Lust Killer (7 page)

Stovall and Kelly looked for the gun that had to be there. An odd suicide, but then, suicides are not normal under any circumstances. Since all the doors and windows had been locked from the inside, and since the dead man was alone in the house, the only answer had to be suicide-unless one believed that a killer had arrived and left via the chimney like Santa Claus. But there was no gun anywhere on the premises, so how could a suicide be explained?

 Neighbors were quick to offer a motive for murder. The dead man had been seeing another man's wife, and the other man was insanely jealous. It was not at all surprising that the victim was dead. What was curious was
how
.

Stovall, who takes as many as one hundred photographs at homicide scenes, shuffled through his developed pictures and stopped when he came to a shot of the screen door. He enlarged it, and enlarged it again, and again.

And there it was. A slight gap in the screen. The bullet had been a .25-caliber, quite small. When it passed through the wire mesh of the screen, it had made a hole, all right—and then the metal strands had snapped back almost as good as new. Unable to be seen by the naked eye, the piercing of the screen showed up in the photo lab. Stovall had weighed the variables, and figured that was the only way. Even if he couldn't see it, he expected to find a tear there.

Jim Stovall's main goal is to find the truth—not to put people behind bars. If the truth sets a "good" suspect free, those are the breaks; it only means that the answer has not yet been ferreted out.

One Salem husband came very close to going to jail for the murder of his wife because a pathologist skimped on the autopsy.

"Failure to perform a complete autopsy or to save material for toxicological analysis is a dangerous practice—even if you have a suitable answer at the time," Stovall says.

In murder, of all human phenomena, things
are
seldom what they seem. In the mysterious death of the forty-year-old victim, it looked clearly as if her architect husband had killed her because he was tired of dealing with her emotional problems. Men have shuffled their wives off for far less.

Stovall and his crew found the woman dead one summer afternoon, lying in her kitchen in a welter of blood with a wound on the top of her head. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide—probably by beating and strangling. Her throat had the hemorrhages peculiar to strangulation, and the state of rigor was well advanced when she was found. Time of death was pegged at ten A.M. because of the rigor mortis.

"There was something not quite right," Stovall recalls. "Her hands were flexed in such a way that I was suspicious."

The husband stated that he'd been home for lunch at noon and that his wife had been fine then. "I took two containers of raspberries out of the freezer for her because she was going to make a pie."

The postmortem examination had included only a cursory look at the head and throat, and the time of death stipulated marked the husband's statement as a lie. He could not have seen his wife alive and well at noon.

Hardly popular with the M.E., Stovall insisted on further tests, and the contents of the victim's stomach were found to be laced with strychnine poison. That made the case a whole new ball game.

Stovall searched the kitchen shelves above where the woman had fallen, and found an old container of poison on the top shelf. A check of sales on strychnine in the Salem area showed that four and a half pounds of the stuff had been sold in the previous twelve months—all in minute amounts sold from a dozen different outlets.

The husband, more bewildered than ever, was given a polygraph test and passed it cleanly. He did remember buying some rat poison many years before, but had forgotten it was even in the house.

"That poor woman killed herself," Stovall says. "Witnesses said she'd been slipping back into her old depression. She had time enough to take the poison, rinse out the glass, and replace the container on the high shelf. Then convulsions seized her and she fell, striking her head on the sharp kitchen counter. Strychnine kills from sheer exhaustion from the constant convulsions. The throat hemorrhages were caused by convulsive spasms, not from strangulation. And when death is caused by a convulsive disorder, rigor is accelerated. She
was
alive at noon—just as her husband said."

A grand jury overturned the murder charge and ruled the woman's death a suicide.

Jim Stovall keeps a constant reminder of the need for attention to forensic detail in solving crimes above his desk, but
beneath
his desk he keeps a pair of ski boots. That is his avocation and his passion away from the police department. A skier for thirty-five years, he is a member of the Professional Ski Instructors of America—teaching skiing in Oregon and also in Colorado during his vacations. His whole family skis. Today his daughter is a ski instructor, and his son is a skier and a lawyer.

In 1970 Jim Stovall was named Master Detective's National Police Officer of the Month, and singled out by
Parade
magazine for an honorable mention in their annual salute to the ten most outstanding police officers in America.

He would never have a case more challenging than the one that began in earnest on November 26, 1968—exactly ten months after the disappearance of Linda Slawson. The second case was part of a pattern, but a pattern with too few variables yet known to be apparent. But the serial killer is never satiated. He kills and moves on to kill again and again, until something stops him. He choreographs his killing so carefully, remembering which of his deadly steps succeed and incorporating them into his pattern.

And in so doing, he leaves, for the men who know what to look for, a path as plain as a trail of breadcrumbs.

CHAPTER FIVE

By the fall of 1968 Jerry Brudos had found a job, again as an electrician, for a firm south of Salem. Not a great job—but a job. His marriage was still intact, but it was strained. Darcie had cooled to his sexual advances; she did not often refuse him, but he sensed she found him disgusting. She was away from their home so much now, spending four days a week with two sisters who were her good friends.

He still ruled the home with an iron hand, however. He told Darcie that the shop area was his and that he didn't want her going out to the garage without his permission. He got a strong padlock and put it on the door to assure that he would have privacy. She complained some because the freezer was out there, and he said flatly, "Just tell me what you want for supper and I'll get it out of the freezer for you. I don't want you butting into my darkroom when I'm working—you'll ruin everything if you do."

He didn't worry so much about her poking around in the attic. He told her that he'd seen mice and rats up there, and that scared her. He had his treasures up there, boxes of shoes and bras and slips, all sizes. Some were even large enough for him to slip into himself to spend hours enjoying the feel of the soft cloth against his bare skin. The things were his, and he didn't want Darcie touching them or asking him questions about where he'd got them.

