Serial killer Harvey Glatman is executed in a California gas chamber for murdering three young women in Los Angeles. Resisting all appeals to save his life, Glatman even wrote to the appeals board to say, “I only want to die.”
Glatman had been a smart kid. As a Boy Scout, he developed an obsession with rope. When his parents noticed that he was strangling himself on occasion, they took him to a doctor who told them that it was just a phase and that he would grow out of it. As a teenager, he threatened a girl with a toy gun in Colorado. Skipping bail, he made his way to New York, where he later spenttwo years and eight monthsin Sing Sing prison on robbery charges.
Following his release, Glatman moved to Los Angeles and opened up a television repair shop. He took up photography as a hobby, in addition to playing with ropes. On August 1, 1957, he combined these two interests in a sinister way. On the pretense of a freelance modeling assignment, Glatman lured 19-year-old Judy Ann Dull to his apartment, where he raped her and then took photos of her, bound and gagged. He then drove her out to the desert east of Los Angeles and strangled her to death with his favorite rope. By the time Dull’s body was found, there were no clues linking the crime to Glatman.
