Jerry Brudos

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerry Brudos asked a young woman a question that she would never forget. She was a college student who had reluctantly gone out with him, and the evening had been uncomfortable for both of them. Partway through, he had told her to think of the two girls who were found in the river. When he drove her home, he asked why she had agreed to see him at all. She answered that she had been curious. He replied, "How did you know I wouldn't take you to the river and strangle you?"

  She had no idea how close to the truth he was speaking. Jerome Henry Brudos was a licensed broadcast technician and a father of two who spent his spare hours in a garage workshop in Salem, Oregon. Neighbors and coworkers knew him as a mild-mannered man. Police in western Oregon came to know him as the Lust Killer and the Shoe Fetish Slayer.

  How does a quiet electronics hobbyist come to threaten a stranger on a date? What did his childhood and his marriage reveal, and what did they hide? What small details of wire, rope and engine parts finally led detectives to his door? And what became of Brudos, and of the people he left behind, in the decades after his arrest?

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• 2. Unwanted Son

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  Marie Brudos had hoped her second child would be a girl. When Jerome Henry was born in Webster, South Dakota, on the 31st of January 1939, she was openly disappointed. He was the younger of two sons. His mother doted on his older brother, James. She often belittled the younger boy and made sure he knew she had wanted a daughter.

  His father, Henry Ervin Brudos, took casual and often seasonal work, and Marie kept house. Henry had a short temper but rarely hit or scolded his children. Marie was the stern, prudish force in the home, and she aimed most of her scorn at her younger son. Seasonal work kept the family moving around the Pacific Northwest until they settled for good on a piece of farmland in Salem.

  Starved of affection at home, the boy attached himself to a neighborhood woman about his mother's age. She was kind to him, and he later admitted that he sometimes pretended she was his real mother. Then her diabetes worsened and she could no longer have visitors. Soon afterward, a girl his own age who had been a close friend died of tuberculosis. Brudos was devastated.

  Around the age of five, he saw a family friend's teenage daughter asleep on his bed in high-heeled shoes. Brudos later said he was "transfixed" and tried to pull the shoes off her feet. She woke and simply told him to leave. That same year, he found a pair of leather heels with a rhinestone-studded clasp in a junkyard and brought them home. He put them on to show his mother, who screamed that he was "wicked." When she learned he had been wearing them in secret, she beat him badly and burned the shoes while he watched.

  Two years later, he tried to steal the heels of his first grade teacher. Caught, he admitted it, but he told the adults he could not say why. By the start of puberty, a second fixation had joined the first. A neighborhood boy with several older sisters had led him into their bedrooms to handle their underwear, and Brudos began stealing it from neighbors. Some of it he wore.

  He was a sickly, unremarkable student who complained of sore throats and migraines. His brother was the popular, high-achieving one. Teachers and classmates noticed nothing about Brudos, and the only office he ever held was secretary-treasurer of a youth club in his early teens.

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• 3. Ed, Jerry's Twin Brother

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  At sixteen, Brudos dug a tunnel with a small alcove near his family's home, a hiding place he imagined using to hold a captive woman. Nobody was ever held there. Instead, he lured a neighborhood girl into his bedroom on a harmless pretext, stepped out, and returned minutes later in a mask with a knife. He made her undress and photographed her. Then he ran, and came back in his own shirt, hair mussed, with a small scuff on his cheek. He told her that an intruder had locked him in the barn at knifepoint.

  Within a year, this had become a routine. Brudos forced girls his age or younger into the barn on the family farm at knifepoint and photographed them undressed. He shut them in a corn crib, changed his clothes, and combed his hair differently. Then he let them out, introducing himself as "Ed, Jerry's twin brother." He acted shocked at their stories and asked, "He didn't hurt you, did he?" He explained that "Jerry" was "in therapy" and that this was "going to set him back a bit." He begged each girl to stay silent and promised to find and destroy the camera. Beyond tentative fondling, none were sexually assaulted, and none are known to have told the authorities.

  The ruse collapsed in April 1956. Brudos persuaded a 17-year-old girl to go on a date, drove her to a deserted road, and ordered her to undress. When she refused, he pulled her from the car and beat her, breaking her nose. A young couple heard the screaming, stopped, and intervened. Brudos first said the girl had fallen out of the car, then that a "weirdo" had attacked her. Nobody believed him. At the police station, he said he had only wanted to scare her into undressing so he could take pictures.

  Officers searched his bedroom and found a large collection of women's clothing and Polaroid photographs of teenage girls. They identified one of the girls, and she told them about "Ed's twin brother" and the previous August.

