The objects tend to be small. A wallet in a metal toolbox. A pair of gold ball earrings in a pouch. A driver’s license mailed to a newspaper. An aviation chart with marks on it. When detectives talk about the things a killer keeps, they reach for the word trophy, and the word is not wrong. In court, though, these objects did a plainer job. They tied a man to a name, and a name to a date, at times when nothing else could.
Ten cases show how much those objects could matter, and how little. In some the objects convicted the man who held them. In others they were incidental, and the conviction rested on other proof. In two, what became of the objects afterward turned into a story of its own.
Harvey Glatman worked as a television repairman in Los Angeles and spent his free time around amateur camera clubs, the crime historian Harold Schechter wrote in The Yale Review. Photography gave him a pretext. He approached young women who wanted modeling work, used false names, and offered to take their pictures.
In 1958 he confessed to killing two of them, Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado, in San Diego County, and to killing a third woman, Judy Dull, the year before. The Supreme Court of California, reviewing the case on automatic appeal, set out what officers found when they searched his apartment under a warrant. In a metal toolbox were Ruth Mercado’s wallet, some of her clothing, and photographs Glatman had taken of both women. He had thrown away most of Mercado’s belongings on the road, the court recorded, but kept a wallet with her identification, her wristwatch, about ten dollars and some clothing. From Shirley Bridgeford he had kept only about 30 cents in coins.
The toolbox corroborated everything he had told police. Glatman pleaded guilty to both murders, the trial court found them to be of the first degree, and he was sentenced to death. In June 1959 the state Supreme Court called the evidence overwhelming on both counts and affirmed. He was executed at San Quentin that September. The killing of Judy Dull, which he described in his confessions, was never charged; the court heard about it only as evidence bearing on penalty.
The case that gave the subject its popular shape began with a receipt. On November 16, 1957, the opening day of deer season in central Wisconsin, Bernice Worden was minding the family hardware store in Plainfield while her son was out hunting. When he came back she was gone. Ed Gein, a reclusive handyman, had told him he might stop in for antifreeze, and the last sale recorded that day was for antifreeze, Isthmus reported in 2007. That slip of paper sent officers to Gein’s farm.
What investigators found there was material, not keepsakes in any ordinary sense. The state’s Dictionary of Wisconsin History records that the search of the farm turned up human remains, and that Gein was believed to have robbed graves in three local cemeteries as well as killing at least two people. UPI, looking back in 1982, reported that investigators had the items buried. He told authorities he had also killed Mary Hogan, a 54-year-old tavern operator, in 1954, UPI reported at his death.
Gein was charged with only one killing, Bernice Worden’s. He was first found unfit to stand trial and committed to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1968 he was found competent and tried before Circuit Judge Robert H. Gollmar, who found that he had killed Bernice Worden and that he had been legally insane when he did it. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and returned to the state hospital. Mary Hogan’s death was never tried. He died in 1984 at the Mendota Mental Health Institute.
The objects outlived the case in an unlikely way. The farm and its contents were advertised for auction in March 1958, and the house burned before the sale. Gein’s car was bought and toured at county fairs as a sideshow, billed, according to Isthmus, as the car that had hauled the dead from their graves.
Edmund Kemper picked up young women and girls hitchhiking around Santa Cruz County between May 1972 and February 1973 and killed six of them. Over the Easter weekend of 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett. Then he drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and telephoned the Santa Cruz police to confess, the KPIX newsfilm of April 24, 1973, records.
He had kept no hidden store of possessions that brought him down; he gave himself up. The evidence-gathering that followed was physical and methodical. On April 27, 1973, KPIX cameras filmed police and sheriff’s deputies working through the trunks of his car and his mother’s car, and Kemper took investigators to places he had described. On November 8, 1973, a Santa Cruz County jury found him guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder, rejecting his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was sentenced to life. At 36, in 1985, he told prison officials he was not fit for release, UPI reported. In July 2024 a parole panel denied him again, Lookout Santa Cruz reported, with his next hearing expected in 2031.
