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A host who's built a real trust with their audience talks about your brand and their own words and their own voice. It doesn't interrupt the experience. It's part of it. With 8 Casked, you can access the world's largest podcast marketplace.
Choose the right shows, the right audiences, the right format. Then watch the data to tell you it worked. You're not buying impressions. You're buying influence.
Learn more by visiting 8cast.com slash advertise. What they did and how? Episode 269. I am your humble host, Thomas Roslant-Vibour-Dul.
Before we continue with the show, I need to send an apology or wait, Elizabeth. Last episode was unfortunately sorely lacking in audio quality. I promise that tonight's and future episodes will have the good standards you can expect and deserve here on the Serial Killer podcast. Last episode ended with the broodos getting married, and his realization that marriage did not state his burgeoning depraved needs.
Tonight we take a closer look at what followed. Enjoy. This episode, like all other sagas told by me, would not be possible without my loyal Patreonis. They are.
Elizabeth, Lisa, Kathy, Corbin, Yow, Val, the Douglassons, Jonathan Manuel, Derek, Alicia, Robin, Holy Troy, Rlyssa and Cody. You are truly the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast and without you, there would be no show. Geribildos had always been able to get hired. That part came easily to him.
He knew how to speak with confidence, how to describe his experience in a way that made it sound solid and dependable. Even impressive. He got lists of wiring jobs he had done years earlier, as though they were in recent. Speak fluently about systems and circuits, and present himself as a man who knew his trade and took it seriously.
Employers often saw a big capable worker and seemed eager to prove himself. What they did not always see, at least not right away, was how quickly his temper flared, or how little patience he had once the novelty of a new job wore off. Keeping those jobs was another matter altogether. Darcy learned early not to panic when he came home with the news.
Sometimes it arrived in the middle of the day. Jerry standing in the doorway with his jaw clenched and his eyes flat, telling her he was done there. Sometimes it came later, after dinner, delivered with a shrug and an insistence that the plays had been run by idiots anyway. She told herself he always landed on his feet.
He always found something else. There was always another opportunity, another shop, another foreman willing to take him on. Jerry made a point of softening the instability with generosity. On holidays and anniversaries he brought home gifts, perfume, jewelry, a new dress he insisted she wear for him.
The presents were often accompanied by an almost boyish tenderness, a version of Jerry who spoke softly and touched her arm as though she were precious. To anyone looking in from the outside, he appeared attentive, even romantic. That surface kindness concealed dark rimples as Darcy could neither see nor imagine. When Meghan was born, Darcy's life contracted around the needs of her child.
Sleep became fragmented, stolen in brief stretches between feedings, days blurred together in a cycle of diapers, laundry, and a constant low-level anxiety of new motherhood. She did not notice how rarely she left the house alone. She did not recognize the gradual erosion of her independence. She told herself this was what being a mother meant.
The house became her world. Jerry went in and out of it, working when he could, retreating when he could not. Darcy never thought of herself as trapped. The idea would have sounded dramatic, even ungrateful.
She had food on the table or roof over her head, a husband who did not hit her. That was enough, she believed. She did not notice how carefully Jerry watched her moods, how acutely he registered every sign of withdrawal when she snapped at him out of exhaustion or failed to respond to his advances, something in him darkened. He did not argue, he did not demand explanations.
He simply shut down, his silence thick and oppressive. Eventually he would leave the house altogether, slipping out after dark with, no explanation. Those were the knights, Jerry proud. He moved quickly through residential neighborhoods, his large frame swallowed by shadow.
He scanned backyards and porches, looking for laundry lines, open windows, unlocked doors, women's underwear and shoes were his primary targets. He took them carefully, folding fabric into his jacket, lifting shoes as though they were fragile objects. The thefts were not impulsive, they were rituals, deliberate acts meant to soothe the crushing gloom that settled over him when he felt unloved or ignored. The relief never lasted long.
People outside the marriage had seen flashes of Jerry's temper, co-workers remembered moments when his anger erupted with startling speed, leaving rooms stunned into silence. Friends spoke of him lowering his voice, his voice going rigid, something volatile radiating from him. Darcy never saw that version of Jerry in full, at home his volatility folded inward, shimits took restraint for control. After private life followed Jerry's preferences without discussion.
