Jerry BrudosAt the end of November 1968, an accident occurred at number 2123 Center Street in Salem, Oregon, when a car crashed into the house, causing damage to the side of the property. The home owner, Jerry Brudos was way for a few days with his family, and although the police came to investigate, they nor anyone else attempted to look inside through the large hole caused by the crash. Had they done so, they would have found a dead body hanging by the neck from the ceiling, the second victim of a fledgling serial killer.
Known as ‘the Lust Killer’ and the ‘Shoe Fetish Slayer’, Jerry Brudos suffered deep emotional and physical abuse as a child, while also developing a psychological fascination for women’s shoes from a young age. This fetish would escalate in his adult years and along with the trauma of his childhood, would become the catalyst for his murder spree, that would claim the lives of four young women, who found themselves at the mercy of a deranged serial killer and necrophile.
From January 1968 to March 1969, three young women had vanished under mysterious circumstances. The first time anyone suspected foul play was in April 1969, when several incidents happened that led police to believe that a suspect was accosting young women with the intention of abducting them. Although the two victims described different experiences, one thing connected, that of a similar description of the offender.
Late in the afternoon of April 21, 1969, a young woman left left her secretarial job in Portland. 24-year-old Sharon Wood was heading to meet with her estranged husband, who wanted to discuss a divorce. As she entered the basement level of a parking garage to look for her car, a tall, pudgy man approached her. As described in Anne Rule’s book The Lust Killer, she later told police that she had sensed someone behind her and had tried to return to an area where she could hear other people.
But in that moment someone tapped her shoulder and she turned around to se a man holding a pistol. He told her not to scream, but faced with this sudden encounter, she became both frightened and enraged. In a matter of seconds, she decided there and then to fight. She screamed and stepped away from him, and he grabbed her and put an arm-lock around her throat. He was much taller than she, and outweighed her by nearly one hundred pounds.
She stood barely a chance against him, but believed that someone might still hear her, and if she failed to struggle, this man might kill her. Her instincts told her that this man had only murderous intentions. Sharon Woods kicked at him with her high-heeled shoes and screamed again, hoping to attract someone attention to the danger she was in. She also grabbed the gun and gave it a hard twist.
When the man tried to silence her with his hand, she bit him, hard. She knew that she’d drawn blood, and he tried to free himself, but could not, so now her attacker was struggling. Grabbing her hair, he tried to force her to the floor, but she continued to resist with all her strength. She was determined that this man was not going to assault her. But he was stronger and managed to slam her head on the concrete, dazing her.
She relaxed her jaw and let him go, and as they stood there post-struggle, she then heard another car coming, and her attacker picked up the gun he’d dropped and left. This was all she could remember. Someone had apparently called the police and Sharon found herself giving her statement to police. Her attacker was a tall man with blue eyes and freckles, she recalled, but knew little else.
She said she’d know him if she saw him again, but when the police questioned others in the area, no one recalled a man by that description. Sharon learned only later that this man’s frustrated attempt to abduct her had only shifted his Modus Operandi. He would from then on be more careful in approaching women, and strengthened his resolve to not be caught. Sharon Woods survived, but not long afterward another young woman would not.
Rule had some measure of success with her memoir, The Stranger Beside Me, about serial killer Ted Bundy, and she’d been writing articles under the pseudonym, Andy Stack. Her literary agent then advised her to continue with her pseudonym for the next three books. “When those came out, The Stranger Beside Me was doing very well,” Rule explained, “so my agent said that these books got such small advances I should not put my name on them.”
“I stayed with ‘Andy Stack,’ but after a while I put them under my real name,” she adds. Rule explains in The Lust Killer that her purpose in writing such a book was to “add to the psychiatric research that may one day to treat aberrant minds before they explode into violence.” She believes that the more we learn about such offenders, the better our chances for stopping them.
At the time of these crimes, little was known about truly deviant serial behaviour. A murder spree was occurring simultaneously in Michigan with eight dead students, and both the Manson Family murders and the Zodiac’s deadly and bizarre killing spree would soon begin in California. Meanwhile Albert DeSalvo, the alleged Boston Strangler, had been interrogated four years earlier.
The murders began in January 1968, when 19-year-old Linda Slawson, a door-to-door encyclopedia saleswoman who worked for a book company, was going door to door to persuade families to purchase sets of encyclopedias. On that day, January 26, her route had taken her to a neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. It some accounts, she was looking for another house when she went there, but only one person knows what truely happened that day.
It was the last anyone saw or heard from Linda Slawson again. The book company that employed her had no record of where she had been that day, so the many desperate requests to police from Slawson’s family came to nothing. The police did manage to locate her car, which had been abandoned, but it offered no clues of what had become of her. There was no sign of struggle, nothing apparently missing. She had just vanished.
