Brudos is one of the most shocking serial killers ever and the subject of Ann Rule’s book The Lust Killer. He abducted, tortured & mutilated young women in his garage, right under the noses of his wife and children. An analysis of the psychological factors that created this monster.

Late in the afternoon on April 21, 1969, Sharon Wood, 24, left her secretarial job in Portland to meet with her estranged husband, who wanted to discuss a divorce. She entered the basement level of a parking garage to look for her car when a tall, pudgy man approached her. She later told police (that Ann Rule accessed for the book The Lust Killer) that she had sensed someone behind her and had tried to return to an area where she could hear other people. But then someone tapped her shoulder and she turned around. The man was holding a pistol.

He told her not to scream, but this sudden encounter both frightened and enraged her. In a split second, she decided 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 was and outweighed her by nearly one hundred pounds. She had barely a chance against him, but she believed that if she didn’t struggle while someone might still hear her, she’d die that day. Instinct told her that this man had murder on his mind.

Sharon kicked at him with her high-heeled shoes and screamed again. 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. He tried to free himself, but could not, so now he was struggling. He grabbed her hair and tried to force her to the floor, but she continued to resist with all her strength. She was not going to let him assault her.

Yet he managed to slam her head on the concrete, dazing her. She relaxed her jaw and let him go. She then heard another car coming, and her attacker picked up the gun he’d dropped and left. She knew no more. Someone apparently called the police and Sharon found herself giving a shaken statement. It had been a tall man with blue eyes and freckles, she recalled. She’d know him if she saw him again. Yet 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 MO in approaching women and strengthened his resolve to be more careful. She survived, but not long afterward another young woman did not.

The next afternoon, a 15-year-old girl in Salem, Oregon, complained about a large man with freckles attempting to force her into a sports car. The incidents seemed related but provided no real leads. There were no witnesses and the man described in both cases had left no trail. Investigators did not realize they were in the midst of a serial murder investigation.

It was a difficult time, with unrest across the country. In 1968, America had been stung by the assassination of presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, the insolence of the Chicago Seven at the Democratic Convention, and the violence on college campuses over the Vietnam War. A whole subculture experimented with drugs and the occult. And the country was about to see many more serial killers.

It would take a while before investigators understood that they were looking for a serial predator. Even then, they would not fully understand the sort of monstrous urges that drove him. On the day they questioned Sharon Wood, three women were already dead.

In 1968, Linda Slawson worked for a book company, going door to door to persuade families to purchase sets of encyclopedias.

She was only nineteen years old. It was January 26, and her route had taken her to a neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Some authors say she was looking for another house when she went there, but no one knows what actually took place, aside from the story told by the person she encountered.

And no one ever saw or heard from Linda Slawson again. Yet the mystery would be revived the following year when other young women turned up missing.

Four months later, on March 27, 1969, Karen Sprinker, 19, went missing. Vronsky says that she was home from college and her mother had expected to meet her for lunch at a downtown restaurant. She waited an hour and then grew worried. Karen would not have missed this appointment. In fact, it turned out that she did park her car at the garage for the store where her mother was waiting. But the car sat empty and Karen never returned to claim it. Shoppers in the area described seeing a very tall and strange-looking woman in the area. One witness said that when this person got close to her, she saw that it was 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 all went together.

Only four weeks later, Linda Salee, 22, appeared to have been abducted from a shopping mall. She’d been there buying a gift for her boyfriend, but had failed to meet him that evening. She also did not show up to work, and her car was found abandoned. Like the others, there was no sign if violence in the car, or any that a stranger had entered it. Of course, her boyfriend was checked out, but nothing indicated that he should remain a suspect. In the days following her disappearance, no sign of Salee turned up.

A young photo of Jerry Brudos

The police wondered if there were any connections among these girls, and a few even thought about Linda Slawson, the encyclopedia salesperson. They laid out time lines, noting the fact that all of the girls had disappeared toward the latter half of each month. And all of them were young white females. But that’s as much as the investigators had. That is, until human remains were found in a nearby river.

He told the police officers interrogating him that he was in the yard when she came to his home. He started to lie to her right away to get her to come inside. She did so readily. He sent his wife and kids out to eat and then when a friend came over unexpectedly, Brudos had to spend some time getting rid of him. Once alone with the dead girl, he quickly undressed her. He recalled every detail, at least of her underwear, and was especially pleased that she had been wearing a pair of red panties. He then got some items from his own collection and redressed her in them. Realizing that he could not keep her there, he removed her foot with a hacksaw, stuck it in the freezer, and then took the body to the Willamette River. To make certain she would not be found, he had tied her to a car engine before throwing her over the bridge railing.

