On Saturday, 28 June 1969, press around the country reported that a 30-year-old Salem Oregon electrician named Jerome Brudos had pleaded guilty to three first-degree murders in the slayings of three young women. ‘I did it,’ Brudos told the jury as he admitted to the murders of Karen Sprinkler, Jan Susan Whitney and Linda Salee.
Brudos told the court that he had killed Miss Whitney with ‘a leather strap’ after she was abducted on 26 November 1968 and said he used a leather strap ‘with a knot in it’ to murder Salee. According to newspaper reports at the time, Brudos said he had held Sprinkler for ‘about an hour’ before he killed her with a rope. He told the court that all three murders had been done with premeditation and deliberation.
There was no death sentence at the time in the state, so Judge Val D Sloper sentenced Brudos to three consecutive life sentences in the Oregon State Penitentiary. At the time of Brudos’s conviction, the body of Jan Susan Whitney, his second victim, had still to be recovered. It was found a month later, around a mile downstream from the Independence Bridge, where Brudos told police he had thrown it. The body had been there since November and was tied to a piece of railroad iron.
The story, as it was covered in the pages of the press at the time, was low key across the board. As some writers have observed, serial killers were a relatively unknown phenomenon at time and absent were the lurid details that would almost certainly have been revealed had Brudos begun his killing spree today. Also omitted from the press at the time, and this time for legal reasons, was the fact that while in custody Brudos had admitted to a psychologist that he had killed a fourth girl who was in fact his first victim – 19-year-old Linda Kay Slawson. Tragically for her family, her body was never found.
In theory, Brudos was eligible for parole in ten years’ time. Whether he would ever be paroled, though, was ‘contingent upon the adjustment he makes during the interim’ according to a statement made at the time by Jack Wiseman, then chairman of the Board of Parole and Probation.
In 1995, Brudos was informed by the parole board that he would never be released. There seemed to have been little ‘adjustment’ in his attitude to his crimes; when he did talk about what he’d done, he sometimes became flippant. According to Anne Rule, when asked by radio host Lars Larson about the murders, he replied, ‘It was a slow Saturday night.’
One person who actually met Brudos in jail was Brent Turvey, who was an undergraduate psychology student at Portland State University when he met Brudos in 1991. Turvey told me that Brudos lied constantly to him but was also affable and utterly disarming when he met him in jail.
All the same, Brudos was a constant target for other inmates and there had even been a couple of attempts on his life by the time Turvey and Brudos met. According to Turvey, Brudos was far more popular with the guards than his fellow prisoners, and was a trustee. He had even helped install the cable and computer system in the jail. ‘They all loved him,’ Turvey stated.
Although Brudos knew he would never be released, he was allowed an interview with the parole board every two years, which was a regular source of anguish to the victims’ families. But finally they got some good news: at 5 a.m. on 28 March 2006, Brudos died of cancer, aged 66. He had been in jail for 35 years. It was a relatively merciful end for a killer who had murdered four young women solely for his own personal pleasure.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BAR-JONAH: SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
Serial sex offender Nathaniel Bar-Jonah rigged up a pulley system in his kitchen so he could hang children by their necks and watch them choke. But had the one-time fast-food worker really killed and served up a young boy to his friends and neighbours?
Early on a cold December morning in the small town of Great Falls, Montana, Detective Robert Burton was on his way to work when he saw something that made him very worried indeed. Hanging around the local elementary school was a man whom Burton recognised as Nathaniel Bar-Jonah. Weighing over 230lb, the hulking shadow of Bar-Jonah wasn’t hard to miss, even in the early-morning gloom. With a doughy, innocent-looking face, he looked out at the world out of two mismatched eyes – one blue, the other brown.
