Warped Jerry Brudos - or джерри брудос as he is known in Russia - loved women... from the ankle down.
The warped rapist had an insatiable sexual hunger for women's feet and shoes, and brutally murdered four women, keeping their hacked off body parts as horrifying trophies that he would caress and masturbate over. The sick serial killer developed a deep abhorrence for the fairer sex thanks partly to his cold hearted mum, who had never hidden the fact that she had wanted him to be a girl. She was overtly hostile towards him, and when he had his first wet dream, she shamed him, forced him to scrub his dirty sheets.
But it wasn’t just his old dear's questionable approach to parenting and puritanical views about sex that set Brudos off on a dark path to rape and murder. Aged just five, he found a woman’s stiletto while playing at a local junkyard. It sparked an obsession that quickly grew out of control. By the age of six, he was in trouble at school for stealing a teacher’s pair of high heels from her bag. Young and confused, he was given a stern telling-off, but it didn’t stop him from sneakily taking women’s underwear from neighbours’ washing lines - or more shoes.
Things escalated further, and it wasn't long before he was powered by an innate hatred for ALL women - not just his negligent mum. At the age of 17, Brudos was placed under psychiatric care after he stalked a local girl and forced her to strip naked at knife point so he could take photos of her. He was treated for “adjustment reaction of adolescence with sexual deviation and fetishism”.
Nine months later, he was deemed cured and no longer a threat. He graduated high school and joined the army. However, his military career didn’t last long, and he was discharged because of bizarre behaviour.
He met wife Darcie and they had two kids - but what might have seemed like a happy normal family was a front for some very sinister goings on at home. Jerry would make Darcie clean the house wearing just a pair of high heels. He also rigged the basement so that she was unable to enter without him being alerted. He was cagey about her going in the lower room for good reason - it was full of shoes, women’s lingerie and photos he had taken of half naked women.
But his secret stash wasn’t enough to fuel his fantasies, so when a pretty young woman selling encyclopaedias knocked on the door in January 1968, he pounced. Despite his mum and wife being in the house, he bludgeoned Linda Slawson and strangled her to death. Before he dumped her body, he wore her clothes and cut off her left foot with a hacksaw. He kept it in a freezer and would put the severed body part in shoes to masturbate over. He also wore women's shoes as he pleasured himself - again all under the nose of his wife, mother and kids.
On November 26 of that year, he offered to help Jan Whitney when her car broke down.
He strangled her then had sex with her dead body, taking her remains home to his basement for a grisly photshoot. Before he dumped her body, he sliced off one of her breasts as a sick memento.
Karen Sprinkler, 23, was snatched from a car park and taken back to Brudos' house where he assaulted her and strangled her to death. He chopped off both of her breasts before she was dumped.
His final victim was killed in April 1969. Linda Salee, 22, was kidnapped and taken back to his basement where he raped and strangled her before having sex with her corpse. Like all his victims, her body was tied to car parts and dumped in Long Tom River.
Brudos was caught after police set up a sting, pretending to be a college girl wanting a second date. She had told police that when they first met he said he wanted to take her to the river and strangle her, matching the modus operandi of the killer.
In June 1969 Brudos pleaded guilty to three first-degree murders (Sprinker, Whitney and Salee) and was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment in Oregon State Penitentiary. By now nicknamed the 'Shoe Fetish Slayer, he also confessed to Slawson’s murder but because he had not taken any photos of her body, and police could only find her foot, there was not enough evidence to charge him.
Chillingly, during his time in prison, Brudos amassed a huge collection of women’s shoe catalogues, allowing his sick fantasies and frenzied masturbation marathons to continue all until his death from liver cancer on March 28 2006.
