The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (20 page)

Police carried out a thorough search along the river and its immediate surroundings. They soon discovered the decomposing body of another female, also tied to an engine block. This victim had also been strangled, apparently with a strap used as a garrotte. The clothing, still on her body, matched what Karen
Sprinker’s mother had described her daughter wearing. However, when the police lifted the body, they found that she was also clothed in a long-line black brassiere that appeared much too large to be hers. It had been padded with brown paper towels. In fact, her breasts had been removed and the padding appeared to have been placed there to absorb the blood and fluid. The body was later formally identified as that of Karen Sprinker.

Police now knew they were dealing with a serial killer and the investigation intensified. They went to the university where Karen had been a student and started to question other students. They were told that some female students had recently complained about getting strange phone calls from a man trying to lure them outside. There were also reports of a suspicious red-haired man seen loitering around campus. Detectives discovered one young woman who had actually ventured out on a brief date with a man claiming to be a lonely Vietnam veteran looking for company. This girl had no intention of seeing the man again, having found him to be very strange. He had apparently asked her why she wasn’t afraid he might strangle her. The detectives asked her to contact them should he call again. To their surprise, he did, so she set a date and then she phoned the police.

The police went to the designated meeting place and saw a tall man enter the room. They approached him and learnt that his name was Jerry Brudos. While they believed he was a viable suspect, he seemed completely at ease, as if he had nothing to hide. That meant he was either innocent, or clever, arrogant and without remorse for what he was doing. The police had nothing with which to detain Brudos, but they kept him under surveillance. Having learnt where he lived, along with the rather significant fact that he’d worked as an electrician, they set out to research his background.

The pieces of the jigsaw were coming together. The police had now established that in January 1968 Brudos had lived in the same neighbourhood where the young encyclopedia salesgirl Linda Slawson had last been seen. Brudos indicated that he had
moved to Salem in August or September 1968 and had gone to work in Lebanon, Oregon, close to the I-5 freeway where Jan Whitney had vanished in November. His current job in Halsey was only six miles from where the bodies had been found. When Karen Sprinker disappeared on 27 March, Brudos had lived within a short walking distance. The police hoped that searches of his house, garage and car might give them more direct evidence. In his garage, they found a lot of nylon rope. Some rope tied into a knot in his workshop appeared to be similar to the knots used on the bodies. He even let detectives take a sample. Police searched his vehicle and found that the interior had been thoroughly cleaned. That was suspicious, but not damning, and Brudos had a ready-made explanation. But he had no defence later on when an adolescent girl picked him out of a photo identification parade as being the man who had attempted to force her into a car. The police made the decision to arrest him. After his arrest and when searched, he was found to be wearing women’s knickers. Brudos then elected to seek legal representation. On 30 May, he agreed to talk freely in an interview despite his attorney advising him not to do so. Brudos offered a confession.

He admitted that, between January 1968 and April 1969, he had killed and mutilated four women and thrown their bodies into a river after he cut parts from them. He also admitted attacking and attempting to kill several more. The detectives who interrogated him noted his complete absence of guilt or remorse, though he mourned his fate and felt badly for his wife and children. His first victim was Linda Slawson, who had naively followed him to the workshop behind his house in an attempt to sell him her encyclopedias. He had hit her with a lump of wood and knocked her out, then strangled her. Once alone with the dead girl, he quickly undressed her. He recalled every detail, at least of her underwear, and was especially pleased that she had been wearing a pair of red knickers. He then got some items of ladies’ underwear from his own collection and re-dressed her in
them. Realising that he could not keep her there, he removed her foot with a hacksaw, placed it in the freezer, and then took the body to the Willamette River. To make certain she would not be found he had tied her to a car engine before throwing her over the bridge. Then he went home and savoured the part of her that he’d kept – a reminder of his first kill and a trophy that he could play with. He had so many high-heeled shoes and he could try them on this severed foot and take pictures. He did that as long as he could, but when the foot deteriorated, he tied it to a weight and threw it into the river as well. Even as he had the dead girl on the floor of his workshop, he held a calm conversation with the rest of his family, urging them to go out and get some dinner at a fast-food restaurant.

