Lust Killer Read online

  There are paper mills in Salem too, and when the wind is right, their acrid smell laces the air, assaults the nose, and leaves a metallic taste on the tongue.

  The brightest high-school students in Oregon are drawn to Willamette University in Salem, and the politicians come to the legislature. Others, as Jerry Brudos once had been, are locked up in the state's institutions—all located in Marion County (except for the boys' reformatory in Woodburn, a few miles north). The Oregon State Prison, the Hillcrest School for Girls, the Oregon State Mental Hospital, and the Fairview School for the Developmentally Disabled surround Salem. Some of the inmates escape, but most are only paroled or furloughed or dismissed from custody. Many of them remain in the Salem area to live in halfway houses or blend, however roughly, into the mainstream.

  Salem police and Marion County sheriff's personnel expect a little more trouble than most lawmen—the percentage of the population that is a little strange exceeds that of most areas.

  Jerry Brudos did not stand out as "strange"; he was too covert for that, and he seldom left the little house on Center Street. Despite the job opportunities offered through the food and paper-mill industries, he was not able to find work. Maybe he didn't look that hard; his headaches were bad, and his neck hurt.

  And he had so much on his mind.

  He moped around the house or puttered in his shop out in the garage, and Jerry packed on pounds. There were new rolls of fat around his waist and under his chin. One day, Darcie mentioned to him that he seemed to be gaining weight, and he grunted and disappeared into another room in the house. He was gone for a short time. When he returned, his wife was shocked to see Jerry standing before her, dressed in a woman's bra—stuffed with something to look like breasts—a girdle, stockings with garters, and the biggest pair of black pointy-toed high-heeled shoes she'd ever seen. Somehow, he'd managed to tuck his genitals inside the girdle so that he almost looked like a woman, turning and posing for her. All he needed was a wig. …

  Jerry looked so peculiar, a great big freckled man standing there in women's underwear—funny, really … but not funny. Darcie laughed nervously, but she was frightened and embarrassed. It seemed a little sick.

  Darcie was naive. She didn't know what a fetish was. She didn't know about transvestites or sexual psychopaths. She knew that some men were gay, but Jerry had always been entirely masculine. Their own sex life had always been straight when it came to intercourse. He'd never asked her to do anything that was kinky or repulsive. Nothing beyond posing for nude pictures.

  He seemed a little disappointed at her reaction. There was an awkward silence, and then he left the room. When he came back, he looked like himself again.

  She wondered where he'd gotten the girdle and bra, but she didn't ask him. She didn't want to make him angry or upset. Because it made her worry when she thought about her husband dressing up like a girl, she put it out of her mind. She had enough to worry about: money for bills, and keeping the children quiet, and trying not to irritate Jerry.

  She could not have known, could never have visualized in her worst nightmares, just how bad things were going to get.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As the Brudoses settled into their Center Street home in Salem in the summer of 1968, a detective worked in his offices in Salem's hundred-year-old city hall, perhaps a dozen blocks northwest of them. Though he was a twenty-year police veteran, and though fifteen years of that time had been spent in the detective unit, where he'd seen his share of violent crimes, Jim Stovall could not foresee how bad things would get either. And when it was over, he would deem the Brudos case the most shocking of his long career.

  Every heinous criminal has his nemesis, his alter ego—the one detective out of dozens whose whole existence is taken up for a time with catching his quarry. Jerry Brudos—for all of his macabre fantasies—was a most intelligent man, a planner and a schemer. He would not be caught easily, and, once caught, he would be difficult to break.

  If there is a working detective in America who could be the model for the brilliant investigators portrayed in fiction, it would be Jim Stovall. That he happened to be living and working in Salem, Oregon, in the black period of killings in 1968 and 1969 was one of the few bright spots in a terrible story.

  In the summer of 1968, Brudos and Stovall did not know each other, although it is very possible that they passed each other on the streets of Salem, that Brudos drove past the looming old city hall, that Stovall drove past the gray house on Center Street. And, oddly but not mystically, long before he ever confronted Jerry Brudos, Stovall would draw up a psychological profile of the killer he sought that was as clear and detailed as if he were psychic.

  But that was later, much later than the sunny, rose-filled days of mid-1968—because, at that time, Brudos had not yet begun to carry out the rest of his killing plans. He still waited, basking in the afterglow of the perfection of Linda Slawson's murder.

  Jim Stovall and Jerry Brudos had a few things in common. They each had a wife and a son and a daughter. Both of them had been in the armed services at one time. And both of them were planners and given to attention to detail. That was all. One of them worked to save lives. The other …

  Some good cops are cerebral and some work with gut feelings-—the "seat-of-the-pants" cop who knows what he knows but cannot tell you why. Stovall is that rare cop who is both, and woe to the criminal who wanders into his line of vision.

  Jim Stovall is a tall, handsome man with clear gray eyes, waving iron-gray hair, and the physique of the athlete he is. He looks like a bank president, or a TV newsman, or—yes—the glorified image of a slick detective. He looks a great deal like the actor Rory Calhoun, but would be embarrassed if someone should mention it to him.

