December 11, 2024 • 54 mins
In this second part of a two-parter, Kate and Paul return to 1958 Los Angeles where a serial killer is terrorizing local women. After the suspect encounters a truly heroic individual, the tide turns in the investigation.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
True crimes, and I weigh in using modern forensic techniques
to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried bones. Hey, Paul, we had a humdinger
(01:03):
of a story of last week, didn't we have this
serial killer?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah? You know that.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That was a fascinating episode for me, you know, in
terms of we've got a guy out in la in
nineteen fifty seven?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It's nineteen fifty seven, yeah, but we're pouring into nineteen
fifty eight now, unfortunately, So tell me what you remember,
because I had a couple of people message me and say,
I really like when Paul does a recap. So let's
give the listeners what they want. I'm going to make you.
We're going to see how closely you listened to me
last week.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, I do have my crib notes that I kept
from you telling me the story, So I do have
a cheat sheet. But I don't know if I can
weave it as eloquently as you would, but I will.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Go ahead and give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Sure you can.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
In August of nineteen fifty seven, nineteen year old Judy,
who is a model. She's a strange from her husband
going through a divorce, has a fourteen month old daughter
that she's in a custody to dispute with with her
strange husband. She needs money. For Judy, who's a model,
the way to make money is to model, and so
(02:12):
she ends up being picked up by a person who
claims to be a photographer and he utilizes the name
Johnny Glenn, and a roommate is able to describe Johnny
as being five to nine hundred and fifty pounds, all
of complected, and he's wearing horned rimmed glasses. She doesn't
(02:32):
come home after being picked up, and roommate gets scared
reports him missing. Law enforcement isn't able to make much
progress in the investigation, and five months later, some kids
find some skeletal remains limited skeletal remains basically forearm, wrist,
and hands from a single body. Months go by, and
(02:57):
then now there is another woman. Her name is Shirley.
She's twenty four years old, she's also divorced, has two kids.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
And she goes out on a date.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
That is set up through this Lonely Hearts club and
she's picked up by a man who goes by the
name of George Williams. And George had actually dated another
woman from this Lonely Hearts club about two weeks prior,
and that woman got home fine, but Shirley never comes home,
(03:28):
nor does she make it to the dance that George
was supposed to take her to. And we actually have
two different descriptions of this man the woman that he
dated two weeks prior, as well as the description of
the man from Shirley's mom who was home and she
got picked up by George. And these descriptions are somewhat varied,
(03:51):
but as I talked about in the first episode, I
think they fall within you know, the general variables that
you get from different witnesses describing the same man. And
you showed me images of two composites, and quite frankly,
to my eyes, those two composits look like the same man.
And we know we have a serial killer in this case.
And at this point I think you're going to start
(04:13):
talking to me about more of the investigation and maybe
more victims.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
You nailed it, got everything right. I was waiting to
see if you were going to miss something up, and
you didn't.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
I passed the test.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Your notes are great. I mean, I know, I see
you scribbling all the time, and sometimes I wonder if
he's doing like a cartoon sketch or something. I'm talking. Okay.
We continued to be in LA, which now makes me
scared to be in LA in general, because women keep
going missing. And you know, as you said, we're still
looking for Ruth and Shirley. We still have not identified
(04:46):
those bones. And about a year to the day when
Judy has gone missing, and this is four months after
Shirley has gone missing, a landlord at at LA boarding
house is very concerned about one of his tenants. It
is July twenty seventh, and now we're in nineteen fifty eight,
and this is a woman named Ruth Mercado. She's a model,
(05:08):
just like Judy and she had just turned twenty four
three days earlier. So all of these women are in
the same age range and sort of physical attributes. The
landlord is concerned because he hasn't seen Ruth in four days,
and he finally decides to go in and check on
her when he goes into the room. So this is
a boarding house, This isn't even a formal apartment. She
(05:32):
isn't there, but she has a couple of pets. There's
a small dog and two parakeets, and they are all
in distress. They haven't been fed or given water in
four days. It sounds like the landlord calls the police
about Ruth's disappearance. Talk to me just about that scene
in general. So we don't know yet if Ruth had
been taken from this boarding house or you know, if
(05:55):
she met somebody out, but she clearly, whatever happened, did
not intend to leave her animal behind.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Right, And I think that that's the critical factor there,
because you know, Ruth, being twenty four years old, she's
an adult.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
She can go off on her own.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I can't imagine with a boarding house if she had
any reporting requirements back to the landlord that would cause
him to end up reporting her missing. But the observation
that she obviously hasn't been taking care of her pets,
you know, that's that's the red flag in this scenario.
So now law enforcement is going to respond and it's
(06:31):
having to now reconstruct what happened. You know, is there
any evidence within this room of violence? Is there evidence
of a struggle? If those are absent, then it's also okay,
So who last saw Ruth?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Where was she last going?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
If she left voluntarily, is there any indisha, you know,
any writings.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Let's say she took.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
A you know, back in nineteen fifty seven, a landline
phone call and on a notepad wrote down a name
and a number or address. You know, that's information that
the investigators are going to gobble up and now go
track that person or those persons down. They have to
really spend a lot of time reconstructing Ruth's life in
(07:15):
the last few days before she disappeared.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
And I think they have no information Paul essentially about Ruth.
That's who we had the least amount of information about.
Right now, let me tell you what the police say
when the landlord calls and says, listen, I've had this tenant,
I haven't seen her in four days, and now we've
got these animals that clearly have not been fed or
watered in four days. The police show up and they
(07:39):
don't see anything really amiss. It doesn't sound like there's
even fourth century into the apartment. Nothing has been turned over,
doesn't look like anything has been taken. But they do
look around the apartment and they find nude photos of Ruth.
It sounds like she was a burlessed type dancer. And
(08:02):
even though the media pick up on this and the
police say they're investigating, I just don't get the sense
that it's with the same level of interest and intensity
as with Judy and Shirley. It sounds like when they
saw those nude photos of her and sort of a
burlesque type show, the interest from both the police and
the media went down quite a bit and they couldn't
(08:22):
connect her. They didn't even think about connecting her with
these other two missing women.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, you know, from that era, I can see that happening.
In essence, law enforcement very rapidly moved off of what
they would classify what we really do classify as high
risk victims. Back in the day, the mindset was we
need to spend our resources elsewhere, and it's just such
an unfortunate thing that that's what happens. I think, you know, immediately,
(08:49):
of course, as we're talking about these victims, for a
proper investigation, you're trying to track down or who knew Ruth.
You know, did anybody within the boarding house know her?
Did she have any friends? You know, what did she
tell these people that she's interacting with the fact that
she is also a model, you know, did she have
any jobs? The victimology is huge, you know, and so
(09:10):
a proper investigation would have been included all that. But
it sounds like, oh, she's into this burlesque type of
aspect and we're just going to move on.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, and this is the only case, and I'm you know,
I'll tell you these are all connected. Of course, this
is the only case we have where a man has
not been seen. You know. In this case, nobody saw
a man come to her apartment. Nobody remembers her saying
I've got a photography gig. No one knows, you know,
if she left with the intention of coming back. She
(09:40):
literally vanished and left these animals that she loved behind,
and the police didn't seem particularly motivated, and you know,
they're not making any headway in the meantime with Judy
and with Shirley. You know, I'm sure they suspect that
Judy is the person who was found the bones, you know,
that were found by the two little boys. But there
were other missing women. So it's it's still a big
(10:02):
mystery for them, you.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Know, And I think that that, you know, that's just
something I want to point out is we are also
talking Los Angeles, and so right now we have focused
in on these these three women that have gone missing.
Imagine the number of missing persons even in nineteen fifty
seven in a city the size of Los Angeles. You know,
law enforcement, they're they're looking at these cases. Each one
(10:27):
of them are individually needles in this massive haystack of caseload. So,
you know, I think with Ruth, I mean the fact that,
like in the prior to cases, there was Judy and
Shirley had family that were engaged at certain levels. Right
with Ruth, right now, it doesn't sound like there's any family.
(10:49):
There's nobody that's going, hey, there's something really wrong here.
It's a landlord of a boarding home.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Well, we are having, you know a problem connecting everything.
We're having a problem finding you know, these two, well,
now three women. I feel for the police in nineteen
fifty seven, fifty eight, with the exception of not investigating
Ruth's case right enough. We now have a fourth victim,
and I have a lot of detail because thank god,
(11:16):
this one is a survivor and a hero as far
as I'm concerned. And you're going to find out why,
because this is an amazing story. So you know, I
was going to sort of like lead up to the
fact that this woman made it out alive, but there's
so much detail you would have suspected that, and you
would have said, okay, well, obviously she survived. When I
(11:37):
watched Zodiac with one of my girls, she said, oh
my gosh, are they both And I had not really
told her about the story, and we were, you know,
watching them the first couple, and she said, are they
both gonna die? And I said, no, I don't think so.
And she said why And I said, well, this is
a lot of detail. So if neither of them survived,
how would we have known this. There's no CCTV. How
(11:59):
would we have known this had happened unless either the
killer said something or somebody survived, and then, of course
we knew with the zodiac in the first couple somebody survived.
So I like being mysterious, but I want to be
realistic at the.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Same time, When does this case happen? How much longer
after Ruth?
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Three months later after Ruth? So now we are a
year and a couple of months after our first case,
which was Judy. So this is October twenty seventh, nineteen
fifty eight. This is a twenty eight year old woman.
Her name is Lorraine Vijel, and she is This is
a familiar story. This is her very first modeling gig
(12:38):
and she's part of a small agency that she's just
started working with. The agency contacts her and says, there's
a photographer who's going to pick her up at the house.
Now I don't know if this is what happened with
Judy or well, it wouldn't have been Sureley. It would
have been Judy with the first modeling gig, and we
don't know if that's what happened with Ruth. But this
(13:01):
is the first time I've heard of an agency being involved.
It looks like he contacted an agency and said I
need a photographer. I need a model for a shoot,
and they hooked him up with Lorraine. So this guy
shows up. His name is Frank Johnson. You know, now
we've got again, you know, a series of disappearances involving
a photographer. So Lorraine says they're supposed to go to
(13:24):
his studio that Lorraine is familiar with and take pictures.
