# 52: The Shoe Fetish Slayer: Jerry Brudos (Part 2)

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 12 Oct 2023, 1 h 03 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO8084150628.mp3

Today's episode is part two of the Jerry Brudos case, aka the Shoe Fetish Slayer aka the Lust Killer aka the Salem Serial Killer Trigger Warning: sexual assault, rape Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] So today's video is going to be Part 2 to my previous video on
[0:43] the serial killer named Jerry Brodus, better known as the Shoe
[0:47] Fetish Slayer or the Lust Killer.
[0:50] I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
[0:52] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
[0:55] video. This video is for educational
[0:57] purposes and everything I'm about to say is just information
[1:01] that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
[1:04] one video. Now before we get into it, I'm
[1:06] just going to give a little bit of a summary of what opened in
[1:09] Part 1. So then you're all caught up.
[1:11] Jerry Brudos grew up in Oregon, neglected and abused by his
[1:15] mother. He was constantly shamed for
[1:17] having normal and natural sexual urges.
[1:21] He took a particular liking to women's high heeled shoes and
[1:24] underwear. However, due to the way that his
[1:27] mother would treat him, whenever he would express his interest in
[1:31] those things, he always thought they were very shameful.
[1:34] And these urges were not normal and they had to happen behind
[1:38] closed doors. And this led to Jerry committing
[1:42] actual crimes in order to fulfill his sexual urges that he
[1:47] was having. And these crimes would include
[1:49] theft, assault, sexual assault, even abduction.
[1:53] Jerry is now in his early 20s with a wife named Darcy and two
[1:58] children. However, lately he feels as
[2:00] though his wife has been neglecting his needs, and so he
[2:04] sets out to fulfill them elsewhere.
[2:06] So where we left off Part 1, Jerry had began going out on an
[2:11] evening and stealing women's underwear from their washing
[2:14] lines. And it was even getting to the
[2:16] point where he was breaking into women's houses so that he could
[2:20] go into their drawers and get their underwear out himself if
[2:25] it wasn't outside on a line. And on this particular day,
[2:28] Jerry Brudos sets out to go and stalk women around town, as he
[2:33] often did. He would go out, find a woman
[2:36] that he thought was attractive, and he would just follow her
[2:38] around all day until she'd finished in town, and then he
[2:41] would go home. However, this time he found a
[2:44] woman that he thought was attractive, but he knew he
[2:47] didn't want to just leave it there.
[2:49] He didn't want to leave it at just the stalking.
[2:51] He wanted more than to just steal her shoes or her
[2:56] underwear. He followed this woman all the
[2:58] way back to her apartment building.
[3:00] He he followed her home, but instead of going inside with
[3:03] her, he hung back and waited outside, watching the building
[3:08] to see which window was hers. He waited until he could see her
[3:11] turn the light on and walk into her apartment so he knew exactly
[3:16] which one was hers. And then Jerry Brutus hung
[3:19] around for another few hours until he was sure that she would
[3:22] be asleep. And then he approached.
[3:25] He broke into this woman's apartment and began looking
[3:28] around for some high heels or some underwear that he could
[3:31] steal. But in the process of doing
[3:34] that, he actually woke the woman up.
[3:37] And Jerry was in her bedroom. And as soon as Jerry realized
[3:40] what he'd done, that he'd woke this woman up, he knew that he
[3:44] had to act fast. He had to do something.
[3:46] And so, without thinking, he impulsively just jumped on this
[3:50] woman and strangled her into unconsciousness.
[3:54] Now, Jerry had done this once before.
[3:56] Well, a couple of times before, he'd physically assaulted a
[3:59] woman while he was trying to steal things.
[4:01] But this time, Jerry brudos took it a step further, and he raped
[4:06] this woman while she was unconscious.
[4:10] And in that moment, something clicked in his brain.
[4:14] He got full satisfaction from this attack.
[4:19] He never felt completion with his attacks.
[4:23] And this time he did, and that made him realise that it wasn't
[4:27] the intimidation or, you know, seeing the fear in his victims
[4:31] eyes. None of that was what did it for
[4:33] Jerry. What helped him achieve full
[4:37] sexual satisfaction, he realised, was that the woman was
[4:41] unconscious, that she was unresponsive.
[4:44] He liked that part. And in that moment Jerry Brudos
[4:49] realised that he was and necrophiliac, that was exactly
[4:54] what he wanted, was to have sex with unconscious or preferably
[5:00] for him, dead women, deceased women.
[5:03] And this took Jerry back to those fantasies that he used to
[5:06] have when he was young, where he always used to want that dungeon
[5:09] of women and he even started digging it in his garden.
[5:13] And then he realised it was too big of a project.
[5:15] Only now he took that fantasy and turned it even more twisted
[5:21] in the way that he wanted this dungeon full of women, but the
[5:24] women would be dead. And in an ideal world, if he
[5:27] could get away with that, Jerry wanted to do that.
[5:30] He would imagine having a full freezer, like a walk in freezer
[5:35] full of dead women, women's dead bodies, and he could just take
[5:40] any of them out at any time whenever he wanted to use them.
[5:45] And this fantasy only got stronger and stronger as the
[5:49] days went on. On January 26th, 1968, nineteen
[5:54] year old Linda Slarson, an encyclopedia saleswoman, knocked
[5:58] on the door of Jerry Brudos's home.
[6:01] And it was Jerry Brudos himself that answered the door that day.
[6:04] And when he did, Linda started her usual pitch trying to sell
[6:08] these encyclopedias. Now, Jerry really did not care
[6:12] about encyclopedias, but he listened anyway.
[6:15] And when she was done, he was like, yeah, I'm interested.
[6:18] If you want to talk more about it, come inside.
[6:21] So she did, and he led her down to the basement, which he said
[6:25] was like his kind of workspace in the house.
[6:28] Meanwhile, his two children and his mother were upstairs.
[6:32] So Linda sits on a stool in Jerry's basement, and he sits
[6:35] opposite her, and they're talking about these
[6:37] encyclopaedias. And then in the middle of the
[6:39] conversation, Jerry gets up on the pretence that he's just
[6:42] going to go pick something up behind Linda.
[6:44] When he got there and she wasn't looking, he picked up a plank of
[6:48] wood and hit her over the back of her head with her.
[6:51] Linda fell to the floor and Jerry knelt down next to her and
[6:54] checked for her pulse to see if she was still alive, just
[6:58] unconscious, or if he'd actually killed her with that blur and
[7:02] she was alive. She did still have a pulse, but
[7:04] at this point that wasn't enough for Jerry.
[7:07] Jerry grabbed the unconscious Lindas neck in his hands and
[7:12] squeezed as hard as he could. He said he could even hear the
[7:15] bones cracking in his hands. And he did this until he was
[7:20] sure that Linda was dead. And when he let go, Jerry Brutus
[7:25] had just claimed his first murder victim.
[7:27] He moved Linda's body under the basement stairs because if
[7:31] anyone was to catch him off guard, open the basement door
[7:34] or, you know, even walk into the basement, they might not see it
[7:38] if the body was slightly hidden. And once he'd got the body out
[7:41] of the way, he ran back up the stairs into the rest of the
[7:44] house and asked his mother to take the children out for food
[7:47] because they hadn't had their dinner yet.
[7:49] But of course, that was to just get them out of the house so
[7:52] that Jerry could run back down to the basement and continue
[7:55] with the aftermath of his murder.
[7:58] Because he didn't kill for the reason of killing, he killed for
[8:02] the aftermath. First he undressed Linda until
[8:06] she was completely naked, and then he went out and got his
[8:09] collection of stolen women's underwear and high heels, all
[8:14] those things that he'd been stealing for most of his life.
