Lust Killer (24 page)

But Edna Beecham became convinced she had seen something on the afternoon of March 27. It became quite clear in her mind. She talked it over with her sister, and she talked about it with other friends, and they all urged her to go to the police.

And she did.

"I saw something," she began. "I saw something on the afternoon of March 27—about one-thirty P.M. I have to tell … "

Life was going to continue to get worse for Darcie Brudos.

On July 17, Jim Stovall and Detective B. J. Miller, accompanied by Salem police Detective Marilyn Dezsofi, drove to Corvallis. Their destination was the home of Darcie Brudos' parents; the grandparents had had custody of Megan, now seven, and Jason, twenty-three months old for several weeks. Now the youngsters were to be placed, at least temporarily, under the custody of the Oregon State Childrens' Services Division.

Jim Stovall carried Jason to the car and Megan took Marilyn Dezsofi's hand. It was a sad errand for the detectives, "but necessary. Darcie Brudos had now become the focal point of an ongoing investigation.

Megan Brudos was a smart little girl, and Dezsofi was astounded when the child commented matter-of-factly, "My daddy killed three … I mean, five women."

Dezsofi, Miller, and Stovall said nothing, and Megan continued to chatter. "I don't like policemen very well—they came and got my Daddy and put him in that place. Are you policemen?"

Dezsofi nodded.

"Was that man one of them that got my daddy?" she asked, pointing to Jim Stovall. Stovall nodded slightly.

Apparently, conversation about the case had not been soft-pedaled around Megan by her mother and grandparents. "My daddy's sick in the head," Megan confided. "He was sick in the head when he was a little boy and he got sicker and now he is so sick, he will never get well. My mom says we're going to have to change our last name."

Megan babbled quite freely to Dezsofi on the way to a foster home in Jefferson. "You know, my brother is too young to know what Daddy did!"

The little girl said that she knew many secrets, and she might tell them later.

But she didn't. The next time the detectives talked with her she blurted, "I forgot all my secrets."

It would always be questionable how much Megan truly knew, and how much of her knowledge had come from overhearing bits and pieces of conversation. She did not recognize pictures of any of the victims, and she laughed out loud when Dezsofi asked her if her father ever put on ladies' shoes for fun.

"Daddy wear women's shoes?" she chortled, as if the idea was absolutely ridiculous.

In the end, Jim Stovall was convinced that Megan had no valuable information. Further, he didn't want to subject the youngster to detailed questioning on matters concerning her father's crimes. Her life would be difficult enough from here on.

Darcie Brudos was stunned almost to inaction when her children were placed in foster care, and she asked Salem attorneys Charles Burt and Richard Seideman to represent her. She was not sure why her children had been taken from her.

Early on the morning of August 7, the reason was quite clear. Richard Seideman called Darcie and told her that she was being charged with first-degree murder,
i.e
., aiding and abetting Jerome Brudos in the murder of Karen Sprinker. "You will be arraigned in half an hour."

The wait was not half an hour, but four hours long, and Darcie left the arraignment to walk the gauntlet past the strobe lights of cameras. Reporters described her in print later as "emotionless," "calm," and "stolid." In reality, she had been too numb to react. She moved through her weeks in jail in a kind of dream.
This
was the worst thing, the thing that had been waiting for her all along … but something she had never dreamed in her worst nightmares might happen.

The burden of the state was predictable. To prove that Darcie Brudos was guilty of aiding and abetting her husband in the death of Karen Sprinker, the case against Brudos himself must be presented. All the evidence would have to be brought out, all the ugliness paraded before a jury. Whatever the final verdict, the decision would be something of a legal landmark.

It began—this final ordeal—in September 1969.

Since he had presided over Jerry Brudos' hearings, Judge Sloper disqualified himself and Judge Hay would preside. The opposing attorneys were well-matched, perhaps the most outstanding criminal lawyers in Marion County. For the state, Gary D. Gortmaker, tall, confident, his prematurely silver hair perfectly cut—an almost constant winner in court. For the defense, Charlie Burt. Burt is a man of short stature, slightly crippled by a childhood bout with polio, somewhat irascible, gruffness hiding his innate kindness. Both men were in their early forties.