Slawson remained on the list, but as each day passed, her case grew colder. Other more pressing incidents took precedence. If she had been abducted, the person responsible had been careful, leaving little evidence, no sign of his presence, his intentions, or what he had done with her. The mystery would remain, until it was revived later the same year when other young women turned up missing.
Jan Whitney, 23, disappeared as she was on her way home for the Thanksgiving holiday, on November 26, 1968. Her Rambler was found off the highway in a rest area near Albany, Oregon. It was locked, but there was no sign of Jan. It was suspected that a minor mechanical fault might have compelled her to look for a ride from someone, possibly the wrong person. It was during the time when girls freely hitch-hiked along the West Coast.
Some four months later, on March 27, 1969, 19-year-old Karen Sprinker went missing. She had been home from college and her mother had expected to meet her for lunch at a downtown restaurant. Her mother waited for an hour and then became worried as Karen would not have missed this meeting. In fact, it was later learned that she did park her car at the garage of the store where her mother was waiting.
But the car sat empty and Karen never returned to claim it. Several shoppers in the area described seeing a very tall and strange-looking woman in the area. One eyewitness said that when this person got close to her, she saw that it was in fact a man in drag. He seemed fairly creepy, so people had avoided him. There was no reason then to link him to this incident, but in retrospect, it was all part of the mystery.
Only four weeks later, it appeared that 22-year-old Linda Salee had been abducted from a shopping mall under similar circumstances. She had visited there to buy a gift for her boyfriend, but had failed to meet him later that evening. She also did not show up to work, and her car was found abandoned. Like the others young women, there was no sign of any violence inside the car, or any that a stranger had entered it.
As a matter of routine procedure, her boyfriend was checked out, but nothing indicated that he should be considered a suspect. In the days following her disappearance, no sign of Salee turned up. There were simply no leads, like Karen Sprinker and Jan Whitney, she was just gone. Investigators wondered if there was any connection between these girls, and some even brought up the case of Linda Slawson, the encyclopedia salesperson.
Detectives soon saw that a pattern began to emerge. When they collated all the time lines, they noted the fact that all of the girls had disappeared toward the latter half of each month. Additionally all of the missing were young white females. But that was as much as the investigators had managed to uncover. That is, until human remains were found in a nearby river.
Three weeks after Linda Salee’s disappearance, a man who’d gone fishing that May in the Long Tom River, south of Corvallis, Oregon, found decomposing human remains bobbing in the rushing current. He called police, and when they arrived, they discovered that the deceased was a female who had been bound to a car transmission box with nylon rope and copper wire which weighed down the body, making it difficult to pull out.
But this grim find provided clear proof of murder and an attempt to conceal it, along with possible evidence to tie back to a suspect, should they find one. Also this victim had been tied to the auto part with a nylon rope and a rather specific type of knot had been used. Police cut the cord carefully so they could preserve the knot, just in case they had reason to use it as probable cause for a warrant or later in court.
The copper wire, too, had been twisted in a specific manner that indicated someone with background as an electrician. With so little evidence, it was difficult for the medical examiner to determine the exact cause of death, but from the condition of the neck area, it appeared that she had been strangled. Oddly there was also a pair of post-mortem punctures, each circled by a burn, at opposite sides of the rib cage that appeared to have been caused by a needle.
No one knew what had caused them, but when dental records were checked it was determined that the remains were those of Linda Salee. Further searches were undertaken along the river and a few days later they came across yet another set of decomposing remains, also bound to something that turned out to be an engine head. Once again, the same type of bindings and knots were found with this victim.
This was a clear enough indication that the same offender was responsible for both. The latest victim had also been strangled, apparently with a strap that had been used as a garrotte. The clothing still on her body matched those Karen Sprinker’s mother had described her wearing the day she went missing. But once the body was lifted, it was found she was also clothed in a long-line black brassiere that appeared much too large to be hers.
This anomaly had been confirmed by her mother. Stranger still, it had been padded with brown paper towels. In fact, this victim’s breasts had been completely removed and the padding appeared to have been placed there to absorb the blood and fluid. Further searches along the river yielded nothing more, while investigators had been hoping that this effort might close the case on the other two missing women.
What investigators knew at this point was they were looking for either a rather strong male or two men working as a team, because the bodies, coupled with the weights, would have been quite heavy to carry. Because of Sprinker’s college background, the police decided to question students on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, something that would prove to fortuitous in their search for answers.
When detectives questioned the students at OSU, they learned that some of the female students had recently complained about getting strange calls from a man who attempted to lure them out. They also found reports of a suspicious red-haired man, described as somewhat pudgy, loitering around campus. But it would be one account that proved to be the most promising lead.
One young woman had actually ventured out on a brief date with a man who claimed to be a lonely Vietnam veteran looking for company. Detectives thought this sounded promising. This girl told police she had no intention of seeing the man again, having found him to be a bit disconcerting, not to mention that he had wanted to discuss the recent discovery of bodies in the river. But detectives asked her to contact them should he call again.