Bar-Jonah was popular with kids in Great Falls because of his frequent garage sales, where he sold Star Wars figures at rock-bottom prices. Parents trusted him and often invited him to babysit their children. But Detective Burton knew better: he knew that, in 1994, Bar-Jonah had been arrested for sexual assault on an eight-year-old boy. Police had not been able to make the case stick, though, and three years later the charges had been dropped. Burton also knew that Bar-Jonah was a known felon in the State of Massachusetts, where he had been convicted of the kidnapping and attempted murder of two young boys while posing as a police officer. What’s more, this wasn’t the first time Burton had seen Bar-Jonah lurking outside the school. In fact, he had seen him twice in the same spot just the week before. This time, Bar-Jonah was wearing a dark-blue police-style jacket.
Burton immediately contacted dispatch and a patrol unit in the area responded to the call. As it was still dark outside, the squad car turned on the spotlight and shone it on the suspect’s face. The police officer told the hulking figure to approach the car and remove his hands from his pockets – a request that Bar-Jonah initially refused. The officer then asked him if he had something in his pocket and Bar-Jonah responded that he had ‘a stun gun’. When the police searched him they found that he was carrying two cans of pepper spray, a realistic-looking toy gun and a badge. He was arrested for impersonating a police officer and for carrying a concealed weapon. Two days later, police searched his home for the very first time.
Bar-Jonah had been living in Montana since moving there from his home state of Massachusetts ten years earlier. He had left behind him a string of convictions for offences against children – a record that Montana authorities were mostly unaware of. To begin with, it looked like a relatively straightforward arrest and police were just looking for anything in his house that could incriminate him further on the charge of impersonating a police officer. What they found there, however, would make headlines all over the world and change the small close-knit community of Great Falls forever.
Among the items found in Bar-Jonah’s squalid ground-floor apartment were a staggering 14,000 pictures of children, culled mainly from newspapers and year books. Hundreds of others were arranged in two binders. They were all meticulously arranged like baseball cards with the names of the children written underneath, among them many photos of children Bar-Jonah had clearly taken himself. According to court records, police also found ‘a blue police coat, a silver toy revolver, a silver badge, a Stunmaster stun gun, a cap with the logo “security enforcement”, two disposable cameras, two albums with cut-outs of children, one coat with a badge in the pocket and numerous photos and negatives’.
Beside the photo albums was a list of children written in Bar-Jonah’s own handwriting. The list was entitled ‘Lake Webster’ – a place where Bar-Jonah had spent most of his teenage years. On the list were 27 names written in chronological order dating from 1963 to 1977. The list opened up hideous possibilities, as Lake Webster had been the scene of Bar-Jonah’s first convicted attack on a child. Equally worrying was the discovery that on the list were the names of Billy Benoit and Al Enrickias – two other children Bar-Jonah had been convicted of kidnapping and attempting to kill in Massachusetts.
Bar-Jonah – born David Brown – had lived in Lake Webster before moving to Montana in 1991, and as a result of his many attacks on children there he had a long criminal record. When he was just 14 years old, he attempted to lure two young brothers from a neighbouring family with a note in which he offered them ‘$20 a piece’ to meet him at the local cemetery at six o’clock. Thankfully, the note was intercepted by the boys’ parents, who contacted the police. They found Bar-Jonah lurking behind a gravestone, waiting anxiously for the boys’ arrival. He got off with just a warning that time, but it wasn’t long before he tried again.
Three years lat
er, Bar-Jonah struck once more, using a method of attack that he was to improve upon over the years that followed. This time he pretended he was a police officer and showed a fake police badge to eight-year-old Richard O’Connor, whom he drove to a remote spot near Lake Webster. There, he forced O’Connor to remove all his clothes before strangling him with the seat belt of his car. Thankfully, Bar-Jonah took pity on his victim and let him go before driving him home and two weeks later even wrote a letter to the boy’s mother and said he was sorry for what he’d done. Again he got off lightly, this time with probation.
When he was 20 years old, in 1977, Bar-Jonah dressed as a policeman and picked up 13-year-old Billy Benoit and 14-year-old Al Enrickias outside the White City Cinemas in Shrewsbury. Armed with a hunting knife, Bar-Jonah handcuffed them both and then drove them to the nearby Charlton woods, where he had earlier set up a tent. Once there he began to choke Enrickias. But the boy, showing a maturity beyond his years, feigned death and then ran to get help. When police caught up with Bar-Jonah after a short pursuit on Route 20, they found Benoit in the trunk of the car. He had been beaten, handcuffed and was severely bruised; Bar-Jonah had half-choked him to death.
