The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (43 page)

As technology has progressed over the years, the recording techniques of serial killers have become increasingly sophisticated. Twenty years after the “Moors Murders” case, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng began kidnapping women and imprisoning them in an underground bunker in Northern California (see
Partners
). The bunker was outfitted with a set of state-of-the-art video equipment, which Lake had stolen from the home of a San Francisco photographer named Harvey Dubs. Lake and Ng used the equipment to record the rape, torture, and murder of three young women—including Dubs’s wife, Deborah.

Harvey Murray Glatman, Snuff Photographer

In 1960, the distinguished British director Michael Powell—renowned for his beautiful ballet fantasy,
The Red Shoes
—released a film that so incensed both the public and critics that it effectively ended his career. It was called
Peeping Tom,
a movie about a sadistic voyeur who films his victims as he is stabbing them to death with a lethal camera tripod (see
Movies
). What sort of sick mind—asked the outraged reviewers—could have dreamed up such a story? But, in fact, just a year before
Peeping Tom
came out, an American psycho named Harvey Murray Glatman had been put to death at San Quentin for crimes shockingly like the ones depicted in the film.

Harvey Murray Glatman; from
52 Famous Murderers
trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Even as an adolescent, Glatman showed twisted sexual tendencies. His favorite form of masturbation was autoerotic asphyxiation—achieving sexual release while dangling by his neck from a rope tied to an attic rafter. A family physician assured Glatman’s mother that her son would outgrow this bizarre practice. As Glatman matured, however, he continued to be obsessed by fantasies of bondage, sadism, and strangulation. At the age of twenty-nine, he set about making his depraved dreams come true.

Posing as a professional photographer, he managed to persuade a series of struggling young models that he was going to take their photos for the covers of the kind of sleazy detective magazines that were so popular back in the 1950s. Since these covers typically featured bound and helpless young women, the models allowed Glatman to truss them up and gag them. They were further disarmed by his appearance—Glatman looked like a creepy but essentially harmless nerd. (If a movie were ever made about his case, Rick Moranis would be the inevitable casting choice.)

Once he had the women in his power, Glatman proceeded to strip and photograph them, rape them at gunpoint, and take more photos of their terrified
looks as the true horror of their situation finally dawned on them. Then he strangled them with a length of rope and disposed of their bodies in the desert.

Altogether, Glatman murdered three young women in this way. He tried to set up a fourth deadly photo session—but this time, the intended victim proved to be more than he could handle. When Glatman pulled his pistol on her in his car, she lunged at him, wrestled the weapon away, and held him at gunpoint until the police arrived.

In custody, Glatman confessed in lengthy detail. He was convicted after a three-day trial in November 1958 and received his death sentence with a philosophical shrug. “It’s better this way,” he remarked.

Few people would have argued with him.

P
IED
P
IPERS

According to German legend, the Pied Piper lured the rats out of the medieval town of Hamelin by playing a magical tune on his flute. When the townspeople refused to pay him, he piped his siren song again, this time leading all the children away and (as one especially disturbing version of the story goes) sealing them up in a cave where they were entombed forever.

Over the years, scholars have tried to discover a historical basis for the tale. In his 1992 book A
World Lit Only by Fire,
for example, author William Manchester argues that the real-life model for the legendary figure was a fifteenth-century lust murderer who kidnapped and killed 130 children. It’s impossible to judge the validity of this claim. Still, there’s reason to believe that there might have been a true-life Pied Piper. Certainly, our own era has produced a number of flesh-and-blood examples—strangely charismatic misfits who have used some sort of intoxicating enticement to lead young people horribly astray.

The most infamous of these characters is Charles
Manson
. At the height of the flower-child era, this psychopathic ex-con managed to mesmerize a group of young hippie followers with a seductive mix of drugs, sex, and occult mumbo-jumbo. Like the mythical Pied Piper, he was a musician (of sorts). And—also like the Piper—he believed he had been cheated of his just reward for his musical talents.

Determined to become a rock star, he toadied his way into contact with such industry insiders as the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson and even saw one of his songs performed on a Beach Boys album. But he failed to land the lucrative recording contract that he craved. After this snub, Manson began to formulate his murder plans—partly to realize his deranged apocalyptic visions, and partly, some say, to get revenge against music producer Terry Melcher, whom he blamed for his failures.

Manson prepared his “family” to go on a homicidal rampage. Once again, music played a part. To Manson’s unhinged mind, the songs from the Beatles’
White Album
—especially “Helter Skelter”—were actually coded messages relating personally to him. Manson used his wacko interpretations of the songs to help program his disciples to carry out his plans. When he was done, seven people were dead, all of them hacked to death.

Another modern-day Pied Piper was Dean Corll, nicknamed the “Candy Man” for his habit of handing out free treats to neighborhood children while working at his family’s confectionery company. Behind that innocent veneer, Corll was an insanely sadistic gay sex killer who employed a teenage accomplice named Elmer Wayne Henley to procure male victims. Enticed to Corll’s apartment in suburban Houston with the promise of glue-sniffing parties, the unwitting young men would be overpowered by Corll, then subjected to hours of unspeakable sexual torture and mutilation before being killed. Corll himself was eventually murdered by Henley, who then led police to the moldering remains of twenty-seven young men, victims of the abominable “Candy Man.”

Another modern murderer was explicitly compared to the old German legend by the press. This was Charles Schmid, a mid-1960s thrill killer dubbed the “Pied Piper of Tucson.”

In the eyes of most of those who knew him, Schmid was just plain bizarre. He dyed his hair jet black and shaped it into a towering pompadour (like his idol, Elvis), wore heavy pancake makeup over his unwashed face, painted his mouth with white lipstick, and sported a fake “beauty mark” fashioned from a quarter-inch circle of dark putty. And then there was his walk—an odd, staggering gait that resulted from his habit of stuffing his boots with rags, cardboard, and crumpled beer cans to boost his undersized stature.

For the bored and restless teens who cruised the Tucson strip known as
the Speedway, however, the twenty-two-year-old “Smitty” was a charismatic rebel. He enticed them into his crackpot little orbit with booze and sex and tantalizing (if totally fictitious) tales of his secret life involving the Hell’s Angels, drug-running, and the Mafia.

He led his teenage followers into a deadly nightmare in mid-1964, when he convinced two of his acolytes to help him lure a fifteen-year-old girl out into the desert. There he raped the girl and crushed her skull with a rock. A year later he murdered his girlfriend and her thirteen-year-old sister. Some of his followers knew about these murders but for months refused to tell the police, so devoted were they to their psychopathic leader. Eventually, however, Smitty was turned in by a guilt-ridden accomplice. While awaiting execution in the Arizona penitentiary, he was fatally stabbed in the face and chest by another inmate.

Shortly after his arrest at the end of 1965, a pop tune hit the charts that seemed to be an eerie reflection of the Schmid phenomenon. Titled, appropriately enough, “The Pied Piper,” and sung by Crispian St. Peters, its chorus went: “Hey, c’mon, babe, follow me/I’m the Pied Piper, follow me/I’m the Pied Piper/And I’ll show you where it’s at.”