On a cold winter day in Portland, Oregon, 19-year-old Linda Kay Slawson was working hard to build a future for herself. It was January 26, 1968, and the aspiring young woman was making her way through a quiet residential neighborhood, selling encyclopedias door-to-door to pay for college. Linda, who lived with her mother and siblings in the nearby community of Aloha, was last seen near Southeast 45th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard, wearing a white coat and a brown skirt.
That afternoon, as she approached a house in the 1500 block of Southeast 47th Avenue, she had no way of knowing she was walking into the home of a monster.
The man who answered the door was Jerome Henry Brudos, an electronics technician who appeared to be a typical family man. He expressed interest in the encyclopedias and invited Linda inside. Once she was in his basement workshop, a space his wife was forbidden to enter, Brudos attacked her, bludgeoning her with a piece of wood before strangling her to death. Linda Slawson became the first of four confirmed victims of the man who would become known as "The Lust Killer" and "The Shoe Fetish Slayer."
When Linda didn't return home, her family grew worried. The discovery of her car, with her purse still inside, was an ominous sign. She had also failed to pick up her last paycheck for $125. For more than a year, her family had no answers, living with the uncertainty of what had happened to their beloved daughter and sister. Her disappearance was a painful mystery, a void that could not be filled.
The truth began to surface in 1969 with the disappearances of other young women in Oregon. The investigation into the murders of Jan Susan Whitney, Karen Elena Sprinker, and Linda Dawn Salee led police to Jerome Brudos. After his arrest in June 1969, a search of his home uncovered a horrifying collection of photographs and trophies, including women's shoes and clothing. Facing investigators, Brudos confessed to the murders of all four women.
Brudos provided a chilling account of Linda's murder, admitting he had kept her body for a time in his workshop. He later disposed of her remains by throwing them from the Wilsonville Bridge on Interstate 5 into the Willamette River. Despite extensive searches, Linda's body was never recovered from the river's depths. She is the only one of Brudos's known victims whose family was never able to lay her to rest.
In June 1969, Jerome Brudos pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Jan Whitney, Karen Sprinker, and Linda Salee. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences and sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary. Although he confessed to killing Linda Slawson, the murder charge in her case was ultimately dropped in July 1969 due to a lack of physical evidence, namely the absence of her body. Brudos died of liver cancer in prison on March 28, 2006, after becoming Oregon's longest-serving inmate. The legal accounting for Linda's death remains incomplete, a painful footnote in a story of profound loss.