It was most likely the fact that the man had actually asked her why she wasn’t afraid he might strangle her alerted police to his odd curiosity. Most intriguingly, it was her description of a tall man with light-colored hair and a lot of freckles that proved similar to those given by women who had nearly been abducted in recent days. Police hoped he would contact this young woman again, and to her surprise, he did.
She promptly set a date for an hours time and then phoned the police. When they went to the designated meeting place, they spotted a tall, pudgy man enter. Upon pproaching him, they learned that his name was Jerry Brudos. While they believed he was a potential suspect, he seemed completely at ease, as if he had nothing untoward to hide. This might be evidence of his innocence or that he was equally as clever, arrogant, and without remorse for his misdeeds
As they had nothing with which to detain him, they decided to keep him under surveillance. Having learned where he lived in the area, along with the significant fact that he had worked as an electrician, detectives set out to research his background and find out everything they could about this possible suspect. Within five days, as the many coincidences began to piled up, they finally decided to arrest Brudos.
Born on January 31, 1939, in South Dakota, the parents of Jerome Henry Brudos had travelled around the country for some years before finally ending up in Oregon. By all accounts, his mother had not wanted him after already having had two boys, and apparently had hoped for a girl. She treated her third born son with criticism and disdain. Often spending his time alone, Brudos developed a fantasy life and habits that by the age of seventeen got him in trouble with the law.
These generally involved a sexual fetish for women’s shoes and underclothing. Harold Schechter explains in his book The Serial Killer Files, “Exactly how Brudos became a foot fetishist is a mystery, one thing is certain, however; he began to manifest the obsession at a startlingly early age.” His discovery of a pair of women’s spike-heeled shoes at a local dump when he was five years old was most likely the starting point.
However, it was likely not due to the shoes themselves, but was more his mother’s strong reaction to seeing him wearing them in his bedroom. She instantly grabbed them, destroyed them, and told him in no uncertain terms that such things were wicked. She began highly agitated and inexplicably upset by the incident, which signalled to the boy that there was something about those shoes that was meysteriously forbidden.
It’s likely that making these shoes off limits attached to women’s high-heeled shoes in general, created a taboo that influenced Jerry Brudos’ developing sexuality. He once stole the shoes that his kindergarten teacher kept in her desk and received a stern reprimand. Most authors agree that as Brudos matured, his developing shoe fetish increasingly provided sexual arousal, something the psychologists who later analyzed him tended to agree with.
He continued to collect shoes, in secret, hiding them from his mother’s disapproval and eventually adding to that stash an assorted collection of women’s underwear, which he had stolen during clandestine raids into nearby houses. When touching female underwear, he gained some sense of comfort and the feeling of arousal. It was this unusual feeling that Brudos could no understand of explain, but desired.
By 1956, at the age of seventeen, Jerry Brudos fetish burgeoned into a dangerous addiction. One day he dug a hole in a hillside where he planned to “keep” girls as sex slaves, and used a knife to accost a 17-year-old girl, demanding that she remove her clothing so he could photograph her nude body. He even beat her with his fists, but after an elderly couple caught him he admitted what he had done.
But this failed encounter would not satify his urges. Even spending nine months for it on the psychiatric ward of Oregon State Hospital, didn’t deter the schoolboy kidnapper. In therapy there, doctors pinpointed the source of his sexual fantasies, that were centered around hatred for his demanding mother and revenge against women in general. They were also made aware of his collection of women’s clothing. As one author stated, his fantasies included “placing kidnapped girls into freezers so he could later arrange their stiff bodies in sexually explicit poses.”
In her book, Rule includes the psychiatric report from that hospital, explaining that the examining mental health staff did not believe Brudos was “grossly mentally ill.” It appeared he had what was described as an “adjustment reaction” to adolescence and was not considered dangerous. However, he had developed a fetish for female shoes and underwear, and for nude female photographs.
For his age, he seemed immature and unable to deal normally with his developing sexuality. But that did not explain his readily accepted use of violence. As Rule explained, the doctors believed that he simply had to grow up. This grossly underestimated assessment is in part to the period.
For not much was known in 1956 about the development of serial sexual predators. An older Brudos went into the military, but was discharged early because of his strange delusions, described as sexual obsessions by others. A civilian again, he became an electronics technician, something for which he possessed an aptitude. In 1961, at the age 22, he met Ralphene, a shy 17-year-old girl, referred to as “Darcie” by Rule.
In an attempt to please him, she went along with whatever Brudos wanted, including staying naked in the house, staying out of his workshop, and avoiding the attic. They had two children together and eventually Ralphene declined to have sex any longer. Although she could sense unusual ways in his character, she seemed not to notice when Brudos stole out during the night to invade other people’s homes to satisfy his underwear fetish.