  Because he was a juvenile, Brudos was sent to the Oregon State Hospital on the 16th of April 1956. He stayed nine months and was allowed to leave to attend high school. The doctors judged him depressive, with a schizotypal personality disorder, but not grossly mentally ill or delusional. They concluded that his sexual fantasies grew out of a hatred of his mother and of women in general.

  He finished 142nd in a class of 202 at Corvallis High School in 1957. In March 1959, he joined the army and trained as a communications technician. He was good at the work. His fellow soldiers, though, remembered a fantasist who boasted that a "beautiful Korean girl" crept into his bed each night. The army discharged him in October 1959 as psychologically unfit.

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• 4. A Quiet Household

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  Back in Corvallis in October 1959, Brudos moved into his parents' two-bedroom home. He took a job at a local radio station as an electrical engineer. His colleagues found him skilled and conscientious, though he showed no interest in advancing. At home, his mother let him have the second bedroom while his brother was away at college. When his brother returned, Brudos was sent to sleep in a shed behind the house.

  Around 1960, he followed a young woman in revealing clothes to her apartment in Salem. He strangled her into semi-consciousness and ran off with her shoes. She was not raped. Soon after, he tried the same with another woman in high heels, but she fought him off and he escaped with one shoe. He took both women's footwear to the shed and often slept with it. He was never arrested for either attack.

  About a year into his radio job, a teenage electronics fan who hung around the station kidded Brudos about his shyness with women. Brudos joked that the boy should find him a girlfriend. To his surprise, the boy took him to the home of 17-year-old Ralphene Schwinler. They married on the 30th of September 1961, when she was one month pregnant. They lived in Portland at first, then moved to a small house in a Salem suburb in the summer of 1968. They had two children, Theresa, born in 1962, and Brian, born in 1967. Brudos fixed cars in the garage for extra money.

  Through the early 1960s, Brudos was never abusive toward Ralphene. He did ask her to do the housework naked except for high heels. He photographed her as she worked, and she went along with it. He is not known to have committed any sexual offense in those years.

  That began to change in the mid-1960s. With a toddler to look after, Ralphene stopped taking part in the nude modeling whenever Theresa might see. Brudos was gaining weight, and she later said, without telling him, that his appearance had begun to repel her. The couple grew distant, and he spent more evenings in his garage workshop, tinkering with electronics.

  In May 1967, while Ralphene was in the hospital giving birth to Brian, Brudos followed a woman in attractive heels to her apartment. He waited until dark, went in, and choked her unconscious. He later said he had not planned to rape her, but the sight of her helpless aroused him enough that he did. He left with her shoes. The next year, Corvallis police arrested him on the grounds of an Oregon State University women's dormitory. He was wearing pedal pushers, high heels and women's underwear, and the charge was stealing women's clothing.

  The garage workshop was where he spent his evenings. He had wired it with an intercom so that his wife and children could not step inside without first announcing themselves.

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• 5. Four Women

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  On the 26th of January 1968-19-year-old Linda Slawson from Aloha, Oregon, walked into Brudos's yard by mistake. She sold encyclopedias door to door and believed she had an appointment with a neighbor. Brudos pretended to be interested in buying a set and led her to his basement. There he struck her with a piece of wood and strangled her. He then asked his mother to take his daughter out for hamburgers. When he was alone, he spent hours dressing and photographing the body in lingerie and shoes from a box of stolen items. He kept her left foot in the basement freezer and kept the two encyclopedias as souvenirs. Her body he weighted with a heavy cylinder head and dropped "over a rail somewhere" in Marion County. He said he could not recall the spot.

  Ten months later, on the 26th of November 1968-23-year-old Jan Susan Whitney stood beside a broken-down Rambler on Interstate 5 between Salem and Albany. Brudos was driving home from a job in Lebanon, Oregon. He told her he could fix the car but needed his tools, and he offered to drive her to his home. Two hitchhikers she had picked up rode along, and he dropped them at their destination first. Parked in his driveway, he slipped into the back seat. He asked her to close her eyes and explain how to tie a shoelace without moving her hands. Whitney took up the challenge. Brudos then strangled her from behind with a leather luggage strap.

  He took her body to the workshop and left it hanging from the ceiling pulley for two days. Brudos later said that during that time a car crashed into the garage wall. A policeman looked at the damage, but dust, darkness and the low position of the hole meant he never saw the body. That night, Brudos tied Whitney to a piece of scrap railroad iron and threw her into the Willamette River, along with Slawson's foot.

