Evil Psychopaths, page 13
The eeriest thing about his confession was the lack of remorse or emotion he displayed, the true sign of the psychopath. In actual fact, he had no conception of the crimes he had committed. It was thought that he was almost certainly insane and that he should plead not guilty on the grounds of insanity. They had done tests and psychiatrists had interviewed him. They concluded that he was both schizophrenic and a ‘sexual psychopath’. The reason, they added was the unhealthy relationship that he had enjoyed with his mother. She had given him unnatural and conflicting feelings about women, both loving and hating them. This conflict eventually manifested itself as a psychosis.
The remains of ten women were discovered on the farm and the difficult and controversial decision was taken to exhume the bodies of the women at the cemetery whose graves he had said he had plundered. All the coffins showed signs of having been tampered with and parts had undoubtedly been stolen from them.
Gein was found to be mentally incompetent and unfit to be tried for first degree murder and was committed to the Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin. Ten years later, however, he was deemed competent to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden and was, finally, found guilty of first-degree murder. However, he was judged to have been insane at the time of the crime and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. They sent him back to hospital where he happily spent the remainder of his life. On 26 July 1984, he lost a long battle with cancer and died. They laid him to rest in his favourite place – next his mother in Plainfield cemetery. He was also tantalisingly close to the graves he had plundered all those years previously.
After he was convicted, Ed Gein’s farm went up in flames, probably as a result of arson – the townspeople were tired of the ghoulish curiosity of morbid out-of-towners. Plainfield fire department took the call and attended the fire, but it was too late. Perhaps they failed to deal with the incident with a great deal of urgency, given who the fire chief was. His name was Frank Worden and he was the son of Bernice Worden, one of Weird Ed’s unfortunate victims.
Harvey Glatman
Harvey had been different from birth. He was slow and never had any friends. He behaved oddly from an early age. His mother, Ophelia, first discovered there was something not quite right with her son was when he was just four years old. She walked into his room to find that he had tied a length of string around his penis, put the other end in a drawer and had then leaned back against the tugging string. The parents dismissed this as a bit of childish experimentation, but it was a lot more than that and, later, rope would replace string and become his means of conquest.
At school, Harvey was called names on account of his large ears and buck teeth. But, above all, he was afraid of girls and never joined in activities and games after school. He would rather go home and play his own game which involved his beloved rope. He would tie it round his neck, throw it over a pipe or rafter and pull on it while masturbating. He had discovered auto-erotic asphyxiation at an extraordinarily early age. When he was eleven, his parents found out about the game and took him to a doctor who just put it down to growing pains.
He did well at school, but girls were still an alien life form; he stammered and blushed whenever any came near him. Moreover, his confidence was not helped by a very bad case of acne. So, to get his thrills, he started to break into houses. But, unlike other everyday burglars, he did not do it for gain; he broke into houses simply for the excitement.
His breaking and entering soon graduated into something different. He would follow a woman home from the centre of Denver, break into her house, force her into her bedroom and tie her with the rope he carried everywhere with him. He would also gag her with a piece of cloth. He had stolen a .25 pistol during one of his burglaries and it came in handy. The woman was at his mercy and he was free to touch her as he pleased. He would unbutton clothes and fondle their bodies as he pleased, doing the same to himself. He never fully undressed them or raped them. However, it made him feel like a real man and not the loser he really was.
In May 1945, however, when he was seventeen, he was finally caught breaking into a house and the police discovered the rope and the gun on him. He confessed to some of the burglaries he had committed, but was careful to leave out the ones that had involved the women. Seeming not to have learned his lesson, although perhaps not able to control his desires even if he had, while awaiting trial, he abducted a woman called Norene Laurel, tied her up and drove her to Sunshine Canyon. He performed his usual acts and then let her go. At the police station, she recognised his face in an album of mugshots and he was arrested again, this time without bail. He was sentenced to a year in Colorado State Prison but was paroled after eight months.
Ophelia, Harvey’s mother wanted him to make a fresh start and set him up in a flat in Yonkers. He got a job as a TV repairman, a trade he had learned in prison and she returned to Denver. Harvey, meanwhile, was on the lookout for excitement. He bought a toy gun – possession of a real one would mean a long prison-stretch if he was caught with it – and he carried his pocket-knife and his trusty length of rope, made of the finest hemp.
At midnight on 17 August 1946, Thomas Staro and Doris Thorn were accosted by a man with a gun. They were marched into a grove of trees and the man tied Staro’s legs together and made him lie down. The man with the gun began to touch Thorn’s breasts. However, unknown to Glatman, Staro had worked himself free of his ropes and was tiptoeing up behind him. There was a struggle and Glatman slashed Staro’s shoulder with the knife before running away into the night.
He fled to Albany where he rented a flat and prepared for his next attack. It came on the night of 22 August. He pushed off-duty nurse, Florence Hayden into a yard where he bound her wrists together. As he did this, however, she screamed and Glatman fled. The next evening, he tried it on with two women walking together, but lost his nerve, eventually just taking their purses.
The Albany Police Department was, by this time, becoming interested in this man who targeted women. The descriptions given by the women all matched; so they knew the crimes were being perpetrated by the same man.
