Lust Killer (19 page)

And he chose to end it.

"I gave the 'come-along' about three more pulls and it lifted her off the ground. She kicked a little and she died."

Stovall's hand tightened around his pen, but he betrayed no other feelings. It was far too late to help Karen; there was nothing to do now but see that this man was off the streets forever—that he would no longer have a chance to act out his sick fantasies.

Brudos described how he had violated the girl's body after death, after taking time out to go into the house to be with his family.

"I went back out later and had sex with her. Then I cut off both of her breasts to make plastic molds. I couldn't get the percentage of hardener right this time either, but they turned out a little better than with the girl from the freeway."

"Jan Whitney."

"Yes. Her. I dressed the girl from Meier and Frank—Karen—in her own cotton panties and the green sweater and skirt. But I used the wide bra instead of her own. I stuffed it with paper towels so it looked all right and so she wouldn't bleed on my car."

"Where did you get that bra?"

"From a clothesline in Portland a couple of years ago. No, wait. Maybe it was one that belonged to my wife. I have a lot of them, so I can't be sure."

"Did you keep Karen's body for several days—the way you kept Jan Whitney's?"

Brudos shook his head. "No. I waited until my wife and the kids had gone to bed, and I took off about two A.M. for the Long Tom River. I weighted the body down with a cylinder head I had for a car. I tossed her into the river on the upstream side."

"Where did you get the cylinder head?"

"I had the stuff around; I fix cars a lot."

"Where are the pictures you took of Karen?"

Brudos smiled, secure that he could count on Darcie's absolute obedience to his wishes.

"Gone. They've all been destroyed."

The two men had been cloistered in the little interview room for a long time. Neither smoked, but the air was heavy—perhaps from the weight of the words that had been spoken. Outside, it was spring and the huge magnolia trees on the courthouse lawn opened their waxy white blooms. Parks around Salem were filled with picnickers, some of them on the banks of the Willamette River. Inside the jail complex, there was no season at all, and certainly no sense of holiday.

There was a break in the interrogation; what had been said was too horrific to continue on endlessly. There would be more; Jerry Brudos seemed consumed with the need to pour it all out. He showed no regret at all about what he had done; he whined instead about his cell and the food, and asked for his wife. He talked to Dale Drake, his attorney. What was said in that conversation was privileged communication, but Drake was pale and his jaw was set when he emerged from the conference.

"Did you get anything?" Stovall's fellow investigators asked the detective, and he nodded grimly. He moved to a worktable where he could transcribe what he had heard onto the yellow legal pad, pages and pages of unbelievable cruelty. So many victims who had never had a chance. He indexed, and he correlated, and he saw that all the pieces had fallen into place. All but Linda Salee's murder.

And that would be covered in the next interview.

Brudos ate. Stovall could not. An hour or two later, they began again. Slowly. Easing back into the intimate revelations.

"We're into April now, Jerry," Stovall commented. "Can you recall your activities in April?"

"I remember everything. I have an excellent memory. "

"Linda Salee disappeared on April 23, a Wednesday. Would that be the first … activity that month?"

"No. You know about the girl on the rail tracks. That was Tuesday. Before that—on Monday—I went to Portland, and I went out to Portland State University … "

Were there more?
Were there other girls who had not yet been found? It was possible. Considering all the rivers coursing through the state of Oregon, there could be other bodies drifting there, unknown to the investigators. Stovall waited.

"I went up there to find a girl. I saw one in the parking complex at Portland State. She was older, maybe twenty-two to twenty-four years old. I had the pistol—it wasn't real; it was a toy, but it looked real. She fought me. She grabbed for the gun and she tried to twist it out of my hand. She was screaming and she caught my finger in the trigger guard and damn near broke it. She was attracting attention, and I knew I had to get away from there. I managed to get loose of her, and I walked up to the next floor of the parking garage, where my car was—I didn't run because that would have made people suspicious. I got in and drove away."

