Lust Killer (3 page)

 He wavered constantly between depression and frustration and the rage that is born of impotence.

Heading into puberty, he was an accident looking for a place to happen.

The family moved to Grants Pass, Oregon. Their new neighbors had a house full of daughters, and Jerry and one of their brothers often sneaked into the girls' bedrooms to play with their clothing. His fetish expanded to include female undergarments. Secret woman things. Brassieres and panties and girdles and the complicated harnesses that they used to hold up their silky nylons. He now loved the feel of the soft cloth, almost as much as the shoes that were so different from men's.

The Brudoses moved again before Jerry was thirteen, and lived on Wallace Pond near Salem, the state capital. Jerry's father made another lackluster attempt at farming there in 1952.

 Larry was sixteen and had the normal pubescent male's interest in the nude female body. He collected pinup pictures and sometimes drew pictures of Superman's girlfriend, Lois Lane—portraying Lois nude and wearing high heels. Given the puritanical views of Eileen Brudos, Larry prudently kept his cache of pictures locked up in a box. Jerry found the box, picked the lock, and pored over the pictures. And it was Jerry—not Larry—who was caught in the act. He didn't tell on his brother, but accepted the punishment. Nobody would have believed that it was Larry's collection anyway, because Larry was the good son and Jerry was the bad son.

At the age of sixteen, Jerry had his first wet dream. Eileen, who steadfastly denied all sexual matters, found his stained sheets and scolded him severely. The nocturnal ejaculation had startled him, too, and he wondered if it was something people should be able to control. His mother made him wash his sheets by hand, and he had to sleep without sheets the next night because he had only one set and the offending sheets were still hanging damp on the line.

 Jerry began to create bizarre fantasies of revenge. He worked for days digging a hidden tunnel in the side of a hill on the farm. His plan was to get a girl and put her into the tunnel. Once he had her, he would make her do anything he wanted. He could picture it all clearly, but he ran into a problem when he tried to think what it was he wanted the captive girl to do. He still didn't know enough about sex to focus on what intercourse was, and he certainly didn't understand rape. He only knew that the thought of a captive woman begging for mercy excited him.

At the same time, Jerry began to steal shoes and undergarments from neighbors' houses and clotheslines. He had quite a little stash that he studied and touched and kept carefully away from Eileen Brudos.

 Interestingly, Jerry never stole his mother's clothing, nor was he tempted to try her things on.

If anyone suspected that it was Jerry who was making off with the neighborhood underwear on Wallace Pond, he was never accused. And then the peripatetic Brudoses moved again—this time to Corvallis. Corvallis is the site of Oregon State University and lies twenty-five miles west of what is today the I-5 freeway that runs from Canada to Mexico. It is a fertile region, as is the entire Willamette Valley. The Long Tom River flows just east of Corvallis, and the Pacific Ocean is fifty miles to the west.

By the time the family moved onto yet another farm, Larry was in college—doing well in his study of electronics. Jerry was skilled in the same field, but his accomplishments paled in comparison to his brother's.

Jerry was almost seventeen, and he had learned the basic facts of life. Still, he had never
seen
a naked woman, and he was determined that he would. His hostility toward and distrust of women in no way mitigated his lusting after them.

Jerry continued to steal women's clothing. At home, in the privacy of his own room, he would take his treasures from their hiding spot and fondle them. He would later tell psychiatrists that touching female garments gave him "a funny feeling." He used the clothing for masturbation, but he failed to achieve an orgasm. The only ejaculation he had experienced to date had come from "wet dreams."

In the late summer of 1955, Jerry Brudos crept into a neighbor's house and stole undergarments belonging to an eighteen-year-old girl who lived there. The stolen clothing by itself soon began to pall, and Jerry thought that it would be so much better if he could have pictures of a real girl, mementos he could keep. He formulated a complicated scheme.

He approached the girl whose lingerie he'd stolen and told her that he could help her get her things back. He bragged to her about a secret; he had been working with the police on the case. He had inside information. She was a little doubtful, but Jerry was persuasive. Since he lived in the neighborhood where the thefts had occurred, he said the police found him the perfect undercover man—no one would suspect he was working with the cops.

The girl debated. She wanted her things back; she'd worked hard to buy them. And Jerry was a kid—only sixteen; he looked like a big clown. She wasn't afraid of him, and maybe he
did
know something.

