Serial Killers

The quiet Pacific Northwest in the 1960’s was home to one of the most murderous serial killers in American history. One ordinary boy, a generation earlier, who preferred to play with women’s shoes had become a native. Jerome Henry Brudos, known as the Lust Killer or the Shoe Fetish Murderer, who laid waste to a series of young lives as young women from the Portland, Oregon area, may be one of the most distastefully macabre of a notably violent and insane group of American serial killer criminals.

In 1969, local women in Portland and surrounding areas started to disappear never to return. Strangled corpses started to surface although in circumstances that meant their location was meant to be a secret. A young boy whose mother has emotionally abused him and psychologically rejected him had formed the beginnings of a vicious killer in the making. Assault grew to rape, coercion grew to abduction, cruising escalated to impersonation of a police officer. The fixated footwear fetish of Brudos had trodden into forbidden fields.

Serial killers like Jerome Brudos are truly a menace to society, both for their sophisticated attempts to mask their killing thirst and their flagrant exhibitionism of their aberrant tendencies. Jerry Brudos made no secret of the fact he had a visible gender dysfunction, which only subsided during male stereotypical experiences like (heterosexual) marriage and fatherhood. But as evidenced by earlier sexual experiences, Jerry Brudos seemed to become enabled and sexually aroused by the wearing of young women’s shoes and underwear, possibly in a trans-formative state toward a gender his mother might have found more pleasing.

Linda Slawson, 19, was a door to door encyclopedia saleswoman in January of 1968, whose chopped-off foot became a “model” for the Brudos shoe collection. Jan Whitney’s car broke down in November of 1968, and after killing the 23-year-old by strangulation Jerry Brudos violated her corpse sexually and repeated this process during the next few days in his private home workshop. Karen Sprinkler, 19, became a fatal model for Brudos in March of 1969 after being picked up in a department store parking garage. Linda Salee, 22, was coerced by Brudos from a local shopping mall.

If there is one signal mark of serial killer, it is a submerged identity trying to get out. The lack of self, the blurred border between another personality (such as a mother) and the isolation from general society and the self-identification as a “reject” or weirdo can designate many types of people into a subcategory vulnerable to criminal behavior. Jerry Brudos was a man who kept his wife under “lock and key”, had two children, made her perform household chores nude in high heels, yet viciously exercised the power of life or death over his many victims. The killings were adorned with objects like women’s underwear and shoes. In these episodes, the girl his mother had always wanted began to emerge.

The likelihood of an individual to follow the rules when they see themselves as separate and apart from society is a common thread among serial killers. Anther common denominator among serial killers is the choice by parents to ignore strong signals that important erosions in a child’s development are occurring. In the case of Jeremy Brudos, multiple alarms should have been ringing long before Brudos’ adolescence. Known as the “Lust Killer” or the “Shoe Killer”, Brudos fulfilled every dread the storied slayings of a serial killer could ever create. His psychopathy was so bizarre he would hang victims to die while watching cartoons and crank up a strangling women while idling in predatory dispassion.

Jerry Brudos was identified early as a son who had a predilection for his mother’s and then other women’s accessories shoes and clothing. Feminine behavior, playing with women’s clothing and dressing women’s shoes strongly aligns the self of a male potential killer with another life, another destiny. The committal of the serial murders is a product of the rage, anger, humiliation and suffering the individual experiences when distanced from this idea of themselves. Jerry Brudos and his killings stamped the Willamette Valley with fear, trepidation, and sadistic violence.

Maternal tirades channeled Brudos’ mixed sexual aggression and sadistic tendencies into violence. Society demands that the killer conform to outward ideals and archetypes. Like John Wayne Gacy and the Green River Killer, societal participation bred a cycle of internal pressure that was bound to break sooner or later. The disturbed tendencies of an adolescent Brudos were dismissed as psychological, not psychiatric. Underground prisons with sexual victims on tap were a theme in his fantasies. These ideas would grow to mirror reality in his workshop and garage prison of murder.

As early as age five, Brudos was instituting the wearing of women’s shoes and women’s underwear. By seventeen, his sexual tendencies veered toward the abnormal, triggered by altitudes of secrecy, fear, and aberration. Born in South Dakota in 1939, Jerry Brudos was the youngest child whose mother would have preferred a daughter. The oldest of four brothers, Larry, was the favorite. Growing into an ordinary boy, with a doughy, pale countenance, Jerry Brudos nevertheless was to electrify the Portland area with ugly murders and astonishingly sadistic sexual violence.