No case on this list turned on kept things as completely as Dennis Rader’s. Between 1974 and 1991 the man who called himself BTK killed ten people in and around Wichita, wrote to police and the press, and then went quiet for long stretches. When he began writing again in 2004, his messages carried objects he could only have taken from the people he killed.
On March 19, 2004, a letter reached The Wichita Eagle with a photocopy of the missing driver’s license of Vicki Wegerle, who had been killed in 1986, according to an Associated Press timeline printed by the Deseret News. In December 2004 a man in Wichita found a package in Murdock Park that held the driver’s license of Nancy Fox, killed in December 1977; the FBI confirmed it as a BTK communication, the AP reported in the Lawrence Journal-World. In January and February 2005, police said, at least three of his packages contained jewelry that might have been taken from victims, including a padded envelope mailed to KSAS-TV with a letter signed "PJ Fox." Lieutenant Ken Landwehr, who commanded the task force, still called it the department’s most challenging case.
The object that finished him was not a trophy at all. In February 2005 he mailed a floppy disk to a Wichita television station. Data on the disk led investigators to Christ Lutheran Church, where, a few weeks earlier, he had handed his pastor a disk and asked him to print copies of a council agenda, the AP’s Sharon Cohen reported. Rader, the congregation’s president, was arrested on February 25, 2005.
On June 27, 2005, he pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder. His lawyer, Steve Osburn, said the state’s case included a confession, DNA and personal trophies taken from the victims, and Rader himself listed among those trophies a watch, a radio and a necklace, the Deseret News reported. At his sentencing hearing in August, Landwehr described what the searches of Rader’s home, office and camper had turned up: hundreds of pictures clipped from magazines and catalogs and mounted on index cards, files holding copies of nearly every message he had sent to the police and the media, and bags of restraints he called hit kits. A police captain read from a journal. Rader had planned, Landwehr said, to scan the files and store them digitally.
Judge Gregory Waller sentenced him on August 18, 2005, to ten consecutive life terms, a minimum of 175 years without parole. The KBI director, Larry Welch, put the case’s lesson in one sentence, the AP reported: "His arrogance helped catch him."
Rodney Alcala was a photographer who used his camera to start conversations. On June 20, 1979, Robin Samsoe, 12, disappeared in Huntington Beach. Alcala was arrested on July 24, 1979. In his home police found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle, rented weeks after Robin vanished, the Supreme Court of California later recounted.
Searched under a warrant, the locker held clothing, film and photographs, and a small pouch of earrings. Robin’s mother said one pair, gold balls, looked like a pair her daughter sometimes borrowed, and that she had trimmed them herself with nail clippers. Those earrings were argued over at three trials. A prosecution expert testified that marks on them matched her clippers; the defense countered that they came from a different tool, and Alcala insisted the earrings were his own.
Two convictions in the Samsoe case were reversed, in 1984 and on federal review in 2003. At the third trial, in 2010, the pouch carried new weight. Prosecutors said the DNA of Charlotte Lamb, a 32-year-old legal secretary killed in El Segundo in 1978, had been found on a pair of rose-shaped earrings from the same pouch. On February 25, 2010, an Orange County jury convicted Alcala of five first-degree murders, Robin’s and those of four women in Los Angeles County, and he was sentenced to death that March 30, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced.
The photographs had a second life. After the verdict, Huntington Beach police released more than 100 of them and asked the public to help identify the people pictured, CBS News reported. In 2013 a relative of Christine Ruth Thornton recognized her in one of them; DNA later confirmed that a woman found in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, in 1982 was Thornton, and Wyoming charged Alcala with her murder in 2016, CBS News reported. That charge was never tried. He pleaded guilty in New York in December 2012 to two murders committed there in the 1970s, and he died of natural causes in July 2021 while awaiting execution, the Associated Press reported.
Robert Hansen ran a bakery in Anchorage, flew a small plane and hunted big game. In October 1983 Alaska State Troopers arrested him as a suspect in the deaths of four women whose bodies had been found outside the city. Among the evidence seized in searches of his home was an aviation chart. United Press International reported in 1984 that police had taken from the house a map marking the places where bodies lay.