The next murder he confessed to was of Jan Whitney, who had been missing for more than six months by that time. He told police that he had come across her after her car had broken down. She was with two men, he said, who looked to him like hippies, but he stopped anyway. For him, it was another unique opportunity that he could not pass up, and he played it out for maximum enjoyment. Jan apparently had given the men a ride and they weren’t helping her to fix the car, so Brudos gave them all a ride, dropped the men off and then took Jan to his home. He told her to wait for him while he told his wife he was going to fix the car. Then he got into the back seat behind Jan, told her to close her eyes and began playing mind games. Foolishly, she complied. He put a strap over her head and around her neck to keep her from moving, and strangled her. Once she was dead, he had sex with the body in the car. Then he took her to his workshop, dressed her in some of his clothes and took pictures to remind him of his deeds. He also sexually violated the body several more times. After that, he tied her up and raised her into the air via a hook-and-pulley system he had fixed in the ceiling. Despite the danger that someone might discover her, he left her hanging there for several days.

Jan Whitney was only Brudos’s second victim but already he
felt sure of himself. Before disposing of the body, he invited police to come and inspect some accidental damage to the garage. They failed to notice the stench of decomposition. Before disposing of her, he cut off her right breast, intending to make a plastic mould, but he did it all wrong. As with Slawson, he weighted Whitney’s body down by tying it to a heavy engine part, and threw it into the Willamette River, but refused to give a specific location. Oddly, he was telling the police so much yet holding back key details as if he thought that keeping certain things back would hinder the prosecution, but they would still have sufficient evidence against him.

His third victim was Karen Sprinker, at the department store where she’d gone to meet her mother. He said he’d seen her and didn’t like the shoes she was wearing. He produced a pistol and forced her to get her into his car, and they went right to his home, where he raped her and forced her to pose in the clothing of his choice. Then he killed her by hanging her by the neck from his hook. He then subjected the corpse to the same treatment as the others. He removed both breasts and dressed her in the long-line bra that was too large for her. He stuffed it to keep her from bleeding in his car and to make the bra look correctly fitted.

With Linda Salee, Brudos had used a fake police identity badge and threatened to arrest her for shoplifting to make her do what he wanted. After he abducted her, he took her back to his workshop and left her bound and gagged while he had dinner in the house. She then fought him when he tried to strangle her with the strap. He raped her as she died and then used wires stuck into her rib cage to try to ‘make her dance’ with an electrical current. It apparently did not work to his satisfaction.

On 2 June 1969, Brudos was charged with first-degree murder for the death of Karen Sprinker. He believed that he’d removed the evidence from his workshop by telling his wife to burn his stash of female clothing. Police went back to his house and found the garage and the pulley and chain just as he had described. They found nylon cord and a leather strap that might have been
used for murder. From a shelf they removed a mould made from a female breast. They also discovered a hoard of women’s shoes in various sizes and many items of ladies’ underwear as well as a collection of photographs. Some were of Brudos in female underwear, but the most important ones contained horrifying images of the victims. They found one of a woman suspended from the hook and pulley with a black hood over her head. Another body had been dressed in several different garments and photographed. Brudos had cut the heads out of the pictures so he could enjoy the anonymous female form. The photograph that really caught their attention was one that would be crucial in the case against him. The photograph was of a girl’s body, clothed in a black lace slip and knickers with suspenders, hung from the ceiling, the camera angled up to her crotch. Reflected in a mirror on the floor in the lower corner of the photo was the frozen image of a killer, caught unawares. It was Brudos, looking at the woman he had just murdered.