The following arrest of his threatening and assaulting a young girl delivered Brudos into the care of the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital. Brudos’ nine month incarceration identified in-depth fantasies containing range and anger against his mother. Brudos was known to take women’s shoes and flee from them. The assignment of Brudos’ sexual fantasies and obsession with feminine objects was categorized into schizophrenia, yet Jerry Brudos graduated with his high school class in 1957 and went on to become an electronics technician.

His attitude toward his behavior was compulsive and psychologically satisfying but the triggers grew more serious. After high school, his behaviors continued. Joining the armed services, his dreams were of a Korean girl entering his bed and untold other secrets. His attitudes and thoughts had him cashiered out of Fort Ord. His mother Eileen ordered him to live in the shed in the back of the family house. The third-class mode of living was to have long term consequences form those who ended up his Jerry’s crosshairs. A date with a girl named Ralphene ended up pregnant and a wedding occurred.

But life was hardly linear and focused with young Jerry Brudos. He would prowl the neighborhood looking for underwear and shoes to steal, this behavior progressed to murder with follow-up segues of masturbation and more shoe wearing. For these reasons Jerry Brudos was also called the Shoe Fetish Slayer. Brudos was so inwardly focused on his sexual fantasies his marriage and children were merely secondary afterthoughts to his main program of lust killing and shoe fetish enjoyment. Stalking a woman to her apartment, her discovery of him ended up in her murder.

Serial killer experts theorize that Brudos felt more in control of women when possessing himself of their underwear and shoes, but also that he was able to participate in a feminine side of himself (as his mother had always wanted). The mutilation of the corpses exhibited both his hatred of his mother’s rejection and possibly an antipathy toward the women’s sexual characteristics he could never fully assume. Brudos took photographs and kept them as trophies of his gender based supremacy. This corresponds to the rejection of his mother towards his gender from childhood.

Brudos tried a plea of criminal insanity in court. Like many serial killers, Brudos considered himself smarter than the police. He even gave police a section of the rope he had used to hang and strangle his victims when Oregon State Police visited him for questioning. Brudo’s cruising for women locally had given police description of a “Vietnam Vet” and one woman who had narrowly avoided being killed also reported a matching description. Jerome Brudos preferred to believe himself falsely infallible to those of superior intellect and claimed an advanced IQ in later interviews.

This error was exploited at his trial as prosecutors massaged Jerry Brudos’ ego on the stand with “hypothetical” questions. His remorseless trophy taking of cut off breasts and photographs, underwear and shoes of his victims proved convenient for local police. Brudos began to confess. His sloppy attempt to evade capture were almost laughable. Brudos was arrested 250 miles from the Canadian border, as police followed with an arrest warrant. Brudos was found wearing women’s underwear, hiding under a blanket in the back seat of the car. His career of escalating torture and violence with sexual overtones and necrophilic assault of the victims dubbed him the “Lust Killer”.

Brudos was given three consecutive life sentences. Authorities probed the culpability of Jerry’s wife Ralphene who might have led police to her husband earlier in the series of killings. Psychologists have estimated that fear and denial caused Ralphene to block out the photographs of nude women she came across and the discovery of a “molded” breast, one of Brudos’ grisly murder trophies. Filing appeals while in prison, he collected women’s clothing and shoe catalogues while forming his own prison library. Convicted of three of the four murders he is believed to have perpetrated, Jerry Brudos died in prison of liver cancer in 2006.

Article by Roy Whyte . Visit his Google+ page for more.

Rodney Alcala is a convicted serial killer whose raping and tortured killings of four women has resulted in a death sentence. Rodney Alcala raped one woman with a claw hammer. Yet the spurious criminal justice system that rewards convicted killers with lifetime jail sentences has upset many members of the general, let alone the victims and their friends and families. Rodney Alcala was sentenced in 1980 for the killing of a Huntington Beach woman. Additional victims of Rodney Alcala have stretched legal court proceedings to the present day.

Caught raping an eight year old girl in 1968, Alcala served thirty four months. The nature of Alcala’s crimes are savagely violent, premeditatively abusive, and sexually motivated in origin. Alcala struck down men, women and children in his twisted lust for episodes of torture, rape and abduction. Channeling a rage or lust unknown except in the most vicious of serial killers, Alcala’s propensity for murder was matched by his cunning in enticing victims. Alcala’s “shtick” was the use of a camera and the pose as a photographer to capture the attention of victims and build enough trust to lead them astray.

