case’s outcome.
“The sergeant’s attorney convinced the girls’ mother that she’d lose her husband’s income and their on-base housing if he was convicted and sent to prison. So she withdrew her charges.
“That case has bothered me for a long time.”
At the time, most law enforcement officers, military or civilian, were reluctant to investigate sexual offenses because they lacked the training to do so, lacked support from their superiors, and feared being tainted among their colleagues for working with perverts.
“It was just one of the sadly neglected areas of law enforcement training,” says Frank Sass, a retired FBI agent who joined the Bureau in 1948 and later inaugurated what was known as sex crime instruction at Quantico. “We were all so damned naive that we didn’t know what we were talking about. We were sadly lacking in knowledge in those days.”
A vivid case in point was Harvey Glatman.
Born in Denver in 1928, he was an athletic, musically gifted boy with jug ears, acute acne, a lopsided smirk, and a reported IQ of 130.
Very early in his boyhood Glatman developed an unhealthy attraction to ropes and bindings. His mother once discovered Harvey alone in his bedroom, nude, with one end of a string tied to his penis, and the other attached to the doorknob. Her son wouldn’t say what he intended to do with this apparatus.
When he was about twelve, Harvey’s parents began to notice angry red marks on his neck, telltale signs that he was experimenting with autoerotic asphyxia.
Known informally today among teenagers as “head rushing” or “scarfing,” autoerotic asphyxia involves temporarily diminishing the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain. The resultant cerebral hypoxia, as it is called, can induce a sense of exhilaration—not unlike the giddiness that pilots sometime experience in the thin air at high altitudes—and is believed by many people to enhance sexual sensations. This euphoric state is most commonly achieved by mechanically compressing the carotid artery and/or jugular vein, often by self-hanging.
Glatman as a youth achieved his autoerotic highs by hanging from attic rafters. How a twelve-year-old Coloradan in 1940 would have learned of such practices is unexplained, although it is possible Glatman discovered cerebral hypoxia in failed attempts at suicide.
The family doctor downplayed the seriousness of Harvey’s solo-sex habits, predicted he’d outgrow them, and prescribed sedatives for the boy in the meantime.
Harvey’s father took a somewhat harsher view of his behavior.
According to a 1950 report done at New York’s Sing Sing Penitentiary, where Harvey later served time, Glatman Senior was “hostile and domineering” and drove the boy into “frenzies of fear by continually upbraiding him for masturbation.”
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 sexual sadists, 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,