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Authors: Ann Rule

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When he went back to her, she sat where he'd propped her. He thought about having sex with her, and decided that wasn't necessary. He berated himself because he had no film for his camera. That was an important thing that he'd neglected to do. But he'd had no idea he would meet a door-to-door saleslady and it would be so easy to lie to her and coax her inside.

But he did have all his other precious things. All the filmy, lacy panties and bras that he'd stolen over a long time. He could never decide which was the best—sneaking into dark apartments and stealing the underwear while he could hear the women sighing in their sleep only a few feet away from him, or playing with his collection of satin and silk that still smelled faintly of their perfume and skin after the garments belonged to him.

He'd never had anyone he could use as a model before. He couldn't show all that stuff to his wife, because she might get suspicious. Now he chose bras and panties and slips with inches of lace edging the satin, and spent hours dressing and undressing the girl. He liked the red panties best of all. They were just right for her.

He had worked through the scenarios in his head for years, and never told anyone what he thought of, always dreaming of captive women. And he wasn't disappointed at all now that he had pulled it off. He knew he couldn't keep her with him forever, but he could remember the way it was now. Next time, he would take pictures too.

His wife came home, and he went upstairs and talked to her briefly, and told her to go to bed—he'd be along when he finished his project. He loved his wife. He really did love her, because she was sweet most of the time, and quiet, and because she didn't nag him. But things just weren't the same since the baby boy was born. He'd wanted to be with her when that happened, right there in the delivery room, and she'd chosen to share that experience with another man. With the doctor—not with him. It just tore the hell out of him that she'd choose another man like that.

When they were all asleep, he went back to the basement. He played dress-up with the dead girl some more, reveling in the quiet that was marred only by the soft whisper of the rain against the windows. He would have to get rid of her before the sun came up. Too bad, but that's the way it was. He needed to have something that belonged to her, though. Not her bra and panties; he already had so many of those from so many women who didn't even know what he looked like or who had stolen from them.

He had a freezer, but it wasn't big enough to keep her in, and all the women roaming through the house would find her anyway. His mind was working well. He understood certain things clearly. He was right-handed, so it seemed proper that he should cut off her left foot. …

He did that, cutting cleanly through her ankle. The foot didn't look right without a shoe, so he slipped the shoe on it before he put the foot into his freezer.

He was pleased with himself. He had convinced Ned Rawls that he was brewing nitroglycerin in the basement, and scared him off easily enough. He'd gotten his fool mother and his wife to go to bed, and now all he had to do was to slip the dead girl into the Willamette River, where no one would ever find her. He already had an engine head to use as a weight, and he was so strong he could handle it easily.

There were many bridges crisscrossing the Willamette River in Portland. In the daytime, cars choked them. But not at two A.M. He chose the St. John Bridge, and just to be on the safe side, he pretended that he had a flat tire. The stupid cops never showed up to help when you really needed them, and he counted on that now. He pulled a jack out of the trunk, nudging her body aside, and set it up under the rear bumper.

It worked like a charm. Nobody in the few cars that passed by even looked twice at him. When there were no cars in sight at all, he lifted the girl from the trunk, along with the engine head, and carried her to the bridge rail. She fell free, and an instant later the deep waters of the Willamette pulled her in and covered her over. The splash itself had been surprisingly gentle, too soft to draw attention.

After he couldn't see her any longer, he undid the car jack, stowed it in the trunk, and drove away. The only thing that bothered him was that he remembered too late the ring she'd worn. Some kind of bulky class ring that said "St. Somebody" on it, and "1967."

He didn't even know her name. It didn't matter. He was sure no one would ever find her.

No one did.

Back at the encyclopedia sales office, they figured that Linda K. Slawson had just decided to quit. Nobody remembered the place where she was supposed to go on the night of January 26. Salespeople came and went. It was to be expected.

