Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (33 page)

In January 1969, Jerry Brudos celebrated his thirtieth birthday. Susan, in the meantime, began to witness her husband’s behavior becoming progressively more bizarre. One day while hanging the laundry she walked into the garage unannounced and saw photographs of nude women in Jerry’s development trays. Susan probably did not recognize that they were dead. Jerry told her that he was developing pictures for a “college kid” and reminded her not to enter the garage without telling him.

When Susan was away from the house, Jerry insisted that she telephone ahead before coming home. When asked why, he replied jokingly, so that he could get the blonde he had in the house out before she got home.

Then Susan found pictures of Jerry that he took of himself using a camera timer. He was lying on their bed dressed in different items of women’s lingerie. His face was covered in the photographs but she recognized his huge body.

One day she found a plastic object that looked like a very realistic copy of a female breast. She asked Brudos what it was, and he explained to her that he had an idea for a novelty item—a female breast paperweight. It was eerie how realistic it looked. Susan testified that Jerry told her it did not come out the way he wanted and that later he made another one, slightly different. This one he put on the fireplace mantel in their living room, where police would later find it when they searched his home. At some point during this period, Brudos also acquired a handgun.

In March, Jerry Brudos went out looking for victims. Accidental encounters were no longer satisfying enough—he now had the taste of blood and was trolling for suitable victims. Jerry Brudos told police that he came upon Karen Sprinker on her way to meet her mother in a department store restaurant. (That Brudos was identified and caught when police surveyed students in Sprinker’s college residence was a remarkable coincidence—Sprinker might have even rebuffed his telephone invitation only to succumb to him weeks later entirely at random in a different city.) Brudos was driving around the street when he spotted an attractive girl in a miniskirt and high heels entering a department store at about ten in the morning. Brudos parked his car in the store’s multilevel garage and went down into the store. But he could not find the girl. On the way back to his car in the garage, Brudos spotted nineteen-year-old Karen Sprinker emerging from her car. It was late morning, just before lunch hour.

Brudos at first was not entirely satisfied with the victim he saw approaching him. He recalled that he did not like the style of shoes she was wearing. But she was pretty and Brudos settled on her as victim just the same.
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Brudos confronted Sprinker with a pistol in the doorway of the department store and forced her out through the indoor parking garage to his car. Although it was noon, nobody passed by at the moment. As her mother patiently waited below in the department store restaurant, Sprinker was being driven away from the parking complex by Brudos.

Brudos drove Sprinker back to his home through midday traffic. Upon arriving at his house, he walked her into his garage and raped her. Afterward he allowed her to use the bathroom in the house and then walked her back to the garage and forced her to pose in various items of clothing and shoes while he took photographs. He then killed her by attaching a rope around her neck through the hook in the ceiling and hoisting her up.

Brudos told police that he then went back into the house, but later returned to the garage to have sex with Sprinker’s corpse. He cut off both her breasts and again experimented with taking molds from them but was still not satisfied with the results. He said that he did not like the bra Sprinker had worn so he picked out one of his favorite bras from his collection to dress her in but now that he had removed her breasts it did not fit. Brudos said he ended up stuffing it with paper towels so it would “look right.”
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When police searched Brudos’s house, they found the photographs that he took of his victims when they were alive and later, when they were dead. One picture showed one of the victims, dressed in a black lace slip, panties, and garter, hanging from a pulley on the ceiling—apparently dead. On the floor, Brudos placed a mirror so that it reflected the girl’s crotch beneath the slip Brudos had dressed her in. One corner of the mirror reflected Brudos’s drooling face gazing up at the girl—Brudos had accidentally photographed himself with his victim.

Brudos displayed a very typical pattern in serial murder: The first victim was killed unexpectedly without much planning; the second murder, ten months later, was more premeditated, but hesitating and virtually unplanned. The third murder, four months later, Brudos planned carefully and set out to commit, stalking his potential victim. Within a month of that killing, he began stalking his fourth victim.

His interaction with his victims likewise escalated. His first victim he only dressed and undressed like a doll; his second victim he raped only after she was dead; his third he raped before killing her. Brudos was “maturing” in his interaction with the women he attacked, in a pattern similarly observed in Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler.

In Portland, twenty-two-year-old Linda Salee was on her way back to her car after purchasing a present for her boyfriend when Brudos approached her in the mall parking lot. He flashed a toy police badge and “arrested” her on “suspicion of shoplifting.” Remarkably Salee said nothing as Brudos drove more than an hour to his house in Salem. Brudos said that it was as if she wanted to go with him.

Brudos drove the car with his victim right into his garage. His wife was home preparing dinner, so Brudos tied Salee up and went in to have supper. Brudos claims that when he returned to the garage he discovered that Salee had gotten loose of the ropes but had not attempted to escape or use the phone in the garage. This kind of passive behavior in shocked and traumatized victims is not uncommon.

Brudos then wrapped a strap around Salee’s neck and began to strangle her. Salee at this point began to fight back, scratching and kicking, but it was too late. Brudos stated that he raped her just as she died or shortly afterward. Brudos then revealed the cause of the strange burn marks police found on Salee’s body. Himself a surviving victim of an accidental electrocution, Brudos told police that he wanted to try an experiment using electricity. He confessed that he hung Salee on the hook like the other victims and stuck hypodermic needles into her rib cage. He then ran an electrical current through them to see if he could animate the corpse. Brudos was disappointed that the experiment did not work and only caused burns to the body. He had hoped, he said, that the corpse would “dance” or move in some way.
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Brudos told police he kept her corpse another day and a night, raping her again. But he did not cut her breasts because her nipples were not dark “like they should be.” He attempted to make plastic molds of them, but failed.

