Lust Killer (12 page)

After days, however, the search was suspended. The river was empty of bodies now, and would give up nothing more to aid in the investigation.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jerry Brudos read about the discovery of the bodies in the Long Tom River. He was not particularly concerned. The cops didn't know anything, really. The papers weren't telling everything; the cops had to know a few more details than the paper was giving—but not that much more. He had been very careful. He had planned it all well. Actually, he figured the cops had to be pretty stupid. They'd been right there with their noses poking through the hole in his garage, and they hadn't seen anything at all. They'd only thanked him for his time and signed the forms for the insurance claims. He had to smile when he heard Darcie dithering about the dead girls and how frightened she was. Darcie didn't know anything either.

He felt quite magical, and full of power. Well, he'd waited long enough to exert his power, and now, nobody was going to stop him. Not his mother, or his wife, or the police. Not anyone.

Even Darcie was being nicer to him, beginning to do the things that he'd begged her to do for years. He thought she must sense his new confidence, and he loved her more than ever, if possible. She was really the only woman he had ever loved.

Darcie had started taking dancing lessons! Now they would be able to get dressed up and go out dancing together and she would wear high heels and pretty clothes and every man on the dance floor would be jealous because she would dance with no one but him.

All the shrinks over the years had insisted that his thinking wasn't normal, that he needed therapy. He had the last laugh now; his thought processes were as smooth as tumblers in a lock. He could plan and carry out whatever he wanted to do, and it all worked. He didn't need a shrink to tell his troubles to. He didn't need to "grow up," and he didn't have to bow down to anyone.

The thing was that, once he started on one of his prowling plans, and once he had a woman, he was seized with a feeling that what he was doing was right, that there was no need for him to consider if he should stop or go ahead. He just let the fantasy take him over.

He reveled in having control. He could move about at his own whim. The one thing he could not bear was to have someone else decide what he should do and where he should be at any given time. He was in charge of his own destiny. That was important.

Sometimes he still had his dizzy spells and sometimes he still got depressed, an overwhelming black depression that settled over him and made him too sad for words. Then he would begin to wonder why Darcie had waited so long to take dancing lessons. He had asked her to dance with him for years, and she wouldn't. He wondered if it was too late now.

And he couldn't enjoy sex with her the way he once had. It left him feeling empty, and she didn't seem very enthusiastic or satisfied with him. If she knew how strong and important he was, she might be more sensual. But he couldn't tell her; she might not understand.

Damn. That forced him to remember his failures. Before the short little girl at Lloyd Center, he had struck out twice. It made him feel bad to think about it.

He had to think about his few failures; he needed to evaluate what had gone wrong and correct it. There was that blonde bitch in Portland. He was still furious with her.

On the twenty-first of April, Jerry had gone to the parking garage at Portland State University to look for a girl. He had his toy pistol and he'd thought that would make a girl frightened enough to go with him.

He'd found himself a prime lookout point, watched women crossing the street far below his perch in the parking lot, and finally chose the one he wanted—a slender woman with long red-gold hair and very full breasts. She wore a bright red linen dress, the hemline stopping at mid thigh, and tantalizing high-heeled pumps.

He didn't know it, nor would it have mattered to him, but her name was Sharon Wood and she was twenty-four years old. She was, on that gloriously warm April day, a perfect target for Jerry Brudos. Actually a gutsy, intelligent young woman, Sharon was having a bad day on April 21. The last thing on her mind was caution. She had far too many other things to worry about. Her abduction should have gone smoothly.

Jerry Brudos, like the majority of serial killers, could pick up on that temporary vulnerability almost as a wolf catches the scent of fear in his prey. The distracted victim is the ideal victim for a predator.

It was three-thirty that afternoon when Sharon left the Portland State history department where she worked as a secretary. She had been married for seven years, had two little children, and her marriage was about to blow all to smithereens. On this afternoon, her about-to-be-ex-husband had agreed to meet with her, and her mind was on that meeting.

