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He was a monster. He was not born a monster, but evolved grotesquely over the twenty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-seven days that passed before Linda K. Slawson had the great misfortune to cross his path.
Jerome Henry Brudos was born in Webster, South Dakota, on January 31, 1939. His parents seem to have been a hopelessly mismatched couple. They already had one son a few years older than Jerome, and they apparently did not particularly want another; the older brother, Larry, was intelligent and placid and gave them little trouble. A girl would have been preferable. Instead, Eileen Brudos gave birth to a red-haired, blue-eyed second son whom she would never really like. As all babies do, he must have sensed that. When he was old enough to form his feelings into words, he would call her a "stubborn, selfish egotist." If she did not like him, he grew to despise her.
Eileen Brudos was a stolid woman who dressed neatly and plainly, and "never, never wore high heels," according to Jerome.
Henry Brudos was a small man-only five feet four inches tall. He moved his family a dozen times during his sons' growing-up years. They usually lived on a farm, farms that gave so grudgingly of their produce and livestock that the elder Brudos had to work a full-time job in town to support them. Like most small men, Jerry Brudos' father was easily offended and hostile if he thought someone was taking advantage of him, and was quick to react with verbal abuse. Whatever his father's faults, Jerome Brudos vastly preferred him to Eileen Brudos.
The Brudoses lived in Portland during the Second World War. Employment was easy then, and their financial picture was fairly stable.
Five-year-old Jerry Brudos was allowed to roam freely, and on one occasion he was pawing through a junkyard when he found something that fascinated him. Shoes. Women's high-heeled shoes, but nothing at all like anything his mother had ever worn. These were constructed of shiny patent leather with open toes and open heels and thin straps to encircle the ankles of the woman who wore them. They were a little worn, of course, and one rhinestone-studded decorative clip was missing. Still, they pleased him, and he carried them home.
More for comic effect than anything else, he slipped his stocking feet into the shiny black shoes and paraded around. Eileen Brudos caught him at it and was outraged. She scolded him severely, her voice rising in a shriek as she went on and on about how wicked he was. She ordered him to take the shoes back to the dump and leave them there. He did not understand why she was so angry, or just what it was that he had done wrong-since obviously no one wanted the old shoes anyway. He didn't take the shoes back; instead he hid them. When he was discovered still sashaying around in his forbidden high heels, there was hell to pay. His mother burned the shoes and made him stay in his room for a long time.
When he was finally let out, he ran to a neighbor woman who was very pretty and soft and kind to him. He liked to pretend that she was his real mother and that he had no connection to Eileen. He already hated Eileen.
Little Jerry Brudos had another friend when he was five-a girl his own age. She was often pale and tired and couldn't play; he did not know that she was dying of tuberculosis. Her death was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to him, and he grieved for her for a long time.
The neighbor woman who was kind to him was sickly too, and suffered from diabetes. Years later, in his own mind, the episode with the stolen shoes, his girlfriend's death at the age of five, and the kind neighbor woman were intertwined, and he could not speak of one without the others.
By the time Jerry Brudos was in the first grade, the family had moved to Riverton, California. He had a pretty teacher who invariably wore high-heeled shoes to class. She always had two pairs on hand, one to switch to if her feet got tired or if she planned to go out on a date when school was over. Stealthily now, because he had learned that high-heeled shoes were not to be noticed overtly, he stared at his teacher's footwear, entranced by the slim heels. When he could stand the temptation no longer, he stole the shoes she kept in her desk and hid them under blocks in the play area so he could take them home with him. But somebody found them and took them back to the teacher. Days later, he confessed that he had taken them.
She was more puzzled than angry. "Why on earth would you want my shoes, Jerome?"
He turned red and ran from the room.
Jerry Brudos failed the second grade. He was a sickly child. He had measles and recurring sore throats, accompanied by swollen glands and laryngitis. As an adult he remembered having a number of "toe and finger operations," probably to treat fungus infections around the nails. He had two operations on his legs. What the defect was is obscure; Jerry Brudos himself recalls only that there was something wrong with the veins in his legs: "The veins were ballooning and I had to have the operations because they were not doing their job."
He often had migraine headaches that blinded him with pain and made him vomit. Because of the headaches and because he seemed not to comprehend the basics of reading and writing, school authorities thought he might need glasses. His brother had sailed through school with A's, and Jerry's I.Q. tested normal or above, but he sometimes seemed vague and slow.
Glasses were prescribed but they were hardly more than window glass, a placebo. He still had headaches, an ailment that would plague Jerry Brudos to greater and lesser degree for much of his life.
He must have spent some time in bed recovering, locked in with the mother he avoided whenever possible, but that part of his life is blanked out in his memory.
He got along all right with his brother, despite the fact that Larry excelled in school and was always deferred to by Eileen. Jerry seldom saw his father because he was always working-on the farm or on his town job.
Jerry's fixation with women's shoes was solidly entrenched. On one occasion his parents entertained visitors who brought their teenage daughter with them. The girl wanted to take a nap, and lay down on Jerry's bed. He crept in and was transfixed to see that she still wore her high-heeled shoes. As she slept, one of the heels poked through the loose weave of the blanket. The sight was tremendously erotic to Jerry. He wanted her shoes. He worked to pry them off her feet, but she woke up and told him to stop it and get out of the room.
It should be pointed out that Jerry Brudos was still a small boy when his shoe-stealing episodes took place, well under the age of puberty. Sex, of course, was a subject forbidden in his home. Like all farm-raised youngsters, he observed sexual behavior among animals. He knew what bulls did to cows, and he knew that boars quite literally "screwed" female pigs with their peculiar but functional penises. He had seen dogs and cats mate. But he would never dare to ask how intercourse between humans was accomplished. Touching and hugging, any demonstration of affection, were discouraged in the Brudos home. He heard jokes at school, and laughed with the other boys-remembering particularly a joke about a girl sliding down a banister-but he never admitted he didn't understand the punch line or the point of the joke. And he was completely unable to make the connection between the strange excitement he had when he was around women's shoes and his own sexual drives.