But when she gets in the car and they start driving,
he doesn't go toward Hollywood. She's trying to direct him
toward the studio because she's worked at the studio before,
and she asked, Frank, why aren't you going in the
right direction, and he said, well, I want to use
my home studio instead. She says she knew something was
(13:46):
really wrong when he gets on the Santa Ana Freeway.
He starts driving very fast. He stops at a desolate
exit and pulls over. He says, I've got a flat tire.
But then he pulls out a gun. He pulls out
a piss so he says, do what I tell you
to do, and you're not going to get hurt, and
he pulls out a piece of rope to tie her
(14:08):
hands together. She fights, and she grabs the gun. They
start struggling in the front seat. The gun goes off
and the bullet grazes Lorraine's thigh. She opens a passenger
drawer and they both fall out onto the ground. On
this desolate exit stop, they are in sight of passing cars,
but nobody stops. They're driving by, and there's like in
(14:30):
a hand in hand battle on the ground over this gun,
and nobody is stopping along this highway. She bites his
hand that is holding the gun. He lets the gun go,
she grabs it and she holds him at gunpoint, and
eventually highway patrolmencome.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
I mean, Lorraine blood coming down, her leg, scraped up,
scared to death, and is holding this guy ready to
blow his brains out until the highway patrol shows up.
Because I'm sure at that point people are passing by
and seeing this woman holding a gun on a guy
on the ground. And now finally we get the police
to show up. What do you think about that? I mean,
what a story.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
That's actually amazing. I'm surprised she didn't kill them, almost
like an act of passion. She's got to be so
scared and so enraged at the same time. You know,
now she's got the upper hand with the firearm, Yeah,
in some ways, that speaks all of us. Speaks to
Lorraine having sort of a wherewithal of understanding the dire
(15:27):
circumstances she's in. And I always say, never let somebody
bind you. You fight at that moment, even if they've
got a gun on you, because if they're binding you,
then they are probably going to do horrific things to
you once they have you under complete physical control. You
can't fight back when you're bound. So the fact that
(15:49):
Lorraine engaged so early on that just speaks volumes to
the courage that she had in that very scary moment.
You didn't describe, I mean, you describe Lorraine as a model,
So I imagine she's probably the same stature as the
other gals you know in that five two five four. Yeah,
you had one hundred and ten hundred and thirty pound
(16:11):
type of range. So it sounds like she was able
to put up enough of a physical resistance against this guy.
You know, he's not somebody that's just just so monstrously
overpowering that she was able to, you know, get the
gun away and hold him at gunpoint.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
And does he just sit there?
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I think he does. And I'm guessing people are starting
to pull over and at some point, you know, the
highway patrol come because people are shopping, and you know,
saying that he needs to come. I think he's just petrified.
Maybe yeah, And you're right, she's pissed. And he is
not a big guy. We've talked about that. He's five
nine and one hundred and fifty pounds, but that doesn't
mean anything. And you know, you and I have talked
(16:50):
about when we've talked about the Colonial Parkway killer. We
didn't do that as an official episode, but you know,
you and I have talked about these sort of people
who take over couples. I always think, how do you
have the balls to do that? One person controlling two people?
And you say, well, you know, when you have a
weapon and you're intimidating them, And he must have just
(17:10):
thought that this gun was going to be enough, and
she clearly had a fight or flight moment and overtook him,
which was great.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, you know, and the likelihood is with the other victims,
you know, he probably pulled a gun on them, you know,
and was expecting the same type of compliance from Lorraine,
and she surprised him and he wasn't ready to handle
that in many ways this. I mean, yeah, there's no
question that Lorraine, you know this, she is a hero
in terms of the action she took. And I'm assuming
(17:42):
now this offender is taken into custody by CHP.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
He is and I know that this seems like this
could be the end of the story. You know, I've
told you this is a serial killer. He is. We've
kind of gone through all the victims, but not quite.
There's more to this story. That is so in your wheelhouse.
There's you know, the criminal profiling part of it, and
then there's potentially other victims. So yes, Lorraine is holding
(18:09):
him with a gun to him, and the highway patrolman
take this guy and they turn him over to Orange
County Sheriff's Department, and they find out that his name
is Harvey Glatman, and I think, you yeah, so you're
shaking your nodding your head. So I was wondering if
this was somebody you had heard of before, because it's
California and it's you know, in this time period. I
(18:31):
know you're familiar with some cases, bigger cases in California.
Had you heard of him before, Harvey Glatman?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
I had, of course, you know, the names of his
victims and some of the circumstances, the details that you're
providing on these cases didn't make me clue in or
this is this is Harvey Glatman. However, I am familiar
with him as a serial killer, you know, notably that
he did he was a photographer, and there's other serial
(18:58):
killers that I worked that did this same.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Type of ruse.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, and you know, Glatman, I don't know if he
comes off as particularly charming, but he is definitely someone
that a lot of women thought, you know, had had
something to offer them, and he really drew them in.
He was thirty. He was actually a television repairman. You know.
I'll tell you a little bit more about him. He's
an interesting character because he is questioned for four days
(19:29):
and by Thursday, October thirtieth, Harvey Glatman has admitted to
the murders of Judy and Shirley and Ruth. And I
don't get it. Why did he confess?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Well, he must know the gigs up. I mean, he's
caught red handed with Lorraine.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
But they don't have proof of anything, Paul. I mean,
he could have just said listen, things got a little rough,
and you know, they're not connecting him to these other women.
I don't think. I think he is saying I did this,
and they're kind of going, what okay?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
I think it really comes down to his you know,
inner motivations and if he is, if he is somebody
that is looking for attention, somebody like Dennis Raider BTK,
I could see where he would confess because he's going, yeah,
I did this, you know, I want the notoriety of
being this serial killer.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I also am wondering how the LA interrogation was back
in nineteen fifty seven. It probably wasn't a very cordial
or pleasant for him.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Little third degree, is what you mean?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I think, Well, I keep having flashes of that movie
La Confidential.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
You know, for the cases.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
It's awesome that he's saying he's admitting, but he also
the cases still need to be proved against him.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Is he providing details?
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Is he able to lead investigators to the rest of
Judy's body?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
You know?
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Does he give the specifics on how he interacted with
each of these women on the nights that are the
days that he picked them up, and what did he
do and et cetera. So there's still a lot of
information that he has to provide up and beyond just
saying I did it.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I first want for us to go back to the
very famous dual sketches that we have, and let's compare
them to what Glatman looks like. Because I had been
on the bins and needles, I thought, well, are these
accurate or not? Because we in my packet they didn't
include an actual picture of Glatman, and so I did
my own little thingy where I put the sketches on
(21:30):
one side and him on the other. So what do
you think about this?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yeah, so I am seeing you know, the two sketches
that you showed me the last time, and then seeing
Glatman on the right hand side. This is a headshot
of Glatman. It shows he's got his glasses on. And
side by side, these two composites are probably as good
(21:56):
of composites as I've ever seen, matching Glatman. The hairline
from the composites a spot on with Glatman's hair. The
length of his face is a little bit more squished
in than the composites. But the protruding ears, the prominent nose,
you know, the mouth, the eyes, you know everything about
(22:20):
the composites. I mean, these are good. They really do
look like Glatman.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Fantastic sketch artists, both of them, and fantastic witnesses. I mean, people, boy,
this is like for me textbook on how accurate things
can be. This is great. I wanted to get this
out of the way before we talk about Glatman and
what he says happened with all of this. So, as
I said, he eventually confessed. We don't know if this
(22:47):
was the act of the third degree, but you know,
they did get a confession out of him, So we
do know stuff about Glatman when he was a kid,
and I figure, let's get the stuff about the women
taken care of and then we can talk a little
bit about him because I know that we talk about
the myths behind serial killers and we'll see kind of
(23:09):
where he falls along those lines for you, all right,
sounds good. So Latman says that he strangled each one
of these women with the same piece of rope, and
that's something that they end up finding in his apartment. He,
as I said, is thirty. He was a television repairman.
And when he confesses, they say, where are they? We
(23:32):
found some bones and that's about it. We don't know
if Judy was that woman that we found. We don't
know where Shirley and we don't know where Ruth are.
And he said, well, let me illuminate a little bit
for you.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Here.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
He takes them to a remote part of the Anza
Desert State Park in the Colorado Desert, not far from
San Diego, and that's where they find the remains of
two women because of, you know, the corner of San
Diego County coroner says that because of the decomposition and
the animal activity that he said, the bodies were a
(24:06):
little more than we're a little more than a bag
of bones. But they tentatively identified them as Ruth and Shirley.
And he said that from what Ladman had told them,
they can identify the bones found six months earlier by
those two boys, which we thought was Judy. So he
has said, you know, here are all three of them,
(24:26):
and took them directly to it. So that's proof positive,
I'm assuming right.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Oh, absolutely, Now does he bring them to the rest
of Judy's remains.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
That's not the impression I got. He said this is
where she was. I think they thought there was not
going to be anything left there. I'm assuming they combed
that area where her bones were found initially. So then
this is where things get difficult for me. I mean,
I have never seen these kinds of photos before. He
decided that he was going to photograph these women, basically
(24:58):
moments before he murdered them. So the newspapers inexplicably printed
these photos. It just makes me nauseous. And these are
not photos I'm going to put on social media. If
listeners want to find them, they can, but I'm not
going to do it. It's as upsetting to me to
see them, almost more upsetting than to see the bodies
of women. Because there's especially one and I'm going to
(25:21):
show you now, there's one photo where a woman looks
absolutely terrified, and it's Judy. But we see all three
of them, so I'm going to show you what he did.
And they find these photos along with the rope in
his apartment. So the title of this is Madman's own
pictures of the girls he killed. So, Paul, the woman
(25:43):
on the upper left is Shirley, the woman on the
right is Judy, and the woman on the bottom is Ruth.
And they all appear to be alive right now, So.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, I'm looking at these photos, which you know, again
for them to have been published in the newspaper is very,
very insensitive to the victims and the victims loved ones.
The horror of these photos. We're seeing these women in
the last moments of their life, and at least with
particularly with Judy, her sitting you know, in this chair
(26:18):
and she's got a gig, her hands are bound behind
her back, her her knees are bound. You can see
the fear in her eyes as she's looking kind of
up to her left, and that's probably where Glatman is
actually standing. And he's taking a photo using you know,
probably a cable attached to the camera on a tripods.