She was feeling lousy physically, too, suffering with a middle-ear infection and using antibiotics; her hearing, at best, was not acute. Now sounds came to her muffled and indistinct. She was near-sighted, and adjusting to newly prescribed contact lenses. The senses she needed most were blurred that afternoon.

It wasn't surprising that Sharon was distracted and depressed. She couldn't even find her damned car keys, and she'd had to dump out the contents of her purse on her desk before she left her office. She hoped she could find the extra key she'd hidden in a magnetic box under the car frame.

Sharon tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the "Walk" sign to flash at the corner of Broadway and Harrison in downtown Portland. She hadn't the vaguest awareness of the big man watching her from his perch high up in the parking garage across the street. Eight stories high with open sides, packed with cars belonging to some of the 9,000 Portland State students and faculty, the parking garage had always seemed safe enough to Sharon.

And it
was
broad daylight. People streamed by her on either side as she waited.

As Sharon Wood headed across the street, she hoped that she could find the spare key, and then she realized she wasn't even sure on which level she'd parked that morning. She was going to be late meeting her estranged husband.

Sharon would recall years later that she had never before in her life encountered any manner of sexual violence. …

"As I sped down the steps into the basement level, my high heels clicked on the concrete," she recalled. "The heavy doors shut automatically behind me, cutting me off from daylight and the campus population. I walked about fifteen feet forward and looked around for my car, and realized I was on the wrong level."

Sharon turned to go back up the dead-space area between the parking levels, and sensed—if only obliquely-—that someone was behind her. She recalls it was only an awareness of someone in back of her, not a distinct impression of a man or a woman.

"Instinct told me not to return to the more isolated stair area, so I pivoted and started for the daylight entrance on the far side of the building," she said.

Sharon still had not looked around, but she walked rapidly, giving into that "gut feeling" that warns of nameless, faceless danger. But she had walked only a few steps when she felt a light tap on her shoulder.

She turned her head and looked directly into Jerry Brudos' pale blue eyes.

"I could sense the evil and I
knew
I was going to die. …"

And then she saw the pistol. The big, freckled man promised her, "If you don't scream, I won't shoot you."

Almost unconsciously, Sharon Wood made a choice. "No!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, at the same time backing away from the man with the gun. Undeterred, Jerry Brudos stepped quickly behind her again and grabbed her in an arm-lock around her neck. She was five feet four inches tall, and weighed 118 pounds. The man who held her in a "half nelson" was over six feet tall and weighed 210 pounds.

Kicking and screaming, Sharon continued to shout "No!" She tried to grab for the gun that was right in front of her face, twisting and pulling at the fat fingers that held it.

The man's huge hand passed close to her mouth, and she bit into the fleshy thickness of his thumb as hard as she could. She tasted blood,
his
blood, and she tried to let go. But, in her terror, her jaw had locked. She
could
not release his hand, and they danced a kind of crazy dance in the dimness of the parking garage as Jerry Brudos tried to free himself of the kicking, biting blonde who had seemed such an easy target.

In desperation, he wound his free hand around and around in Sharon Wood's long strawberry blonde hair and pulled her head toward the concrete, forcing her body to the ground.

"Oh, God," she thought. "Now, he's going to rape me right here."

Brudos still had a grip on Sharon's hair, and began to beat her head against the floor. Hazily, she saw a Volkswagen "Bug" driving toward them as she began to lose consciousness. Only then did her jaw relax from its muscle spasm and her attacker pull his thumb free. Through bleared eyes she saw him pick up his gun and run. How odd, she thought hazily: Once
he
became the captive, he acted scared to death … he was fighting to get away from
me
.

And then she passed out.

Portland police patrolmen arrived at the parking garage to take Sharon Wood's statement about the crime, which was listed as "aggravated assault." Tragically, no connection was made at the time between the attack on Sharon in Portland and the dead girls found floating in the river near Corvallis.

Of the two officers responding, one told Sharon, " Don't you think you took a hell of a chance—fighting a man with a gun?" His partner disagreed, "I think you did the right thing."

In this instance, of course, she had. She would not know for years the details of her attacker's other crime. Sharon Wood was left with a pounding headache, wrenched muscles, scrapes, bruises, torn clothing, and nightmares.

