‘I didn’t like to kill’
But executed murderer later tied to mystery slay
In the spring of 1954, a couple of college students found a woman’s naked, battered body along a creek near Boulder, Colo.
She could not be identified, so a group of citizens raised funds to bury her and give her a headstone. It read: “Jane Doe — April 1954 — Age About 20 Years.”
For 55 years, no one knew her name.
In the late 1990s, historian Silvia Pettem became interested in the forgotten girl, and started to look into the case, eventually writing a book on the search, “Someone’s Daughter.” In 2009, DNA testing matched the remains to a blood sample from a sister.
Boulder’s Jane Doe was Dorothy Gay Howard, a pretty 18-year-old who disappeared from her home in Phoenix.
DNA may have revealed who she was, but not how she died. For years, the best guess has been that she was a victim of perverted murderer Harvey Murray Glatman.
He preyed on pinup models in the 1950s, which earned him the nickname of “The Glamour Girl Slayer.”
A half century after his death, Howard’s identification brought his name and twisted story back into the news.
Glatman first caught the public eye on Oct. 31, 1958.
That day, Lorraine Vigil, 28, answered a call from a man who introduced himself as Frank Johnson. He told her he was a photographer looking for a model for a true detective magazine, wrote Michael Newton in “Rope,” his 1998 book on the case.
Johnson picked her up at her apartment and told her they were going to drive to his studio in Hollywood. She panicked when he headed in the wrong direction.
He drove to a deserted area and pulled out a gun and a rope. “Do as you’re told,” he said, “and you won’t get hurt.”
Instead, Vigil fought back. She grabbed the gun by the muzzle and struggled as he tried to tie her other hand behind her back with a long rope.
During their struggle, the gun went off, and a bullet grazed her thigh.
Luckily, a California highway patrolman was nearby, heard the shot, and rushed to the scene.
During an interrogation in the county jail in Santa Ana, Vigil’s assailant admitted that his name was really Harvey Glatman.
Born in New York City in 1927, Glatman seemed to be a normal baby, but signs of trouble emerged early. “When he was 3, I noticed some instances of strange behavior,” his mother, Ophelia, said. She later recalled that the behavior included sadomasochistic tendencies. But she brushed it off.
The family moved to Denver, where Glatman grew up extremely “girl-shy,” his mother recalled. He took up hobbies — like photography, burglarizing apartments, purse snatching and assaulting women.
At 17, he went to jail for eight months. When he finished his sentence, his mother took him back to New York, then to Albany. He quickly got in trouble again, was convicted of a series of muggings, and was sent to Sing Sing.
After his release in 1951, he moved back to the family home in Denver and in January 1957, to Los Angeles, where he lived on his own for the first time, supporting himself with a job repairing TVs.
After his attack on Vigil, police searched Glatman’s home and found a horrible photo library, with images of bound and gagged women.
Hidden in a toolbox were photos and personal belongings of three missing women — Judy Ann Dull, 19, and Shirley Bridgeford and Ruth Rita Mercado, both 24.
Glatman confessed to killing all three, starting with Dull. He picked her up on Aug. 1, 1957, told her he was shooting pictures for a true detective magazine and that she’d have to pose bound and gagged. He tied her up, snapped half a roll and raped her. Then he drove her into the desert, strangled her with a rope, and buried the corpse in a shallow grave.
Bridgeford, a divorcee with two young sons, accepted a blind date with Glatman through a lonely-hearts club on March 7, 1958. He drove her into the desert and raped her. Before strangling her, he shot some photos of the victim, bound, gagged and weeping in terror.
Mercado was another Hollywood hopeful. Glatman gave her the story about being a photographer on assignment for a crime magazine. She let him into her apartment and allowed him to tie her up. Then, as with the others, he raped and strangled her, and left the body in the desert.
He explained that after the rapes, he knew the women would report him to the police and could identify him. “I didn’t really like to kill,” he said. “It was just that I got past the point of no return.”
After hours describing the murders and the attack on Vigil in detail, he led police to the skeletal remains of his victims.
Glatman pleaded guilty to the three murders. The photos, his taped confession, and Vigil’s description of her terror ride were presented to the court. A judge sentenced him to death for two of the slayings in December 1958.
“It’s about what I wanted,” was the condemned prisoner’s only comment. Police believed that he was the evil hand behind other murders, including Howard’s. But whatever secrets he had, he took them with him when he died in California’s gas chamber on Sept. 18, 1959.