According to a paediatric report presented as evidence for the defence, Susan Cabot’s degenerating mental illness had already taken its toll on Timothy by the time he was just 11 years old. The report described Cabot as overly dramatic and overly protective and Timothy as emotionally immature and disturbed. But the state of disrepair of the house was perhaps the most shocking indicator as to just how mentally unbalanced Susan Cabot was and filmed footage of the house was shown in court.
In September, Timothy changed his plea from not guilty for reasons of insanity to not guilty. He finally took the stand on 6 October 1989. There, he quickly broke into tears and recalled that his mother, moments before her death, had started screaming at him and had seemed to have had no idea of who he was. Fearful of her worsening state, he had tried to call paramedics, at which point she had attacked him with the barbell. Timothy had taken the barbell off her but she had come at him again – this time with a scalpel. Timothy, in self-defence, had beaten her to death.
On 10 October 1989, Judge Darlene E Schempp announced her decision. She could see no evidence of malice or premeditation. She found Timothy guilty of involuntary manslaughter – a sentence that carried a sentence of six years in jail; he had already spent two-and-a-half years in jail while awaiting trial. He was given just three years’ probation. The judge concluded her summation by saying that that there was no doubt in her mind that he had ‘loved his mother very much’.
Throughout his trial, the press had described Timothy as resembling a lost, somewhat forlorn-looking little boy. Yet Timothy wasn’t a child when he had caved in his mother’s skull with such force and repetition that the walls and even the ceiling had been covered in blood.
‘The house became his,’ recalls Tom Weaver. ‘I later heard that it was sometimes used for filming, and that one group of movie-makers, without even knowing about the house’s history of murder, became so creeped out by the atmosphere of the place that at least one of them, a woman, wanted to flee… A few years ago I started getting occasional emails from a complete stranger, a Cabot family friend, who said that Tim was hospitalised and suffering from some weird irreversible disease that was slowly making his brain disappear within his skull.’
According to Weaver, the emails abruptly stopped and in fact nothing at all is known about the fate of Susan Cabot’s son or where he is now. Meanwhile, the house he once shared with his mother on Charmion Lane has since been demolished and in its place stands a newer, more luxurious property more in keeping with the other elegant houses on the street. What really happened that night over 20 years ago remains a mystery.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JEROME BRUDOS: THE SHOE FETISH SLAYER
Hedonistic serial killer and family man Jerome Brudos killed four young women in his own backyard and dumped their remains in a nearby river. But how did he keep his murderous nature a secret and could it really have been his love of women’s shoes that made him a killer?
When opportunity came knocking on his door on a late afternoon in January 1968, Jerome Brudos didn’t hesitate – not even for a second. Her name was Linda Kay Slawson. She was 19 years old and pretty and was selling encyclopaedias in order to save up money for college.
Jerome Brudos, unlike many of the people Slawson encountered in her line of work, seemed affable enough and in fact appeared genuinely interested in what she had to sell. His wife, mother and children were all in the house, so he led her out back towards his garage so she could show him the encyclopaedias in peace. Slawson must have thought for a moment that it was her lucky day.
Brudos led her around towards the back of his house and past the children’s toys littered on the path. As soon as Slawson entered the garage, Brudos snatched up a thick plank of wood and cracked her over the head with it. After a furtive look back to the house, Brudos dragged her unconscious body further into the darkness, where he strangled her to death.
Brudos had physically assaulted women in the past but he had never actually killed before. He now found that he had in his possession something he had craved for all his life: a human doll. Something he could dress up at leisure in his secret stash of women’s clothing, underwear and – more importantly – the huge collection of women’s shoes that he had stolen.
He calmly walked back into his house and suggested that his family go out and get something to eat. Brudos then returned to the garage, where he stripped Slawson’s body, dressed her up in his women’s underwear and arranged her body in sexually provocative poses. He then cut off her left foot with a hacksaw and put the foot in the freezer so that he could use it to model his collection of high-heel shoes later on. That done, he put the body in the boot of his car, drove to Interstate 5 and threw it into the Willamette River.
Brudos would spend the next two years seeking out victims – all of them pretty and young, like Slawson – but to begin with he did not seem in any particular hurry to kill again. In fact, he waited 11 months before committing his next murder, and once again the attack was opportunistic.
His next victim was 23-year-old Jan Susan Whitney and her car had broken down on Interstate 5 between Salem and Albany. Brudos – who was blond and chubby with freckles, giving him a slightly youthful air – stopped and offered Whitney a ride to his house, where he told her he would phone a pick-up truck. Once there, Brudos got into the back of the car and strangled Whitney to death with a leather strap. He then had sex with her body in the car.
Brudos carried the body to his garage and hung it by the neck via a pulley, which he had fixed to the ceiling. He kept it hanging there for several days so he could dress it up, have repeated sex with it and take photos. He finally disposed of it in the same spot where he had dumped Slawson: the Willamette River. Again, Brudos had kept a keepsake: a breast, which he made a mould of in resin and used as a paperweight. By this time Slawson’s foot had rotted, having been taken out of the freezer so many times to model his shoe collection, and so that had to go into the river too.
