Lust Killer Page 6

  He didn't worry so much about her poking around in the attic. He told her that he'd seen mice and rats up there, and that scared her. He had his treasures up there, boxes of shoes and bras and slips, all sizes. Some were even large enough for him to slip into himself to spend hours enjoying the feel of the soft cloth against his bare skin. The things were his, and he didn't want Darcie touching them or asking him questions about where he'd got them.

  He didn't even like to have her come home unexpectedly from her silly visits to her friends. "You call me before you come home," he told her. "I like to have some warning who's going to pop in on me."

  "But I'm your wife," she protested.

  "You just call, like I told you."

  There was no point in arguing with him. She did call, but that didn't seem to be enough. Jerry flooded her friends with calls of his own whenever she was away from home. "He wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, when I was coming home. He was terribly jealous of me, wondering who I was with—and I never was with anyone but my girlfriends. Once I asked him why he was always checking on me, why I couldn't come back to my own house without calling first. He made a joke of it. He said he wanted to be sure he got the blond out of the house before I got there."

  He had never cheated on her, not as far as she knew. It was a dumb joke. She was a little afraid of him now, because he seemed so strange. He had never harmed her physically, but he was so big, and even his friends said he was the strongest human they'd ever seen. He could carry a refrigerator all by himself and never even show the strain.

  Jerry Brudos had begun his fantasy about capturing women when he was seventeen. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had refined it and polished it until it had grown to something right out of Krafft-Ebing, a nightmare of sadism.

  He wanted to find someplace where he could set up an underground "butcher shop." It would have cells where he could keep his captives, and a huge freezer room. When he had it all ready, he would take a bus and go out and round up pretty girls and bring them back to his torture complex. He would choose which ones he wanted for his pleasure. He would shoot them and stab them and beat them and play with them sexually, and no one would be able to find out. When he had them, he would take pictures of them for his collection. When he was finally done with them, he would take them into his freezer room and freeze them in the positions he wanted so that he could keep them forever.

  He acknowledged that there were problems with his plan. For one thing, it would take thousands and thousands of dollars to finance such a complex. He had barely enough money to pay rent and buy food. He still had to borrow money from his bitch of a mother and play up to her so he could use her car when he needed it. He was smart enough to earn a lot of money, but he just had bad luck: everybody took advantage of him, and so he worked for peanuts.

  Practically, too, he figured that if so many girls turned up missing, somebody would catch on and the cops would start sniffing around.

  But it was a plan that always stayed in his mind.

  It made him dizzy thinking about it. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night feeling dizzy, and he knew it was because of his sexual fantasies. He could end them only by rolling over and having sex with his wife. Now when he made love to her, he felt that he was making love to someone else—to one of his captive women. He knew that it was Darcie, but he had an uncanny sensation that it was not.

  He didn't hurt her, and she never knew.

  At work, the men kept on with their filthy jokes about women. They thought he was some kind of prude because he no longer bothered to laugh. They treated him like he was nobody; it gave Jerry pleasure to realize what fools most men were.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Autumn came to Oregon and all the flowers turned black with frost, everything but the roses. The oak leaves turned yellow and covered the red earth, their branches hung with moss that wafted in the wind like an old woman's hair. And the rains came, weeks on end of steady gray rain that dripped from eaves and trees and pushed the rivers up over their banks. From time to time a violent storm swept in from the Pacific Ocean, and the rain pounded incessantly then against the windows of the gray shake house on Center Street and drummed on the thin roof of the garage workshop.

  Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and that meant that Jerry would be spending time with people he detested: his own mother—who would complain that she missed her husband, now long buried, and her favorite son, working a thousand miles away, and Darcie's parents, just as bossy and opinionated as they'd ever been.

  The constant rain and the dull job and the holidays coming up made him restless. His headaches were like a hammer pounding in his head, demanding that he leave the crowded house and the whining kids and his wife who didn't seem to respect him the way she once had.

  It was hard to find trophies in the winter. Nobody hung wash out on lines because it would never get dry. He had to prowl and watch and go inside to steal underwear.

  He had to do something to stop the headaches and the dizziness.

  At twenty-three, Jan Susan Whitney was well along in preparing for her future goals. She was almost finished with her degree at the University of Oregon in Eugene, some sixty miles south of Salem. No longer attending college full-time, she now lived in McMinnville, southwest of Portland. She had her own car, an older model Rambler, and a job and friends in both McMinnville and Eugene.

  Jan Susan Whitney was a pretty girl with short, thick brown hair and blue eyes. She was five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 130 pounds.

  She was, perhaps, more trusting than most—or only naive; she occasionally picked up hitchhikers on her trips between Eugene and McMinnville.

  On November 26, 1968, Jan concluded a visit to friends in Eugene and headed north on the I-5 freeway toward her apartment in McMinnville. She was dressed in black bell-bottom slacks and a green jacket when she said good-bye to her friends. She planned to be home that evening; it was only a short drive, two hours at most.

  Thanksgiving was two days away, and Jan had plans to be with friends and relatives. She was happy, and dependable, and intelligent. There was no reason at all—no predictable reason—for her to completely disappear.

