Harvey Murray Glatman was born in the Bronx on December 10, 1927, and grew up in Denver. He was an intelligent, painfully awkward boy who was found by his parents at twelve half-strangling himself with a rope in the bath, an interest a doctor told them he would grow out of. He served time in Colorado and New York for armed robbery and assaults on women in the 1940s, was released in 1951, and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a television repairman and pursued photography as a hobby.
He used the photography. He answered advertisements from aspiring models and placed his own with a modelling agency under the name Johnny Glynn, presenting himself as a magazine photographer specialising in detective story covers, which gave him a reason to ask a woman to be tied up and to look frightened. Judy Dull, a nineteen-year-old model, died in August 1957; Shirley Bridgeford, whom he met through a lonely hearts club, in March 1958; Ruth Mercado, another model, in July 1958. He photographed each of them alive and bound, and again after he had killed them, and kept the pictures in a toolbox. The Los Angeles press called him the Glamour Girl Slayer, after the modelling work he offered the women.
On October 27, 1958, he picked up Lorraine Vigil, a model sent to him by an agency, and drove her out towards Santa Ana. She fought him in the car, got hold of the gun, and a passing highway patrolman, Thomas Mulligan, found the two of them struggling at the roadside.
He confessed at once and took detectives to the desert graves. He was convicted in November 1958, refused to appeal, and was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on September 18, 1959. The photographs were used for years afterwards in police training, and the case is one of the earliest in which a killer's own documentation was the whole of the evidence.