Within two days, he was arrested and he confessed. In spite of the pleas of his mother who all this time had believed him to be leading a quiet life in Yonkers, he was sentenced to five to ten years in prison; he was in the big league now. At Elmira, where he spent the first two years of his sentence, he was diagnosed as a ‘psychopathic personality – schizophrenic type’. He was then moved to maximum security at Sing Sing. As is reported to often be the case with sociopaths like Glatman, he played the system well and got time off for good behaviour, being released after serving only two years and eight months. There were conditions though; he had to return to the care of his mother, get a job and be under court supervision for four and a half years.
He behaved himself and in 1956, he was free of all restrictions. He moved to Los Angeles and went crazy.
Harvey had enjoyed photography in his art classes at high school and now he took it up again, but with a more sinister purpose. He intended to use it to photograph girls from the modelling studios that had sprung up everywhere in LA. Girls who had arrived in Hollywood dreaming of being stars like Marilyn Monroe offered themselves to be snapped clothed, semi-clothed, or naked, according to how much they were paid.
He worked as a TV repairman again and rented a small apartment on Melrose Avenue, saving enough to buy a used 1951 Dodge Cornet and some expensive photography equipment. He invented a name, Johnny Glenn, for his photographer identity and spent months hanging around the modelling studios, taking thousands of photographs.
But, it was not quite enough for Harvey.
Judith Ann Dull was a nineteen-year-old divorcee working to fund a child custody battle she was waging with her ex-husband. Glatman called her on the morning of 1 August 1957, and asked if she would be interested in posing for a true crime magazine layout. She was wary, but agreed to pose for him at her own apartment at two o’clock that afternoon. He asked her to wear a tight skirt and sweater.
Arriving at her apartment, he told her the light was not good enough and suggested they go to his studio. Once there, he explained that the pictures were to illustrate a story about bondage and she would have to be tied up. Innocently, she allowed him to tie her wrists and ankles, at which point he pulled a .32 Browning automatic pistol from his pocket. He undid the ties on her wrists and ordered the now terrified Judith to strip off, slowly. He photographed her all the while, barking out instructions as to how he wanted her to pose.
He then raped her several times and forced her to sit beside him while he watched television. He said he would take her home afterwards.
Of course, he had no intention of taking her home.
When he told her he would drop her on the outskirts of town, she presumed that was to allow him to make his escape. They got in the car and he drove a hundred miles out of town before stopping the car. He made as if to untie her and for a moment she must have thought it was going to be alright, but quickly he put the rope round her neck, pushed her down onto her knees and ran the other loop of rope around her ankles. Pulling up on the rope, her neck snapped and she was dead. He finished the evening off by using his flash attachment to take photos of the dead girl, arranging her body in a variety of poses.
He stuck the photos all over his bedroom walls.
It was seven months before he killed again.
He met twenty-four-year-old Shirley Ann Bridgeford, a divorced mother of two children, through the Patty Sullivan Lonely Hearts Club. ‘George Williams’ promised to take her square dancing on 7 March 1958. Williams – in reality Harvey Glatman – picked her up at her home where, to his surprise and concern, a houseful of people greeted him. He suggested to her that rather than go dancing, they go for a drive in the country and get some dinner somewhere en route. She agreed and they stopped in Oceanside.
After dinner they drove on. Somewhere near Anza State Park he stopped the car and pulled his gun out, ordering Shirley to undress. He raped her and then took photographs of her. He then waited until the sun came up to take pictures of her in daylight before garotting her. As with Judith Dull, he then photographed the corpse in different poses.
Four months later, it was the turn of Ruth Mercado, her body photographed and dumped near to Shirley Bridgeford’s remains.
In the summer of 1958, Glatman went to the Diane Studio, one of the better agencies on Sunset Boulevard. It was arranged for him to work with Lorraine Virgil, a woman who had signed on with the agency only the previous week. He was to pick her up at eight that evening
But the owner, of the studio, Diane, was suspicious of the man with the big ears, unkempt hair and smelly body odour. She phoned Lorraine and told her to
be careful.
As soon as Lorraine got into his car and he started heading in the wrong direction alarm bells began to ring in her head. When she questioned him, he told her someone had already booked the studio and they were actually going to his own private studio.
As they sped down the freeway, she became even more anxious. Again she asked him where they were going. He said ‘Annaheim’. However, she knew that they had already sped past the Annaheim turn-off. As she became more and more concerned, he began to shout at her to shut up. He swung the car dangerously into an exit ramp, crossing two lanes to get to it. Off the freeway, he stopped the car and asked her to put her arms out. He told her he was going to tie her up to keep her quiet and to emphasise his point, he pulled out his gun. Lorrraine reached for the door handle, trying to escape, but he grabbed her and they struggled. He tried desperately to wrap a coil of rope around her, but, unlike the other women, Lorraine fought back.
She grabbed the gun barrel and the gun went off, the bullet burning her thigh as it skimmed past. Suddenly, Glatman released his hold on her and she wrenched open the car door and fell out. He climbed out behind her, trying to haul her back into the car, but just as he grabbed her sweater, the pair were bathed in a pool of light. It came from the headlights of a patrol car.