  And yet, she did vanish that night.

  Since she had been in transit, it was almost impossible for investigators to pin down just where she might have vanished, or if she had been taken away against her will. A check of her apartment indicated that she had not returned from her trip to Eugene; mail and papers had stacked up, and dust lay heavy in the small rooms.

  Jan Whitney had not called any of her friends or family. She had simply disappeared somewhere along the I-5 corridor.

  A description of her car was sent out on the teletypes in Oregon and adjoining states.

  The car was found parked in a rest area on the road leading up to the Santiam Pass just north of Albany, Oregon, and slightly east of the I-5. The red-and-white Rambler had no external damage, and it was locked.

  The Oregon state police ordered that the vehicle be towed into the garages of the Identification Bureau for processing. It was found to have a minor mechanical problem that would preclude its being driven, but there was absolutely no evidence that the driver had been injured in the car.

  No blood. No sign of struggle. There were a few personal items belonging to Jan Whitney. There were no keys.

  In processing the Rambler, state police I.D. technicians lifted a good latent print from one of its hubcaps. With the technology available in 1968, a single latent print was worthless to detectives unless they had a suspect's print to compare it to. (FBI fingerprint files had single-print information only on the ten most-wanted criminals.)

  The discovery of her car in the lonely parking lot made things look ominous for Jan Whitney. She would have no reason to be there on a foggy, dank November evening. If she had left her inoperable car and attempted to walk along the freeway for help, she had not been seen. Since pedestrians along I-5 are quite noticeable because they are so f
ew and far between, it would seem that someone reading news stories of her disappearance would have come forward if she had been seen that night. A search of ditches and the land bordering the freeway netted nothing. Not one sign of the missing woman. If she had fallen and been injured, or even killed after being struck by a passing car, the men and dogs that searched would have found her.

  There seemed to be no ready explanation for the fact that her car was found in the parking lot at the foot of the Santiam Pass. Jan Whitney had been headed for McMinnville, and a detour toward the pass made no sense. Yet her car was there. Why?

  Jan Whitney was gone, just as inexplicably as Linda Slawson had disappeared in Portland ten months to the day earlier.

  Thanksgiving came two days after Jan Whitney vanished. Jerry Brudos took his family away for the holidays to visit friends and family. While they were gone, there was an accident. A car went out of control on Center Street, sliding on rain-slick streets and crashing into Brudos' garage workshop, damaging the structure and punching a hole in the exterior wall. The Salem police investigated the accident, but they could not get into the garage to estimate the damage because the doors were all locked.

  When the family returned, Jerry was agitated to see that there was a hole in the wall of his private workshop. He told Darcie he would take care of some things and then call the police.

  A few hours later, he contacted the Salem police accident investigator who had left a card and unlocked the garage so that the officer could check the damage from the inside. When this was accomplished, Jerry nailed boards over the splintered wood and the workshop was completely closed off again.

  Jerry was away from home that night for some time, but Darcie didn't think much of it; he was often gone for hours, and he never explained where he had been when he returned.

  The Oregon State Police continued their probe into the mysterious disappearance of Jan Whitney, but all the man-hours of work netted exactly nothing.

  Oregon State Police Lieutenant Robert White attempted to trace the anonymous correspondent who had mailed a letter from Albany. Sent in a plain envelope, and tediously printed as if the writer wished to disguise his handwriting, the letter said the writer had been at the Santiam rest stop where Miss Whitney's Rambler was abandoned, and, more startling, indicated that he had been present when Jan Whitney disappeared.

  Lieutenant White appealed to the public, asking the informant to come forward. But that was the end of it. If the writer was telling the truth, he chose for his own reasons to remain silent. He might have gleaned his information from newspaper accounts of the missing woman, or he might have had actual knowledge, either as a witness or as a perpetrator. There was no way of telling.

  Jerry Brudos continued to commute to his job at Lebanon, Oregon—a tiny hamlet just east of the I-5 freeway-beyond the Albany exit.

  Christmas came, and the new year, and Jerry Brudos celebrated his thirtieth birthday. His headaches had improved for a while, but then he felt nervous again and they returned worse than before.

  Darcie thought about leaving him. But she had no skills to get a job, and there was no money, and she did not believe in divorce.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jan Whitney had been missing for four months when spring came again to the Willamette Valley. Linda Slawson had been gone for fourteen months. They had disappeared fifty miles apart, and there were not enough similarities between the two cases to allow law officers to connect them. The girls were both young and slender, and attractive-—but one apparently had vanished from the streets of Portland, and the other from the freeway south of Salem. At any given time, there are always a handful of women who have disappeared in a metropolitan area. Most have chosen to leave for their own reasons, and eventually return or at least contact their families.

  Some do not. Stephanie Vilcko, sixteen, had left her Portland-area home to go swimming in July 1968—and never returned. Stephanie's disappearance came to a tragic denouement on March 18, 1969. A Forest Grove high-school teacher discovered her skeletonized body along the banks of Gales Creek five miles northwest of Forest Grove. By the time she was found, the ravages of time and weather had obliterated tissue that might have told forensic pathologists how she had died. Wind, ice, and water had also carried away any shred of physical evidence left by a killer—if, indeed, there was a killer.