The chart did what no witness could. Prosecutors laid it before Hansen in February 1984, and on February 27 he pleaded guilty in Anchorage Superior Court to four counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life plus 461 years, UPI reported. In a taped confession he told prosecutors and troopers he had killed 17 women.
That spring, with the ground thawed, he showed investigators where he said the women were buried. On April 24 and 25, 1984, troopers recovered three bodies at sites he had pointed out. Lieutenant Bob Jent of the troopers' Criminal Investigation Bureau said the records Hansen had kept were so exact that "we didn’t have to dig more than (once) for each body," UPI reported. Hansen died in state custody in Anchorage on August 21, 2014, at 75, the Alaska Dispatch News reported. The thirteen killings beyond the four he pleaded to were confessed, never charged.
Ted Bundy is often placed among the trophy keepers, and the trial record does not bear that out. What convicted him in Florida was not a hidden collection but an accumulation of ordinary evidence.
For the January 1978 murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, the Supreme Court of Florida described a case built on an eyewitness who saw a man leaving the house and on forensic dentists who testified that Bundy’s teeth matched a bite mark. A jury convicted him in July 1979. For the murder, with other charges, of Kimberly Leach, 12, of Lake City, the state assembled a chain of small things: a Lake City motel register he signed under another name on February 8, 1978; a white van taken from Florida State University’s media center, with group B bloodstains on its carpet and fiber evidence linking his clothing and the girl’s to it; and a stolen license tag. That tag, taken from a house near the Chi Omega house on January 13, 1978, was seen on the floorboard of a car he was using in Tallahassee on February 11, 1978, the court recorded. He was convicted in 1980 and executed at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989, UPI reported.
Arthur Shawcross kept nothing that police needed. What exposed him was a return. On January 3, 1990, a New York State Police helicopter crew flying surveillance over the Northampton Park area west of Rochester were watching a car near the place where June Cicero, 34, was later found, UPI reported. The crew followed it to a nursing home and then to Shawcross’s home.
He was on parole after serving a sentence for first-degree manslaughter in the 1972 death of an eight-year-old girl in Watertown. UPI also reported that a Social Security card belonging to another victim, Felicia Stephens, had been found near the same park. On December 13, 1990, a Monroe County jury rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty of ten counts of second-degree murder, the Deseret News reported, and he pleaded guilty in March 1991 to murdering an eleventh woman, Elizabeth Gibson, in Wayne County. He died in custody in November 2008.
On April 1, 1990, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer stopped to check on a tractor-trailer parked with its hazard lights flashing at the edge of Casa Grande and found a woman being held captive in the truck. The driver was Robert Ben Rhoades, a long-haul trucker from Houston, the Tucson Weekly reported.
Under a warrant, FBI agents searched his Houston apartment on April 6, 1990, and seized clothing and a photo album, according to the Illinois Appellate Court’s summary of the evidence. Among the photographs was a girl nobody could yet name. She was Regina Walters, 14, a runaway from Pasadena, Texas, who was found dead that September in Bond County, Illinois. An FBI agent, Mark Young, noticed that details in the Houston file matched the Illinois case, the Tucson Weekly reported, and photographs taken from Rhoades were matched to the Illinois investigation.
The truck evidence from Arizona had been tagged for destruction, and investigators saved it. In it was a notebook that belonged to Regina Walters; the Illinois court record confirms it was found in Rhoades’s truck. On September 11, 1992, he pleaded guilty to her murder under a negotiated agreement and was sentenced to natural life. In March 2012 he pleaded guilty in Texas to two counts of capital murder, for the deaths of Douglas Scott Zyskowski and Patricia Candace Walsh, and received two more life sentences, the Deseret News reported.
Jeffrey Dahmer photographed the men he killed, the Deseret News reported in July 1991. On July 22, 1991, a man escaped from his Milwaukee apartment and brought police back; what officers found there ended the series. He admitted killing seventeen people.
