Lust Killer (29 page)

AFTERWORD

March 1, 1988

Will Jerome Henry Brudos ever get out of prison? The rational answer is no. However, an overview of "lifers" who
have
been released on parole after ten or twelve or fourteen years is not reassuring. In the vast majority of states in America, "life in prison" means somewhere between ten and fourteen years. "Good behavior" generally cuts sentences by a third. In Oregon, a convicted killer can technically apply for parole in six months. While parole has never been granted so soon, most convicted killers in Oregon are back on the streets within a dozen years.

One Portland man, convicted in the early sixties in the mutilation murder of a housewife, served a little over twelve years in the Oregon State Prison in Salem. During his "life" sentence, he was trained to be an apprentice plumber. He was a model prisoner— as most sadistic sociopaths are. Within a month of his parole, he repeated his crime, using an identical M.O. (Modus Operandi). He was arrested for killing and dismembering a woman he met in a bar, although detectives believe his actual new toll is three victims, not one.

The same thing happened with an Oregon City murderer who was released in the late seventies and went to work as a school janitor. He was subsequently arrested and convicted of killing the high school teacher whom he had dated until she discovered his criminal record. When she confronted him, and threatened to tell school authorities, he killed her.

Oregon is no worse than any other state. It is only representative of a profoundly dangerous problem, and this book happens to be about a killer who operated in Oregon. Prisoners convicted of heinous crimes are released every day in every state
years
before their sentence release date. In some cases, their prison records have been exemplary. In others, infraction slips have mysteriously disappeared before they ever reached the hands of the parole board.

There are many reasons for parole to occur so much earlier than the layman might expect. Prisons are full to bursting, and the cost of keeping one prisoner in a penitentiary for just one year ranges from $6,000 to $15,000. "Old" crimes tend to be forgotten, buried under the mountains of media coverage of new crimes that mount up inexorably year after year. A man whose name has been infamous becomes just another number after he has been in prison for two decades. He becomes a "nobody" in the world of crime.

And sometimes he gets out.
Often
, he gets out. So many killers slip through the cracks of the justice system; only the hue and cry of the media or victims' support groups serves to remind parole boards, prison administrators, and legislators of the crimes that sent him to prison for "life."

Jerome Brudos. Is it possible that he too may one day convince a parole board in Oregon that he is safe to be at large?

Quite.

That possibility is the impetus behind this book. The "monster" may sleep, but he only slumbers—waiting for his chance to roam free once more. He does not get better. There is no psychiatric treatment today that cures a sadistic sociopath. Minor behavior modification is the most studies have been able to promise, and that modification usually disappears when active treatment ceases.

Jerry Brudos had been in the Oregon State Penitentiary for almost twenty years. He has changed little in appearance in those two decades. He has long since regained the weight he lost in his first months in prison, and he is once again a bulky, lumbering giant of a man. He is still freckled, but his hair is much thinner, and the blond is considerably grayed. He is forty-nine years old now.

There is an old saying among convicts: No matter how long your sentence, you only do "hard time" for one year. The literal translation is that human beings acclimate. Prison becomes a little world.

Jerry Brudos has acclimated. Since prison mail is not censored in Oregon, he is able to pursue his overweening interest. He sends away for—and receives—every catalog he can find featuring, of course, women's shoes. He stacks them up in the comer of his cell for slow perusal and study.

He earns spending money by making leather key fobs. He always liked the touch of leather. Over the years, he has probably turned out hundreds of the key rings stamped with jobs, hobbies, avocations, college logos, and mascots. Prison visitors who choose to can pay a dollar or two for a slightly ghoulish souvenir. A whole display board is filled with leather key fobs that Jerry Brudos once touched and shaped.

The tags read "Jerry Brudos-Box 33284."

Today, with the evolution of electronics into a world that Brudos could only have imagined twenty years ago, he has become totally involved with computers. The man whose writing seems to be that of a near illiterate remains a genius with electronics. The Oregon State Penitentiary has a network of computers and word processors and who would be more adept at keeping them humming than Jerry Brudos? Some informants insist he "runs the whole prison computer system," and others deem him only a technician who helps out.