[8:18] He then dressed her up in pretty much every single garment that
[8:23] he had, just to see what he liked the best on her body.
[8:27] And whenever he found a set of underwear that he particularly
[8:31] liked Linda in, he would take pictures of it.
[8:35] And he did this with quite a few different underwear sets.
[8:40] And as he was doing this, Jerry realised that he had never been
[8:45] more satisfied. He'd never been happier.
[8:50] He wanted to keep Linda's body forever and do this every single
[8:54] day, but he just couldn't. The risk of someone finding her
[8:57] was way too high. Of course he'd have to keep her
[9:00] in a freezer. The freezer in their basement
[9:02] just was not big enough. And even if it was, there's
[9:05] always the risk of his kids or his wife coming down and opening
[9:08] that freezer to get something out and seeing a human body in
[9:11] there. He realized that he just
[9:13] couldn't keep this body and it needed disposing of soon as
[9:17] possible. And so instead he decided that
[9:19] he would keep a trophy from the body if he had to get rid of the
[9:23] rest of it. And so Jerry Brudos took a
[9:26] hacksaw, sawed off 1 of Linda's feet, and kept it as a trophy
[9:31] because that's the only part of the body that he's really
[9:35] interested in. He loves high heeled shoes.
[9:37] He'd stolen so many high heeled shoes over the years and now he
[9:41] finally had a a foot to model them.
[9:44] Jerry Brudus then once again hid the body under the basement
[9:48] stairs before his family got home because if one of them
[9:51] opened that door, they would see it straight away.
[9:53] He then waited until the middle of the night.
[9:56] He got up and left his wife in bed.
[9:58] When he knew that everyone was asleep, he went down to the
[10:01] basement and put Linda Slarson's body in his car.
[10:05] And Jerry knew exactly how he was going to dispose of this
[10:08] body. He was going to drive to a
[10:10] bridge rather close to his house, actually.
[10:13] And when he got there, he pulled over onto the roadside and got a
[10:16] spare tire out of his car so that if anyone was to drive
[10:20] past, he would just look like he was, you know, trying to change
[10:24] his tire. But of course, he wasn't
[10:25] changing a tire. What he was really doing was
[10:28] tying a heavy object like a car engine to Linda's body so that
[10:32] when he threw it over the edge of the bridge into the water
[10:36] below, it wouldn't rise to the top.
[10:38] And after just a few months, as Linda's dismembered foot began
[10:43] decaying in Jerry's basement, he realized he no longer wanted it
[10:47] anymore. And so he drove out to that same
[10:49] bridge and threw her foot over that same railing that he'd
[10:53] thrown her body over. Of course, within a day or two
[10:56] of Linda's disappearance, her family and friends noticed that
[11:00] she was missing. However, her work colleagues
[11:02] just assumed that she'd quit. Her job as an encyclopedia sale
[11:07] saleswoman was a rather temporary job for people that
[11:10] worked it. It was one of those things that
[11:11] you came into when you needed the money and you would leave
[11:14] when you found your kind of career path that you actually
[11:18] want to be on for the rest of your life.
[11:19] So all of her colleagues just kind of assumed that she'd left
[11:23] and found another job in an area that she actually wanted to
[11:26] progress in. But when her family and friends
[11:28] hadn't heard from her in a fair few days, they decided to go to
[11:32] the police and file this as an official missing persons report.
[11:36] And so searchers began to try to find 19 year old Linda.
[11:39] Meanwhile, in the aftermath of his first ever murder, Jerry
[11:43] Brudos was on a high that he'd never felt before.
[11:47] He'd never felt so much satisfaction from an attack
[11:50] before, and he knew that he didn't want to stop there.
[11:53] Later that year, in 1968, Jerry Brudos was 29 years old, and he
[11:59] decided to move his whole family once again.
[12:02] They moved around a lot whenever Jerry would get a new job.
[12:04] However, this time he decided to move them to Salem, OR, which is
[12:09] where he'd grown up, where he'd spent most of his life, and it
[12:12] was there where he would commit his second murder. 23 year old
[12:16] Jan Susan Whitney was a college student driving home from
[12:19] visiting her friend one night on November 26th, 1968, when her
[12:24] car broke down in the middle of the road.
[12:26] A couple of guys pulled over on the side to help Jan sort out
[12:30] her car. However, it was clear that she
[12:32] needed a new part to be able to fix it and neither of these men
[12:36] have this part. However, then another person
[12:40] pulls in and in this car was Jerry Brudos.
[12:43] Jerry took a look at Jan's car and said Yep I know exactly what
[12:47] to do to fix this and I have that exact part at home, I just
[12:50] need to run back and pick it up. He offered to bring Jan with him
[12:53] to go pick up the part as well as those two men that had
[12:56] stopped to help. So all four of them got in the
[12:59] car and then those two men felt as the the situation was solved
[13:04] and this guy was going to go get the part.
[13:06] So they just said OK you can drop us off at home and then you
[13:09] 2 can go get the part. So Jerry dropped these two guys
[13:13] off at home and it was just him and Jan in the car and they go
[13:16] back to Jerryd home to get this car part.
[13:20] So they pull up onto the driveway and when they do, Jerry
[13:23] realizes that he doesn't have his house key on him.
[13:25] And he's like, oh, do you mind waiting until my wife gets back?
[13:29] She's got the only house key so she can unlock the house for us.
[13:32] Then we'll get the part, then we'll go fix your car.
[13:34] And Jan was happy to wait. This man was going to fix her
[13:37] car for her for free. So she was like, yeah, fine,
[13:40] whatever. So the two of them just sat in
[13:42] the car on the driveway and talked for a while.
[13:44] So the two of them are talking for a while and then Jerry turns
[13:48] to and says, do you want to play a game?
[13:51] And she says, OK, what's, what's the game?
[13:53] So Jerry says to her, I bet you can't explain to me how to tie a
[13:58] bow without physically showing me what to do.
[14:02] So just with words, you've got to teach someone how to tie a
[14:04] bow. And Jan agrees to play this
[14:06] game. And so Jerry goes and gets in
[14:08] the back of the car. So then he can't see Jan's
[14:11] hands. And Jan begins explaining to him
[14:14] how to tie a bow. But of course, Jerry Brudos had
[14:17] other plans. As soon as he got into the back
[14:20] of the car, he grabbed a leather strap, wrapped it around Jan's
[14:24] neck from behind and pulled on it, strangling her until she
[14:28] stopped breathing. And when he was sure that Jan
[14:31] was dead, he dragged her body into the garage of this new
[14:35] house. Of course, he had a key this
[14:37] whole time. That was all just a lie to keep
[14:40] her in the car. And in there, he undressed her,
[14:43] raped her lifeless body, and then dressed her up in his
[14:48] collection of stolen underwear. Once again.
[14:50] He tried on all these different underwear garments on her and
[14:55] took pictures of her in almost every single one.
[14:58] And once he was done, he hung the body up from a rope pulley
[15:03] that he had in this garage, so a suspended rope from the ceiling.
[15:07] And he left Jan's body hanging there for days while he
[15:11] committed repeated necrophilia on her.
[15:14] He even left Jan's body hanging from this pulley in the garage
[15:18] while the whole family went away for Thanksgiving and he just
[15:22] left a dead body in the garage. Once they returned home from
[15:25] Thanksgiving, Jerry decided it was probably time to dispose of
[15:29] this body, otherwise it was going to start decaying.
[15:32] It was going to start smelling, but not before he took his own
[15:35] trophy from his second victim. He decided to cut off 1 of Jan's
[15:40] breasts, and then he disposed of the rest of her body.
[15:44] He attempted to preserve this breast that he'd taken as a
[15:48] trophy. At first he tried to kind of
[15:51] encase it in resin, but that didn't work.
