Lust Killer (18 page)

Jim Stovall thought of the few killers in history whose fetishes had extended to mutilation and subsequent preservation of the bodies. It was a blessedly rare phenomenon. Until Brudos, Ed Gein of Wisconsin was the best known—and the little recluse who had hated his mother so much that he had killed her and other older women and made vests of their dried flesh. But Ed Gein had been a lifelong bachelor, absolutely ruled by his hated mother; this man had a wife, children, an education, and a brilliance in his work. And still he recounted the acting out of his terrible fantasies in a voice as commonplace as if he were describing how to rewire a lamp.

Brudos' voice cut into Stovall's thoughts. "You guys almost caught me on Jan Whitney. I was scared to death."

"What do you mean?"

"The wife and I went to Portland around Thanksgiving, and I left the girl hanging in my shop. Some guy drove his car into my garage and left a hole in it. The police came out, and they wanted to get into the garage, but it was locked. That was close.

"When I got home, I found their card and so I took the girl out of the workshop and put her in the pump house in the backyard and covered her with a sheet of plastic. Then I called the cops and they came out and checked my workshop. They never suspected anything, and there was this wide-open hole there. If they'd shone a light in, they maybe could have seen her hanging there. … "

If only. If only. Those thoughts came up so often in a homicide investigation. If the victim had not gone where she had—if she had not somehow crossed the path of a killer ready to strike. If
this
had happened, then the tragedy would not have happened. For those who believe in fate, it is easier to fathom. If only Jan Whitney's body had been discovered in November 1968, then Brudos would have been stopped. Then Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee would be alive.

Stovall easily kept Brudos going on his monologue, so caught up was the prisoner in revealing his terrible scenario. "You did dispose of the body then?"

"I threw her in a river. I weighted her down and threw her in a river. The water was very high."

"Which river?"

"The Willamette."

"Where was that—at what point on the river?"

"I don't care to say."

"Was it in Portland?"

"No."

"Was it the Long Tom—and not the Willamette?"

"I told you it was the Willamette. That's enough. It was a long time ago. It doesn't matter."

Stovall wondered at Brudos' sudden reluctance; he would give the most minute and horrific details, and then balk at something that seemed simple. He seemed to believe that, without a body, he could not be convicted of killing Jan Whitney. He did not know that "corpus delecti" is not a human body at all, but rather "the body of the crime." He knew little of the law, obviously, despite his superior attitude.

"Was it at Independence?"

"I can't say."

Stovall mentioned other bridges in the Salem area, but he thought Brudos' reaction to the suggestion of the bridge at Independence was the most telling. No body had been found there, and it might never be after six months without discovery.

"Jan Whitney's car was not on the freeway when it was found. It was somewhere else."

"I went back and moved it after I had her hoisted up in my shop. I tied it to mine with a tow bar and pulled it into the rest stop at Santiam. I was going to get rid of it entirely, but I saw three state police cars while I was towing it—two going south and one going north. I couldn't take the chance that one of them might stop me and ask about her car. So I just towed it into the Santiam rest stop, locked it, and left it."

"What would you have used to weight Jan Whitney's body down? Whatever it was, it must have been effective."

"Scrap iron. I had scrap iron out in the pumphouse."

Jim Stovall considered the information he had elicited from Jerry Brudos thus far. He had two confessions-—verbal confessions—on homicides whose victims might never be found. Jerry Brudos certainly had knowledge that no one else could have known; he had mentioned details that had been withheld from the news media. He knew the dates, the places, and the manner of death. Or did he? Without the bodies, no one could say what the manner of death had been. One thing was certain: Brudos' confessed acts against nature had grown increasingly violent. First the theft of undergarments and shoes, then the choking of women, then rape, and then murder.

The homicide of Linda Slawson had, according to Brudos, not involved rape—only the dressing and redressing of the body. Jan Whitney's body had been violated again and again after death. It was as if the obsessive perversions that drove Brudos grew like a cancer within him, demanding always new horrors to satisfy and titillate that malignancy.

