A camera gives a predator a reason to approach a stranger, a reason to be alone with her, and a reason, later, to keep something. In at least seven murder cases of the past seventy years, that last impulse handed investigators evidence they could not otherwise have found. The pictures did very different work from case to case. In some they confirmed a confession already made. In others they put a name to a victim nobody had yet identified, or tied a defendant to a young man whose death would otherwise have stayed a missing-person report. In one they were released to the public decades after they were taken, and a woman’s family recognized her.
Harvey Murray Glatman repaired televisions in Los Angeles, where he moved early in 1957, and spent his spare time around amateur camera clubs, the crime historian Harold Schechter wrote in The Yale Review. Photography gave him a way to reach young women who wanted modeling work. He used false names with each of them.
Judy Dull, 19, was looking for modeling jobs when he hired her for a photo session in 1957, according to Schechter. In March 1958 he got Shirley Bridgeford’s name from a lonely hearts club and called for her at her home. In July 1958 he answered a newspaper ad in which Ruth Mercado offered herself for modeling work, the California Supreme Court recorded, and went to her apartment on the pretext of a job. Both women were taken into the desert of San Diego County and strangled.
He was caught on the evening of October 27, 1958, when a motorcycle officer on a side road in Orange County came upon him struggling over his pistol with a young woman he had threatened. She survived. Glatman confessed to all three killings, and he led officers to the places in the desert where the remains of Bridgeford and Mercado were recovered.
The photographs came next. Searching his apartment under a warrant, officers found a metal toolbox holding Ruth Mercado’s wallet, some of her clothing and photographs Glatman had taken of both women in the desert. With the confessions, the remains and the property, they made up a case the state Supreme Court called overwhelming on both counts. The photographs did not solve the crimes; they corroborated, in his own hand, what he had already told detectives.
Glatman pleaded guilty in San Diego County to the murders of Bridgeford and Mercado and waived a jury. Judge John A. Hewicker found both murders to be of the first degree and fixed the penalty at death in December 1958. He was never charged with Judy Dull’s death, though the court heard evidence of it at the penalty hearing. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on June 5, 1959, and he was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on September 18, 1959, the Washington Examiner reported; Schechter gives the date as September 19.
Jerome Henry Brudos was arrested in Oregon in late May 1969. Within days his two court-appointed lawyers had concluded that insanity was the only defense open to him. Their reasons, as the Oregon Court of Appeals later set them out, were that he had admitted the killings to them and confessed to the police, and that the prosecution held what the court called a mass of highly incriminating physical evidence seized from his person and his home. That evidence included photographs he had taken of his victims before and after the murders.
The insanity defense never reached a jury. Between June 9 and June 25, 1969, five psychiatrists and two clinical psychologists examined him, and all of them found that he had been legally sane when the women were killed. About a month after his arrest he pleaded guilty, orally and in writing, to three counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment. The Court of Appeals affirmed on July 9, 1970, and in July 1973 it upheld the denial of post-conviction relief, calling the lawyers' choice of an insanity defense "eminently reasonable" in light of the evidence.
His camera did not lead police to him. By the time his photographs were in evidence, he was in custody and had already confessed. What they did was leave him with no plausible defense other than his state of mind.
At about 1 a.m. on May 14, 1983, two California Highway Patrol officers stopped a car weaving along Interstate 5 in southern Orange County. The driver, Randy Steven Kraft, a 38-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach, said his passenger was a hitchhiker. He failed a sobriety test. When Sergeant Michael Howard reached into the car he found that the passenger, Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine, was dead. He had been strangled.
A search warrant for the car described photographs, and officers found them under the floor mat. Among the pictures were young men later named in the murder counts, among them Rodger DeVaul Jr. and Robert Loggins Jr. Negatives found at Kraft’s house produced more pictures of DeVaul, and Loggins appeared in photographs found in the house and in a briefcase. A prosecution expert matched clothing in another picture to trousers that Eric Church had owned. In the trunk, in a business binder, was a handwritten sheet of 61 short entries that prosecutors read as a list of victims.
The California Supreme Court summed up the case in a single line: physical evidence linked Kraft to eight of the murders. The photographs were part of that physical link, connecting the man in the car with young men whose bodies had been found along Southern California roads over more than a decade. In 1989 an Orange County jury convicted him of 16 counts of first-degree murder, and on November 29, 1989, he was sentenced to death. On appeal he argued that officers had no right to look under the floor mats. The court disagreed: the warrant described the photographs, and officers were entitled to look where they might be found. It affirmed the judgment in its entirety on August 10, 2000. In March 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a halt to executions in California.
Robert Berdella ran a curio booth in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived in a house in the Hyde Park neighborhood. On April 2, 1988, a young man who had been held captive there for days got out through a second-story window and found help. Within a day, police had closed the street.
