Jerry Brudos

What the record shows

Jerome Henry Brudos, known as Jerry Brudos, pleaded guilty in June 1969 to three counts of first-degree murder for the killings of young women in the Salem and Portland areas of Oregon in 1968 and 1969. According to the Oregon Court of Appeals in State v. Brudos (1970), he entered the pleas orally and in writing with the advice of counsel and received three consecutive life sentences. Police attributed four murders to him and he admitted all four, but he was never tried for the fourth because the victim's body was not recovered. He died in the Oregon State Penitentiary in 2006.

According to the Wikipedia article and Biography.com, the first victim was Linda Slawson, a 19-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman from Aloha, who called at Brudos's home in the Portland area on January 26, 1968, and was killed there; her body was never found. On November 26, 1968, Jan Whitney, 23, disappeared after her car broke down on Interstate 5 between Salem and Albany. Brudos later admitted stopping for her and strangling her in his car. Her remains were recovered from the Willamette River near Independence after his conviction and identified by dental records.

Karen Sprinker, an 18-year-old Oregon State University student, was abducted at gunpoint from a department store parking garage in downtown Salem on March 27, 1969. Linda Salee, 22, of Beaverton, was taken from the Lloyd Center shopping area in Portland on April 23, 1969. In May 1969 both bodies were found in the Long Tom River, weighted with automobile parts and bound with cord. In the same week as the Salee abduction, two other young women escaped attempted abductions in Portland; one later identified Brudos.

Investigators noticed that the knots on both river victims matched and, because Sprinker was an OSU student, interviewed women on the Corvallis campus. One student reported that a caller had asked her for a date, and police asked her to report any further contact. When Brudos called again, officers were present at the meeting. According to the Wikipedia article, his home was searched under warrant on May 26, 1969, yielding nylon rope and photographs of the victims, and Oregon state troopers took him into custody on May 29 after finding him hiding in the family station wagon. In early June he confessed to the four murders and to earlier assaults.

Brudos was arraigned on June 4, 1969, in Marion County and initially pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Court-appointed psychiatrists found him legally sane. On June 27, 1969, before Circuit Judge Val D. Sloper, he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Sprinker, Whitney and Salee and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms with the possibility of parole. His wife, Ralphene Brudos, was indicted in August 1969 in connection with the Sprinker murder and was acquitted at trial.

The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions and sentences on July 9, 1970, holding that consecutive life terms were permissible and that any challenge to the pleas had to be raised through post-conviction relief; the Oregon Supreme Court denied review that September. Brudos then sought post-conviction relief, arguing his pleas were not knowing and voluntary. According to Brudos v. Cupp (1977), the post-conviction court rejected that claim and the Court of Appeals upheld the denial of his request to move the hearing out of Marion County. The Wikipedia article reports that later appeals failed and parole was repeatedly denied over the objections of the victims' families.

Brudos spent nearly 37 years at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, where he held clerical jobs. He died there of liver cancer on March 28, 2006, at age 67, described by state officials as the longest-held inmate in the Oregon prison system.

Brudos was born on January 31, 1939, in Webster, South Dakota, and grew up in Oregon. According to the Wikipedia article, he was arrested in 1956 at age 17 for assaulting a girl and spent nine months under psychiatric evaluation at the Oregon State Hospital, graduated from Corvallis High School in 1957, was discharged from the Army in 1959 and married in 1961. He was living in Salem with his wife and two children at the time of the 1969 murders.