Serial Killer Investigations Read Online Free PDF

stopping for dinner he continued his drive until they were nearly a hundred miles south of Los Angeles before pulling the car over. He tried to fondle her; when she protested he produced a gun and ordered her into the back seat; there he raped her. Then, in the Anza Borrego desert, he tied her up, snapped photographs, and strangled her with a rope. He kept her red panties as a keepsake.
    At the end of his two-hour confession, he led the detectives to the bones of Shirley Ann Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado.
    In court in San Diego in November 1958, Glatman pleaded guilty to all three murders, rejecting his lawyer’s advice to plead guilty but insane on the grounds that he would rather die than spend the rest of his life behind bars. Superior Court Judge John A. Hewicker duly obliged, and on 18 September 1959, Glatman was put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Pierce Brooks attended his execution.
    Psychologically speaking, Glatman was the archetypal serial killer, a fantasist whose crimes were the outcome of sexual frustration. Scrawny and unattractive, he felt from the beginning that he would never be able to possess the kind of woman he dreamed about unless he took her by force. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1928, he was a mama’s boy who did not get on with other children. Girls at school found the scrawny boy with the sticking-out ears unappealing; he therefore made his bid for attention by snatching their purses, running away, and then flinging them back at them. His mother is quoted as saying: ‘It was just his approach.’
    When he was 12 he discovered the pleasures of masochism, learning that tightening a noose around his throat induced sexual satisfaction. His mother, noticing the marks around his neck, took him to see the family doctor, who reassured her that the boy would outgrow the behaviour. But by the age of 17 his sexual frustrations had found no other outlet, so he tried force, pointing a toy gun at a teenaged girl and ordering her to undress. She screamed and he fled, only to be picked up by the police. He broke his bail, and absconded to New York, where he satisfied his aggressive urges against woman by robbing them at gunpoint; he became known as the ‘Phantom Bandit’. He was caught and sentenced to five years in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and was released in 1951. He then returned to Colorado, where he became a television repairman, and in 1957 moved to Los Angeles, where his mother set him up in the TV repair business. And he soon took on the identity of Johnny Glenn, magazine photographer, and on 1 August 1957, called at the flat of Judy Dull.

    Pierce Brooks never forgot the effort it had cost him to check whether there had been any similar abductions in the Los Angeles area, and he now began to try to convince his superiors of the importance of logging crimes, solved and unsolved, on a computer system where similarities could be observed. In due course, he became chief of homicide detectives in Los Angeles, then went on to become chief of police in Springfield and Eugene, Oregon, and in Lakewood, Colorado. His dream of computerising crime reports eventually became the system known as VICAP the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. And the newly formed FBI Academy at Quantico looked like the ideal place to set it up. There Howard Teten and Patrick J. Mullany were teaching the concept of psychological profiling of criminals to their students.
    In June 1973 came their first opportunity to put it into practice when seven-year-old Susan Jaeger from Farmington, Michigan, was abducted from a Rocky Mountains campsite in Montana. Sometime in the early hours an intruder slit open her tent with his knife and overpowered her before she could alert her parents, William and Marietta Jaeger, who slept close by. Once the alarm was raised an intensive search failed to reveal any trace of the missing child, or any clue to the identity of her abductor. When the FBI was later called in, the case was