Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me
When I say thou dost disgust me.
O, I hate thee with a hate
That would fain annihilate.

—Henry David Thoreau, “Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell”

Psychopathic persons whose crimes are categorized at level 18 of the Gradations of Evil scale are motivated by the desire to kill—put plainly and simply—and, sometimes, in unfathomable numbers. While some torture is perpetrated by these types, it is of secondary importance to the assailant and is never protracted in nature. When rape is present, it is generally not the individual's primary motive and is perpetrated in a manner intended as part of a wider process of murder, which, in and of itself, may provide a psychosexual thrill. We should reemphasize that the murder, torture, and sexual assault described here must involve at least two human victims. Again, torture and/or sexual assault isolated to animals would be considered vicious acts of the type associated with Category 16. Moreover, Category 16 is the highest ranking possible for cases involving a single homicide.

The hatred of humankind exhibited by individuals in this category is so deep-seated and generalized that essentially anybody might fall prey to their savage rage. However, as we shall see in the following vignette, these killers do tend to demonstrate a widespread fury toward a certain type of person—young women, in this instance. In virtually all of the cases we have examined, the killers appeared to be repeatedly playing out powerful fantasies in which they symbolically dominated and destroyed some abusive or rejecting individual in their lives, in a pattern that likely would have gone on indefinitely were it not for incarceration or death. In individuals assigned to this category, this often promptly picks up upon release or escape from prison, should either one transpire. The goal appears to be to bring to life a certain frequently imagined scenario in the most perfect way possible. This often requires that victims be of a certain sex or racial group, or the presence of some distinct feature, such as hair worn in a certain fashion or a particular article of clothing. Thus, the identification of potential victims sometimes requires extensive hunting and prowling. If a psychologically required feature is present to a “perfect” enough degree, the killer may seek to savor it by retaining a corpse, body part, pre- or postmortem photographs, or some piece of the victim's clothing for paraphilic purposes.

The brutality such individuals inflict—sometimes escalating as the killer's need for stimulation grows over time—is often unspeakably overblown and gruesome, such that one might draw consolation from the fact that their victims are typically eliminated in expeditious ways. Category 18 types are often so enraged and so driven by desires to control and humiliate others that, as with some Category 17 offenders, posthumous mutilation and necrophilic acts might be observed.

We turn now to the case of Jerry Brudos, an insatiable killer who engaged in some degree of torture. He is particularly illustrative of the typical motivations and personality features of individuals associated with this category. Born to a farming couple in South Dakota in 1939, Brudos was the younger of two sons. His father was short-tempered but never abusive. His mother, who had been hoping for a girl, was bitterly disappointed and reportedly spent years belittling and maltreating him, sometimes humiliating him by dressing him in female clothing. He would loathe her across his lifetime. His family relocated to various cities in the Pacific Northwest throughout his early childhood, eventually settling in Salem, Oregon. At age five, he discovered a pair of open-toed high-heeled shoes in a junkyard while wandering around town. When he wore them home, his mother heavily scolded him and set the heels on fire. He would cite this powerful memory—in which women's shoes became forbidden objects—as the origin of his lifelong podophilia, or foot fetish, which he would eventually take to a bizarre and macabre new level.¹

That same year, the Brudos family moved once again, this time to Riverton, California, where the future killer entered grammar school. When he attempted to steal a pair of high heels from his first-grade teacher, she confused him by expressing curiosity about what prompted him to do so, rather than chastising him, as his mother had done. This constituted a mixed message for him.2 The following year, he failed the second grade. Between the ages of seven and eight, Brudos suffered a series of health issues, including measles, sore throats, swollen glands, laryngitis, and fungal infections of his finger and toenails, requiring several operations. He also experienced vision problems and frequent headaches, which were never explained. Around this time, his family returned to Oregon, where he repeatedly sneaked into the home of a female neighbor to play with her clothes and undergarments.³

In adolescence, Brudos began digging a tunnel in a hillside near his family's home, entertaining vivid fantasies of capturing and imprisoning a girl there. During this period, he was not interested in sexually assaulting a female, so much as completely possessing her. For the purposes of masturbation, he was routinely burglarizing local homes to gather up footwear and stealing women's undergarments from clotheslines. At sixteen, after acquiring the underwear of an eighteen-year-old woman, Brudos hatched a scheme to obtain an image of her in the nude. He invited her to his home, claiming he wished to help her to locate her purloined property. Then he disguised himself as a masked intruder, wielded a knife, and forced her to remove her clothes, after which he photographed her. After she fled the house following the incident, Brudos found her and claimed the “attacker” was locked up in his barn.⁴ The following year, he abducted a seventeen-year-old female and drove her to a deserted farmhouse, where he severely beat and disrobed her, snapping more photographs for what was now a rapidly growing collection.⁵

Brudos was committed to Oregon State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation and treatment, where he was initially diagnosed with an “adjustment reaction to adolescence with sexual deviation-fetishism.” It emerged that his sexual fantasies might be psychologically related to unresolved rage toward his abusive mother, which gave way to a generalized hatred of women.⁶ At the time of discharge nearly nine months later, he was deemed to be a “borderline schizophrenic” who posed no further danger to society at large.7 After high school, he enrolled in two separate technology schools,⁸ but his attendance was erratic and he ultimately dropped out to join the US Army at twenty. During his service, he began dreaming about a Korean woman who would creep into his bed at night and seduce him. He was discharged from military service due to “bizarre obsessions” and returned to his family's home, where he lived in their toolshed. At this time, he began preying on local women, knocking them down or strangling them into unconsciousness before running off with their shoes.⁹

