Lust Killer (8 page)

No blood. No sign of struggle. There were a few personal items belonging to Jan Whitney. There were no keys.

In processing the Rambler, state police I.D. technicians lifted a good latent print from one of its hubcaps. With the technology available in 1968, a single latent print was worthless to detectives unless they had a suspect's print to compare it to. (FBI fingerprint files had single-print information only on the ten most-wanted criminals.)

The discovery of her car in the lonely parking lot made things look ominous for Jan Whitney. She would have no reason to be there on a foggy, dank November evening. If she had left her inoperable car and attempted to walk along the freeway for help, she had not been seen. Since pedestrians along I-5 are quite noticeable because they are so few and far between, it would seem that
someone
reading news stories of her disappearance would have come forward if she had been seen that night. A search of ditches and the land bordering the freeway netted nothing. Not one sign of the missing woman. If she had fallen and been injured, or even killed after being struck by a passing car, the men and dogs that searched would have found her.

There seemed to be no ready explanation for the fact that her car was found in the parking lot at the foot of the Santiam Pass. Jan Whitney had been headed for McMinnville, and a detour toward the pass made no sense. Yet her car was there. Why?

Jan Whitney was gone, just as inexplicably as Linda Slawson had disappeared in Portland ten months to the day earlier.

Thanksgiving came two days after Jan Whitney vanished. Jerry Brudos took his family away for the holidays to visit friends and family. While they were gone, there was an accident. A car went out of control on Center Street, sliding on rain-slick streets and crashing into Brudos' garage workshop, damaging the structure and punching a hole in the exterior wall. The Salem police investigated the accident, but they could not get into the garage to estimate the damage because the doors were all locked.

When the family returned, Jerry was agitated to see that there was a hole in the wall of his private workshop. He told Darcie he would take care of some things and then call the police.

A few hours later, he contacted the Salem police accident investigator who had left a card and unlocked the garage so that the officer could check the damage from the inside. When this was accomplished, Jerry nailed boards over the splintered wood and the workshop was completely closed off again.

Jerry was away from home that night for some time, but Darcie didn't think much of it; he was often gone for hours, and he never explained where he had been when he returned.

The Oregon State Police continued their probe into the mysterious disappearance of Jan Whitney, but all the man-hours of work netted exactly nothing.

Oregon State Police Lieutenant Robert White attempted to trace the anonymous correspondent who had mailed a letter from Albany. Sent in a plain envelope, and tediously printed as if the writer wished to disguise his handwriting, the letter said the writer had been at the Santiam rest stop where Miss Whitney's Rambler was abandoned, and, more startling, indicated that he had been present when Jan Whitney disappeared.

Lieutenant White appealed to the public, asking the informant to come forward. But that was the end of it. If the writer was telling the truth, he chose for his own reasons to remain silent. He might have gleaned his information from newspaper accounts of the missing woman, or he might have had actual knowledge, either as a witness or as a perpetrator. There was no way of telling.

Jerry Brudos continued to commute to his job at Lebanon, Oregon—a tiny hamlet just east of the I-5 freeway-beyond the Albany exit.

Christmas came, and the new year, and Jerry Brudos celebrated his thirtieth birthday. His headaches had improved for a while, but then he felt nervous again and they returned worse than before.

Darcie thought about leaving him. But she had no skills to get a job, and there was no money, and she did not believe in divorce.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jan Whitney had been missing for four months when spring came again to the Willamette Valley. Linda Slawson had been gone for fourteen months. They had disappeared fifty miles apart, and there were not enough similarities between the two cases to allow law officers to connect them. The girls were both young and slender, and attractive-—but one apparently had vanished from the streets of Portland, and the other from the freeway south of Salem. At any given time, there are always a handful of women who have disappeared in a metropolitan area. Most have chosen to leave for their own reasons, and eventually return or at least contact their families.