  In the Second World War, Stovall served in both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps, where he was a rifle-range coach. When the armistice was declared, it seemed a natural progression that he should sign up with the Salem Police Department.

  Like most veteran cops, Stovall has lived through hairy incidents. As a rookie with less than a year on the force, he responded to the most dangerous radio squawk an officer can get: "Family fight." An enraged husband had left the family home after threatening to come back and kill his wife. Since a fair percentage of angry husbands do just that, there was a "want" on the suspect's vehicle. Stovall spotted the car, signaled it to move over to the side of the road, and approached the driver's door from the rear, stopping just behind the driver. Instead of the driver's license he'd requested, the man came up with a Luger–pointed at Stovall's heart.

  Stovall could see that the man was wild-eyed and shaky, likely to shoot. He kept his voice and his eyes steady as he spoke. "Look … you don't know me too well—so I'll give you a chance to point that in another direction. …"

  The driver's finger tightened on the trigger, and Stovall could almost hear his mind deciding what to do. They stared at each other for five … ten … fifteen seconds, and then the gunman laid his weapon down on the seat beside him and surrendered.

  Had things gone badly, the Salem Police Department would have lost one hell of a cop.

  Stovall was the top marksman in the department for eighteen years, and still shoots an occasional 98 or 99 on the FBI's PPC course. One night, he was staked out in the hallway of a building where a rash of burglaries had occurred. After a boring night, he heard the tinkle of broken glass somewhere in the building. The would-be burglar met Stovall in the hall, where the officer flashed his light into the man's face and challenged him. The suspect broke and ran into a room, locking the door behind him. Stovall aimed at the shadow behind the glass door and fired his .38. He then heard a crash, followed by the sound of running feet.

  Stovall thought he had missed the man, until a doctor in a Salem hospital's emergency room reported that a man had come in for treatment of a "nail wound." Stovall went to the hospital and recognized the man he'd seen for a split second in the rays of his flashlight. The burglaries stopped, and the thief
recovered at leisure in prison.

  Promoted into the detective unit after only five years on the force, Stovall availed himself of all training opportunities. He has a certificate in legal medicine from the Harvard University Medical School, has had many hours of study at Willamette University's Law School, and studied police business administration at the International City Managers' Association Institute of Training in Chicago. He has attended the Southern Police Institute in Louisville, Kentucky, and schools on visual-investigation analysis and link-analysis-charting techniques given by the California Department of Jus52 Ann Rule tice. He has also studied advanced psychology and hypnosis. And he is an expert photographer and a licensed pilot.

  A dog-eared square of paper is always tacked where Stovall can see it above his desk: "THE ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC PROOF MUST BE PRESENT TO ESTABLISH AND SUBSTANTIATE A SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION."

  And Jim Stovall has solved some homicide cases that defied solution, by meticulous attention to detail, by seeking and eventually finding that minuscule bit of physical evidence that starts the first ravel in a case that seems impenetrable.

  When a lovely twenty-three-year-old woman was beaten and stabbed to death in her bedroom in Salem, Stovall determined that the bludgeon weapon was a broken soft-drink bottle, its green fragments glittering in the sheets that covered her.

  Every man the girl had ever known or dated was located and questioned, and all of them were cleared. Then the victim's mother remembered a seventeen-year-old boy she had encountered on the street. "He said he'd been away for a year, and he mentioned to me that he would like to call my daughter and come over to see her sometime—but I don't think he ever called or came around, because she never mentioned him."

  Jim Stovall recognized the youth's name—he'd been arrested for minor juvenile offenses and there was a warrant out for him on a burglary charge. When he was taken into custody, he grudgingly let the detective have his clothing and shoes for lab examination.

  There were a few specks of dark red on the suspect's clothes—too little to classify as to type. But in the heel of the youth's shoes, Stovall saw a tiny sliver of green glass.

  At the Oregon State Crime Lab the shard of glass was compared with the bottle fragments found at the death scene under a scanning electron microscope and then in an electrospectrometer with a laser attachment for elements and light refraction. The samples were identical. They could only have come from the same batch of bottles, a circumstance that indicated it was highly probable that they had come from the same bottle.

  Faced with that information, the killer confessed that he had killed the victim when she refused his sexual advances.

  One of the strangest cases Jim Stovall ever solved was a classic "man found shot dead in a locked room with no weapon in sight."

  Investigating a report on a man who had disappeared from his usual haunts, Stovall and his partner, Sergeant John Kelly, checked the doors of the man's home and found them all locked. The front door was open, but a locked screen door prevented entry. The windows were all locked from the inside. Stovall broke the screen-door lock and stepped inside. The occupant lay facedown several feet from the front door. His right hand still clutched a nutcracker, and his mouth was full of nut meats. Until the dead man was turned over, it looked as if he had succumbed to a heart attack. But, face up, there was a small red hole in the front of his shirt, over his heart.

  Stovall and Kelly looked for the gun that had to be there. An odd suicide, but then, suicides are not normal under any circumstances. Since all the doors and windows had been locked from the inside, and since the dead man was alone in the house, the only answer had to be suicide-unless one believed that a killer had arrived and left via the chimney like Santa Claus. But there was no gun anywhere on the premises, so how could a suicide be explained?