(26:39):
That's interesting that he's standing. He's not like standing there
with the camera and photographing her because I bet she's
she's engaged with where he's at. This photo of Judy,
of the three we talked about in the first episode,
those True Detective magazines, this is exactly the type a photo,
(27:00):
the type of imagery that's in the true detective magazines.
That's why these guys liked those magazines. Glatman is in
essence making his own imagery, yeah, purposefully with these women
bound like this and with the fear on their faces,
because that's what he is getting off on. You know,
(27:22):
all of them are fully clothed at the time these
photos are taken, but they're all bound gagged.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
I can see the one on the upper left. Surely
I had a hard time seeing it, but I can
definitely see a gag around her mouth. There's like a
shadow or something going on there.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
She's outside, yeah, you know, Judy's the only one that's inside.
She's you know, sitting up in this chair. And then
you have Shirley and Ruth, who are laying mostly on
their back, you know, but bound identical manner, you know,
around the ankles, around the knees, hands behind their back,
the game eggs around their mouth.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
And we know that Glatman.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
After these photos sexually assaults them and then strangles them.
And it's very interesting behaviorally that he utilizes the same
length of rope as the murder weapon in all three cases.
So he's not tying a ligature around their neck and
leaving that on. He is manually strangling them utilizing this rope.
That's something that he just that's what he wants to do.
(28:26):
And the fact that he's keeping that rope is significant.
It's significant that he's keeping these photos, and he's keeping
the rope with the photos right and in his residence. Yep.
You know, so this is all part of you have
to ask anytime the offender does something that is not
needed to commit the crime, you have to go, well,
why is he doing that? Well, that's something significant to
(28:47):
the offender, and it's often insight to the offender's fantasy.
Glatman is a fantasy motivated offender.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
And I know this won't surprise you, but they looked
in a toolbox in his apartment and found personal belongings
for all three women. You call those mementos, is that right?
Not trophies, mementos souvenirs. Souvenirs.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Okay, generally you could say it's sort of semantics. But
you know, within the behavioral analysis terminology, when offenders are
taking items in essence to help remember the crimes that
they committed, we utilize the term souvenir. And that's just
(29:29):
what he has done is and that is a very
very common thing that these guys do.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
These photos which are terrifying to me. The police, when
they looked through his apartment found some of them pinned
to his wall. I mean, well, let me tell you
what he says happened. At this point, I don't see
a reason why not to believe him, because he really
is very straightforward about this. His intention was sexual assault,
(29:58):
he says, for all three women, but he didn't want
to be identified. And going through the Lonely Hearts Club,
I mean, of course would identify him, and going through
an agency photographer agency. It's just so interesting and maybe
as you learn a little bit more about him, you'll
understand going to the person's house, being able to be
identified by the mother and the sister, I mean, what
(30:19):
is he thinking. I don't understand why he says, well,
I had to kill them, But he's allowed other people
like former dates to be able to identify him too.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, you know this is where I mean, he's pre
planning his crimes. Obviously, he is not a dumb offender
by any stretch of the imagination. But just because he's
reasonably intelligent doesn't mean he has a PhD in committing crimes.
And I mentioned, you know what stood out to me
is at this offender by going and picking up Judy
(30:52):
at her house, and by going and picking up Shirley
and interacting, you know, to at least he's seen by
Shirley's mom. He's elevating his risk. Why is he doing that.
He's not lurering these women to an isolated location that
a lot of guys will do because they don't want
to be seen. He's allowing himself to be seen. This
(31:13):
is where he's just not thinking things through at the
depth that maybe some other offenders would in order to
try to minimize the risk of them being caught. He's
obviously able to isolate these women and sexually assault and
kill them. He's successful at committing the crime, but he's
not being very diligent about covering all his tracks in
(31:37):
order to be as successful as a predator as he
could have been.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Well, let me tell you these details are something else,
and I think it speaks number one to the terror
that these women must have felt, and number two to
his psychology. So tell me what do you think about this.
He picked up Judy, who is the first victim that
we know of. He picked up Judy. He brought her
back to his apartment rather than to some studio or
(32:01):
maybe he said we're gonna do this pin up shoot
at my apartment. He's actually assaulted her at gunpoint, and
then of course took photos of her bound and gagged.
We don't know which came first. Then he drove her
into the desert and had her get out of the car. Now,
normally I would not go into this much detail what
I'm getting ready to tell you, but I just wonder
(32:22):
what this says about him. At gunpoint, he told her
to kneel down, and he tied the rope around her
ankles and then around her neck and then strangled her
by pulling the rope tight. Why would he do that?
There's something that he wanted to do. Is that like
hog tying? It's not.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
If I were to describe it just the way that
you said, I would say, yes, it is a form
of hogtying if it's just straight from the ankles to
the neck, Because I've seen an offender who's done some
more elaborate aspects, you know, in essence, where now the
victim is face down and ankles are bound, then that
(33:00):
same rope goes up around the neck, but it's done
in such a way to where the victims strangles themselves
because it's so tight. You know, their legs are now
pulling against the rope around their neck. Sounds like in
this case you still have this ankles to neck connection
from behind, but Glatman has to further tighten or utilize
(33:23):
a separate rope, which I think is the case as
the murder weapon. Now, this may be something he saw.
You know, these offenders visually will see things like in
the True Detect magazines and want to replicate what they've
seen or what they've read about. That could be something
that he is just trying to do because it was
fantasy material for him from something he's seen or read about.
(33:47):
Or it may be because Glatman is not a very
physically robust and maybe competent male, it may be a
mechanism of safety for him, so he knows that he
has absolute control over Judy, that she cannot fight back
(34:08):
because she is completely incapacitated. If that's the case, then
that would be more of what I would say an
mo type of characteristic of Glatman, because he's utilizing it
to accomplish the crime and lower the risk to himself
his own self preservation.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
But if he's doing.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
It because it's something he's seen that turned him on,
then that is fantasy that is a signature of.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
His Well, then we changed locations a little bit, so
we now are going to talk about his second victim,
who is Surely, and this is the Lonely Hearts club
blind date. He picks her up and instead of going
to the stance, he drives her to Huntington Beach. Surely,
of course, is arguing with him and says take me home,
(34:52):
and he drove her out into the desert instead. They
waited in the car until the sun came up.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
He needs light to take the photographs.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I get.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, she refused to get out of the car and
he held her at gunpoint and made her get out
of the car. So she gets out of the car
and he binds her and sexual assaults her, and then
he makes her walk in the desert for hours before
he makes her lie on her stomach and he strangles her.
I mean, this is is this something he's replicating that
(35:21):
he saw or read again?
Speaker 2 (35:23):
You know, it could be you know, I think Glatman
is taking you know, he's elevating his risk by driving
around with this woman that he's he's abducted, you know,
from Sun Valley, Huntington Beach all the way down to
San Diego County and then he then it sounds like
he makes her walk for hours down in the San
(35:43):
Diego County desert before she goes face down and he
strangles her from behind. From a behavioral side, you know,
some of these offenders want to watch the victim face
to face as they strangle. You know, they in essence,
they play god. They know they're the ones that are
controlling when the victim dies. They want to see the
(36:04):
victim's fear. They want to feel the victim struggle against them. Here,
if he's strangling her from behind, it almost does sound
like he's eliminating her as a witness. The act of
killing isn't part of the fantasy. Potentially, in Shirley's case,
I can't eliminate the possibility that maybe he has seen
or been exposed to something where this is replicating a
(36:28):
fantasy story in his head. But he may just be
eliminating her as a witness, and he's utilizing the desert
and the distance that she ends up having to walk
as a way to further hide her body.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Well, the last woman who was Ruth, this is the
burlesque show woman. He tells the police that he actually
didn't want to kill Ruth, that she was the one
that he actually really liked. She's disgusting through a studio,
it sounds like, to try to photograph her, and she
(37:04):
wanted to cancel because she didn't feel well. He came
to her apartment anyway, and he forced his way in.
This is the boarding house, that's right, and repeatedly raped
her at gunpoint over the course of a night. I
don't know where other people are in this boarding house,
if it was deserted or people didn't hear. But he
made her put on a robe and walked to his
(37:24):
car the next day, and then he drove her to
the desert, took photos over clothed and unclothed, and then
killed her with the same length of rope.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
And he's driving her all the way down to San
Diego County desert again.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, I mean, unless he kills them somewhere else. I
haven't read this, and then puts the remains there. But
I have not read, you know, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
Well, this newspaper photograph of Ruth, it's showing her bound
and gagged, and the way that the caption reads is
she's on this blanket in the San Diego County desert
just before she was strangled. So he drove her alive
all the way down to San Diego County. So you see,
with Judy, she's found in the Hollywood Hills if I
remember right, right, h Yep, she's kind of kept in
(38:07):
the Los Angeles area versus Shirley and Ruth. He's driving
a distance south of Los Angeles to San Diego County
and purposely, I'm sure, choosing the desert. The desert is
not a kind place for bodies that are left on
the surface.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Well, after all of this, he is charged with Shirley
and Ruth's murders. I don't know why not Judy, but
you know they paired them together. And he pleads guilty
and he's sentenced to the gas chamber. But we have
a potential boulder, what they call the boulder, Jane, do
we might have another victim, So tell me what you
(38:47):
think about this. Okay, So he has been sentenced, he
is not dead yet. They are finding photos of women
from Colorado also, he had been in Colorado similarly bound
in gagged. They asked Latman if all of these women
are still alive, and he says, unless they've been run over,
(39:09):
and he says, I didn't kill anybody else. But the
wording raises eyebrows because there's a cold case in Boulder
that they've been trying to solve. No one really had
been making this connection very well. But there was a
woman whose body was found in the Boulder Canyon in Boulder,
Colorado in nineteen fifty four, so three or four years earlier.
(39:30):
They think that she might have been run over, And
for more than fifty years since she has been called
Jane Doe, the Battered Blonde of Boulder Canyon. And in
two thousand and nine they identified her as a woman
named Dorothy Gay Howard through DNA, and he was in
Denver at the time, and that she had been visiting
(39:53):
around this exact same time her aunt who was in Denver,
and that they think that there must have been a connection,
but that was that the police are never really able
to make that connection. It doesn't seem like strong enough,
but it could be a coincidence. I don't know, what
do you think?
