In the spring of 1969, Linda Dawn Salee, a 22-year-old woman, was happily planning her future. A secretary and part-time student in Portland, Oregon, she was looking forward to her upcoming wedding. On April 23, 1969, she drove to the Lloyd Center shopping mall with a happy errand in mind: to buy a birthday gift for her boyfriend. It was a simple, hopeful task on an ordinary day, but Linda would never make it home.
Her car was later found abandoned in the mall's parking garage, the first sign that something was terribly wrong.
Linda’s disappearance marked the end of a terrifying crime spree that had haunted Oregon for over a year. She was the final victim of Jerome Henry Brudos, a serial killer later known as "The Lust Killer" and "The Shoe Fetish Slayer." Brudos, an electronics technician who lived with his wife and two children, concealed a dark and violent life. He had a lifelong fetish for women's shoes and undergarments, a compulsion that escalated from theft and assault to abduction and murder.
On that April day, Brudos abducted Linda from the Lloyd Center. He took her to his home, where he subjected her to a horrific ordeal in his garage workshop, a place his own family was forbidden to enter. He ultimately killed her by strangulation and bludgeoning. Afterward, he drove her body to the Long Tom River, a distributary of the Willamette River. In an attempt to conceal his crime, he weighed her body down with a heavy auto transmission part before sinking it into the water.
For weeks, Linda’s fate remained a mystery. Then, on May 10, 1969, a fisherman made a grim discovery in the Long Tom River: Linda Salee's body. Just two days later, investigators found the body of another of Brudos's victims, 19-year-old Karen Sprinker, a mere fifty feet away, also weighed down. The specific and unusual knots used to tie both victims to the heavy car parts provided a crucial link between the cases, confirming police suspicions that they were dealing with a serial killer.
The investigation intensified, and a tip from a college student who had been on a date with Brudos led police to his door. A failed abduction attempt where the victim escaped and was able to identify him gave authorities the cause they needed to obtain a search warrant. Inside Brudos's home, they found a trove of horrifying evidence, including photographs he had taken of his victims, confirming his involvement in the murders. Brudos was arrested on May 29, 1969.
Following his arrest, Jerome Brudos confessed to the murders of four young women: Linda Kay Slawson, 19; Jan Susan Whitney, 23; Karen Elena Sprinker, 19; and Linda Dawn Salee. On June 27, 1969, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Linda Salee, Karen Sprinker, and Jan Whitney. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary. He was not prosecuted for the murder of Linda Slawson, as her body was never recovered. Brudos died of liver cancer in prison on March 28, 2006, after serving nearly 37 years.
