Jim Stovall considered the information he had elicited from Jerry Brudos thus far. He had two confessions-—verbal confessions—on homicides whose victims might never be found. Jerry Brudos certainly had knowledge that no one else could have known; he had mentioned details that had been withheld from the news media. He knew the dates, the places, and the manner of death. Or did he? Without the bodies, no one could say what the manner of death had been. One thing was certain: Brudos' confessed acts against nature had grown increasingly violent. First the theft of undergarments and shoes, then the choking of women, then rape, and then murder.
The homicide of Linda Slawson had, according to Brudos, not involved rape—only the dressing and redressing of the body. Jan Whitney's body had been violated again and again after death. It was as if the obsessive perversions that drove Brudos grew like a cancer within him, demanding always new horrors to satisfy and titillate that malignancy.
With every sensational murder case, there are a half-dozen or more men who confess to the crimes. They want attention, a sense of importance at being, however briefly, in the limelight—or they gain some erotic stimulation from lying about the details of crimes they never committed.
At this point in the interrogation, Stovall had to look at the two confessions with suspicion. Ninety percent of him thought he had the right man, and he was positive he had the man who had threatened Liane Brumley and tried to abduct her. But Stovall had to be careful in correlating what the suspect had said about Whitney and Slawson. It was possible that Brudos was only a weirdo, a student of newspaper accounts of sexual crimes, who had concocted his own fantasy stories.
Each bit of information gleaned in the interview was thoroughly checked, even as Brudos' statements continued. Each time Stovall stepped from the room, he handed notes to Frazier and other members of the team for follow-up.
Brudos had said that Jan Whitney's car had been broken down on the I-5 on the evening of November 26. Frazier called the Albany station of the state police and asked them to check back through their logs during late November 1968 for a possible corroboration of that information.
"Yes," the answer came back. "One of our troopers noted a red-and-white Nash Rambler parked on the east shoulder of I-5 at seven minutes after ten P.M. on November 26-—at milepost seventy, two miles south of Albany. No driver or passengers in the area. It was noted, and the trooper on the next shift would have tagged it for towing if it had still been there. But it was gone by the next shift."
That information fit exactly with what Brudos had said. That spot at milepost seventy was just about ten miles from the spot in the Santiam parking lot where the car was eventually located. Someone had moved it in the wee hours of the morning. …
Frazier did a tedious hand check through all the Salem Police department's accident reports for the Thanksgiving weekend of 1968. He found the report of a car that had skidded off Center Street into a garage at 3123 Center. Minor damage reported. Occupants not at home.
Frazier located the traffic investigator who had left his card at the little gray house and who had subsequently interviewed Jerry Brudos. Yes, there had been a hole in the workshop portion of the garage, a gap in the splintered siding. It had seemed a routine investigation, with nothing to make him suspicious. He had seen only a family home, a few children's toys cluttering the back porch. Nothing at all to indicate there was a virtual abattoir within the garage, a torture chamber. Brudos had seemed anxious to get the place fixed so the rain wouldn't get in. The officer had been in the garage and workshop to check the damage from the inside, and it had looked just like anybody's garage. No body. Nothing strange in there at all.
But of course by then Brudos had, according to his statement, hidden Jan Whitney's mutilated body in the pumphouse.
The facts were beginning to mesh perfectly with the suspect's almost unbelievable confessions.
There was something else that Brudos could not have known without having been there. The long-line black bra found on Karen Sprinker's body. The mention of that bra had been Brudos' first slip, the initial fissure in the wall the suspect had built up.
If Brudos had killed Karen Sprinker, she would have been his third victim, according to his own recital of facts. Each case had been a little worse than the one before. Jan Whitney had allegedly had one breast amputated; Stovall knew that Karen Sprinker's body had been missing both breasts.
The detective truly dreaded hearing the next confession, but he would have to listen. The dialogue was an established thing now, and the original duo of players would continue. There could be no substitution of interrogators.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"It was in March … " Stovall said. "When Karen Sprinker disappeared … "
"The twenty-seventh."
"Yes. A weekday. It always seemed to be on a weekday."
"I spent weekends with my family," Brudos said.
"Had you ever seen Karen Sprinker before?"
"No. It wasn't that girl who attracted me. She just happened to be there."
"Where would that be?"
"Meier and Frank, of course. Everybody knows that—it was in all the papers. I have clippings at home that say that."
"That's true. You weren't working that day?"
"I had a sick day. I had a bad headache in the morning, and I didn't go to work."
"You didn't stay at home, though."
"No. I was just driving around. I drove by Meier and Frank, and I saw this girl."
"Was it Karen?"
"I told you it wasn't." Brudos was cocky now. He seemed proud of the fact that he had managed his crime in broad daylight in the midst of a crowd of shoppers.
"I was just driving around, as I said, and I saw a girl near Meier and Frank. She was wearing a miniskirt and high heels. It was about ten in the morning. I watched her and she went into the store. The way she looked, her clothing and her shoes, turned me on. I had to have her.
