In 2024, we’d say Harvey Glatman looked like a nerd, a gamer who spent his days and nights in his mom’s basement never getting a date.
But in 1957, they called him something else.
Glatman sold aspiring models on the premise he would get their photos placed in the bondage-heavy popular crime magazines of the era. And, in Los Angeles, there was no shortage of pretty girls waiting to be “discovered.”
During the photo shoots he would tie them up, gag them and then murder them. Cold case investigators are still looking at Glatman for the slayings of Jane Does in Colorado and California.
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Glatman was born in the Bronx in 1927 and moved to Denver as a kid. An IQ test revealed that the young, bespectacled man was very bright but there troubling aspects of his personality.
From the time he was 12, Glatman showed signs of antisocial and sadomasochistic tendencies. Once he tied a string around his penis and pulled it to get a sexual thrill. The family doctor claimed he’d “grow out of it.”
By the time he was a teen, the budding predator was breaking into women’s apartments and stealing lingerie. Naturally, this escalated to rape and in August 1945, he was busted and sentenced to five to 10 years in the reformatory.
When he was transferred to the Big House — Sing Sing — the prison headshrinker said this: “[Glatman has a] psychopathic personality — schizophrenic type having sexually perverted impulses as the basis of his criminality.”
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Sprung in 1948, cops now believe Glatman ramped up his twisted fantasies in 1954. Kids found the woman’s body, stripped of clothes and jewelry and dumped in Colorado’s Boulder Canyon. For decades, the luckless victim was known only as Jane Doe 1954.
Fifty-four years later, she was identified as an 18-year-old woman from Phoenix, Arizona, named Dorothy Gay Howard. She had lived in a Denver boarding house — just blocks away from Glatman’s childhood home.
Detectives now believe she was Harvey Glatman’s first murder victim. At the time, he was working as a TV repairman.
“My confidence is pretty high that Harvey Glatman is the killer,” Det. Steve Ainsworth told The Denver Post in 2008.
A coroner originally determined she had been badly beaten – but in 2004, it was determined she had likely been hit by a car. At the time, creepy Glatman was driving 1951 Dodge Coronet.
Ainsworth added: “They match extremely closely. I thought, ‘It’s got to be him.’”
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Like many other Americans, Glatman saw California as the golden land of opportunity in those post-war years: A target-rich environment for his sickening schemes.
He quickly set about his vile calling. Using newspaper lonely hearts columns and ads looking for models, this was how he satisfied his sick desires. The bodies would be dumped in the nearby desert.
— On Aug. 2, 1957, he kidnapped and murdered Judy Dull.
— Shirley Bridgeford was reported missing on March 3, 1958.
— Ruth Mercado, aka Angela Rojas, was reported missing on July 29, 1958.
Next on Glatman’s death list was a young model named Lorraine Vigil. On Oct. 27, 1958, Glatman attacked Vigil in his car, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
The gangly Glatman struggled to subdue Vigil but she managed to get his gun and held him at gunpoint until a member of the California State Patrol arrived on the scene.
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Glatman would sing like a canary. He unburdened himself to shocked homicide detectives and confessed to the three Golden State murders.
“Now, let me ask you something pretty point blank, Harvey,” one LAPD detective asked Glatman during his confession. “Are these girls alive or dead?”
The killer responded: “Unless they’ve been run over.”
Investigators asked about his Denver days and whether there were any murders there. No, he said, adding he hired women for bondage photos there as well.
Jane Doe 1954 had ligature marks that indicated she had been bound before she was murdered.
“That was yet another thing that directs me to think Harvey Glatman is the guy,” Ainsworth said, adding that crucial evidence to make his case has gone missing in LA.
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After cops busted Glatman for the trio of southern California murders, they discovered a toolbox in his apartment. It was filled with detective magazines and his horrifying collection of trophy photos.
The snapshots were of his three LA victims. But others could not be identified. Most of the photos have disappeared.
Colorado detectives pray the missing photos turn up to bring closure to the disturbing case.
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It was going to be the night train to Nowheresville for Harvey Glatman. He was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
On Sept. 18, 1959, Glatman sucked gas in the green room at San Quentin. And that was that.
“(He) was a pioneer of sorts. Nine years before author John Brophy coined the term ‘serial murder,’ nearly two decades before FBI agent Robert Ressler dusted it off and made the tag a household word, Glatman was already plying his trade … Glatman never had a catchy nickname [but he has since then] become the stuff of urban myth, a quintessential bogeyman,” Michael Newton wrote.