in his fifties. Yet he wasn’t able to maintain a happy marriage and divorced several times.
His first wife, Ruth, was a student teacher. It was an unusual marriage in that Glennon remained at home with his mother (his father having died) whilst Ruth lived in a flat with several other students. Ruth had enjoyed a party-girl lifestyle yet now she and her young husband were reduced to having sex in his car. Unsurprisingly the relationship broke down, and within three years they were divorced.
Glennon’s second wife, Eda, was a librarian. This time he took his bride to live with himself and his mother, who insisted on doing most of the cooking. That relationship also began to break down and Eda told her parents that he’d tried to kill her with barbiturates.
Whilst he was still married to Eda, Glennon started to have an affair with a 21-year-old patient, Ruth Jolley. She remained his girlfriend for several years until he physically threw his wife Eda out of the house.
Ruth now became his third wife (and the second of his wives to be called Ruth) and bore him a son, David, on whom Glennon doted. Glennon’s mother died during this marriage so, for the first time, he lived alone with his wife and child. Unfortunately, the relationship soon became rocky with the dentist staying away most weekends. Ruth knew that Glennon kept a special bed in his dental surgery on which to have sex with female patients who were attracted to him.
After this divorce, Glennon went to live with his sister, Melody, and her husband. The siblings were so close that outsiders sometimes thought they were dating. Melody shared their mother’s love of the occult and would later declare herself to be a psychic white witch.
A criminal mindset
Glennon Engleman had grown up believing that you had to commit crime to get ahead. As such, he claimed that his boat had been stolen and got the insurance money. In truth, he sank the boat himself, but first reclaimed the expensive motor. He would continue to pursue such ‘victimless’ frauds – including money laundering – for many years. His mother had encouraged him in this, saying that banks and insurance companies were fair game, that it wasn’t stealing. Friends noticed that Glennon became more and more amoral after such mother-son talks.
He would eventually receive lengthy jail sentences for mail fraud and for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and his third wife, Ruth, would admit to helping him by money laundering.
The first alleged murder
By 1958, Glennon’s first wife, Ruth, had married again. Six months after the marriage, her new husband, James Bullock – who was studying accountancy – drove off in the direction of his evening class but his body was later found lying in the road beside his car, which was parked outside a known homosexual haunt. He had been shot in the vehicle and sustained four bullet wounds that had caused profuse bleeding. A man was seen running away from the bloody scene. The witness, a passing driver, called the emergency services, but, moments after James Bullock was stretchered into the ambulance, he died.
When the police found that Ruth was still seeing her first husband, Glennon Engleman, they asked for his alibi. At first he said that he’d been buying his current wife a Christmas present but when this story didn’t check out he admitted that he’d been performing an abortion and hadn’t mentioned it because it was illegal. The police tried to arrest him for this but he punched the arresting officer, earning a $100 fine. None of his patients would admit that he’d performed abortions on them so the case was closed.
Ruth’s insurance claim was contested and it was two years before she received $64,000 from the insurance company. She promptly handed $20,000 of it over to Glennon Engleman to invest. Meanwhile, Glennon told his friends that the attractive Ruth was much better off without her ‘faggot’ husband. Though heavily suspected of this murder – and linked with it publicly after reports in the local paper – he was never charged. His third wife, also called Ruth, would allege that he told her he’d committed the killing and that he was proud of it.
The second murder
Five years later, in 1963, Glennon Engleman was working on a drag-racing investment. He’d had an affair with a beautiful eighteen-year-old, Sandy, and now persuaded her to marry a young man called Eric Frey. Eric was interested in drag racing and soon got involved with Glennon’s drag-racing strip. Meanwhile, the newly-weds took out life assurance schemes.
The marriage wasn’t a happy one and the dentist was soon telling his friends that Sandy would be better off without Eric. He told Sandy the exact same thing. Various friends of the dentist also admitted to knowing that Eric Frey was about to die at Glennon Engleman’s hands.
On 26th September 1963, Eric, Sandy and several of Glennon’s other friends made their way to the drag strip to work there for the evening. Glennon asked Eric to help him blow up a well with dynamite as he was afraid that some of the children who played on the strip would fall in. Eric obligingly approached the well, whereupon Glennon hit him over the head with a rock and threw him down it. Some of the others heard the young man cry out, ‘Why do you want to kill me?’ but Sandy didn’t hear her husband’s cries, as she’d walked some distance away. In response, Glennon climbed into the well and held the semi-conscious man’s head under the water. Everyone listened to Eric splash and gurgle – then the eventual silence told them that he’d drowned.
Glennon left the well, one of his friends ignited the dynamite and everyone told the police that Eric had accidentally blown himself up. His wife of one year received $25,000 insurance money for this supposedly accidental death and duly handed $16,000 of it over to Glennon for his drag strip. The strip went bankrupt the following year.
The early Sixties was also the time that the dentist acquired a new best friend, Robert Handy. His new friend would assist in some of his murderous crimes…
Robert Handy
Robert Handy was an attractive man who had once been married to a St Louis Playboy Club bunny girl. (When he was finally arrested, he was dating a stripper.) He worked as a carpenter but his main love was nature and animals. He met Glennon when he was working on Glennon’s brother Vernon’s house.