  The next victim was Karen Elena Sprinker, an 18-year-old Oregon State University chemistry student. On the 27th of March 1969, she was walking from her car toward a Meier & Frank department store to meet her mother for lunch. Brudos, who was dressed in women's clothing, had pulled into the lot on impulse after spotting a woman in heels and a miniskirt. He lost sight of that woman, then saw Sprinker and forced her at gunpoint into his station wagon. At his workshop, she begged him to spare her and said she would do whatever he asked. He raped her, photographed her, and then killed her with a rope thrown over a ceiling beam. That evening he tied her body to a six-cylinder engine part and threw it into the river.

  April 1969 brought two failures. On the 21st, 24-year-old Sharon Wood was tapped on the shoulder in a Portland parking garage stairwell and turned to face a pistol. She bit his hand and kicked him while twisting his wrist to push the gun away from her. He slammed her head against the concrete floor and ran. The next day, 15-year-old Gloria Jean Smith was ordered at gunpoint toward a green Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. He told her, "I want you to come with me. I won't hurt you... I won't rape you." She asked him to let go of her coat, and he did. When she saw a woman working on her front lawn, she screamed and ran to her, and he fled. Smith described her attacker as in his early thirties, about 6 ft tall, and around 200 pounds, wearing dark glasses. Police checked every known sex offender who fit that description and ruled them all out.

  Linda Dawn Salee, a 22-year-old secretary and part-time student from Beaverton, was his last victim. On the afternoon of the 23rd of April 1969, she left the Lloyd Center shopping mall. She carried slacks and a watchband bought as gifts for her fiance. Brudos flashed a fake police badge, accused her of shoplifting, and walked her to his car. Once she was inside, he told her she was being held for ransom. At his house, his wife appeared on the porch to say dinner was ready. Brudos signaled Salee to freeze, told his wife he would be in shortly, and tied Salee up in the garage. Then he went inside and ate with his family.

  When he came back, Salee had freed herself but had not run. She asked him, "Why are you doing this to me?" as he put a leather strap around her neck. She scratched and kicked at him until she lost consciousness, and he killed her. Afterward, he hung her from the pulley. He pushed needles into her ribs and ran electric current through them, hoping to make the body move. It failed. A day later, he fastened her to a vehicle gearbox and threw her into the river.

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• 6. Tracing the Evidence

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  Two fishermen on the Long Tom River spotted a bundle under the surface on the 10th of May 1969. It turned out to be a bloated, bound woman in a coat, weighed down with a gearbox. Copper wire was twisted around it in the neat way an electrician trims a line. She was Linda Salee. The coroner ruled that she had been strangled, though decomposition left him unable to say whether she had been raped.

  Two days later, a diving recovery team found Karen Sprinker about 20 yards away. She had been tied with the same cord and copper wire, and held down by a six-cylinder head. Her autopsy found smothering or strangulation. Her body was wearing a size 38 D bra far too large for her, stuffed with brown paper towel.

  Detectives saw two clues in the matching electrical flex and the engine parts. Their killer might be an electrician or a mechanic. Officers canvassed the owners and staff of garages and junkyards across western Oregon, and others interviewed the families and friends of both women.

  At Oregon State University, they heard from female students who had gotten phone calls over recent months. A man claiming to be a Vietnam veteran, using different names, kept asking them out. Almost every woman hung up or said no. One felt sorry for him and accepted. She described a dirty station wagon with children's clothes inside, which suggested he was married. Investigators asked her to alert them if he called again. One week after Salee's body surfaced, on the 18th of May, he did. He was arrested walking toward the meeting place.

  He gave his true name, age and occupation but a false address, and police had no legal grounds to hold him. Still, the background check showed prior violence against women. Vehicle records placed him in the same Portland district where Slawson was last seen alive. His real address turned out to be only blocks from the store where Sprinker was taken. His mother owned a Karmann Ghia that he had in his possession on the 22nd of April, the day Gloria Smith was grabbed. Smith picked him out as her attacker, and that was enough for a search warrant.

  Officers searched the property on the 26th of May. In the garage they found a large stock of women's lingerie and shoes. They also found a list of phone numbers for sorority houses and student housing, and many Polaroids of young women, some alive and some clearly dead. In several, a woman hung from the garage pulley above a mirror laid flat on the floor. In one, the mirror caught Brudos himself holding the camera. Sprinker was among the women photographed. A severed breast coated in epoxy sat on the living room mantel.

  There was also a coil of the same copper wire used on Salee and Sprinker. Rope tied in the knot used on the bodies lay nearby, and engine parts were scattered about the garage. Police placed him under constant watch.

  On the 29th of May, state troopers found Brudos crouched under a blanket in the back of the family station wagon. His wife was driving it toward Portland. He was arrested for the attempt on Gloria Smith. The following evening, he phoned his wife and asked her to destroy more incriminating evidence. She refused.