It was just something that was peculiar to himself. But he sensed that it had to be a secret thing. Why else would his mother have been so enraged over his shoe theft when he was only five? Why else would the teenage visitor have been so angry with him? And his very need for subterfuge and secrecy made his obsession all the more thrilling.
Looking at the fair, bland-faced Jerry, the child who seemed dull in school, no one ever detected the fires burning in him. That there was danger there, however incipient, would have seemed laughable.
For all of his life, women held the reins of power over Jerry Brudos-in one way or another. Eileen, his mother, was strong, rigid, and intractable. He could not please her; he had never been able to please her, and she clearly ran the household. She railed at him for the most minor lapses, and it seemed to Jerry that his brother got away with everything. Larry avoided chores just as much as Jerry did, but their mother always had an excuse for Larry. Larry was "exceptional" and "gifted" and needed the time to study. Their father and Larry both knew that Eileen had it in for Jerry, but there was nothing they could do about it. She ruled with a firm hand, and all three males in the family chose evasive tactics rather than confrontation.
The other females who had been important to Jerry Brudos deserted him; his little girlfriend died and left him, the neighbor lady became too ill to have time for him, and his teacher never quite trusted him after he admitted the theft of her shoes. He learned early that women could not be counted on.
He wavered constantly between depression and frustration and the rage that is born of impotence.
Heading into puberty, he was an accident looking for a place to happen.
The family moved to Grants Pass, Oregon. Their new neighbors had a house full of daughters, and Jerry and one of their brothers often sneaked into the girls' bedrooms to play with their clothing. His fetish expanded to include female undergarments. Secret woman things. Brassieres and panties and girdles and the complicated harnesses that they used to hold up their silky nylons. He now loved the feel of the soft cloth, almost as much as the shoes that were so different from men's.
The Brudoses moved again before Jerry was thirteen, and lived on Wallace Pond near Salem, the state capital. Jerry's father made another lackluster attempt at farming there in 1952.
Larry was sixteen and had the normal pubescent male's interest in the nude female body. He collected pinup pictures and sometimes drew pictures of Superman's girlfriend, Lois Lane-portraying Lois nude and wearing high heels. Given the puritanical views of Eileen Brudos, Larry prudently kept his cache of pictures locked up in a box.
Jerry found the box, picked the lock, and pored over the pictures. And it was Jerry-not Larry-who was caught in the act. He didn't tell on his brother, but accepted the punishment. Nobody would have believed that it was Larry's collection anyway, because Larry was the good son and Jerry was the bad son.
At the age of sixteen, Jerry had his first wet dream. Eileen, who steadfastly denied all sexual matters, found his stained sheets and scolded him severely. The nocturnal ejaculation had startled him too, and he wondered if it was something people should be able to control. His mother made him wash his sheets by hand, and he had to sleep without sheets the next night because he had only one set and the offending sheets were still hanging damp on the line.
Jerry began to create bizarre fantasies of revenge. He worked for days digging a hidden tunnel in the side of a hill on the farm. His plan was to get a girl and put her into the tunnel. Once he had her, he would make her do anything he wanted. He could picture it all clearly, but he ran into a problem when he tried to think what it was he wanted the captive girl to do. He still didn't know enough about sex to focus on what intercourse was, and he certainly didn't understand rape. He only knew that the thought of a captive woman begging for mercy excited him.
At the same time, Jerry began to steal shoes and undergarments from neighbors' houses and clotheslines. He had quite a little stash, which he studied and touched and kept carefully away from Eileen Brudos. Interestingly, Jerry never stole his mother's clothing or was tempted to try her things on.
If anyone suspected that it was Jerry who was making off with the neighborhood underwear on Wallace Pond, he was never accused. And then the peripatetic Brudoses moved again-this time to Corvallis. Corvallis is the site of Oregon State University and lies twenty-five miles west of what is today the I-5 freeway that runs from Canada to Mexico. It is a fertile region, as is the entire Willamette Valley. The Long Tom River flows just east of Corvallis, and the Pacific Ocean is fifty miles to the west.
By the time the family moved onto yet another farm, Larry was in college-doing well in his study of electronics. Jerry was skilled in the same field, but his accomplishments paled in comparison to his brother's.
Jerry was almost seventeen, and he had learned the basic facts of life. Still, he had never seen a naked woman, and he was determined that he would. His hostility toward and distrust of women in no way mitigated his lusting after them.
Jerry continued to steal women's clothing. At home, in the privacy of his own room, he would take his treasures from their hiding spot and fondle them. He would later tell psychiatrists that touching female garments gave him "a funny feeling." He used the clothing for masturbation, but he failed to achieve an orgasm. The only ejaculation he had experienced to date had come from "wet dreams."
In the late summer of 1955, Jerry Brudos crept into a neighbor's house and stole undergarments belonging to an eighteen-year-old girl who lived there. The stolen clothing by itself soon began to pall, and Jerry thought that it would be so much better if he could have pictures of a real girl, mementos he could keep. He formulated a complicated scheme.
He approached the girl whose lingerie he'd stolen and told her that he could help her get her things back. He bragged to her about a secret; he had been working with the police on the case. He had inside information. She was a little doubtful, but Jerry was persuasive. Since he lived in the neighborhood where the thefts had occurred, he said the police found him the perfect undercover man-no one would suspect he was working with the cops.
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