Robert genuinely seemed to care for Glennon Engleman. The admiration was mutual, with Glennon telling other friends that Robert was as courageous as a lion. The men often drove for long distances together to enjoy the countryside, sometimes taking David, Glennon’s son, with them. Robert also had children who’d been left with him after his divorce.
In the early Sixties, the two men were involved in a counterfeiting scheme, and, when the police caught up with Robert, he alone took the rap for it. He was released in September 1968.
The third murder
By the mid-Seventies, Glennon Engleman was again looking for additional funds. This time he turned his attention to Carmen Miranda, his 24-year-old dental nurse. She had known him since she was a little girl, as her impoverished Mexican family helped to clean his house. When she’d become pregnant at seventeen, Glennon had performed an illegal abortion on her, after which she’d almost bled to death, but Carmen remained loyal to Glennon as he was the most intelligent, educated and powerful person that she and her seven siblings had ever known.
Glennon told her that she’d have to pull off some kind of scam if she ever wanted to better herself. He had persuaded her to marry a man called Peter Halm and told her that, if Peter was to die, she’d get the insurance money and could give some of it to him…
In September 1976, Carmen agreed to lure her unsuspecting spouse to a remote picnic area frequented by hunters, knowing that Glennon Engleman and Robert Handy would be waiting for him there. When Peter got close enough, Glennon Engleman raised his rifle, took aim and blasted him in the head. The unfortunate young man collapsed, bleeding profusely, and begged his wife to get help.
Seconds later, he died.
As Glennon had predicted, the police weren’t too interested in the death of an ordinary working man and the case was put down as an accidental shooting. Carmen received $37,500 from the death but was allegedly so upset that she gave most of it to her brother. Glennon, however, took $10,000, most of which he used to pay his overdue tax bill, but his debts soon mounted up again.
The fourth and fifth murders
The following year, Glennon was once again prepared to kill for profit. By now, he had a lover called Barbara who was divorced. Glennon soon persuaded her to remarry and to insure her new husband. He told her to choose an ordinary man (not a professional man or anyone involved in law enforcement) so that the authorities wouldn’t investigate closely when he died.
Shortly after the marriage, Barbara told Glennon that her new in-laws – Arthur and Vernita Gusewelle – were wealthy farmers. Their estate was valued at over half a million dollars, and if they died the money would be divided equally between her new husband, Ronald, and his brother.
Robert Handy and Glennon Engleman drove to the estate on the evening of 3rd November 1977. Glennon knocked at the door and said that he was from the Farm Bureau: as usual, the dentist sounded entirely plausible. It seems that, initially, Robert waited outside in the car.
Once inside the house, Glennon produced his gun and ordered the couple to lie on the floor. They followed his orders, doubtless hoping that he would spare them, but he shot them both through the head. Vernita, 55, died quickly but her 71-year-old husband, though mortally wounded and blinded, briefly regained consciousness.
Robert Handy now allegedly entered the farmhouse (according to Glennon’s testimony and the fact that Arthur Gusewelle said the word ‘two’ as he was dying) and ransacked it to make it look like a profit-based double murder. They left the scene believing that they were leaving behind two corpses, but Arthur Gusewelle managed to drag himself to the phone after the killers left. He was able to tell the ambulance crew that there were ‘two’, and they believed that he meant two men. He said ‘two’ again at the hospital before he died.
However, Glennon Engleman and Robert Handy weren’t finished with what Glennon would later describe as ‘his biggest project’. They planned to wait for a few months and then kill Barbara’s husband, Ronald Gusewelle, so that all of the money went to Barbara, after which Glennon could directly benefit. Eager to make as much from her husband’s forthcoming death as possible, Barbara forged his signature on an insurance application form to the tune of $193,000. The pretty woman had become a Black Widow who thought she’d be set up for life.
The sixth murder
By March 1979 the Gusewelles’ estate had been divided up and Glennon and Robert decided that it was time that 33-year-old Ronald Gusewelle died. Barbara ushered them into Ronald’s garage shortly before he was due home. She also got towels ready to mop up any telltale blood.
Glennon shot the luckless man in the chest as he entered the garage. Uncomprehending for a second, Ronald stood swaying and was promptly bludgeoned with a hammer – Glennon would later say that Robert did the bludgeoning. Robert helped squash Ronald’s corpse into his car, breaking one of his legs in the process, then the men drove the car to an area frequented by prostitutes, put condoms in Ronald’s pocket and hoped that the death would look like a sexual homicide.
The seventh murder
That same month, a dental laboratory owner called Sophie Marie Berrera found that someone had planted a bomb in her garage. Fortunately the building leaked and the bomb became rain-soaked and didn’t detonate.
Sophie had previously filed a law suit against Glennon Engleman as he owed her $14,500. This was for dental impression work she’d done for him over an extended period. The dental impressions he had handed in were so poorly taken that Sophie had to spend longer on them than on other impressions, and as a result, she tried to charge him more.
