Jerry Brudos

Jerry Brudos
Born	Jerome Henry Brudos (1939-01-31)January 31, 1939 Webster, South Dakota, United States
Died	March 28, 2006(2006-03-28) (aged 67) Salem, Oregon, United States
Cause of death	Liver cancer
Other names	The Lust Killer The Shoe Fetish Slayer
Criminal penalty	Life imprisonment
Killings
Victims	4+
Span of killings	January 26, 1968–April 22, 1969
Country	United States
State(s)	Oregon
Date apprehended	May 25, 1969

Jerome Henry "Jerry" Brudos (January 31, 1939 – March 28, 2006) was an American serial killer and necrophiliac who committed the murders of a minimum of four women in Oregon between 1968 and 1969.^[1]

Early life

Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota, and was the younger of two sons. His mother had wanted a girl and was very displeased that she had another son instead. She would also constantly belittle him and treated him with disdain, as well as abuse him. As a child, Brudos and his family would move into different homes in the Pacific Northwest, before settling in Salem, Oregon.

He had a fetish for women's shoes from the age of five,^[2] after playing with spike-heeled shoes at a local junkyard. He reportedly attempted to steal the shoes of his first grade teacher. Brudos also had a fetish for women's underwear and claimed that he would steal underwear from female neighbors as a child. He spent his teen years in and out of psychotherapy and psychiatric hospitals. He began to stalk local women as a teenager, knocking down or choking them unconscious, and fleeing with their shoes.^[3]

At age 17, he abducted and beat a young woman, threatening to stab her if she did not follow his sexual demands.^[4] Shortly after being arrested, he was 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. He also underwent a psychiatric evaluation, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Despite being institutionalized, he still graduated from high school with his class in 1957. Shortly after graduation, Brudos became an electronics technician.^[5]

In 1961, he married a 17-year-old girl named Darcie Metzler, with whom he would father two children, and settled in a Salem, Oregon suburb. He asked his new bride to do housework naked except for a pair of high heels while he took pictures. 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. He kept the shoes, underwear, and (for a time) the bodies of his victims in a garage that he would not allow his wife to enter without first announcing her arrival on an intercom that Brudos had set up.

Crimes

Between 1968 and 1969, Brudos bludgeoned and strangled four young women.^[6] The only initial evidence were witness sightings of a large man dressed in women's clothing. In the garage of his Salem, Oregon home, Brudos kept trophies from his victims, expressly two pairs of amputated breasts that were used as paperweights and the left foot of a 19-year-old woman named Linda Slawson (his first murder victim) which he used to model the shoes he collected.^[7][8] After committing a murder, he would dress up in high heels and masturbate. Police investigation and interviews of local university students led them to Brudos, who described the murders in detail.^[3] He had confessed to murdering Linda Slawson, Jan Whitney, Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee, and was sentenced to life in prison.^[9]

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, because it is not the body of a person he was convicted of killing.

Illness and death

Brudos died in prison on March 28, 2006 from liver cancer. At the time of his death, Brudos was the longest incarcerated inmate in the Oregon Department of Corrections (a total of 37 years, from 1969 to 2006).^[10]

Popular culture

• American thrash/death metal/grindcore band Macabre, recorded a song about Brudos (from their Murder Metal album) called "Fatal Foot Fetish".

Bibliography

Rule, Ann (1994). Lust Killer. Signet Books. ISBN 0-4511-6687-6. 

References