One time, he even walked up to her dressed in women’s underwear, to which she was reportedly shocked, and he seemed hurt by her inability to understand. He had hoped he found a woman who would be compliant to his will and accept his fetishes, everything, but she had disappointed him. So he returned to his secret world in his workshop. The couple said nothing more to each other about what happened.
But other discoveries made her uneasy. On another occasion she discovered a paperweight in the house shaped like a woman’s breast. That really unnerved her, but Jerry Brudos had a ready explanation. Not knowing what else to do, she accepted it and forgot the incident, just like she did when she caught him developing photographs of nude women. It’s unlikely that Ralphene Brudos would have been able to comprehend the nature of her husbands aberrant obsession.
In his book, The Serial Killer Files, Harold Schechter discusses this deviance, or paraphilia at length. He makes mention of several horror films which depict men who dress in women’s clothing as psychotic knife wielding slashers, who hate and want to kill women. Examples of this are the movies Psycho and Dressed to Kill, however, transvestites are generally nonviolent.
Schechter describes their penchant for women’s clothing or undergarments, explaining that it does not turn these men into rapists or killers, but is often accompanied by feelings of shame. If they take up violence, their fetish may become part of the crimes they commit, but the desire for women’s clothing is merely an expression of their particular erotic desires. He states that becoming violent is the manifestation of a different drive.
Just as Jerry Brudos would go on to claim, several mass murderers and serial killers assert that as children they were forced to dress as girls, but unlike him most did not become transvestites. While others became cross-dressers without any influence from their parents. Brudos can be identified as cross-dressing, with a female fantasy in the form of an escape mechanism and without the desire to change gender identity.
The attraction for Brudos was the desire to wear shoes and underwear, and as he grew bolder in acquiring and wearing these items, he took advantage of his ability to sneak undetected into women’s bedrooms and there to overpower one sleeping woman and rape her. The victim reported it to the police, but no one traced it to Brudos. In January 1968, at the age of 28, Brudos answered the door to Linda Slawson.
It was his first murder, and it was only after he described to police what he had done that day did the full extent of his sick and perverted fantasies come to light. Detectives Jim Stovall and Gene Daugherty were put in charge of the investigation, and when Brudos cropped up as a potential suspect, they attempted to link the murders to him by cross-referencing his known activities against their timeline of the missing women.
As described by Rule, “In January 1968, Jerry Brudos had lived in the same neighborhood worked by the young encyclopedia salesgirl the missing Linda Slawson. Brudos had indicated that he had moved to Salem in August or September 1968 and had gone to work in Lebanon, Oregon hard by the 1-5 freeway where Jan Whitney had vanished in November. His current job was in Halsey only six miles from the body sites in the Long Tom.”
She adds, “And of course, when Karen Sprinker had disappeared from Meier and Frank on March 27, Brudos had lived only blocks away.” During questioning, Brudos had referred vaguely to “problems,” without going into details, and appeared to have a lot of nylon rope in his workshop. The officers who met him later expressed to having a “bad feeling” about him, but that was not sufficient grounds for a warrant to search his home.
It was also believed that he did not look strong enough to have carried the bodies with their respective weights, and did not drive a sports car, as described by the teenaged girl who was accosted by the Frekle-faced man, however, he did admit borrowing one. Most alarmingly, some rope tied into a knot in his workshop appeared to be similar to the knots used on the bodies.
He allowed detectives to take a sample, but then called an attorney, Dale Drake, and asked him to find out why the police seemed so interested in him and the items in his workshop. Drake agreed to represent him should the need arise. Meanwhile, detectives secured a warrant to search Brudos’ vehicle but found that the interior had been thoroughly cleaned. Suspicious as this was, it was not damning, and Brudos once again had a ready explanation.
But his aptitude for alibis run out when the adolescent girl picked him out of a photo spread as the man who recently had attempted to force her into a car. It was sufficient cause for police to arrest him, along with a weapons charge after a gun was found in his car. Investigators had hoped for a stronger case, but they had some concern that should Brudos learn the full extent of their suspicions, he might panic and flee.
One day when he and Ralphene drove to Portland, the cops moved in. After his arrest that day, May 30, 1969, he agreed to submit to an interrogation. During the routine search, he was found to be wearing women’s panties. In a series of stops and false starts, and despite his attorney warning him against talking, Brudos offered a startlingly frank confession and invited detectives into his secret world.
Less than a decade earlier, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho was released. The film was loosely based on the horrific story of Ed Gein, and showed the demented, mother-dominated nerd Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, who could present a personable front as a hotel proprietor while harboring a compulsion to fatally stab a female guest who aroused him. Gein had been told that any woman other than his mother was unpure.