After the attempted murder on the two boys near Lake Webster, Bar-Jonah had served just two years in a maximum-security prison before being sent to the relatively cushy confines of Bridgewater Treatment Centre for the sexually dangerous. There, he had taken classes in journalism, worked in the canteen and quickly found God. It was during this period that he changed his name from David Brown to the more Jewish-sounding Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah – apparently, so he would know ‘what it was like to be persecuted’.
In prison, he had expressed perverse sexual fantasies of rape and torture to psychologists, revealing that he had once tried to choke a female classmate when he was just six years old. He also told psychologists about his bizarre fantasies, which revolved around torture, and also expressed a curiosity about the taste of human flesh. After ten long years of intensive therapy, he was still, according to one psychologist report, ‘A borderline personality with marked passive-dependent and psychopathic features’.
That didn’t stop Bar-Jonah from appealing against his sentence. Two psychologists who submitted reports to the appeal hearing argued that the ‘vulnerable’, ‘honest’ Bar-Jonah had ‘benefited from therapy’ and felt that it was safe to finally let him go. On 12 February 1991, the now Christian child molester, who had openly confessed to fantasising about eating another human being, had been deemed safe to release back into the community.
Three weeks later, he attacked another child – a seven-year-old boy who was waiting for his mother in her car. The obese child molester opened the door of the car, squeezed inside and then sat on top of the boy, though he fled when the boy’s mother (the aptly named Nancy Surprise) came back and saw him. Arrested shortly afterwards, Bar-Jonah ludicrously claimed that he had simply been looking for a place to get out of the rain. Incredibly, instead of being sent to prison or being taken back to the mental facility of Bridgewater, Bar-Jonah was given yet another lucky break. His lawyers sought a plea-bargain agreement and the boy’s mother, believing that the case against Bar-Jonah was much weaker than it actually was (he had actually made a confession), agreed. The direst consequence of this was that his record was not shown in court. He was given just two years’ probation for breaking and entering and assault and battery on the condition that he go to live with his mother in Great Falls, Montana. The judge had ordered a psychological evaluation too, but it never took place; in fact, Bar-Jonah was never formally placed on probation. Worse still, the State of Montana was not even warned that he was on his way.
Back in Montana, detectives were trying to figure out what the other names on the Lake Webster list meant. Were they other victims who had fallen prey to the fat teenage child molester? Searching through his notebooks, police saw the name of another boy they recognised, and this one was local: ten-year-old Zachary Ramsay, a Great Falls child who had disappeared early one morning five years previously while taking a shortcut through an alley on his way to school. So was the list of names a victim list after all? Could any connection be established between Bar-Jonah and Zachary Ramsay? And, if Bar-Jonah had indeed killed him, what had he done with the body?
There was one horrifying clue. Among the 28 boxes of papers, police found a series of coded messages. They believed that the code was a device through which Bar-Jonah had relived some of his happiest memories as he had worked on it alone in his room. By taking every second or third letter out of certain sentences, shocking messages began to appear. Police soon became convinced that these messages were reminders of past meals – with Zachary Ramsay as the main ingredient. They read: ‘Barbecue bee sum young guy.’ ‘Little boy stew.’ ‘Christmas dinner for two.’ ‘Lunch is served on the patio with roasted child.’ ‘Little boy pot pies.’ ‘Sex a la carte.’ And ‘Barbequed kid.’
Police discovered that a few pages had been ripped out of the notebook, although they were able to re-create what had been written there from the impressions left on other pages. These proved particularly worrying reading as, according to the prosecutor in the case, they concerned various methods of torture. They also provided three other names that were added to the growing list of children that Bar-Jonah may have attacked.