Sensing that Glennon was behind the bombing, Sophie dropped her lawsuit but towards the end of the year she filed again. On 14th January 1980 she got into her car and turned the ignition key. The resultant explosion could be heard for miles around. Both of her feet were blown off and there was massive damage to her torso. One of her ears was found a hundred yards away.
Immediately after her death, Sophie’s family told the police that Glennon Engleman had hated her and that she’d feared he would kill her. The dentist denied everything so the police went to speak to his third wife, Ruth, with whom he was still having sex. Ruth had already admitted to money laundering for Glennon but now – fearing for her own life – she wanted no more to do with his illegal schemes. She told the authorities about the various murders that the dentist claimed to have been responsible for and she agreed to wear a wire so that they could hear him for themselves. Unlike most murderers, Glennon liked to talk about his killings, albeit in a coded way. He called this ‘homicidal intimacy’.
Have you read the news today?
By January 1980, the St Louis Globe newspaper was noting that Glennon had benefited from two unsolved murders and a supposedly accidental death: the lawsuit against him had been dropped after Sophie Berrera’s murder, and he had benefitted from James Bullock’s shooting and from Eric Frey’s death in the well because both of their widows had invested money in his drag strip. The dentist was livid when he read the reports but he believed that none of his co-conspirators would betray him. Meanwhile, he had been betrayed by his own body; he had developed diabetes and required frequent medicine.
Trapped by a tape
Eager to make an arrest before the dentist could strike again, the police had been listening avidly to Glennon’s many post-coital conversations with his third ex-wife, Ruth. He hinted at various murders and had admitted taking money from his dental nurse Carmen Miranda after her husband’s mysterious shooting – but at one stage he went further, saying, ‘I have no desire to keep on killing my fellow man.’ This, with the masses of circumstantial evidence and financial motives, was enough for the police to make an arrest. First, they moved Ruth and her son to an unknown locale under the Federal Relocation Program. It was a move that may well have saved her life. Glennon Engleman had already hinted that he would kill her when their son became a teenager, suggesting that a teenage boy no longer needs a protective mother – so she was terrified of what he’d do once he knew that she’d betrayed him for many weeks.
Other arrests
In February 1980, the police arrested Glennon Engleman, Robert Handy, Carmen Miranda and her brother Nick Miranda. (Nick had acted as the go-between, handing Engleman $10,000 of the $75,000 Carmen received from the insurance company.) Robert Handy cried when he heard that Glennon had been arrested and originally refused to say anything incriminating about his friend. So the police offered Carmen and Nick Miranda immunity from prosecution if they would tell what they knew about Peter Halm’s murder, Sophie Berrera’s murder and any other crimes that Glennon was being investigated for. The Mirandas also had to agree to testify against Glennon Engleman and Robert Handy in court.
The trials
At first Glennon continued to deny everything and refused to see a psychiatrist, which made things difficult for his defence team. He told friends that he could astrally project himself out of prison whenever he wanted to, so he was very popular with other prisoners, most of whom were equally keen to astral-project.
At his first trial, in Minnesota in 1980, he pleaded not guilty to the murder of Peter Halm but Carmen Miranda testified against him, explaining that the dentist had encouraged her to marry Peter and lure him to the caves where Engleman and Handy would be waiting with their guns.
The prosecution said that Carmen was guilty of murder too but that giving her immunity had been necessary to build a strong enough case against Dr Engleman. She’d suffered from such serious depression after the shooting that she’d been hospitalised and she cut a pathetic figure on the stand. Glennon, who’d known her since she was a baby, wept during her testimony.
The tapes of Glennon and Ruth talking about death were introduced but the judge said that the jury couldn’t have a transcript of what was said. Glennon cheered up markedly at this as some of the homicidal pillow talk was somewhat indistinct.
He looked affable in his suit and tie when he took the stand but was clearly enraged at being addressed as Mr Engleman. ‘It’s Dr Engleman,’ he corrected immediately.
He admitted that he owned many guns and was an expert shot but denied shooting Peter Halm, so the prosecution asked him why he’d talked to Ruth about committing homicide. Glennon replied that he’d been talking about murder in general terms in order to scare her. And why did he want to frighten her? Because she’d allegedly stolen his coin collection and he wanted it back. He said that he also wanted to scare her into letting him see more of David, who he feared was unduly influenced by her overprotective ways. During this diatribe against his ex-wife he became so incensed that his face turned purple and his eyes bulged. ‘That bitch has taken him out of my life,’ he growled.
With Carmen Miranda explaining how the murder plot had been formed, Glennon Engleman’s guilty sentence was a foregone conclusion. He was sentenced to fifty years without the possibility of parole.
The dentist appeared unconcerned at the verdict, stating, ‘I’m fifty-three years old. In fifty years there won’t be anything but dust. I don’t relish this guilty verdict but we will appeal.’
However, his sentencing days weren’t over for he was now sentenced to thirty years for a federal mail fraud and another thirty years for federal bombing charges relating to Sophie Berrera’s car bomb murder. Dynamite had been used in the car bomb, which meant that the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency were involved, and they relentlessly pursued the case.
Doctors Who Kill Page 15