Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (32 page)

Brudos graduated from high school in 1958 and was said to have excelled in electronics. In March 1959, Brudos joined the army and was trained as a communications technician, but he received an early discharge in October 1959 after being found unfit for service. Brudos moved back in with his parents in their two-bedroom house in Corvallis, Oregon. While his brother, Larry, was away at college, Jerry was allowed to sleep in the second bedroom, but when Larry came home, he was relegated to a shed at the back of the house.

During this period, Jerry began to stalk and attack women whose shoes he was attracted to. He would choke them into unconsciousness and then run off with their shoes. He continued stealing women’s garments from clotheslines and dwelled in his dark shed surrounded by female attire.

Despite Jerry’s mental problems, he continued to excel in electronics. He became a licensed broadcast technician and was employed at a Corvallis radio station as their engineer. He was less of a loner than in high school and was friendly with several male employees at the station. He remained, however, terminally shy in the presence of women.

A young boy used to come to the radio station and hang around watching Jerry work and pestering him with questions. One day in 1962, Brudos jokingly told him to find him a girlfriend. To Jerry’s surprise, the boy took him to a house where he introduced him to a pretty dark-haired seventeen-year-old girl with big eyes. Her name was Susan
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and she was almost as shy as Jerry.

Despite her shyness, Susan had dated teenage boys her own age, but the twenty-three-year-old Brudos seemed different to her. He courted her, pulling out her chair, buying her gifts, opening doors for her, and treating her as a lady. She was impressed by his job at the radio station and the attention and admiration he gave her.

They slipped into sex effortlessly, according to Susan, who says that there never seemed anything strange about Jerry’s sexual performance. He was tender and loving. She knew nothing of his fetishes or his past mental problems.

Before long, Susan was pregnant, and they decided to get married. The couple had already agreed that they would marry if she became pregnant. Brudos admitted that their relationship was not a big love affair, that Susan saw marriage as a way of escaping the restrictions of her strict parents, while he just needed somebody to sleep with. In 1962, the couple had a girl whom they named Karin.

Susan testified that nothing in Jerry’s behavior changed. He continued to be kind and tender with her, and bought her presents on holidays and anniversaries. They seemed to have a fairly lively sex life. Even before they were married, Susan posed nude while Jerry snapped photographs of her. He developed them himself in his own darkroom. Often he asked Susan to pose in black high-heeled shoes. Jerry asked her to do the housework nude except for her shoes, and the two of them romped around the house naked. The first three years of their marriage appeared to be happy ones. Jerry, it appeared, had finally found his fantasy girl.

Yet there were problems that nagged at the marriage. First, Jerry could not hold down a job. He kept changing jobs, and in their seven-year marriage the Brudoses lived in twenty different houses. Secondly, Susan felt that Jerry was very distant and removed from their daughter, Karin. He avoided all physical contact with his daughter, spent no time with her, and paid her little attention.

By the third year of their marriage, Susan was twenty and was beginning to turn away from Jerry’s requests. Wearing high heels hurt her back and she was too busy with their child and housework to be “dressing up” for Jerry. The sex was becoming monotonous and their daughter was getting too old, Susan felt, for them to be running around the house naked. Once again, Jerry Brudos began to feel rejected.

Susan says that Jerry became “depressed” and withdrawn when she did something to displease him, but she never witnessed him being angry or violent. Unknown to Susan, during these “depressions” Jerry went out prowling at night stealing women’s garments. Brudos also began to experience more migraine headaches and the pain was more intense. He also claims that he began to have “blackouts.”

People who worked with Jerry Brudos during this period remember a very mild-mannered and brilliant electronics technician. One of his former employers says that he felt that Brudos could have run any television or radio station in the country, but somehow he seemed to lack ambition. He was a dependable and valuable worker and presented himself as a family man who did not smoke or drink and never talked of women.

Despite their marital problems, in 1967 Susan became pregnant again. Brudos was very enthusiastic about her second pregnancy and wanted to be in the delivery room with Susan when the baby came. He felt betrayed by Susan when she told doctors not to allow him into the delivery room, later explaining to Jerry that she did not want him to see another man touching her. She did not think it was right.

