Jerry Brudos, (31 January 1939 - 28 March 2006) was a serial killer and a necrophiliac also known as "The Lust Killer" and "Shoe Fetish Slayer".

Early life

Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota. His mother had wanted a girl, and often ignored and belittled him. He had a fetish for women's shoes from the age of five. He spent his teen years in and out of psychotherapy and state hospitals. He began to stalk local women as a teenager, knocking down or choking them unconscious, and fleeing with their shoes.

At age 17, he dug a hole and kept girls as sex slaves. Shortly after he was found out and taken to a psychiatric ward of Oregon State Hospital for nine months. There it was found his sexual fantasies revolved around his hatred and revenge against his mother and women in general.

Brudos suppressed his obsessions long enough to graduate from high school and become an electronics technician. In 1961, he married and settled in a Portland, Oregon suburb. It was at about this time, however, that he began complaining of migraine headaches and "blackouts," relieving his symptoms with night-prowling raids to steal shoes and lace undergarments.

Murders

Between 1968 and 1969, Brudos bludgeoned and strangled four young women. The only initial evidence was witness sightings of a large man dressed in women's clothing. Brudos kept trophies from his victims, such as amputated breasts and a foot. After committing a murder, he would dress up in high heels and masturbate.

Police investigation and interviews of local coeds led them to Brudos, who confessed to the murders in detail. He was charged with three counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Incarceration

While incarcerated, Brudos had piles of women's shoe catalogues in his cell — he wrote to major companies asking for them — and claimed they were his substitute for pornography. He lodged countless appeals, including one in which he alleged that a photograph taken of him with one of his victim's corpses cannot prove his guilt, as it is not the body of a person he was convicted of killing.

He died in prison in March 2006.

In popular culture

Brudos is the subject of the book Lust Killer by crime writer Ann Rule.

The American band Macabre made a song about Brudos, titled "Fatal Foot Fetish", which is featured on the 2003 album Murder Metal.

An American Deathcore band by the name of Through the Eyes of the Dead uses a quote by Jerry Brudos in the end of the song "Truest Shade of Crimson" off of their 2005 release "Bloodlust".

John Water's 1981 movie Polyester (film) portrays a disturbed teenager named Dexter Fishpaw with a serial foot stomping fetish. It is alluded that he uses pictures of shoes as a pornographic aid.

Board refuses parole for serial killer

Serial killer refuses to detail crimes

"One day's like another in here," he said.

Jerome Brudos timeline & Victims

29 march 2006

Key dates in the investigation and prosecution of Jerome Brudos.

Jan. 26, 1968: Linda Slawson, 19, of Aloha is last seen selling encyclopedias in the Portland neighborhood where Brudos lived with his wife, Ralphene, and their two kids. Slawson's body was never recovered, but Brudos later would tell police he killed her and threw her body into the Willamette River from the Wilsonville bridge on Interstate 5. Brudos never was prosecuted for her death.

Nov. 25, 1968: Jan Whitney, 23, of McMinnville is last seen in Eugene. Her car was later found abandoned at a rest stop along Interstate 5 between Salem and Albany.

March 27, 1969: Karen Sprinker, 19, of Salem is last seen alive in the Meier & Frank parking lot in downtown Salem.

April 22, 1969: Gloria Jean Smith, 15, is nearly abducted while walking near Parrish Middle School. Smith eventually identifies Brudos as the man who attempted to kidnap her and take her to a green Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a car later identified as belonging to Brudos' mother. Before getting to the car, Smith spots Phyllis Kerr working in nearby front yard and yells to her and pulls away.

April 23, 1969: Linda Salee, 22, of Beaverton is last seen alive at the Lloyd Center parking lot in Portland.

May 10, 1969: The body of Linda Salee, 22, is found in the Long Tom River near Monroe, weighted down.

May 12, 1969: The body of Karen Elena Sprinker, 19, is found in the Long Tom River near Monroe, weighted down.

May 18, 1969: Jerome Brudos is identified as a possible suspect after a tip from an Oregon State University student.

May 26, 1969: Brudos' home in the 3100 block of Center Street NE is searched by police who find copper wire, rope and pictures of female victims.

May 29, 1969: Brudos is arrested on a charge of armed assault related to the April 22 incident with Gloria Smith.

June 3, 1969: Brudos is arrested in Salem on three counts of murder in the deaths of Karen Sprinker, Linda Salee and Jan Whitney.

June 27, 1969: Brudos pleads guilty to three counts of murder in the deaths of Sprinker, Salee and Whitney, three days before the scheduled start of a trial. Judge Val Sloper hands down three consecutive life sentences. Brudos is transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary.

July 27, 1969: The body of Jan Whitney is found tied to a piece of railroad iron in the Willamette River near Independence.

June 21, 1995: After repeated parole hearings, the Oregon Parole Board tells Brudos he will never be paroled. "You will be in prison for the rest of your life, and there will be no further parole hearings," said board chair Marva Fabien. Brudos continues to be allowed to appear before parole board every two years for an informal interview.

March 28, 2006: Jerome Brudos dies at 5:10 a.m. inside the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Brudos' known victims

Jan Susan Whitney was the first of the three women whose deaths would be attributed to Jerome Brudos. The 23-year-old from McMinnville last was seen in Eugene on Nov. 25, 1968. Her car later was found abandoned at a rest area along Interstate 5 between Salem and Albany.

