Part 2 (1/2)

The writer noted that Harvey ”was told it would drive him crazy and would rot his brain. He was told his pimples resulted from it, and that the pimples revealed his habit to the whole world. He was told that every time the act occurred he lost the equivalent of a pint of blood.”

However terrorized the boy must have been by his father's threats, he was not deterred in his dangerous autoeroticism. When Glatman as an adult couldn't find a suitable female victim, he'd dress up in women's clothes and hang himself.

Such behavior turns out to be recurrent among s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts, the most polymorphously perverse of all aberrant criminals.

Glatman's first arrest came just after high school, in Boulder, Colorado. He accosted girls with a toy gun, tied their hands and feet, and then gingerly fondled his victims. He occasionally robbed the girls, but only for insignificant amounts of money that he never spent.

Then he moved to New York and began committing felony robberies as the so-called Phantom Bandit. After doing five years at Sing Sing, where he received intensive psychiatric care, Glatman returned to Colorado, and then moved on to Los Angeles, where his mother set him up in a small television repair business.

When Harvey left Sing Sing, an optimistic prison counselor wrote that ”he is beginning to understand himself, and is making great strides in overcoming his neurosis, although a great deal of work remains to be done with him.”

Indeed.

Socially isolated in Los Angeles, Glatman began seriously to connect with his paraphilias, primarily s.e.xual bondage and a rope fetish. Searching for images to serve as raw material for his paraphilic fantasies, he found one source that was plentiful even in the straitlaced fifties-detective magazines.

Glatman later told investigators that he collected detective magazines, ”sometimes for the words, sometimes for the covers,” which in those days invariably portrayed an ample-chested victim, often bound with ligatures and with a gag in her mouth, helpless and horror-struck, cringing under the menacing figure of a male.

Only after Hazelwood and his longtime colleague, Dr. Park Dietz, published a critical study of such periodicals in 1986 did the tone of these cover ill.u.s.trations change.

Glatman set about making his fantasies real. He posed as a freelance detective-magazine photographer under the names Johnny Glynn and George Williams, and joined a lonely hearts club in pursuit of potential victims. With sure instincts for the vulnerable, and skills at manipulation, he persuaded these women to disrobe for him, as well as to allow him to bind them for his ”shoots.”

Glatman tied his knots and wrapped his ligatures with painstaking, exquisite care. Judging from the photographic evidence, it must have required considerable time. Only after the intricate work was completed to Glatman's aberrant taste did he then murder his victims.

After he was caught, the Lonely Hearts Killer claimed to have raped his three known murder victims. However, Glatman also disclosed that he was impotent in the absence of bondage.

Hazelwood believes Glatman may have fabricated the rape story as a means of making his behavior more comprehensible to the policemen who interrogated him. In those days, even veteran police officers weren't likely to understand how for some s.e.xual offenders all that is required for s.e.xual gratification is a rope, a camera, and a weapon.

Bob Keppel writes in his book, Signature Killers, that Glatman, again like Ted Bundy and many other s.e.xual killers, kept a box full of trophies-photos of the victims and articles of their clothing to help him relive the killings.

Keppel also isolates Glatman's s.e.xual sadism. ”Glatman first photographed each victim with a look of innocence on her face,” writes Keppel, as if she were truly enjoying a modeling session. The next series represented a s.a.d.i.s.t's view of a s.e.xually terrorized victim with the impending horror of a slow and painful death etched across her face. The final frame depicted the victim's position that Glatman himself had arranged after he strangled her.

After a three-day trial, Harvey Glatman was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He discouraged his lawyers from filing appeals. ”He told me that he couldn't stand the other guys on death row,” Pierce Brooks, a legendary Los Angeles police detective who conducted many interviews with Glatman, recalled to me just before his death in the spring of 1998. ”He said they were so stupid that he'd rather be executed than spend the rest of his life around them.”

Glatman was put to death in the San Quentin gas chamber in August of 1959.

Roy Hazelwood first learned of the Lonely Hearts Killer in military police training about a year later. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng experience for the twenty-two-year-old soldier whose knowledge of the world was largely confined to tiny Spring Branch, Texas, where he grew up.

”Glatman just seemed to come out of nowhere,” Roy recalls. ”I didn't understand anything about him. I wanted to know why he took pictures of the victims. Why did he tie them in various positions and in various stages of undress?

”Glatman seemed so ordinary to me, yet his crimes seemed so sophisticated compared to other criminals of the time. I wondered, Where did he learn these things? Why was he aroused by them?

”Why did he tie a victim's legs entirely, instead of just her ankles? Why put a gag in her mouth when they're out in the desert? These questions were swimming in my head.

”And another important thing that struck me was how very little people seemed then to know about this behavior. All of us in the cla.s.s asked questions of the instructor.

”Basically, his answers were: 'Well, we don't know those things.'