On 4 June 1969, Brudos stood trial. He initially pleaded not guilty on the basis that he was insane. However, when he realised that this was not going to work for him he changed his plea to guilty to the murders of Jan Whitney, Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee, all from Salem. He was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment, with the chance for parole. He also admitted to a fourth murder, of Linda Slawson, but as her body was never found he was not prosecuted. He has made several appeals on legal issues, all of which have been turned down. The remains of Jan Whitney’s body were recovered in summer 1970.

Jerome Brudos’s three life sentences came to an end on 28 March 2006, when he died of natural causes at the age of 67. He was the longest-serving inmate (almost 37 years) at Oregon State Penitentiary when he died. Brudos’s wife was arrested and tried as his accomplice. A neighbour claimed she had actually seen her help Brudos with a victim, but this testimony was discredited. Since there was no evidence that Brudos’s wife knew about or participated in any of the crimes, as difficult as that might be to
believe, she was acquitted. In 1970, she ended her eight-year marriage to Brudos, changed her name and moved with the children to an unknown location.

The police investigation to catch the serial killers who came to be known as the Sunset Strip Killers started in earnest on 12 June 1980 along the Ventura Highway near Los Angeles. On that morning, a refuse collector came upon a grisly find close to rubbish he was collecting – the near-naked body of a teenage girl. The young brunette lay face down on a bush-covered embankment. She had been shot in the head with a small-calibre weapon. Nearby, a blonde girl around the same age was also found dead. She had been shot in the head and chest but her pink jumpsuit had not been removed. Nevertheless, it was slit up the leg as if whoever had killed her had a sexual motive either before or after death. There was also fresh blood on this girl’s face.

The police suspected that the girls had been killed elsewhere, and that they might have been hitchhiking together. No ID was found on either of them. The police were aware that the bodies were found near the spot where another young female murder victim, Laura Collins, had been found in 1977. Her murder had not yet been solved. On Friday 13 June, the two young females were identified as Gina Marano, aged 15, and her step-sister Cynthia Chandler, aged 16.

As is the case with many murders, the police often receive calls from cranks wanting to ‘confess’ or from aggrieved people wanting to put forward suspects. On this occasion, one call they received was from an anonymous female who said her boyfriend had been involved in the killings. She knew details that had not been released to the press and stated that she and her boyfriend had recently washed the car, inside and out (this would be consistent with the way a killer would react when wanting to remove evidence). During the conversation, the phone cut off and
she did not call back. If she had, some lives could have been saved and she herself might not have taken the path she did.

On 23 June, two more females were found, shot in a similar fashion. The first body found was that of prostitute Karen Jones, 24. She had been shot in the head with a small-calibre pistol. Her body was found behind a restaurant in Burbank. Not long after the first body was found, the headless body of a naked woman believed to be in her twenties was discovered beside a rubbish bin at the rear of another restaurant in Los Angeles. The body was soon identified as that of Exxie Wilson, aged 21, also a prostitute and a friend of Karen Jones. A thorough search of the area failed to find her missing head.

On the morning of 27 June, Jonathan Caravels went down the alley near his apartment at around 1am. He tried to park his car, encountered resistance and spotted a wooden box with an oversized lid. Hopeful that he had found something valuable, he went over to it. Part of the wood was shattered on the outside, as if someone had hit it or thrown it. Leaning over, he unlatched the metal clasp and lifted the lid. Inside was some coarse material, which smelt of something odd. Rummaging past the material, he got the surprise of his life. Wrapped in blue jeans and a T-shirt was a human head. He could see that this person was female and brunette, and that her mouth was slightly open, but he didn’t pause for a closer look, immediately calling the police. An early crime scene examination revealed that the head was considerably colder than the outside air and may have been in a deep freeze and then washed. It didn’t take long for them to realise that the head was that of Exxie Wilson. Inside the skull was a .25-calibre copper-jacketed bullet. Ballistics analysis determined that it was probably from an automatic known as a Raven and that the bullet that had killed Exxie was from the same gun that had killed the step-sisters and Karen Jones. They now knew they had a serial killer on their hands – one who had apparently committed two murders at the same time – but decided not to release all the details to the press.