Lust Killer

by Ann Rule

  A daughter, Megan, was born to the couple in 1962, and the marriage seemed to be a happy one for the first three years. Jerry found jobs easily enough, although he couldn't seem to hold on to them. It was no great concern to Darcie because he could always find another. He spent a great deal of money on presents for her on holidays and anniversaries, and he continued to be kind and considerate. She was so busy with the baby that she didn't tumble to the fact that she was virtually a prisoner in her own home.

  She didn't know that when she said or did something that made her husband "depressed," he prowled and stole underwear and shoes to make himself feel better. She had not seen the flashes of temper that "scared the hell out of" people who knew him.

  Jerry's choice for their intimate behavior was her guideline too. When they were home together, they were nude. They continued to "run around the house without clothes" until Megan grew from an infant to a toddler and Darcie balked at being naked in front of the child.

  And Jerry, always an avid—if sometimes secret—photographer, insisted on taking nude pictures of Darcie. He had taken a few shots before their marriage, and more on their wedding night. She didn't feel comfortable with it, but he assured her that she was his wife and it was all right. She didn't mind the black-and-white snaps because he could develop them in his own darkroom, but she objected to color slides. They had to be processed commercially. Jerry had an answer for that, too. He explained that if he took the first and the last slides in a series of pleasant scenery or something else innocuous, nobody would ever look at them. Big labs process too much film to look at every single picture.

  "Darcie," he explained, "they look at the first or the last-and that's all."

  She relented, but she never felt good about it.

  Jerry's suggested poses were so strange. He directed the naked Darcie to ride on Megan's tricycle, toward him, away from him. Darcie's buttocks bulged over the tiny seat, her breasts were draped over the handlebars. When she saw the finished print, she winced. She begged him to rip the pictures up, and he promised he would.

  But he didn't.

  Some of her husband's requests were bizarre. Jerry had Darcie pose, sitting on the floor, with a nylon pulled over her face so that her features were distorted into a grotesque mask. And, as always, she was nude. Some of the pictures featured Darcie wearing nothing but spike-heeled black patent-leather shoes.

  One day, those pictures, along with so many others, would become police exhibits. Darcie Brudos, who had been embarrassed that someone in an anonymous photo lab might see her naked image, could never have imagined that her nakedness would be seen by scores of strangers, that she would be questioned in court about why she would pose for such kinky pictures.

  Nor could she have possibly foreseen why her private sex-life with Jerry would be such a subject of speculation.

  Even when they weren't taking pictures, Jerry wanted Darcie to wear high heels all the time—not just when they went out, but when she did housework. They made her back hurt, and aggravated her bad knee. She tried to explain that to Jerry, but her arguments seemed to depress him.

  In a way—a way she could not possibly know at the time—Darcie Metzler Brudos had become the fantasy girl that the sixteen-year-old Jerry Brudos had wanted to place in a secret tunnel, someone of his own to do with what he wanted.

  She usually went along with him. She was not an assertive woman. Her father had been dominant; now her husband was dominant. She was a little afraid of him, yet could not say why. She compromised again and again with her hulking husband in a marriage that she has described as "very good" at first, and then, as three or four years passed, "stranger and stranger." The shy, soft little woman wanted only a happy home—but achieving that became increasingly difficult.

  Darcie was hurt to see that Jerry was so removed and disinterested in their daughter. "He was very distant with Megan." If the toddler tried to crawl in Brudos' lap or to kiss him, he invariably pushed her away. He avoided any physical contact with his own child, and Megan sensed that she somehow displeased her father. On one atypical occasion, Brudos took Megan on an outing to feed ducks, and the child was overjoyed at receiving attention from him, but it was only an isolated incident and Brudos returned behind the invisible wall he'd built between himself and Megan.

  Darcie wondered if he resented Megan because she took so much of her own time. That may have been a partial explanation for Brudos' behavior. It may have been that he did not trust himself with the girl-child, that he felt an incestuous attraction. If the latter was true, Megan was saved from something far worse than neglect.

  In Brudos' eyes, Darcie was perfect. He had such a tenuous lid on his underlying violence, but if she had managed to remain completely docile, submissive, and obedient, he might have maintained the status quo longer than he did.

  She could not. Such small things depressed Jerry. Small mistakes grew into gargantuan betrayals in his mind.

  The Brudoses moved from one rented home to another-twenty houses or more in their seven years together. From Corvallis to Portland, and back again, and then for a while to Salem. Darcie got used to packing everything and moving on, but she always dreaded the news that they would have to move again. She knew Jerry was smart and clever with anything electrical, and she wondered why he couldn't hold a job. She wanted to have her own home, someplace permanent where she could put up curtains and plant bulbs and know she would be around to see them come up. But she never was; they were always living someplace else when spring came. And she began to worry for Megan, who would be starting school soon. What would it do to the child to have to adjust continually to new schools?

  Jerry had done the same thing already, of course—moving constantly up and down the West Coast when he was a child. If he had done it, he didn't see why Megan couldn't.