Why was Jerome Brudos so obsessed with women’s shoes? Much of what is known about him, especially his childhood and growing love of ladies’ footwear, has emerged from the extensive research carried out by famous crime writer Anna Rule, whose book Lust Killer (1983) is the definitive account of the case.
According to Rule’s research, Brudos’s obsession began when he was just five years old. She writes that at that age he found a pair of high-heel shoes at a rubbish dump. He went home, put them on and paraded himself in them in front of his mother, who was furious – much to his surprise – and ordered him to take them back to the dump. But, instead of putting Brudos off, the incident had the reverse effect. Women’s footwear became an obsession, one that escalated over time; by the time he reached his twenties, he was stalking women, knocking them unconscious and then stealing their shoes for his collection.
I talked to Dr Cameron Kippen, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on foot fetishism, to try to understand Brudos’s obsession with shoes and how it might have led to his impulse to kill. According to Kippen, exactly why someone becomes sexually aroused by an inanimate object is still unknown. It is likely, however, that Brudos’s obsession began during his infant sexual development. ‘Something goes wrong in the individual’s developing conceptual thought processes and the person is left with a response which triggers their sexual desires when they see or interact with the object,’ Kippen told me. ‘This secretive behaviour becomes progressively more intense as they go through puberty. Stealing knickers and shoes would be common enough and forms part of a graduation where crimes becomes incrementally more serious.
‘I would think by the time Brudos experienced his mother’s reprimand, he had a full-blown sexual fascination with women’s shoes. Often the “buzz” comes from being caught and this negatively reinforces the behaviour. That would be the thrill he sought to re-create. Being caught and chastised would be more thrilling and negatively reinforce the deviant behaviour. He would seek that out at every opportunity.
‘
Brudos would love his shoe collection literally and pay the object of his desire the ultimate compliment by presenting them with a foot. Victims may have been chosen because they had a specific foot size, but not necessarily because he was turned on by feet. Lust murderers will revisit the site of their crimes if they can to relive the excitement. They enjoy doing what they do and will experience high orgasms, so any opportunity to relive the experience brings it all back to them. Taking a keepsake would satisfy some, and, in Brudos’s case, paying the ultimate compliment to his beloved shoe collection would be essential. So off comes the foot.’
Brudos, according to Kippen, is what is known as a ‘retifist’, someone who is obsessed with an inanimate object – in Brudos’s case, shoes. Although he is often mistakenly labelled as a foot fetishist, he wasn’t obsessed with feet at all. One killer who did have a real foot fetish was Dayton Lee Rogers. Rogers – also from Oregon, like Brudos – has been on Death Row since June 1989, having been convicted of murdering six women over a period of ten years. Rogers dumped the bodies of his victims, all of them prostitutes, in a wood overlooking the Molalla River, earning himself the nickname the ‘Molalla Forest Killer’.
Rogers, who was a married mechanic, bound and tortured his victims before dumping them and in one case actually gutted one of his victims. According to crime writer Gary King in his account of the case, Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1992), Rogers was particularly obsessed with the arches of women’s feet. Of the seven corpses found in the forest, one of them had had her foot removed with a hacksaw while another one had her foot cut two-thirds of the way through and then snapped off. According to King’s research, this was almost certainly done while the victim was still alive.
According to Dr Kippen, Brudos had what he calls a ‘reversed Cinderella fixation’. Instead of presenting the shoe to the foot, Brudos presented the foot to the shoe. Dr Kippen argues that Brudos may indeed have chosen his victims because of the size of their feet. ‘He brought the foot to the object of his greatest desire – his shoe collection.’
Four months after killing Slawson, and this time disguised as a woman, Brudos abducted 19-year-old Karen Sprinkler at gunpoint in a car park outside a department store. He brought her to his garage, forced her to pose in his collection of women’s clothes and lingerie, again took photographs, raped her, then choked her to death by suspending her in the air with the pulley. He had repeated sex with the body before cutting off both of her breasts to make plastic moulds. He then tied her body to a six-cylinder car engine with nylon cord and threw her in the river.
Although his killing spree continued, Brudos, in common with many serial killers, was able to completely separate his domestic life from his murderous activities; no one in his family suspected that anything was amiss. But how did he manage to maintain and lead a normal life while at the same time ensuring that his real nature remained a secret?
I talked to Dr Joe Davis – Director of the Department of Forensic Science, Criminal Justice and Criminology at the National University, San Diego, California – about the way Brudos managed to place the different areas of his life into compartments. Dr Davis specialises in forensic psychology and forensic mental health and has studied Brudos’s case in depth. He defines him as a ‘hedonistic serial killer’. ‘Jerry or Jerome Brudos, like so many others – like Bundy, Gacy – had so much to hide but was invigorated by the hedonistic excitement that came from his acts that brought so much sexual and ego-gratification called “ego-syntonic” thinking,’ he informed me. ‘Driven by pure sexual and physical hedonism, Brudos quickly adapted, and equipped mentally, a persona of a “double life” that could (and did) provide an intellectualised, rationalised and compartmentalised cover or covert life.