To begin with, though, police did not charge Bar-Jonah with the disappearance of Zachary Ramsay, or make any revelations about his alleged cannibalism. It was a young local crime reporter called Kim Skornogoski who broke the story. She revealed that Bar-Jonah was a suspect eight months before he was actually charged with the murder and it was through her stories that Great Falls learned they had been living with a monster for over ten years. ‘In those months between police naming him as a suspect and charging him, I wrote about officers digging up Bar-Jonah’s garage, finding a child’s bones, and I did extensive research into his criminal background in Massachusetts,’ Skornogoski told me. ‘So you can imagine that, with each story, there were waves of reaction from the community. The most common feeling was frustration and anger – that Massachusetts would release Bar-Jonah and, when caught jumping into a car with a young boy, instead of sending him back to jail, he was sent to join his family in Great Falls, Montana.
‘In talking with investigators, I knew that they suspected Bar-Jonah cannibalised Zach early on. But we didn’t report that fact until it was part of the affidavit charging him. That, of course, was quite a shock to the community. There are several sick allegations that he cooked these meals for neighbours and church groups. Many were angry that we would report that part of the case at all.’
Report them they did, though. The 83-page affidavit outlined prosecutor’s belief that Bar-Jonah had indeed killed Zachary Ramsay and then served him up to unknowing friends and neighbours, and possibly even to Bar-Jonah’s own mother, during a two-week stretch. As police gathered evidence and interviewed friends and neighbours, many of them started to recall that some of the food served up by Bar-Jonah soon after Zachary’s disappearance had rather an odd taste.
On one occasion, Bar-Jonah told neighbours that he was serving them deer burgers that he had hunted himself, though he had no hunting licence and didn’t even own a gun. In addition, he served up chilli, stews, pies and spaghetti, all of which had a strange aftertaste. After eating some of his ‘deer meat’, one female friend promptly told him that it must have gone off and Bar-Jonah, in a sulk, threw it away.
If this wasn’t all bad enough, some of the negatives police took from a disposable camera were shots of Bar-Jonah lying on the bed in various states of arousal, along with pictures of children who were known to live in the upstairs apartment. Police interviewed the two brothers upstairs and then later their cousin, all of whom told them that they had been abused at his hands. Bar-Jonah was charged with three counts of sexual assault, one count of aggravated kidnapping and one count of assault with a weapon for the attacks on the boys upstairs, and while awaiting trial he was als
o formally charged with the murder of Zachary Ramsay.
At this point, Bar-Jonah filed a ‘Motion for Change of Venue’ arguing that, as he was currently linked to a very well-publicised murder case in Great Falls (i.e. the murder of Zachary Ramsay), he could not receive a fair trial for the charges of abuse. The motion was granted and the trial moved 150 miles away to Silver Bow County. There began the largest jury selection in the state’s history, as lawyers sifted through 200 potential jurors.
As the abuse case unfolded, jurors were shown the thousands of photos of children found in Bar-Jonah’s house, including the photos that he had taken of the alleged victims. Particularly damaging to the defence was Exhibit 91, an article entitled ‘The Right Ropes, The Top Knots’, which contained instructions on how to tie knots. Then there was Exhibit 92-A, a pamphlet entitled ‘Autoerotic Asphyxia’. This helped corroborate the harrowing story of the 11-year-old boy known only as ‘SJ’ from court records. The boy, who had been eight years old at the time of the attack, told the court that Bar-Jonah had one day asked him if he wanted to play a game called the ‘rope game’. Bar-Jonah had then put a tan-coloured rope around his neck and pulled him up on a pulley attached to his kitchen ceiling, to watch him choke. ‘It was like a pulley, and he would just start pulling it,’ the boy told the court. ‘I started choking and I went up – I was scared, I thought I might die.’ Thankfully Bar-Jonah let him go.
He was sentenced to ten years for aggravated kidnapping, 100 years for sexual assault and 20 years for felony assault, all of the sentences to run consecutively with no possibility of parole. Since the discovery of the list in Bar-Jonah’s house, FBI investigators have compiled a computer database of names or locations connected in some way to the overweight ogre. As the FBI goes about the massive task of establishing exactly where Bar-Jonah was on any given day for the last 15 years, he has become a suspect in many other disappearances, including that of a seven-year-old girl called Janice Pockett.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 8