With every sensational murder case, there are a half-dozen or more men who confess to the crimes. They want attention, a sense of importance at being, however briefly, in the limelight—or they gain some erotic stimulation from lying about the details of crimes they never committed.

At this point in the interrogation, Stovall had to look at the two confessions with suspicion. Ninety percent of him thought he had the right man, and he was positive he had the man who had threatened Liane Brumley and tried to abduct her. But Stovall had to be careful in correlating what the suspect had said about Whitney and Slawson. It was possible that Brudos was only a weirdo, a student of newspaper accounts of sexual crimes, who had concocted his own fantasy stories.

Each bit of information gleaned in the interview was thoroughly checked, even as Brudos' statements continued. Each time Stovall stepped from the room, he handed notes to Frazier and other members of the team for follow-up.

Brudos had said that Jan Whitney's car had been broken down on the I-5 on the evening of November 26. Frazier called the Albany station of the state police and asked them to check back through their logs during late November 1968 for a possible corroboration of that information.

"Yes," the answer came back. "One of our troopers noted a red-and-white Nash Rambler parked on the east shoulder of I-5 at seven minutes after ten P.M. on November 26-—at milepost seventy, two miles south of Albany. No driver or passengers in the area. It was noted, and the trooper on the next shift would have tagged it for towing if it had still been there. But it was gone by the next shift."

That information fit exactly with what Brudos had said. That spot at milepost seventy was just about ten miles from the spot in the Santiam parking lot where the car was eventually located. Someone
had
moved it in the wee hours of the morning. …

Frazier did a tedious hand check through all the Salem Police department's accident reports for the Thanksgiving weekend of 1968. He found the report of a car that had skidded off Center Street into a garage at 3123 Center. Minor damage reported. Occupants not at home.

Frazier located the traffic investigator who had left his card at the little gray house and who had subsequently interviewed Jerry Brudos. Yes, there had been a hole in the workshop portion of the garage, a gap in the splintered siding. It had seemed a routine investigation, with nothing to make him suspicious. He had seen only a family home, a few children's toys cluttering the back porch. Nothing at all to indicate there was a virtual abattoir within the garage, a torture chamber. Brudos had seemed anxious to get the place fixed so the rain wouldn't get in. The officer had been in the garage and workshop to check the damage from the inside, and it had looked just like anybody's garage. No body. Nothing strange in there at all.

But of course by then Brudos had, according to his statement, hidden Jan Whitney's mutilated body in the pumphouse.

The facts were beginning to mesh perfectly with the suspect's almost unbelievable confessions.

There was something else that Brudos could not have known without having been there. The long-line black bra found on Karen Sprinker's body. The mention of that bra had been Brudos' first slip, the initial fissure in the wall the suspect had built up.

If Brudos had killed Karen Sprinker, she would have been his third victim, according to his own recital of facts. Each case had been a little worse than the one before. Jan Whitney had allegedly had one breast amputated; Stovall knew that Karen Sprinker's body had been missing both breasts.

The detective truly dreaded hearing the next confession, but he would have to listen. The dialogue was an established thing now, and the original duo of players would continue. There could be no substitution of interrogators.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"It was in March … " Stovall said. "When Karen Sprinker disappeared … "

"The twenty-seventh."

"Yes. A weekday. It always seemed to be on a weekday."

"I spent weekends with my family," Brudos said.

"Had you ever seen Karen Sprinker before?"

"No. It wasn't that girl who attracted me. She just happened to be there."

"Where would that be?"

"Meier and Frank, of course. Everybody knows that—it was in all the papers. I have clippings at home that say that."

"That's true. You weren't working that day?"

"I had a sick day. I had a bad headache in the morning, and I didn't go to work."

"You didn't stay at home, though."

"No. I was just driving around. I drove by Meier and Frank, and I saw this girl."