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Well, do you know how Dorothy? What was she left
on the road? How does she get run over?
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Let me give you the circumstances here. So she was
only identified because of her twenty four year old grand
niece who starts researching this. I told you the identification
happened in two thousand and nine, and that's how we
know all of these details. So she had been eighteen,
and she had been in Denver visiting we think her aunt.
That's where Glatman was at the time, and he was
(40:38):
known to police at that time. Dorothy was originally from Arizona,
and she was married to a guy who her family
didn't approve of, and she got divorced pretty quickly. She
had been married to another older man, but it seems
like she left him and went to Denver in this time.
In nineteen fifty four, her body was found in April
by a creek and Boulder Canyon by two University of
(41:01):
Colorado students. No clothes, no jewelry, badly beaten. There had
been animal activity, so her face was unrecognizable, but she
did have perfect teeth, which I thought, that's weird, But
that meant apparently she couldn't be identified by dental records.
They didn't have any dental records that they could figure out.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Does that make sense to you From the dental side,
you know, oftentimes what you see is you have the
dentists who they will you know, when you have a
deceased body that in which you have the intact teeth,
the anthropologists that are forensical identologists will come in and chart,
you know, the various fillings, the various anomalies to you know,
(41:44):
the person's dental aspects. And then when they have a
possible identification, then they go to the dentists to see
the records, the dental records and does that add up
with the various sings. At the old on time, the
friends of goodontologists was able to chart. Now if you
have somebody who has had no cavities and no fillings
(42:07):
and no other dental issues like me, the dentist doesn't
have anything outside of saying this person has perfect teeth,
you know. So in the databases there isn't anything that
you know in the comments to say, hey, kean On,
this person has a bridge on the lower left part
of their jaw. You just don't have that information, right.
That observation is interesting. She was badly beaten but found
(42:30):
by a creek, but it doesn't say that she was
on the road side. So you know, I wonder because
I have seen this where sometimes in fact, i've got
one victim who is beaten so badly. The pathologist says
she's been run over and she wasn't. She was just
beaten so badly, you know. And I'm wondering, is that
(42:51):
what we're dealing with in this Dorothy case, because it
doesn't sound like she's on the road.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, they have a suspicion about it. I know, this
seems like a weird weak connection right now because it's
just him in the city. But this is what police do,
and this is why I think this part of the
case might be a little bit confusing. So the police
in fifty eight, they gather all of these photos of
these women that he's taking photos of. He knows everybody's names,
and they're trying to, of course, identify who's alive, and
(43:18):
so far they can only confirm these three women who
were dead. He gets to a woman that he says
was in Denver, and he points to it and says,
I didn't mark her name down and I never saw
her again. He does not admit to killing somebody, but
he made that weird cryptic remark, and they don't trust
that he's obviously going to tell them everything. He does
(43:38):
admit that he encountered a woman in Denver, but he says,
I don't know her name. We have a record of
this because it's in a police transcript, but we don't
have the photo that was actually discussed. So what police
in fifty four thought happened was that this victim, who
we now know is Dorothy, had been thrown into the
(43:59):
canyon this creek alive from the road above, or possibly
rammed with a car. Now tell me if this is possible.
In the late two thousands, of cold case investigator compared
the injuries on Dorothy's body to the dimensions of a
nineteen fifty one Dodge Coronet, which was Glatman's car. He said,
(44:20):
they lined up. I mean, does that even sound like
that's a thing they're trying to make this connection?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
You know, I would have to see what the invest
you know, the injuries the investigators looking at you. I mean,
you could most certainly have contusions that match up with
features of a vehicle as they hit the body. You could,
you know, have some very unique features of a vehicle
that get impressed into the body during let's say, a
(44:47):
moving type of act of violence.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
You know, if the victims.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Standing up and the vehicle hits the victim and at
a certain point on their body that maybe those those
features are replicated based on the abrasions and the contusions
and stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
The body is such.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
A weird medium though, for a large object to put
unique characteristics, you know, to be able to really conclusively
match up. I'm not saying I'm skeptical. I just would
need to see it. I would say it's possible. But
sometimes people will imagine things that aren't there.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah, let me just say, you know, they were never
able to make obviously a definitive connection, and there were
many photos and I'm not sure how helpful Glatman was
after a certain point, but let me sort of say this,
this is a little bit of his background, because I
also think this is important. You know, we are interested
in the backgrounds of killers and warning signs. So police
(45:50):
say from a young age he had been interested in
rope and strangulation at the age of four.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
You know, I when I talked to law enforcement about,
you know, recognizing the serial predator, there's a phrase that
I always use, and it's called no thy enemy. And
this is to underscore that these predators, their psychology, their fantasy,
(46:16):
their behaviors is so abnormal that unless you study what
these guys do, you're not necessarily going to recognize or
think about, you know, evidentiary aspects of the case. And
when you start talking about going into the you know,
the various psychological abnormalities that these some of these offenders
(46:40):
exhibit as they they grow up, you run into this
type of thing.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
I know, some people.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Say age four, Yes, things some abnormality start showing up
at a very young age. I have Phil Hughes by
age he was in second grade, and he's mutilating his
female classmates doll by second grade. Wow, you know, and
when he was being interviewed by psychologists yet he was
(47:08):
talking about seeing like what he described as dead mannequins
in his in his in his head. I've really moved
away from kind of the psychology of the making of
the serial predator, you know, I kind of really more
want to catch him, right, I know, you know, uh,
And it's for the other people who want to study
(47:30):
the psychology. But here you have Glatmin at a very
young age exhibiting some abnormal behaviors and admitting at that
age to fantasy of strangulation. And this just carries out
to where now he's committing you know, strangulation and sexual
assault on adult females.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think this is another weird thing.
His parents said that he would when he was a
little older than four, not much older, he would talk
like a roper string around his neck in the bathtub
and let the other end of the rope be pulled
into the drain to feel that tightening. And I just think, God,
it's so that's so young. I mean, to really be
(48:13):
fascinated in that way or want to replicate that in
some way.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yeah, And this is where if you see your child
doing these types of behaviors, get them help.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
This is not going to be a surprise to you
or anybody listening. His behavior was never good. He was
pinging with his family between New York City and Denver
throughout his young adult teenage years. He would repeatedly break
into women's homes and tie him up and grope them.
Not rape, but grope, And of course eventually that escalated.
He was in and out. He served five years in
(48:47):
sing Sing for grand larceny. So this was just a
clear escalation, not the mutilation of animals that sometimes we
look for that we know of. This, This is different.
And I will say though that I I've done stories
on people who strangle, and they've strangled animals to begin with,
you know, as practice, So I wouldn't be surprised if
(49:08):
he had done that with this level of fascination that
he had, you, I'd.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Say, that's entirely possible, though it's not absolutely necessary. You know,
this is all you know, the cruelty to animals, you know,
that's all part of this serial killer triad. And it's
you know, I don't put much weight on, you know,
the bed wetting aspect, a little more weight on, you know,
the setting of the fires, depending on why they're setting
(49:32):
the fires. But I put a huge amount of weight
on if you have somebody, a child that is torturing animals,
killing animals, they're one step.
Speaker 3 (49:43):
Away from doing that to a human.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
And that that is the most significant component of the
serial killer triad. This evolution where he's breaking into houses
and groping women. I can guarantee he was a peeper
at one point, and he was a burglar, a fetish burglar,
prior to actually going physical with these victims inside their
(50:08):
own houses.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
That's the standard.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
You know, you have to get comfortable at committing these
various types of lesser crimes before you get into the
more serious crime. And you know, I talk about these
social barriers to a fence, and I imagine, Kate, if
you're in a neighborhood and you walk on your neighbor's lawn,
you get uncomfortable. You know, you're afraid that that person
(50:33):
is going to be upset with you and yell at
You imagine going up on your neighbor's lawn and looking
inside their house, yeah, or breaking into their house. These
offenders have to pass each of those social barriers and
get comfortable doing that. And so that's where I'm pretty
sure Glatman is doing all of these various other lesser
(50:54):
crimes before going in and groping the women inside these
their own homes.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Well this after he pleads guilty. He is executed at
San Quentin Prison in nineteen fifty nine. I will say,
I'm always looking for heroes, and I love looking for
the female hero in this story. And how many lives
did Lorraine save by fighting so hard? And then I
(51:19):
mean a bullet hit her, grazed her on the thigh.
She's bleeding. People are ignoring her as they fly down
the highway and she's holding this guy's own pistol against him,
and God knows how many people he would have killed,
how many women he would have killed if she had
not done that, And I just think that's amazing. I
love ending on a good note like that that. I'm
(51:40):
very proud of this woman.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
You know, no, absolutely, I mean there's no question the
courage to fight and to actually win the fight.
Speaker 3 (51:49):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
Well, I feel like I need a couple of baths
or a couple of showers after this, because this was
just horrific compared to what well, I mean, we always
took about really difficult crimes, but this was pretty difficult
for me and I had never seen photos like this before.
But a really powerful story finally a woman being able
(52:13):
to take control of the situation and saving so many
lives at least being able to provide closure for the
other victims in this case, I mean, one of them
the harder cases that we've had to deal with.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
From my I guess world perspective and experience, Glatman is
just one of many of these monsters that are out there,
and it really is something that people need to pay
attention to because if you take a look at Harvey Glatman.
He doesn't look like the Boogeyman. He looks just like
(52:49):
the average guy. He looks non threatening, yet he is
able to isolate and take control of these women then
ultimately kill them. And these types of predators are out there,
and these are the types of cases that I have
spent the last thirty years of my life working.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Well. Next week, I'm going to avoid serial killer cases
because this was a tough one on me. But we
will come back with another really good episode. Thanks for
all your hard work on this, Paul. This was a
lot YEP.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
This was a good case, good series of cases for me.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
Thank you, Kate, good see you next week. This has
been an exactly right production for.