He didn't even like to have her come home unexpectedly from her silly visits to her friends. "You call me before you come home," he told her. "I like to have some warning who's going to pop in on me."

"But I'm your
wife
," she protested.

"You just call, like I told you."

There was no point in arguing with him. She did call, but that didn't seem to be enough. Jerry flooded her friends with calls of his own whenever she was away from home. "He wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, when I was coming home. He was terribly jealous of me, wondering who I was with—and I never was with anyone but my girlfriends. Once I asked him why he was always checking on me, why I couldn't come back to my own house without calling first. He made a joke of it. He said he wanted to be sure he got the blond out of the house before I got there."

He had never cheated on her, not as far as she knew. It was a dumb joke. She was a little afraid of him now, because he seemed so strange. He had never harmed her physically, but he was so big, and even his friends said he was the strongest human they'd ever seen. He could carry a refrigerator all by himself and never even show the strain.

Jerry Brudos had begun his fantasy about capturing women when he was seventeen. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had refined it and polished it until it had grown to something right out of Krafft-Ebing, a nightmare of sadism.

He wanted to find someplace where he could set up an underground "butcher shop." It would have cells where he could keep his captives, and a huge freezer room. When he had it all ready, he would take a bus and go out and round up pretty girls and bring them back to his torture complex. He would choose which ones he wanted for his pleasure. He would shoot them and stab them and beat them and play with them sexually, and no one would be able to find out. When he had them, he would take pictures of them for his collection. When he was finally done with them, he would take them into his freezer room and freeze them in the positions he wanted so that he could keep them forever.

He acknowledged that there were problems with his plan. For one thing, it would take thousands and thousands of dollars to finance such a complex. He had barely enough money to pay rent and buy food. He still had to borrow money from his bitch of a mother and play up to her so he could use her car when he needed it. He was smart enough to earn a lot of money, but he just had bad luck: everybody took advantage of him, and so he worked for peanuts.

Practically, too, he figured that if so many girls turned up missing, somebody would catch on and the cops would start sniffing around.

But it was a plan that always stayed in his mind.

It made him dizzy thinking about it. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night feeling dizzy, and he knew it was because of his sexual fantasies. He could end them only by rolling over and having sex with his wife. Now when he made love to her, he felt that he was making love to someone else—to one of his captive women. He knew that it was Darcie, but he had an uncanny sensation that it was not.

He didn't hurt her, and she never knew.

At work, the men kept on with their filthy jokes about women. They thought he was some kind of prude because he no longer bothered to laugh. They treated him like he was nobody; it gave Jerry pleasure to realize what fools most men were.

CHAPTER SIX

Autumn came to Oregon and all the flowers turned black with frost, everything but the roses. The oak leaves turned yellow and covered the red earth, their branches hung with moss that wafted in the wind like an old woman's hair. And the rains came, weeks on end of steady gray rain that dripped from eaves and trees and pushed the rivers up over their banks. From time to time a violent storm swept in from the Pacific Ocean, and the rain pounded incessantly then against the windows of the gray shake house on Center Street and drummed on the thin roof of the garage workshop.

Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and that meant that Jerry would be spending time with people he detested: his own mother—who would complain that she missed her husband, now long buried, and her favorite son, working a thousand miles away, and Darcie's parents, just as bossy and opinionated as they'd ever been.

The constant rain and the dull job and the holidays coming up made him restless. His headaches were like a hammer pounding in his head, demanding that he leave the crowded house and the whining kids and his wife who didn't seem to respect him the way she once had.

It was hard to find trophies in the winter. Nobody hung wash out on lines because it would never get dry. He had to prowl and watch and go inside to steal underwear.

He had to do something to stop the headaches and the dizziness.

At twenty-three, Jan Susan Whitney was well along in preparing for her future goals. She was almost finished with her degree at the University of Oregon in Eugene, some sixty miles south of Salem. No longer attending college full-time, she now lived in McMinnville, southwest of Portland. She had her own car, an older model Rambler, and a job and friends in both McMinnville and Eugene.

Jan Susan Whitney was a pretty girl with short, thick brown hair and blue eyes. She was five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 130 pounds.

She was, perhaps, more trusting than most—or only naive; she occasionally picked up hitchhikers on her trips between Eugene and McMinnville.

On November 26, 1968, Jan concluded a visit to friends in Eugene and headed north on the I-5 freeway toward her apartment in McMinnville. She was dressed in black bell-bottom slacks and a green jacket when she said good-bye to her friends. She planned to be home that evening; it was only a short drive, two hours at most.

Thanksgiving was two days away, and Jan had plans to be with friends and relatives. She was happy, and dependable, and intelligent. There was no reason at all—no predictable reason—for her to completely disappear.

And yet, she did vanish that night.

Since she had been in transit, it was almost impossible for investigators to pin down just where she might have vanished, or if she had been taken away against her will. A check of her apartment indicated that she had not returned from her trip to Eugene; mail and papers had stacked up, and dust lay heavy in the small rooms.

Jan Whitney had not called any of her friends or family. She had simply disappeared somewhere along the I-5 corridor.

A description of her car was sent out on the teletypes in Oregon and adjoining states.

The car was found parked in a rest area on the road leading up to the Santiam Pass just north of Albany, Oregon, and slightly east of the I-5. The red-and-white Rambler had no external damage, and it was locked.

The Oregon state police ordered that the vehicle be towed into the garages of the Identification Bureau for processing. It was found to have a minor mechanical problem that would preclude its being driven, but there was absolutely no evidence that the driver had been injured in the car.