"I drove into the parking garage and I parked on the third floor. I looked for the girl in the miniskirt inside the store. I must have spent an hour or more looking for her—but she was gone. Maybe she went out another door or something. Anyway, I couldn't find her and I went back to my car. I mean, I was walking back toward my car when I saw the other girl. "
"Karen Sprinker?"
"I guess so. I didn't know her name. She had on a green sweater and a matching skirt. I didn't like her shoes, but she was a pretty girl with long dark hair. I watched her while she locked her car and then came down the steps toward the door into the store."
The description sounded so familiar to Stovall. Of course. This was the way the investigating team had pictured Karen's abduction. Standing there in the empty parking garage, they had visualized the way it must have been—ghost images left behind, almost palpable in their intensity.
"She reached to open the door, and I grabbed her by the shoulder. She turned around, startled-like, and saw the pistol I was pointing at her. I said, 'Don't scream and I won't hurt you. Come with me and I won't hurt you.' "
"Did she scream?"
"Of course not. She said she would do whatever I wanted if I just didn't shoot her. She kept saying that—several times—as if she was trying to convince me. I walked her to my car and put her inside. Nobody was in the parking garage."
Brudos continued in his monologue, intent now on recreating what had occurred two months before. "I drove to my house and into the garage."
"Was your wife home?"
"No. She was over at her girlfriend's house. She was always over there visiting. The girl—Karen—was still telling me that she would do anything to keep me from shooting her. I asked her if she had ever had a man before, and she said 'No.' She said she was in her period. That was true; she was wearing a Tampax."
Stovall knew this was correct information, and a detail withheld from anyone but the investigating team.
"I raped her—there on the floor of my workshop."
"Did she resist you?"
"No,
she was afraid of the gun. Afterward she said she had to use the bathroom, so I took her into the house and allowed her to do that."
"That would have been out the side door of the garage and through the breezeway there to the back door?"
"Yes. She didn't try to run away or anything. I still had the gun. Then I took her back out to the workshop. I wanted some pictures of her. I took some in her clothes, and some in her underwear, and some in underwear I had out there. I had her wear the black patent-leather high heels that I have, because hers were very plain and low. I took a lot of pictures."
Stovall thought of the brilliant, gentle girl, trying to reason with a maniac, believing that she could keep him calm by going along with his orders. She would have been so frightened, and yet hoping desperately that he would set her free when he had finished with her. If she had fought him, what would have happened? Maybe she would have had a chance while she was in the parking garage, or even when she walked from the garage to the house-only twenty feet or so from a busy street. Maybe not. And yet Stovall doubted that Brudos would have had the guts to shoot her where there was a possibility that someone would hear.
So many female victims made the mistake of thinking that reason can temper madness. The odds are always better if a woman screams and kicks and draws attention in a public place. If a rapist or kidnapper shows enough violence to approach a woman and attempt to take her away by force, there is every possibility that he will show no mercy at all when he gets his victim alone in an isolated spot. Captivity and torture are the thrust of his aberration. Pity and compassion have no place in the makeup of a sexual criminal.
Too late for Karen.
"I tied her hands in back of her and told her I had to do that to keep her from going away. She said that wasn't necessary, but I couldn't trust her. Then I put a rope around her neck. I had it attached to a 'come-along.'
"I swung the rope up on the hoist, and tightened it around her neck. I asked her if it was too tight, and she said it was."
Jerry Brudos, who had never had control over women, had been in absolute control of Karen Sprinker's life.
And he chose to end it.
"I gave the 'come-along' about three more pulls and it lifted her off the ground. She kicked a little and she died."
Stovall's hand tightened around his pen, but he betrayed no other feelings. It was far too late to help Karen; there was nothing to do now but see that this man was off the streets forever—that he would no longer have a chance to act out his sick fantasies.
Brudos described how he had violated the girl's body after death, after taking time out to go into the house to be with his family.
"I went back out later and had sex with her. Then I cut off both of her breasts to make plastic molds. I couldn't get the percentage of hardener right this time either, but they turned out a little better than with the girl from the freeway."
"Jan Whitney."
"Yes. Her. I dressed the girl from Meier and Frank—Karen—in her own cotton panties and the green sweater and skirt. But I used the wide bra instead of her own. I stuffed it with paper towels so it looked all right and so she wouldn't bleed on my car."
"Where did you get that bra?"
"From a clothesline in Portland a couple of years ago. No, wait. Maybe it was one that belonged to my wife. I have a lot of them, so I can't be sure."
"Did you keep Karen's body for several days—the way you kept Jan Whitney's?"
Brudos shook his head. "No. I waited until my wife and the kids had gone to bed, and I took off about two A.M. for the Long Tom River. I weighted the body down with a cylinder head I had for a car. I tossed her into the river on the upstream side."
"Where did you get the cylinder head?"
"I had the stuff around; I fix cars a lot."
"Where are the pictures you took of Karen?"
Brudos smiled, secure that he could count on Darcie's absolute obedience to his wishes.
"Gone. They've all been destroyed."