Some do not. Stephanie Vilcko, sixteen, had left her Portland-area home to go swimming in July 1968—and never returned. Stephanie's disappearance came to a tragic denouement on March 18, 1969. A Forest Grove high-school teacher discovered her skeletonized body along the banks of Gales Creek five miles northwest of Forest Grove. By the time she was found, the ravages of time and weather had obliterated tissue that might have told forensic pathologists how she had died. Wind, ice, and water had also carried away any shred of physical evidence left by a killer—if, indeed, there was a killer.

Stephanie, Linda, and Jan were only three among a dozen or more such cases. There had been headlines when the women first vanished, and then column-long articles on back pages of area papers, and finally, small items from time to time. In police departments, the files on the missing and dead women were growing thicker. Cases which detectives wryly refer to as "losers" are always thicker and more complex than the "winners"; they may slip from the public's mind-—but they are never, never forgotten by the men who work through one frustrating false lead after another.

Thursday, March 27, 1969, was a typical example of spring in Salem, Oregon; the daffodils around the courthouse were in bloom, along with the earliest rhododendrons and azaleas, but they were alternately buffeted by rainy winds and warmed by a pale sun washing down through the cool air.

Karen Sprinker, nineteen years old and a freshman at Oregon State University in Corvallis, was enjoying a short vacation between terms and had come home to Salem to visit her parents. Her father was a prominent veterinarian in Salem, and Karen had elected to follow him into the field of medicine, although she planned to treat human patients. She was carrying a heavy premed schedule at Oregon State, and earning top grades.

Karen was beautiful, but not in a sultry way; she embodied the sweetness and warmth of an innocent young woman. In an age when chastity was becoming old-fashioned, Karen Sprinker was a virgin, confident in her own principles. She had thick, almost black hair that fell below her shoulders and tumbled across her high forehead in waving bangs. Her eyes were dark brown, and her smile was wide and trusting.

She had never had a reason not to trust.

Karen had graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in Salem in the class of 1968. She was class salutatorian, a member of the National Honor Society, a National Merit Scholarship finalist, winner of the Salem Elks' Leadership Award, and a member of the Marion County Youth Council. With her intelligence and concern for people, she was a natural as a future doctor. All things being equal, she would be practicing by 1979, a full-fledged M.D. before she was thirty.

Shortly before noon on March 27, Karen Sprinker headed for the Meier and Frank Department Store in Salem. She was to meet her mother for lunch in the store's restaurant, and then the two of them were going to shop for spring clothes that Karen could take back to school.

Meier and Frank's is the biggest department store in Salem, located in the downtown area. It is a block and a half east of what were the Salem Police Department's offices in 1969; it is a block and a half north of the Marion County sheriff's offices in the basement of the courthouse. The store complex contains its own many-tiered inside parking garage, a nicety for shoppers, who can avoid walking through the rain that is a definite possibility from November until June.

Mrs. Sprinker waited in the luncheon room for Karen, who was driving her own car. Their lunch date was set for twelve, and Karen was unfailingly prompt. At twelve-fifteen Karen's mother looked at her watch, puzzled. She waved the menu away and asked for a cup of coffee, trying to concentrate on the models wending their way through the crowded room while they showed the store's new outfits.

At twelve-thirty she began to watch the door for sight of her daughter. People nearby finished their meals, and new groups sat down. And still Karen didn't appear. Her mother wondered if there had been some mistake about the time. No, she was sure Karen had understood.

Mrs. Sprinker left the restaurant and found a pay phone nearby. She called the family home, but no one answered. She went back to the lunchroom, but Karen still hadn't arrived. At length she left a message with the hostess, asking her to tell Karen that her mother had gone home—and would be there waiting for a call.

Karen wasn't at home. Everything there was just as Mrs. Sprinker had left it. Karen wasn't at her father's clinic, nor had she called there.