Nudity in the house was casual, almost playful. They chased each other through rooms, uncloated, laughing until Meghan grew old enough to to toddle after them, curious and unselfconscious. That was when Darcy drew a line. She refused to continue walking around naked in front of their child.
Jerry argued his case, soaked, then reluctantly gave in. The concession wrangled him. Jerry had always liked cameras. At first the photographs felt harmless.
He had taken nude pictures of Darcy before they married, then more on their wedding nights in a dim motel room that smelled of stale champagne and industrial detergent. The lighting was poor, the bedspread thin and scratchy. Darcy remembered feeling exposed and certain, but Jerry's voice was steady and reassuring. It told her she was his wife now, but nothing about this was wrong.
She wanted to believe him. She tolerated the black and white photographs because Jerry developed them himself. Every place they lived gained a makeshift dark room, closet spacements. Even spare bathrooms were covered into chemical soaked spaces.
A sharp smell of developer and fixers seeped into the rest of the house, clinging to curtains and clothes. Darcy learned to live with it. The images stayed inside the home. That mattered.
Galar's lights were different. Those had to be processed commercially and the thought of strangers handling intimate images made her skin crawl. Jerry anticipated her hesitation. It told her he had solved the problem.
He filled the beginning and end of each roll with scenic shots. Lakes hills wildflowers. So no technician would bother inspecting the middle frames. The labs processed too much film to scrutinize everything.
His certainty was persuasive. Darcy let herself be convinced. Over time, Jerry's instructions became...stranger. His voice remained calm, but his demands grew more specific, more controlling.
He positioned her as though she was an object rather than a partner. One afternoon, he had her straddle-megan small tricycle in the living room. The space was cramped. The curtains dusty, the sunlight, muted.
She pedaled toward him and away. Her body awkwardly folded over the plastic, meant for a child. And she later saw the developed image under the red glow of the darkroom light. Something inside her recoiled.
She begged him to destroy it. Jerry promised he would. He did not. Some sessions crossed into territory that felt openly grotesque.
It pulled a sheer nylon stocking over her face, flattening her nose, stretching her mouth into something barely recognizable. She sat naked on cold linoleum, goosebumps rising as the chill crept into her skin. In other photographs, she wore nothing but glossy black heels that clicked sharply against the floor as she shifted her weight, trying to follow his directions. The single bulb overhead cast long shadows that climbed the walls and refused to stay still.
They moved constantly. More than twenty homes in seven years. Each relocation followed the same exhausting ritual. Boxes scavenged from grocery stores, newspaper wrapped around dishes, inks, merged on Darcy's hands.
Corvalles, with its college energy, Portland, with its industrial sprawl and river fog. Back again, then on to Salem. Darcy adapted because she had no choice. Still, every announcement of another move filled her with dread.
Jerry was skilled. He could wire almost anything, yet stability eluded him. Darcy dreamed of a permanent home. A place where she could plant bulbs and...no, they would bloom for her.
Spring always came somewhere new. Jerry saw nothing wrong with drifting. He had grown up that way, traveling the west coast in a battered station wagon. He told himself that if he had survived it, Megan would too.
By 1967, the pressure inside him intensified. The urges he had suppressed grew louder. My grain tore through his skull. Blackouts left him standing in familiar rooms with no memory of how he arrived there.
When Darcy announced her second pregnancy, Jerry's excitement surged. He immersed himself completely. He was certain it would be a son. He imagined the birth as a personal, bery birth.
He insisted on being present. When Darcy's barbed his way, something fractured. The news of his son's arrival barely registered. The opportunity for renewal had slipped away.
Weeks later, in downtown Portland, he followed a woman with elegant shoes. Etrachter movements memorized her building, waited until darkness fell. As he was rifling through her underwear draw on, the young woman awoke. Before she could scream, he silenced her with his hands.
What followed escalated beyond anything he had done before. Concerned she might recognize him later, he strangled her until unconsciousness. Then he brutally raped her, then fled. Shoes clutched in his hands as trophies.
An event in 1967 almost killed Jerry. He made his living as an electrician since he had left the radio station in Cornwallis. He was very cautious and certainly knowledgeable about safety precautions. Yet he came very close to electrocuting himself.
He was working at one bench and reached across to connect a live wire in his hand to terminals on the other bench. Instantly, his body became rigid as a jolt of power ran through him. 480 volts erased from his right arm through his chest and down his left arm and the force of it picked him up and threw him across his bench and onto the floor. He was not rendered unconscious but he was dazed and burned and his neck was injured, cervical damage that would stay with him.