At twenty-one, Brudos, who had been working as an electrician, obtained a license from the Federal Communications Commission and took up a job at a local radio station. There, he met seventeen-year-old Darcie Metzler, whom he married after a brief courtship. They went on to have a daughter. He routinely requested that his wife do housework wearing nothing but a pair of high heels while he photographed her.¹⁰ In 1967, his wife gave birth a second time to a son. He was not permitted, for unclear reasons, to be present at the birth, and he went into a psychological tailspin, escalating his thefts of shoes and underwear, which he claimed alleviated chronic migraines and blackouts. He was also electrocuted, almost lethally, after touching a live wire at work. That year, he stalked a woman and followed her home, where he waited for her to fall asleep before raiding her closet. When she unexpectedly awoke, he choked her until she passed out and committed his first rape before racing home with her shoes.¹¹

In January of 1968, Brudos received a visit from an attractive nineteen-year-old door-to-door encyclopedia saleswoman named Linda Slawson. Convincing her to follow him into his lower garage, he bludgeoned her with a two-by-four and strangled her to death. After sending his wife and kids out for fast food, he stripped the corpse and dressed it up in various undergarments from his personal hoard, taking photographs to his heart's content. Then, using a hacksaw, he severed the woman's left foot, which he retained in his freezer, taking it out from time to time to slip into various high-heeled shoes while masturbating. Brudos faked a flat tire to pull his car over at the side of a bridge traversing the Willamette River, where he dumped the partially mutilated body over the edge. It was never recovered.¹²

Brudos went on to commit four more murders. After the family moved to Salem, Oregon, he constructed a darkroom in the garage for privately developing photographs, which would also provide him an area to work with victims. He arranged with his wife that she would never enter the space without announcing her arrival on an intercom system.13 At first, the new workroom went mostly unused, since it was difficult to lure the victims he identified during periods of prowling back to his home. In July of 1968, Brudos strangled sixteen-year-old Stephanie Vikko to death, leaving her corpse in a wooded area.¹⁴ Four months later, he used a strap to strangle twenty-three-year-old Jan Whitney, whom he discovered in a broken-down car along an interstate. He raped her during the murder and repeatedly after death, retaining the body on a hook in his garage for five days before dumping her into the same river where he had disposed of the remains of Slawson.¹⁵

Brudos then turned to abduction. Stalking a parking garage, he seized nineteen-year-old Karen Sprinker, using a toy pistol, and dragged her to his workshop, where he stripped her and posed her in a variety of outfits while photographing her, like a living mannequin. He then placed a noose, which was attached to the ceiling, around her neck, lifting her slightly above the floor so that she could stand on her toes while he took snapshots. He hoisted her farther up, and, as she slowly asphyxiated to death, he prepared a meal and watched a cartoon. He sexually assaulted the corpse and amputated her breasts, coating them with preservative to use as paperweights. Brudos then dressed the body with a bra, which he stuffed with paper to replace the mammaries he had removed, and hurled the corpse into another river, tied to an engine block to weight it down.¹⁶

In April of 1969, Brudos attempted to abduct a young woman in a Portland State University parking garage, who attempted to fend him off by biting his thumb.¹⁷ He beat her into unconsciousness but was frightened off by a passing car. Then, brandishing a pistol, he tried to kidnap a twelve-year-old on her way to school, but when a neighbor caught sight of him, he leaped into his car and sped away.¹⁸ Since his method of capture was proving risky, he considered ensnaring a woman by posing as a police officer and flashing a phony badge. At a shopping mall, he spied twenty-two-year-old Linda Salee carrying birthday presents for her boyfriend and, claiming he was a security guard investigating a spate of shoplifting, convinced her to get into his car. He then brought her to his workshop, where he stripped, hanged, strangulated, and photographed her in the manner of Sprinker. After she expired, he put nails in her rib cage and hooked them up to an electrical current to see if the body would twitch or jump. He would later explain that he did not sever her breasts before dumping her weighted body in a river purely because he did not care for the appearance of the nipples.19

In May of 1969, a fisherman discovered Salee's body, and divers subsequently discovered the corpse of Sprinker. In the meantime, a tip from an Oregon State student, who had gone on a blind date with Brudos and felt disturbed by his endless talk of the missing women, led authorities to the killer. During a visit by police to his home, he inexplicably gave them a piece of the rope he had used to asphyxiate one of his last two victims, perhaps having grown disorganized or arrogant with regard to attempting to conceal his crimes. While one might wonder whether he had begun to feel regretful or weary of killing, it should be emphasized that Brudos displayed no remorse whatsoever and made concerted efforts to avoid arrest. Whatever the case may be, the rope yielded forensic evidence that linked him to the murders of which he was suspected.²⁰

In a last-minute attempt to cover up his crimes, Brudos washed down the inside of his vehicle, claiming water had gotten into the vehicle at a car wash. He was arrested while trying to flee to Canada, hiding under a blanket and wearing silk panties.²¹ After an insanity defense was rebutted by seven separate psychiatric evaluations, he ultimately pled guilty and received three life sentences. His wife, who was charged as a possible accomplice but cleared, divorced him in 1970, leaving Oregon with the children and changing her name.²² Over the years, the so-called “Lust Killer” sometimes laughed while reminiscing about the thrill of murdering and mutilating his victims, and gathered ladies’ shoe and clothing catalogs in prison, feeding his psychosexual needs right to the end of his life. He referred to the women he killed as “candy wrappers” that he discarded because they no longer held any use for him. During an interview not long before his death from liver cancer in 2006, he callously remarked, “I'm assuming that I never hurt anybody, because I never got any complaints from anybody.”²³