[15:53] Resin is kind of like what you've freeze something in
[15:56] plastic, but for some reason that didn't work.
[15:59] And so his next attempt at turning this into a trophy was
[16:02] to stuff it and make it like taxidermy.
[16:06] Some sources even say that Jerry's wife Darcy saw this
[16:12] breast trophy at one point, but she just didn't say anything,
[16:16] although I don't know how true that is because it was only on a
[16:19] couple of sauces. And to dispose of his second
[16:22] victim's body, Jerry did exactly the same thing that he'd done to
[16:25] his first victim, Linda Slarson. He tied a very heavy car engine
[16:29] part to Jan's body, put her in his car, and then drove her out
[16:33] to that exact same bridge in the middle of the night and threw
[16:37] her body over the side into the river.
[16:40] Meanwhile, of course, Jan's friends and family have already
[16:42] noticed that she's gone missing. And so they reported this to
[16:46] police and an investigation began.
[16:48] Jan's car was actually found in a parking lot, of course, not
[16:53] where she left it. When police found it, it was
[16:55] fully working and it was locked. So it seemed as though Jan had
[16:59] literally just driven there, parked her car, gotten out,
[17:02] locked it, and disappeared. From that point.
[17:05] There was no blood. There was no smashed glass.
[17:08] There was, you know, everything about this car seemed normal.
[17:12] So this worried police. It seemed as though Jan had
[17:15] parked there, everything had been normal, and then something
[17:18] had happened to her while she'd been out that day, because this
[17:21] car seemed as though she intended on coming back to her.
[17:25] But not only that, this was now the second girl that had gone
[17:29] missing in that general area where there'd been absolutely no
[17:34] sign of their disappearance. There'd been no clues, there'd
[17:37] been no suspects. Just two young women that had
[17:41] disappeared. In March of the following year,
[17:50] 1969, eighteen year old Karen Sprinker was home for spring
[17:54] break. She was trying to fit as much
[17:56] family time into her short vacation as she possibly could
[18:00] before she went back to school. She was studying to become a
[18:02] doctor. She had all the brains and
[18:05] beauty any girl her age could want.
[18:07] She came from a very wealthy family and she just had a really
[18:11] bright future ahead of her. On March 27th, Karen planned to
[18:15] meet her mother at Myers and Briggs Department Store in
[18:18] Salem, OR again for some lunch. However, she failed to turn up.
[18:23] Her mother waited for her for a while in this restaurant, but
[18:26] when it became clear that maybe Karen had forgotten about the
[18:28] plans or just done something else, her mother began calling
[18:32] around all her friends to see if any of them knew where she was.
[18:35] She called around all of her home friends.
[18:38] No one knew. So then she decided to call
[18:40] around her university friends, even though her university
[18:43] wasn't in the area. Maybe Karen had decided to go
[18:47] back early and just completely forgotten about these plans with
[18:50] her mother. But none of her university
[18:52] friends knew where she was either.
[18:53] None of them had heard from her, nothing.
[18:56] And so her mother went home and informed Karen's father about
[18:59] this, and the two of them decided to go looking for Karen.
[19:02] They went to all of her usual spots that she liked to go to,
[19:05] restaurants, cafes, you know, anywhere.
[19:08] But they just couldn't find any sign of Karen or her car
[19:12] anywhere. It even got to the point where
[19:14] her parents were calling around all the local hospitals to see
[19:17] if maybe Karen had been taken in, maybe she'd gotten into a
[19:20] car accident, which meant that they wouldn't be able to find
[19:22] her or her car. Neither of them would be
[19:24] accounted for. However, none of the hospitals
[19:27] had any record of her being admitted that day.
[19:30] Within a few days, her family reported Karen Sprinker as
[19:33] missing to the police, and a search began, of course, for
[19:37] both Karen and for her car. Because people's cars are often
[19:40] a good indication of where they've been, what they were
[19:43] doing, what they were intending on doing before they went
[19:47] missing. And Karen's car was actually
[19:49] located in the parking lot in the car park of that Myers and
[19:54] Briggs department store where she was supposed to meet her
[19:57] mother that day. So it was clear that Karen had
[20:00] arrived and intended on going to that lunch date.
[20:04] But something must have happened from her getting to the car park
[20:07] to getting inside the store. That is a very short window of
[20:11] time. But of course, in a time like
[20:13] this where there's no cameras or anything.
[20:15] It was going to be very hard to figure out what had happened to
[20:20] Karen, but of course, we know that Jerry Brooders happened.
[20:24] He'd gone out that day, the first day that he'd actually
[20:27] gone out, intending to find and kidnap and kill a victim.
[20:32] The last two victims were opportunistic.
[20:35] Linda Slauson literally knocked on his front door.
[20:38] And so he took advantage of the moment.
[20:40] Jan Susan Whitney He was just driving down that road one day
[20:43] when she happened to have broken down on the side of the road.
[20:46] And again, he took advantage of the situation.
[20:49] However, with this one, he'd gotten in his car that day and
[20:54] gone driving, specifically looking to to abduct a woman.
[20:58] He was driving around Salem, OR when he drove past the Myers and
[21:02] Briggs department store and he saw a beautiful woman in a dress
[21:06] and high heels walking into the store.
[21:09] So Jerry decided that that was it.
[21:11] That was going to be the woman that he was going to abduct and
[21:14] kill that day. So he drove his car around,
[21:16] parked it in the car park, and then went inside the store to go
[21:19] and find this woman. He just couldn't find her.
[21:22] He couldn't find her again anywhere.
[21:24] He was looking for a while, but then eventually decided to give
[21:27] up and go back to his car to go and find another victim.
[21:30] However, as he was on his walk out of the department store and
[21:33] back into the car park, that is when he ran into Karen Sprinker.
[21:38] He saw Karen get out of her car and begin approaching the
[21:41] department store. And in that moment, he decided
[21:45] that that was going to be his new victim.
[21:47] And so he looked around to see if anyone was there, anyone
[21:50] could see him. And when he realized the curse
[21:52] was clear, he approached Karen. And as he got closer, Jerry
[21:57] produced a gun from his pocket and he pointed it right at Karen
[22:02] and told her that if she came with him, he wouldn't hurt her.
[22:05] And so Karen did as she was told.
[22:07] She was terrified. She was being threatened with a
[22:11] gun. She was fearing for her life in
[22:13] that moment. But what Karen didn't know was
[22:16] that the gun was fake. Jerry didn't own any guns.
[22:20] But in that moment she was scared and she did as she was
[22:23] told. She went with Jerry to his car
[22:26] and was never seen again. Jerry drove Karen back to his
[22:30] house, took her into the garage, and demanded that she stripped
[22:34] naked for him and tried on his collection of stolen underwear.
[22:38] And as with his other victims, Jerry took photos of Karen in
[22:43] this underwear, but the only difference now is that his
[22:46] victim is alive. The other two women, when he'd
[22:48] been taking pictures of them in the underwear, he'd had to put
[22:52] the underwear on them because they were already deceased at
[22:55] the point that he was dressing them and taking pictures of
[22:58] them. But Karen was alive, enduring
[23:01] all of this. And Jerry forced Karen to enjoy
[23:04] this for hours, just making her get changed and taking pictures
[23:08] of it, making her get changed again.
[23:10] However, once he was bored of this, he tied Karens arms behind
[23:15] her back, tied a noose around her neck, and attached the other
[23:19] end of that rope to the pulley on his garage roof.
[23:23] Some sources say that Jerry even asked Karen as he put the rope
[23:27] on her neck if it was too tight and when she said yes, Jerry
[23:31] smiled because that was exactly what he wanted.
