Serial Killer Investigations (3 page)

In January 1964, while the Boston Strangler was still at large, the assistant attorney general of Massachusetts, John S. Bottomly, decided to set up a committee of psychiatrists to attempt to establish some kind of ‘psychological profile’ of the killer. One of the psychiatrists who served on that committee was Dr James A. Brussel, the man who had been so successful in describing the Mad Bomber. When he attended his first meeting, Brussel discovered that there was a sharp division of opinion within the committee. One group believed that there were two stranglers, one of whom killed older women, and the other young ones. The opposing group thought that there was only one Boston Strangler. (To this day, the controversy continues over the irrefutable identity of the culprit, or culprits.)

It was at his second meeting of the committee—in April 1965—that Brussel was hit by a sudden hunch as he listened to a psychiatrist pointing out that in some cases, semen was found in the vagina, while in others it was found on the breasts, thighs, or even on the carpet. When it was his turn to speak, Brussel outlined the theory that had suddenly come to him ‘in a flash’.

‘I think we’re dealing with one man. The apparent differences in modus operandi, I believe, result from changes that have been going on in this man. Over the two-year period during which he has been committing these murders, he had gone through a series of upheavals...’ The first four victims, said Brussel, were women between the ages of 55 and 75, and there was no seminal fluid found at the scenes. The women had been manipulated in other ways—‘a type of sexual molestation that might be expected of a small boy, not a man... A boy gets over his sexual obsession with his mother, and transfers his interest to girls of his own age. The Strangler... achieved this transfer—achieved emotional puberty—in a matter of months.’ Now he wanted to achieve orgasm inside younger women. And with the final victim, Mary Sullivan, the semen was in her mouth and over her breasts. The Strangler was making a gesture of triumph and of defiance: ‘I throw my sex in your face.’

This man, said Brussel, was a physically powerful individual, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, the age at which the paranoid reaction reaches its peak. He hazarded a guess that the Strangler’s nationality was Italian or Spanish, since garrotting is a method used by bandits in both countries. Brussels final ‘guesses’ were startlingly to the point. He believed that the Strangler had stopped killing because he had worked it out of his system. He had, in effect, grown up. And he would finally be caught because he would be unable to resist talking about his crimes and his newfound maturity.

The rest of the committee was polite but sceptical. But one year later, Brussel was vindicated when DeSalvo began admitting to his cellmate George Nassar that he was the Boston Strangler.

In 1966, Brussel travelled to Boston to interview DeSalvo. He had been half expecting a misshapen monster, and was surprised to be greeted by a good-looking, polite young man with a magnificent head of dark hair. (Brussel had even foretold that the Strangler would have well-tended hair, since he was obsessed by the impression he made on women.) Brussel found him charming, and soon realised how DeSalvo had talked his way into so many apartments: he seemed a thoroughly nice young man.

Then what had turned him into a murderer? As usual, it proved to be the family and childhood background. DeSalvo’s father was the worst kind of brute. He beat his wife and children mercilessly—on one occasion he broke his wife’s fingers one by one. He beat one son with a hose so badly—for knocking over a box of fruit—that the boy was not allowed on the beach all summer because he was covered in black-and-yellow bruises. He often brought a prostitute home and had sex with her in front of the children. His mother was also less than satisfactory. She was indifferent and self-preoccupied, and had no time for the children. As a child Albert had been a ‘loner’, his only real friend a dog that lived in a junkyard. He developed sadistic compulsions at an early age. He and a playmate called Billy used to place a dog and a cat in two compartments of an orange crate and starve them for days, and then pull out the partition, and watch as the cat scratched out the dog’s eyes. But, like so many psychopaths he could display considerable charm and make himself liked.

The real key to DeSalvo was sex. And in that sense he is typical of a majority of serial killers. From an early age he was insatiable, ‘walking around with a rail on most of the time, ready to take on any broad or fag come along, or to watch some broad and masturbate... thinking about sex a lot, more than anything, and needing it so much all the time. If only somebody could’ve seen it then and told me it was not normal, even sick...’ DeSalvo is here exaggerating; a large proportion of healthy young males go around in much the same state. And DeSalvo’s environment offered a great deal of sexual stimuli. He participated in sex games with his brothers and sisters when he was five or six years old. At the age of eight he performed oral sex on a girl at school, and was soon persuading girls to do the same for him. Combined with the lack of moral restraint that resulted from his family background, his tremendous sex urge soon led him to rape—his own estimation was that he had raped or assaulted almost two thousand women. During the course of the Green Man attacks, he raped four women in a single day, and even then tried to pick up a fifth.

