Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (31 page)

Jerome Henry Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota, on January 31, 1939. He was the younger of two brothers and apparently was unwanted by his mother, Eileen, who was hoping for a daughter as a second child. The father was a small, short-tempered man, but not abusive. They were a poor family and lived mostly on farms while the father held casual jobs in town.

The mother was extremely dominating and highly critical of Jerry. While her other son, Larry, could do no wrong, she constantly denigrated Jerry. Both the father and the older brother were aware of her dislike for her younger child, but both were equally intimidated by Eileen Brudos.

Little Jerry roamed around freely and liked to play in a junkyard near their home. One day when he was five years old he found a pair of women’s shiny black patent leather high-heeled shoes; one of them still had a rhinestone-studded clasp. Jerry was both pleased and fascinated by the shoes—he had never seen a pair like that; his mother always wore flats. The little boy brought them home with him, slipped them on, and showed his mother. Her reaction was completely unexpected: She shrieked with outrage, telling the boy he was wicked and ordering him to take the shoes back to the dump.

Five-year-old Jerry Brudos could not understand what he had done wrong—the shoes came from a dump, and nobody wanted them. Yet by his mother’s reaction, he saw that he was committing some sort of deeply forbidden act. Instead of throwing the shoes out, Jerry hid them. When his mother found them, she made a show of burning them and punishing Jerry harshly. A fetish was born.

The bonding between mother and child had already been disturbed by Eileen’s distaste for Jerry. The boy attached himself to a kindly woman in the neighborhood and often fantasized that she was his real mother. The woman had diabetes and was very sick, and before long could no longer receive visits from Jerry. At the same time, Jerry also had a close friendship with a girl his own age who died from tuberculosis. He was devastated by the death of his girlfriend and grieved for a long time. These three events all occurred when Jerry was five years old, and for some inexplicable reason they became interconnected in his mind—he would not be able to speak of one without the others.

When Jerry was in the first grade, he stole his teacher’s high-heeled shoes from her desk. Before he could take them home, he was caught and humiliated. On another occasion, a couple with a teenage daughter was visiting the Brudos home. The daughter did not feel too well. She laid down on Jerry’s bed and fell asleep, still wearing her high-heeled shoes. Jerry recalls that he was transfixed and sexually aroused by the sight of the shoes and attempted to pry them off the sleeping girl. She awoke and told Jerry to get out of the room.

At school Jerry was a dull and sickly child. He failed the second grade and was often sick with sore throats and migraine headaches that made him vomit. He had two leg operations to correct circulation in his legs and had fungal infections in his toes and fingers. While his brother Larry passed school with A’s, Jerry was considered a dull child, despite the fact that his IQ was tested at normal or above.

Sex was never discussed in the Brudos home, and Jerry never witnessed any signs of affection between his parents. Growing up on the farm, Jerry recalls that he saw farm animals having intercourse, but he never associated or linked the erotic feelings he had for shoes with human sexuality. For him, his obsession with shoes was something secret and forbidden—and highly pleasurable.

The family moved around a lot, and for a period they lived next door to a house where there lived a lot of daughters. Jerry and one of their brothers would sneak into the girls’ rooms and fondle their clothing. Jerry discovered that touching female underclothes gave him the same arousing sensations that the shoes did. He loved the feel and the scent of female underwear, bras, and stockings. They were mysterious and forbidden totems arousing in him deep erotic feelings that he could not understand or explain.

Jerry Brudos, it must be remembered, was still a prepubescent boy. It is not unusual for some boys, at age five or even younger, to feel a sexual urge toward the female person, without understanding what it is that they are feeling or why. As the child does not know what to make of the pleasing yet frustrating urges he feels, they can sometimes be “short-circuited” to a number of other parallel, transient, and experimental emotions or fantasy scenarios. If these associations permanently fuse in the child’s subconscious, they can become fetishes or paraphilias such as masochism or sadism, necrophilia, bestiality, and so forth, that the child will carry with him into adulthood. Psychologists are unsure what causes such a fusing in some children, but in the case of Brudos, it might have been his mother’s hysterical reaction to his bringing home a pair of high-heeled shoes. Whatever sexual feeling he might have had at that moment could have become fused with guilt, rage, and unrequited desire for the rest of his life. The unfortunate events that followed in his childhood could have prevented him from ever growing out of it.