He was a coward, obviously. Fight him in public, and he ran like a rabbit. Stovall wondered if the girl from Portland had any idea of what she had escaped.

"You drove on home, then?"

"Yeah. The next day, I was driving around in Salem and I saw this young girl on the Southern Pacific tracks. I showed her the plastic pistol and told her that she was to come with me. I had her by the shoulder and I pulled her between two houses. She said she could walk by herself. I had her almost into the car—I had my friend's car that day—when she balked. She took off running. There was some woman working in her yard, and the girl ran to her, and I got in the car and took off."

"Two days in a row, you struck out. That might have made you a little angry-a little disappointed."

"A little."

"You might have been afraid that you had been seen, that you could be identified by someone."

"No. I got away easily both times. I didn't worry."

"You plan well. You probably worked out another plan that would work."

"Yes. I always had another plan, a backup plan. I went back to Portland the next day."

"That would be the twenty-third, then?"

"That's right. I had a badge, looked just like a real police badge—you can buy them, you know. I bought it right there in Lloyd Center; it was a toy, but you'd have to look real close to be sure. I started looking for a girl."

"You found a girl?"

Brudos nodded. "I saw this girl in the parking garage. She was walking toward her car and she had her arms full of packages. I went up to her and showed her the badge and told her I was taking her into custody for shoplifting. I said I was a special police officer assigned to Lloyd Center and would have to take her downtown with me. She believed me, but she said she hadn't stolen anything—that she had the sales slips to prove it. But she came with me quietly. She didn't fight me at all. She just got in my car."

"Did she ask questions when you went by downtown Portland and got on the freeway for Salem?"

"No. It was funny; it was like she wanted to go with me. She didn't say anything at all. She just rode along nicely."

"You drove with her all the way to Salem? That would have meant she was in the car with you for an hour."

"That's right. I got to my house and I drove into the garage and closed the doors. I told the girl to follow me, and I started for the house. I didn't know my wife was home. She walked out on the back porch just as I left the garage. I held my hand back and warned the girl not to come out, and she stopped. My wife didn't see her. I told Darcie to go back into the house and stay there because I had something important to do in the shop.

"My wife said that dinner was almost ready, and I told her I'd be in in a minute. Then I tied the girl up with a rope and I went into the house for dinner. The girl was out there waiting in the garage. My wife said she was going to the health spa that night and that a baby-sitter was coming. That was okay, because she wouldn't bother me out in my workshop."

"You're telling me that Linda Salee was out there in the garage alone while you went in and ate dinner?"

"Yes. But she was tied up. Funny thing, though. When I went back out there to check on her after I ate, she'd gotten loose of the rope. She hadn't tried to leave the shop, and she hadn't even used the phone out there. She was just waiting for me, I guess."

It
was
odd, Stovall thought. But there might have been a close time element; the woman might have struggled free just as Brudos walked in the door. More likely, she had been terrorized into immobility. Just as a mouse tormented by a cat will simply give up, unable to run any longer, paralyzed by fright and indecision.

Or perhaps it was all a delusion in Brudos' mind, his surface ego demanding that the women he kidnapped should find him attractive and would seek out his company.

There was no way to tell now.

"I got the leather strap out—the postal strap that I used on the woman from the freeway—and I put it around her neck and pulled her off her feet. She was a little woman—short and light. She turned around, kind of, and she said, 'Why are you doing this to me?'

"I pulled the strap tighter and she went limp. I put her on the floor and got on top of her. I think I was inside her when she died."

"She just waited for you in the shop? She didn't try to fight you at all?" Stovall asked.

"Well … after I went back out there, I guess she did fight me. I don't know why—because she'd been so quiet all the time coming down and when I first put her in there. She fought me pretty bad until I managed to get the strap around her neck. I didn't like her—the way she kicked and scratched when I told her not to."