The March 2010 sentencing of Rodney Alcala for the Orange County murders stems from killings from the 1970’s. Common to the cases of serial murderers in America of this era, development of legal DNA evidence brought Alcala’s career at large to a halt. Alcala is suspected in the strangulation death and disappearances of many other victims. Alcala’s habits make law enforcement professionals dread the existence of other undisclosed victims both as bargaining tools and further proof of his serial killing deeds. Even among the most brutal and vicious serial killers, Rodney Alcala stands apart.

Like many secretive killers with a method for concealing the bodies, Alcala may be waiting for bargaining room in the appeals phase of his trial proceedings to proffer knowledge and proof of additional deaths. Historically serial killers have negotiated proof of additional murders for tradeoffs in sentencing and incarceration conditions.Yet Alcala may have over thirty additional murders to reveal. As Alcala furnishes material an argument for his appeals to his current and most recent sentence, news media and the law enforcement community will be listening closely for hints of further proof of serial killings.

Alcala may be guilty of thirty or more murders. Lack of forensic sophistication in crime scenes, casual evidence gathering techniques by American law enforcement, aging witnesses and evidence, and the mores of the times allowed for many people to disappear into the web of Rodney James Alcala. Apprehended in the late 1970’s, Alcala is still defending himself in law courts in legal proceedings today.

This era in American history remains the ‘golden era” of serial killers. Rodney Alcala is thought by some investigators to be possibly among the most prolific of American serial killers because he was smart enough to shield his activities and elude the law. Alcala “warned” the jury in his recent trial that sentencing would cost the state and public a huge amount of money due to planned appeals and additional legal processes.

Alcala is one of many American serial killers whose reign of terror went largely unnoticed in the United States of the 1970’s. Development of DNA evidence coupled with exacting legal proceedings are a element in many American serial killer histories. In the typical celebrity phase of many serial killers, a penned letter attributed to Alcala has been put up recently for sale on Ebay. Profilers of serial killers note the similarity to other murderers like the Green River Killer and Ted Bundy.

Rodney Alcala once appeared on the American television show ‘The Dating Game’ and has manifested an eagerness to self-substantiate an identity as a notorious serial killer. Alcala’s favorable rulings to shield his prior sexual criminal history from new case trials and his “career” as a celebrity defendant has made segments of the American public sensitive to Alcala’s evasion of a jail sentence or death penalty.

The day after the jury voted for the death penalty for serial killer Rodney James Alcala, more than a hundred photographs of Alcala’s were released. The female women and children pictured in 1970’s era photo poses and shots were of individuals composed by Alcala. Law enforcement officials found these photos among materials more than 30 years ago in a storage locker of Alcala’s. Circumstances show Alcala rented it just as police were closing in on him for killings in 1977-1979. Continued legal setbacks to Alcala’s incarceration and execution have vexed victim’s families and opened new scrutiny into the American legal system.

Alcala is thought to be an intelligent man, crafty enough to legally represent himself yet not smart enough to dispose of the kind of trophy photographs sociopath killers are known to keep. Trophy jewelry from multiple suspected victims found among Alcala’s belongings helped convict him of the murders. Alcala was the first man in a dozen years to represent himself for a death penalty trial. Alcala was born in 1943, and is self-possessed enough at 66 to argue his own cases in front of juries. Yet despite a newly announced death penalty sentence, Alcala’s path to justice for his culpability for his serial killings is far from over.

Photos hidden by Alcala may point to more killings. Media release of photographs of a putative series of killing victims has launched an investigation by law enforcement into unknown or unidentified victims of Alcala not previously linked to him. It is now suggested that Alcala may have murdered three women in New York City in the 1970s. But legal proceedings for these crimes and allowing Alcala more time in the courtroom spotlight is a troublesome matter. Court trials and extradition would be excessive and complex, freeing a clever killer from everyday incarceration to entertain more jury members representing himself. And like the families of victims and the general public, prosecutors may elect to leave Alcala to his death sentence without further circus acts.

While convicted to date for only five murders, Alcala may be responsible for as many as 100 murders during his killing spree.

Article by Roy Whyte . Visit his Google+ page for more.

In 1979, Atlanta was re-emerging as the jewel of the South, a town rumbling with political and economic pulses that created opportunity, arts, and culture echoed only faintly elsewhere. Unfortunately, poverty and African-American race relations would pave the way for a killer to murder many young people whose futures were eradicated overnight.

The deaths of a series of innocent young African American people conducting casual errands produced bodies found in the river and roadway. Children started vanishing while about everyday activities. These were all young people or children or very young juvenile adults. Fresh young black faces smiled in police files from photographs gone forever dim. Twenty seven to twenty nine missing persons were attributed to the Atlanta Child Murderer.