Speaker 2 (53:34):
Our sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com
slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (53:46):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 3 (53:49):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 1 (53:58):
You can follow Buried Bone on Instagram and Facebook at
Bury Bones. Pod.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now, and
Speaker 1 (54:10):
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, my life solving America's cold cases,
is also available now
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
True crimes, and I weigh in using modern forensic techniques
to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried bones. Hey, Paul, we had a humdinger
(01:03):
of a story of last week, didn't we have this
serial killer?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah? You know that.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That was a fascinating episode for me, you know, in
terms of we've got a guy out in la in
nineteen fifty seven?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It's nineteen fifty seven, yeah, but we're pouring into nineteen
fifty eight now, unfortunately, So tell me what you remember,
because I had a couple of people message me and say,
I really like when Paul does a recap. So let's
give the listeners what they want. I'm going to make you.
We're going to see how closely you listened to me
last week.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, I do have my crib notes that I kept
from you telling me the story, So I do have
a cheat sheet. But I don't know if I can
weave it as eloquently as you would, but I will.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Go ahead and give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Sure you can.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
In August of nineteen fifty seven, nineteen year old Judy,
who is a model. She's a strange from her husband
going through a divorce, has a fourteen month old daughter
that she's in a custody to dispute with with her
strange husband. She needs money. For Judy, who's a model,
the way to make money is to model, and so
(02:12):
she ends up being picked up by a person who
claims to be a photographer and he utilizes the name
Johnny Glenn, and a roommate is able to describe Johnny
as being five to nine hundred and fifty pounds, all
of complected, and he's wearing horned rimmed glasses. She doesn't
(02:32):
come home after being picked up, and roommate gets scared
reports him missing. Law enforcement isn't able to make much
progress in the investigation, and five months later, some kids
find some skeletal remains limited skeletal remains basically forearm, wrist,
and hands from a single body. Months go by, and
(02:57):
then now there is another woman. Her name is Shirley.
She's twenty four years old, she's also divorced, has two kids.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
And she goes out on a date.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
That is set up through this Lonely Hearts club and
she's picked up by a man who goes by the
name of George Williams. And George had actually dated another
woman from this Lonely Hearts club about two weeks prior,
and that woman got home fine, but Shirley never comes home,
(03:28):
nor does she make it to the dance that George
was supposed to take her to. And we actually have
two different descriptions of this man the woman that he
dated two weeks prior, as well as the description of
the man from Shirley's mom who was home and she
got picked up by George. And these descriptions are somewhat varied,
(03:51):
but as I talked about in the first episode, I
think they fall within you know, the general variables that
you get from different witnesses describing the same man. And
you showed me images of two composites, and quite frankly,
to my eyes, those two composits look like the same man.
And we know we have a serial killer in this case.
And at this point I think you're going to start
(04:13):
talking to me about more of the investigation and maybe
more victims.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
You nailed it, got everything right. I was waiting to
see if you were going to miss something up, and
you didn't.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
I passed the test.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Your notes are great. I mean, I know, I see
you scribbling all the time, and sometimes I wonder if
he's doing like a cartoon sketch or something. I'm talking. Okay.
We continued to be in LA, which now makes me
scared to be in LA in general, because women keep
going missing. And you know, as you said, we're still
looking for Ruth and Shirley. We still have not identified
(04:46):
those bones. And about a year to the day when
Judy has gone missing, and this is four months after
Shirley has gone missing, a landlord at at LA boarding
house is very concerned about one of his tenants. It
is July twenty seventh, and now we're in nineteen fifty eight,
and this is a woman named Ruth Mercado. She's a model,
(05:08):
just like Judy and she had just turned twenty four
three days earlier. So all of these women are in
the same age range and sort of physical attributes. The
landlord is concerned because he hasn't seen Ruth in four days,
and he finally decides to go in and check on
her when he goes into the room. So this is
a boarding house, This isn't even a formal apartment. She
(05:32):
isn't there, but she has a couple of pets. There's
a small dog and two parakeets, and they are all
in distress. They haven't been fed or given water in
four days. It sounds like the landlord calls the police
about Ruth's disappearance. Talk to me just about that scene
in general. So we don't know yet if Ruth had
been taken from this boarding house or you know, if
(05:55):
she met somebody out, but she clearly, whatever happened, did
not intend to leave her animal behind.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Right, And I think that that's the critical factor there,
because you know, Ruth, being twenty four years old, she's
an adult.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
She can go off on her own.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I can't imagine with a boarding house if she had
any reporting requirements back to the landlord that would cause
him to end up reporting her missing. But the observation
that she obviously hasn't been taking care of her pets,
you know, that's that's the red flag in this scenario.
So now law enforcement is going to respond and it's
(06:31):
having to now reconstruct what happened. You know, is there
any evidence within this room of violence? Is there evidence
of a struggle? If those are absent, then it's also okay,
So who last saw Ruth?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Where was she last going?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
If she left voluntarily, is there any indisha, you know,
any writings.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Let's say she took.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
A you know, back in nineteen fifty seven, a landline
phone call and on a notepad wrote down a name
and a number or address. You know, that's information that
the investigators are going to gobble up and now go
track that person or those persons down. They have to
really spend a lot of time reconstructing Ruth's life in
(07:15):
the last few days before she disappeared.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
And I think they have no information Paul essentially about Ruth.
That's who we had the least amount of information about.
Right now, let me tell you what the police say
when the landlord calls and says, listen, I've had this tenant,
I haven't seen her in four days, and now we've
got these animals that clearly have not been fed or
watered in four days. The police show up and they
(07:39):
don't see anything really amiss. It doesn't sound like there's
even fourth century into the apartment. Nothing has been turned over,
doesn't look like anything has been taken. But they do
look around the apartment and they find nude photos of Ruth.
It sounds like she was a burlessed type dancer. And
(08:02):
even though the media pick up on this and the
police say they're investigating, I just don't get the sense
that it's with the same level of interest and intensity
as with Judy and Shirley. It sounds like when they
saw those nude photos of her and sort of a
burlesque type show, the interest from both the police and
the media went down quite a bit and they couldn't
(08:22):
connect her. They didn't even think about connecting her with
these other two missing women.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, you know, from that era, I can see that happening.
In essence, law enforcement very rapidly moved off of what
they would classify what we really do classify as high
risk victims. Back in the day, the mindset was we
need to spend our resources elsewhere, and it's just such
an unfortunate thing that that's what happens. I think, you know, immediately,
(08:49):
of course, as we're talking about these victims, for a
proper investigation, you're trying to track down or who knew Ruth.
You know, did anybody within the boarding house know her?
Did she have any friends? You know, what did she
tell these people that she's interacting with the fact that
she is also a model, you know, did she have
any jobs? The victimology is huge, you know, and so
(09:10):
a proper investigation would have been included all that. But
it sounds like, oh, she's into this burlesque type of
aspect and we're just going to move on.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, and this is the only case, and I'm you know,
I'll tell you these are all connected. Of course, this
is the only case we have where a man has
not been seen. You know. In this case, nobody saw
a man come to her apartment. Nobody remembers her saying
I've got a photography gig. No one knows, you know,
if she left with the intention of coming back. She
(09:40):
literally vanished and left these animals that she loved behind,
and the police didn't seem particularly motivated, and you know,
they're not making any headway in the meantime with Judy
and with Shirley. You know, I'm sure they suspect that
Judy is the person who was found the bones, you know,
that were found by the two little boys. But there
were other missing women. So it's it's still a big
(10:02):
mystery for them, you.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Know, And I think that that, you know, that's just
something I want to point out is we are also
talking Los Angeles, and so right now we have focused
in on these these three women that have gone missing.
Imagine the number of missing persons even in nineteen fifty
seven in a city the size of Los Angeles. You know,
law enforcement, they're they're looking at these cases. Each one
(10:27):
of them are individually needles in this massive haystack of caseload. So,
you know, I think with Ruth, I mean the fact that,
like in the prior to cases, there was Judy and
Shirley had family that were engaged at certain levels. Right
with Ruth, right now, it doesn't sound like there's any family.
(10:49):
There's nobody that's going, hey, there's something really wrong here.
It's a landlord of a boarding home.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Well, we are having, you know a problem connecting everything.
We're having a problem finding you know, these two, well,
now three women. I feel for the police in nineteen
fifty seven, fifty eight, with the exception of not investigating
Ruth's case right enough. We now have a fourth victim,
and I have a lot of detail because thank god,
(11:16):
this one is a survivor and a hero as far
as I'm concerned. And you're going to find out why,
because this is an amazing story. So you know, I
was going to sort of like lead up to the
fact that this woman made it out alive, but there's
so much detail you would have suspected that, and you
would have said, okay, well, obviously she survived. When I
(11:37):
watched Zodiac with one of my girls, she said, oh
my gosh, are they both And I had not really
told her about the story, and we were, you know,
watching them the first couple, and she said, are they
both gonna die? And I said, no, I don't think so.
And she said why And I said, well, this is
a lot of detail. So if neither of them survived,
how would we have known this. There's no CCTV. How
(11:59):
would we have known this had happened unless either the
killer said something or somebody survived, and then, of course
we knew with the zodiac in the first couple somebody survived.
So I like being mysterious, but I want to be
realistic at the.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Same time, When does this case happen? How much longer
after Ruth?
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Three months later after Ruth? So now we are a
year and a couple of months after our first case,
which was Judy. So this is October twenty seventh, nineteen
fifty eight. This is a twenty eight year old woman.
Her name is Lorraine Vijel, and she is This is
a familiar story. This is her very first modeling gig
(12:38):
and she's part of a small agency that she's just
started working with. The agency contacts her and says, there's
a photographer who's going to pick her up at the house.
Now I don't know if this is what happened with
Judy or well, it wouldn't have been Sureley. It would
have been Judy with the first modeling gig, and we
don't know if that's what happened with Ruth. But this
(13:01):
is the first time I've heard of an agency being involved.
It looks like he contacted an agency and said I
need a photographer. I need a model for a shoot,
and they hooked him up with Lorraine. So this guy
shows up. His name is Frank Johnson. You know, now
we've got again, you know, a series of disappearances involving
a photographer. So Lorraine says they're supposed to go to
(13:24):
his studio that Lorraine is familiar with and take pictures.