What they took from the house went far beyond the case of the man who escaped. United Press International reported in May 1988 that police had seized more than 200 photographs, in which they counted 22 men. Police released pictures of seven of the men to the press and had identified six. Remains found in the house were identified that month as those of Robert A. Sheldon, 23, of California, who had once given Berdella’s address as his own. By December, UPI reported, the seized photographs were known to include Sheldon and Larry W. Pearson, 20, of Wichita, Kansas. Investigators also had a loose-leaf notebook in which Berdella had kept a record, the filmmaker Ben Meade told The Pitch, a Kansas City weekly.
On August 3, 1988, Berdella pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Larry Pearson and was sentenced to life without parole. In exchange for his confessions and information, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty in the remaining cases. On December 19, 1988, he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Robert Sheldon and, according to the Missouri Court of Appeals, to the second-degree murders of Jerry Howell, James Ferris and Todd Stoops. The bodies of Howell and Ferris had never been found; their families had long believed he was one of the last people to see them. Mark Wallace’s death brought the total to six. Berdella died of a heart attack in 1992, The Pitch reported, after about four years in prison. The house was demolished in 1993, according to the Kansas City Public Library.
In the early hours of April 1, 1990, Officer Mike Miller of the Arizona Department of Public Safety stopped to check on a tractor-trailer parked at Casa Grande with its hazard lights flashing. Inside he found a woman being held captive. The driver was Robert Ben Rhoades, a long-haul trucker from Houston. He was convicted in Arizona on charges arising from that night.
On April 6, 1990, FBI agents searched his Houston apartment. Among what they took, the Illinois Appellate Court later recorded, were photographs of a girl nobody could then identify. On September 29, 1990, a farmer found the body of Regina Kay Walters, 14, in a barn along Interstate 70 in Bond County, Illinois. She had left Pasadena, Texas, on February 3 with an 18-year-old companion, Ricky Lee Jones, who has never been found.
FBI agent Mark Young, who had been studying the Illinois case, recognized the connection in the Houston file. The photographs, the Tucson Weekly reported, showed the girl inside the same barn. The Arizona truck evidence, nearly destroyed in storage, held her notebook. Trucking logs placed Rhoades in Bond County that winter. On September 11, 1992, he pleaded guilty in Bond County to her first degree murder and was sentenced to natural life. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed in July 2001.
The photographs from his apartment carried one more story. In 2019 a woman in Alberta recognized herself in a picture from the collection and told APTN News that the driver had photographed her as a hitchhiker in 1985 and dropped her off unharmed in Winnipeg.
Rhoades’s other proven killings came to light without help from his camera. Remains found in Millard County, Utah, in October 1990 were identified in 2003 as those of Patricia Candace Walsh, 24, who had been hitchhiking with her husband, Douglas Scott Zyskowski, whose body had been found in Texas in January 1990. Utah charged Rhoades and then dismissed its case in September 2006 so that Texas could try both deaths together. In March 2012 he pleaded guilty in West Texas to two counts of capital murder and received two life sentences without parole, the Deseret News reported. In February 2019 he was serving life sentences in Illinois, APTN News reported.
Rodney James Alcala was a UCLA graduate and a working photographer, and he used the camera to open conversations with women and girls. On June 20, 1979, Robin Samsoe, 12, disappeared in Huntington Beach while riding a borrowed bicycle to a ballet lesson. Earlier that afternoon a man with a camera had photographed her and a friend on the cliffs over the beach, telling them he was taking pictures for a contest, the California Supreme Court recorded. Alcala was arrested on July 24, 1979, after a composite sketch was circulated. In his house police found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle that he had rented after Robin disappeared. The locker held, among other things, a large collection of photographs: more than 2,000, CBS News reported in 2010.
The Samsoe case went to trial three times. Juries convicted him in 1980 and 1986, and both judgments were set aside, by the California Supreme Court in 1984 and by the federal courts in 2001 and 2003. By the third trial, DNA and other forensic evidence had linked him to the deaths of four women in Los Angeles County: Jill Barcomb, 18; Georgia Wixted, 27; Charlotte Lamb, 32; and Jill Parenteau, 21. On February 25, 2010, an Orange County jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of kidnapping; Robin Samsoe’s case is a conviction for murder, with other charges. Judge Francisco Briseño sentenced him to death on March 30, 2010.
The photographs had been held back for three decades while the case was investigated and tried. On March 10, 2010, after the verdict, Huntington Beach police released a selection and asked the public to help identify the people in them, to learn whether there were victims nobody knew about. Dozens of people called. Some were women who recognized themselves and reported that they were alive and well. Three families came forward believing that missing relatives were among the faces, and Detective Patrick Ellis said each identification had to be checked against other photographs from the families. In April 2010 the New York Police Department released more than 200 further pictures whose backgrounds suggested they had been taken in New York.