I do not want to make any kind of value judgment here on gender issues or alternative sexual lifestyles or on what is normal or abnormal, healthy or unhealthy. Let us say for the sake of argument that basic “normal” development will lead a child and adolescent to gradually discover increasing degrees of sexual pleasure from conventional affectionate contact with the opposite sex: touching, hugging, kissing, intercourse, and so on. If this development, however, is sidetracked or “short-circuited,” the individual seeks sexual pleasure by focusing on areas that were fused to his or her sexual memories in childhood. These become fetishes or
paraphilias—
narrowly focused sexual obsessions with either inanimate objects or particular types of partners or activities accompanying sex that often exclude the enjoyment of sex in any other form. It also appears to be predominantly a male problem. (See Chapter 7 for more on types of paraphilias.) Paraphilias are often accompanied by deep shame, so deep that sometimes the offender finds it less shameful to kill the victim than to admit to a para-philiac desire.

Sometimes these associations are minor and harmless and simply limit the individual in his relationship to the opposite sex—they become expressed as preferences for long-legged women, or for women with a certain body type, color of hair, scent, voice, and so forth.

Other times these paraphilias are more extensive. For example, a surprisingly common paraphilia among otherwise heterosexual males approaching middle age is a desire for sex with transsexuals: males who appear to be women with developed breasts but still have a penis. In many countries, entire neighborhoods are sometimes dedicated exclusively to prostitutes of this category. Why? Most likely the normal sexual urge of some male children toward the opposite sex is short-circuited by their ignorance of female anatomy—especially if they have no female siblings in the family or have not been exposed to full female frontal nudity in life or in pictorial form (to which many males growing up prior to the 1970s would not have been readily exposed). Instead, the male child fills in his imagination with what he knows best—his own body. He imagines the female form with the penis and fuses this imagery with his earliest and arguably most intense sexual sensations. What happens next, of course, remains a mystery. Upon discovering the true form of female genitals, some males react with aversion while others decide that what women really have is even better than what they imagined and go from there. Others, however, continue to associate an intense desire with their childhood memory of women with male genitals.

Paraphilias are powerful because they are so often linked to a primal sexual awakening in childhood that is frequently not even understood as “sex” but just as an overwhelming mysteriously pleasurable but unsatisfied urge. Some individuals spend the rest of their lives chasing the sexual dragon they experienced in childhood, never coming close to replicating the original sensation.

In some cases, these sexual associations are severe and debilitating and sometimes dangerous to others. They can be fused with sadistic or necrophiliac tendencies or with rage and humiliation, especially in individuals who were abused as children. Even harmless paraphilias can be given a dangerous edge under certain circumstances. Jerry Brudos had no opportunity for healthy social development, and his almost-comic shoe fetish became a motive for horrific murders. While in others, a fetish for shoes would be a harmless quirk, in Brudos it was streaked with feelings of hate, rejection, betrayal, anger, and frustration toward women. Brudos was a walking time bomb and as he staggered into puberty, it got only worse.

When Jerry’s older brother was sixteen, he had assembled a large collection of pinup pictures that he kept hidden in a box. One day, Jerry found Larry’s collection and was poring over it when his mother walked in on him. Again there was a hysterical scene and Jerry was severely punished. He never told his mother that the collection was Larry’s and not his.

At age sixteen, Jerry had his first nocturnal ejaculation—a wet dream. When his mother discovered the seminal stains on his sheets, he was again punished. Jerry was forced to wash his own sheets by hand and sleep without sheets while they dried on the line.

