Most of the case updates I write here follow a familiar shape — an appeal, a parole hearing, a conviction overturned or upheld. This one is different. Harvey Glatman, the “Lonely Hearts Killer” whose crimes I covered in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 2, has been dead since 1959, executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin. There is no new ruling to report and no parole board to second-guess. And yet his name still surfaces.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a cold case detective in Colorado. He had read the story I’d written on Glatman and had questions about it. He was working the case of a woman who went missing in Colorado during the years Glatman lived in the state, and he wanted to talk through what I had found.

It makes sense that Glatman’s name would come up. Before he became California’s “Glamour Girl Slayer,” he spent his formative years in Denver. He served time in a Colorado prison for a string of assaults on women, and he completed his parole there before heading west. His shadow has hung over Colorado’s unsolved cases for decades — most notably the murder of Boulder’s “Jane Doe,” identified in 2009 as eighteen-year-old Dorothy Gay Howard, a young woman investigators still believe Glatman may have killed. So when a Colorado detective comes across a woman who vanished in the 1950s, Glatman is a name worth ruling in or out.

That was exactly this detective’s goal. He didn’t tell me he was convinced Glatman was responsible — quite the opposite. He wanted to eliminate him as a suspect if the evidence allowed, and confirm him if it didn’t. That is careful, honest police work, and I was glad to help. I sent him everything I had gathered when I first researched the chapter.

I never learned whether any of it made a difference. My honest guess is that it didn’t — Glatman may simply have no connection to this particular woman, and the answer lies somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere there is a family that has spent a lifetime waiting for an answer that never came. If a folder of old research can help a detective close one door, or open another, and move that family even slightly closer to the truth, then the hours I once spent inside Harvey Glatman’s terrible story were worth far more than I realized when I wrote it.