Karen Sprinker's parents went through all the steps that worried parents take when a dependable, thoughtful child cannot be found. If Karen had been an unpredictable girl, or a rebellious girl, it would have been much less frightening. But Karen had always been the kind of daughter who called home if she was going to be even fifteen minutes late. She was happy with her life and with her family. She loved college, and she'd been looking forward to the shopping trip, to the chance for some girl talk with her mother.

The Sprinkers called all of Karen's friends—and none of them had seen or heard from her. All of them were as puzzled as the Sprinkers, stressing that Karen had no problems that her parents might not have been aware of.

Her mother was aware that Karen had been in her menstrual period, and wondered if perhaps she had suddenly been seized with severe cramps, or even if she might have fainted. She had never had unusually severe periods, but there was always the possibility that she had become ill. Her parents called Salem hospitals to see if she might have been admitted.

None of the hospital admitting records listed Karen Sprinker. No illness. No accident.

Reluctantly going to the police-—because that step seemed to mark Karen's disappearance as something so much more ominous—the Sprinkers reported Karen as missing.

The Salem police tried to reassure Karen's parents; they had seen so many "missing" people come back with reasonable explanations of why they were gone. Teenagers, particularly, tend to walk away of their own accord. They often have secrets their parents do not suspect, or romances that they think their parents won't approve of. Because they have never been parents, they cannot understand the worry that results when they are late getting home.

The officer taking the complaint urged the Sprinkers to try to remember something that Karen might have said, some hint she might have given about something she planned to do or someplace she wanted to go.

"Could she have gone back to her dorm at Oregon State?" "No," her mother said impatiently. "I've already called. She hasn't been back since the term ended. Her room is locked."

As the Sprinkers painted a picture of their daughter's habits and her consideration for others, the officer felt a chill.
This
girl didn't sound at all like a runaway. She didn't sound like a girl who might suddenly decide to get married or take off with a boyfriend.

In almost any police department in America, the policy is not to take a formal complaint on a missing adult for twenty-four hours-simply because most of the missing come back within that period. If there are signs of foul play, then of course the search is begun immediately. The reason for the twenty-four-hour delay is pragmatic. There is not enough manpower even in a big police department to look for everyone; there would be no time for other police business. Missing-persons detectives can concentrate only on cases that deal with true vanishings. If a child is missing or if there are indications that the missing person has come to harm, the twenty-four-hour limit is forgotten.

A preliminary report was taken, listing "Karen Elena Sprinker-missing since 12:30 hours, March 27, 1969. Meier and Frank (?)" Then the Sprinkers went home to sit by the phone, to listen for the sound of Karen coming through the front door.

They waited all night long, without any word from Karen.

Salem police went to the parking garage at Meier and Frank, on the off-chance that Karen had come to the store but for some reason had not appeared for her date at the restaurant. They searched through the levels of the parking garage and found no sign of the missing girl, nor signs of anything unusual in the shadows of the looming concrete ramp that wound around and up.

Not until they reached the roof. And there they found Karen Sprinker's car, parked neatly between the diagonal lines of a parking slot, and locked. There was no way to tell how long it had been there; Meier and Frank puts no time limit on shoppers' parking.

Like Jan Whitney's car, there was nothing about it that was out of the ordinary. Some of Karen's books were on the seat, but otherwise it contained nothing. When it was hauled in for processing, technicians at the lab found no blood and no semen on the seat covers or the door panels. There were no cigarettes in the ashtray, and the latent prints lifted from the steering wheel, dashboard, and other surfaces were only those of the Sprinker family.

Whatever had happened to Karen Sprinker had not happened in the car itself.

Scores of shoppers parked on the roof floor every day, and they had only to walk down a flight of concrete stairs to reach a door into the store itself. A matter of a few minutes. Karen had come to the store in broad daylight. That figured, because she was to meet her mother at noon. It would seem to be one of the safest spots in the city of Salem.

But the investigators, led by Jim Stovall, hunkered down and checked the floor from the missing girl's car, down the steps, and all the way to the door for signs of something, anything she might have dropped—even drops of blood.