His desires increasing and accelerating, Brudos killed his third victim four months after he murdered Jan Whitney. Karen Sprinker had been visiting the Meier & Frank department store where she was supposed to have lunch with her mother. Walking to her car in the parking lot, Brudos—dressed as a woman—abducted her at gunpoint on the 27th of March 1969. He drove her back to his garage, raped her, made her dress up (he didn’t like the shoes she was wearing) and pose for photographs, took her underwear for his fetish trophies, and then hung her from the ceiling before garrotting her. After repeatedly raping the corpse, he cut off the breasts. ‘Her breasts had been chopped off and they look blue and deflated, the nipples a disconcerting shade of brown. Surrounded by dried black blood, they lie, rather delicately on a china plate I bought at Pottery Barn on top of the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner, though I don’t remember doing this.’[229]
Partial objects of commodification, the reduction to things, to objects of possession to objects of obsession to objects of desire. After stuffing a bra from his lingerie stash with wadded paper towels and covering her mutilated chest with it, Brudos weighted the body, redressed it, and threw it in the Long Tom River. Police discovered it two months later, after they had discovered the corpse of Brudos’s next victim.
Desire escalated and accelerated, Brudos killed again four weeks later. Like Christie before him and Bundy later, Brudos pretended to be a police officer and arrested 23-year-old Linda Salee for shoplifting in a shopping mall. He drove her to his garage, bound her, took a break to eat lunch, returned and raped her while strangling her to death with surgical thread. Brudos kept the body in his garage for a few days, raping it, trying to take moulds of Salee’s breasts, he later hung the corpse from the ceiling and, using needles and jump wires, shot electricity through it to watch the corpse dance. Again, he weighted the body with a transmission box, bound it with nylon rope and dumped it in the Long Tom River where an angler discovered it two weeks later.
Police caught Brudos on the 25th of May 1969 setting a trap for him after a woman reported that he had acted strange on a date, that he was stalking students at a local college and had attempted to abduct a teenage girl. When the police arrested him, they found that he was wearing women’s panties. When police forensic officers searched Brudos’s home, they discovered the hook-and-pulley system, nylon cords, leather straps, a mould of the amputated breast, women’s shoes, underwear, and photographs of Brudos dressed in women’s clothing and of his victims in various stages of dress, torture, and decomposition—in most of the photographs, the heads are not visible or are hooded. One shot showed a woman’s body hanging from the ceiling, dressed in black lace lingerie, the point of view as from the woman’s vagina shown in a mirror between her feet, Brudos staring obliviously at the reflected dead body.
If Brudos was part Archibaldo de la Cruz, he was also part Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho—a cross-dressing, mother-obsessed, women hater. Despite his defence arguing that he was insane, Brudos pleaded guilty to the three murders (Linda Slawson’s body was never found) and the court sentenced him to three consecutive life sentences. Despite numerous appeals and parole hearings, he remained incarcerated and became the longest-serving prisoner in the US. He died in Oregon State Penitentiary on 29 March 2006.
Like Christie, Brudos developed fetishes and the desire to kill and rape women as revenge attacks on his mother. Like Bundy, he would rape the victims pre-, peri-and post-mortem. Like Bundy and West, he would then mutilate the corpses and take trophies. Like Gein, he would turn the body parts into household objects. Brudos’s obsessive desires ranged from harmless shoe fetishism to anal necrophilia. His lust for murder, body parts, shoes, and mutilation escalated. A number of women had escaped Brudos’s attempts to abduct them. There may have been more undetected bodies of young white females who happened to go missing. Brudos, arrogant and with no conscience or remorse, admitted only what he had to. During psychiatric tests, Brudos confessed that—like Archibaldo de la Cruz and his fetish mannequin, like Hans Bellmer’s Die Puppe—he wanted a human doll he could dress, pose, photograph, and have sex with. Like Bertrand, Christie, West, and Gein, Brudos claimed to have had blackouts and to be detached from reality while committing his crimes, later blaming his actions on his mother.
In Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, as Archibaldo drags the mannequin to his workshop to burn it, to rid himself of at least one of his fetishes, a leg and shoe fall off signifying not only Archibaldo’s separation from reality but his initial separation from his mother—the instigation of his multiple fetishes. Brudos’s amputation of feet, breasts, and other body parts actualized in his mind his mother’s separation and her confiscation of the black high-heel shoes—in Brudos’s mind, the same event. He desired to incapacitate bodies, freeze them, and arrange them in erotic poses as forbidden and pliable mother substitutes. As Archibaldo burns the mannequin in a furnace, it appears to become alive and dance—in its death it has become the real object of desire. Similarly, Brudos electrified the corpse of Linda Salle to watch it dance.
Hans Bellmer’s dolls prefigured both Buñuel’s mannequin and Brudos’s victims. In an essay on Bataille and Bellmer, Elliott Vanskike observes, ‘The Doll that Bellmer constructed in the early 1930s was a female mannequin, outfitted with a wig and articulated by means of ball joints so that the arms and legs could be manipulated. Bellmer varied the settings for the photographs of his Doll—beds, staircases, the forest. And he varied the arrangement of the mannequin. But whether it was clothed in a chemise and child’s patent leather shoes, or assembled with arms or legs missing or grotesquely rearranged, the Doll was always posed to suggest a certain degraded innocence, an unsettling juxtaposition of childish naïveté and adult depravity.’[230]
Like Brudos’s victim in his photographs, like Bundy’s bodies, many of Bellmer’s dolls had no heads. The dolls and posed bodies—in West’s case, bodies taped until they could not move—were manipulated to cater for Bellmer/Bundy/Bataille/Brudos’s desires. How murderers and artists meet is apparent here—in the disturbed gaze—in which they: ‘explore the limits and potential of desire, the power of desire not just to form the desired object, but to unmake the maker. Confronted by the Doll, the viewer sees the stable dialectic between self and other collapse. To use Bataille’s formulation of this confrontation, “we are faced with the paradox of an object which implies the abolition of all objects, of an erotic object.”’[231]
230
Elliott Vanskike, ‘Pornography as Paradox: the joint project of Hans Bellmer and Georges Bataille,’