Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  Soon after midnight on September 6, 1991, Donald Gaskins walked into the execution chamber without help, and sat in the electric chair. After his wrists and ankles had been strapped, a metal headpiece was placed on his skull, with a wet sponge inside it. Before the black hood was placed over his head he gave a thumbs-up salute to his lawyer. Three buttons were then pressed by three men—so that none of them would be sure who had been responsible for the execution.

  His body was handed over to his daughter, and was later cremated.

  13

  Slaves

  In a chapter on the history of sex crime in I Have Lived in the Monster, Robert Ressler writes about the rise of serial murder: “Perhaps it is because modern society has thrown up many young men who were loners as children. They turned to fantasy as a result of physical and mental abuse during childhood, and were mentally unable to participate in normal consensual sexual relationships as young adults.” And he adds: “The lethal fusing of sexual and aggressive impulse that characterize serial killers seems to occur in most modern societies . . .” And he cites Ed Kemper, who told a psychiatrist: “I have fantasies about mass murder—whole groups of select women. . . . Taking life away from them . . . and having possession of everything that used to be theirs—all that would be mine. Everything.”

  Unlike DeBardeleben, Kemper is not the kind of aggressive sadist who enjoys inflicting pain and humiliation on living victims. His dream is about sex slaves, with whom he can do whatever he likes because they are dead. With a slightly different temperament, such as that of William Heirens, he might have released his tensions in underwear fetishism.

  Ressler then discusses a serial killer who followed this route. Jerry Brudos, an electrician of Salem, Oregon, had been stealing shoes and panties for most of his life when, on January 26, 1968, he received a visit from Linda Slawson, a twenty-two-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman. He invited her into his garage, knocked her unconscious with a piece of wood, and then strangled her. He was not interested in rape, but in dressing and undressing her as if she were a doll, using a box of stolen panties and bras. That night he threw her in the Long Tom River, south of Corvallis, Oregon. He kept only one thing—her foot for trying shoes on—in his garage freezer.

  The following November, Brudos succeeded in luring another victim into his garage, twenty-three-year-old student Jan Whitney. He strangled her from behind, and then once again “played dolls.” This time he also raped her, then suspended her by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling—the archetypal “sex slave” position. He kept her there for several days, using her as a plaything, and even removed her breast and tried to turn it into a paperweight with a resin hardener. He left her there while he took his family for a Thanksgiving trip, and was dismayed on his return to find that a corner of his garage had been demolished by a car that had run out of control. Fortunately for him, the police who were called to the accident had failed to look inside.

  Once more he disposed of the body in the river.

  But he was growing bored with passive slaves. On March 19, 1969, he abducted a nineteen-year-old student, Karen Sprinker, from a parking lot by pointing a gun at her and promising not to hurt her. After raping her on his garage floor, he made her pose for photographs in her white cotton bra and panties, and then in more glamorous underwear from his box. Finally he tied a rope around her neck, pulled her clear of the ground, and watched her suffocate. He then violated the corpse, cut off her breasts, and disposed of the body in the river.

  With his next—and final victim—Brudos used the same abduction technique. Linda Salee, a twenty-two-year-old office worker, was climbing into her car, loaded with parcels, when Brudos showed her a police badge and told her he was arresting her for shoplifting. He took her back to his garage and tied her up, then left her while he went and ate dinner. He then went back to the garage and strangled her with a leather strap; he was in the act of raping her as she died. Later, he once more disposed of the body in the river.

  The finding of bodies in the river triggered the search for the killer. Detective Jim Stovall decided to start at the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, eighty miles south of Portland, where Karen Sprinker had been a student, and spent two days questioning every female student. The only promising leads were several mentions of a stranger who made a habit of telephoning the residence hall, asking girls their first names, then talking at length about himself, claiming to be psychic and to be a Vietnam veteran. He usually asked for a date, but seemed unoffended when he was refused. It was when one of the girls mentioned that she had agreed to meet the “Vietnam veteran” that Stovall’s attention suddenly increased.