  In 1965 Jerry had a job at an electronics firm in West Salem, working as a technician. His employer found him a "Casper Milquetoast kind of guy." But he also recalls him as "the most brilliant electronically oriented mind I've ever seen. There wasn't anything he didn't know about electricity and circuitry."

  The boss liked him well enough, although he seemed a sissy and totally non aggressive. Brudos worked in the company for months, went fishing with the boss, and never, never showed any signs of temper. He was placid and amenable to suggestion. He just didn't apply himself, and that was the only explanation his employer could give for his being stuck in a technician's job. "With his First Class FCC license, he could have run any television or radio station in the country. But his only ambition was to read—read and study—and that was the end for him. He always carried a bound portfolio with him, filled with letters of recommendation. Each letter was encased in plastic, and he was really proud of those things. They were from college professors and electronics experts—character references. He must have shown them to me four or five times; he wanted people to think he was important."

  There was one thing Jerry Brudos never discussed with the men at the plant. That was women. He presented himself as a solid family man, and he never participated in the sometimes ribald conversations of his fellow workers. He didn't drink, and he didn't smoke, and his employer was sorry to lose him when he left.

  He came back to visit after a year or so. He still wasn't running a television or radio station, not even a small one.

  Brudos had an explanation for that, a story that was a total fabrication. He said he'd enlisted in the Navy and had been injured in the explosion of a shell aboard ship. He recalled that the accident had killed two of his buddies, and that he had spent a year in a naval hospital himself, his injuries so severe that he had become eligible for a service pension. It was a patent lie-all of it. Since he had been released from the Army for psychiatric reasons, the Navy would never have accepted him. His former boss didn't know that, of course, but the story sounded fishy.

  And yet even with Brudos' transparent attempt to make himself a hero, his ex-employer couldn't help liking the guy. He was pitiable,
sitting there with his usual hangdog expression, his shoulders sloped forward as if he expected rejection. So, what the hell—he'd tried to make himself sound macho with some fairy tale. His old boss took Jerry home to meet the family, and didn't question him about what he'd really been up to while he was gone.

  Two events occurred in Jerry Brudos' life in 1967 that seemed to unleash the perverted obsessions that had lain smoldering inside him for so long. Given the extent of his aberration, some thing at some time would have triggered him. The monster within was growing restless. His migraines were accelerating both in number and in magnitude and he was experiencing what he called "blackouts."

  He had managed to alleviate his depressions—the terrible black, hopeless feelings that swept over him when he thought Darcie did not love him enough—with his nocturnal prowls to steal underwear and shoes. Each time, for a while, his stolen garments made him feel better. But his spells of feeling good lasted such a short time.

  When Darcie became pregnant again, Jerry was enthusiastic—far more than he had been over her pregnancy with Megan. It was almost as if he was going through the gestation right along with her. He wanted to do it all; he wanted to be right there in the delivery room when his son was born. He had no doubt at all, that it would be a son.

  His own father had not been very easy to reach, closed up, really, when he'd needed to talk, or just plain not there. But, given the choice between his parents, he thought his father at least had tried the best he could. Jerry, though, would be a good father to his son—right from the beginning.

  In a way, and on an unconscious level, Jerry foresaw his son's birth as a rebirth for himself too. When he saw that baby emerge into the world, he would be released from the bad things he had been doing.

  He thought Darcie understood how important it was that he should be in the delivery room with her. He believed he could trust her to send for him when it was time.

  She didn't. He tried to follow her into the delivery room, and found his way blocked. The doctor had left firm orders that he was not to be allowed in! Even the announcement that he had a son didn't mitigate his anguish, and he could hardly bear to look at the infant at first.

  He was plunged into despair when Darcie came home and told him that she had asked the doctor to keep him out.

  "Why?" he asked her, bewildered. "You told me I could be there."

  "I didn't want you to watch another man play with me," she said. "I didn't think it was right."

  It was such an odd way to describe a physician's part in the birth of a baby. But, considering how he had always told Darcie he could not bear to have "another man touch you," she may have thought that any touching would disturb her husband.

  Tears sprang to Jerry's eyes, and he could not be consoled. Instead, he went out into the night and stole another pair of shoes. This time, it wasn't enough. He was still full of rage and hurt.

  A short while later, he was in downtown Portland and saw a girl wearing a pretty pair of shoes. Rather than knocking her down and stealing her shoes, he decided that he would follow her until she went home and take the shoes from her there. He watched her for hours, staying just behind her while she shopped for groceries, following her onto the bus and jumping out the doors behind her just as they began to close. He watched her go into an apartment building, followed, and noted which window was hers.

  He waited until he was sure she was asleep, and then he crept into her apartment. It was exciting to have varied his procedure this way, to know what the woman looked like who slept so close to where he fumbled in her closet. He told himself that he didn't want her; he had only come for her shoes.

  But she woke up and saw the dark shadowy figure kneeling on her bedroom floor. Before she could cry out, he was beside her on the bed. He had to choke her then because she might be able to tell someone what he looked like. He would make her unconscious before she could turn on the lamp beside her bed. Her throat was so soft, and he applied just enough pressure with his big hands. She sighed and went limp.