A son, Jason, was born and Brudos, while continuing to ignore Karin, paid much attention to the infant, taking him along on errands and planning to teach the boy how to use his tools in the basement when he grew up. After Jason’s birth, however, the couple drifted apart even further. Susan, although she never told Jerry, was now actually repelled at the idea of having sex with him. She spent a lot of time out with her girlfriends, while Jerry was in his basement workshop fiddling with his electrical and electronic projects. Jerry’s mother, whom he openly hated, came over and babysat upstairs.

In 1967, another thing happened that may or may not have triggered Jerry Brudos on his path to serial murder. While repairing an electrical device he touched a live wire and received a tremendous jolt of power that knocked him off his feet. He was burned and dazed and sustained some neck injury. Brudos was very fortunate to have inexplicably survived the lethal current. As a result, Brudos would now suffer even more severe headaches, and would pass periods of time unable to work.

Shortly after the birth of his son and the accident, Jerry Brudos went out on one of his forays in which he knocked women down and stole their shoes. For some reason, however, this time he followed a woman back to her home. He waited until he thought she was asleep and broke into her apartment. When the woman awoke, Brudos pounced on her and strangled her into unconsciousness. He testified that her limp body aroused him to such an extent that he raped her. Brudos was now escalating into some kind of necrophiliac fantasy, even though he had not killed the woman. It is hard to say whether Brudos genuinely broke into the woman’s apartment to steal her shoes or deliberately stalked her. His change in MO is curious—why not just knock her down as before and take the shoes? Regardless, Brudos left the apartment with the shoes, which he claimed were his favorite of all he had stolen.

A serial killer’s first kill is often accidental or unplanned. It gives him the taste of blood, so to speak, and triggers his circular addiction for subsequent murders. We might wonder if there is such a thing as a “window” for some serial killers during which if they do not have an opportunity to commit their first murder, they never become serial killers. How many nonlethal sex offenders are separated only by chance from becoming serial killers? Some would say that it is just a matter of time for individuals destined to be serial killers—they will kill sooner or later; it is inevitable. Others say that some serial killers never start out with murder as part of their fantasy, and that the first homicide happens suddenly and unexpectedly during the commission of a lesser offense, but then, once committed, becomes incorporated into future offenses. The description is akin to human-eating lions and tigers, which, once they overcome their fear of people and get a taste of human flesh, never return to hunt wild game again.

We do know, by Jerry Brudos’s own testimony, that by the end of 1967 he was fantasizing about keeping preserved female corpses in a freezer so he could dress them in his favorite lingerie and pose them at will. But the actual killing itself was never part of Brudos’s prehomicidal fantasies.

One can only wonder what would have happened with Jerry Brudos if on January 20, 1968, encyclopedia saleswoman Linda Slawson had not gotten her addresses mixed up and accidentally called at the Brudos home, thinking she had an appointment there.

Jerry Brudos confessed to police that he was working in the yard when Slawson appeared at his house, saying she had an appointment. He showed her to the rear door and down to the basement, telling her he was interested in buying a set. Slawson must have been so eager to make a sale that she followed him down to her death. While Brudos’s mother was upstairs watching his little girl, Slawson sat on a stool in Jerry’s basement workshop and began her sales pitch. At some point Brudos slipped behind Slawson and struck her in the head with a two-by-four. He then strangled the young woman to death. He hid her body under the staircase, then went upstairs and asked his mother to go out and get some hamburgers.

Brudos then returned to the basement and took Slawson’s corpse out from under the staircase. The psychological drive behind his murder is clear in the answer he gave police when asked whether he remembered what Slawson was wearing. He responded that he could not remember her outer clothing but listed off to the police the precise color and style of lingerie. He said that he tried out different lingerie on her from his collection, dressing the dead woman like a “big doll.”
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Brudos kept the body into the night. Around 2:00
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. he loaded the corpse into his car and drove to a bridge over a river. He parked his car and took out the jack to make it look like he had a flat tire.