  Stephanie, Linda, and Jan were only three among a dozen or more such cases. There had been headlines when the women first vanished, and then column-long articles on back pages of area papers, and finally, small items from time to time. In police departments, the files on the missing and dead women were growing thicker. Cases which detectives wryly refer to as "losers" are always thicker and more complex than the "winners"; they may slip from the public's mind-—but they are never, never forgotten by the men who work through one frustrating false lead after another.

  Thursday, March 27, 1969, was a typical example of spring in Salem, Oregon; the daffodils around the courthouse were in bloom, along with the earliest rhododendrons and azaleas, but they were alternately buffeted by rainy winds and warmed by a pale sun washing down through the cool air.

  Karen Sprinker, nineteen years old and a freshman at Oregon State University in Corvallis, was enjoying a short vacation between terms and had come home to Salem to visit her parents. Her father was a prominent veterinarian in Salem, and Karen had elected to follow him into the field of medicine, although she planned to treat human patients. She was carrying a heavy premed schedule at Oregon State, and earning top grades.

  Karen was beautiful, but not in a sultry way; she embodied the sweetness and warmth of an innocent young woman. In an age when chastity was becoming old-fashioned, Karen Sprinker was a virgin, confident in her own principles. She had thick, almost black hair that fell below her shoulders and tumbled across her high forehead in waving bangs. Her eyes were dark brown, and her smile was wide and trusting.

  She had never had a reason not to trust.

  Karen had graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in Salem in the class of 1968. She was class salutatorian, a member of the National Honor Society, a National Merit Scholarship finalist, winner of the Salem Elks' Leadership Award, and a member of the Marion County Youth Council. With her intelligence and concern for people, she was a natural as a future doctor. All things being equal, she would be practicing by 1979, a full-fledged M.D. before she was thirty.

  Shortly before noon on March 27, Karen Sprinker headed for the Meier and Frank Department Store in Salem. She was to meet her mother for lunch in the store's restaurant, and then the two of them were going to shop for spring clothes that Karen could take back to school.

  Meier and Frank's is the biggest department store in Salem, located in the downtown area. It is a block and a half east of what were the Salem Police Department's offices in 1969; it is a block and a half north of the Marion County sheriff's offices in the basement of the courthouse. The store complex contains its own many-tiered inside parking garage, a nicety for shoppers, who can avoid walking through the rain that is a definite possibility from November until June.

  Mrs. Sprinker waited in the luncheon room for Karen, who was driving her own car. Their lunch date was set for twelve, and Karen was unfailingly prompt. At twelve-fifteen Karen's mother looked at her watch, puzzled. She waved the menu away and asked for a cup of coffee, trying to concentrate on the models wending their way through the crowded room while they showed the store's new outfits.

  At twelve-thirty she began to watch the door for sight of her daughter. People nearby finished their meals, and new groups sat down. And still Karen didn't appear. Her mother wondered if there had been some mistake about the time. No, she was sure Karen had understood.

  Mrs. Sprinker left the restaurant and found a pay phone nearby. She called the family home, but no one answered. She went back to the lunchroom, but Karen still hadn't arrived. At length she left a message with the hostess, asking her to tell Karen that her mother had gone home—and would be there wai
ting for a call.

  Karen wasn't at home. Everything there was just as Mrs. Sprinker had left it. Karen wasn't at her father's clinic, nor had she called there.

  Karen Sprinker's parents went through all the steps that worried parents take when a dependable, thoughtful child cannot be found. If Karen had been an unpredictable girl, or a rebellious girl, it would have been much less frightening. But Karen had always been the kind of daughter who called home if she was going to be even fifteen minutes late. She was happy with her life and with her family. She loved college, and she'd been looking forward to the shopping trip, to the chance for some girl talk with her mother.

  The Sprinkers called all of Karen's friends—and none of them had seen or heard from her. All of them were as puzzled as the Sprinkers, stressing that Karen had no problems that her parents might not have been aware of.

  Her mother was aware that Karen had been in her menstrual period, and wondered if perhaps she had suddenly been seized with severe cramps, or even if she might have fainted. She had never had unusually severe periods, but there was always the possibility that she had become ill. Her parents called Salem hospitals to see if she might have been admitted.

  None of the hospital admitting records listed Karen Sprinker. No illness. No accident.

  Reluctantly going to the police-—because that step seemed to mark Karen's disappearance as something so much more ominous—the Sprinkers reported Karen as missing.

  The Salem police tried to reassure Karen's parents; they had seen so many "missing" people come back with reasonable explanations of why they were gone. Teenagers, particularly, tend to walk away of their own accord. They often have secrets their parents do not suspect, or romances that they think their parents won't approve of. Because they have never been parents, they cannot understand the worry that results when they are late getting home.

  The officer taking the complaint urged the Sprinkers to try to remember something that Karen might have said, some hint she might have given about something she planned to do or someplace she wanted to go.