The courtroom had 125 seats for spectators, and there were hundreds of would-be observers waiting outside the locked doors each morning, all vying for a seat. Spectators' purses and packages were searched before they were allowed into the courtroom; threats against Darcie Brudos' life had been voiced.

Those who were lucky enough to get a seat would not budge, even during recesses. They watched Darcie Brudos, and commented in stage whispers that she did not "look like a murderess." She did not; in her white blouse and neat dark suit, her short hair tousled, she looked very young and very frightened. She was much thinner than she was when Jerry was arrested. The pounds she'd fought for years had slid away with the tension of the past four months.

She was only twenty-four, a very young twenty-four. She could hear them talking behind her. She heard muffled laughter and a constant undertone of conversation, as if the gallery believed she could not hear their comments.

"If anybody dies, just prop him up—and keep your seat. We don't want to miss anything."

She saw a hugely pregnant woman who seemed about ready to deliver, and thought how uncomfortable she must be sitting all day on a hard courtroom bench. And then the woman said, "I hope I have the baby over the weekend so I can be back here by Monday morning. … "

She saw the armed deputies leaning against the back wall, and realized with a shock that they were there to protect
her
from the possibility of attack by someone who had already judged her and found her guilty.

The first panel of prospective jurors—forty in all—was exhausted by noon of the first day of jury selection; they had all read about the "Brudos case," and they had all formed opinions as to her guilt or innocence. It would take two and a half days to select a jury. Eight women and four men. And then she wondered. It was such a toss-up. She knew women could judge another woman far more harshly than men did. Would they understand? Would they believe her?

It was time to begin. District Attorney Gortmaker rose to make his opening remarks to the jury. Gortmaker assured the jury that he would prove that Darcie Brudos had helped her husband when he'd killed Karen Sprinker. He said he would produce an eyewitness who had
seen
Darcie assist Brudos in forcing a person wrapped in a blanket into their home. …

Charlie Burt spoke next. He stressed that Darcie had had no reason at all to aid her husband. He pointed out that Darcie had refused to destroy evidence, had actually saved physical evidence for the police to find. "This is hardly the act of a woman trying to protect herself!"

On the first morning of the trial, Megan Brudos was called into the courtroom so that Judge Hay could determine if she would be a competent witness. A witness against her mother. … Darcie had not seen her daughter for over two months. Seeing Megan walk timidly into the courtroom was almost more than she could bear. Megan was only seven years old; she seemed so frail, thinner than she had been, and quite frightened.

The testimony of a child under ten in a court of law is always suspect. Some children are mature enough to relate facts accurately; others are not. Judge Hay leaned toward Megan and smiled as he spoke softly to her.

"What is your name?"

"Megan."

"What do you think happens when you don't tell the truth?"

"You get in trouble."

"Do you believe in God?"

"Yes."

"How are your marks in school?"

"I got some bad marks. … "

"But some good ones too?"

"Yes, they balance out."

"Do you think you could answer questions honestly—if someone should ask you in this courtroom?"

"Yes."

Both the defense and prosecution declined to question Megan at this time. The child looked around the courtroom for the first time, and she saw her mother. She began to cry.

And so did Darcie.

Megan was led from the room—but she had been accepted as a potential witness against her mother.

On Thursday morning, September 25, the prosecution's case began in earnest. Lieutenant Robert W. 190 Ann Rule Pinnick of the state crime lab took the stand to identify clothing removed from Karen Sprinker's body.

"Were there articles of clothing that you removed from the body of the deceased?" Gortmaker asked.

"I removed from the badly decomposed body of Karen Sprinker … white panties, a black long-line bra, a green skirt … a green sweater."

The courtroom was very quiet as Pinnick broke the seal on the bags holding the clothing, and there was a concurrent odor that insinuated itself into the close air. (When Darcie Brudos' trial was over, the courtroom would retain the stench, a stench removed only by having all the benches stripped and revarnished.)

