INFAMOUS MURDERS: MODEL MURDERS

Many young women yearn to be models. They see it as an easy and glamorous route to fame and fortune, but tragically the dream is often short lived. Infamous Murders examines three cases in which dreams of stardom led to murder.
19-year-old photographic model Judy Ann Dull had been missing for five months when her body was found on the 9th of March 1958, half-buried in the desert sixty miles from Los Angeles. The police investigation had no evidence to go on, until, in October that year, police interrupted a violent struggle between a man and a woman. The man was identified as Harvey Glatman. After searching his house police found photographs of women bound and gagged, including one of murdered model Judy Ann Dull. Glatman told detectives that he enjoyed the suffering of his victims, and he later confessed to three murders. He pleaded guilty in San Diego Courthouse and was sentenced to death.
On the 7th of July, 1983, Vicki Morgan's body was removed from her blood-spattered bedroom. She had been bludgeoned to death. At 3.40am that same night Marvin Pancoast walked into North Hollywood police station and said to the desk sergeant, 'I just killed Vicki'. Pancoast had met Vicki in 1979 at a drug rehabilitation centre, and they had remained close friends until Pancoast moved in with Vicki just three weeks before her death.
He had become impatient with what he described as her constant complaining and overwhelming self-pity. He later pleaded insanity. On the 14th of September the jury found Pancoast guilty of first-degree murder. But a sex-scandal remained, involving Vicki Morgan, government ministers and the editor of Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt.
On the 1st of September 1996 Charles Rathbun was found guilty of the murder of Linda Sobek. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Rathbun had posed as a photographer and taken Linda to the desert outside Los Angeles for a photo shoot. Rathbun claimed that Sobek had been drinking heavily, and that they had had a fight in the car. He claimed he tried to calm her by holding her down with his full body weight.
By the time he released her she had suffocated. He panicked, drove to the Angeles National Park and dumped the body in a shallow grave. Her body was found a week later, and Rathbun was heavily punished for her death.