[23:34] He then wound the leather on this rope pulley until it was
[23:39] getting tighter and tighter and lifting Karen higher and higher
[23:43] off the ground until eventually her feet were no longer on the
[23:47] ground and she was just suffocating from this rope.
[23:51] He left Karen hanging from that rope to die and when he was sure
[23:56] that she was dead, he pulled her body down from this rope and
[24:00] committed necrophilia on her multiple times for the rest of
[24:03] that evening. Even when his wife and children
[24:05] came home, he was just in the garage just a few doors away
[24:09] from them, committing necrophilia on on a woman's
[24:13] corpse. But as with his other victims,
[24:16] Jerry knew that he couldn't keep her body around no matter how
[24:19] much he wanted to. So instead he decided to take
[24:23] trophies. Multiple.
[24:25] This time he cut off both of Karens breasts and just kind of
[24:30] left them on the side. And in the meantime he decided
[24:33] to pack up the two holes on her chest with brown packing paper.
[24:38] And he later said that he did this because he didn't want to
[24:41] get blood in his car from her two gaping wounds.
[24:45] And once again with his third victim, he did the same routine
[24:49] that he'd done with the first two.
[24:50] He waited until the middle of the night when everyone was
[24:53] asleep. He put the body in his car, tied
[24:57] a very heavy car engine part to it it, and then threw her off
[25:01] that same bridge into that same river where his previous two
[25:05] victims were. Meanwhile, Karen's parents have
[25:08] been doing absolutely everything in their power to find their
[25:12] daughter. They've been doing newspaper
[25:14] interviews, public appeals, doing all these different
[25:17] questionings and investigations with the police.
[25:20] They created missing persons posters and put them all over
[25:24] Salem begging people if they had any form of information, even if
[25:29] they think it's insignificant, to just get in touch with
[25:32] police. And this led to police receiving
[25:34] a very interesting tip from a couple of teenagers who had also
[25:40] been at the Myers and Briggs department store.
[25:43] I don't know if it was on the same day as Karen's
[25:45] disappearance or on a different day, but we do know for sure
[25:48] that it was the exact same car park that this incident took
[25:52] place. They recalled seeing a very
[25:55] tall, large woman in the car park just in in the corner by
[26:00] herself, watching people going about their day, going to their
[26:04] cars, going back to the store, whatever.
[26:06] This woman was wearing a dress and heels and stockings, but she
[26:10] was constantly like rearranging her stockings and her dress.
[26:14] She seemed uncomfortable and kind of anxious.
[26:18] And so as the teenagers were leaving the store, they decided
[26:21] to kind of drive over and see what was going on, see if this
[26:24] woman needed help. But as they got closer to this
[26:26] woman, they realized that it wasn't a woman at all.
[26:31] It was a man dressed as a woman. Of course, police couldn't do
[26:34] much with that lead. They didn't have a name, they
[26:37] didn't have a face. They had no more information to
[26:40] go off. But it was just kind of
[26:42] interesting information to hold in mind maybe for later on.
[26:46] Just one month after the murder of Karen Sprinker, Jerry sets
[26:50] out to find yet another victim in April of 1969.
[26:55] You can see how these murders are getting more and more
[26:57] frequent. At first there was kind of a
[26:59] year long gap between the 1st and the 2nd, and now there's
[27:02] just a month long gap. The satisfaction that he gets
[27:06] from a new kill is wearing off a lot quicker.
[27:09] And so he wants the rush again. Well, I say that, but the rush
[27:13] that Jerry gets from these murders isn't actually from the
[27:17] murder at all. It's from the power that he has
[27:21] over these women, from the intimidation.
[27:23] He wants to scare women as well as the necrophilia.
[27:27] That's a complete other part to it.
[27:28] Jerry Brudos doesn't commit murder to murder.
[27:32] He commits murder for the byproduct of it, which is the
[27:36] dead body. That's what he wants from this.
[27:38] He does enjoy the build up. He enjoys, you know,
[27:41] intimidating the woman, seeing the fear in her eyes, but
[27:45] ultimately the main reason that he's doing this is for the dead
[27:50] body at the end because he gets ultimate sexual satisfaction
[27:55] from necrophilia from having sex with an unresponsive.
[28:02] On April 23rd of 1969, Jerry Brudos went to a local
[28:08] university's car parking unit to go and look for his next victim.
[28:12] His last attack. He'd picked up the woman in a
[28:15] car parking unit. And so I think he looked at that
[28:18] and thought, OK, well, I'll just do that again since it obviously
[28:21] worked the first time. It's going to work a second
[28:23] time. He spotted 24 year old Sharon
[28:26] Wood leaving the university where she worked as a secretary
[28:29] and making her way to the car parking unit.
[28:32] Sharon was a mother of two and currently going through a
[28:35] divorce to her husband of seven years.
[28:38] And that's actually where she was going that day.
[28:40] She was going to a meeting about this divorce.
[28:43] On her walk to the car park, Sharon suddenly began feeling
[28:47] very anxious, very uneasy, as if something was wrong, something
[28:53] was off. And then she began hearing
[28:56] footsteps behind her. And so she starts walking
[28:59] faster. She's speeding up.
[29:01] She decides not to go up the dark stairwell in the car park.
[29:05] Instead, she decided to go through the main entrance, kind
[29:08] of where the cars would go because it's a lot bigger, it's
[29:12] a lot brighter, there's more light there.
[29:15] And it was as she was just entering this car parking unit
[29:19] that she felt a tap on her shoulder.
[29:21] And so she turns round, and there, looking her straight in
[29:24] the eyes, is Jerry Brodus. Immediately Sharon knew that she
[29:28] was in danger before Jerry had even said anything.
[29:31] And Jerry proceeds to do the exact same thing to Sharon that
[29:35] he'd done to Karen a month prior.
[29:37] He got out this fake gun from his pocket and told Sharon to
[29:41] follow him to his car and he wouldn't hurt her.
[29:44] But Sharon wasn't the type to give in so easy.
[29:47] Sharon screamed no at Jerry and turned around to go back out the
[29:52] way that she'd came in through that main entrance of the car
[29:55] park. But before she could, Jerry
[29:58] pounced on her. Jerry put her in a headlock and
[30:01] dragged her to the ground, and Sharon was trying to fight him
[30:04] back and, you know, get him off her.
[30:06] But really, she was a small woman.
[30:08] Her strength was just no match for Jerry's.
[30:11] And so Sharon did the only thing that she really could do in the
[30:14] that situation. Scream.
[30:17] But of course, Jerry couldn't have that.
[30:18] He couldn't have his victim making noise because what if
[30:21] someone heard? So he put his hand over her
[30:24] mouth to muffle her screams, and that was when Sharon saw her
[30:29] opportunity. She bit down on Jerry's hand so
[30:32] hard that his hand started bleeding and her jaw just
[30:36] clenched. It must have been out of
[30:38] adrenaline, out of fear, but she couldn't undo her jaw even if
[30:42] she wanted to, and Jerry was doing everything he could to get
[30:46] Sharon's teeth out of his hand. This was excruciating pain for
[30:50] him, and he couldn't do anything until he got her face off his
[30:54] hand. He lifted up his hand, which of
[30:56] course had Sharon's head kind of attached to it, and he began
[31:00] hitting her head off the curb to try and get her to release her
[31:04] jaw, but that wasn't working. It wasn't until a car actually
[31:08] came around the corner in the car park and seeing the lights
[31:13] or the noise must have kind of shocked Sharon out of it and she
[31:16] unclenched her jaw. And when she did, Jerry saw his
[31:20] opportunity and he ran away. Luckily, Sharon was able to go
[31:24] to hospital and she was checked over.