One of the released photographs did what no court had done. In 2013 a relative who had been searching since 1977 for Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, recognized her among the faces. Her siblings gave DNA, and in 2015 it matched remains a rancher had found in 1982 northeast of Granger, in southwest Wyoming. Investigators determined that the photograph had been taken a short distance from where her remains lay. In September 2016 Sweetwater County charged Alcala with her murder. He was never brought to Wyoming for trial, and the county attorney dismissed the charge after his death, the Rawlins Times reported.
In New York, meanwhile, he pleaded guilty in December 2012 to the murders of Cornelia Crilley, a flight attendant killed in Manhattan in 1971, and Ellen Hover, who disappeared there in 1977, and on January 7, 2013, he was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was returned to California, where his appeal of the 2010 judgment was still pending in early 2013. He died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, at 77, while awaiting execution. After his death the Associated Press reported that authorities thought he might have killed as many as 130 people. That figure is an estimate, not a finding: he was convicted of seven murders and charged with an eighth.
Between 2010 and 2017 eight men disappeared from Toronto’s Gay Village: Skandaraj Navaratnam, Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Abdulbasir Faizi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi and Majeed Kayhan. Bruce McArthur was arrested in January 2018 in connection with the deaths of Esen and Kinsman.
The case laid before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in February 2019 rested in part on McArthur’s digital devices. Police found photographs of seven of the eight men, CBC News reported. He had tried to delete them, and forensic examiners recovered them. Some of the files did not carry the victims' names, and McArthur told police that he did not know the names of two of the men. The pictures linked him directly to men whose disappearances had gone unexplained for years.
McArthur pleaded guilty on January 29, 2019, to eight counts of first-degree murder. On February 8, 2019, Justice John McMahon sentenced him to life imprisonment and ordered the sentences to run concurrently, with no eligibility for parole for 25 years, Radio Canada International reported. The judge gave two reasons for not making the parole terms consecutive: McArthur would be 91 before he could seek parole, and his guilty pleas had spared the families a long trial.
Set side by side, the cases show the limits as clearly as the power. Glatman’s and Brudos’s pictures were found after they had confessed, and they closed off any defense but insanity. Kraft’s and Berdella’s put faces to the counts in an indictment and names to remains. In the Rhoades case a photograph turned an unidentified girl into a named victim and placed her with the man who killed her. Alcala’s collection, released to the public, gave one family its answer and left many other identifications to be checked. A photograph shows that two people were once in the same place. In every one of these cases it took a confession, a body, a fingerprint or a DNA profile to show what happened afterward.
• 1957: Judy Dull is killed; Harvey Glatman later admits it and is never charged.
• March and July 1958: Glatman kills Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado in San Diego County.
• October 27, 1958: Glatman is arrested in Orange County; his apartment yields photographs of both women.
• September 18, 1959: Glatman is executed at San Quentin.
• Late May 1969: Jerome Brudos is arrested in Oregon; about a month later he pleads guilty to three first-degree murders.
• July 24, 1979: Rodney Alcala is arrested; a Seattle storage locker holds his photographs.
• May 14, 1983: Randy Kraft is stopped on Interstate 5; photographs are found under the floor mat of his car.
• April 2, 1988: A man escapes from Robert Berdella’s house in Kansas City; police seize more than 200 photographs.
• December 19, 1988: Berdella pleads guilty to further murders, six deaths in all.
• 1989: Kraft is convicted of 16 murders and sentenced to death.
• April 1 and April 6, 1990: Robert Ben Rhoades is arrested in Arizona and his Houston apartment is searched.
• September 29, 1990: Regina Walters’s body is found in Bond County, Illinois.
• 1992: Rhoades pleads guilty to her murder (September 11); Berdella dies in prison.
• August 10, 2000: The California Supreme Court affirms Kraft’s death sentence.
• February 25 and March 30, 2010: Alcala is convicted of five murders and sentenced to death.
• March 10, 2010: Huntington Beach police release Alcala photographs to identify the people in them.
• March 2012: Rhoades pleads guilty in Texas to two capital murders.
• January 7, 2013: Alcala is sentenced in New York for two murders.
• 2015: DNA confirms that remains found in Wyoming are Christine Ruth Thornton’s, after a relative recognized her in an Alcala photograph.
• January 2018: Bruce McArthur is arrested in Toronto.
• January 29 and February 8, 2019: McArthur pleads guilty to eight first-degree murders and is sentenced to life.
• July 24, 2021: Alcala dies on California’s death row.