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• 7. Confession and Court

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  For several days after his second arrest, Brudos denied everything and called the evidence circumstantial. Then he began to talk about the fetishes that ruled his life. By early June, he had confessed to all four murders. He started with Linda Slawson, whose name he could not recall and whom nobody had yet connected to him. He said he had killed her mostly because of the shoes she wore when she wandered onto his property. He then walked police through every later killing and each attempted abduction.

  He accepted responsibility but resisted questions about why. At one point he said, "There must be something wrong with me." He denied hating women, though he admitted that killing let him "let off steam." Psychiatrists decided that he could not be satisfied by ordinary intercourse and that lust drove his crimes. Even in the killings that seemed to arise from chance encounters, they said, he had known from the start that he would kill. Photographs of two victims matched the women pulled from the river. His account of Whitney matched what was known of her disappearance, which identified her as his second victim. Slawson was still listed as a Jane Doe.

  The court assigned an attorney, Dale Drake, and an arraignment was set for 9 a.m. on the 4th of June 1969. Brudos was charged that day with the murders of Whitney, Sprinker and Salee and entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Several doctors examined him and agreed unanimously that he was sane and fit for trial, which was set for the 30th of June.

  Three days before it began, on the 27th of June 1969, Brudos pleaded guilty. The charge was three counts of first-degree murder, heard by Marion County Circuit Court Judge Val D. Sloper. He received three consecutive life sentences, with the possibility of parole, at Oregon State Penitentiary. He appealed repeatedly, and every appeal failed.

  His wife faced the law as well. Brudos insisted she knew nothing and that he had forced her to drive the car on the day he was arrested. Even so, on the 7th of August 1969, Ralphene was indicted for the first-degree murder of Sprinker. The charge rested on one witness. That person said Ralphene had helped Brudos push a blanket-covered young woman into the house the day Sprinker vanished. Ralphene denied it. Other witnesses contradicted the account at her trial in September, and she was acquitted in October. During the case, the children were placed in state care, and seven-year-old Theresa was told to prepare for questioning at her mother's trial. Ralphene regained custody after the acquittal.

  Slawson's case never reached a courtroom. Brudos confessed, and Polaroids found in his garage backed up his claim to have photographed her lower legs and feet. But he had not photographed the rest of her after death, so nothing proved that the pictures were taken after she died. Prosecutors lacked firm evidence, and her body was never found.

  Whitney was found exactly one month after his conviction. Her body lay in the Willamette River near Independence, Oregon, about a mile downstream from the spot Brudos had named. Dental records confirmed who she was.

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• 8. Decades Inside

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  Behind bars, Brudos made himself useful. By the 1970s, he held clerical duties. He used his electronics training to maintain the prison's computer record system, wire up a cable television network, and service the vending machines. Other inmates attacked him several times because he was a sex offender. He refused each time to name who did it. He was also allowed to order mail-order catalogs of women modeling heels and underwear, which fed his fantasies.

  He appeared at many parole hearings, and relatives of his victims came to every one to ask that he stay locked up. On the 21st of June 1995, he was told he would spend the rest of his life in prison. He still went to informal parole hearings every two years until he died.

  Over those years, he gave interviews to a range of people. One was Jim Byrnes, a former Marion County detective. Byrnes asked whether Brudos felt any remorse or sorrow for the girls who died. Brudos picked up a sheet of paper from the table, crushed it into a ball and tossed it on the floor. He said he cared about those girls about as much as he cared about that wadded paper. The psychiatrist Michael H. Stone described Brudos as psychopathic, pointing to his callousness and absence of remorse.

  Ralphene, meanwhile, had divorced him and cut off all contact. She changed her name and moved to a state she never disclosed. Brudos said until the end that he still loved her.

  Brudos died of liver cancer in Oregon State Penitentiary at 5:10 a.m. on the 28th of March 2006. He was 67, and after almost 37 years inside he was the longest-serving inmate in the Oregon Department of Corrections. Jan Whitney's younger sister told a reporter that she cried when she heard, but not for him. She cried for her family, because "He put our family through hell. You're never really the same." Detective James Stovall called it "good riddance" and said, "He was a true monster."

  Television has revisited the case more than once. An episode of Most Evil, narrated by Tim Hopper, first aired in August 2006. A documentary called Jerome Brudos: The Lust Killer, directed by Jeffrey Woods, followed in June 2008. Mindhunter gave the case its seventh episode in October 2017. Most Evil Killers, narrated by Fred Dinenage, covered it in February 2021.

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