[31:26] She was absent absolutely fine. She had injuries, but they were
[31:29] easily treated and she was able to report this to police.
[31:33] Police asked Sharon to describe her attacker in as much detail
[31:37] as she possibly could. However, because she'd been hit
[31:40] in the head so many times, and because he'd been behind her for
[31:44] most of this attack, getting her in a headlock and all sorts, she
[31:48] didn't really get a good look at him.
[31:49] And she couldn't really remember him that much.
[31:51] All she could really remember about Jerry was that he was
[31:54] tall, he was broad, he had a really freckly face, and he had
[31:58] red hair. Meanwhile, Jerry Brudus has
[32:01] returned home, and he's disappointed in himself at this
[32:05] failed abduction. This is the first time that he'd
[32:08] ever set out to commit one of these attacks, one of these
[32:12] murders, and failed. And he didn't like that because
[32:16] this was a power thing for him, for the woman to have
[32:20] overpowered him in a way that time.
[32:23] He didn't like it at all. And so he wasted absolutely no
[32:26] time in going back out there and finding yet another victim.
[32:30] He actually went out the very next day.
[32:33] And that day he came across 15 year old Gloria Jean Smith as
[32:38] she was walking by some railway tracks in Salem.
[32:41] And notice how he's gone for a significantly younger victim.
[32:44] He had, there's almost a decade difference between his previous
[32:48] victim, Sharon Wood, and this one, Gloria Jean Smith, possibly
[32:52] because his confidence was knocked after his failed
[32:55] abduction. And he knows that if he goes for
[32:58] a smaller, younger victim, they're going to be more scared.
[33:01] They're going to be less likely to physically overpower him.
[33:04] And you know he has a higher chance of this being successful
[33:08] attack. He noticed Gloria heading
[33:11] towards the railway tracks and so Jerry ran ahead and hid in a
[33:15] Bush and waited for her to approach so that he could get
[33:19] out and attack. However, Jerry didn't time it
[33:22] quite right. He jumped out of this Bush and
[33:25] tried to run and grab Gloria but she quickly realized what was
[33:29] going on and turned and ran the opposite way and Jerry couldn't
[33:33] catch her in time. Once again another failed
[33:36] abduction and this was two in a row now and Jerryd confidence is
[33:41] severely knocked. And so he decides to go back to
[33:44] the drawing board and think about what's not working for him
[33:47] and what he needs to do differently.
[33:49] And so once again, the very next day, three days in a row now,
[33:53] Jerry Brudos goes out looking for his fourth murder victim,
[33:58] this time employing some new tactics.
[34:01] On that day, 22 year old Linda Saley was out at her local mall
[34:05] shopping for a present for her boyfriend.
[34:08] She parked her car on the 6th floor of the car parking unit at
[34:12] the mall and went inside to do her shopping.
[34:14] So once again, Jerry Brudos is particularly targeting car
[34:19] parking units, possibly because it's not a place that many
[34:22] people really hang around. You kind of go there, park your
[34:26] car and leave, or you come back to your car and leave.
[34:29] No ones ever really stood around a car parking unit.
[34:33] Jerry noticed Linda in the car parking unit.
[34:35] She was very short, very petite, just a very small woman.
[34:40] And that's exactly what Jerry was looking for.
[34:42] Someone physically smaller than him that he could overpower.
[34:46] Someone that probably wasn't strong enough to fight back.
[34:50] And so Jerry decided to wait in that car parking unit for Linda
[34:54] to return. As she came back out of the
[34:56] shopping mall, Jerry approached her.
[34:59] However, this time he wasn't using the that fake gun to
[35:02] intimidate her, as he'd done the past few times.
[35:05] This time, he got out a fake police badge.
[35:09] He told Linda that he was a police officer working on the
[35:12] case of a serial shoplifter at that mall, and Linda happened to
[35:18] fit the description of the suspect perfectly, and so he was
[35:22] going to need her to come back to the police station for
[35:24] questioning. Of course, Linda knew she was
[35:26] innocent. She offered to give Jerry all of
[35:28] her receipts to prove that she'd bought everything on her that
[35:31] day. However, Jerry insisted that she
[35:34] come for a question in, and so Linda complied.
[35:36] She followed Jerry back to his car and got in the back seat,
[35:40] and the two of them drove in silence back to the police
[35:44] station that turned out to be Jerry Brudos's home.
[35:48] When they arrived on Jerry Brudos's driveway, Linda was
[35:52] still silent. She never said a word, and Jerry
[35:55] Brudos ordered her to step inside his garage.
[35:58] And of course, at this moment, she's probably realizing that he
[36:02] wasn't a police officer. The car wasn't marked, he wasn't
[36:05] wearing a uniform or anything. All he had was a badge and he'd
[36:09] taken her back to a Random House that was not a police station.
[36:13] But she was probably very scared, realizing that she was
[36:16] now alone with this random man that had lied to her to get her
[36:20] alone. She was very scared and so she
[36:22] did as she was told. She stepped into the garage in
[36:25] silence. Once she was in there, Jerry
[36:28] Brudos tied her hands behind her back and then left her in that
[36:32] garage alone to go and have dinner with his family.
[36:36] And when he returned, Linda had freed herself from her ties.
[36:41] She'd managed to get her hands united, but she was still sat in
[36:45] that exact same seat that she was in when Jerry left her.
[36:49] She hadn't tried to leave through the garage door, which
[36:51] was open. She hadn't tried to call anyone
[36:54] using the phone that was in the garage.
[36:56] And there's two possible explanations for this.
[36:58] Maybe she'd only just managed to free her hands and she was going
[37:02] to try escape or call for help, but she just didn't get time.
[37:05] Or maybe this was just such a deep fear action that her mind
[37:09] just went blank and she was too scared to even try to escape.
[37:13] Because maybe if she stayed and did as she was told, she would
[37:17] stay alive. But if he caught her trying to
[37:19] escape, maybe that was when she would lose her life.
[37:23] Either way, she just sat there. She'd undone her hands, but she
[37:26] was still sat there in that chair.
[37:28] And so when Jerry got back, he still did everything to Linda
[37:32] that he was planning to do. As he'd done with his previous
[37:35] victim, Karen Sprinker, he tied a rope around Linda's neck and
[37:39] attached it to the rope pulley on his garage roof.
[37:42] He then slowly turned the leather on this rope pulley
[37:46] until it was lifting her off the ground and her feet were no
[37:49] longer touching the floor. And then he left her there to
[37:52] die. Once he was sure that Linda was
[37:55] dead, he took her body down from the rope and as he'd done with
[37:58] all of his previous victims, he committed repeated necrophilia
[38:04] on her body. However, this time, instead of
[38:06] taking a trophy from her body before he disposed of the rest
[38:10] of it, he decided that he was going to perform some kind of
[38:15] experiment on her body. See, Jerry Brudos was quite an
[38:20] amateur scientist. He liked to do certain like,
[38:24] chemical reactions in his garage.
[38:26] This was before he began abducting and murdering women.
[38:30] But he'd always been someone that always had projects going
[38:34] on in the garage, which is what made this whole thing seem less
[38:37] weird when he was spending so much time in the garage away
[38:40] from his family and didn't want them in there.
[38:42] It's because he done like, experiments with harmful
[38:45] chemicals and things like that. He did a lot of work with resin
[38:48] which can be poisoned nurse so his family knew not to go in the
[38:51] garage, but he hadn't done any experiments for quite a while up
[38:55] until the murder of Linda Sayley.
[38:57] He decided to insert 2 large needles into the sides of her
[39:01] rib cage and send a large electric shock through her body
[39:06] to see if he could make her body jump.
[39:09] Although this didn't work out exactly how Jerry had planned it
[39:13] just kind of burnt her flesh around.
