On May 10, 1969, two fishermen on the Long Tom River in Oregon saw what looked like a large parcel floating just under the surface. It was the bound body of a young woman in a coat, weighted with a car gearbox and tied with copper wire twisted the way electricians trim their lines. She was Linda Dawn Salee, twenty-two, a secretary and part-time Portland State student from Beaverton, missing since April 23. Two days later divers found Karen Elena Sprinker, eighteen, an Oregon State chemistry student, twenty yards away, tied with the same cord and wire to a six-cylinder engine head. Both breasts had been cut from her body, and the bra she wore, far too large, was stuffed with brown paper towels.
Questioning Sprinker's classmates, detectives learned that several women students had been getting calls from a man who said he was a Vietnam veteran and asked them out. One had felt sorry for him and gone. He drove a dirty station wagon with children's clothes in it, and at one point told her to think of the two girls found in the river. When he dropped her off he asked how she had known he would not take her to the river and strangle her. She agreed to call police if he rang again. On May 18 he did, and officers picked him up on his way to meet her. He gave his real name, age and job, and a false address, and they had to let him go.
He was Jerome Henry Brudos, thirty, an electronics technician. Born in Webster, South Dakota, on January 31, 1939, he was the younger of two sons of a mother who had wanted a girl and never let him forget it. At about five he found a pair of high-heeled shoes in a junkyard and wore them home; his mother called him wicked, and when she found he had kept them she beat him and burned them in front of him. By his teens he was stealing women's shoes and underwear and photographing girls. At sixteen, wearing a mask and carrying a knife, he forced a neighborhood girl to undress for photographs, then came back pretending to be "Ed," his own twin brother. In April 1956 he beat a seventeen-year-old girl who refused to undress on a date, breaking her nose, and was sent to the Oregon State Hospital for nine months. Doctors there found him depressive, with a schizotypal personality, but not grossly mentally ill.
The army discharged him in 1959 as psychologically unfit. He worked as an engineer at a Corvallis radio station, and on September 30, 1961, married Ralphene Schwinler, seventeen and a month pregnant. They had a daughter and a son and moved in 1968 to a small house near Salem, where his garage workshop was off limits to his family unless they announced themselves over an intercom he had installed. In May 1967, while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to their son, he followed a woman in high heels home, choked her unconscious and raped her, and left with her shoes.
On January 26, 1968, Linda Katherine Slawson, nineteen, a door-to-door encyclopedia saleswoman from Aloha, came to his house by mistake, thinking she had an appointment there. He feigned interest, took her to the basement, clubbed her with a piece of wood and strangled her. He sent his mother out with his daughter to buy hamburgers. He dressed and redressed the body in shoes and underwear from his collection and photographed it, cut off the left foot and kept it in the basement freezer, and later sank the body somewhere in Marion County. It was never found. On November 26 he stopped on Interstate 5 for Jan Susan Whitney, twenty-three, whose Rambler had broken down, offered to fetch tools from his house, and strangled her with a leather strap in his car in the driveway. Her body hung from a pulley in his garage for two days. When a car crashed into the garage wall, a policeman looked through the hole and saw nothing in the dark. That evening he sank her in the Willamette River with the decaying foot.
On March 27, 1969, wearing women's clothes, he forced Sprinker into his station wagon at gunpoint in the parking lot of the Meier & Frank store in Salem, where she was meeting her mother for lunch. In his garage she begged him not to kill her. He raped and photographed her, then hanged her from a ceiling beam. In April he tried to abduct two more: Sharon Wood, twenty-four, in a Portland parking garage on April 21, who bit deep into his hand and fought him off, and Gloria Jean Smith, fifteen, the next day, who ran to a woman working in her yard. On April 23 he showed Salee a fake police badge at the Lloyd Center mall in Portland, where she had been buying birthday presents for her fiancé, and told her she was under arrest for shoplifting. At his garage he tied her up and went in to have dinner with his family, then came back and strangled her.
His record, his mother's Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and Gloria Smith's identification were enough for a warrant. On May 26 detectives searched the garage and found women's shoes and lingerie, lists of sorority phone numbers, and Polaroid photographs of women living and dead, one of them Sprinker, and in one a mirror on the floor that showed Brudos holding the camera. A severed breast coated in epoxy sat on the living-room mantel, and the copper wire and rope matched the river bindings. On May 29 state troopers stopped his wife driving toward Portland and found him under a blanket in the back. By early June he had confessed to all four killings. "There must be something wrong with me," he said.
On June 27, 1969, three days before trial, he pleaded guilty before Marion County Circuit Judge Val D. Sloper to three counts of first-degree murder and was given three consecutive life terms. He was never tried for Slawson, because his photographs of her showed only her feet and legs. Whitney's body was found in the Willamette near Independence a month after his conviction. His wife was charged with Sprinker's murder on a witness's claim that she had helped carry a woman into the house; other witnesses contradicted it, and she was acquitted that fall. She divorced him, changed her name and moved away.
In prison he ran the computer records, wired a cable television network and ordered catalogs of women modeling shoes and underwear. Asked by a former detective whether he felt sorry for his victims, he crushed a sheet of paper and threw it on the floor, and said he cared about them as much as that. Victims' families came to his parole hearings, and on June 21, 1995, he was told he would die in prison. He died of liver cancer at the Oregon State Penitentiary at 5:10 a.m. on March 28, 2006, at sixty-seven, the longest-held inmate in the state. Whitney's younger sister said that when she heard, she cried, not for him but for her family: "He put our family through hell."