Bates was, in effect, killing an unacceptable part of himself. When revealed that his mother had passed away, murdered by Norman himself, who dressed as her to commit murder, his condition of multiple personality disorder shocked the nation, especially with the added twist of its creepy cross-gendered manifestation. Now, sitting before them, police were about to see something like the real thing, only without the excuse of mental illness.
Unexpectedly, as Brudos admitted to his crimes and provided details, it became evident to detectives that he thoroughly relished describing his fetish for shoes and undergarments. As he described these things at length, he grew more excited, somehow hoping that he could convince his interrogators of the joys of indulging in such desires, but they just listened intently. It was soon evident, that from January 1968 to April 1969, Brudos killed four women.
Some newspaper reports have indicated there were five victims, but a fifth incident was never matched to the MO, and under questioning Brudos denied knowing the victim. He also admitted to attacking or attempting to kill several more. Most of what is known about his deadly encounters with these victims has come from his confessions, which he gave freely over a period of three days.
Although Brudos mourned his fate and felt badly for his wife and kids, the detectives who interrogated him noted his complete absence of guilt or remorse, and noted the fact that he never lost his appetite, despite giving vivid and grotesque descriptions of his crimes. He admitted to murdering and mutilated four of the women, then throwing their bodies into a river after he cut parts and kept them.
His first victim, Linda Slawson, was missing her left foot when her body was found. This he kept for a while after he disposed of the rest of her, using the foot to try shoes on it and taking photographs. Two other women had their breasts removed by Brudos, for reasons he would later explain, and he also photographed them while having their lifeless bodies under his power. Most shockingly, he admitted to committing necrophilic acts by having sex with their bodies.
He told how Linda Slawson, who had naively followed him to the workshop out the back of the house to pitch her encyclopedias, had been hit by him with a two-by-four hard enough to knock her out. She was then strangled, all while his wife, children and mother lived in the very same house with him. In that moment, he had a dead girl on the floor of his workshop, something he had fantasized about for a long time.
He remained calm and collected, speaking with family members, and urging them to go out and get some dinner at a fast food place. Unlike most serial killers, Jerry Brudos first murder went against every instinct a killer has to get rid of the body and get as far away from the scene of the crime as humanely possible. It is only later, when they become bolder and more comfortable, that they begin to do more with corpses, if that is part of their fetish.
For Jerry Brudos, that was an important part, yet with his first experience, he was more than happy with this circumstance. Straight away, with the corpse of dead girl in his workshop, he started thinking about what he could do with her, now that he had the real thing rather than just his obsessive fantasies. He had spent a considerable amount of time, years in fact, with his own private images.
These had by now become clearly defined and sophisticated that when he gained the opportunity to spent actual time with a victim, he could then live out the things he had only dreamed about before. He described for the officers interrogating him how when she arrived at his home, he was in the yard. At once he began to lie to her in order to get her to come inside. Hoping to make a sale, she did so readily.
Although he sent his wife and kids out to eat, a friend came over unexpectedly, and Brudos had to spend some time getting rid of him. Once alone, he quickly undressed her dead body, recalling every detail of what she was wearing, particularly her underwear, and was especially pleased that she had been wearing a pair of red panties. Getting some items from his own collection, he redressed her in them.
Suddenly realizing he could not keep the body at home, he removed her foot with a hacksaw, placed it in the freezer, and then dragged the body his car and dumped it at the Willamette River. In order to make sure she would not be found, he tied to body to a car engine before throwing it over the bridge railing. Then he returned home to enjoy the part of her he had kept, which would serve as a reminder of his first kill and something he could play with.
By that time he had accumulated a large collection of high-heeled shoes, and he could now try them on this severed foot and take pictures to savour the moment. He did this for as long as he could, but when the foot started to deteriorate, he tied it to a weight and threw it into the same river. He also recalled odd little details for police, such as that Slawson had a class ring on her finger.
Detectives were shocked at the callous and matter-of-fact attitude Jerry Brudos expressed in recounting his first crime, along with the way he grew more arrogant as he described these gruesome details. It seemed as if he thought of these women as objects, who existed purely for his warped pleasure. He cared little for whatever lives they had lived, or would have gone on to lead had they not run into him. He only cared for his own pleasure.
But that pleasure was short lived, and before long he required a new fresh plaything in order to experience that again. When he realized that no-one had stumbled upon the remains and that police were not knocking on his door in the pursuit of Linda Slawson’s killer, he went looking for another victim. With the realization that they might not find her body so long after her murder, detectives pressed for details about Jan Whitney.
By that time, she had been missing for six months, and police theorized that her killer had come across her car while broken down. This proved correct, as Brudos described how he happened upon her, in the company of two men, who looked like hippies, he said. He stopped anyways, not wishing to pass up such an opportunity. Jan had given the men a ride, but when it broke down, they failed to help her fix it, and so Brudos gave them all a ride, dropping the men off, before taking Jan to his home.
