On January 14, 1980, Sophie Marie Barrera, fifty-nine, came out of her dental laboratory on Miami Street, east of South Grand Boulevard in south St. Louis, got into her car, and was killed when a dynamite bomb planted in it exploded. She had been suing one of her customers, a south side dentist named Glennon Engleman, for more than $14,000 in unpaid lab fees. Her son, Frederick Barrera, told police Engleman had killed her. He was right, and her death finally brought down a man who had been killing around St. Louis for more than twenty years.
Glennon Edward Engleman was born in St. Louis on February 6, 1927, the youngest of four. He served in the Army Air Corps, went to Washington University's dental school on the GI Bill, graduated in 1954, and opened a practice on the south side where he had grown up. To patients he was a slight, balding, generous neighborhood dentist, not a very careful one; the lab often had to redo his casts. He also ran a drag strip at Pacific, Missouri.
The first death connected to him came on December 17, 1958. James Stanley Bullock, twenty-seven, a clerk for Union Electric who took night classes at St. Louis University, left home around seven for class and was shot with a .22 near the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park. He had married Edna Ruth Ball on June 28 that year. She was Engleman's ex-wife. She collected about $64,000 in life insurance and put part of it, $15,000 or $20,000 by different accounts, into Engleman's drag strip. Engleman was never charged, and the case stayed open.
The second came on September 26, 1963, at the drag strip. Eric Frey, who worked there and whom later accounts call Engleman's partner, was killed in a dynamite blast in an old well or cistern he was filling; the death was ruled an accident. Later accounts say Engleman hit him with a rock, pushed him down the well and set off the dynamite. Frey's widow, Sandy, collected the insurance, $25,000 or $37,000 by different accounts, and said she later gave Engleman $16,000 of it. No charge was ever filed.
The pattern the prosecutors later described was a dentist who drew young women to him, steered them into marriages with men who could be insured, and killed the husbands for a share of the payout. In 1976 Peter J. Halm Jr., twenty-six, of Kirkwood, was shot dead at Pacific. His wife, Carmen Miranda Halm, a former dental assistant trainee who had worked for Engleman and known him since childhood, collected $60,000 in life insurance.
On November 3, 1977, Arthur Gusewelle, sixty-one, and his wife, Vernita, fifty-five, were killed at their farmhouse near Edwardsville, Illinois; Arthur was shot and Vernita was beaten to death with a sledgehammer. Seventeen months later, on March 31, 1979, their son Ronald, thirty-three, the heir to the family's oil business, was killed in East St. Louis. His widow, Barbara Gusewelle Boyle, had once been one of Engleman's girlfriends, and he had set her up with a fellow dentist before she married Ronald. She collected about $340,000; one account says $190,000. An accomplice, Robert Handy, later pleaded guilty to conspiring in the three Gusewelle killings and served fourteen years.
What broke the case open after the Barrera bombing was Engleman's third wife. He had married Ruth Jolley on April 15, 1967, and they had a son, David. She told an FBI agent named McGarvey that Engleman had bragged to her about the killings for years, and that there were others: Bullock, Halm, Ronald Gusewelle. She agreed to wear a wire, and after many attempts he made incriminating statements on tape. She and her son then went into witness protection, and Engleman was arrested and charged with the murders of Sophie Barrera and Peter Halm.
The federal cases were moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, on a change of venue. On September 25, 1980, a jury there convicted him of mail fraud and conspiracy in the Halm killing, and a second federal jury convicted him over the bombing of Barrera's car; he got two thirty-year terms. In Missouri he was sentenced to life on a capital murder charge for Halm; he could not be sentenced to death because Missouri's death penalty law had not been in force in 1976. He was also convicted of the Barrera murder, with accounts differing over whether by verdict or by a guilty plea entered to avoid a death sentence, and by 1984 he was serving two life terms with no parole for fifty years. "He says he does it for money, but I think that's a front," said Gordon Ankney, the prosecutor who sent him to prison. "He never did it for enough to make it worthwhile."
Illinois came last. In 1984 a grand jury took up the Gusewelle killings on new evidence, including blood in the garage matched to Ronald. Barbara Boyle was arrested in Florida after buying an expedited passport and a ticket to Switzerland, and was held on $6 million bail. Engleman, who had confessed the three killings in prison, pleaded guilty in 1985 and received three life terms without parole. Boyle was convicted of her husband's murder, acquitted of his parents', and sentenced to fifty years; she was released from the Dwight Correctional Center on October 10, 2009.
Glennon Engleman died in prison on March 3, 1999. He was convicted of five murders, and later accounts attribute seven deaths to him over twenty-two years.