[39:16] The needles on either side didn't make her body flinch in
[39:19] any way. And Sir Jerry, disappointed with
[39:23] how this experiment had gone, he decided to just dispose of her
[39:27] body the same way that he'd disposed of all of his other
[39:30] victims. Although this time he decided
[39:32] not to take a trophy. He wasn't gonna cut off her
[39:36] breasts or anything, as he'd done with his previous victims,
[39:39] because to him, Linda Saley's breasts were.
[39:42] And I quote too pink. So instead he just tied a very
[39:47] heavy car part to her body, went out in the middle of the night
[39:51] and through her body over the side of the bridge into the
[39:54] river. Throughout this whole case,
[40:03] police had been looking for these 4 missing women.
[40:07] They'd all been reported as missing by their friends and
[40:09] family. However, police just didn't have
[40:12] very many leads, and Jerry hadn't even been suspected once.
[40:17] He wasn't linked to any of the women.
[40:18] His name hadn't even come up once.
[40:21] He was barely even known to police.
[40:23] Yes, he'd done a few things in his younger years when he'd
[40:27] abducted that woman and he assaulted the other woman.
[40:30] Very serious thing, but he hadn't done anything in his
[40:34] adult life. And so police had kind of
[40:37] forgotten about Jerry Bruders. And it was looking as though
[40:41] Jerry Bruders was going to get away with his serial murders.
[40:45] That was until two weeks after the murder of his final victim,
[40:49] Linda Saley. Her body had floated to the top
[40:53] of the river. It was spotted by a fisherman
[40:56] who reported it to police. And police came and recovered
[40:59] the body. And then within two days of that
[41:01] happening, another body floated to the top of the river.
[41:05] This time it was Jerry's third victim, Karen Sprinker.
[41:08] Her body was found just 50 feet away from where Linda's was
[41:13] found. And the similarities between
[41:15] both of these cases, both of these dead bodies were just
[41:18] astounding to police. Two young girls, both very
[41:22] similar in age, both clearly murdered.
[41:25] This was clearly a homicide. They'd been tied to car engine
[41:29] parts and thrown in the same river to police.
[41:32] This was a no brainer that these two were connected and the
[41:35] similarities only grew when the bodies were taken in for autopsy
[41:40] and their causes of death were both found to be the exact same
[41:44] thing, asphyxiation. On a closer look at the ropes
[41:49] used to tie the women to their respective car parts, police
[41:53] realized that the style of knot used to tie these ropes were the
[41:57] exact same on both women. Of course, further out into
[42:01] their theory that these two murders were connected, but not
[42:04] only that, this style of knot was a very specific, intricate
[42:09] style of knot commonly used by electricians.
[42:13] And this gave police a little bit more information about
[42:16] perhaps the kind of person that their killer could be.
[42:19] Maybe they were an electrician or a former electrician.
[42:23] So at this point in the investigation, police have only
[42:26] found two of the four bodies in that river.
[42:30] So to them, it's a double murder, not a serial killer.
[42:33] However, due to the nature of how these women's bodies were
[42:37] found, they believed that this probably was a serial killer.
[42:40] They were just yet to find the other bodies.
[42:43] And so divers were sent into this river to search for
[42:47] potentially more bodies. And these searches took a full 2
[42:51] weeks because they had to search quite a big chunk of the river
[42:55] in case bodies had moved with the currents and things.
[42:59] And this case was very big news. It was being reported all over
[43:03] the state, all over surrounding states as well.
[43:06] This was huge front page news. But Jerry Brutus didn't seem put
[43:11] off by this investigation in the slightest.
[43:14] He was still being the same creep he'd always been, stalking
[43:18] women, following women. And at this point in the case,
[43:21] he particularly liked going to the university and watching the
[43:27] women's dorm rooms, watching the windows.
[43:29] He would just sit outside, sit in the bushes and just spy on
[43:32] the dorm rooms for hours every night, sometimes even calling
[43:36] the dorm room numbers to try to speak to some of the women.
[43:39] And Jerry had this tactic. Every time he wanted to call one
[43:43] of the dorm rooms, he'd call a different one every time and say
[43:46] like, oh, can I talk to Elizabeth Now?
[43:49] He didn't know an Elizabeth. He didn't even know if an
[43:52] Elizabeth lived in there. But Jerry would just hope for
[43:55] the best and hope that there was an Elizabeth in that room and
[43:59] that the woman on the other side of the phone would be like, Oh
[44:01] yeah, let me just go get her. Of course, this tactic didn't
[44:04] work for him most of the time. If the woman on the other side
[44:07] of the phone said, oh, Elizabeth doesn't live here, he'd just be
[44:10] like, oh, sorry, wrong number. However, this method did work
[44:13] quite a few times and he ended up getting through to quite a
[44:17] few girls in these dorm rooms. And when he would get onto the
[44:21] phone with these girls, he would just make small talk for a
[44:24] while, which I don't know how this worked.
[44:27] These girls were answering the phone to a complete stranger who
[44:31] called specifically for them, but they don't know who it is
[44:35] and when they answer the phone, he just starts making small
[44:37] talk. I imagine that must have been
[44:39] very confusing for these women. He would tell these women that
[44:42] he was a Vietnam War veteran. He would tell them all these
[44:45] fake stories about all of his experiences in the war, and then
[44:50] he would ask them out on dates. And unbelievably, this actually
[44:55] worked. A few times, women accepted his
[44:57] invitation for dates. A few of the dates ended up
[45:01] falling through, of course, because the women had no idea
[45:03] who this man on the phone was. They just kind of said yes and
[45:07] then changed their mind later on.
[45:09] But one woman in particular went through with it.
[45:12] He met this woman on site at her university, and they went On
[45:16] this date. They were just kind of walking
[45:17] around on campus and all he seemed to talk about was his own
[45:22] murders. Of course, these two bodies
[45:25] being found in a river was huge news in that area.
[45:28] It was all people in Salem were talking about, so this wasn't
[45:32] particularly odd that they were talking about that.
[45:36] Of course, a first date is never really a time to be talking
[45:39] about murder, but you know, if it's current news at the time,
[45:42] it makes sense. And everyone was terrified,
[45:45] especially young women who were the same age, the same kind of
[45:49] victim profile as the two women that were found.
[45:52] This woman was terrified and she had no idea that she was talking
[45:56] to serial killer. But like I said, this was
[46:00] current news. It was big news as well.
[46:02] So this woman didn't think much of it at first, but as this day
[46:06] it was going on and on. Jerry Brutus was acting weirder
[46:10] and weirder. So much so to the point that
[46:12] when he left, this woman actually called police because
[46:16] she was freaked out by Jerry. She told police on the phone
[46:19] that when Jerry was there, he'd offered to give her a back
[46:22] massage, which she accepted. However, once he started doing
[46:26] it, he told her to act sad while he was doing it, even telling
[46:31] her and I quote, think about those two girls that were found
[46:35] in the river. That was an awful thing that
[46:37] happened to them. He was trying to make her
[46:39] genuinely sad while he gave her a massage.
[46:43] Very odd. Of course, this woman told
[46:45] police how Jerry kept bringing up the murders throughout the
[46:49] date, even asking her just before we left why she'd
[46:53] actually agreed to meet up with him that day.
[46:56] He even told her, well, how did you know I was going to bring
[46:59] you home safely? How did you know that I wasn't
[47:01] going to take you out to the river, strangle you, and throw
[47:05] you in? So police thought that this was
[47:08] a lead worth looking into, and so they asked this woman to
[47:11] describe this man that she'd been on a date with in as much
[47:14] detail as she possibly could. She said that he was large,
[47:18] redheaded, and freckly. And as soon as police heard that
[47:22] description, heard those 3 keywords, they knew that this
[47:26] was the person that they were looking for in this
[47:28] investigation. Thinking back to those two
[47:30] failed abductions of Sharon Wood in the car parking unit and 15
[47:35] year old Gloria Jean Smith at the railway.