This was something that Brussel had failed to recognise. The Strangler had not been ‘searching for his potency’, as Brussel speculated; he had always been potent. During his teens, a woman neighbour had asked him if it was true that he had a permanent erection, and when he modestly admitted it, invited him into her apartment. ‘She went down on her knees and blowed me and I come almost right off and she said: “Oh, now you went and come and what am I going to have to get screwed with?” and I said: “Don’t worry, I’ll have a hard-on again in a few minutes.”’ When he left her, she was exhausted, but he was still unsatisfied.

It was not potency DeSalvo was searching for, but emotional stability.

Yet Brussel was undoubtedly correct about the main motivation: that DeSalvo’s murders were part of an attempt to grow up. The murders of older women were acts of revenge against the mother who had rejected him; but the murder of a young black woman named Sophie Clark signalled a change. When he knocked on her door DeSalvo had no idea that she would be so young—he was looking for elderly or middle-aged women, like his mother. Clark’s white dress and black stockings excited him. He talked his way into her apartment by claiming to be a workman sent to carry out repairs—the method he invariably used—then, when she turned her back, hooked his arm round her neck and squeezed until she was unconscious. After that he raped her and then strangled her. The experience taught him that he preferred girls to older women, and caused the change in his method. Hence the change in the type of victim he selected, that so misled the profiling team that they assumed there were two stranglers.

Brussel was also correct about the reason DeSalvo stopped killing. The last victim, Mary Sullivan, tried to reason with him, to talk him out of raping her. Her words struck home. ‘I recall thinking at the time, yes, she is right, I don’t need to do these things any more now.’ And as he tied her up he realised, ‘I would never be able to do it again.’ It was his last murder, and he returned to rape, the only known serial killer to have murdered his way to some kind of maturity.

Chapter Two

By the mid-1970s, it was obvious to some of America’s leading analysts that the police were losing the battle against the rising murder rate. In 1960 it had been around 9,000 a year; by 1975 it was 20,500. Twenty years earlier, virtually all murders had been solved, but by the time the figure had risen to 20,000 a year, a quarter were remaining unsolved. And the rate was still climbing.

This was one of the chief concerns felt by the training staff at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. The new facility had been opened in 1972 on a marine base in the midst of 385 acres of woodland, and it was seen as the successor of the old National Police Academy in Washington DC. This had been the base of J. Edgar Hoover, whom many regarded as a dead hand on the FBI, and it may or may not have been coincidence that 1972 was also the year of his death.

And at least one of the instructors, ex-Los Angeles cop Howard Teten, brought some new ideas to the problem of crime solving. He and James Brussel had spent a great deal of time discussing the new technique of criminal profiling, and Teten thought that this might prove a technique worthy of development. As instructors in Applied Criminology, he and his colleague Patrick J. Mullany were trying to teach a thousand recruits a year to think themselves inside the mind of the criminal. The Mad Bomber case and the Boston Strangler murders seemed to prove that a competent policeman should be able to form a picture of a criminal from a thorough examination of the facts at the crime scene.

In the 1950s, another Los Angeles detective, Pierce Brooks, had been struck by a closely related idea. Three women had vanished in the LA area. The first, a pretty model named Judith Ann Dull, had agreed to be photographed on 30 July 1957, by a jug-eared man who called himself Johnny Glenn. He told her he was a magazine photographer. She left her apartment with him and vanished; her remains were found five months later in the desert 130 miles away.

On 8 March of the following year, Shirley Ann Bridgeford, a 24-year-old divorcee, accepted a blind date with a man who called himself George Williams; he had obtained her phone number by enrolling in a lonely hearts club. He drove off with her into the desert, and she also vanished. Sergeant David Ostroff, who had investigated the disappearance of Judy Dull, noted that the man who had arrived to take Shirley square dancing was scruffy and jug-eared, and concluded that he and Johnny Glenn were probably the same person.

Three months later, another model disappeared from her flat; she was Ruth Rita Mercado, a striptease dancer who also posed nude. No one saw the man who abducted her, but her profession made it likely that she was another victim of Johnny Glenn.