But when she gets in the car and they start driving,
he doesn't go toward Hollywood. She's trying to direct him
toward the studio because she's worked at the studio before,
and she asked, Frank, why aren't you going in the
right direction, and he said, well, I want to use
my home studio instead. She says she knew something was
(13:46):
really wrong when he gets on the Santa Ana Freeway.
He starts driving very fast. He stops at a desolate
exit and pulls over. He says, I've got a flat tire.
But then he pulls out a gun. He pulls out
a piss so he says, do what I tell you
to do, and you're not going to get hurt, and
he pulls out a piece of rope to tie her
(14:08):
hands together. She fights, and she grabs the gun. They
start struggling in the front seat. The gun goes off
and the bullet grazes Lorraine's thigh. She opens a passenger
drawer and they both fall out onto the ground. On
this desolate exit stop, they are in sight of passing cars,
but nobody stops. They're driving by, and there's like in
(14:30):
a hand in hand battle on the ground over this gun,
and nobody is stopping along this highway. She bites his
hand that is holding the gun. He lets the gun go,
she grabs it and she holds him at gunpoint, and
eventually highway patrolmencome.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
I mean, Lorraine blood coming down, her leg, scraped up,
scared to death, and is holding this guy ready to
blow his brains out until the highway patrol shows up.
Because I'm sure at that point people are passing by
and seeing this woman holding a gun on a guy
on the ground. And now finally we get the police
to show up. What do you think about that? I mean,
what a story.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
That's actually amazing. I'm surprised she didn't kill them, almost
like an act of passion. She's got to be so
scared and so enraged at the same time. You know,
now she's got the upper hand with the firearm, Yeah,
in some ways, that speaks all of us. Speaks to
Lorraine having sort of a wherewithal of understanding the dire
(15:27):
circumstances she's in. And I always say, never let somebody
bind you. You fight at that moment, even if they've
got a gun on you, because if they're binding you,
then they are probably going to do horrific things to
you once they have you under complete physical control. You
can't fight back when you're bound. So the fact that
(15:49):
Lorraine engaged so early on that just speaks volumes to
the courage that she had in that very scary moment.
You didn't describe, I mean, you describe Lorraine as a model,
So I imagine she's probably the same stature as the
other gals you know in that five two five four. Yeah,
you had one hundred and ten hundred and thirty pound
(16:11):
type of range. So it sounds like she was able
to put up enough of a physical resistance against this guy.
You know, he's not somebody that's just just so monstrously
overpowering that she was able to, you know, get the
gun away and hold him at gunpoint.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
And does he just sit there?
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I think he does. And I'm guessing people are starting
to pull over and at some point, you know, the
highway patrol come because people are shopping, and you know,
saying that he needs to come. I think he's just petrified.
Maybe yeah, And you're right, she's pissed. And he is
not a big guy. We've talked about that. He's five
nine and one hundred and fifty pounds, but that doesn't
mean anything. And you know, you and I have talked
(16:50):
about when we've talked about the Colonial Parkway killer. We
didn't do that as an official episode, but you know,
you and I have talked about these sort of people
who take over couples. I always think, how do you
have the balls to do that? One person controlling two people?
And you say, well, you know, when you have a
weapon and you're intimidating them, And he must have just
(17:10):
thought that this gun was going to be enough, and
she clearly had a fight or flight moment and overtook him,
which was great.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, you know, and the likelihood is with the other victims,
you know, he probably pulled a gun on them, you know,
and was expecting the same type of compliance from Lorraine,
and she surprised him and he wasn't ready to handle
that in many ways this. I mean, yeah, there's no
question that Lorraine, you know this, she is a hero
in terms of the action she took. And I'm assuming
(17:42):
now this offender is taken into custody by CHP.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
He is and I know that this seems like this
could be the end of the story. You know, I've
told you this is a serial killer. He is. We've
kind of gone through all the victims, but not quite.
There's more to this story. That is so in your wheelhouse.
There's you know, the criminal profiling part of it, and
then there's potentially other victims. So yes, Lorraine is holding
(18:09):
him with a gun to him, and the highway patrolman
take this guy and they turn him over to Orange
County Sheriff's Department, and they find out that his name
is Harvey Glatman, and I think, you yeah, so you're
shaking your nodding your head. So I was wondering if
this was somebody you had heard of before, because it's
California and it's you know, in this time period. I
(18:31):
know you're familiar with some cases, bigger cases in California.
Had you heard of him before, Harvey Glatman?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
I had, of course, you know, the names of his
victims and some of the circumstances, the details that you're
providing on these cases didn't make me clue in or
this is this is Harvey Glatman. However, I am familiar
with him as a serial killer, you know, notably that
he did he was a photographer, and there's other serial
(18:58):
killers that I worked that did this same.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Type of ruse.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, and you know, Glatman, I don't know if he
comes off as particularly charming, but he is definitely someone
that a lot of women thought, you know, had had
something to offer them, and he really drew them in.
He was thirty. He was actually a television repairman. You know.
I'll tell you a little bit more about him. He's
an interesting character because he is questioned for four days
(19:29):
and by Thursday, October thirtieth, Harvey Glatman has admitted to
the murders of Judy and Shirley and Ruth. And I
don't get it. Why did he confess?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Well, he must know the gigs up. I mean, he's
caught red handed with Lorraine.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
But they don't have proof of anything, Paul. I mean,
he could have just said listen, things got a little rough,
and you know, they're not connecting him to these other women.
I don't think. I think he is saying I did this,
and they're kind of going, what okay?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
I think it really comes down to his you know,
inner motivations and if he is, if he is somebody
that is looking for attention, somebody like Dennis Raider BTK,
I could see where he would confess because he's going, yeah,
I did this, you know, I want the notoriety of
being this serial killer.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I also am wondering how the LA interrogation was back
in nineteen fifty seven. It probably wasn't a very cordial
or pleasant for him.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Little third degree, is what you mean?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I think, Well, I keep having flashes of that movie
La Confidential.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
You know, for the cases.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
It's awesome that he's saying he's admitting, but he also
the cases still need to be proved against him.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Is he providing details?
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Is he able to lead investigators to the rest of
Judy's body?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
You know?
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Does he give the specifics on how he interacted with
each of these women on the nights that are the
days that he picked them up, and what did he
do and et cetera. So there's still a lot of
information that he has to provide up and beyond just
saying I did it.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I first want for us to go back to the
very famous dual sketches that we have, and let's compare
them to what Glatman looks like. Because I had been
on the bins and needles, I thought, well, are these
accurate or not? Because we in my packet they didn't
include an actual picture of Glatman, and so I did
my own little thingy where I put the sketches on
(21:30):
one side and him on the other. So what do
you think about this?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yeah, so I am seeing you know, the two sketches
that you showed me the last time, and then seeing
Glatman on the right hand side. This is a headshot
of Glatman. It shows he's got his glasses on. And
side by side, these two composites are probably as good
(21:56):
of composites as I've ever seen, matching Glatman. The hairline
from the composites a spot on with Glatman's hair. The
length of his face is a little bit more squished
in than the composites. But the protruding ears, the prominent nose,
you know, the mouth, the eyes, you know everything about
(22:20):
the composites. I mean, these are good. They really do
look like Glatman.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Fantastic sketch artists, both of them, and fantastic witnesses. I mean, people, boy,
this is like for me textbook on how accurate things
can be. This is great. I wanted to get this
out of the way before we talk about Glatman and
what he says happened with all of this. So, as
I said, he eventually confessed. We don't know if this
(22:47):
was the act of the third degree, but you know,
they did get a confession out of him, So we
do know stuff about Glatman when he was a kid,
and I figure, let's get the stuff about the women
taken care of and then we can talk a little
bit about him because I know that we talk about
the myths behind serial killers and we'll see kind of
(23:09):
where he falls along those lines for you, all right,
sounds good. So Latman says that he strangled each one
of these women with the same piece of rope, and
that's something that they end up finding in his apartment. He,
as I said, is thirty. He was a television repairman.
And when he confesses, they say, where are they? We
(23:32):
found some bones and that's about it. We don't know
if Judy was that woman that we found. We don't
know where Shirley and we don't know where Ruth are.
And he said, well, let me illuminate a little bit
for you.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Here.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
He takes them to a remote part of the Anza
Desert State Park in the Colorado Desert, not far from
San Diego, and that's where they find the remains of
two women because of, you know, the corner of San
Diego County coroner says that because of the decomposition and
the animal activity that he said, the bodies were a
(24:06):
little more than we're a little more than a bag
of bones. But they tentatively identified them as Ruth and Shirley.
And he said that from what Ladman had told them,
they can identify the bones found six months earlier by
those two boys, which we thought was Judy. So he
has said, you know, here are all three of them,
(24:26):
and took them directly to it. So that's proof positive,
I'm assuming right.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Oh, absolutely, Now does he bring them to the rest
of Judy's remains.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
That's not the impression I got. He said this is
where she was. I think they thought there was not
going to be anything left there. I'm assuming they combed
that area where her bones were found initially. So then
this is where things get difficult for me. I mean,
I have never seen these kinds of photos before. He
decided that he was going to photograph these women, basically
(24:58):
moments before he murdered them. So the newspapers inexplicably printed
these photos. It just makes me nauseous. And these are
not photos I'm going to put on social media. If
listeners want to find them, they can, but I'm not
going to do it. It's as upsetting to me to
see them, almost more upsetting than to see the bodies
of women. Because there's especially one and I'm going to
(25:21):
show you now, there's one photo where a woman looks
absolutely terrified, and it's Judy. But we see all three
of them, so I'm going to show you what he did.
And they find these photos along with the rope in
his apartment. So the title of this is Madman's own
pictures of the girls he killed. So, Paul, the woman
(25:43):
on the upper left is Shirley, the woman on the
right is Judy, and the woman on the bottom is Ruth.
And they all appear to be alive right now, So.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, I'm looking at these photos, which you know, again
for them to have been published in the newspaper is very,
very insensitive to the victims and the victims loved ones.
The horror of these photos. We're seeing these women in
the last moments of their life, and at least with
particularly with Judy, her sitting you know, in this chair
(26:18):
and she's got a gig, her hands are bound behind
her back, her her knees are bound. You can see
the fear in her eyes as she's looking kind of
up to her left, and that's probably where Glatman is
actually standing. And he's taking a photo using you know,
probably a cable attached to the camera on a tripods.