Were it not for his fetishes and his fantasies, for his obsession with death, Jerry Brudos— on the outside—could probably have made a fortune working with computers.

But, in the end, murder became paramount to Jerry Brudos. To the layman, a killer is a killer is a killer. To the criminologist, there are as many gradations of the violence in murder as there are colors in the rainbow. Humans kill for financial gain. Humans kill because of jealousy. Humans kill one another for revenge or out of fear or even to achieve a kind of infamy. But the lust killer, the sadistic killer, the serial killer, is a breed unto himself.

Little Jerry Brudos, the five-year-old who was transfixed by a pair of women's shoes, and who then evolved through so-called "minor" sex crimes over thirty years to commit multiple murders fits the majority of the guidelines established for the lust killer/serial killer. It is a category that Jerry Brudos resents mightily. He threatened to sue an Oregon newspaper for deeming him a "lust killer." "I'm a killer, yes," he wrote. "But I'm not a
lust
killer
." A matter of pride … or semantics? (Brudos withdrew his suit when he was reminded of his psychiatric report.)

Because the number of these murderers has grown alarmingly in America since the early 1960s, the Behavioral Science Unit of the F.B.I. carries on continual research to update our knowledge of them.

During the black years when the big man with the friendly, almost-shy grin acted out his secret fantasies, there was no definitive term to describe his psychopathology. The phrase "serial killer" had yet to be coined. In the 1960s, the press lumped his kind of killer in with all the others who murdered many victims. "Mass murderers" they were deemed. But this freckled giant was not a mass murderer, nor was Albert De Salvo, "The Boston Strangler," whose crimes had taken place 3000 miles away and half a decade earlier. Nor was Jack-the-Ripper a mass murderer as he prowled night after night through the narrow streets of London's red-light district.

They were all serial killers, men who killed their victims one at a time over a long time—men who would never stop until they were arrested or too old—or dead.

How far back in criminal history can we trace serial killers? Possibly to the very beginning. Bob Ressler, of the F.B.I.'s Behavioral Science Unit, suggests that the werewolves of gypsy fables were, in actuality, not murderous mutants at all, but serial killers. Humans, after all, but as deadly as werewolves.

By 1988, the term "serial killer" would be well known, these killers-by-the-numbers a favorite topic of talk shows, and the concern of law enforcement officials all over America. These are the men who stalk and kill and wait … and stalk and kill again and wait.

Jerry Brudos was one of them. Twenty years ago, this man with the broad bland face was as dangerous and deadly as any murderer since time began. But, in 1968, he was tragically ahead of his time. For a long time no one knew he was out there, scheming and trolling for victims.

Even when they found him, he was difficult to categorize. Today, the Jerome Henry Brudos case is used by criminologists, detectives, professors, psychologists, and psychiatrists as one of the classic examples of murderous horror. Infamous, Brudos is nevertheless sought out by experts who would interview him, seeking some way to untangle the bloody threads of his life. He is not only a serial killer; he is a lust killer.

The worst of the worst.

Special Agents R. Roy Hazelwood and John E. Douglas have isolated the profile of this most dreaded killer in their paper "The Lust Murderer."

They might well have been describing Jerome Henry Brudos.

Basically, there are two types of personalities, who commit lust murders: the Organized Nonsocial and Disorganized Asocial (and occasionally, one who possesses characteristics of both). Jerry Brudos' personality fits into the parameters of the first type easily. According to Hazelwood and Douglas, the Organized Nonsocial killer is a person who is completely heedless of the welfare of society; he cares only for himself. Other humans matter
only
in the ways they fulfill—or deny—his needs. While he dislikes other people, he does not avoid them. Rather, he shows the rest of the world an amiable facade. It allows him to manipulate them toward his own goals. He is quite cunning, and he plans well.