  He had not thought of raping her, but having her so helpless stimulated him. He moved his hands over her body. For that moment, she belonged to him, and he felt a powerful erection, the strongest he had ever had.

  He raped her there in the dark, and when he was finished with her, he took the shoes and left.

  They were the best shoes he'd ever stolen.

  The birth of his son—without him—had been the worst thing that had ever happened to him. He had erased the disappointment of being robbed of that experience by having the woman.

  The second event of 1967 almost killed Jerry. He had made his living as an electrician since he'd left the radio station in Corvallis. He was very cautious, and certainly knowledgeable about safety precautions, yet he came very close to electrocuting himself.

  He was working at one bench and reached across to connect a live wire in his hand to terminals on another bench. Instantly his body became rigid as a jolt of power ran through him, 480 volts raced from his right arm through his chest and down his left arm, and the force of it picked him up and threw him across his bench and onto the floor.

  He was not rendered unconscious, but he was dazed and burned. And his neck was injured, cervical damage resulting that would stay with him.

  A weaker man would have been killed, but Brudos survived. Indeed, he was never even hospitalized.

  And so he was quite well and strong enough to lift heavy objects—even the deadweight of a body or an automobile engine—by January 26, 1968. He had beaten women, and stolen their lingerie and shoes, and choked them, and, finally, raped one. But he had never killed a woman.

  Not until Linda Slawson came to his door hoping to sell him a set of encyclopedias. …

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ironically, even as her husband's mental problems had progressed into homicidal rage, Darcie Brudos thought that maybe their marriage was getting better. He had been so unhappy about the events surrounding Jason's birth, but he seemed to have forgiven her once she had explained her motivations to him. He became enthralled with Jason, showing the youngster so much more attention than he'd ever shown their first child. He took Jason with him when he went on errands, and he talked about teaching Jason how to use the tools in his workshop—when he grew up a little. It hurt Darcie that he still ignored Megan, but it was nice that he seemed to accept Jason.

  He let Darcie herself have a little more freedom, allowing her to visit girlfriends or to bowl. She knew he wasn't crazy about having his mother baby-sit for Megan while she was away, but he didn't really put his foot down. He was always downstairs in his workshop anyway, fiddling with some electrical project or other, or out with his friends buying engine parts in junkyards.

  His headaches, however, had grown worse. She had to keep the children quiet so much of the time because any sound seemed to cause him excruciating pain when he had one of his migraines. It was easier just to take them both with her and go spend the days with girlfriends where the kids could be themselves. She thought maybe the electrical accident had caused the headache problems to be so bad now. But she couldn't persuade Jerry to go to a doctor about it.

  The brief spate of calm after Jason's birth didn't last very long. Darcie blamed herself for part of the trouble. She no longer enjoyed sex with her husband. She wasn't even sure why, but when he accused her of being uninterested in him, or disgusted by his touch, she had to agree with him—even though she would not admit it out loud. They weren't kids on a honeymoon any longer; she couldn't go dashing around the house naked now. She hated posing for nude photos, obeying his instructions to pose this way and that.

  He wanted her to dress up "fancy" all the time, saying that other women looked good and she didn't. But you couldn't wear sexy clothes while you were doing dishes and washing diapers.

  He wanted to go out dancing. Well, that hurt her bad knee, and wearing spike heels all the time made her back hurt. When she told him so, he looked offended and drove off somewhere. She had no id
ea where he went or what he did.

  She knew he was very sensitive, and she sensed that she should not argue with him or disobey him, but she was no longer the pliable girl she had been when they were first married. She wanted something beyond the cloistered life in which only the two of them existed.

  Jerry lost his job in Portland and in the spring of 1968 they decided to leave the house at Forty-seventh and Hawthorne and move to Salem. In a way, Darcie was glad to go—especially when they found the nice little house on Center Street. It was not a lavish house, but it was kind of cute and cozy. Gray shake and close to the ground. It had a big yard full of evergreens, roses, and flowering trees. There was a fence around the yard, just white chicken wire, but sturdy enough to prevent the children from running out into Center Street, a main thoroughfare in Salem. There was an attic for storage, and the garage had a workshop portion where Jerry could set up all the gear he'd accumulated. The garage wasn't hooked onto the house itself, but connected by a breezeway. Jerry looked at the place and deemed it perfect for them.

  Darcie had friends in Salem, and she liked living in a smaller city than Portland.

  For Jerry Brudos, coming back to Salem was the completion of a circle. The Oregon State Mental Hospital where he had been incarcerated a dozen years earlier after beating his teenage date was only a few blocks down Center Street from the gray house. Its proximity didn't seem to bother him; he never spoke of it at all.

  Salem, Oregon, is one of the lovelier cities on the West Coast, and the capitol city of Oregon. The Capitol Building itself is gleaming white and topped with an immense statue of a pioneer, a golden figure that can be seen for miles. The parking strips of Salem are planted with roses that bloom from May through December. There are carefully preserved mansions alongside modern homes, and the land outside Salem is verdant and productive. Green beans, corn, peas, hops, and strawberries grow abundantly in the Willamette Valley, and Salem has processing plants where the crops are canned and frozen.