She stumbled towards them, still holding the gun and fell at their feet. Glatman, meanwhile cowered
by his car, sobbing and whimpering that it was not
his fault.
When Glatman’s mother left the prison after visiting her son, she said to the assembled press: ‘He is not a vicious man – he is sick.’ And that was his only hope of escaping the gas chamber; to prove that he was not of sane mind. Harvey did not want to be examined, though; he wanted to die. However, he was persuaded to undergo psychiatric tests. There was no point. The report said: ‘he shows no evidence of a psychosis. He knows right from wrong, the nature and quality of his acts and he can keep from doing wrong if he so desires.’
Harvey pleaded guilty and on 15 December 1958, he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.
On 18 September 1959, he entered San Quentin’s notorious ‘green room’. The chamber door was locked shut at a minute past ten. He was strapped in by two minutes past ten. The cyanide pellets were released a minute later and by twelve minutes past ten, Harvey Glatman was dead.
He might have enjoyed it a bit more if he had been hung on the end of a rope of the finest quality hemp.
Albert DeSalvo
The Boston Strangler
For a few years in the 1960s, the city of Boston was gripped by panic. A spate of gruesome murders had forced women indoors, cowering behind double-locked doors and jumping at the slightest sound. The dead women were all single women, thirteen of them being killed between 14 June 1962 and 4 January 1964. The police believed the murders – six of them elderly victims and the remainder younger women – to be the work of one killer, the monster the media dubbed the Phantom Fiend, or, more famously, the Boston Strangler.
There was a sexual motive to each killing and a number of the victims were strangled with articles of their own clothing, sometimes tied at the neck in a macabre large bow.
The case has become one of the most famous in American criminal history with debate raging even now as to whether there was one killer or a number of them committing copycat murders. One commentator even speculates that there were seven or eight murderers operating in the Boston area at the time. The main question is, however, was Albert DeSalvo, the man who ultimately confessed to the killings, the Boston Strangler? Or was he just a small-time criminal and sex attacker who wanted the infamy and the money that a confession would bring, even when he was locked up for life on other convictions?
DeSalvo was a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker who had been arrested frequently for burglary. Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1931, he was regularly beaten as a child by his abusive father. His criminal career started early and he was a frequent visitor to the police station on assault and other petty criminal charges. In 1948, he enlisted in the US Army, meeting his wife, Imgard during a posting to Germany. He received an honourable discharge from the forces in 1956.
Meanwhile, his first child was born, a girl who was unfortunately physically handicapped. At this time, his wife became concerned that if the couple were to have another child, it, too, would be handicapped. She refrained from having sex with DeSalvo which created problems for a man with an abnormally high sex drive.
A year before leaving the army, he had been arrested for molesting a young girl but the case never came to court. Nothing much changed after he left the army and he was arrested several times for breaking and entering. Nonetheless, he always had a job, working for a rubber company and then in a shipyard. As the new decade dawned, he was working in construction maintenance.
Everyone characterised him as a hard-working, devoted family man but there was another side to Albert DeSalvo which would pretty soon catch up with him.
In the early 1960s there had been a series of bizarre sexual offences in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. A man in his late twenties would knock on an apartment door and if it was opened by a young, attractive woman, he would introduce himself as an employee of a modelling agency that was on the lookout for prospective models. He would claim that the woman’s name had been passed to the agency and that, if she was interested, she could earn $40 an hour. He reassured them about the type of work, that it was all above board and would involve no nudity. All he needed to do, he said, was take their measurements. If they were up for it, he would take out a tape measure and take down their vital statistics. Someone from the agency would call them if they were suitable, he would say before taking his leave of them. In March 1961, DeSalvo was arrested as he tried to break into a house. He confessed to being the character that had become known as the ‘Measuring Man’ but was treated fairly leniently by the court, receiving an eighteen-month prison sentence. He was released in April 1962. Two months later the Boston Strangler killed his first victim.
Anna Slesers was an attractive fifty-five-year-old divorcee who had arrived from Latvia ten years earlier. Her son Juris found her on the evening of 14 June 1962 lying on the bathroom floor with the cord of her bathrobe tied tightly around her neck in an elaborate bow. Her bathrobe was open, her legs spread grotesquely wide apart and she had been sexually assaulted with an unknown object. The apartment looked as if it had been ransacked, the contents of her purse scattered on the floor and other items spread around the place. Although it looked like a robbery scene, detectives were puzzled to find a gold watch and Anna’s jewellery intact.
Sixteen days later, sixty-eight-year-old Nina Nichols was found murdered in her apartment in Boston’s Brighton area. Again, the apartment gave the appearance of having been burgled, but valuable items had been left untouched. Again her legs were spread and her housecoat and slip were pulled up to her waist. She had been sexually assaulted and the killer once again left his signature – two nylon stockings around her neck tied in a large bow. She was estimated to have died at around five in the afternoon but the Strangler was having a busy day. Between eight and ten that night, he struck again in the Boston suburb of Lynn.