Her family worried, and then grew frantic, and made a Missing Persons report to the Portland Police Department. But all efforts of the Missing Persons detectives led nowhere. Linda K. Slawson remained on the missing rolls, certainly not forgotten by either the investigators or by her family. There simply was no place left to look for her. The earth might as well have opened up and swallowed her.

The big man with the moon face kept her foot for a while. He used it as a model to try shoes on. When he grew tired of that game, he put a weight on it and tossed it too into the Willamette.

And then he planned and fantasized and wondered what he could do next. What he'd done to the girl in the red panties had been so exciting and so fulfilling that he had no intention of stopping.

CHAPTER ONE

He was a monster. He was not born a monster, but evolved grotesquely over the twenty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-seven days that passed before Linda K. Slawson had the great misfortune to cross his path.

Jerome Henry Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota, on January 31,1939. His parents seem to have been a hopelessly mismatched couple. They already had one son a few years older than Jerome, and they apparently did not particularly want another; the older brother, Larry, was intelligent and placid and gave them little trouble. A girl would have been preferable. Instead, Eileen Brudos gave birth to a red-haired, blue-eyed second son whom she would never really like. As all babies do, he must have sensed that. When he was old enough to form his feelings into words, he would call her a "stubborn, selfish egotist." If she did not like him, he grew to
despise
her.

Eileen Brudos was a stolid woman who dressed neatly and plainly, and "never, never wore high heels," according to Jerome.

Henry Brudos was a small man—only five feet, four inches tall. He moved his family a dozen times during his sons' growing-up years. They usually lived on a farm, farms that gave so grudgingly of their produce and livestock that the elder Brudos had to work a full-time job in town to support them. Like most small men, Jerry Brudos' father was easily offended and hostile if he thought someone was taking advantage of him, and was quick to react with verbal abuse. Whatever his father's faults, Jerome Brudos vastly preferred him to Eileen Brudos.

The Brudoses lived in Portland during the Second World War. Employment was easy then, and their financial picture was fairly stable.

Five-year-old Jerry Brudos was allowed to roam freely, and on one occasion he was pawing through a junkyard when he found something that fascinated him. Shoes. Women's high-heeled shoes, but nothing at all like anything his mother had ever worn. These were constructed of shiny patent leather with open toes and open heels and thin straps to encircle the ankles of the woman who wore them. They were a little worn, of course, and one rhinestone-studded decorative clip was missing. Still, they pleased him, and he carried them home.

More for comic effect than anything else, he slipped his stocking feet into the shiny black shoes and paraded around. Eileen Brudos caught him at it and was outraged. She scolded him severely, her voice rising in a shriek as she went on and on about how wicked he was. She ordered him to take the shoes back to the dump and leave them there. He did not understand why she was so angry, or just what it was that he had done wrong—since obviously no one wanted the old shoes anyway. He didn't take the shoes back; instead he hid them. When he was discovered still sashaying around in his forbidden high heels, there was hell to pay. His mother burned the shoes and made him stay in his room for a long time.

When he was finally let out, he ran to a neighbor woman who was very pretty and soft and kind to him. He liked to pretend that she was his real mother and that he had no connection to Eileen. He already hated Eileen.

Little Jerry Brudos had another friend when he was five—a girl his own age. She was often pale and tired and couldn't play; he did not know that she was dying of tuberculosis. Her death was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to him, and he grieved for her for a long time.

The neighbor woman who was kind to him was sickly too, and suffered from diabetes. Years later, in his own mind, the episode with the stolen shoes, his girlfriend's death at the age of five, and the kind neighbor woman were intertwined in his mind, and he could not speak of one without the others.

By the time Jerry Brudos was in the first grade, the family had moved to Riverton, California. He had a pretty teacher who invariably wore high-heeled shoes to class. She always had two pairs on hand, one to switch to if her feet got tired or if she planned to go out on a date when school was over. Stealthily now, because he had learned that high-heeled shoes were not to be noticed overtly, he stared at his teacher's footwear, entranced by the slim heels. When he could stand the temptation no longer, he stole the shoes she kept in her desk and hid them under blocks in the play area so he could take them home with him. But somebody found them and took them back to the teacher. Days later, he confessed that he had taken them.