  The man had seemed intrigued when she mentioned that she was taking a psychology course, and told her that he had been a patient at the Walter Reed Hospital, where he had learned about some interesting new techniques. When he suggested meeting her at the dorm for a coffee, the girl agreed.

  The man’s appearance had been a disappointment. Overweight and freckled, he looked to be in his thirties. He had a round, unprepossessing face and narrow eyes that gave him an oddly cunning look, like a schoolboy who is planning to steal the cookies. But he seemed pleasant enough, and they sat in the lounge and chatted at some length. Nevertheless, she had the feeling that he was a bit “odd.” This suddenly came into focus when he placed a hand on her shoulder and remarked: “Be sad.”

  “Why?”

  “Think of those two girls whose bodies were found in the river . . .”

  When he left, he asked her to go for a drive, and when she declined, made the curious comment: “How do you know I wouldn’t take you to the river and strangle you?” Stovall began to feel excited when the girl told them that the “Vietnam veteran” had mentioned that he might call again.

  “If he does, would you agree to let him come here? Then call us immediately?”

  The girl was reluctant, but agreed when the police told her that they would be there before the man arrived. She merely had to make some excuse to delay him for an hour.

  A week later, on Sunday, May 25, 1969, the Corvallis Police Department received the call they had been hoping for. The girl told them that the “Vietnam veteran” had telephoned a few minutes ago, asking if he could come over. She told him she wanted to wash her hair, and asked him to make it in about an hour.

  When the overweight, freckle-faced man in a T-shirt walked into the lounge of Callaghan Hall, two plainclothes policemen walked up to him and produced their badges. The man seemed unalarmed; he gave his name as Jerry Brudos, and said that he lived in Salem; the only sign of embarrassment was when he admitted that he had a wife and two children. He was now in Corvallis, he explained, because he was working nearby—as an electrician. Because Brudos had committed no offence for which he might be arrested, or even taken in for questioning, the police let him go.

  A preliminary check showed that he was what he claimed to be—an electrician working in Corvallis. But when Stovall looked into his record, he realized that he had a leading suspect. Jerome Henry Brudos, thirty, had a record of violence towards women, and had spent nine months on the psychiatric ward of the Oregon State Hospital. Moreover, at the time of the disappearance of Linda Slawson, Brudos had lived in Portland, in the area where she was trying to peddle encyclopedias.

  The first thing to do was to check him out. Stovall called on Brudos at his home in Center Street, Salem, and talked to him in his garage. Stovall’s colleague, Detective Jerry Frazier, also went along, and noted the lengths of rope lying around the room, and the hook in the ceiling. He also noticed that one of the ropes was knotted, and the knot was identical to one that had been used to bind the corpses in the river.

  This, Stovall decided, had to be their man. Everything fit. He worked as an electrician and car repairman. He had been working at Lebanon, Oregon, close to the place where Jan Whitney’s car had been found. And he had been living close to the place from which Karen Sprinker had disappeared in Salem.

  There was ano
ther piece of evidence that pointed to Brudos. On April 22, an overweight, freckled man holding a gun grabbed a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl as she hurried to school along the railroad tracks; she had screamed and succeeded in running away. She immediately picked out the photograph of Jerry Brudos from a batch shown to her by the detectives.

  Except for this identification, there was no definite evidence against Brudos for the murders. Stovall was therefore reluctant to move against him. But five days after Brudos had been questioned in Corvallis, Stovall realized that he could no longer take the risk of leaving him at large. As he was on his way to arrest Brudos for the attempted abduction of the schoolgirl on the railway tracks, he received a radio message saying that Brudos and his family had left Corvallis, and were driving towards Portland. Shortly after this, a police patrol car stopped Brudos’s station wagon. At first it looked as if Brudos was not inside; but he proved to be lying in the back, hidden under a blanket.

  Back at the Salem police station, Brudos was asked to change into overalls. When he removed his clothes, he was found to be wearing women’s panties.

