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Lust Killer Mass Market Paperback – June 7, 1983
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To his neighbors, Jerry Brudos was a gentle, quiet man whose mild manner sharply contrasted with his awesome physical strength. To his employers, Jerry was an expert electrician, the kind of skilled worker you just don't find anymore. To his wife, Darcie, Jerry was a good husband, and a loving father to their children, despite his increasingly sexual demands on her, and his violent insistence that she never venture into his garage workroom and the giant food freezer there.
To the Oregon police, Jerry Brudos was the most hideously twisted killer they had ever unmasked. And they brought to light what he had done to four young women—and perhaps many more—in the nightmare darkness of his sexual hunger and rage. First, Jerry Brudos was brought to trial...and then, in a shattering aftermath, his wife was accused as well...
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBerkley
- Publication dateJune 7, 1983
- Dimensions4.18 x 0.84 x 6.69 inches
- ISBN-100451166876
- ISBN-13978-0451166876
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Rule has an instinct for suspense, knowing just what information to leak to the reader and when.”—The Washington Post Book World
“A raw docudrama of almost unbelievable intensity.”—Booklist
“A harrowing pathological portrait, a nearly unthinkable triple-murder plot, a hold-your-breath police procedural and a tale of dedication and compassion all superbly combined to produce the most riveting true-crime account since In Cold Blood.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Excellent....One of the most detailed studies of a sociopath to dignify the true-crime circuit.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
“A fascinating and grisly story...un-putdownable.”—New York Daily News
“A good read....Rule springs surprises and revelations with a novelist’s skill.”—Seattle Times
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Berkley; Reissue edition (June 7, 1983)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0451166876
- ISBN-13 : 978-0451166876
- Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.18 x 0.84 x 6.69 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #80,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #189 in Criminology (Books)
- #374 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts
- #8,009 in Suspense Thrillers
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About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Ann Rule is regarded by many as the foremost true crime writer in America, and the author responsible for the genre as it exists today. She came to her career with a solid background in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
As a child, Ann spent her summer vacations with her grandparents in Stanton, Michigan, helping her grandmother prepare meals for the prisoners in the jail. She wondered why such friendly, normal appearing, men were locked behind bars, and why the sweet woman in the cell upstairs (who taught Ann to crochet) was about to go on trial for murder. That was the beginning of her lifelong curiosity about the "Whys" behind criminal behavior.
Following in the footsteps of her grandfather, a sheriff in Michigan, Ann joined the Seattle Police Department when she was 21, worked a year and a half, but couldn’t pass the eye test. After five years of rejection slips, she finally sold her first article for $35! Soon, she found her niche when she began writing for fact-detective magazines like TRUE DETECTIVE.
Ann was a full-time true crime writer from 1969 - 2015. Over the past 30 years, she has published 33 books and 1400 articles, mostly on criminal cases. Ann has a BA from the University of Washington in Creative Writing, with minors in Psychology, Criminology and Penology. She has completed courses in Crime Scene Investigation, Police Administration, Crime Scene Photography and Arrest, Search, and Seizure, earning her an Associates Degree from Highline Community College.
Ann not only attended several police seminars on organized crime, arson, bomb search, and DNA, but taught her own seminars to law enforcement groups, and was a certified instructor in many states on subjects such as: Serial Murder, Sadistic Sociopaths, Women Who Kill, and High Profile Offenders. She was a member of the U.S. Justice Department Task Force that set up the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VI-CAP), and testified twice before Senate Judiciary Sub-committees on victims' rights and on the danger of serial killers.
Ann's books deal with three areas: the victims' stories; the detectives and prosecutors and how they solve their cases with old fashioned police work and modern forensic science; and the killers’ lives. Ann spent months researching for her books, investigating the killers' early childhood, and even back into their family histories to find some of the genesis of their behavior.
Eight of Ann's books have been made into TV movies, and five more are in the works. She won the coveted Peabody Award for the miniseries based on her book,Small Sacrifices, and has two Anthony Awards from Bouchercon, the mystery fans' organization. She has been nominated three times for Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. She was also awarded the Washington State Governor's Award. Ann is active in support groups for victims of violent crimes and their families, in programs to help battered and abused women, and support groups for children caught in traumatic living situations.
Ann Rule passed away in July of 2015.
From Ann Rule:
“My first book, THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, was about Ted Bundy, but, amazingly, I had the book contract to write about an unknown killer six months before Bundy was identified as the "Ted Killer." And I had known him all along, and didn't realize it; he was my partner in the all-night shift at Seattle's Crisis Clinic!”