She was more puzzled than angry. "Why on earth would you want my shoes, Jerome?"

He turned red and ran from the room.

Jerry Brudos failed the second grade. He was a sickly child. He had measles and recurring sore throats, accompanied by swollen glands and laryngitis. As an adult he remembered having a number of "toe and finger operations," probably to treat fungus infections around the nails. He had two operations on his legs. What the defect was is obscure; Jerry Brudos himself recalls only that there was something wrong with the veins in his legs: "The veins were ballooning and I had to have the operations because they were not doing their job."

He often had migraine headaches that blinded him with pain and made him vomit. Because of the headaches and because he seemed not to comprehend the basics of reading and writing, school authorities thought he might need glasses. His brother had sailed through school with As, and Jerry's I.Q. tested normal or above, but he sometimes seemed vague and slow.

Glasses were prescribed but they were hardly more than window glass, a placebo. He still had headaches, an ailment that would plague Jerry Brudos to greater and lesser degree for much of his life.

He must have spent some time in bed recovering, locked in with the mother he avoided whenever possible, but that part of his life is blanked out in his memory. He got along all right with his brother, despite the fact that Larry excelled in school and was always deferred to by Eileen. Jerry seldom saw his father because he was always working—on the farm or on his town job.

Jerry's fixation with women's shoes was solidly entrenched. On one occasion his parents entertained visitors who brought their teenage daughter with them. The girl wanted to take a nap, and lay down on Jerry's bed. He crept in and was transfixed to see that she still wore her high-heeled shoes. As she slept, one of the heels poked through the loose weave of the blanket. The sight was tremendously erotic to Jerry. He wanted her shoes. He worked to pry them off her feet, but she woke up and told him to stop it and get out of the room.

It should be pointed out that Jerry Brudos was still a small boy when his shoe-stealing episodes took place, well under the age of puberty. Sex, of course, was a subject forbidden in his home. Like all farm-raised youngsters, he observed sexual behavior among animals. He knew what bulls did to cows, and he knew that boars quite literally "screwed" female pigs with their peculiar but functional penises. He had seen dogs and cats mate. But he would never dare to ask how intercourse between humans was accomplished. Touching and hugging, any demonstration of affection, was discouraged in the Brudos home. He heard jokes at school, and laughed with the other boys—remembering particularly a joke about a girl sliding down a banister—but he never admitted he didn't understand the punch line or the point of the joke. And he was completely unable to make the connection between the strange excitement he had when he was around women's shoes and his own sexual drives.

It was just something that was peculiar to himself. But he sensed that it had to be a secret thing. Why else would his mother have been so enraged over his shoe theft when he was only five? Why else would the teenage visitor have been so angry with him? And his very need for subterfuge and secrecy made his obsession all the more thrilling.

Looking at the fair, bland-faced Jerry, the child who seemed dull in school, no one ever detected the fires burning in him. That there was danger there, however incipient, would have seemed laughable.

For all of his life, women held the reins of power over Jerry Brudos—in one way or another. Eileen, his mother, was strong, rigid, and intractable. He could not please her; he had never been able to please her, and she clearly ran the household. She railed at him for the most minor lapses, and it seemed to Jerry that his brother got away with everything. Larry avoided chores just as much as Jerry did, but their mother always had an excuse for Larry. Larry was "exceptional" and "gifted" and needed the time to study. Their father and Larry both knew that Eileen had it in for Jerry, but there was nothing they could do about it. She ruled with a firm hand, and all three males in the family chose evasive tactics rather than confrontation.

 The other females who had been important to Jerry Brudos deserted him; his little girlfriend died and left him, the neighbor lady became too ill to have time for him, and his teacher never quite trusted him after he admitted the theft of her shoes. He learned early that women could not be counted on.

BOOK: Lust Killer
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