Daily News from New York, New York • 123

lg SUNDAY -NEWS; -JUNE 28, 1970 III 3 ills mm xx llilll wiiir -x 7 A Justice Story Coeds Karen Sprinker (left) and Linda Salee (right were two of the four doomed young women whose paths unfortunately crossed that of electrician Jerome Brudos. He admitted killing all four. Was IKIos Ubby Four attractive young women perished at the hands of a sex-driven killer before a sharp-eyed detective found a clue in an oddly-bent bit of wire By KERMIT JAEDIKER Not until May 10, 1969. The Long Tom River is a narrow country stream winding lazily through flat fertile farmland in southern Benton County. May 10 was a Saturday and a lovely one.

George Alontgomery and his son, Boyd, decided to spend it fishing. Carrying their tackle, they went to the Bundy Bridge, spanning the Long Tom River at a point 13 miles from Corvallis, and baited their hooks and lowered them hopefully into the dark water. Suddenly they spotted something that took all the zest out of fishing. Floating in the water, several yards upstream, was the scantily clad body of a girL Police summoned to the scene pulled the body ashore and it was soon identified as that of Karen Sprinker. the neighborhood of the store, scanning noonday crowds for a pretty face, a good figure.

He spotted a girl but had to drive around the block to get close to her. What with the traffic, by the time he had rounded the block, she was gone. There was a big multilevel parking lot near the department store and he went up the ramp to the roof level and saw Karen Sprinker getting out of her car. He went over to her, swiftly for a heavy man, and pulled a gun, a toy job but realistic, and told her to come along with him. All her mother knew was that Karen didn't show up for lunch and never got in touch with her.

AH the college knew was that she never returned to classes. All the -police knew was that she drove to the parking lot and got out of her car and then vanished. The last to go of the pretty ones, the voung doomed, was Linda Dawn Salee, 22, of Beaverton. She was a secretary and a part-time student at Portland State University and was planning to get married soon. Her fiance was having a birthday and she drove her Volkswagen out to Lloyd Center, Portland's big shopping complex, to get him some presents.

It was April 23 The parking garage there was tmder- ground. Linda parked her' car and then went into a smart men's shop and bought a Hue velour pair of slacks and a watchband. Then she headed back to the car. A man stopped her and flashed a badge, actually a phony, purchasable in any novelty shop. He said she was under arrest for "shoplifting' and ordered her into his station wagon.

He was the fat man soft and dangerous. A ROPE was tied around her neck, and He WAS TALL and fattish and pale and made you think of a big: white, soft slug in a young and dying tree. He had thin reddish hair. The eyes in his moon face were small, a faded blue and al-v most lashless. He could smile pleasantly enough, especially when amused or intrigued.

A variety of things amused or intrigued him. Women's high-heeled shoes. He loved to put them on, in secret, of course. Another hobby was photography. He once took a rather coy picture of himself in spiked shoes and panties.

He also made a hobby of kidnaping young and pretty women and murdering them. He photographed them, too, alive or dead, clothed or nude, hanging by a pulley with hoods over their faces. He got away with all that for a year and a half, partly because he had luck and a good deal of nerve and partly because such killers are usually difficult to track. One of the best keys to the solution of a murder mystery is the personal motive, but he killed quite impersonally, although not without a certain passion. The locale was Portland, and environs beautiful, caught in a circle of foothills rolling east to snow-capped Mt.

Hood while to the west lay the Tualatin Valley and the Coast Range Mountains and, less than 100 miles away, the Pacific Ocean. There was a wave of terror, but not in the beginning, just a vague unease. One girl after another vanishing and none of them the type that runs away. The first to go was Linda Kay Slaw- -son of Alohar a beautiful 19-year-old blonde who sold encyclopedias door to door. She disappeared early in January of 1968 while seeking orders for books in Portland.

She was described as dependable and happy, scarcely the dissatisfied kind of girl that usually pulls up stakes suddenly. A search of the car she was using disclosed her purse and that got police to wondering. If she ran off, why leave her purse? Another thing she failed to pick up a check for $125 due her from book sales. A runaway girl could use $125. And yet there was nothing solid to prove that she hadn't run off.

The second to go was Jan Susan Whitney, 23 and attractive, of McMinn-' ville. On Nov. 26, 1968, she drove to Eugene to see about reentering the University of Oregon. After getting registration information, she got into her 1959 red and white Rambler and headed northward. On Interstate 5, she stopped to give a couple of hitchhikers a ride.

A few miles later, the car developed engine trouble. She just managed to get over to the Bide of the road at a rest stop north of Albany when it stalled. A green-blue station wagon came along and stopped and the man at the wheel offered Jan and the hitchhikers a ride. He was tall and pudgy and had small eyes but a nice smile. Jan and the other two joined him in his car.

He dropped the hikers off near Salem, which is 40 miles from Portland, and then drove on. Later, after Jan was reported missing, police searchers found her car locked and parked at the Interstate 5 rest stop. Karen Elena Sprinker of Salem was a pretty brunette 19-year-old coed majoring in chemistry at Oregon State University in Corvallis. On March 27, 1969, she had a date to have lunch with her mother at Meier Frank's, a large Salem department Btore. That very day, the fat man.

was In her hands were bound in front of her. Tied to her body was a weight, a 60-pound cylinder head from a Chevrolet. The weight was designed to keep her at the bottom of the river but had failed to do so after formation of body gases. Divers groped around the river bottom and two days later brought up the body of another girl Linda Salee. Her hands, too, were bound.

Around her neck was a pink commercial cleaning rag. She had been weighted down vith a 40-pound over-drive unit from a Ford transmission. Both girls had been strangled Linda by hand, Karen evidently with the rope around her neck. The pink rag around Linda's neck was believed to have been a gag that slipped from her mouth. Both girls were known to have worn panty hose.

These were missing and so were their shoes. What clothing there was on them suggested that someone else, a man, had put the clothes on. They just weren't put on right, as a girl would have done. Evidently the killer had first stripped them and then later partially dressed them. The auto parts and other material were removed to the State Police crime laboratory and there Lt.

Robert Pen-nick, a highly perceptive man, made an interesting discovery. A wire had been wrapped around one of the auto parts, probably to lug it along the ground, and the wire had what Pennick recognized as an underwriter's knot. That, in Pennick's opinion, meant the killer might be either an electrician or A GAIN the kidnaping, for that's what it was, went unwitnessed. Police investigating Linda's disappearance learned simply that she'd gone shopping and that the gifts she had bought were not in her car when they searched it. Women reading news reports of the disappearance were now getting scared.

One girl had made a luncheon date with her mother and failed to show up. bought her boy friend some presents and never gave them to him. One left her car right out on the highway. Strange. And yet investigators couldn't call it murder..