Jerome Henry Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota, on January 31, 1939, and raised in Oregon by a mother who had wanted a daughter and told him so. He developed a fixation on women's shoes at about five, when he found a pair of high heels at a rubbish dump, and spent his adolescence stealing shoes and underwear from neighbours' washing lines, for which he was committed to a psychiatric hospital at seventeen. He married, had two children, worked as an electronics technician, and built himself a workshop in the garage of the house at Salem which his wife was not permitted to enter.
He killed four women between January 1968 and April 1969: Linda Slawson, an encyclopedia saleswoman who called at the door; Jan Whitney, whose car broke down; Karen Sprinker, taken from a department store car park; and Linda Salee. He took them to the garage, killed them, and kept them there, photographing them in the clothes and shoes he had collected. He removed a foot from one and the breasts of others and kept them in the freezer, and made a paperweight from one. The Oregon press called him the Lust Killer and the Shoe Fetish Slayer.
He was caught by persistence rather than forensics. Two bodies surfaced in the Long Tom and Willamette rivers in May 1969, weighted with car parts, and police were canvassing Oregon State University about a man who had been telephoning female students asking them for dates and claiming to be a Vietnam veteran. One student agreed to meet him, told the police, and they were waiting.
He confessed and pleaded guilty in June 1969 to three murders and was given three life sentences. He was a keen correspondent from prison and requested women's shoe catalogues for the rest of his life. He died of liver cancer at the Oregon State Penitentiary on March 28, 2006, having become the state's longest-serving inmate.