Serial Killers

The so-called “Angel of Death” killer was an inside man, a hospital employee and orderly whose access to unattended hospital patients and means to extinguish their lives proved fatal in double digits for American patients in the Midwest and Southeast. Donald Harvey started his criminal career simply by strangling patients too weak to struggle or using drugs to subdue them when nobody else was near. True to the nature of every serial killer, Harvey continued killing for little or no material gain, and even falsified job information for employment where he could kill again.

Born in Ohio in 1952, Harvey was part of a normal family. Growing up a ‘nice boy”, Donald Harvey won the praise and notice of teachers but not friends. Harvey was not happy to be a factory worker and when nuns noticed his adeptness around the building they suggested instead he train to be a medical orderly. At this time, many religious orders governed medical care in hospitals and medical wards. Harvey enjoyed an advantage to be trained without earning his vocation or showing moral turpitude before being considered for medical training. Soon Harvey would be charged with full care of patients on an unsupervised basis.

A homosexual man, this serial killer came by his moniker of murder because he always seemed to be around when death struck a patient. Yet to the inside atmosphere and world of the nurse or orderly, death was a constant enough attendant to the work life that few made connections until it was much too late for the victims. By using alternate methods in varying deaths converging with patient illnesses and symptoms, much of the initial activity of Donald Harvey passed relatively unnoticed. As medical equipment changed, Harvey disconnected ventilators and poisoned food. Despite discharges from hospitals, Harvey utilized a common trait among serial killers and obtained employment in the same field he would otherwise have been disqualified from.
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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.
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