The late 1970’s was “heavy” time for a racial killer to strike Atlanta. A rash of ugly race relations, accusations, Atlanta’s political upheaval, and backlash against police and law enforcement occurred all at once. Police were unable to find a white perpetrator, and African Americans were insulted when profilers targeted a black killer. Concern, anger, grief, fear and rage in 1979-1981 shook Atlanta to its core. The killings progressed day by day and stretched racial tensions to the breaking point.

Police behaviour during this period has been strongly questioned. Constant challenges that police did not pursue the killer because the targets were African-American were substantiated by the media and the political totems of the time. The notoriety of the Atlanta Child Killings was rife throughout the nation. Mohammed Ali and Gladys Knight came to Atlanta to donate money to the families of the victims, money that would itself become mishandled and lost.

The culture and society of 1979 made such killings abominable to hear about. The poverty of the African American ghetto in Atlanta, combined with the appalling body count, lit a flame under racial tensions throughout the South and in Georgia especially. The unique formula of racial tensions and early forensic science, matched with a young DNA court procedure and an explosive set of shocking murders made a signature case for the history of serial killers.

Lead FBI investigators identified a likely type and narrowed suspects accordingly. Without a girlfriend, driving a police model car, owning a dog, the killer had a ‘thing” for young men and a scheme to get them into his company. Yet public perceptions about a black killer may have cost lives. Usually in Atlanta, but particularly during the killings era, no white man walked unnoticed in predominantly black areas of Atlanta neighbourhoods.

After Williams conviction for two of the murders, no more killings or abductions were reported. Yet the strength of racial community among the African Americans in Atlanta has convinced many Williams was wrongfully imprisoned for the murders. Examination of the American justice system for the Wayne Williams case yields differing opinions about the potential for justice to be reached.

One seven year old girl was kidnapped from her home, and police mislabeled bodies and shrugged off the cases of “runaways”. One young boy telephoned the task force hotline but was dismissed. The ignored young child’s body, that of Patrick Balazar, was later found strangled to death. Children sent down the block to the store never returned. Ever. Variance in the mode of death and method of dumping and hiding bodies pointed to a clever killer intent on avoiding being caught.

The identification of Wayne Williams as the Atlanta Child Murderer happened despite errors and obfuscations by police, a common thread in many serial killing cases and notorious murderer careers. Misidentification, sloppy forensic techniques, haphazard professionalism regarding crime scene handling and case evidence being destroyed let Wayne Williams stay free much longer than he should have.

Yet Wayne Williams is thought by many to be innocent, not least because he never confessed to the crimes and no fingerprints were ever found to match his at the crime scenes or on any of the evidence. Carpet fibers linking evidence from the corpses to floor carpet fiber in the Williams home was the chief piece of evidence against him.

The caliber of racial divide in the American South, even in the late 1970’s, kept the public from wholly accepting that an African American man could be the killer of so many black children, when instincts and history dictated that a white killer might be responsible. Suppression of the racial theme and involvement of the Ku Klux Klan is a hotly debated topic in this case.

Angry groups of black people walked the streets with baseball bats, but community children kept disappearing. The frequency and longevity of the Atlanta Child Murders bothered national audiences watching the news nightly. The racial motif in the killings (if the suspect was white) made the suspected murders guilty of a federal violation of the Civil Rights of the victims.

Defensive African American community factions of Atlanta refused to believe a serial killer might be black and murdering “their own”, and thus Williams went free ever more. Criminologists argued that only a black man could move within the black neighborhoods so much and so often unnoticed. Had they (the Atlanta African-American community) accepted this theory earlier they might have identified the black man moving in their midst.

Was Williams betting on racial camouflage to avoid getting caught? Did he select African American victims to mask his crimes and shield himself as a suspect, or did the young men or children represent an earlier, more innocent version of himself? Only one girl was involved as a victim in the killings. The age of the victims ramped up as the spree came to a close, shortly before Williams was caught.

Wayne Williams was apprehended while crossing a bridge one of the corpses had been found under. Any challenge to hsi guilt just include an analysis as to why he was there. Did black men in racially charged Atlanta during a crime spree rove the bridges at 3 a.m. checking addresses? Williams obnoxious behaviour and cocky style added fuel to the fire.

The missing victims and their names and ages chronicle a sad epoch of Atlanta history. Victims of the Atlanta child murderer were Aaron Jackson, 9, Patrick Rogers, 15, Lubie Geter, 14, Terry Pue, 15, Patrick Baltazar, 12, Curtis Walker, 13, Joseph Bell, 16, Timothy Hill, Larry Rogers, 20, Eddie Duncan, 21, Michael Mcintosh, 23, Jimmy Payne, 21, and Nathanial Cater, 27.