[47:38] When both of these women reported their attacker to the
[47:41] police, they also described him as large, red headed and
[47:45] freckly. So could this be the Salem
[47:48] Serial killer out looking for his next victim?
[47:51] Perhaps those two failed abductions had been failed,
[47:55] failed murder attempts and maybe this was his next victim, this
[47:59] girl at the university to find out.
[48:01] Police told all the women at this university that if they
[48:05] received another phone call from this Vietnam War veteran that
[48:09] they stole him on the phone for as long as they can and call
[48:13] police to the scene immediately. Around a week or so later, on
[48:17] May 25th, 1968, Jerry Brudos once again calls that girl that
[48:23] he'd been on a date with a week prior.
[48:26] He just said to this woman like, hey, I'm in the area right now,
[48:29] do you fancy going on a second date?
[48:31] I can be with you in around 15 minutes.
[48:33] So the girl agreed, but she said she was going to need a little
[48:36] bit more time to get ready, and she told him to come and meet
[48:39] her at her uni dorm in about an hour, giving her plenty of time
[48:44] to get the police there before Jerry got there.
[48:46] So police arrived at her kind of dorm reception room.
[48:52] I don't quite understand the the layout of this dorm, but anyway
[48:56] there was quite a large reception room apparently with
[48:59] like bulletin boards and stuff. Police got there as quickly as
[49:02] they could anywhere, and they waited for Jerry to arrive.
[49:05] And as soon as he did, they approached him.
[49:08] They told him that they just wanted to ask him a few
[49:10] questions and they said that they were doing this to everyone
[49:12] on campus due to the recent murders, just so that Jerry
[49:16] didn't suspect that they were suspecting him.
[49:19] They asked him, of course, the basic things, his name, his
[49:22] address, what he did for a living.
[49:24] He said his name was Jerry. Brooders gave his address and he
[49:27] said that he was an electrician for a radio station.
[49:30] And they also asked him why he was at the university that day.
[49:34] And Jerry said that he was actually in the area because he
[49:37] was helping a friend work on his garden.
[49:39] However, the friend wasn't home yet.
[49:41] And so to kill about an hour or two, Jerry had just gone to the
[49:45] university and was just having a look around.
[49:48] And immediately this was a red flag to police because why had
[49:53] this man just lied about his reason for being at the
[49:56] university? They knew that he was there for
[49:59] a date with this girl, not that he was helping a friend with his
[50:02] garden. So now not only did he fit the
[50:05] description of the potential abductor, he was now acting
[50:09] suspicious too. That on top of the fact that he
[50:12] just told police that he was an electrician and his just general
[50:16] creepy behaviour, this meant that they suspected him way more
[50:20] than they did originally. But no matter how much they
[50:22] suspected him in that moment, they couldn't arrest him because
[50:26] they had no physical evidence. Or, you know, this was the first
[50:30] time they'd met this man. This was the first time they'd
[50:32] heard his name. It didn't make sense to arrest
[50:35] him on the spot then and there. They needed more evidence.
[50:37] So police said thank you for your time.
[50:39] And they let Jerry go. And as soon as they did, he left
[50:43] the university. He didn't stick around and meet
[50:45] this girl for this date because if he would have done that would
[50:48] have been way too big. Police would have known that he
[50:51] lied about his reason for being there, even though they already
[50:53] knew. But Jerry didn't know they knew.
[50:56] I don't know if that makes sense, but if he would have
[50:58] stayed and gone On this date, he would have looked even more
[51:01] suspicious to police. So, you know, his best bet was
[51:04] to just leave and try not to incriminate himself any further.
[51:08] So police officers went back to the police station and ran his
[51:11] name through the database. This was the first time they had
[51:15] a name in this case. They'd had so many leads, but
[51:18] just no specific suspects that they could properly look into.
[51:23] So they ran his name, Jerry Brudos, on the database.
[51:26] And his previous criminal history came up.
[51:29] Those two assaults that he'd committed in his teen years that
[51:32] landed him in in the psychiatric ward for like 8 months.
[51:35] They were also able to find a record of Jerry Brudos's
[51:39] addresses at every point in his life.
[51:42] So every time he'd moved home, this had been logged, his new
[51:46] address had been logged. And it seemed that each of these
[51:49] very suspicious disappearances of these four women happened
[51:53] very close to Jerry. No matter where he was, whenever
[51:57] he moved home, a woman would go missing in that area.
[52:00] And then when he moved back to Salem, women started going
[52:04] missing there as well. For example, the first murder of
[52:07] Linda Slauson, the encyclopedia saleswoman.
[52:10] They knew roughly what neighborhood Linda had gone
[52:13] missing from because her sales company had the record of where
[52:18] she was supposed to be selling that night.
[52:20] They didn't have the exact house, unfortunately.
[52:23] However, they did have that general area, and Jerry Brudos
[52:28] lived in that area at the time of her disappearance.
[52:31] They also found that Jerry's current home in Salem, OR was
[52:35] just a few miles away from the river where the bodies had been
[52:39] found. And Jerry actually drove over
[52:42] that bridge above the river to get to work every day.
[52:46] So that was a bridge and a river that he knew well.
[52:49] And this was suspicious enough for police to want to go and
[52:52] have a chat with Jerry Bruders just about the missing women in
[52:57] the area. They weren't acting too
[52:58] suspicious of him right now because if they did, he was
[53:02] going to try to flee. So they were just kind of acting
[53:04] as though they wanted a bit of information from a local.
[53:07] In this questioning, police once again brought up the fact that
[53:11] Jerry Bruders was an electrician, just to confirm
[53:14] that for their records. And Jerry talked about how he'd
[53:17] been an electrician for several different radio stations since
[53:22] his early 20s. So almost a decade he'd been
[53:25] doing that job. And that was very important for
[53:28] police, that they spoke to him about that in a bit more detail.
[53:31] Because if you remember what I said about the knots on the
[53:34] ropes that were found on the women's bodies, they had a very
[53:38] specific style of knot that was commonly used among
[53:41] electricians. Not only that, but one of the
[53:44] officers that was doing this questioning decided to get up
[53:47] and have a bit of a walk around Jerry's home.
[53:50] This wasn't an official search. It was just him having a walk
[53:54] around, seeing if he could see anything suspicious on any of
[53:57] the sides or anything. And this officer went into Jerry
[54:01] Brudos's garage and found a length of rope with that exact
[54:06] style of electrician not in it. Now at this point in the case,
[54:12] after this very suspicious questioning, police decided to
[54:16] go all out and get search warrants for Jerry Brudos's
[54:20] cars. On May 28th, 1969, Jerry
[54:23] Brudos's cars were searched, however nothing was found.
[54:28] But of course, anyone that's trying to hide evidence, anyone
[54:31] that's done anything criminal in their car is of course going to
[54:35] bleach every square inch and meticulously clean it just in
[54:39] case it's searched. Police eventually gave up the
[54:43] search of the cars when they realized they weren't really
[54:45] going to find anything, and they went back to the police station
[54:48] feeling quite defeated. They thought that they were
[54:52] going to find something in one of those cars that meant that
[54:54] they could arrest Jerry. Police knew that they had to do
[54:57] something, though, because they suspected this man so much that
[55:01] they thought they had the serial killer.
[55:04] And the whole time that he wasn't arrested and wasn't in
[55:07] police custody, he was a danger and he could be killing other
[55:10] people. They had to do something.