Brudos’s arrest was not easy, but he was arrogant and almost challenged police to find evidence to convict him. Several days after Brudos was identified when he called the girl at the dormitory, detectives came to visit him at his garage workshop. He freely let them come inside. They looked suspiciously at the strange hooks in the ceiling and the cord tied off in a knot exactly the same as the ones found on the ropes binding the bodies in the river. Brudos noticed the detectives eyeing the knot, and told them they could take the knot if they wanted—which is precisely what they did.

The fifteen-year-old girl that Brudos attempted to kidnap identified Brudos, and he was arrested on that charge. When police found a handgun in his vehicle, he was also charged with weapons offenses. But police did not have enough evidence to even search his garage—the photographs remained there while Brudos was being held on the other charges. At one point, Brudos even called Susan from jail and asked her to burn the container with the photographs and a bag of clothing, but she didn’t.

Detectives skillfully interviewed Brudos, who at first followed his lawyer’s advice and remained silent. In the end, however, Brudos needed to brag and he confessed to police. Subsequently his home and garage were searched and evidence recovered. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.

His wife, Susan, was later charged as an accessory to murder and the children were taken away. She was found not guilty, recovered her children, and disappeared into obscurity. Brudos remained in love with Susan until the end.

Later Brudos appealed his conviction and is now eligible for parole. Today he denies that he committed any crimes and refuses to discuss them if asked. It is unlikely he will get released, but he keeps trying.

As of 1997, Brudos did not look like he had aged much since 1969. He was a model prisoner in the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he maintained the prison’s record computer systems and installed the cable TV network. He was also in charge of repairing, stocking, and maintaining the vending machines. These are all highly privileged positions, a remarkable achievement considering he is a sex offender, on the lowest rung of a prison hierarchy. Sex offenders are often murdered by their fellow prisoners, many of whom have wives, girlfriends, and daughters of their own. In fact, several “accidents” have happened to Brudos in prison, but he refused to name any attackers. Inside a prison only one of two things count: intelligence or strength. Brudos has both, and perhaps with that rare combination he has managed to rise above his sex offender status. He is considered by guards as polite and not particularly dangerous—he wanders around the prison unsupervised.
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 Ed Gein—The Original “Psycho”

Ed Gein, who killed in rural Wisconsin in the 1950s, is perhaps one of the more notorious hedonistic lust killers. He was the character on whom Robert Bloch’s novel
Psycho
and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name were based, and part of the composite character of Buffalo Bill, the serial killer who skinned his victims in the novel and movie
The Silence of the Lambs.
Officially Gein is known to have killed two local women, which technically speaking excludes him from some definitions of serial killers that insist on three or more victims. But he was suspected in several other local homicides. He looked like a harmless farm-elf with one those flannel ear-flapped hats and his shirt buttoned to the top. His only reason to kill was that he needed to harvest human body parts—especially the husk of a female head and torso that he wore like a bodysuit.

Ed Gein lived alone on a farm after his mother and brother died and was known in the community as slightly odd but harmless. Nobody knew he had been robbing graves of freshly buried corpses for years. In 1954, however, he killed a local woman and dragged her body on a sled back to his farm. His crime was never detected.

In 1957, after Bernice Worden, a local town hardware store clerk, disappeared and somebody remembered seeing Gein in the premises earlier, the police visited his farm. They found a human heart in a pan on the stove; human entrails in the refrigerator; a shoebox with nine vulvas in it; another box containing four noses; a pair of stockings made from human skin; a soup bowl fashioned out of a human skull; a vest made from a female torso; skulls mounted on Ed Gein’s bedposts; nine masks made out of the flesh of female faces, some hanging on the walls as decoration; a human scalp in a cereal box; a drum fashioned out of human skin; four chairs whose upholstery was made of human skin caked in dripping fat; various pieces of jewelry fashioned out of body parts; and ten female heads. Many of the artifacts had been rubbed down with oil to keep their luster; the human masks were made up with lipstick; a red ribbon was tied through one of the vulvas. In Ed Gein’s summer kitchen, they found the headless and quartered corpse of Bernice Worden hanging from the rafters like a freshly killed deer.

Ed Gein had no particular compulsion to kill—what he needed was corpses. When during the hard winter months he could no longer dig into the frozen earth to uncover graves, he began killing to get his supply. Gein was certified insane and died in detention in 1984. One of his neighbors remarked, “Good old Ed. Kind of a loner and maybe a little bit odd with that sense of humor of his, but just the guy to call in to sit with the kiddies when me and the old lady want to go to the show.” For years, children who visited Gein’s house had been reporting to their parents that Gein had a collection of “shrunken heads” and strange masks hanging on walls, but the parents dismissed the stories as childish tales. None of the children ever reported Gein’s behavior toward them as threatening or unusual in any way.

HEDONIST THRILL KILLERS

These types of offenders specifically derive sadistic pleasure from the
process
of killing—not the actual killing, but the acts leading up to it. To enjoy the act, they need to keep their victims immobilized and alive and aware of what is happening to them. They often kill in elaborate ritualized methods and sometimes take a respite and revive victims who lose consciousness before continuing their torture. (A surviving victim of Richard Cottingham testified that he wiped her face down with a cool, damp cloth between bouts of torture [see the Preface].) These sadistically driven killers derive pleasure from the pain and suffering their victims go through as they die. Once the victim is dead, they almost immediately lose interest. Postmortem mutilation and necrophiliac acts are not a frequent characteristic of this kind of murder.