Each garment was displayed after Pinnick identified his own initials on the labels of the bags that held them.

"Did you find anything inside the strapless brassiere?"

"Yes, sir."

"What was that?"

"Brown—or tan—paper towels had been stuffed into the cups."

"When the body was examined—on autopsy—were the breasts intact?"

"They were not. They were absent."

There was no carnival atmosphere now. There were only shocked gasps, and Darcie felt the force of eyes staring behind her.

She had not known. This she had not known.

Burt and Seideman had tried to warn Darcie what the physical evidence would be like; she had listened and nodded, but she had not foreseen how awful it really was. The defense team had tried to keep the evidence out of trial, but all two thousand pieces of it were allowed, trundled into the courtroom by deputies before each session.

Lieutenant Pinnick described the manner in which Karen Sprinker's body was weighted down with an engine head from a Chevrolet, the mass of it attached with nylon rope—microscopically identical in class and characteristic with the nylon rope taken from Jerry Brudos' workshop.

"Did you form an opinion on whether the victim had been undressed … or redressed?"

"Yes, sir. She apparently had been. The black brassiere was not hers."

"Did you go to 3123 Center Street on June 3, 1969, to participate in a search of the premises?"

"Yes, sir."

"And did you seize certain items of evidentiary value from those premises?"

"Yes, sir."

Darcie watched as piece after piece of evidence was introduced, identified by Pinnick, and accepted. Here in the courtroom, it all seemed to have a macabre air—although some of the items were quite familiar to her: the blue shag rug (that Jerry had said he needed to keep his feet warm in the workshop), his tool chest, the vise, a gas can, a green plastic wastebasket, a reloading device for ammunition, his rock tumbler, a blue wooden box and a gray metal kitchen stool. She had seen all those things on the rare occasion that he allowed her into the workshop. She was not sure what they might possibly have to do with his crimes.

For the rest of the day, the morass of evidence grew, and as it grew, Darcie began to feel physically ill.

There were the shoes—she had seen none of them. The women's low shoes with laces she had never seen before. Were they Karen Sprinker's? The prosecution said they had been. And all of the others. Where had he gotten them, and how had he kept them so secret from her?

All the things the police had found in the attic. Gortmaker lifted packages from a huge box, packages to be opened to show that they contained so many brassieres … and girdles. Jerry had obviously stolen these things, and she had had no idea.

Her attorneys had warned Darcie that there would be terrible pictures, and now they were handed to Lieutenant Pinnick for identification, passed to the defense table for Darcie's perusal, and then given to the jury. She was afraid she was going to vomit.

She saw the hanging body of a woman who hung as still as death from a hook in Jerry's workshop, her face covered with a black hood. The next girl, who had to be Karen Sprinker—she recognized her face from newspaper stories—gazed into the camera with an awful kind of fear in her eyes. She wore only panties and shiny black pumps, and she stood on Jerry's blue rug. …

There was a black notebook—she had never seen it before—and it held pages of pictures of naked female torsos. The women photographed had no heads; they had been snipped from the photos. Why? To avoid identification? Or as a symbolic gesture of violence? Darcie studied the headless nude photos and wondered who they were—or who they had been.

There were pictures of Jerry. Jerry dressed grotesquely in women's underclothing—wearing a black slip, stockings, and high heels. She had seen him like this, but she had put it out of her mind.

And then the worst picture of all. The dead girl hanging from the ceiling by the rope around her neck. And Jerry. Her husband's face was there, too; he had leaned too far over the mirror on the floor, photographing himself along with the dead woman when he snapped this terrible picture.

Darcie looked up at the jury and saw that their faces were gray and sickened as they passed the pictures down the line. She saw a woman look at one of the pictures, shut her eyes against the image, and swallow hard.

What else would they show? Darcie knew she was living in a nightmare now. How could she have been in the same house with Jerry and not have realized how sick he was? How could she convince anyone that she had not known?