It was clear that Brudos felt a great deal of resentment toward Linda Salee, the girl who had resisted him. She was the first one; the others had gone down gently, but this athletic little woman had tried to live, pitting her strength against the hulking killer. If she only had fought earlier …

Still angry, Brudos had chosen to punish Linda Salee after her death. Mercifully, it no longer mattered.

"I hung her up by her neck from the hook in the ceiling where I'd hung the others. I had this experiment I wanted to try, using electricity."

Stovall tensed inwardly. There had been those strange marks on Linda Salee's body, the tissue near her ribs showing evidence of burns—something that had baffled both him and Medical Examiner Brady.

"An experiment?"

"Yeah. Once I had her up on the hook, I took her clothes off—having the hook there made dressing and undressing them easier. I took these two hypodermic needles and I stuck them on each side of her rib cage, and then I had electric leads attached to the needles. Then I plugged in the leads to see what she would do—if she would dance, or what. It didn't work; it just burned her."

"You kept her there for a while?"

"One day and one night. I raped her again, but I didn't like her body. Her breasts were all pink—the nipples weren't dark like they should be; they just all blended in together. I didn't cut them off because they didn't appeal to me. I made some circular paper cones and put them over her breasts to make plastic molds, but the epoxy set up hot and it didn't work. I wasn't able to get a really perfect mold from any of them. When you salt a breast down and dry it, it shrinks to about a third of its normal size. I'm sure there's a way to do it so it will work, but I never could."

Thank God he would not have another chance to try.

"When did you take the girl's body out of your shop?"

The second night. I tied the overdrive unit to her and put her in the Long Tom."

Jim Stovall went over all the versions of the murders again and again. He would approach the vital points from one angle, and then come back from another angle. The facts never changed; they were entrenched in the suspect's mind—as if he had cherished his secret killing games and relived them until he knew every facet of them perfectly.

The thought of what Jerry Brudos had done was so despicable that a normal man could scarcely contemplate it without feeling a sickness in the gut. Jim Stovall had no doubt at all that if Brudos had not been caught, he would have continued to kill month by month until he himself grew old and died.

Brudos was taken back to his cell, and Stovall walked past the reporters who had clustered around the jail all weekend, eager for a headline story. The Associated Press had got wind of the arrest in the dorm at Corvallis, and printed that. They did not have the name of the suspect, or any details; they only knew that something big was in the wind. They would get nothing at this point of the probe.

Stovall stepped outside and thought the air smelled wonderful, but he was exhausted after three days of the most intense and macabre interrogation he had ever participated in.

Still, he wondered if he could sleep.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The headlines came on Monday morning. On June 2, 1969, an anxious public pored over this slight information:

Marion County District Attorney Gary Gortmaker announced this morning that Jerome Henry Brudos, 30, a Salem electrician, has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of an Oregon woman. The victim listed in the charge is Karen Sprinker, 19, of Salem.

District Attorney Gortmaker declined to give the press any further information. Nor would he say where Brudos was being held: public feeling ran hot and vengeful; in the old days when the area was Oregon Territory, a man suspected of the crimes that rumor attributed to Brudos would have been summarily hung by an angry mob. Oregon had become a "civilized" state where a man accused must go through the due process of law. And yet … Officials feared what might happen if they revealed Jerry Brudos' location.

"Due process" meant that there were many legal and investigative procedures to be accomplished. A search warrant for Brudos' home and workshop, for his vehicles, a further check on facts elicited through Stovall's interviews, and then formal arraignment. In the face of cruel madness, calm, sane steps must be taken.

Detectives checked with Portland police to see if there had been a rape complaint in 1967 that resembled the case Brudos had discussed—a sleeping woman being throttled and sexually attacked. There was. Portland police records indicated their case, #67-35144, had occurred on May 18, 1967—"Assault, Possible Rape." The victim, Joyce Lynn Cassel, had given a statement that correlated almost exactly with what Jerry Brudos had described.