(26:39):
That's interesting that he's standing. He's not like standing there
with the camera and photographing her because I bet she's
she's engaged with where he's at. This photo of Judy,
of the three we talked about in the first episode,
those True Detective magazines, this is exactly the type a photo,
(27:00):
the type of imagery that's in the true detective magazines.
That's why these guys liked those magazines. Glatman is in
essence making his own imagery, yeah, purposefully with these women
bound like this and with the fear on their faces,
because that's what he is getting off on. You know,
(27:22):
all of them are fully clothed at the time these
photos are taken, but they're all bound gagged.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
I can see the one on the upper left. Surely
I had a hard time seeing it, but I can
definitely see a gag around her mouth. There's like a
shadow or something going on there.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
She's outside, yeah, you know, Judy's the only one that's inside.
She's you know, sitting up in this chair. And then
you have Shirley and Ruth, who are laying mostly on
their back, you know, but bound identical manner, you know,
around the ankles, around the knees, hands behind their back,
the game eggs around their mouth.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
And we know that Glatman.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
After these photos sexually assaults them and then strangles them.
And it's very interesting behaviorally that he utilizes the same
length of rope as the murder weapon in all three cases.
So he's not tying a ligature around their neck and
leaving that on. He is manually strangling them utilizing this rope.
That's something that he just that's what he wants to do.
(28:26):
And the fact that he's keeping that rope is significant.
It's significant that he's keeping these photos, and he's keeping
the rope with the photos right and in his residence. Yep.
You know, so this is all part of you have
to ask anytime the offender does something that is not
needed to commit the crime, you have to go, well,
why is he doing that? Well, that's something significant to
(28:47):
the offender, and it's often insight to the offender's fantasy.
Glatman is a fantasy motivated offender.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
And I know this won't surprise you, but they looked
in a toolbox in his apartment and found personal belongings
for all three women. You call those mementos, is that right?
Not trophies, mementos souvenirs. Souvenirs.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Okay, generally you could say it's sort of semantics. But
you know, within the behavioral analysis terminology, when offenders are
taking items in essence to help remember the crimes that
they committed, we utilize the term souvenir. And that's just
(29:29):
what he has done is and that is a very
very common thing that these guys do.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
These photos which are terrifying to me. The police, when
they looked through his apartment found some of them pinned
to his wall. I mean, well, let me tell you
what he says happened. At this point, I don't see
a reason why not to believe him, because he really
is very straightforward about this. His intention was sexual assault,
(29:58):
he says, for all three women, but he didn't want
to be identified. And going through the Lonely Hearts Club,
I mean, of course would identify him, and going through
an agency photographer agency. It's just so interesting and maybe
as you learn a little bit more about him, you'll
understand going to the person's house, being able to be
identified by the mother and the sister, I mean, what
(30:19):
is he thinking. I don't understand why he says, well,
I had to kill them, But he's allowed other people
like former dates to be able to identify him too.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, you know this is where I mean, he's pre
planning his crimes. Obviously, he is not a dumb offender
by any stretch of the imagination. But just because he's
reasonably intelligent doesn't mean he has a PhD in committing crimes.
And I mentioned, you know what stood out to me
is at this offender by going and picking up Judy
(30:52):
at her house, and by going and picking up Shirley
and interacting, you know, to at least he's seen by
Shirley's mom. He's elevating his risk. Why is he doing that.
He's not lurering these women to an isolated location that
a lot of guys will do because they don't want
to be seen. He's allowing himself to be seen. This
(31:13):
is where he's just not thinking things through at the
depth that maybe some other offenders would in order to
try to minimize the risk of them being caught. He's
obviously able to isolate these women and sexually assault and
kill them. He's successful at committing the crime, but he's
not being very diligent about covering all his tracks in
(31:37):
order to be as successful as a predator as he
could have been.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Well, let me tell you these details are something else,
and I think it speaks number one to the terror
that these women must have felt, and number two to
his psychology. So tell me what do you think about this.
He picked up Judy, who is the first victim that
we know of. He picked up Judy. He brought her
back to his apartment rather than to some studio or
(32:01):
maybe he said we're gonna do this pin up shoot
at my apartment. He's actually assaulted her at gunpoint, and
then of course took photos of her bound and gagged.
We don't know which came first. Then he drove her
into the desert and had her get out of the car. Now,
normally I would not go into this much detail what
I'm getting ready to tell you, but I just wonder
(32:22):
what this says about him. At gunpoint, he told her
to kneel down, and he tied the rope around her
ankles and then around her neck and then strangled her
by pulling the rope tight. Why would he do that?
There's something that he wanted to do. Is that like
hog tying? It's not.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
If I were to describe it just the way that
you said, I would say, yes, it is a form
of hogtying if it's just straight from the ankles to
the neck, Because I've seen an offender who's done some
more elaborate aspects, you know, in essence, where now the
victim is face down and ankles are bound, then that
(33:00):
same rope goes up around the neck, but it's done
in such a way to where the victims strangles themselves
because it's so tight. You know, their legs are now
pulling against the rope around their neck. Sounds like in
this case you still have this ankles to neck connection
from behind, but Glatman has to further tighten or utilize
(33:23):
a separate rope, which I think is the case as
the murder weapon. Now, this may be something he saw.
You know, these offenders visually will see things like in
the True Detect magazines and want to replicate what they've
seen or what they've read about. That could be something
that he is just trying to do because it was
fantasy material for him from something he's seen or read about.
(33:47):
Or it may be because Glatman is not a very
physically robust and maybe competent male, it may be a
mechanism of safety for him, so he knows that he
has absolute control over Judy, that she cannot fight back
(34:08):
because she is completely incapacitated. If that's the case, then
that would be more of what I would say an
mo type of characteristic of Glatman, because he's utilizing it
to accomplish the crime and lower the risk to himself
his own self preservation.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
But if he's doing.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
It because it's something he's seen that turned him on,
then that is fantasy that is a signature of.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
His Well, then we changed locations a little bit, so
we now are going to talk about his second victim,
who is Surely, and this is the Lonely Hearts club
blind date. He picks her up and instead of going
to the stance, he drives her to Huntington Beach. Surely,
of course, is arguing with him and says take me home,
(34:52):
and he drove her out into the desert instead. They
waited in the car until the sun came up.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
He needs light to take the photographs.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I get.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, she refused to get out of the car and
he held her at gunpoint and made her get out
of the car. So she gets out of the car
and he binds her and sexual assaults her, and then
he makes her walk in the desert for hours before
he makes her lie on her stomach and he strangles her.
I mean, this is is this something he's replicating that
(35:21):
he saw or read again?
Speaker 2 (35:23):
You know, it could be you know, I think Glatman
is taking you know, he's elevating his risk by driving
around with this woman that he's he's abducted, you know,
from Sun Valley, Huntington Beach all the way down to
San Diego County and then he then it sounds like
he makes her walk for hours down in the San
(35:43):
Diego County desert before she goes face down and he
strangles her from behind. From a behavioral side, you know,
some of these offenders want to watch the victim face
to face as they strangle. You know, they in essence,
they play god. They know they're the ones that are
controlling when the victim dies. They want to see the
(36:04):
victim's fear. They want to feel the victim struggle against them. Here,
if he's strangling her from behind, it almost does sound
like he's eliminating her as a witness. The act of
killing isn't part of the fantasy. Potentially, in Shirley's case,
I can't eliminate the possibility that maybe he has seen
or been exposed to something where this is replicating a
(36:28):
fantasy story in his head. But he may just be
eliminating her as a witness, and he's utilizing the desert
and the distance that she ends up having to walk
as a way to further hide her body.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Well, the last woman who was Ruth, this is the
burlesque show woman. He tells the police that he actually
didn't want to kill Ruth, that she was the one
that he actually really liked. She's disgusting through a studio,
it sounds like, to try to photograph her, and she
(37:04):
wanted to cancel because she didn't feel well. He came
to her apartment anyway, and he forced his way in.
This is the boarding house, that's right, and repeatedly raped
her at gunpoint over the course of a night. I
don't know where other people are in this boarding house,
if it was deserted or people didn't hear. But he
made her put on a robe and walked to his
(37:24):
car the next day, and then he drove her to
the desert, took photos over clothed and unclothed, and then
killed her with the same length of rope.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
And he's driving her all the way down to San
Diego County desert again.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, I mean, unless he kills them somewhere else. I
haven't read this, and then puts the remains there. But
I have not read, you know, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
Well, this newspaper photograph of Ruth, it's showing her bound
and gagged, and the way that the caption reads is
she's on this blanket in the San Diego County desert
just before she was strangled. So he drove her alive
all the way down to San Diego County. So you see,
with Judy, she's found in the Hollywood Hills if I
remember right, right, h Yep, she's kind of kept in
(38:07):
the Los Angeles area versus Shirley and Ruth. He's driving
a distance south of Los Angeles to San Diego County
and purposely, I'm sure, choosing the desert. The desert is
not a kind place for bodies that are left on
the surface.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Well, after all of this, he is charged with Shirley
and Ruth's murders. I don't know why not Judy, but
you know they paired them together. And he pleads guilty
and he's sentenced to the gas chamber. But we have
a potential boulder, what they call the boulder, Jane, do
we might have another victim, So tell me what you
(38:47):
think about this. Okay, So he has been sentenced, he
is not dead yet. They are finding photos of women
from Colorado also, he had been in Colorado similarly bound
in gagged. They asked Latman if all of these women
are still alive, and he says, unless they've been run over,
(39:09):
and he says, I didn't kill anybody else. But the
wording raises eyebrows because there's a cold case in Boulder
that they've been trying to solve. No one really had
been making this connection very well. But there was a
woman whose body was found in the Boulder Canyon in Boulder,
Colorado in nineteen fifty four, so three or four years earlier.
(39:30):
They think that she might have been run over, And
for more than fifty years since she has been called
Jane Doe, the Battered Blonde of Boulder Canyon. And in
two thousand and nine they identified her as a woman
named Dorothy Gay Howard through DNA, and he was in
Denver at the time, and that she had been visiting
(39:53):
around this exact same time her aunt who was in Denver,
and that they think that there must have been a connection,
but that was that the police are never really able
to make that connection. It doesn't seem like strong enough,
but it could be a coincidence. I don't know, what
do you think?
