Jerry Brudos, the shoe fetish slayer.
In January 1968, women in Portland were terrorized by Jerry Brudos, a man who was alleged to have a foot fetish and four vanished completely, according to The New York Daily News.
About a year later a fisherman found the remains of a 22-year-old woman, Linda Salee, who had disappeared the year before. Police ended up finding four more bodies and eventually tracked them all back to Brudos. He confessed to the murders in gory detail to the police.
After keeping the body of his first victim for several months, in order to dress her up, he eventually dumped the victim in the river, but not before sawing off a foot to use for trying on heels and taking photos of them. In another horrific find, detectives discovered that he would keep souvenirs of his crimes including shoes, bras, girdles and even a paperweight he made out of human breasts.
Jerome Henry "Jerry" Brudos (January 31, 1939 – March 28, 2006) was an American serial killer and necrophile who murdered at least four women in Oregon between 1968 and 1969
Jerry Brudos was responsible for the horrific deaths of four women in the Salem, Oregon area between 1968 and 1969.
Dubbed “The Lust Killer” by author Ann Rule and “Shoe Fetish Slayer”, Brudos’ crime spree shocked the nation when he was apprehended in early ’69. Perhaps the most morbidly fascinating aspect of serial killers and true crime is what drives someone to kill, presumably for fun and/or gratification of some kind. In the case of Brudos (and a commonality among many serial killers), his reasoning began in early childhood.
Jerome “Jerry” Brudos was born in South Dakota in 1939, but his family was constantly on the move. As a toddler, he was bounced back and forth between Oregon and California before his folks finally landed near Salem. There an incident happened that would embed itself into his five-year-old brain and remain for the rest of his life.
He discovered his first pair of women’s high-heeled stiletto shoes.
They were discarded in a nearby junkyard, and the child was immediately smitten. He brought the pumps home with him where he could have the object of his affection with him always, although his mother Eileen didn’t share in his adoration. Eileen had never wanted another boy. When she discovered she was pregnant she fervently prayed for a girl. Her firstborn Larry was adored, but she could never seem to forget that Jerry was just another subpar son. Disappointment evolved into open hostility. Eileen would try to humiliate her second-born by dressing him in girl’s clothing while heaping praise and love upon elder brother Larry.
old salem oregon
Salem, Oregon in the 1960s. / Image via / Salem History Digital Collections / Statesman Journal
When she discovered her son’s clandestine junkyard heels, Eileen flew into a rage and set them on fire. Something in his childlike brain snapped that day, and his obsession with women’s footwear became full-blown fetishization. He was caught attempting to steal his first-grade teacher’s shoes from under her desk, and later those of a neighborhood girl who came to visit. Brudos also became a panty-thief, sneaking into nearby homes to steal women’s underwear.
old salem oregon
Salem, Oregon in the 1960s. / Image via / Salem History Digital Collections / Statesman Journal
When she discovered her son’s clandestine junkyard heels, Eileen flew into a rage and set them on fire. Something in his childlike brain snapped that day, and his obsession with women’s footwear became full-blown fetishization. He was caught attempting to steal his first-grade teacher’s shoes from under her desk, and later those of a neighborhood girl who came to visit. Brudos also became a panty-thief, sneaking into nearby homes to steal women’s underwear.
As childhood grew into adolescence, the young man’s fantasies only became darker and increasingly violent. Psychiatrists examining him later in his life believed his fantasies revolved around a desperate wish to take revenge on his mother for her demeaning attitude toward him in his formative years.
Around the age of 17, Jerry Brudos began stalking women. His typical behavior was to hold them at knife-point, knock them down and render them unconscious before making off with their footwear. On one particular occasion, he threatened to stab a young woman, forcing her to strip naked while he photographed her, then took her shoes home to bed with him. Ultimately, he was arrested for this crime and quickly shipped off to the
Budros had discovered that hurting women (like he wanted to hurt his mother) was an aphrodisiac.
Despite multiple confessions of his fetishes, including fantasies of chopping up young women to explicitly rearrange their body parts inside of a freezer, the bespectacled teenager only spent nine months in the hospital before being deemed sane enough for release in 1957. He graduated high school, then tried joining the army (subsequently discharged for having “bizarre obsessions”), and found work at a Corvallis radio station before settling down and marrying 17-year-old Darcie Metzler in 1961.
Acquaintances described their nondescript red-headed neighbor as “a devoted family man, who neither drank nor smoked, and rarely if ever used profanity.” He was tall and pudgy. Portly, even. From the outside looking in, the Brudos family was a normal one. Just your typical ‘two kids and a dog’ type of suburban household. Continue reading
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