“To choose a book subject, I weed through about 3,000 suggestions from readers. I'm looking for an "anti-hero" whose eventual arrest shocks those who knew him (or her): attractive, brilliant, charming, popular, wealthy, talented, and much admired in their communities--but really hiding behind masks.”
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I don't like the fact that this was originally published under a pseudonym. To me, it is disingenuous, and furthermore, writers are always more disciplined when they sign their own names to their work. I can already hear all of the rationalizations for using another name in this case -- particularly using a male's name in an earlier era -- and those rationalizations fall on deaf ears to me. My opinion: write under your own name or don't write at all.
If Ms. Rule has any issues with her writing -- her style and grammar are almost always excellent, surely better than 99 percent of so-called "authors" out there -- it would be in occasional lapses in logic. For example, as she describes in "The I-5 Killer," Mr. Woodfield supposedly argued that since female guards are only allowed in female prisons, that male guards should only be allowed in male prisons. Yes, Mr. Woodfield may be a serial killer. Yes, Mr. Woodfield may be a very bad guy. Yes, I may not like Mr. Woodfield, and neither should you. But his logic was certainly correct on this point, no matter how you feel about him, and Ms. Rule seemed to ridicule his logic in that book. That made me raise more than an eyebrow, as logic stands or sits on its own.
As another example, in this book, she discusses how male prisoners in prisons don't like other male prisoners "who kill women and children." Yes, that is probably true, but Ms. Rule seems to perpetuate the myth herself that women and children have more value than others in society. And you know by deduction who those "others" are. All that's left is men. I say "phooey" once again. A life is a life, and it seems that she waved her hands here by using a too-common appeal-to-emotion fallacy on this count late in this book. Perhaps she didn't believe anyone would catch it? I sure did, and I sure didn't like it.
I would imagine that female readers like Ms. Rule's books better than male readers. Personally, I've always been a fan of Jack Olsen's work as he seemed to take a more balanced and logical approach to writing as a comparison; unfortunately, he is no longer with us. But whenever I read a book from Ms. Rule, I can always spot personal opinion here and there where I believe that those opinions don't have much merit in true-crime writing.
Now, for the good. I am giving this book a 4 out of 5, after all.
While this book is only somewhere around 250 pages, it surely gives enough detail about the life and crimes of Mr. Brudos. He was certainly an oddity as a cross-dressing serial killer who seemed to enjoy carving up his victims before disposing of them. I'm not sure that it's fair exactly to compare him to someone like Jack the Ripper, however, as Mr. Brudos didn't seem to invoke the same fury as that 19th century killer. Mr. Brudos seemed to work more slowly and methodically.
I did feel incredibly sorry for Mr. Brudo's wife. She was more than dragged through the mud, by not only the media, but the judicial system and the public. Ms. Ridgeway's wife comes to mind in comparison, although Ms. Ridgeway was certainly treated better. For some reason, people always mistakenly believe that a serial killer's spouse "must know something," and that would usually be the furthest from the truth. By definition, for a serial killer to be a serial killer and therefore be "successful," he must kill at least three people. (Some people argue two, but that argument is for another day.) And to kill at least three people, usually no one else but the serial killer and his victims must know his identity; if anyone else knows he will be ratted out in a hurry. Therefore, serial killers -- minus outliers such as the "Ken and Barbie Killers" Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka -- generally only work alone. Without requiring much thought, it is completely logical to believe that even people inside of a serial killer's life have no idea about his private atrocities, and those people would include his wife. Naturally, she should have never been tried as a killer, or had private images displayed publicly. To Oregon I say, "Shame on you."
Well, to those of you who dislike my review simply because you believe I'm an "Ann Rule hater" -- a phrase that I've read once too often on the web -- I say "balderdash." I just wish that she could hold her logic completely through the entirety of a book. If she did that, I would easily give her a 5. I'm waiting, Ms. Rule. Or is that Andy Stack?
I found this book to be interestingly different from Rule's later publications, where her writing is "thick," and her details incredibly thorough. This was a book that, I thought, was somewhat weak compared to Rule's later writing, though I will read anything that she puts out.
As I've been reading all three titles that were reissued, I am struck more and more by the thought, "Where do these monsters come from?" I had a childhood that could match any of these murderers for sadness, despair and abuse, yet I haven't a violent bone in my body. I'm always interested when Rule tries to probe that question.
My impression of this book is that its a lukewarm telling of a scary story, and it's an interesting read in that it's Ann Rule at her earliest.
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Arrivato ben imballato nei tempi previsti ed in perfette condizioni.
Io adoro Ann Rule e pian pianino li sto comprando e leggendo tutti