Jerry Brudos, the 'Shoe Fetish Slayer,' Stole His Female Victims' Footwear After Killing Them

Jerry Brudos may not have the notoriety of fellow serial killers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein, but his crimes were no less heinous than his contemporaries.

Remorseless and perverse, Brudos infamously carried out a string of brutal assaults, abductions and murders in the 1960s. What started as a potentially harmless fascination with women’s feet eventually grew to a deadly obsession, leading to the tragic deaths of four young Oregon women.

Since his birth on January 31, 1939, in Webster, S.D., Jerome Henry “Jerry” Brudos’s life was one of despair. He was his parents’ second son, but his mother had desperately wanted a daughter. As such, she inflicted emotional abuse upon Brudos, while giving his older brother nothing but devotion. This cognitive dissonance was enhanced by Brudos’s family frequently moving around the Pacific Northwest, finally settling in Salem, Ore.

During these tumultuous moves, coupled with a strained relationship toward female figures, Brudos first developed interest in women’s shoes and feet. He once stole some high heels from a junkyard and wore them around his home; his mother, as punishment, made him burn the shoes. But his fetish only grew. He almost succeeded in stealing his first grade teacher’s footwear, and by age 12, his interests had expanded to include women’s undergarments.

Coupled with his mother’s disdain for anything sexual, Brudos’s pubescent years were marked by bizarre fantasies of overpowering women, which became reality when, in 1956 at age 17, he viciously assaulted a woman. Brudos was arrested on charges of assault and battery and sent to the Oregon State Hospital. He spent almost nine months there before being discharged with a diagnosis of “borderline schizophrenia.”

Never a standout student, Brudos soon gave up on school and joined the U.S. Army, where he found himself capable as a communications technician. Upon his discharge in 1959, he began work in a similar capacity at a radio station. There, a year later, he met his future wife, 17-year-old Darcie Metzler, who would prove to be an explosive catalyst for Brudos’s obsession.

Brudos married Metzler within months of meeting her, which fueled his obsessions.

He insisted she go about the house naked except for a pair of high heels, an act she indulged for several years. But when their daughter became a toddler and Metzler gave birth to a son in 1967, she refused to continue. As a result, Brudos resumed stalking women and stealing their footwear and undergarments; he even once raped an unconscious woman, sexually excited by the prospect of overpowering her.

Brudos’s fetish reached its peak between 1968 and 1969 when he abducted and strangled to death four women—Linda Katherine Slawson, Jan Susan Whitney, Karen Elena Sprinker and Linda Dawn Salee—for the purpose of satiating his domineering sexual fantasies and stealing their footwear. All four were murdered either in his automobile or his Portland, Ore., home workshop.

Brudos arranged the women’s bodies in provocative positions post-mortem so that he could take pictures for sexual gratification. He dressed his deceased victims in lingerie and footwear, committed necrophiliac acts, severed and retained their feet or breasts and eventually dumped their remains in the Willamette River. Brudos attempted two other abductions that ultimately failed; these victims recalled Brudos’s appearance to police, but no matches came up at the time.

In May 1969, Salee and Sprinker’s bodies were discovered. The fact that they’d been bound with the same electrical flex led police to believe they had the same perpetrator. During the ensuing investigation, it was discovered that several Oregon State University students had been approached by a Vietnam veteran looking for dates. One woman explained how she acquiesced out of curiosity, to which the man—Brudos—replied, “How did you know I wouldn't take you to the river and strangle you?”

This revelation led to a search of Brudos’s property on May 26. There, investigators found lists of phone numbers for college girls’ dormitories, photographs of women both alive and dead and a cache of undergarments and shoes. Within a few days, police had enough evidence, combined with the testimony of Brudos’s attempted abductees, to arrest him. Notably, Brudos phoned Metzler that evening, asking her to destroy any incriminating evidence in their home; she refused.

Brudos soon confessed to his crimes, though he gave no indication of pre-meditation; instead, he said he’d simply needed to “let off steam.” On June 27, 1969, Brudos was charged with three counts of first-degree murder for Whitney, Sprinker and Salee and given a sentence of three consecutive life imprisonment terms; Slawson was initially a Jane Doe and her body has never been found.

Dubbed by media as both the “Shoe Fetish Slayer” and the “Lust Killer,” Brudos spent the remainder of his life in Oregon State Penitentiary. He ended up as a model prisoner who worked with the prison’s electrical equipment. Surprisingly, he was allowed to order catalogs of women modeling lingerie and high heels, which furthered his sexual fantasies even behind bars.

Brudos never showed remorse for his crimes, even after being physically assaulted several times by disgusted fellow prisoners. He died of liver cancer at the age of 67 on March 28, 2006, having spent almost 37 years in prison, the longest of any inmate in the Oregon Department of Corrections.