Lust Killer

by Ann Rule

  Or perhaps it was all a delusion in Brudos' mind, his surface ego demanding that the women he kidnapped should find him attractive and would seek out his company.

  There was no way to tell now.

  "I got the leather strap out—the postal strap that I used on the woman from the freeway—and I put it around her neck and pulled her off her feet. She was a little woman—short and light. She turned around, kind of, and she said, 'Why are you doing this to me?'

  "I pulled the strap tighter and she went limp. I put her on the floor and got on top of her. I think I was inside her when she died."

  "She just waited for you in the shop? She didn't try to fight you at all?" Stovall asked.

  "Well … after I went back out there, I guess she did fight me. I don't know why—because she'd been so quiet all the time coming down and when I first put her in there. She fought me pretty bad until I managed to get the strap around her neck. I didn't like her—the way she kicked and scratched when I told her not to."

  It was clear that Brudos felt a great deal of resentment toward Linda Salee, the girl who had resisted him. She was the first one; the others had gone down gently, but this athletic little woman had tried to live, pitting her strength against the hulking killer. If she only had fought earlier …

  Still angry, Brudos had chosen to punish Linda Salee after her death. Mercifully, it no longer mattered.

  "I hung her up by her neck from the hook in the ceiling where I'd hung the others. I had this experiment I wanted to try, using electricity."

  Stovall tensed inwardly. There had been those strange marks on Linda Salee's body, the tissue near her ribs showing evidence of burns—something that had baffled both him and Medical Examiner Brady.

  "An experiment?"

  "Yeah. Once I had her up on the hook, I took her clothes off—having the hook there made dressing and undressing them easier. I took these two hypodermic needles and I stuck them on each side of her rib cage, and then I had electric leads attached to the needles. Then I plugged in the leads to see what she would do—if she would dance, or what. It didn't work; it just burned her."

  "You kept her there for a while?"

  "One day and one night. I raped her again, but I didn't like her body. Her breasts were all pink—the nipples weren't dark like they should be; they just all blended in together. I didn't cut them off because they didn't appeal to me. I made some circular paper cones and put them over her breasts to make plastic molds, but the epoxy set up hot and it didn't work. I wasn't able to get a really perfect mold from any of them. When you salt a breast down and dry it, it shrinks to about a third of its normal size. I'm sure there's a way to do it so it will work, but I never could."

  Thank God he would not have another chance to try.

  "When did you take the girl's body out of your shop?"

  The second night. I tied the overdrive unit to her and put her in the Long Tom."

  Jim Stovall went over all the versions of the murders again and again. He would approach the vital points from one angle, and then come back from another angle. The facts never changed; they were entrenched in the suspect's mind—as if he had cherished his secret killing games and relived them until he knew every facet of them perfectly.

  The thought of what Jerry Brudos had done was so despicable that a normal man could scarcely contemplate it without feeling a sickness in the gut. Jim Stovall had no doubt at all that if Brudos had not been caught, he would have continued to kill month by month until he himself grew old and died.

  Brudos was taken back to his cell, and Stovall walked past the reporters who had clustered around the jail all weekend, eager for a headline story. The Associated Press had got wind of the arrest in the dorm at Corvallis, and printed that. They did not have the name of the suspect, or any details; they only knew that something big was in the wind. They would get nothing at this point of the probe.

  Stovall stepped outside and thought the air smelled wonderful, but he was exhausted after three days of the most intense and macabre interrogation he had ever participated in.

  Still, he wondered if he could sleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The headlines came on Monday morning. On June 2, 1969, an anxious public pored over this slight information:

  Marion County District Attorney Gary Gortmaker announced this morning that Jerome Henry Brudos, 30, a Salem electrician, has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of an Oregon woman. The victim listed in the charge is Karen Sprinker, 19, of Salem.

  District Attorney Gortmaker declined to give the press any further information. Nor would he say where Brudos was being held: public feeling ran hot and vengeful; in the old days when the area was Oregon Territory, a man suspected of the crimes that rumor attributed to Brudos would have been summarily hung by an angry mob. Oregon had become a "civilized" state where a man accused must go through the due process of law. And yet … Officials feared what might happen if they revealed Jerry Brudos' location.

  "Due process" meant that there were many legal and investigative procedures to be accomplished. A search warrant for Brudos' home and workshop, for his vehicles, a further check on facts elicited through Stovall's interviews, and then formal arraignment. In the face of cruel madness, calm, sane steps must be taken.

  Detectives checked with Portland police to see if there had been a rape complaint in 1967 that resembled the case Brudos had discussed—a sleeping woman being throttled and sexually attacked. There was. Portland police records indicated their case, #67-35144, had occurred on May 18, 1967—"Assault, Possible Rape." The victim, Joyce Lynn Cassel, had given a statement that correlated almost exactly with what Jerry Brudos had described.

  She had lost three pairs of shoes and a black bra. When she had regained consciousness, she'd found her window screen had been removed and set aside. She lived in an apartment on South East Pine. She had not really seen her attacker, because she had been wakened from a deep sleep and attacked in a darkened room.