The lust killer is a man full of fantasy—Brudos, for example, drew pictures in his mind of the "killing place" where he could imprison captive women, torture them, and then freeze them for his pleasure forever. He was fascinated early on with pornography, and used it to build on his own fantasies. Psychiatrists detect a glaring lack of self-confidence in the lust killer. Like Brudos, he can ward off reality by sinking into his cruel fantasies. Therein lies his power over all the women who have rejected him.

For Brudos, the first rejection by a woman is easy to pinpoint: his own mother did not like him. He could never please her in any way.

The true lust killer finds his victims because they come to him. That is,
they cross his path
. He does not choose them ahead of the killing time, but he is always ready. Linda Slawson came to Jerry Brudos' home to sell encyclopedias. Although she had gone to the wrong address, for
him
it was propitious. Jan Whitney's car had broken down on the freeway just moments before Brudos passed by on his way home from work. Karen Sprinker had the misfortune to be in the parking garage of a department store while Brudos was seeking another woman, a woman who had evaded him. And Linda Salee too walked out of a busy store at the most dangerous moment—only to meet Jerry Brudos.

 Until the terrible moment when they became his choice, he had never seen any of them before. …

They had crossed his path.

The motivations behind the commission of a lust murder are emotions alien to a normal male. The lust killer is a sadist for whom sex and cruelty are so interwoven that, for him, one does not exist without the other. Although he may deny interest in sex when he is arrested, it is quite probably the most intense stimulus in his life. The victim is not a real person to him. Indeed, there
are
no other
real
people in his life. Only himself. His victim is only a vehicle for his own pleasure.

Jerry Brudos has told psychiatrists that, once he began his attacks, there was never any thought of not carrying through. He killed under the influence of an urge that even he himself could not—cannot—define. It was something that was to be done. His victims had been drawn into the fantasies that had become reality to him.

Because Jerry Brudos was really a most inadequate man, a "Casper Milquetoast" among other men, he needed to demean and possess women. He could not seem to possess Darcie, as hard as he tried to control her. She was slipping away from him—at least in his own mind. But he
could
possess his love-hate objects: women. He could trap them, torture them, confine them, and eventually destroy them. When he did that, his anxiety was assuaged for a time. In Brudos' case, the time seemed to be about a month. Just as Jim Stovall had predicted, Brudos prowled under a pseudomenstrual cycle.

The lust killer's modus operandi is marked by brutality and sadism, say Hazelwood and Douglas. Invariably the victim's bodies are mutilated, and mutilated in areas that have sexual connotation: the genitals, the breasts, the buttocks. Brudos' fixation was on the breasts; he destroyed them by literally cutting them away from the dead victims.

It is rare for a lust killer to shoot his victims; he requires the direct contact of beating, strangulation, or stabbing. Jerry Brudos used the leather postal strap and his hanging device. As with other lust killers, the main portion of his sexual attack occurred while his victims were unconscious or dead. His innate fear of female rejection continued to such a degree that, even when his victims were helplessly bound, he could not risk their fighting him.

Most lust killers have a scenario that requires they take a souvenir of their killings. Here, too, Jerry Brudos worked in a pattern that was predictable. He saved shoes, undergarments, and photographs, and, exceeding even heretofore infamous lust killers, he saved the severed breasts and attempted to make paperweights out of them.

There is one characteristic common to most lust killers that may be surprising. They seem obsessed by driving, often driving hundreds of miles. They travel long distances trolling for victims, and Brudos was no exception. His battered station wagon was constantly on the I-5 freeway, going to Portland, back to Salem, then to Corvallis. This may be a manifestation of their anxiety, of the need to keep moving. More likely, it is their innate cunning that inspires this; they have learned that they will avoid detection more easily if they commit their crimes in widely separated police jurisdictions. They seek to have their "patterns" known only to themselves.

Agents Douglas and Hazelwood have determined that most lust killers are relatively young—between seventeen and twenty-five years of age. Brudos began his sexual crimes at the age of sixteen, but he managed to avoid serious consequences for his heinous crimes until he was thirty years old. In that way, he was, perhaps, cleverer than most, and in his perverted mind, he considered it something of an accomplishment. When he was finally face-to-face with Jim Stovall, he was eager to brag about his crimes.