The two men had been cloistered in the little interview room for a long time. Neither smoked, but the air was heavy—perhaps from the weight of the words that had been spoken. Outside, it was spring and the huge magnolia trees on the courthouse lawn opened their waxy white blooms. Parks around Salem were filled with picnickers, some of them on the banks of the Willamette River. Inside the jail complex, there was no season at all, and certainly no sense of holiday.
There was a break in the interrogation; what had been said was too horrific to continue on endlessly. There would be more; Jerry Brudos seemed consumed with the need to pour it all out. He showed no regret at all about what he had done; he whined instead about his cell and the food, and asked for his wife. He talked to Dale Drake, his attorney. What was said in that conversation was privileged communication, but Drake was pale and his jaw was set when he emerged from the conference.
"Did you get anything?" Stovall's fellow investigators asked the detective, and he nodded grimly. He moved to a worktable where he could transcribe what he had heard onto the yellow legal pad, pages and pages of unbelievable cruelty. So many victims who had never had a chance. He indexed, and he correlated, and he saw that all the pieces had fallen into place. All but Linda Salee's murder.
And that would be covered in the next interview.
Brudos ate. Stovall could not. An hour or two later, they began again. Slowly. Easing back into the intimate revelations.
"We're into April now, Jerry," Stovall commented. "Can you recall your activities in April?"
"I remember everything. I have an excellent memory. "
"Linda Salee disappeared on April 23, a Wednesday. Would that be the first … activity that month?"
"No. You know about the girl on the rail tracks. That was Tuesday. Before that—on Monday—I went to Portland, and I went out to Portland State University … "
Were there more? Were there other girls who had not yet been found? It was possible. Considering all the rivers coursing through the state of Oregon, there could be other bodies drifting there, unknown to the investigators. Stovall waited.
"I went up there to find a girl. I saw one in the parking complex at Portland State. She was older, maybe twenty-two to twenty-four years old. I had the pistol—it wasn't real; it was a toy, but it looked real. She fought me. She grabbed for the gun and she tried to twist it out of my hand. She was screaming and she caught my finger in the trigger guard and damn near broke it. She was attracting attention, and I knew I had to get away from there. I managed to get loose of her, and I walked up to the next floor of the parking garage, where my car was—I didn't run because that would have made people suspicious. I got in and drove away."
He was a coward, obviously. Fight him in public, and he ran like a rabbit. Stovall wondered if the girl from Portland had any idea of what she had escaped.
"You drove on home, then?"
"Yeah. The next day, I was driving around in Salem and I saw this young girl on the Southern Pacific tracks. I showed her the plastic pistol and told her that she was to come with me. I had her by the shoulder and I pulled her between two houses. She said she could walk by herself. I had her almost into the car—I had my friend's car that day—when she balked. She took off running. There was some woman working in her yard, and the girl ran to her, and I got in the car and took off."
"Two days in a row, you struck out. That might have made you a little angry-a little disappointed."
"A little."
"You might have been afraid that you had been seen, that you could be identified by someone."
"No. I got away easily both times. I didn't worry."
"You plan well. You probably worked out another plan that would work."
"Yes. I always had another plan, a backup plan. I went back to Portland the next day."
"That would be the twenty-third, then?"
"That's right. I had a badge, looked just like a real police badge—you can buy them, you know. I bought it right there in Lloyd Center; it was a t
oy, but you'd have to look real close to be sure. I started looking for a girl."
"You found a girl?"
Brudos nodded. "I saw this girl in the parking garage. She was walking toward her car and she had her arms full of packages. I went up to her and showed her the badge and told her I was taking her into custody for shoplifting. I said I was a special police officer assigned to Lloyd Center and would have to take her downtown with me. She believed me, but she said she hadn't stolen anything—that she had the sales slips to prove it. But she came with me quietly. She didn't fight me at all. She just got in my car."
"Did she ask questions when you went by downtown Portland and got on the freeway for Salem?"
"No. It was funny; it was like she wanted to go with me. She didn't say anything at all. She just rode along nicely."
"You drove with her all the way to Salem? That would have meant she was in the car with you for an hour."
"That's right. I got to my house and I drove into the garage and closed the doors. I told the girl to follow me, and I started for the house. I didn't know my wife was home. She walked out on the back porch just as I left the garage. I held my hand back and warned the girl not to come out, and she stopped. My wife didn't see her. I told Darcie to go back into the house and stay there because I had something important to do in the shop.
"My wife said that dinner was almost ready, and I told her I'd be in in a minute. Then I tied the girl up with a rope and I went into the house for dinner. The girl was out there waiting in the garage. My wife said she was going to the health spa that night and that a baby-sitter was coming. That was okay, because she wouldn't bother me out in my workshop."
"You're telling me that Linda Salee was out there in the garage alone while you went in and ate dinner?"
"Yes. But she was tied up. Funny thing, though. When I went back out there to check on her after I ate, she'd gotten loose of the rope. She hadn't tried to leave the shop, and she hadn't even used the phone out there. She was just waiting for me, I guess."
It was odd, Stovall thought. But there might have been a close time element; the woman might have struggled free just as Brudos walked in the door. More likely, she had been terrorized into immobility. Just as a mouse tormented by a cat will simply give up, unable to run any longer, paralyzed by fright and indecision.