However, the Prince did not become a murderous necrophile. A closer look at shoe fetishism provides an insight to Brudos’s escalating paraphilia and murderous desires.
‘By fetichists… I understand individuals whose sexual interest is concentrated exclusively on certain parts of the female body, or on certain portions of female attire. One of the most frequent forms of this fetichism is that in which the female foot or shoe is the fetich, and becomes the exclusive object of sexual feeling and desire. It is highly probable, and shown by a correct classification of the observed cases, that the majority and perhaps all of the cases of shoe fetichism, rest upon a basis of more or less conscious masochistic desire for self-humiliation.’[224]
In Luis Buñuel’s 1955 Ensayo de un Crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz), young Archibaldo de la Cruz is chastised by his governess for wearing her black high-heel shoes, he is forced to take them off. Later, he witnesses her death, shot by a stray bullet during the Mexican Revolution. He stands over the woman’s body and is eroticized by the sight of blood, stockings, long legs, and black high-heel shoes. Susana Medina’s film, Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys examines Buñuel’s use of fetish images in his films—crucifixes, wedding dresses, music boxes heads of hair; but, mostly, shoes and feet, mostly black high heels. ‘High heels with their emphasis on gravity and minimal contact with the earth. High heels are over-determined objects in terms of thought translated into matter.’[225] In her novel of the same name, Medina analyses what it is to be a pervert, a shoe-fetishist, and in what varying degrees can that turn one—as in the case of Buñuel’s Archibaldo de la Cruz—into a murderer.
‘What was a pervert? What was a fetishist? Was it a question of degree? Was his life dominated by boots, by shoes, underwear or whatever? I myself had struggled to be different, had done everything possible to be different, but this struggle for authenticity was probably only a pose. Or worse, not a personal decision but something imposed from without.’[226]
Brudos is a classic Freudian example of castration and Oedipus complex—the shoes replacing his mother’s vagina, replacing his own penis in one hermaphroditic object. Excising his victims’ breasts took from them their femininity in revenge for the confiscation of the shoes, the initial castration. Brudos acquired shoes and started a collection that he hid from his mother. He also began to steal and buy women’s underwear, which he also hid. This tri-fetish of shoes, underwear, and the hidden—the eternal return of the forbidden—increased his sexual arousal when in the presence of his fetish objects that were at once forbidden, erotic, and comforting.
After suffering years of humiliation by his mother, at the age of 17, not long after the release of Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Brudos enacted his first sexual revenge. His fetishism, and the fantasies accrued around it, escalated dangerously. He excavated part of a local hill in which to keep women as sex slaves. To populate it, he kidnapped a young woman, pulled a knife on her and forced her to strip. Threatening her with mutilation and rape, he took photographs of her naked body and beat her.
Police arrested him and courts sentenced Brudos to nine months in Oregon State Hospital’s psychiatric ward where doctors diagnosed him as borderline schizophrenic. Like Christie and West, Brudos had an obsession with the positioning of dead women’s bodies, fitting them into small spaces. Christie’s cupboards, West’s tiny graves—for Brudos it was freezers, the frozen bodies rearranged in pornographic tableau; a murderous precursor of the artist Marc Quinn’s frozen head ‘Self’ and his sculptures of Kate Moss, Pamela Anderson, and Allanah Starr. Although Foucault questions the nineteenth-century focalization of sex as a casual power, stating, ‘the most discrete event in one’s sexual behaviour—whether an accident or a deviation, a deficit or an excess—was deemed capable of entailing the most varied consequences throughout one’s existence,’[227] in Brudos’s case, the events of his childhood seem to have had a major influence on his desires for revenge, death, and necrophilia. By the age of 17, Brudos was stealing underwear and shoes, his attempts at developing normal male-female relationships foundering under the severe restrictions set by his mother or because of his strange behaviour.
Like Christie and Bundy, Brudos tried to live a normal life, at least socially. After an unsuccessful spell in the military (discharged for delusional tendencies), Brudos became an electrician and, in 1961, married a 17-year-old woman variously called by biographers Ralphene, Darcie, or Susan (police arrested her as an accomplice but the court acquitted her of any wrong doing. She divorced Brudos in 1970 and moved to a secret location under an assumed name). Outwardly, their life was no different to any other young couple. But soon Brudos forced his wife to parade around the house in bra and panties and increased his voyeuristic obsession by taking photographs of her naked, wearing high-heel shoes while cleaning and cooking. His fetishism, ‘this obscene underground, the unconscious terrain of habits, [was] what [was] really difficult to change,’[228] and rather than change it, he amplified it. He forbade his wife to enter the loft or his garage workshop. After their two children were born, their sex life stopped. This may have been a result of Brudos’s transvestism, underwear theft, and/or collection of nude photography.
Seven years into his marriage, Brudos killed 19-year-old college student Linda Slawson. An opportunistic murder, Brudos asked the door-to-door encyclopaedia saleswoman into his garage in Salem, Oregon, to talk about a purchase, then beat her with a piece of wood and strangled her to death. Excited by this reification of his erotic fantasies, he gave his mother, wife and two children money to go treat themselves to burgers. Once they had left, he returned to the garage bringing with him his extensive collection of underwear and shoes. He stripped the body, added her red panties to his collection, and then dressed her in lingerie. He cut off her left foot with a hacksaw, put it into a stiletto-heel shoe, and stashed it in the freezer. The rest of the body, he weighted down with an engine block and—like Bundy had done with some of his victims—dumped it in a nearby river never to be discovered. Police discovered the woman’s abandoned car but follow-up enquiries found nothing suspicious. Brudos spent weeks putting the amputated foot into shoes from his collection, taking photographs of it and masturbating over it. Once it had decomposed, he threw it into the river.
Within a year, his manic desire had returned and, on the 26th of November 1968, another opportunity presented itself for him to murder. 23-year-old Jan Whitney’s car had broken down on freeway 1-5 near Albany, Oregon, and Brudos stopped and asked if she needed a lift. He drove to his garage on the pretence that he could fix her car. There, he incapacitated her, hung her up, and strangled her to death. He took the body down and spent the rest of the day dressing it in costumes. He took photographs and sexually abused the body, repeatedly raping it vaginally and anally. He then placed the body on a hook and pulley hanging from the ceiling and left it there over the Thanksgiving holidays. While away, an accident occurred and police investigated a car crash that damaged the garage. They did not ask to look inside but Brudos became paranoid. In a similar manner to Bundy’s crimes, Brudos cut off one of Whitney’s breasts, photographed the body, and dumped it in the Williamette River. Like Gein, he used the breast as a ‘thing’—a paperweight solidified with epoxy resin. The trophies of Christie (pubic hair), Gein (body parts), Bundy (heads), West (bones), and Brudos are Lacanian objects of drive, stimulating and enacting desires; Objet petit a, partial objects defining the drives. But they are also objects of anxiety and libido, the desire to control and regain the whole body and the desire for the metonymic part of it. Brudos’s fetishes were erotic and ritualistic, they were also commodities.
226
Susana Medina,