He went inside and told his wife he was going to go fix her car for her, telling her to wait for him, to which she complied. When he returned, he got into the car behind her, told her to close her eyes, and began playing mind games. Again, she complied, and he placed a strap over her head and around her neck to keep her from moving, then strangled her. Once dead, he had sex in the car with the body, then took her to his workshop.
There he dressed her in some of his clothes and took pictures to remind him of this moment, and also sexually violated the body several more times. After that, he tied her up and raised her body into the air via a hook-and-pulley system he had fixed in the ceiling. Although someone could have discovered her at any moment, he left her hanging there for several days. She was only his second victim and already he felt untouchable.
It was during the several days away with family, that a car crashed into the Brudos home, leaving a gaping hole wide enough to view what was inside. But no-one looked, not even police who came to investigate. “That was close,” Brudos told the detectives, relieved his murder spree was not brought to an abrupt end there and then. After removing the body, which by that time would have begun to decompose, he invited the officers come to inspect the accident damage.
They apparently smelled nothing, however Brudos had wrapped the corpse in a plastic sheet in another building in the yard. He described how he tried something different with this victim, taking her right breasts rather than a foot this time. “I was going to make a plastic mold of it,” he said in the interview, “and then I could make paperweights.” But he did something wrong, and so it didn’t turn out the way he wanted.
As with Slawson, he weighted Whitney’s body down by tying it to a heavy part and threw it into the Willamette River. Oddly he refused to give a specific location, but was telling the police so much yet holding back key details, perhaps assuming that if he kept certain things secret it would hinder their attempts at prosecuting him. They had more than enough evidence for trial, and only really prevented their ability to find the body.
It was four months later when he went looking for his next victim. He encountered 18-year-old Karen Sprinker at the department store where she’d gone to meet her mother. He had first tried for another victim, and missed, so had settled on Karen, although he commented to detectives he had not liked the shoes she was wearing. Dressed in women’s clothing, and armed with a pistol, he forced her into his car, and they went right to his home.
In his workshop he raped and forced her to pose, making her try on his collection of undergarments and pose while he took photographs. When satisfied, he killed her by hanging her by the neck from his hook. Finally, he subjected the corpse to the same indignities he’d imposed on the others, before he removed both breasts and dressed her in the long-line bra that was too large for her.
He stuffed it to keep her from bleeding in his car and to make the bra look correct. He then had sex with the body again, and attempted, to make plastic molds using her severed breasts. As with his previous victim, he would try again and still fail. Afterwards, he employed his usual method so the body would never be recovered, tying it to a 6-cylinder car engine with nylon cord before throwing it in the Willamette River.
After the killing of Karen Sprinker, Brudos made two attempts at ensnaring further victims, failing in his April 1969 abduction of Sharon Wood, and the following day he was also hampered in his bid to kidnap young Gloria Gene Smith. Not wishing to lose another intended victim, Brudos used a fake police badge and the threat of arrest for shoplifting to make 22-year-old Linda Salee do what he wanted.
While she remained bound in his workshop, Brudos had dinner with his family, during which she did not try to escape. But when he returned and attempted to strangle her with the strap, she fought him. He raped her as she was strangled to death, and afterwards used wires he stuck into her rib cage in an attempt to try and “make her dance” with an electrical current. This apparently did not work as he had planned.
With these shocking confessions, it was reported in the local papers that Jerry Brudos was charged with first-degree murder on June 2, 1969, in the death of Karen Sprinker. As police prepared a search warrant, Brudos was smug in the knowledge that any incriminating evidence had been removed from his workshop. He had gave his wife explicit instructions to burn his stash of female clothing. But Brudos was in for a shock, as Ralphene had not complied.
A police search team then descended on the Brudos home in the 3100 block of Center Street, in a an effort to locate item that might link him to one or more of the victims, as well as the intention of learning more about the man they were dealing with. They were not prepared for what they discovered. They took photographs of everything, including the hook-and-pulley in the ceiling used to hoist bodies into the air.
They found the possible murder weapons, the nylon cord and a leather strap that might have been used to strangle the life out of these young women. On a shelf they came across a mold made from the gruesome “paperweight” that Brudos had described making from a female breast. Searching further, they found his secret cache of women’s shoes in various sizes and many styles of underwear bras, girdles, panties, and slips as well as a collection of photographs.
Some featured Brudos in female underwear, but the most important ones contained horrifying images of his victims before and after death. One depicted the body of a woman suspended from the hook-and-pulley with a black hood over her head, while another body had been dressed in several different garments and photographed. Quite often, Brudos had cut the heads out of the pictures so he could enjoy the anonymous female form.
But one photograph in particular caught their attention, and was the one that would secure the case for the prosecution against the depraved murderer. As described by Rule, it was of, “a girl’s body, clothed in a black lace slip and panties with garters, hung suspended from the ceiling. The camera angled up to her crotch reflected in a mirror on the floor. In the lower corner of the photo, there was the frozen image of a killer, caught unawares in the mirror.” It was Brudos, looking at the woman he had just murdered.