 Jerry Brudos invited her to his home on a night when he knew everyone else in his family would be gone. When he heard her knock on the door, he called to her from upstairs, "Up here! Come on up—"

She edged up the shadowy staircase of the old farmhouse, following the sound of his voice. His room was dim and she couldn't see Jerry. Suddenly, a tall figure wearing a mask jumped out at her and waved a large knife.

 "Take off your clothes—or I'll cut you," the voice behind the mask said. "Do it!"

He pressed the knife against her throat, and she could feel its sharp edge cutting. Her heart convulsed as she realized she had made a terrible mistake in judgment.

Trembling, the girl removed her clothing. She wasn't stupid; she knew who it was behind the mask—but she didn't know what he was going to do to her. She didn't have a chance to fight; she'd have to go along with him.

Her captor produced a cheap camera with a flash attachment, and she realized that ne wasn't going to rape her; he wanted to take pictures of her!

He directed her how to pose, and took some shots when she was totally naked, and then some when she was partially clothed. She did what he asked; terrified that he might still have more in mind than photographs. He moved quickly, giving her orders to move this way, to bend, to turn.

When the roll of film was finished, the masked figure walked out of Jerry Brudos' bedroom. His victim threw on the rest of her clothes frantically and was just heading toward the stairs when Jerry, without a mask, walked into his bedroom. He was breathing heavily.

 "Hey, are you OK?" he asked. "I was out in the barn, and somebody came along—I couldn't see who it was—and locked me in. I just managed to break out! Did you see anyone around here?"

She shook her head, and edged past him, running for home the minute she made it to the front door.

 Jerry Brudos actually believed he'd fooled his victim into believing it was a stranger who had forced her to pose nude. He figured he'd pulled it off when nobody came around accusing him.

He developed the pictures and
really
saw what a naked woman looked like for the first time. He'd been so intent on taking the pictures before somebody came home and caught him that he hadn't stopped to savor his subject. He'd been in such a hurry that he hadn't even become sexually excited. But then Jerry Brudos' fantasies had never included
interaction
with a female; in his fantasies, women acted only on his bidding. He was the Master and they were only slaves.

His first impression of a nude female was that "she looked awful funny." But he soon took great pleasure in looking at his photographs while he handled his subject's stolen panties and bras, incorporating her, his prisoner, into his fantasy.

 Later, his victim told police, "I knew who it was all the time; I wasn't fooled by that mask and his phony story about being locked in the barn, but I was afraid of him. I was scared if I told he would find out and he would kill me. … "

Eight months passed after the episode of forced picture-taking; Jerry wasn't worried about being discovered because nothing had come of it. But he had looked at those same pictures so often that they no longer produced the effect they once had. Besides that, they were smudged and tattered.

He needed a new captive.

 Jerry Brudos couldn't find a girl who would date him. He was big and clumsy and suffered from teenage acne—"acne vulgaris," the doctors called it. His pimples were even more obvious when he blushed scarlet. When he was nervous, he ducked his head and his voice became a croak.

 But it was more than his appearance and his awkwardness; there was something about Jerry Brudos that turned girls off, something scary that triggered an almost visceral reaction warning them to stay away from him.

Nevertheless, on a warm April evening in 1956, Jerry Brudos managed to lure a seventeen-year-old girl into his car on a ruse. He began to talk as if they were on a date together and she stared at him, baffled. She had only accepted a short ride.

 Her bewilderment turned to panic when he stared straight ahead and drove faster, farther and farther away from the main roads. Finally, he pulled into an overgrown driveway and parked at a deserted farmhouse, its siding grayed from the weather, the wind blowing through its glassless windows.

She looked around and saw that they were miles from other houses, from anyone who might come to help her if she screamed.

 Without a word, Jerry Brudos dragged the girl from his car and began to beat her. His fists rained down on her face and breasts, and she tasted her own blood warm and salty in her mouth. Fearing it would do no good, she screamed anyway as the huge, strange boy continued to pummel her. He pulled at her clothing, ordering her to strip for him. He wanted to see her naked, he said gasping. She twisted and kicked and tried to get away.

The sun would be setting soon, and she knew if she didn't get help, she would be dead by the time the sun rose again. She screamed with all her might, and his fist crunched sickeningly into her nose.

 Fortunately, a couple from a farm down the road happened to be driving by just at that moment. The husband wrenched his steering wheel and turned quickly into the weed-choked yard. They saw the old car parked there, and the tall, heavy young man bent over someone on the ground beside it.

