Jerry Brudos loved collecting and wearing slinky, lacy slips and bras and, especially, fancy high-heeled shoes. But the clothes didn’t look very good on him, and every so often he’d go off in search of prettier models.
Four of his living paper dolls would die.
In January 1968, young women started to vanish around Portland, Ore. It was an era when children frequently disappeared, only to turn up later in places like Haight-Ashbury. But these girls were poor candidates for the counterculture. One sold encyclopedias door-to-door. Another was a medical student, and the other two were balancing work and school. All had strong ties with family.
When they went missing, there was no doubt it was because something awful had happened.
The worst fears were confirmed on May 10, 1969, when a man fishing in the Long Tom River, south of Corvallis, spotted what looked like a bundle of rags. It turned out to be Linda Salee, 22, a petite, blonde from Portland.
On April 23, she was supposed to meet her boyfriend. She never showed up that evening, or at her job the next morning.
Autopsy results showed she had died of asphyxiation.
Two days later, divers recovered the body of another missing girl, Karen Sprinker, 19, a medical student, studying at Oregon State. On March 27, the usually punctual girl failed to show up for a date with her mother and no one heard anything about her since.
Like Salee, Sprinker’s cause of death was asphyxiation. Other details linked the victims, such as the weights used to sink the corpses. Both were kept submerged with auto parts.
There was another strange detail in Sprinker’s case: Both her breasts had been sliced off and, although she was still wearing the clothing she had on the last time anyone saw her alive, her bra had been changed to a black one that was too big for her. The cups had been stuffed with paper.
Coeds at Sprinker’s dorm at Oregon State University told detectives that they had recently been receiving odd phone calls from a man who said he was a lonely Vietnam veteran and boasted of extra sensory perception. Then he asked them out. Only one agreed, wrote Ann Rule in her book on the case, “Lust Killer.”
On April 22, the student said, she met her mystery date, a tall, fleshy, redhead with freckles. He wasn’t terribly attractive, but what she found most off-putting was his tendency to blurt out odd and disturbing thoughts, like, “How did you know I would bring you back home and not take you to the river and strangle you?”
One encounter was more than enough, but detectives persuaded the girl to call for a second, to set a trap. They grabbed Jerry Brudos and questioned him; they ended their interview with strong suspicions, but not enough evidence for an arrest.
Their suspicions were strengthened when they probed his history. Born in 1939 in South Dakota, Brudos was obsessed with women’s clothes, especially sexy shoes, as far back as early childhood. His fascination seemed to be a rebellion against his mother, who, he recalled later, always wore sensible footwear. He hated her.
At 5, he started his high-heel collection, with a fancy patent leather pair recovered from a dump. Later, he tried to swipe a pair of pumps that his first-grade teacher kept in a drawer.
At 17, after years of stealing underwear and shoes, two attacks on teenage girls landed him in a psychiatric ward. Doctors examined him and found him to be immature, but not dangerous. In less than a year, they set him free with the advice to “grow up.”
A stint in the Army ended early because of his peculiar ways. He later drifted into marriage with a sweet, submissive woman, became a father, and flitted from job to job. Despite his odd behavior, he was an exceptionally talented mechanic and electrical engineer.
Police arrested Brudos after a girl who escaped an attempted abduction identified him. Under questioning, he confessed to his crimes in sickening detail, starting with theft of high heels and women’s undergarments, which he stored in a secret workroom in his house. It was equipped with a refrigerator. The place was off-limits to everyone else. Even his wife was not allowed inside.
Brudos said he committed his first murder on Jan. 26, 1968.
Victim number one was Linda Slawson, 19, the college girl selling encyclopedias. Brudos admitted holding onto the body so he could dress her up. Later he dumped her in a river, keeping a foot that he sawed off and stored in the freezer. He periodically took it out, put it in a dressy shoe, and took photos of it. Eventually, he dumped that in the river, too.
Brudos confessed to the Salee and Sprinker murders, as well as the killing of a fourth woman, Jan Whitney, another college student who vanished in November 1968. He admitted to necrophilia and experiments, like suspending Salee’s body from the ceiling and using electrical shocks to try to make the corpse “dance.”
Detectives opened the killer’s secret torture chamber and found a terrifying cache of photos of the women before and after death, and souvenirs of his crimes: shoes, bras, girdles and paperweights made of human breasts.
His original plea was not guilty by reason of insanity. But psychiatrists determined that although Brudos was extremely twisted, his crimes were well-planned and he was aware of what he was doing. He changed his plea to guilty, got life, and died of cancer in 2006.
His wife, who seemed to be clueless, was tried as an accomplice. And while she recalled some disturbing incidents, like seeing her husband prancing around in bras and girdles, there was nothing to link her to his crimes.
Found not guilty, she changed her name and vanished.
