On the evening of October 27, 1958, a motorcycle officer riding a side road in Orange County, California, came upon a man and a woman fighting over a gun at the roadside. The woman was Lorraine Vigil, a model sent to a photographer by her agency. On the way to what she had been told was his studio he had driven onto the Santa Ana Freeway at high speed, stopped, pulled the pistol and tried to force her to submit. As they struggled they fell out of the car, the gun went off, and she ended up holding it on him until the officer arrived. The man was Harvey Murray Glatman, a thirty-year-old television repairman, and within days he was telling detectives about three women he had killed.
He was born in the Bronx on December 10, 1927, the only child of Albert and Ophelia Glatman, and grew up in Denver. His IQ was measured at 130. As a small child he showed sadomasochistic tendencies, and at twelve he took to running a rope around his neck, through the bathtub drain, and pulling it tight. His mother asked the family doctor, who said he would grow out of it. As a teenager he broke into women's apartments, stealing lingerie and once a handgun, and went on to stalking and assaulting women. In August 1945 he pleaded guilty to first-degree grand larceny in New York and was sent to the Elmira Reformatory, and later to Sing Sing, where he was diagnosed with a psychopathic personality of the schizophrenic type with sexually perverted impulses at the root of his crimes. Accounts differ on whether he was paroled in 1948 or released in 1951. He went back to his family in Denver, and in January 1957 he moved to Los Angeles, lived on his own for the first time, and worked repairing televisions.
There he went looking through modeling agencies, offering work shooting pictures for detective and pulp magazines, which gave him a reason to ask a woman to pose bound and gagged. On August 1, 1957, he picked up Judy Ann Dull, nineteen, told her the pictures were for a true detective magazine, tied her up, photographed her and raped her, then drove her into the desert, strangled her with a rope and buried her in a shallow grave. Shirley Ann Bridgeford, twenty-four, a divorced mother of two young sons, met him on a blind date arranged through a lonely hearts club in March 1958. He drove her into the desert east of San Diego, raped her, photographed her bound, gagged and weeping, and strangled her. Ruth Rita Mercado, twenty-four, another would-be model who also went by Angela Rojas, let him into her apartment in July 1958 and allowed him to tie her up. He did the same to her. He said afterward that once he had raped them he knew they could identify him and his car. "I didn't really like to kill," he said. "It was just that I got past the point of no return."
He led police to the remains in the desert. A search of his apartment turned up a metal toolbox holding Ruth Mercado's billfold, some of her clothing, and the photographs of Bridgeford and Mercado posed in the desert with their hands and feet tied. He became known as the Glamour Girl Slayer and the Lonely Hearts Killer.
He was indicted in San Diego County for the murders of Bridgeford and Mercado, the two killed there. Against the wishes of his mother and his lawyer, who wanted an insanity plea, he pleaded guilty to both and waived a jury on the degree of the crime and the penalty. "I would rather be executed than spend the rest of my life behind bars," he told Judge John A. Hewicker, who warned him he might feel differently as the time approached. In December 1958 Hewicker found both murders to be in the first degree and sentenced him to death. Evidence about Judy Dull's killing and the attack on Lorraine Vigil was heard, but he was never tried for Dull. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on June 5, 1959. He asked the warden to do nothing to save his life, and on September 18, 1959, he was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
He was also suspected in the killing of a young woman found by hikers near Boulder, Colorado, in 1954, known for decades as Boulder Jane Doe and identified by DNA in 2009 as Dorothy Gay Howard, eighteen, of Phoenix. He never confessed to it. Jack Webb fictionalized parts of the case in a 1966 Dragnet television film, with the LAPD captain Pierce Brooks, who had helped question him, as technical adviser. James Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places describes how he confessed to the three murders and was cleared of the 1958 killing of Ellroy's mother.