Karen Elena Sprinker of Salem, a 19-year-old honor student at Oregon State University, was killed in March 1969. Police suspected that she was abducted from the parking structure at Meier & Frank in downtown Salem, where she was to meet up with her mother for a lunch date.

Linda Dawn Salee, 19, of Beaverton worked as a secretary and attended classes part time at Portland State University. In April 1969, Salee's car was found at Lloyd Center in Portland, where she had gone to buy her boyfriend a birthday present.

Linda Kay Slawson, 19, of Aloha, last was seen in January 1968 selling encyclopedias door-to-door in Portland, where Brudos and his family lived at the time. Her body never was recovered, and Brudos never was prosecuted for her death.

Infamous murderer dies at 67 in prison

29 march 2006

Jerome Henry Brudos, a Salem electrician whose torture-murder of at least three young women in the late 1960s gave law enforcement nationwide fresh insight into the dark forces that create a serial killer, died Tuesday in the Oregon State Penitentiary. He was 67 and the state's longest-serving inmate.

The Oregon Department of Corrections released few details other than to say Brudos died at 5:10 a.m. in the prison infirmary. A relative of one of Brudos' victims said Tuesday she learned that he had suffered from liver cancer.

Brudos was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murders of Linda Dawn Salee, 22, of Beaverton; Karen Elena Sprinker, 19, of Salem; and Jan Susan Whitney, 23, of McMinnville. Brudos later confessed to the murders of Linda Slawson, 19, and Stephanie Vikko, 16, but police did not have enough physical evidence to charge him. At the time, Oregon did not have the death penalty.

"He was one of the true monsters of the United States or the world perhaps," said James Stovall, the Salem detective who tracked down Brudos.

Married with two children, Brudos either lured or kidnapped the young women, sometimes with a uniform and badge. He took them to the garage of his Salem house and, usually within an hour, strangled them.

He photographed the women as they died and after their deaths. He dressed their bodies in lingerie and had sex with them. He then cut off body parts. One foot he preserved and used to model his collection of high-heeled shoes. He cast a severed breast in resin for a paperweight.

Stovall and the Salem police got onto Brudos' trail in May 1969 when the bodies of Salee and Sprinker were found in the Long Tom River. Their bodies were weighted down with old automobile parts.

On Tuesday, Stovall said the break in the case came when Brudos tried to kidnap a 12-year-old girl. She escaped and identified him for police from a photo lineup. Brudos was arrested just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, and through those three days, Stovall lived at the old City Hall as Brudos dropped hints.

Stovall said Brudos at first would profess innocence, then would ask, "So how would you know?"

"And I would tell him: 'There are things that you know, Jerry, and things that I know that nobody else knows.'

A confession

Finally, Brudos confessed. On June 27, 1969, three days before he was scheduled to go to trial, Brudos pleaded guilty to murdering Salee, Sprinker and Whitney.

Not long after, the Northwest correspondent for True Detective magazine arrived in Salem from Seattle. Long before she told the story of serial killer Theodore Bundy, Ann Rule studied Brudos.

"I can remember going out to the house on Center Street, scared to death, seeing the rose-covered trellises in the breezeway between the house and the garage," Rule said Tuesday.

At the time, law enforcement knew little about serial killers, Rule said, then, "the FBI behavioral science unit kind of chose Brudos as the perfect poster boy for lust murder, which is a step beyond serial murder because sexual torture is involved."

Rule and behavioral scientists studied Brudos' background. Born Jan. 31, 1939, in South Dakota, he was raised in California with a domineering mother who desperately had wanted a girl, so she dressed Brudos in girl's clothes. Still, he was treated as a family outcast.

Early fascination

At an early age, he apparently acquired a fascination with high-heeled shoes and started breaking into homes to steal them. The family moved to Oregon when Brudos was a teenager, and in 1956, he was sent to the Oregon State Hospital after he beat up a girl who rejected his advances.

He was in the Army for a short time but once back in Oregon, Brudos became an electrician. His raids into people's homes continued, and he had started preying on women, stalking them until he could knock them down and choke them to steal their shoes. He married, lived in Portland for a time, then moved to Salem.

"Serial killers almost never physically hurt someone they know," Rule said. "It has to be a stranger, a particular victim type. When they are in the killing mode, it is whoever happens to cross their path who fits the profile."

In 1982, Rule published "Lust Murder," a book about Brudos. She said that while nearly 40 years of study has yielded much information about serial killers, authorities still do not know a lot.

"If we could predict what causes them, we could stop them," she said.

Mixed emotions

While the story of Jerome Henry Brudos will live on in law enforcement texts and true-crime books, his death left mixed emotions Tuesday in Cindi Elliott Aurora, Jan Whitney's sister.

"Sad. Relieved," Elliott said. "I hope he spends all eternity in hell."

Elliott said she got the news Tuesday from a cousin, who had been notified by the Corrections Department. The cousin passed the news that Brudos had been suffering with liver cancer. All day, Elliott said, she wrestled with her feelings about Brudos.

"I wish I'd kinda known he was sick," she said. "Part of me would have, maybe, even talked to him. I'm not sure. I don't know what I would have expected having a conversation with him."

Her sister would have been 62 this year, Elliott said: "She would have been a grandmother."

Elliott was curious about one facet of Brudos' death.

"I did ask, 'What's happening to his body?' They told me, a friend had been listed as next of kin, so it will go to the friend. I was always curious about what would happen."