  Had Janet Shanahan also been one of Brudos' victims? Stovall thought not. He had questioned Brudos about the woman murdered in Eugene and left in her car, and Brudos had appeared to be totally unfamiliar with that case. Since he had freely admitted the other four homicides, there was no reason to think he would omit that case from his smug recital. He had also looked blank when Stephanie Vilkco was mentioned.

  Brudos balked at reducing his verbal statements to written form, as if he felt his words had no substance that could harm him if they were not down in black and white in a formal statement.

  There was now probable cause for a search warrant. Until the verbal statements, probable cause could not have been proved absolutely. A search warrant is a precise document; the items sought must be listed. The preservation of citizen rights in America does not allow lawmen to swoop down upon premises to seek out whatever may be there; the officers must list evidence they seek before they can obtain a search warrant. And if they should find items outside the sphere of an original search warrant, the premises must then be secured until an additional warrant is issued.

  At this point, Stovall was able to list items that might well be found in the Brudos home: pictures, underwear, shoes, auto parts, copper wire, rope, the hook in the workshop ceiling, the "come-along," a leather postal strap, possessions belonging to the victims—and possibly even the molds made from the victims' breasts. Brudos had apparently not suspected that his arrest was so near, and the man who had hoarded all manner of bizarre paraphernalia might well have failed to dispose of it.

  The first two elements of a solid case were now present. The circumstantial evidence. The confession. And still, there was a third element yet to be discovered: the physical evidence.

  The physical evidence went back again to the placard over Jim Stovall's desk: "THE ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC PROOF MUST BE PRESENT TO ESTABLISH AND SUBSTANTIATE A SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION."

  Marion County Circuit Court Judge Val D. Sloper issued a search warrant for the premises o
f the Brudos home early Tuesday morning, June 3. Armed with the search warrant and accompanied by Attorney Dale Drake and Larry Brudos, the defendant's brother, a group of investigators met at the gray shake house on Center Street. Larry Brudos unlocked the doors, and Stovall, Frazier, D.A. Gortmaker, and Lieutenant Robert W. Pinnick of the state crime lab and his assistants entered.

  Nothing had been destroyed. Darcie Brudos had disobeyed her husband overtly for the first time in their marriage. And so all the grotesque tools of Jerry Brudos' crimes remained.

  The men worked carefully, moving with excruciating slowness through the empty structures, a foot at a time, and then further once they had determined that they had obtained all evidence from each portion. They could not risk destroying evidence with a single thoughtless step. They photographed constantly, preserving the original appearance of the home and workshop.

  Given other circumstances, many of the tools and much of the equipment might be considered ordinary. Given these circumstances, they took on macabre meaning.

  There was a hook in the workshop ceiling; there was a thirty-foot three-sixteenth-inch rope and a "comealong" to winch an object upward. There was a leather postal strap with a cinch. There was more nylon cord. There were a vise and a locked tool chest. There were hundreds of keys, including a key ring in a brown case bearing numerous keys that seemed to be for cars and for house locks.

  The searchers observed full scuba gear and fins, and reloading equipment for ammunition. They found a chest full of women's shoes—including spike patent-leather heels, other high heels, and a pair of low, laced shoes. There were ashes in a green plastic wastebasket that looked to be the residue of burned film or photographs.

  There was a large blue shag rug on the floor of the workshop, a rug that seemed out of place in the area. The investigators moved on to the main house and up into the dusty attic; it smelled of sun-baked wood, and cobwebs wafted in the slight breeze from the open door.

  Most of Jerry Brudos' collection was in the attic. There were forty pairs of high-heeled shoes in all sizes from four to ten. White shoes. Brown shoes. Red shoes. Calf. Suede. Straw. Patent-leather. Open-toed sandals. Pumps. All of them slightly worn, and some of them curved to the shape of their original owners' feet.

  And of course there were soft piles of undergarments, stolen by Brudos over the years, all the thefts managed when Brudos' compulsion gripped him. They found fifteen brassieres—fancy bras of lace and satin and sheer black nylon, and more utilitarian bras of cotton. They ranged in size from 30 A to 38 D. Some still smelled faintly of perfume; some were freshly laundered.

  There were lacy slips and panties. There were dozens of girdles, all of them small-sized.

  Some of the dust in the attic was thick and untouched, and there were clear spots where the big man had crouched as he pawed through his treasures, stimulating himself with his fantasies—all of this part of his hidden sex life.

  The house itself seemed the home of an average young family—the children's toys still scattered where they had been left when Darcie Brudos abandoned the house to take comfort with her family. The kitchen was neat; there was still food in the refrigerator. But over the counter there was a roll of brown paper towels—towels that would prove to be identical in class and characteristics with those wadded lumps taken from the black bra Karen Sprinker wore.

  In the living room, Criminalist Pinnick ran his hands along a high shelf over the fireplace. He touched an object and lifted it down.

  It was a metal mold, formed in an exact replica of a female breast. The breast was full, and perfectly shaped. It was too perfect to have been fashioned from clay.

  It was real.