He pleaded guilty but insane to fifteen counts of first-degree intentional homicide, and on February 15, 1992, a Milwaukee jury found him sane on every count, UPI reported. He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms. In May 1992 he pleaded guilty in Akron, Ohio, to aggravated murder in the 1978 death of Steven Hicks, the St. Petersburg Times reported. On November 28, 1994, he was beaten to death by another inmate at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
His belongings became a legal problem. Families of victims who held judgments against his estate won a court order transferring the items to them and planned to auction them as compensation. Joseph Zilber, a Milwaukee real estate developer, was horrified by the idea and raised $407,225 through a group called the Milwaukee Civic Pride Fund to buy the objects instead. The day after Columbia County Circuit Judge Daniel George approved their release in June 1996, the fund destroyed them. Zilber’s stated aim was that "these tools of death be permanently destroyed," the Deseret News reported. The apartment building came down, and by 2021 a grassy lot marked where it had stood, TMJ4 reported.
Set side by side, the cases sort themselves. Glatman’s toolbox, Rhoades’s truck, Hansen’s chart and Rader’s mailings did the work of a witness: each linked a living suspect to a specific victim in a way no confession could be argued away from. Alcala’s pouch did that work twice, three decades apart, once through a mother’s memory of her nail clippers and once through DNA. The Gein and Dahmer cases show the other side, objects so charged that the public response to them, a carnival exhibit in one case and a $407,225 purchase made in order to destroy them in the other, became part of the record. Bundy and Shawcross, often grouped with the collectors, were convicted on eyewitnesses, forensic matches, and a helicopter crew’s patience.
• November 16, 1957: Bernice Worden disappears from her hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin; a sales slip leads officers to Ed Gein’s farm.
• 1958: Harvey Glatman confesses; a toolbox in his apartment holds Ruth Mercado’s wallet and photographs of two victims.
• March 1958: The Gein farmhouse burns before an advertised auction.
• September 1959: Glatman is executed at San Quentin.
• 1968: Gein is found to have killed Bernice Worden while legally insane and is returned to the state hospital.
• April 1973: Edmund Kemper telephones the Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado; on April 27 investigators search the trunks of his car and his mother’s car.
• November 8, 1973: Kemper is found guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder.
• July 1979: Rodney Alcala is arrested; a storage locker in Seattle yields a pouch of earrings and his photographs.
• July 1979 and February 1980: Ted Bundy is convicted of the Chi Omega murders and of the murder of Kimberly Leach.
• October 1983: Robert Hansen is arrested; an aviation chart is seized from his home.
• February 27, 1984: Hansen pleads guilty to four first-degree murders.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed.
• January 3, 1990: A State Police helicopter crew follows Arthur Shawcross’s car from the place where June Cicero’s body lay.
• April 1990: Robert Ben Rhoades is arrested in Arizona; his Houston apartment is searched on April 6.
• December 13, 1990: Shawcross is convicted of ten counts of second-degree murder.
• July 22, 1991: Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested in Milwaukee.
• February 15, 1992: A jury finds Dahmer sane on fifteen counts.
• September 11, 1992: Rhoades pleads guilty to the murder of Regina Walters.
• November 28, 1994: Dahmer is killed in prison.
• June 1996: Dahmer’s belongings are bought by a civic fund and destroyed.
• March 19, 2004: A letter to The Wichita Eagle carries a photocopy of Vicki Wegerle’s driver’s license.
• December 2004: A package left in a Wichita park holds Nancy Fox’s driver’s license.
• February 25, 2005: Dennis Rader is arrested after a floppy disk is traced to his church.
• August 18, 2005: Rader is sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
• February 25, 2010: Alcala is convicted of five first-degree murders in Orange County.
• March 2012: Rhoades pleads guilty in Texas to two counts of capital murder.
• August 21, 2014: Hansen dies in custody.
• July 2021: Alcala dies while awaiting execution in California.
• July 9, 2024: Kemper is denied parole.