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Well, do you know how Dorothy? What was she left
on the road? How does she get run over?
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Let me give you the circumstances here. So she was
only identified because of her twenty four year old grand
niece who starts researching this. I told you the identification
happened in two thousand and nine, and that's how we
know all of these details. So she had been eighteen,
and she had been in Denver visiting we think her aunt.
That's where Glatman was at the time, and he was
(40:38):
known to police at that time. Dorothy was originally from Arizona,
and she was married to a guy who her family
didn't approve of, and she got divorced pretty quickly. She
had been married to another older man, but it seems
like she left him and went to Denver in this time.
In nineteen fifty four, her body was found in April
by a creek and Boulder Canyon by two University of
(41:01):
Colorado students. No clothes, no jewelry, badly beaten. There had
been animal activity, so her face was unrecognizable, but she
did have perfect teeth, which I thought, that's weird, But
that meant apparently she couldn't be identified by dental records.
They didn't have any dental records that they could figure out.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Does that make sense to you From the dental side,
you know, oftentimes what you see is you have the
dentists who they will you know, when you have a
deceased body that in which you have the intact teeth,
the anthropologists that are forensical identologists will come in and chart,
you know, the various fillings, the various anomalies to you know,
(41:44):
the person's dental aspects. And then when they have a
possible identification, then they go to the dentists to see
the records, the dental records and does that add up
with the various sings. At the old on time, the
friends of goodontologists was able to chart. Now if you
have somebody who has had no cavities and no fillings
(42:07):
and no other dental issues like me, the dentist doesn't
have anything outside of saying this person has perfect teeth,
you know. So in the databases there isn't anything that
you know in the comments to say, hey, kean On,
this person has a bridge on the lower left part
of their jaw. You just don't have that information, right.
That observation is interesting. She was badly beaten but found
(42:30):
by a creek, but it doesn't say that she was
on the road side. So you know, I wonder because
I have seen this where sometimes in fact, i've got
one victim who is beaten so badly. The pathologist says
she's been run over and she wasn't. She was just
beaten so badly, you know. And I'm wondering, is that
(42:51):
what we're dealing with in this Dorothy case, because it
doesn't sound like she's on the road.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, they have a suspicion about it. I know, this
seems like a weird weak connection right now because it's
just him in the city. But this is what police do,
and this is why I think this part of the
case might be a little bit confusing. So the police
in fifty eight, they gather all of these photos of
these women that he's taking photos of. He knows everybody's names,
and they're trying to, of course, identify who's alive, and
(43:18):
so far they can only confirm these three women who
were dead. He gets to a woman that he says
was in Denver, and he points to it and says,
I didn't mark her name down and I never saw
her again. He does not admit to killing somebody, but
he made that weird cryptic remark, and they don't trust
that he's obviously going to tell them everything. He does
(43:38):
admit that he encountered a woman in Denver, but he says,
I don't know her name. We have a record of
this because it's in a police transcript, but we don't
have the photo that was actually discussed. So what police
in fifty four thought happened was that this victim, who
we now know is Dorothy, had been thrown into the
(43:59):
canyon this creek alive from the road above, or possibly
rammed with a car. Now tell me if this is possible.
In the late two thousands, of cold case investigator compared
the injuries on Dorothy's body to the dimensions of a
nineteen fifty one Dodge Coronet, which was Glatman's car. He said,
(44:20):
they lined up. I mean, does that even sound like
that's a thing they're trying to make this connection?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
You know, I would have to see what the invest
you know, the injuries the investigators looking at you. I mean,
you could most certainly have contusions that match up with
features of a vehicle as they hit the body. You could,
you know, have some very unique features of a vehicle
that get impressed into the body during let's say, a
(44:47):
moving type of act of violence.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
You know, if the victims.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Standing up and the vehicle hits the victim and at
a certain point on their body that maybe those those
features are replicated based on the abrasions and the contusions
and stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
The body is such.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
A weird medium though, for a large object to put
unique characteristics, you know, to be able to really conclusively
match up. I'm not saying I'm skeptical. I just would
need to see it. I would say it's possible. But
sometimes people will imagine things that aren't there.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah, let me just say, you know, they were never
able to make obviously a definitive connection, and there were
many photos and I'm not sure how helpful Glatman was
after a certain point, but let me sort of say this,
this is a little bit of his background, because I
also think this is important. You know, we are interested
in the backgrounds of killers and warning signs. So police
(45:50):
say from a young age he had been interested in
rope and strangulation at the age of four.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
You know, I when I talked to law enforcement about,
you know, recognizing the serial predator, there's a phrase that
I always use, and it's called no thy enemy. And
this is to underscore that these predators, their psychology, their fantasy,
(46:16):
their behaviors is so abnormal that unless you study what
these guys do, you're not necessarily going to recognize or
think about, you know, evidentiary aspects of the case. And
when you start talking about going into the you know,
the various psychological abnormalities that these some of these offenders
(46:40):
exhibit as they they grow up, you run into this
type of thing.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
I know, some people.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Say age four, Yes, things some abnormality start showing up
at a very young age. I have Phil Hughes by
age he was in second grade, and he's mutilating his
female classmates doll by second grade. Wow, you know, and
when he was being interviewed by psychologists yet he was
(47:08):
talking about seeing like what he described as dead mannequins
in his in his in his head. I've really moved
away from kind of the psychology of the making of
the serial predator, you know, I kind of really more
want to catch him, right, I know, you know, uh,
And it's for the other people who want to study
(47:30):
the psychology. But here you have Glatmin at a very
young age exhibiting some abnormal behaviors and admitting at that
age to fantasy of strangulation. And this just carries out
to where now he's committing you know, strangulation and sexual
assault on adult females.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think this is another weird thing.
His parents said that he would when he was a
little older than four, not much older, he would talk
like a roper string around his neck in the bathtub
and let the other end of the rope be pulled
into the drain to feel that tightening. And I just think, God,
it's so that's so young. I mean, to really be
(48:13):
fascinated in that way or want to replicate that in
some way.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yeah, And this is where if you see your child
doing these types of behaviors, get them help.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
This is not going to be a surprise to you
or anybody listening. His behavior was never good. He was
pinging with his family between New York City and Denver
throughout his young adult teenage years. He would repeatedly break
into women's homes and tie him up and grope them.
Not rape, but grope, And of course eventually that escalated.
He was in and out. He served five years in
(48:47):
sing Sing for grand larceny. So this was just a
clear escalation, not the mutilation of animals that sometimes we
look for that we know of. This, This is different.
And I will say though that I I've done stories
on people who strangle, and they've strangled animals to begin with,
you know, as practice, So I wouldn't be surprised if
(49:08):
he had done that with this level of fascination that
he had, you, I'd.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Say, that's entirely possible, though it's not absolutely necessary. You know,
this is all you know, the cruelty to animals, you know,
that's all part of this serial killer triad. And it's
you know, I don't put much weight on, you know,
the bed wetting aspect, a little more weight on, you know,
the setting of the fires, depending on why they're setting
(49:32):
the fires. But I put a huge amount of weight
on if you have somebody, a child that is torturing animals,
killing animals, they're one step.
Speaker 3 (49:43):
Away from doing that to a human.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
And that that is the most significant component of the
serial killer triad. This evolution where he's breaking into houses
and groping women. I can guarantee he was a peeper
at one point, and he was a burglar, a fetish burglar,
prior to actually going physical with these victims inside their
(50:08):
own houses.
Speaker 3 (50:09):
That's the standard.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
You know, you have to get comfortable at committing these
various types of lesser crimes before you get into the
more serious crime. And you know, I talk about these
social barriers to a fence, and I imagine, Kate, if
you're in a neighborhood and you walk on your neighbor's lawn,
you get uncomfortable. You know, you're afraid that that person
(50:33):
is going to be upset with you and yell at
You imagine going up on your neighbor's lawn and looking
inside their house, yeah, or breaking into their house. These
offenders have to pass each of those social barriers and
get comfortable doing that. And so that's where I'm pretty
sure Glatman is doing all of these various other lesser
(50:54):
crimes before going in and groping the women inside these
their own homes.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Well this after he pleads guilty. He is executed at
San Quentin Prison in nineteen fifty nine. I will say,
I'm always looking for heroes, and I love looking for
the female hero in this story. And how many lives
did Lorraine save by fighting so hard? And then I
(51:19):
mean a bullet hit her, grazed her on the thigh.
She's bleeding. People are ignoring her as they fly down
the highway and she's holding this guy's own pistol against him,
and God knows how many people he would have killed,
how many women he would have killed if she had
not done that, And I just think that's amazing. I
love ending on a good note like that that. I'm
(51:40):
very proud of this woman.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
You know, no, absolutely, I mean there's no question the
courage to fight and to actually win the fight.
Speaker 3 (51:49):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
Well, I feel like I need a couple of baths
or a couple of showers after this, because this was
just horrific compared to what well, I mean, we always
took about really difficult crimes, but this was pretty difficult
for me and I had never seen photos like this before.
But a really powerful story finally a woman being able
(52:13):
to take control of the situation and saving so many
lives at least being able to provide closure for the
other victims in this case, I mean, one of them
the harder cases that we've had to deal with.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
From my I guess world perspective and experience, Glatman is
just one of many of these monsters that are out there,
and it really is something that people need to pay
attention to because if you take a look at Harvey Glatman.
He doesn't look like the Boogeyman. He looks just like
(52:49):
the average guy. He looks non threatening, yet he is
able to isolate and take control of these women then
ultimately kill them. And these types of predators are out there,
and these are the types of cases that I have
spent the last thirty years of my life working.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Well. Next week, I'm going to avoid serial killer cases
because this was a tough one on me. But we
will come back with another really good episode. Thanks for
all your hard work on this, Paul. This was a
lot YEP.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
This was a good case, good series of cases for me.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
Thank you, Kate, good see you next week. This has
been an exactly right production for.
Speaker 2 (53:34):
Our sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com
slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (53:46):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 3 (53:49):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 1 (53:58):
You can follow Buried Bone on Instagram and Facebook at
Bury Bones. Pod.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now, and
Speaker 1 (54:10):
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, my life solving America's cold cases,
is also available now
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
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