  There were photos on the shelf too—pictures of Brudos in a black lace slip.

  When a further search of the house netted nothing more of evidentiary value, the men returned to the shop. They looked in a dim corner of the shop and saw—on a bench there—another breast mold. This breast was small; it had obviously come from a different source than the lush mold in the living room.

  It looked real too—resin had coated human flesh, and taken on its form.

  The toolbox lock was forced open. There were tools in the lower portion of it. In the upper-right-hand drawer there was a thick packet of pictures. Pinnick lifted them out carefully.

  "Oh, my God … "

  The investigators saw the glossy black-and-white shots, the pinups of a madman. Jan Whitney and Karen Sprinker—helpless in the lens of their captor.

  It was deathly quiet in the shop as Pinnick slowly revealed each photo, holding them by the edges where no fingerprints could cling. The men gazed at the pictures, feeling a sense of personal intrusion on the privacy of the lost girls. Not one of them spoke; it was an experience they had never had before, and hoped devoutly never to have again.

  There was a picture of a nude woman suspended from the ceiling by the damnable hook and its intricate pulley arrangements. Her face was obscured by a black hood. It would prove to be the body of Jan Whitney.

  That would tie in with the verbal statements given to Stovall. Jan Whitney had not lived to get out of Brudos' car, had died there with the leather postal strap around her neck.

  Karen Sprinker had endured captivity in this very workshop. She stared mutely into the camera, and it was almost impossible to describe the expression on her face. Fear, yes. But something more—a kind of resignation, as if she had detached herself from the proceedings, as if her essence was gone and only her body submitted to the demands of the man behind the camera.

  She wore different garments in the pictures. A bra and girdle that had not been her own. Another shot with a different brassiere and girdle. There was a photo where she wore only panties, and another where she had on just a bra. Her feet were encased in the spike-heeled black patent-leather pumps; her own plain flats rested on the fluffy blue rug.

  "Damn him," one officer breathed. "Damn him."

  Yes, damn him.

  There was a black three-ring binder full of more photographs, variations on the other pictures. Many, many photos of nude female torsos, their heads snipped away by scissors.

  It was obvious that all the pictures had been taken in the garage workshop; the blue shag rug showed in all the photos, and the Craftsman tool chest could be seen just behind the victims. It seemed impossible to think that Jerry Brudos could have held his captives here, torturing them and then killing them within feet of neighboring homes, just a breezeway removed from his own home. Yet the pictures established that. They substantiated the terrible confessions he had made to Jim Stovall.

  Why hadn't the girls screamed for help? It seemed incomprehensible that they had not. And yet there is an explanation. There is profound shock in any kidnapping or hostage situation, a kind of denial. This can't be happening to me. Torn from their normal activities in situations that seemed safe, Brudos' victims had to have been instantly plunged into ultimate fear and denial. Studies done of prisoners in concentration camps—the survivors—elicited the theory that those who survived were the individuals who were able to override their shock and terror early on. Instead of "this can't be happening," they knew that it was happening, that it was true—and they fought back. Those who could not deal with reality, however terrible it was, died.

  And so had Linda Slawson and Jan Whitney and Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee. Before they had time to accept their danger, they were killed.

  The investigators had found so many pictures, and they found too the ashes of what seemed to be burned photographs, charred bits of proof sheets in the wastebasket and in the backyard. What had those pictures shown?

  Lieutenant Pinnick spotted the corner of still another photograph, a photo caught between a workbench and a wall. He pulled it out of the spot where it had apparently been overlooked.

  It was an awful picture. 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.
The ropes swirled surrealistically, and the girl's muscles were relaxed. Her face didn't show, but clearly, she was dead.

  "Look," Stovall said quietly. "Look at the bottom."

  "What is that?"

  "It's him."

  It was. In the lower corner of the photo, there was the frozen image of a killer, caught unawares in the mirror. Brudos had photographed himself as he focused on the body of his victim, capturing his own lust-filled, slack face. He would not have dared to keep such a picture. But he had apparently lost track of this one last print when it slipped behind the workbench. It was as if an unseen hand had secreted it there so that justice would be done.

  The monster had photographed himself at the apex of his madness.

  The searchers had been in the house and garage for hours, and they were finally convinced they had found all that they had sought. They cleared the property after changing the locks, and left it cordoned off with ropes and signs that forbade trespassing. All the physical evidence found was removed to the state crime lab for testing and evaluation.

  Without the rest of it, that single picture would be enough. There was no way Jerry Brudos could explain that away, no chance for him to call back his confession. He had killed, and he had photographed himself in the very midst of his killing frenzy.

  There was the matter of the hundreds of keys Jerry Brudos had collected. Where were the locks that they fit? Was there still more corroborating physical evidence among them that would tie him to his victims? Checking them all would be a monumental task, but Stovall, Frazier, and Daugherty did it.

  The three investigators went first to McMinnville, where Jan Whitney's Rambler was in storage. The keys on the brown leather key ring opened the trunk of that car. Next they tried the ignition, and the lock turned. To be absolutely sure, the detectives installed a new battery in the Nash and tried the key again.