”That made a h.e.l.l of an impression on me. I remember thinking, 'Someday I'm going to look into this.' ”

Harvey Glatman ever since has served as a touchstone case for Hazelwood. He was the first s.e.xual offender Roy ever encountered, and in many ways remains one of the most complex criminals he's ever studied.

3.

”I Don't Like Women All That Much”

Harvey Glatman also was Hazelwood's introduction to multiple killers.

An itinerant subtype of these predators-for whom the term ”serial killer” was coined in the 1980s by agent Bob Ressler at the BSU-seemed to explode out of nowhere in the 1960s and 1970s, and to spread like a virus. In truth, although serial killers often can seem magically immune to capture, they are no more uniquely modern than any other criminal.

Like all irrational offenders, they sort themselves along a behavioral continuum from the patient, deliberate hunters, such as Bundy, to wild, murderous outlaws, such as the killing team of Juan Chavez and Hector Fernandez, described later in this chapter.

In between, there are startling anomalies, such as Henry Wallace, a thirty-one-year-old African American who confessed in 1996 to s.e.xually a.s.saulting and killing eleven black women in several southern states between 1992 and 1994. Unlike the majority of serial killers, who princ.i.p.ally prey on strangers, Wallace raped and murdered women he knew, or worked with in various fast-food restaurants. It was a very poorly thought-out MO, which invited Wallace's eventual detection.

”If he elected to become a serial killer, he was going about it in the wrong way,” said Bob Ressler, who interviewed Wallace and testified as an expert witness for the defense at Wallace's murder trial.

Another, far better known multiple, or spree, killer added his own, individual twists to the crime in 1997.

Andrew Cunanan, slayer of flamboyant Italian clothing designer Gianni Versace, lived extremely well as a domestic companion to wealthy older gay men-”a gigolo,” in his mother's uncompromising description.

He also was a familiar figure in the haute gay worlds of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, well remembered by a succession of friends and lovers as vain, charming, highly intelligent, and articulate-a h.o.m.os.e.xual Ted Bundy.

Cunanan spent lavishly-he reportedly owed Nieman Marcus forty-six thousand dollars at his death-and dealt and consumed (sometimes injecting) a variety of drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamine, and the male hormone testosterone, which can induce rages.

According to several sources, he favored sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic p.o.r.nography. One partner characterized Cunanan's s.e.xual habits as ”extreme.”

Late in 1996, his patron of the moment severed his relations.h.i.+p with the young man, just as two of Cunanan's romantic interests, Jeff Trail, twenty-eight, and David Madson, thirty-three, both of Minneapolis, reportedly were trying to put him in their pasts.

By the following spring, Cunanan appears to have gone broke and was drinking heavily. On April 18, 1997, a friend in San Francisco saw Cunanan for what would prove to be the last time.

”Something had snapped in him,” John Semerau told Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair. ”Now I realize the guy was hunting-he was getting the thrill of the hunt, the thrill of the kill. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in his body. He had stepped over the edge.”

Cunanan flew to Minneapolis from the West Coast in late April 1997. He made no effort to hide the visit. On Tuesday afternoon, April 29, Jeff Trail's body was discovered, wrapped in a carpet, in David Madson's blood-spattered apartment. Trail had been repeatedly struck about the face and head with a hammer, which was found in Madson's apartment.

Sat.u.r.day morning, May 3, Madson's body was found by fishermen at a lake about one hour's drive north of Minneapolis. He had been shot three times with a .40-caliber weapon; once in the head, once in the eye, and once in the back. His red Jeep Cherokee was missing.

Police later matched the .40-caliber slugs recovered from the Madson crime scene with a box of .40-caliber ammunition discovered in Jeff Trail's apartment.

Roy Hazelwood, who followed Andrew Cunanan's saga in the newspapers, recalls thinking at the time that Cunanan must have been very much concerned at the direction in which his lifestyle was leading him prior to the killings.

”He was physically attractive,” Roy observes, ”and had traded on his appearance and youthfulness to both validate his self-worth and to enjoy a very high standard of living.

”But then he began to age. His appearance-the essence of his self-esteem-began to fade. He was finding it difficult to attract the rich and appreciative s.e.xual partners he believed he deserved. To make matters worse, their use of him was one of the factors causing him to age, and because of that they no longer desired him as they once had.

”So Andrew Cunanan, I believe, decided to get even. He did so by killing those who represented or symbolized the men who'd ruined and then rejected him.”

On May 4, Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin's s.a.d.i.s.tically broken body was discovered in his home. Miglin, seventy-five, was bound hand and foot. His body was partially wrapped in plastic, paper, and tape. His face was also taped, except for two airholes at his nose. He had been tortured-several of his ribs were broken-and stabbed. His throat had been cut open with a saw. He had been left under a car in his parking garage across the street from his Chicago town house.