Jerry Brudos

Brudos died in prison on March 28, 2006, from liver cancer. At the time of his death, he was the longest incarcerated inmate in the Oregon Department of Corrections (a total of 37 years, from 1969 to 2006).

While incarcerated, Brudos had piles of women's shoe catalogues in his cell. He wrote to major companies requesting them, and claimed they were his substitute for pornography. He lodged countless appeals, including one in which he alleged that a photograph taken of him with one of his victim's corpses could not prove his guilt, because it was not the body of a person he was convicted of killing. In 1995, the parole board told Brudos that he would never be released.

Brudos would dress up in high heels and masturbate after committing a murder. In May 1969, a fisherman found the bodies of Salee and Sprinker in the Long Tom River. The police asked students at a nearby university campus about suspicious men and one led them to Brudos, who had phoned her several times to ask her for a date. Brudos gave police a false address, which increased their suspicions. At his garage, the police found copper wire that was determined to have been cut with the same tool that cut the cords used to tie the bodies. Brudos was arrested, and he made a full confession.

On June 28, 1969, Brudos pled guilty to three first-degree murders (Sprinker, Whitney and Salee) and was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment in Oregon State Penitentiary. Though he confessed to Slawson's murder, Brudos was neither tried nor convicted for it because he did not make and keep photographs of the body, unlike in the other cases, but only of her foot. Whitney's body was found a month after Brudos' conviction, about a mile downstream from where he said he had thrown it.

Between 1968 and 1969, Brudos bludgeoned and strangled four young women and attempted to attack two others:

In 1961, Brudos married a 17-year-old girl with whom he would father two children, and settled in a Salem suburb. He asked his new bride to do housework naked except for a pair of high heels while he took pictures. It was at about this time that he began complaining of migraine headaches and "blackouts," relieving his symptoms with night-prowling raids to steal shoes and lace undergarments. Brudos would experience a transvestite period, where he used the female persona as a form of escape mechanism. Brudos kept the shoes, underwear, and (for a time) the bodies of his victims in a garage that he would not allow his wife to enter without first announcing her arrival on an intercom that he had set up.

In his teenaged years, Brudos began to stalk local women, knocking them down or choking them unconscious, and fleeing with their shoes. At age 17, he abducted and beat a young woman, threatening to stab her if she did not follow his sexual demands. Shortly after being arrested, he was taken to a psychiatric ward of Oregon State Hospital for nine months. There it was found Brudos' sexual fantasies revolved around his hatred towards his mother and women in general. He underwent a psychiatric evaluation and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Despite being institutionalized, Brudos graduated from high school with his class in 1957. Shortly after graduation, he became an electronics technician.

Jerome Henry "Jerry" Brudos (January 31, 1939 – March 28, 2006) was an American serial killer and necrophile who murdered at least four women in Oregon between 1968 and 1969.