Then he went home and savored the part of her that he’d kept — a reminder of his first kill and a trophy that he could play with. He had so many high-heeled shoes and he could try them on this severed foot and take pictures. He did that as long as he could, but when the foot deteriorated, he tied it to a weight and threw it into the river as well. He also recalled for police that Slawson had a class ring on her finger.

Brudos, who has been in prison longer than any other inmate in Oregon, periodically comes up for parole, inspiring a flurry of letters from Oregon residents to the parole board to prevent him from going free. Brudos makes a plea for it, insisting that he’s no longer a threat to society, and even claiming he did not commit the murders. He’s also tried to mitigate his crimes by blaming his mother’s abuse and neglect. In appeals to the board, he’s mentioned having blackouts during his crime spree and has indicated that at the time the world had seemed increasingly less real to him.

On June 2, 1969, as reported in the local papers, Brudos was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Karen Sprinker, and the police prepared a search warrant. Brudos believed he’d removed the evidence from his workshop by telling his wife to burn his stash of female clothing. But he was not smirking over this for long. Darcie had not complied.

A team entered the Brudos home and workshop to search for items that might link him to one or more of the victims, as well as to learn more about his methods. What they discovered there was shocking. They took photographs of everything, including the hook-and-pulley in the ceiling used to hoist bodies into the air. They found nylon cord and a leather strap that might have been used for murder. From a shelf they removed a mold made from the gruesome “paperweight” that Brudos had described — the one of a female breast. They also discovered a 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 were of Brudos in female underwear, but the most important ones contained horrifying images of the victims. They found one of a woman suspended from the hook-and-pulley with a black hood over her head. 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.

The photograph that really caught their attention, as reported by Rule, was one that clinched the case against this monstrous murderer — even in the minds of his own attorneys. “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 floorIn 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.

Now the police had good physical evidence against him. They had also confirmed from a survivor the details of a rape that Brudos had admitted to, although this woman had been unable to identify her attacker. In that incident, she had lost several pairs of shoes and some underwear.

It was time to proceed through the legal process. Some sources claim that neither Slawson’s nor Whitney’s bodies were found, while Rule indicates that Jan Whitney’s was recovered in the summer of 1970. The district attorney nevertheless had sufficient evidence in 1969 in the other cases to go forward. They had the photographs and the confession. That was a “body” of evidence.

He attempted with whining and tears to convince the psychiatrists that he was himself a victim of a terrible mother, but most of them saw that he just felt sorry for himself. He added that in 1967 he’d suffered an accident. While repairing a device he had contacted a live wire, which had knocked him off his feet. He’d survived but had suffered afterward from severe headaches. He then began knocking women down to steal their clothing, and had committed a rape in a woman’s home. In that situation, he said that he’d been unable to control himself. He said that he then began to fantasize about keeping female corpses in his freezer. He wanted to be able to dress and pose them however he liked, whenever he liked. In order words, he wanted a life-sized doll.

After his first murder he had purchased a large freezer. He had now activated his fantasy and he wanted to be more prepared in the event he had such an opportunity again. He was clearly a man who liked being in control. In fact, he insisted that if he were treated in a hospital, he would get better, and he was determined to get out and raise his own children. He was oblivious to the seriousness of his situation, but not confused or disoriented. He was arrogant and revealed no sense of remorse.

Jerry Brudos Around the End of his 3 Life Sentences in Prison

When Brudos pled guilty in mid-1969 to the strangulation murders of three young women, he was convicted and imprisoned. Apparently, states Salem-news.com, crime writer Ann Rule, who authored the only book about Brudos, predicted he’d be in prison for about 36 years.A model prisoner and computer expert, Brudos held out hope for release, going before the parole board at regular intervals and insisting he was no longer a danger to society. However, 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. Yet he’d also admitted that killing had relieved stress. Although he was denied parole, over the years he received privileges in the prison, including unsupervised mobility. He was found dead in his bed around 5:10 in the morning. Other reports indicate that he’d had treatment for colon cancer, and during the week before his death had been going to the prison infirmary.

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