[55:13] So in the meantime, police decided that they were going to
[55:16] stage a stakeout mission on Jerry Brudos's home.
[55:20] They were going to have an undercover police officer
[55:22] outside 24/7 watching the premises, mainly to see if Jerry
[55:28] was leaving and coming back and, you know, bringing people back
[55:32] or putting suspicious things in his car, you know, and on May
[55:38] 30th, so just two days after his cars were searched, it seems
[55:43] that those search warrants had scared Jerry Brutus a little bit
[55:47] because on that day he packed up his car, packed all his family
[55:51] into his car and began driving north.
[55:54] Luckily, the officers in the stakeout car saw this happening
[55:58] and so they were able to contact police back at the station and
[56:01] they all set out to track down Jerry Brudos and his family.
[56:05] Alerts were sent out to police departments all over that side
[56:09] of America. They were sent out to state
[56:11] borders just in case Jerry was going to try and Passover into
[56:15] the Canadian border. Later that day, Jerry Brudos's
[56:18] car was tracked down on an Interstate heading to the
[56:22] Canadian border. So police were right about the
[56:25] theory that Jerry was going to try to flee the country.
[56:27] They tracked down the car, they pulled them over and they went
[56:30] to arrest Jerry Brudos. But when they got to the car, he
[56:34] wasn't in there. Darcy was driving the car.
[56:37] The two children, his son and daughter, were sat in the back
[56:40] of the car, and Jerry wasn't in there.
[56:42] There was no one else in there. That was until one of the
[56:45] officers turned on a flashlight and shone it on the ground of
[56:49] the back seats, kind of in the footwell, and they saw a big
[56:53] lump under a blanket. And of course, this blanket lump
[56:57] was Jerry Bruders. And police were able to arrest
[57:00] him then and there. Jerry was taken into police
[57:03] custody and when he got to the police station, he was strip
[57:06] searched. And as they asked him to
[57:09] undress, they realized that Jerry Bruders was wearing
[57:12] women's underwear. Now, I can't say for sure that
[57:15] it was stolen from his victims, but we can probably theorize
[57:19] that this underwear that he was wearing was the underwear of one
[57:23] of the women's that he murdered. Once Jerry was in custody, he
[57:27] got that one phone call. You know how inmates get one
[57:30] phone call to someone at home just to kind of tell them what
[57:33] the situation is. Jerry Brutus chose his wife
[57:37] Darcy. And on this phone call, Jerry
[57:40] told Darcy to burn everything. Burn everything in the garage,
[57:45] all of his collection of stolen underwear, all of his photos.
[57:49] You know, the trophies that he'd taken, the breast molds.
[57:53] It's kind of mad that he didn't think that police would be
[57:56] listening and recording this phone call.
[57:58] But anyway, he said it all anyway.
[58:00] So Jerry was questioned for hours by officers.
[58:04] They were presenting all of this evidence that they had against
[58:07] him and he was still denying it. That was until around 4 hours in
[58:12] when Jerry Brudos confessed to all four murders.
[58:16] On a search of his home, police found a lot of pictures that
[58:21] Jerry Brudos had taken of his victims, both dead and alive,
[58:25] and they also found a large portion of his stolen underwear
[58:29] collection. It seemed that Darcy hadn't
[58:32] really burned much of it, although she did burn a few
[58:36] things. I don't know why she didn't burn
[58:38] it all, whether it was a case of she just didn't have enough
[58:41] time, or whether she kind of felt bad for burning evidence.
[58:46] Either way, police got as much evidence as they needed.
[58:49] Really, they didn't need every single thing that Jerry had ever
[58:52] done to say that he was guilty. In his trial, Jerry Brudos
[58:56] attempted to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, and so a lot
[59:01] of psychiatric evaluations had to take place by many different
[59:06] psychiatrists. However, every single one of
[59:08] these evaluations he had to be tested by a fair few
[59:11] professionals, but not one of them found a single issue with
[59:17] Jerry's mental state. They found that he was perfectly
[59:20] mentally stable and he was just a cold blooded killer.
[59:24] In his final trial, Jerry Brutus decided to partially change his
[59:29] plea. He decided to plead guilty to
[59:32] three of the four murders. And that was because he couldn't
[59:35] actually be charged with the murder of Linda Slaughton, the
[59:38] first victim, the encyclopedia saleswoman, because there was
[59:43] number physical evidence that he ever killed her.
[59:46] There was number physical evidence that he'd ever even met
[59:49] this woman because yes, he did take pictures, but it seems as
[59:52] though those were the pictures that Darcy managed to burn
[59:56] because they found no link to Linda Slarson in Jerry's life at
[1:00:01] all. The only evidence that they
[1:00:02] really had to say that Jerry Brudos killed Linda Slarson was
[1:00:06] that she was in his neighborhood selling encyclopedias on the day
[1:00:10] that she went missing. Jerry is still believed to have
[1:00:13] murdered Linda Slarson and he did confess to murdering Linda
[1:00:16] Slarson and told the whole story that I've told in this video,
[1:00:20] but he just wasn't charged with it and wasn't for.
[1:00:23] Found guilty of it. He was however, found guilty of
[1:00:26] the other three murders, the three that he confessed to, and
[1:00:29] for that he received 3 consecutive life sentences.
[1:00:33] And Darcy Bruders was actually also put on trial and charged
[1:00:37] with being an accessory to the murder of Karen Springer.
[1:00:41] The prosecution just found it very unlikely that Darcy could
[1:00:44] have been in the house living with Jerry Bruders through all
[1:00:49] of this, through all four of these murders and not known a
[1:00:52] thing like how, how is that possible?
[1:00:55] She was tried in court, but she was ultimately found not guilty.
[1:01:00] The court decided that maybe she actually didn't know that Jerry
[1:01:03] was doing this the whole time. People have their own opinions
[1:01:06] about that. Let me know what you think down
[1:01:08] in the comments down below. Do you think she knew that all
[1:01:10] of this was going on? And just wasn't saying anything.
[1:01:14] Or do you think she actually had no idea Darcy Bruders and the
[1:01:17] two children were actually granted new identities after all
[1:01:21] of this? And I think they're still alive
[1:01:24] today and just living their new lives with their new identities.
[1:01:28] While Jerry Bruders rotted in prison, he was particularly
[1:01:32] targeted by other inmates in jail for, you know, physical
[1:01:36] abuse, fights, sexual abuse. However, he was weirdly liked
[1:01:42] among the prison staff because he was an electrician.
[1:01:45] Jerry would be transported to different places in the prison
[1:01:49] almost every day to help them fix some kind of electrical
[1:01:53] issue. Because it was free and Jerry
[1:01:56] knew how to do it all. It saved the prison money.
[1:01:58] And in return for his free labour around the prison, the
[1:02:02] guards would bring him in women's catalogues, women's shoe
[1:02:07] catalogues specifically, because this was Jerry's pawn.
[1:02:11] This was like bringing him in, you know, like a Playboy
[1:02:15] magazine. I don't know.
[1:02:16] I don't know, like pawn magazines.
[1:02:18] All his life he'd got off to women's high heeled shoes, and
[1:02:23] technically he was allowed that in his cell because it wasn't,
[1:02:27] you know, it was just a women's catalog.
[1:02:30] It wasn't actually porn. But to him it was.
[1:02:34] On March 26th, 2006, at the age of 67, Jerry Brudos passed away
[1:02:39] in his cell from liver cancer. But yeah, that's about all I
[1:02:43] have for this case. Thank you so much for listening
[1:02:49] to Usual Disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[1:02:51] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[1:02:54] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[1:02:57] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[1:03:00] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
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[1:03:06] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[1:03:09] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[1:03:12] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[1:03:15] production. See you next time.

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