A weak man would have been killed but Bluedos survived. Indeed, he was never even hospitalized and so he was quite well and strong enough to lift heavy objects, even the dead weight of a body or an automobile engine by the 26th of January 1968. He had beaten women and stolen their lingerie and shoes and choked them and finally raped one. But he had never killed a woman, not until Linda Slausen came to his door hoping to sell him a set of encyclopedians.
Ironically, even as her husband's mental problems had progressed into homicidal rage, Darcy Brudo's thought that maybe their marriage was getting better. He became enthralled with Jason, their son, showing the youngsters' love. He was so much more attention than he had ever shown their first child, Megan. He took Jason with him when he went on errands and he talked about teaching Jason how to use the tools in his workshop when he grew up a little.
It hurt Darcy that he still ignored Megan but it was nice that he seemed to accept Jason. He let Darcy herself have a little more freedom, allowing her to visit Garrold's friends or to bowl. She knew he wasn't crazy about having his mother babysit from Megan while she was away but he didn't really put his foot down. He was always downstairs in his workshop anyway, fiddling with some electrical project or other or out with his friends buying engine parts in junkyards.
His headaches however had grown worse. She had to keep the children quiet so much of the time because any sound seemed to cause him excruciating pain when he had one of his migraines. It was easier just to take them both with her and go spend the days with girl friends where the kids could be themselves. She thought maybe the electrical accidents had caused the headache problems to be this bad, but she couldn't persuade Jerry to go to a doctor about it.
The brief spade of calm after Jason's birth did not last very long. Darcy blamed herself for part of the trouble. She no longer enjoyed sex with her husband. She wasn't even sure why, but when he accused her of being uninterested in him or disgusted by his touch, she had to agree with him even though she would not admit it out loud.
There weren't kids on a honeymoon any longer. She couldn't go dashing around the house naked now. She hated posing for nude photos of being his instructions to pose this way and that he wanted her to dress up fancy all the time, saying that other women looked good then she did not. But she couldn't wear sexy clothes while ever doing dishes and washing typles.
He wanted to go out dancing. Well, that hurt her bad knee and wearing spike heels all the time made her back hurt. When she told him so, he looked offended and drove off. Somewhere she had no idea where or what he did when he was there.
She knew he was very sensitive and she sensed that she could not argue with him or disobey him, but she was no longer the pliable girl he had been when they were married. She wanted something beyond the cloistered life in which only the two of them existed. Jerry lost his job in Portland and in the spring of 1968 they decided to leave the house at 47th and Hawthorne and move to Salem. In a way Darcy was glad to go, especially when they found a nice little house on Center Street.
It was not a lavish house, but it was kind of cute and cozy. It had a big yard full of evergreens, roses and flowering trees. There was a fence around the yard, just white chicken and wire, but sturdy enough to prevent the children from running out into Center Street, a main thoroughfare in Salem. There was an attic for storage and the garage had a workshop portion where Jerry could set up all the gear he had accumulated.
Jerry looked at the place and deemed it perfect for them. Darcy had friends in Salem and she liked living in a smaller city than Portland. But Jerry Brutus, coming back to Salem, was the completion of a circle. The Oregon State Mental Hospital, where he had been incarcerated a dozen years earlier after beating his teenage quote-unquote date, was only a flu blocked down Center Street from the Grey House.
Its proximity did not seem to bother him. He never spoke of it at all. Jerry Brutus did not stand out as strange. He was too covert for that and he seldom left the little house on Center Street.
Despite the job opportunities offered through the food and paper mill industries, he was not able to find work. Maybe he did not look very hard. His headaches were bad and his neck hurt, and he had so much on his mind. He moaked around the house or putted in his shop out in the garage and Jerry packed on pals.
There were new rolls of fat around his waist and under his chin. One day Darcy mentioned to him that he seemed to be gaining weight and he grunted and disappeared into another room in the house. He was gone for a short time. When he returned, his wife was shocked to see Jerry standing before her, dressed in a woman's bra stuffed with something to look like breasts, a girdle, stockings with cartons, and the biggest pair of black pointed toed high-heeled shoes she had ever seen.