"She fell out of the car," he explained, reaching out to help the sobbing girl up. "She's just hysterical because it scared her."

The girl shook her head violently, trying to speak through her swollen mouth.

The couple looked on doubtfully, and the boy shrugged his shoulders. "Well, actually, what happened was that some weirdo attacked her. I came driving by and I stopped to help. She was fighting him off when I came up, and he took off through the fields over there."

This version didn't make any more impression on the couple than the first one, and they insisted on taking the girl—and Jerry Brudos, who went along quite meekly—back to their house, where they called the Oregon State Police.

Faced with the police, Jerry Brudos admitted that he had beaten the girl himself. He said he'd wanted to frighten her enough to make her take off her clothes so he could take pictures of her. He denied ever doing such a thing before. He seemed baffled by the incident himself; he felt his temper had just gotten the best of him. But police found his camera equipment in the trunk of his car, and recognized premeditation before the attack.

Jerry Brudos' victim was treated in a local Emergency Room and found to have extensive bruises and a badly broken nose.

Investigators searching Jerry's room on the farm in Dallas, Oregon, came upon his cache of women's clothing and shoes. And they found photographs. Pictures of women's undergarments and shoes, and photos of a nude girl. Jerry had an excuse for this, too. He insisted the pictures had been taken by another boy, and that he had only developed them.

"I had to … he said he'd beat me up if I didn't. …"

Jerry Brudos was arrested for assault and battery. He was referred to Polk County Juvenile Department, which began a background investigation.

Eileen Brudos was outraged, and Henry was stunned. There had never been anyone on either side of the family who showed signs of mental illness or violence.
What in the world could be the matter with Jerry?

 
A review of the case for which he was arrested, the presence of fetish items in his room, and a talk with the eighteen-year-old neighbor girl who now felt safe to come forward, convinced authorities that Jerry Brudos had deeper problems than the average juvenile delinquent.

He was committed to Oregon State Hospital for evaluation and treatment in the spring of 1956.

 Jerry Brudos seemed humbled and meek as he talked to a procession of psychiatrists. He said he was a sophomore in high school. He liked sports but he didn't like rough competition. "I don't like to fight or to push people around, or be pushed around—so I don't go out for any of the teams."

 He gave his hobbies as working with radios, electronics, mechanics, and … photography. He had belonged to 4-H, Boy Scouts, and the Farmer's Union. The Jerry Brudos who sat in Oregon State Hospital seemed impossibly remote from a sadistic sex criminal. He blushed crimson when asked about his sex life—or rather his lack of sexual experience. He said he "suffered" from nocturnal emissions—"wet dreams"—about every two months. He tried to lead a clean life; he didn't drink. He didn't smoke.

No, he had never had a sexual relationship with a girl. He had never even been out alone with a girl; sometimes, he had been in large groups where girls were present. Yes, he had taken the pictures of the neighbor girl and she had been the first naked woman he had ever seen.

Doctors were a little puzzled, searching for a diagnosis. One psychiatrist wrote on April 16, 1956:

 "The boy does not appear to be grossly mentally ill. He comes shyly into the interview situation and sits down in dejected fashion to talk with great embarrassment about his difficulty. It is difficult for him to form any relationship with the examining physician although he does warm up slightly through the course of the interview. He is precisely oriented in all spheres; speech rate, thought rate, and psychomotor activities are within normal limits. Flow of thinking is relevant, logical, and coherent. He tends to be evasive on a basis of his acute embarrassment and is somewhat rambling and verbose in trying to tell his story. He appears to be somewhat depressed at the present time and his predominant mood would appear to be of depressed, dejected embarrassment. His affect is appropriate to thought content.
There is no evidence of suicide, homicide, or destructive urges.
He feels that he sometimes has trouble controlling his temper but that it has never got him into trouble except on this last occasion when he maintains that he cannot remember too clearly exactly what he did but was told that the girl received a broken nose. There is no evidence of hallucinations, delusions, or illusions. He denies any sense of fear except over what is going to happen to him, and he says he has some sense of guilt over having got into trouble but does not feel particularly guilty over having taken the photographs. … Intellectually, he is functioning well within the limits of his educational background. His insight and judgment are questionable; he feels that there must be something the matter with him and he hopes that he will be able to find out and have it cured here. …