But she was alive.

She was one of Jerry Brudos few failures.

He'd had to get out of there quickly. He had kept his head, though. If he'd run, somebody would have been suspicious. He'd forced himself to walk away casually—fast, but casually. He climbed the ramp to the next floor and walked to his car. Nobody stopped him. But his thumb throbbed for the rest of the day.

It was humiliating to have something like that happen, and he'd still been so full of the urge for a woman. He'd tried again the next day, right in Salem. That girl was a young one, not more than fourteen or fifteen, and he'd thought he was lucky to find a schoolgirl out of school at ten-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday. She was just hurrying along the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks headed for Parrish Junior High when he spotted her.

He'd tried to act like it was urgent when he said, "I want you to come with me. I won't hurt you," and then he'd grabbed at her coat at the shoulder and pulled her between two houses, and showed her the gun.

She'd been scared, all right, and he'd told her, "I won't rape you. I wouldn't do that."

"Let go of me," she'd said, as if she wasn't afraid of him at all.

Then he'd led her toward the borrowed sports car and told her to get in, and the little bitch had broken away from him and run screaming for help to a woman who was working in her yard.

He'd had to run too, get in his car, and gun the motor before somebody got a glimpse of the license plate.

Two failures had hurt his ego some, and made him determined that he'd be successful the next day. He smiled. He had been perfectly successful. He'd walked right into the parking garage at Lloyd Center and found the pretty girl in the beige coat. He'd caught her before she could get into her red Volkswagen and he'd held out the little tin police badge—and she'd fallen for it.

And now he was okay again. The secret was to learn from his failures, not to dwell on them.

There were so many girls around. Even though the police had found the two he'd left in the river, he didn't worry that anybody was close to him; they had no idea who he was. He thought about all the girls there were on college campuses—more than any other place. They were all young, and most of them were pretty.

He developed a new plan. It worked beautifully. All he had to do was call one of the dorms and ask for a common name—"Susan" or "Lisa" or "Mary." Somebody always came to the phone, and he pretended that a friend had given him her name. Some of them wanted to know
which
friend and hung up on him when he couldn't come up with a name. But he managed to get three dates that way. He took them out for coffee and talked with them. None of them were exactly his type, but he enjoyed bringing up the newspaper articles about the dead girls in the river, and it turned him on to see how nervous it made them. Talk about jumpy! When he reached out to touch them on the shoulder, they practically leaped out of their skin.

Seeing them afraid and nervous was so stimulating that he'd been driven to steal more underwear for his collection. He had an improvement on his "panty raids," too; he wore women's underwear when he crept through the dorms, and a pair of large-sized women's pedal pushers. It made his forays more exciting when he dressed that way.

He had no doubt that his "blind" telephone calls would soon win him a coffee date with a girl who
was
his type. When he found the next one, he would take her with him. …

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jim Stovall, Jerry Frazier, and Gene Daugherty were living and breathing the cases of Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee. They did not delude themselves into thinking that the girls' deaths were the final acts of a pattern. They knew it would continue if the killer wasn't caught, and it made everything else in their lives take a back seat.

During the day, Stovall and Frazier plodded through junkyards in Salem and Portland with Lieutenant Daugherty, trying to get a line on the origin of the auto parts used to weight the girls' bodies. The parts had come from a Chevrolet, a model produced between 1953 and 1962. The engine head had weighed sixty pounds. The task of tracing the parts to one particular car from the hundreds of thousands that came off assembly lines in a nine-year period was almost hopeless. There were no serial numbers to compare, no way at all to follow the history of the junked vehicle back to Detroit and then through a series of owners. But there was the faintest of possibilities that some junkyard owner would remember selling the parts. And there was more likelihood that the auto parts could be traced than that the origin of the mass-produced mechanic's cloths could. The nylon cord and the copper wire used to fasten the engine parts to the bodies was also mass-produced, available from uncountable sources. The black bra was old, purchased years before, and had been sold through outlets all over America.