  When Stovall first questioned Brudos, he failed to secure any admissions. It was the same for the next three days, Stovall did not ask outright if Brudos had murdered the girls; he confined himself to general questions, hoping to pick up more clues. But at the fifth interview, Brudos suddenly began to talk about his interest in female shoes and underwear. Then he described how he had followed a girl in attractive shoes, broken into her home through a window, and made off with the shoes. Soon after this, he described how he had stolen the black bra—found on Karen Sprinker’s body—from a clothesline. Now, at last, he had virtually admitted the killing. Then, little by little, the rest came out—the curious history of a psychopath who suffered from the curious sexual abnormality for which the psychologist Alfred Binet coined the word fetishism.

  In Jerry Brudos’s case, it first showed itself at the age of five, when he found a pair of women’s patent leather shoes on a rubbish dump, and put them on at home. His mother was furious and ordered him to return them immediately; instead he hid them and wore them in secret. When his mother found them, he was beaten and the shoes were burned.

  When he was sixteen—in 1955—he stole the underwear of a girl who lived next door. Then he approached the girl and told her he was working for the police as an undercover agent, and could help her to recover the stolen articles. She allowed herself to be lured into his bedroom on an evening when his family was away. Suddenly, a masked man jumped on her, threatened her with a knife, and made her remove all her clothes. Then, to her relief, he merely took photographs of her with a flashbulb camera. At the end of the session, the masked man walked out of the bedroom, and a few minutes later, Jerry Brudos rushed in, claiming that the masked intruder had locked him in the barn. The girl knew he was lying, but there was nothing she could do about it.

  In April 1956, Brudos invited a seventeen-year-old girl for a ride in his car. On a deserted highway, he dragged her from the car, beat her up, and ordered her to strip. A passing couple heard her screams, and rescued her.

  A psychiatrist determined that he was sane and had no violent tendencies. Back in his home, police found a large box of women’s underwear and shoes. They sent him to the Oregon State Hospital for observation, and he was released after nine months.

  A period in the army followed, but he was discharged because of his bizarre delusions—he was convinced that a beautiful Korean girl sneaked into his bed every night to seduce him.

  Back in Salem, he attacked a young girl one night and stole her shoes. He did it again in Portland. Then, just as it looked as if nothing could stop him from turning into a rapist, he met a gentle seventeen-year-old named Darcie (a pseudonym) who was anxious to get away from home, and who got herself pregnant by him. Once married, she was sometimes a little puzzled by his odd demands—making her dress up in silk underwear and high-heeled shoes and pose for photographs—but assumed that most men were like this.

  While his wife was in the hospital having a baby, Brudos followed a girl who was wearing pretty shoes. When he broke into her room that night, she woke up, and he choked her unconscious. Then, unable to resist, he raped her. He left her apartment carrying her shoes.

  He was now a time bomb, waiting for another opportunity to explode. It happened when an encyclopedia saleswoman knocked on his door one winter evening . . .

  Because he pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, Jerry Brudos was sentenced without a trial to life imprisonment.

  * * * * *

  The desire for a living toy was carried to an absurd extreme when Cameron Hooker, a bespectacled, mild-looking timber worker, kidnapped a hitchhiker and kept her in a box for seven years. No case better illustrates Hazelwood’s comment that sex crime is not about sex, but about power.

  On May 19, 1977, twenty-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking from Eugene, Oregon, to Westwood in Northern California when she was offered a lift by a young couple with a baby. When they suggested turning off the main road to look at some ice caves, she raised no objection. In a lonely place the man placed a knife to her throat, handcuffed her, and then confined her head into a peculiar boxlike contraption that left her in total darkness. Hours later, he took her into the cellar of a house, stripped her, suspended her from the ceiling with leather straps, and whipped her. Then the couple had sex under her feet. After that, the head-box was clamped on again and she was placed in a larger wooden box, about three feet high, for the night.