  Neighbors were quick to offer a motive for murder. The dead man had been seeing another man's wife, and the other man was insanely jealous. It was not at all surprising that the victim was dead. What was curious was how.

  Stovall, who takes as many as one hundred photographs at homicide scenes, shuffled through his developed pictures and stopped when he came to a shot of the screen door. He enlarged it, and enlarged it again, and again.

  And there it was. A slight gap in the screen. The bullet had been a .25-caliber, quite small. When it passed through the wire mesh of the screen, it had made a hole, all right—and then the metal strands had snapped back almost as good as new. Unable to be seen by the naked eye, the piercing of the screen showed up in the photo lab. Stovall had weighed the variables, and figured that was the only way. Even if he couldn't see it, he expected to find a tear there.

  Jim Stovall's main goal is to find the truth—not to put people behind bars. If the truth sets a "good" suspect free, those are the breaks; it only means that the answer has not yet been ferreted out.

  One Salem husband came very close to going to jail for the murder of his wife because a pathologist skimped on the autopsy.

  "Failure to perform a complete autopsy or to save material for toxicological analysis is a dangerous practice—even if you have a suitable answer at the time," Stovall says.

  In murder, of all human phenomena, things are seldom what they seem. In the mysterious death of the forty-year-old victim, it looked clearly as if her architect husband had killed her because he was tired of dealing with her emotional problems. Men have shuffled their wives off for far less.

  Stovall and his crew found the woman dead one summer afternoon, lying in her kitchen in a welter of blood with a wound on the top of her head. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide—probably by beating and strangling. Her throat had the hemorrhages peculiar to strangulation, and the state of rigor was well advanced when she was found. Time of death was pegged at ten A.M. because of the rigor mortis.

  "There was something not quite right," Stovall recalls. "Her hands were flexed in such a way that I was suspicious."

  The husband stated that he'd been home for lunch at noon and that his wife had been fine then. "I took two containers of raspberries out of the freezer for her because she was going to make a pie."

  The postmortem examination had included only a cursory look at the head and throat, and the time of death stipulated marked the husband's statement as a lie. He could not have seen his wife alive and well at noon.

  Hardly popular with the M.E., Stovall insisted on further tests, and the contents of the victim's stomach were found to be laced with strychnine poison. That made the case a whole new ball game.

  Stovall searched the kitchen shelves above where the woman had fallen, and found an old container of poison on the top shelf. A check of sales on strychnine in the Salem area showed that four and a half pounds of the stuff had been sold in the previous twelve months—all in minute amounts sold from a dozen different outlets.

  The husband, more bewildered than ever, was given a polygraph test and passed it cleanly. He did remember buying some rat poison many years before, but had forgotten it was even in the house.

  "That poor woman killed herself," Stovall says. "Witnesses said she'd been slipping back into her old depression. She had time enough to take the poison, rinse out the glass, and replace the container on the high shelf. Then convulsions seized her and she fell, striking her head on the sharp kitchen counter. Strychnine kills from sheer exhaustion from the constant convulsions. The throat hemorrhages were caused by convulsive spasms, not from strangulation. And when death is caused by a convulsive disorder, rigor is accelerated. She was alive at noon—just as her husband said."

  A grand jury overturned the murder charge and ruled the woman's death a suicide.

  Jim Stovall keeps a constant reminder of the need for attention to forensic detail in solving crimes above his desk, but beneath his desk he keeps a pair of ski boots. That is his avocation and his passion away from the police department. A skier for thirty-five years, he is a member of the Professional Ski Instructors of America—teaching skiing in Oregon and al
so in Colorado during his vacations. His whole family skis. Today his daughter is a ski instructor, and his son is a skier and a lawyer.

  In 1970 Jim Stovall was named Master Detective's National Police Officer of the Month, and singled out by Parade magazine for an honorable mention in their annual salute to the ten most outstanding police officers in America.

  He would never have a case more challenging than the one that began in earnest on November 26, 1968—exactly ten months after the disappearance of Linda Slawson. The second case was part of a pattern, but a pattern with too few variables yet known to be apparent. But the serial killer is never satiated. He kills and moves on to kill again and again, until something stops him. He choreographs his killing so carefully, remembering which of his deadly steps succeed and incorporating them into his pattern.

  And in so doing, he leaves, for the men who know what to look for, a path as plain as a trail of breadcrumbs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  By the fall of 1968 Jerry Brudos had found a job, again as an electrician, for a firm south of Salem. Not a great job—but a job. His marriage was still intact, but it was strained. Darcie had cooled to his sexual advances; she did not often refuse him, but he sensed she found him disgusting. She was away from their home so much now, spending four days a week with two sisters who were her good friends.

  He still ruled the home with an iron hand, however. He told Darcie that the shop area was his and that he didn't want her going out to the garage without his permission. He got a strong padlock and put it on the door to assure that he would have privacy. She complained some because the freezer was out there, and he said flatly, "Just tell me what you want for supper and I'll get it out of the freezer for you. I don't want you butting into my darkroom when I'm working—you'll ruin everything if you do."