Just before he threw her over into the river he cut her foot off because he wanted to still keep some part of her. Brudos confessed to police that because he was right-handed he cut off her left foot. He took it home and kept it in his freezer. He would insert the frozen foot into different shoes from his collection and take pictures of it.
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One suspects that it was no coincidence that Jerry’s mother was just a few feet away on the next floor upstairs when he killed his first victim. Here he was, under the nose of the woman who had punished him for bringing back a pair of old shoes from a garbage dump when he was five, now hacking those shoes off the legs of real women, with their feet still inside. It was almost too simple to be true.

In the spring of 1968, the Brudoses moved to Salem into a house just a few blocks away from the Oregon State Hospital, where Jerry had been committed as a teenager. The house they rented had a garage that stood separately across a narrow breezeway, and Jerry was overjoyed by the big space for his “workshop.” He installed a heavy padlock on the door and an intercom. He told his wife never to go into the garage without calling him on the intercom. The reason, he said, was that he had set up a photo darkroom and if she opened the door, she might ruin the work he was doing.

Brudos bought a huge freezer and installed it in the garage. Susan complained that it was pointless to lock her away from the freezer when she needed to prepare dinner, but Brudos insisted she just tell him what she needed from the freezer and he would bring it to her. This annoyed Susan, as sometimes she just wanted to look over all the things in the freezer for an idea of what to prepare.

Susan noticed that Jerry was putting on more weight and getting fat and tubby. One day she jokingly told him he was getting too fat. Jerry left the room without saying a word and then returned about ten minutes later. Susan was shocked to see Jerry dressed in a bra with stuffing for breasts, a girdle with stockings, and huge high-heeled shoes. It was the strangest thing she had seen in her young life. Jerry asked her if he looked thinner now and Susan laughed nervously, not knowing what to say. After an awkward silence, Jerry left and returned as himself again. They never talked about it afterward and both behaved as if it never happened.

In November 1968, Jerry Brudos again killed unexpectedly. He encountered Jan Whitney on the highway by chance on his way from work. Her car had broken down and Brudos stopped. After inspecting the car, he said that he could fix it for her, but they would need to drive back to his house nearby for him to get his tools. Jan went along.

When they got to the house, Jerry told Jan that his wife had not come home yet and they would have to wait a few minutes for her to let him in so he could get his tools. Jan sat inside the car, which was parked in the driveway of Jerry’s house. Brudos nonchalantly slipped into the backseat of the car behind Jan. In his statement to the police, Brudos said that he engaged Whitney in a little game, asking her if she could close her eyes and, without moving her hands to demonstrate, describe how to tie a shoelace. Whitney went for the challenge and as she sat there with her eyes closed attempting to describe how to tie a shoe, Brudos slipped a strap around her throat and strangled her in the car. He then raped her corpse in the car. Afterward he carried her body into his workshop and dressed her in some of the clothes from his collection, photographed her, and had sex with her corpse again. Afterward he hoisted her up from a hook in his garage ceiling. He decided to keep the corpse.

Brudos confessed to police that he kept Whitney’s corpse hanging in the garage for days. He would rush home from work, dress the body up in various items of clothing, and have sex with it. He wanted something of her to keep and he cut off one of her breasts and experimented in preserving it. He stuffed it with sawdust and mounted it with tacks on a board like a trophy. He also tried taking a plastic mold from it in the hopes of producing lead paperweights but he was not satisfied with the result.
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Brudos got rid of Jan Whitney’s body only after the police nearly discovered it accidentally. Leaving the corpse hanging from the hook in the ceiling, Brudos took Susan and the kids on a Thanksgiving weekend trip. While away, an automobile passing the Brudos house skidded and crashed into the garage, knocking a hole through the wall. When the police arrived at the scene, they actually shone a light through the hole to inspect the damage, but did not see the dead woman hanging from the ceiling. Not wanting to violate any constitutional rights by entering Jerry’s property without his permission, the police left a card asking Jerry to call them when he got home. They needed to inspect the garage to determine damage for their report. When Jerry got home, he wrapped Jan’s body in plastic and hid her in the water pump shed behind the garage. He then called the police and let them inspect the damage. Afterward he threw Jan Whitney’s body into a river, weighed down with a heavy automotive part. Neither Whitney’s nor Slawson’s bodies were ever recovered, and Brudos refused to tell the police exactly where he dumped them.