Police now had solid physical evidence against their main suspect, and had also confirmed details from a survivor of a rape that Brudos had admitted to, although this woman had been unable to identify her attacker. During that incident, she had lost several pairs of shoes and some underwear. Some sources claim that neither Slawson’s nor Whitney’s bodies were found, while according Rule, Jan Whitney’s remains were recovered in the summer of 1970.
It was time for the legal process to decide Brudos fate. Although two victims bodies were never recovered, the district attorney had sufficient evidence in 1969 in the other cases to go forward. Prosecutors had the photographs of his depraved crimes, along with the confession, and on June 4, 1969, Jerry Brudos was arraigned. He was soon charged with additional crimes, those of the murders of Jan Whitney and Linda Salee.
He was defended by Dale Drake, who was assisted by high-powered criminal lawyer George Rhoten. The defence and many observers expected the trial to be a fairly long and drawn out affair, since the prosecution had an extensive witness list and an extensive collection of evidence. In response, the defense attorneys formulated a strategy based on a mental illness, since knew they could not get around Brudos actual guilt.
Brudos pleaded not guilty, and quite reluctantly, because he believed himself a genius, as not guilty by reason of insanity. This would mean that he would be processed through mental health assessments from both sides. It was during these meeting with psychiatrists that he attempted with crying and tears to convince them that he was merely the victim of an abusive mother, but most saw through this act and realized he just felt sorry for himself.
He recounted an accident he suffered in 1967, when while repairing a device he had contacted a live wire, which had knocked him off his feet. Although he survived, he suffered afterward from severe headaches. It was around this time that he began knocking women down to steal their clothing, and had committed a rape in a woman’s home. He said that he’d been unable to control himself.
It wasn’t long before he began to fantasize, as he put it, about keeping female corpses in his freezer. He wanted to be able to ‘play’ with the bodies, dressing and posing them however he liked, whenever he liked. In order words, he wanted a life-sized doll. It was after his first murder that he had purchased a large freezer, and then had the means to enact his fantasy, while being prepared if such an opportunity arose again.
Jerry Brudos was a man who clearly liked being in control, and he insisted that if he were treated in a hospital for his paraphilia, he would get better, and stated his determination to get out of prison and raise his own children. He was oblivious to the seriousness of the situation he now found himself in, but appeared neither confused or disoriented. Revealing no sense of remorse, he maintained an arrogant attitude towards his crimes.
He would be assessed by no less than seven psychiatrists, who indicated that while he had a personality disorder, he nevertheless was aware of what he was doing was wrong. With this professional diagnosis, Brudos would not be considered legally insane but rather suffered from antisocial personality. This, in addition to the paraphilias of a deviant nature that he indulged with his victims.
But they were in agreement, he was not psychotic. He had certainly known what he was doing to these girls and that it was both illegal and wrong. He was undoubtedly a danger to society, and there was no question that his condition could be cured and he be rehabilitated. After consulting with his attorneys, who saw no way to get their client off, Brudos changed his plea to guilty in the murders of Jan Whitney, Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee, all from Salem.
For his crimes, Jerry Brudos was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment, with the chance for parole. During the proceedings, he also admitted to a fourth murder in Multnomah County, but the body of Linda Slawson was never found and he was not prosecuted in the case. In a shocking twist to the case, Brudos’ wife was arrested and tried as his accomplice, after a neighbor claimed to have actually seen Ralphene help Brudos with a victim, but her testimony was discredited.
As reported by the Seattle Times, Jerry “forbade her from visiting the garage… she had to call him on the intercom when she wanted something from the freezer.” It was possible that she knew the horrible things her husband had done, or perhaps she just didn’t want to know or admit that such unspeakable crimes happened in her own home. “He has to be sick,” she said of her husband after his convictions. “I don’t think any person in his right mind could do the things he did and not be sick. I don’t have the ability to know the extent of his sickness, but I know he is ill.” The 25-year-old housewife and mother had expressed amazement that people had filled the courtroom every day of her trial.
“Why would they sit there day after day?” she wondered. “I can see one day, maybe, to see what I looked like… there hadn’t been any pictures of me [in the newspapers] before then… but I couldn’t sit and watch something like that.” Since there was no evidence that Ralphene knew about or participated in any of her husband’s crimes, however difficult that was for many to believe, a jury acquitted Ralphene of first-degree murder charges in October 1969.
In 1970, Ralphene Brudos ended her eight-year marriage to Jerry, changed her name, and moved with the children to an unknown location. As Rule puts it, she, too, was a victim and would most likely have wanted to put the entire experience behind her. It is possible that she would never forget It is likely she just wanted to put the whole thing behind her, although she would probably never forget her inadvertent discoveries of his cross-dressing habit and that “paperweight.”
