Five men in this archive photographed the people they killed. In three of the five the photographs are substantially why we know what they did. In one they were found afterwards and proved nothing that was still in doubt. In the fifth they opened a case that cannot be closed.
Harvey Glatman is the earliest, and the clearest. He was a television repairman in Los Angeles with a camera and a plausible line: he presented himself to modelling agencies as a magazine photographer who shot covers for detective story pulps, which gave him a professional-sounding reason to ask a young woman to let herself be tied up and to look frightened. He used the name Johnny Glynn. Judy Dull, nineteen, died in August 1957. Shirley Bridgeford, whom he met through a lonely hearts club, died in March 1958. Ruth Mercado, another model, died 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.
He was caught because the fourth woman fought. On October 27, 1958 he drove Lorraine Vigil out towards Santa Ana; she got hold of his gun in the car, and a highway patrolman named Thomas Mulligan found the two of them struggling at the roadside. Glatman confessed at once and took detectives to the desert graves. He refused to appeal and was executed at San Quentin on September 18, 1959.
His photographs were used for years afterwards in police training. It is one of the earliest cases in which a killer's own documentation was the whole of the evidence.
Robert Ben Rhoades drove a long-haul rig with a compartment concealed between the seats of the cab, fitted with handcuffs bolted to the ceiling. He was stopped on April 1, 1990 by Arizona police who pulled in behind a semitrailer parked on the highway with its hazard lights on, and found him torturing a woman inside it. That arrest was for what the officers walked in on. What connected him to the killings was the search of his house, which turned up photographs of Regina Kay Walters, fourteen, and of Patricia Candace Walsh.
He had killed Walters in a derelict barn in Illinois and photographed her there. He is serving life without parole at Menard, and pleaded guilty in Texas in 2012 to two further counts. Figures of fifty or more circulate and none of them has been established; the record holds three convictions and a boy, Ricky Lee Jones, whose body has never been found.
Robert Berdella kept the most complete record of the five. Between 1984 and 1987 he killed six men in Kansas City: Jerry Howell, Robert Sheldon, Mark Wallace, Walter Ferris, Todd Stoops and Larry Pearson. He restrained them in an upstairs room, kept them alive for days or weeks, photographed what he did, and typed a log recording each man's condition hour by hour in the manner of clinical notes.
He was stopped by an escape, not by an investigation. On the morning of April 2, 1988 Chris Bryson, who had been held for several days and who survived, worked a hand free while Berdella was at his shop, got out of a second-floor window wearing a dog collar, and flagged down a passing car. Police searched the house on Charlotte Street and found two human skulls, more than three hundred Polaroids, and the log.
He pleaded guilty rather than face a capital trial, and as part of that agreement gave a long account of each killing, which is the source of most of what is known. He died of a heart attack in the Missouri State Penitentiary on October 8, 1992, having complained the day before that he had not been given his heart medication.
Jerome Brudos worked in a garage at Salem, Oregon that his wife was not permitted to enter. He killed four women between January 1968 and April 1969, and photographed them in the shoes and clothing he had spent his life collecting. He was caught by police work rather than by the pictures: two bodies surfaced in the rivers, officers canvassing Oregon State University found he had been telephoning female students for dates, one of them agreed to meet him, and they were waiting. He pleaded guilty to three of the four killings. His photographs are the only set of the five that changed nothing: they were found after he was already caught, and by then he had confessed. They are a record of the killings rather than the reason anyone knows about them.
Then there is Rodney Alcala, and his case runs the other way.
He was a UCLA fine arts graduate and a genuinely capable photographer, which was the method. In 2010, after his conviction for five murders, investigators released more than a hundred photographs found in a Seattle storage locker he had rented. Most were of young women. Some were of children. They were published for the ordinary reason that police publish anything: in the hope that somebody would recognise a missing relative.
A number of the people in them have never been identified. Several forces regard his true total as far higher than the seven he was convicted of. He died in 2021 without answering any of it.
So the same act produced two opposite results. For Glatman, Rhoades and Berdella the photographs closed the cases: they proved the killings, established the sequence, and in Glatman's case were substantially the entire evidence against him. For Alcala the photographs opened one that cannot be closed, because a picture of a living woman who was never reported missing establishes nothing at all. It is not evidence of a crime. It is only evidence that he was in a room with her.
That is the distinction worth holding on to. A photograph is not proof of what happened next. It is proof of proximity, and it becomes evidence of murder only when something else, a body, a confession, a forensic match, tells you which of the two it was.
There is a version of this subject that treats the pictures as the point and works through them one by one. That version is available in a great many places. The people in them did not consent to being photographed, did not consent to what followed, and in Alcala's case are mostly still unidentified, which means some of them are alive and some of their families are not aware the pictures exist.