"Was it Karen?"

"I told you it wasn't." Brudos was cocky now. He seemed proud of the fact that he had managed his crime in broad daylight in the midst of a crowd of shoppers.

"I was just driving around, as I said, and I saw a girl near Meier and Frank. She was wearing a miniskirt and high heels. It was about ten in the morning. I watched her and she went into the store. The way she looked, her clothing and her shoes, turned me on. I had to have her.

"I drove into the parking garage and I parked on the third floor. I looked for the girl in the miniskirt inside the store. I must have spent an hour or more looking for her—but she was gone. Maybe she went out another door or something. Anyway, I couldn't find her and I went back to my car. I mean, I was walking back toward my car when I saw the other girl. "

"Karen Sprinker?"

"I guess so. I didn't know her name. She had on a green sweater and a matching skirt. I didn't like her shoes, but she was a pretty girl with long dark hair. I watched her while she locked her car and then came down the steps toward the door into the store."

The description sounded so familiar to Stovall. Of course. This was the way the investigating team had pictured Karen's abduction. Standing there in the empty parking garage, they had visualized the way it must have been—ghost images left behind, almost palpable in their intensity.

"She reached to open the door, and I grabbed her by the shoulder. She turned around, startled-like, and saw the pistol I was pointing at her. I said, 'Don't scream and I won't hurt you. Come with me and I won't hurt you.' "

"Did she scream?"

"Of course not. She said she would do whatever I wanted if I just didn't shoot her. She kept saying that—several times—as if she was trying to convince me. I walked her to my car and put her inside. Nobody was in the parking garage."

Brudos continued in his monologue, intent now on recreating what had occurred two months before. "I drove to my house and into the garage."

"Was your wife home?"

"No. She was over at her girlfriend's house. She was always over there visiting. The girl—Karen—was still telling me that she would do anything to keep me from shooting her. I asked her if she had ever had a man before, and she said 'No.' She said she was in her period. That was true; she was wearing a Tampax."

Stovall knew this was correct information, and a detail withheld from anyone but the investigating team.

"I raped her—there on the floor of my workshop."

"Did she resist you?"

"No, she was afraid of the gun. Afterward she said she had to use the bathroom, so I took her into the house and allowed her to do that."

"That would have been out the side door of the garage and through the breezeway there to the back door?"

"Yes. She didn't try to run away or anything. I still had the gun. Then I took her back out to the workshop. I wanted some pictures of her. I took some in her clothes, and some in her underwear, and some in underwear I had out there. I had her wear the black patent-leather high heels that I have, because hers were very plain and low. I took a lot of pictures."

Stovall thought of the brilliant, gentle girl, trying to reason with a maniac, believing that she could keep him calm by going along with his orders. She would have been so frightened, and yet hoping desperately that he would set her free when he had finished with her. If she had fought him, what would have happened? Maybe she would have had a chance while she was in the parking garage, or even when she walked from the garage to the house-only twenty feet or so from a busy street. Maybe not. And yet Stovall doubted that Brudos would have had the guts to shoot her where there was a possibility that someone would hear.

So many female victims made the mistake of thinking that reason can temper madness. The odds are always better if a woman screams and kicks and draws attention in a public place. If a rapist or kidnapper shows enough violence to approach a woman and attempt to take her away by force, there is every possibility that he will show no mercy at all when he gets his victim alone in an isolated spot. Captivity and torture are the thrust of his aberration. Pity and compassion have no place in the makeup of a sexual criminal.

Too late for Karen.

"I tied her hands in back of her and told her I had to do that to keep her from going away. She said that wasn't necessary, but I couldn't trust her. Then I put a rope around her neck. I had it attached to a 'come-along.'

"I swung the rope up on the hoist, and tightened it around her neck. I asked her if it was too tight, and she said it was."

Jerry Brudos, who had never had control over women, had been in absolute control of Karen Sprinker's life.