By August 1970, Jerry Brudos insisted that the court should not have accepted his guilty plea to three first-degree murders, and thus should not have imposed consecutive life sentences. The Oregon Court of Appeals published an opinion on Brudos’ petition for a rehearing, the brief having been filed by Gary Babcock. His attorney argued that once a person has received a life sentence for an offense, all consecutive life sentences must run concurrent with it. Brudos claimed Ralphene “convinced me to sign the confessions” to protect her and their two children.
The response from the court explained that they could not consider the defendant’s first claim of error on direct appeal, and the defendant instead had to present his grounds for setting aside his pleas of guilty within the appropriate legislative framework. In nutshell, his appeal was denied. As were any and all subsequent appeals, including the one in which he claimed he’d suffered from hypoglycemia when offering his guilty plea.
Having been in prison longer than any other inmate in Oregon, Brudos periodically comes up for parole, something that results in a flurry of protesting letters from Oregon residents to the parole board to prevent him from gaining his freedom. Brudos makes his plea, insisting that he’s no longer a threat to society, and even goes so far as to claim he did not commit the murders.
In his many appeals to the board, he tried to mitigate his crimes by blaming his mother’s abuse and neglect, and mentioned having blackouts during his crime spree, indicating that at the time the world had seemed increasingly less real to him. In 1995, the parole board voted to keep him in prison for life, however Brudos still came up for it every two years, in a misguided view that one day he will be free. Yet he has shown no remorse.
As reported in an Associated Press article, “Brudos still refused Thursday to say why he’d killed, contending that he would be in danger if he did. He told board members that he was ready to join society; that in more than thirty years at Oregon State Penitentiary, he had availed himself of every possible rehabilitation program for sex-offending murderers.” Brudos was then quoted at saying, “I think I’ve got a whole new personality.”
A reporter for the Oregonian said that Brudos is certain he won’t kill again, “but he won’t say why.” The article went on to recount an encounter with Brudos by a young woman on a tour of the prison. When he took her hand, she felt that something wasn’t right in the way he looked at her and jerked it away. The encounter chilled her. “Human’s have an instinct,” says the reporter, “and it is important to heed it; lives depend on it.”
But Brudos himself indicated that his own life depended on divulging nothing in the presence of reporters who attended the parole hearings. “These people here will get me killed,” he was quoted in the Corvallis Gazette-Times. He firmly believed that any publicity of the crimes he committed more than thirty years ago, might inspire violence against him within the prison.
In August 2003, Jerry Brudos once again sought his freedom, and as they have done in the past, the parole board members once again denied his request. This time they made their decision after only a half hour interview with the convicted killer, explaining that they did not need a full hearing. This decision was applauded by the Gazette-Times, who stated that a man who could mutilate and murder five [sic] young women, they decided, was not a likely candidate for responsible citizenship, especially since he did it all without ever alerting his wife to the devious acts he performed inside his home-based workshop.
Within prison Brudos was considered a model patient, who consistently denies his crimes, and is allowed to walk around the prison unsupervised. Adept at computers, Brudos was allowed by the prison to sell leather key fobs with his name engraved on them through their prison store. Rule wrote in a 1988 update of her book, that Sharon Wood purchased one, a reminder of her ordeal and a symbol for assisting with her work in empowering women to defend themselves against physical attack.
Brudos was once again up for parole in August 2005, the year that Rule predicted he was actually eligible for release, based on serving the minimum time for his three consecutive sentences. The result was the same as before, and he was denied. Under the oudated Oregon system, he will come up for a hearing every two years until he dies or gains his freedom. Although he adjusted to prison life, Brudos invested much of his time in working on ways of getting out.
On March 28, 2006, it was reported in Salem, Oregon’s Statesman Journal, the 67-year-old Jerome Jerry Brudos had passed away from natural causes. By serving almost 37 years, he was the longest-incarcerated inmate at Oregon State Penitentiary. At the time of Brudos’ mid-1969 guilty plea to the strangulation murders of three young women, for which he was convicted and imprisoned, Ann Rule predicted that he would be in prison for about 36 years.
It is understood that his time in prison was uneventful, with Brudos apparently a model prisoner. Brudos, who was noted as a computer expert in prison, always held out hope for release, and went before the parole board at regular intervals and insisted he was no longer a danger to society. His release was always denied however, because he never expressed remorse for his crimes, blaming his lethal act on his mother’s abuse.
At times, he even recanted his confessions and said he was not guilty, but also admitted that killing had relieved stress. Despite always being denied parole, over the years he received privileges in the prison, including unsupervised mobility. Some reports indicate that he had been treated for colon cancer, and during the week before his death was admitted to the prison infirmary. Guards found him dead in his bed around 5:10am on that March morning.
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