The case was handed to Pierce Brooks, a former naval officer and blimp pilot. It seemed likely to Brooks that the same offender was responsible for other crimes in the surrounding counties, and so he began his own search through local newspaper files. He felt frustrated because it seemed so likely that the same criminal was responsible, and a computer file of similar crimes would have been a far more efficient method of finding out. But although computers existed in those days, they were far too bulky and far too expensive for the LAPD.

In fact, Johnny Glenn was caught only by chance. Two patrolmen near the small town of Tustin spotted a couple struggling in the glare of their cruiser’s headlights. As they approached, the woman broke free from the man and pointed a gun at him. She lowered it at one of the patrolmen’s order, and explained that the gun belonged to the man, who had tried to rape her. The man made no attempt to deny the accusation, and was taken into custody. The woman, Lorraine Vigil, was a model who had agreed to go on a magazine assignment with the man, who said his name was Frank Johnson, because a friend who had originally agreed to take the job had pulled out and offered it to her. Instead of driving to his studio, as he had promised, he drove north, stopped on a quiet and dark road, where he pointed the gun at her and told her that he was going to tie her up. She made a grab for the gun, which went off, and forced open the door. As they struggled in the dark, she succeeded in snatching the gun, mere seconds before the patrolmen arrived.

At the Santa Ana police station the man gave his name as Harvey Murray Glatman, 30, a TV repairman. He did not deny the attempt at assault, but claimed it was a sudden impulse.

When Pierce Brooks received a bulletin about the arrest he noted that Glatman lived close to Ruth Mercado. The house proved to be a shabby building on South Norton Avenue, and police who searched it found the walls covered with nude pinups, in which some of the women were bound and gagged. There were also a number of lengths of rope—it seemed Glatman took an interest in bondage. Brooks realised he had his man.

Glatman agreed to take a lie detector test, and when Ruth Mercado’s name was mentioned, the stylus gave a nervous leap. A few minutes later, Glatman was confessing to murdering her.

He described how he had obtained Mercado’s number from one of the numerous Los Angeles modelling agencies that booked girls who were willing to pose clothed, semi-clad, or in the nude (agencies freely gave out their client’s contact information in those days). Introducing himself as Frank Johnson, he spoke to the 24-year-old stripper. When he called on her on 22 July 1958, some instinct made her plead illness. The following evening, however, he showed up at her apartment with his automatic pistol, and took her to her bedroom. There he tied her up and raped her. Then, telling her they were going for a picnic, he marched her down to his car. He drove her out to the desert, and spent a day taking photographs of her—bound and gagged—and raping her. In between rapes he released her and allowed her to eat. Then he told her that he would take her home. On the way, he stopped the car for ‘one more shot’, tied her up once more, and strangled her with a rope.

He then went on to describe the murder of Judy Dull. Calling on a model who had recently arrived from Florida, he had looked at her portfolio—but he was fascinated by a photograph he saw on the wall of 19-year-old Judy. She was married, with a 14-month-old daughter, but separated from her journalist husband. Glatman obtained her telephone number, and the following day he called her and asked her to pose for photographs later that afternoon. Dull was initially reluctant until he explained that they would have to shoot at her apartment, since his own was being used. Posing in her own home seemed safe enough, but when Glatman arrived there, he told her that he had managed to borrow a studio from a friend. It was, in fact, his own apartment.

Once there, he told her to take off her dress and put on a skirt and sweater. He then explained that he had to tie her hands behind her—he was taking a photograph for the cover of a ‘true detective’ magazine. Dubious but compliant, she allowed him to tie her hands behind her, bind her knees together, and place a gag in her mouth. He snapped several photographs, then unbuttoned her sweater, pulled down her bra, and removed her skirt. After that he shot more photographs. Finally, when she was clad only in panties, he laid her on the floor and started to fondle her. She struggled and protested through the gag. Glatman became impotent if a woman showed signs of having a mind of her own—total passivity was required for his fantasy. He threatened her with a gun until she promised not to resist, and then raped her twice. After that, both sat naked on the sofa and watched television. Judy promised that if he would let her go she would never tell anyone what had happened. Glatman pretended to agree—he wanted her cooperation. He assured her that he would drive her out to a lonely place and release her, and then he would leave town. Then he drove into the desert near Phoenix, Colorado, and strangled her, after first taking more photographs. He buried her in a shallow grave.