  The next day she was chained by her ankles to a rack, and given food. When she showed no appetite, he hung her from the beam again and whipped her until she was unconscious. Later the man made her use a bedpan, which he himself emptied. Again she was locked up in the box.

  This went on for weeks. When she became dirty and unkempt, he made her climb into the bath. He raised her knees and held her head under water until she began to choke. He did this over and over again, taking snapshots of the naked, choking girl in between. After that, her female jailer tried to comb her hair, then gave up and snipped off the knots and tangles with scissors.

  Cameron Hooker had been born in 1953. He was a shy, skinny boy who had no close friends. When he left school he went to work as a laborer in a local lumber mill. His only reading was pornography, particularly the kind that dealt with flagellation and bondage. His daydream was to flog nude women who were tied with leather straps. When he was nineteen, he met a plain, shy fifteen-year-old named Janice. She was delighted and grateful to be asked out by this quiet, polite youth who drove his own car and treated her with respect. So far she had fallen in love with boys who had ignored her or treated her badly. Cameron was marvelously different. When he explained that he wanted to take her into the woods and hang her up from a tree, she was frightened but compliant. It hurt her wrists, but he was so affectionate when he took her down that she felt it was worth it. In 1975 they married, and she continued to submit to strange demands, which included tying her up, making her wear a rubber gas mask, and choking her until she became unconscious. Finally, he told her of his dream of kidnapping a young woman and using her as his “slave.” Eventually, she agreed. She wanted a baby, and longed to live a normal life; perhaps if Cameron had a “slave,” he would stop wanting to whip and choke her. That is how it came about that Colleen Stan was kidnapped, and taken to their basement in Oak Street, Red Bluff, where she was to spend the next seven years.

  After a month or so, Janice felt she could no longer stand it. The idea of holding someone captive sickened her. What was worse was that the captive was an attractive young woman. Even though her husband had agreed that there would be no sex between him and his “slave,” it was obvious that he was deriving from Colleen the same sexual satisfaction that he derived from tying her up. Janice decided to weaken the ties with her husband. She went to stay with a sister, and found herself a job in Silicon Valley. She returned every weekend, but this brought about the situation she had been trying to avoid
. Left alone with his “slave” for the whole week, Cameron gave way to temptation. He forced Colleen to perform oral sex on him, reasoning that he was not going back on his bargain so long as there was no vaginal intercourse. He also burned her with a heat lamp, administered electric shocks, and choked her until she blacked out. Six months after the kidnapping, he started giving her small tasks, such as shelling walnuts or crocheting. The Hookers sold the results of her labors in the local flea market.

  Early in 1980, after nearly three years of captivity, Colleen was allowed an amazing excursion. She was permitted to dress up in some of Janice’s clothes, make up her face, and accompany Janice to a dance. There they met two men and went home with them. Janice vanished into the bedroom with one of them, while Colleen stayed talking to the other. Cameron apparently suspected nothing, and his wife’s liaison continued for the next two months, until it fizzled out. After that, Janice, still unsuspected, had another short affair.

  In January 1981, Hooker discovered an article in an underground newspaper about a company of white slavers who forced girls to sign a slavery contract, and decided that Colleen should do the same. On January 25, Colleen was made to sign a long document declaring that she handed herself over, body and soul, to her Master, Michael Powers (alias Cameron Hooker), but her true owner was a company affiliated with the Mafia. She was to agree never to wear panties, and always to sit with her legs open. She was told that her new name was Kay Powers.

  Now she was allowed upstairs to help with household chores, but if Cameron came in and shouted “Attention!” she had to strip off her clothes and stand on tiptoe with her hands above her head. Soon after this, Janice herself suggested to her husband that he should have sex with his slave. Perhaps she was hoping that he would cite his original agreement and refuse; in fact, he promptly brought Colleen up from the basement, spread-eagled her naked on the bed, with a gag in her mouth and her wrists and ankles tied to the corners, and then raped her. Janice, meanwhile, rushed off to vomit.