Somehow he had managed to tuck his penis inside the girdle so that he looked almost like a very grotesque woman, turning and posing for her. Darcy laughed nervously, but she was frightened and embarrassed. It seemed a little sick. Darcy was naive.
She did not know what a fetish was. She didn't know about transvestites or sexual psychopaths. She knew that some men were gay, but Jerry had always been entirely masculine. Their own sex life had always been straight and it came to intercourse.
He never asked her to do anything that was kinky or repulsive sexually, nothing beyond posing for nude pictures. He seemed a little disappointed at her reaction. There was an awkward silence, and then he left the room. When he came back, he looked like himself again.
She wondered where he had gotten the girdle and bra, but she did not ask. She didn't want to make him angry or upset. Because it made her worry when she thought about her husband dressing up like a girl, she put it out of her mind. She had enough to worry about, money for bills, and keeping the children quiet and trying not to irritate Jerry.
She could not have known, could never have visualized in her own worst nightmares just how bad things were going to get. EQ Bank is here to help you make bank. Let that sink in. It's a bank built to make you money.
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Get started at ACAST.com slash advertise. Madoff all of 1968. Jerry Brutos had found a job, again as an electrician, for a firm south of Salem. a great job, but a job.
His marriage was still intact, but it was strained. Darcy had cooled to his sexual advances. She did not often refute him, but he sensed she found him disgusting. She was away from their home so much now, spending four days a week with two sisters who were her good friends.
He still ruled home with an iron hand, however. He told Darcy that the shop area was his, and that he did not want her going out to the garage without his permission. He got a strong padlock and put it on the door to assure that he would have privacy. She complained, because the freezer without was out there, and he said flatly, just tell me what you want for supper, and I'll get it out of the freezer for you.
I don't want you burning into my dark room when I'm working. You'll ruin everything if you do." He didn't worry so much about her poking around in the attic. He told her that he had seen mice and rats of them, and that scared her. He had his treasures of them, boxes of shoes and bras and slips all sizes.
Some were even large enough for him to slip into himself to spend hours enjoying the feel of the soft cloth against his bare skin. The things were his, and he did not want Darcy touching them or asking him questions about where he had gotten them. As far as she knew, he had never cheated on her. She was a little afraid of him now, because he seemed so strange.
He had never harmed her physically, but he was so big, and even his friends said he was the strongest human they had ever seen. He could carry a refrigerator all by himself and never even show the strain. Jerry Brutus had begun his fantasy about capturing women when he was 17. By the time he was 29, he had refined it and polished it until he had grown to a nightmare of sadism.
He wanted to find some place where he could set up and underground the butcher shop. It would have cells where he could keep his captives and a huge freezer room. When he had it all ready, he would take a bus and go out and round up pretty girls and bring them back to his torture complex. He would choose which ones he wanted for his pleasure.
He would shoot them and stab them and beat them and play with them sexually, and no one would be able to find out. When he had them, he would take pictures of them for his collection. When he was finally done with them, he would take them into his freezer room and freeze them in the positions he wanted so that he could keep them forever. He acknowledged that there were problems with his plan.
For one thing, it would take thousands and thousands of dollars to finance such a complex. He had barely enough money to pay rent and buy food. Practically too, he figured that if so many girls turned up missing, somebody would catch on and the cops would start sniffing around. But it was a plan that always stayed in his mind.
It made him dizzy thinking about it. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night feeling dizzy and he knew it was because of his sexual fantasies. He could end them only by rolling over and having sex with his wife. When he made love to her, he felt that he was making love to someone else, to one of his captive women.
He knew that it was Darcy, but he had an uncanny sensation that it was not. He didn't hurt her and she never knew. At work, the men kept on with their filthy jokes about women. They thought he was some kind of prude because he no longer bothered to laugh.
They treated him like he was nobody. It gave Jerry pleasure to realize what fools most men were. Autumn came to Oregon and all the flowers turned black with frost, everything but a rose. The oak leaves turned yellow and covered the red earth.
Their branches hung with moss that wafted in the wind like an old woman's hair. The rains came weeks on end of steady grey rain that tripped from eaves and trees and pushed the rivers up over their banks. From time to time a violent storm swept in from the Pacific Ocean. The rain pounded incessantly then against the windows of the grey shake house on the center street and dremned on the thin roof of the garage workshop.
