Jerry Brudos: The evil killer who kept his victim’s feet in the 1960s
Whether it’s a slight thing for feet to a complete inability to climax without having superheated salad tongs clamped to your nipples, everyone has a weird sex thing to varying degrees. Yes, I do mean everyone, with absolutely no exceptions.
Most of the time, that’s absolutely fine. Pretty much every kink can be explored harmlessly, even the really dicey ones that get occasionally talked about in Parliament. After all, kink is just your brain working out your insecurities and hangups in a way that is pleasurable to you. It’s basically therapy with more jizz, and the more you repress them, the more they demand to be felt. Having them doesn’t make you a freak or a creep or a bad person, no matter how many people try to link the actions of crazy people to their kinks.
Nevertheless, Jerry Brudos will go down in history as ‘The Shoe Fetish Slayer’, unconsciously linking his certain fetish to the fact that he murdered, mutilated and molested four people. While it’s true that Brudos was acting on sexual urges that he’d been demonstrating since he was a child, when pursuing his victims. More importantly, he was also acting on violent urges that had manifested at the same time.
Both kinds of urges had been treated the same way when adults, in particular, his mother, had discovered them – Brudos had been punished for them and threatened with the same if he ever so much as spoke about them again.
This, obviously, didn’t stop them, and both of them began intensifying to such a degree that Brudos began attacking his teenage girlfriends, before desperately trying to cover up his own actions by claiming to have a twin brother called Jerry who was responsible for the assaults.
Once Brudos was married to Ralphene Schwinler in 1961, he had an outlet for his urges for a period of time. However, once his wife had to devote more time to their children, his old habits came back fiercer than ever, until the disgusting peak of his activity in 1968 and 1969.
This was when he abducted and murdered four young women, keeping a piece of each of them just out of reach of his wife and two children.
This is best exemplified by his first victim, Linda Slawson. The 19-year-old was going door to door selling encyclopedias, and Brudos had convinced her to go down to the basement with him before murdering her. After the act, she removed her foot and stored it in the back of the family’s freezer, just out of reach of her husband, son and daughter. He did the same with the breasts of his later victims, only trying to get rid of them when they started to decompose.
Thankfully, Brudos didn’t dispose of these keepsakes as well as he should, and they, along with the rest of his victims’ bodies, began surfacing in the lake he’d stowed them in. They were discovered by local fisherman and after authorities analysed what had happened to these young women, word was put out for information regarding men showing the kind of behaviour that Brudos was exhibiting. After two more attempts at kidnapping that went awry, Brudos was investigated and arrested for his crimes.
Faced with the overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Brudos confessed. After an insanity plea was ruled out by a psychiatric evaluation, he was sentenced to three life sentences in 1969. He lived out the rest of his life in prison, dying in 2006 of liver cancer.