‘Brudos, like so many others, was able to “protect” via these mental defences his otherwise fragile ego by splitting off and compartmentalising his real self from his imagined fantasised one. This blur was indistinguishable by Brudos demonstrating the ability to turn this on or off at will.’
A spilt personality?
‘No, not a split personality by diagnosis, but one of a life-long malignant personality style, adjustable to fit his pathological needs anchored to narcissism and anti-social traits and behaviours. Each kill or act he performed further reinforced, solidified and galvanised this persona of evil with NO moral consciousness available to him to counteract it.’
Between his third and fourth murders, Brudos also attacked two other women, both of whom were able to escape. On 21 April 1969, Brudos approached 24-year-old Sharon Wood on the basement floor of a car park in Portland.
Ms Wood still lives in Oregon and is now a writer with ten grandchildren. She told me that her brief encounter with Brudos in that car park almost 40 years ago has given her ‘a lifetime to ponder survival’s mysteries’. Asked what happened that day, she sent me a poem called ‘Battle in the Bunker of an Everyday Parking Structure’, which tells the story of her chance encounter with Brudos that afternoon in 1969. The poem, Mrs Wood told me, is ‘as brief as the encounter that’s given me a lifetime, 38 Aprils since and 456 months, to ponder survival’s whys and maybes.’
‘I was in my forties when I read Ann Rule’s book Lust Killer,’ she says, ‘and found out how hopeless it had been for the others. There is a photo of me in the book back in 1969, hair like a painted waterfall, and, though you can’t see them, purple suede go-go boots. Now I have ten grandchildren, four of whom could have been someone else’s but not mine, because their parents – my twins – were born 1 August 1970, 16 months post the car park attack. My parking garage, unchanged in every way, is still there on Southwest Broadway, the main street of my hometown.’ I drive or walk by my memories there two or three times a week, every time just so grateful I survived.’
Battle in the Bunker of an Everyday Parking Structure
Daylight surrounded those corner stairs,
But I descended into closed basement air.
It was April, no rain, a light breeze,
The maples new again at hanging leaves.
Both of us in his six-storey lair,
I didn’t see him hidden there:
Making his selection, floor by floor
Tracking my lone distraction.
I’d misplaced my keys, spaced my car,
Oblivious, I searched those oil-stained rows.
I was dressed in linen red,
Didn’t know he’d fashioned paper weights
Of the last one’s breasts –
Thrown into the Long Tom River what was left.
I hadn’t yet seen her or all the rest:
Photographs of their waiting eyes,
Options frozen as his camera stalked and pried.
He came at me from behind my left shoulder,
The gun of his body cocked
Like a hair-trigger soldier.
So much we can’t know: whether
We will survive if we fight or die if we do.
What I knew was he whispered into my ear:
Don’t scream and I won’t shoot you.
Brudos was indeed armed with a gun, but Wood fought back and, after a brief but violent struggle, which left Wood unconscious and lying on the floor, Brudos fled. Wood had been extremely lucky. The next day brought another failed attack: Brudos attempted to abduct 15-year-old Gloria Gene Smith in his mother’s green Volkswagen but drove off after Smith ran to a passer-by for help. The day after that, Brudos tried again and this time was successful. His next victim was 22-year-old Linda Salee, whom he abducted in a shopping mall car park. Like the others, she was brought to his garage where he raped her and at the same time strangled her to death. Again she was pulled up by the hook in the air while Brudos had fun with her corpse.
This time, he didn’t take a keepsake; her breasts were ‘too pink’, he later told police. Brudos, a trained electrician, did, however, run a current through the body to see if it would jump. It didn’t. Later, he tied her body to a car transmission with nylon cord a
nd copper wire and dumped her in the river, just like the rest.
Brudos had also been busy searching for more victims at the nearby Oregon State University campus. According to Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and criminal profiler, he picked up directories of students on the campus. They had photos in them, so he picked out the girls he liked, ‘cold called them and asked them for a date’.
Thankfully, Brudos’s murder spree was nearing an end. Less than 20 days after his fourth murder, a fisherman called Sam Wallace spotted a body floating in the Long Tom River and called the police. It was Linda Salee. Just 50ft away, police also found Karen Sprinkler’s body.
As part of the murder inquiry that followed, police asked students at the nearby university campus if they had noticed any strange men hanging around. One of them told them that someone had been pestering her for a blind date on the phone. Police persuaded her to accept and were waiting when Brudos showed up. They asked him a few questions, which he answered co-operatively enough, but when he gave them a false address he immediately became a suspect.
Detectives went around to his house and Brudos foolhardily invited them into the garage. One of the officers, Detective Miller, noticed a piece of rope with a strange knot in it, and some copper wire; he pocketed the wire and had it examined. It was determined that the tool used to cut it matched the one that had been used to tie the bodies to the engine parts in the river. Brudos was arrested and soon afterwards made a full confession.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 7