Thanksgiving was just around the corner and that meant that Jerry would be spending time with people he detested. His own mother would complain that she missed her husband, now long buried, and her favourite son, working a thousand miles away and darse his parents, just as bossy and opinionated as they had ever been. The constant rain and a dull job and the holidays coming up made him restless. His headaches were like a hammer pounding in his head, demanding that he leave the crowded house and the whining kids and wife who didn't seem to respect him the way she once had.
It was hard to find trophies in the winter. Nobody hung wash out on lines because it would never get dry. He had to prowl and watch and go inside to steal underwear. He had to do something to stop the headaches and the dizziness.
At 23, Jan Susan Whitney was well along in preparing for her future goals. She was almost finished with her degree at the University of Oregon in New Jean, some 60 miles south of Salem. No longer attending college full-time she now lived in Mac Minnieville, southwest of Portland. She had her own car, an older model rampler, and had a job and friends in both Mac Minnieville and Eugene.
Jan Susan Whitney was a pretty girl, with short thick brown hair and blue eyes. She was five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. She was, perhaps, more trusting than most, or maybe only naive. She occasionally picked up hitchhikers on her trips between Eugene and Mac Minnieville on the 26th of November 1968.
Jan concluded a visit to friends in Eugene and headed north on the I-5 freeway toward her apartment in Mac Minnieville. She was dressed in black bell-buttons lags and the green jacket when she said goodbye to her friends. She planned to be home that evening. It was only a short drive two hours at most.
Thanksgiving was two days away and Jan had plans to be with friends and relatives. She was happy and dependable and intelligent. There was no reason at all, no predictable reason for her to completely disappear. And yet, she did vanish that night.
Since she had been in transit it was almost impossible for investigators to pin down just where she might have vanished or if she had been taken away against her will. A check of her apartment indicated that she had not returned from her trip to Eugene. Male and papers had stacked up and dust lay heavy in the small rooms. Jan Whitney had not called any of her friends or family.
She had simply disappeared somewhere along the I-5 corridor. Her car was found parked in a rest area on the road leading up to the East Santhium Pass, just north of Albany, Oregon and slightly east of the I-5. The red and white rambler had no external damage and it was locked. No blood, no sign of struggle.
There were a few personal items belonging to Jan Whitney. There were no keys. In processing the rambler state police, ID technicians lifted a good latent print from one of its hubcaps. With the technology available in 1968, a single latent print was worthless, two detectives, unless they had a suspect's print to compare it to.
And they did not have that. The discovery of her car in the lonely parking lot made things look ominous for Jan Whitney. She would have no reason to be there on a foggy, dank, November evening. If she had left her inoperable car and attempted to walk along the freeway for help, she had not been seen.
Since pedestrians along I-5 are quite noticeable because there are so few and far between them, it would seem that someone reading new stories of her disappearance would have come forward if she had been seen that night, a search of titches and the land bordering the freeway netted nothing. Not one sign of the missing woman. If she had fallen and been injured or even killed after being struck by a passing car, she would have been found by the men and dogs that searched. There seemed to be no ready explanation for the fact that her car was found in the parking lot at the foot of the sentient pass.
Jan Whitney had been headed for Mac Minneville and the detour toward the pass made no sense. Jan Whitney was gone just as inexplicably as Linda Slauson had disappeared in Portland 10 months to the day earlier. EQ Bank is here to help you make bank. Let that sink in.
It's a bank built to make you money. Not just take your money. Sound unrealistic? Don't just take it from me.
Take it from the over 600,000 other Canadians earning high interest and paying no fees on everyday banking. Like not right now. I can't just wrangle over half a million people like that. That'd be unrealistic.
What a bank helping you make bank? Yeah, that's EQ Bank. Quick question. When was the last time a display ad changed your mind?
Now think about the last time a friend told you about something they loved. Different feeling right? That's how podcast advertising works. A host who's built a real trust with their audience who talks about your brand and their own words and their own voice.
It doesn't interrupt the experience. If part of it, with ACAST, you can access the world's largest podcast marketplace. Choose the right audiences, the right format. Then watch the data tell you it worked.
You're not buying impressions. You're buying influence. Learn more by visiting ACAST.com slash advertise. And with that, we come to the end of part four in this series covering the lust killer Jerome Henry Bludos.
Next episode we'll continue this riveting saga through parafilia and serial murder. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.