Jerry Brudos said that around this period he began to develop violent fantasies toward females. Brudos began to dig a tunnel in a hillside near the farm on which they lived. It was his fantasy to kidnap and imprison a girl there. Brudos recalls that he had no specific idea of intercourse or rape at that time—he was just excited by the idea of possessing a female.

During this period, Brudos began to slip into neighbors’ homes and steal shoes. He stole female underwear from clotheslines. He assembled a large collection of female garments, which he secreted from his mother. Years later, when police checked into the manufacture of the mysterious bra that one of Brudos’s victims was found wearing, they discovered that it had not been on the market for years. It is possible that it came from Brudos’ teenage-era collection.

Brudos stated in a psychiatric interview that touching female clothes gave him a “funny feeling” and he attempted to masturbate with it, but failed to ejaculate. He said he could only ejaculate in nocturnal emissions during his teenage years.

In 1955, Jerry Brudos was seventeen and had by now learned about intercourse. He became obsessed with seeing a naked girl, but Jerry was very shy and withdrawn around girls in school and the neighborhood. The situation was worsened by his hulking size and the onset of severe acne. Girls were repelled by the big, clumsy, ugly giant.

In August 1955, when the Brudos family was living in Salem, Oregon, Jerry crept into a neighbor’s house where an eighteen-year-old girl lived and stole her underwear. The next day he went to her and told her he was working undercover with the police and that he could get her lingerie back for her. The story seemed absurd to the girl, but Jerry was convincing. He told her that he lived in the neighborhood where many thefts were taking place and that nobody would suspect a seventeen-year-old kid as an undercover agent. He told the girl to come to his house when he knew nobody would be home. Since Jerry was a year younger than she was and he seemed like a chubby clown, the girl felt no fear of him. She decided she had nothing to lose and went to Jerry’s house.

When she knocked at his door, Brudos called to her from upstairs to come in. When she walked into his room, he jumped out of a closet wearing a mask and wielding a knife. He forced her to take her clothes off and then took photographs of her. After he finished he ran out of the room. The shaken girl was getting dressed as Jerry came running into the house without the mask. He told the girl that somebody had locked him in the barn and that he had just managed to break out. Did she see anyone, he asked. The girl knew it had been Brudos in the mask, and dashed from the house. As is often the case in sex crimes, the girl did not report the incident at the time.

In the meantime, Brudos developed the photographs and took great pleasure in handling the girl’s lingerie as he gazed at her pictures. His only regret was that he could remember little of the actual crime—he said he was too nervous and too busy taking pictures to actually savor the possession he had of the victim.

In April 1956, Brudos struck again. He lured a girl from his school into his car, drove her out to a remote location, and ordered her to take her clothes off. When she refused, he dragged her out of the car and began beating her with his fists, breaking her nose and causing extensive bruising. Fortunately a couple was driving by in their car and stopped when they saw the scene. Brudos at first attempted to convince them that the girl accidentally fell out of the car and was hysterical because she was scared. Then he told them that he was driving by and saw the girl being attacked by a “weirdo” and that he had fought him off. The couple took the now-docile Brudos and his victim to the police.

Police searched Brudos’s room and found his photographs and collection of female clothing. The girl in the pictures was contacted, and his assault from the previous August surfaced. Brudos was treated as a juvenile offender and sent for psychiatric evaluation to the Oregon State Hospital. The doctors found that Brudos was depressed and that his “judgment and insight are questionable.” But he was not grossly mentally ill or suffering from hallucinations, delusions, or illusions. According to the psychiatrist, Brudos showed no evidence of homicidal or suicidal tendencies and was suffering from “adjustment reaction of adolescence with sexual deviation, fetishism.”

Brudos lived at the psychiatric hospital but was allowed to attend high school during the day. He was talented in mathematics and science, but he performed below his abilities. Years later, when Brudos became infamous, nobody from high school could remember him—it was as if he did not exist. Like so many serial killers, he lived in isolation. After eight months of treatment, Brudos was released from hospital care and moved back to his unhappy home.