The case of the Atlanta Child Murders would mirror many famous serial killer prosecutions for incomplete case handling. The method of disposing of the bodies had changed. This was thought by criminologists as an attempt to evade police detection and throw off any ensuing criminal case. Yet the thread of the chain of victims linked the cases to the serial killer.

The FBI had been brought into the murder investigation after the mayor of Atlanta asked for help. The suspected kidnapping of some of the missing victims made the crimes Federal offenses. As the media intensified its coverage of the crimes, both as a response to race relations, accusations of police irresponsibility, and the outcry against the continuing deaths.

The Wayne Williams serial killer controversy rages on. Of all the serial killer cases that dispute their ultimate responsibility or change their account of the facts after arrest, sentencing, or imprisonment, the Wayne Williams case tears at the threads of racial tolerance to this day. The twenty-nine young black people are gone forever. The mourning black families winced at allegations of drug use and crime involved in the slayings.

Yet despite strong evidence, resistance to the acceptance of Williams’ guilt continues.

Was Wayne Williams wrongly convicted? Does the suspected innocence of one or some of the Atlanta murders justify a murderer convicted with so much circumstantial evidence ? How believable can Wayne Williams be today, however much his behaviour and personality seem to be altered? Is Williams exploiting a more politically correct social climate?

Interviews with Wayne Williams dispute the accounts of the murders claimed by police. Williams claimed to be a music scout for young performing talent. Wayne Williams claims never to have been homosexual or murderous, and claims to have been looking for an address for a woman named Cheryl Johnson at the time of his arrest. Williams just happened to be driving across the Chattahoochee River.

Yet no person of this name ever came forward. Williams claimed to have been arrested in a climate where nobody who knew him personally testified. Yet prosecutors could not make the claim that Williams was ever above suspicion, and Williams’ own account of driving around the bridge where human remains were found out of “curiosity” leaves many holes in his story.

The Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments from attorney William Kunstler, attributing deaths Wayne Williams was accused of, that claimed the Klu Klux Klan was starting a race war using controversial homicides. That would have explained the missing/destroyed evidence. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation could furnish no proof of this. But the snatched children were not believed to be KKK murders.

GBI investigation of the Klu Klux Klan involved an eight week surveillance. Yet no KKK representatives were found crossing the Chattahoochee River during the time police were searching for an active killer. Challenging statements for some of the killings does not clear Wayne Williams of all murders. Notably, many parents and relatives of the Atlanta Child Murders victims think Williams may be innocent.

Many who suspect Williams is innocent of individual murders of the entire portfolio of the Atlanta Child killings nevertheless acquiesce the burden of disproof against all the killings is persuasively convincing of his guilt of some of them. Williams’ legal strategies may reflect his innocence or his ability to manipulate the legal system after decades of imprisonment, common among serial killers after the glow of publicity has faded.

The notoriety of Wayne Williams in 2010 is seriously less than in 1981, when fear of a race war kept suspicion of the Ku Klux Klan under wraps. Today the evidence of one Billy Ray Whitaker, clearing Williams of the killing of Lubie Geter, would be challenged due to the mental instability of the witness but his memory retention. Could any member of the Ku Klux Klan

The fact remains that of all the people living in Georgia in 1979-1980, only one was driving on the same body-dumping bridge the night police were watching: Wayne Williams. Only one man had no alibi for any of the twenty-nine killings attribute to the Atlanta Child Murderer: Wayne Williams. Only one man had DNA carpet fibers combined with DNA identified hairs from his dog matched with forensic evidence from victim’s clothing: Wayne Williams. And Williams had a bona fide script for legitimately interviewing young people alone, as he was a music business talent scout.

Vulnerabilities in case handling and criminology techniques eventuated in only two charges being made against Williams. As of 2010, Wayne Bertram Williams is still trying to appeal the “miscarriage” of justice. Yet the appeal is framed in a slippery slope of the American legal system. Williams may get a new trial based on developed DNA techniques. NB: the Wayne Williams and Atlanta child murders case was rife with evidence mishandling.

A retrial of Wayne Williams for Atlanta murder trial would be an expensive exploration of American justice. Yet criminologists can claim that the DNA evidence and the modern handling of DNA in contemporary murder cases are not congruent. How DNA is treated and handled today versus in 1981 may create a cloud of legal wrangling that might free Williams.

Article by Roy Whyte . Visit his Google+ page for more.