Lust Killer Read Free Page A

to go out on a date when school was over. Stealthily now, because he had learned that high-heeled shoes were not to be noticed overtly, he stared at his teacher's footwear, entranced by the slim heels. When he could stand the temptation no longer, he stole the shoes she kept in her desk and hid them under blocks in the play area so he could take them home with him. But somebody found them and took them back to the teacher. Days later, he confessed that he had taken them.
    She was more puzzled than angry. "Why on earth would you want my shoes, Jerome?"
    He turned red and ran from the room.
    Jerry Brudos failed the second grade. He was a sickly child. He had measles and recurring sore throats, accompanied by swollen glands and laryngitis. As an adult he remembered having a number of "toe and finger operations," probably to treat fungus infections around the nails. He had two operations on his legs. What the defect was is obscure; Jerry Brudos himself recalls only that there was something wrong with the veins in his legs: "The veins were ballooning and I had to have the operations because they were not doing their job."
    He often had migraine headaches that blinded him with pain and made him vomit. Because of the headaches and because he seemed not to comprehend the basics of reading and writing, school authorities thought he might need glasses. His brother had sailed through school with As, and Jerry's I.Q. tested normal or above, but he sometimes seemed vague and slow.
    Glasses were prescribed but they were hardly more than window glass, a placebo. He still had headaches, an ailment that would plague Jerry Brudos to greater and lesser degree for much of his life.
    He must have spent some time in bed recovering, locked in with the mother he avoided whenever possible, but that part of his life is blanked out in his memory. He got along all right with his brother, despite the fact that Larry excelled in school and was always deferred to by Eileen. Jerry seldom saw his father because he was always working—on the farm or on his town job.
    Jerry's fixation with women's shoes was solidly entrenched. On one occasion his parents entertained visitors who brought their teenage daughter with them. The girl wanted to take a nap, and lay down on Jerry's bed. He crept in and was transfixed to see that she still wore her high-heeled shoes. As she slept, one of the heels poked through the loose weave of the blanket. The sight was tremendously erotic to Jerry. He wanted her shoes. He worked to pry them off her feet, but she woke up and told him to stop it and get out of the room.
    It should be pointed out that Jerry Brudos was still a small boy when his shoe-stealing episodes took place, well under the age of puberty. Sex, of course, was a subject forbidden in his home. Like all farm-raised youngsters, he observed sexual behavior among animals. He knew what bulls did to cows, and he knew that boars quite literally "screwed" female pigs with their peculiar but functional penises. He had seen dogs and cats mate. But he would never dare to ask how intercourse between humans was accomplished. Touching and hugging, any demonstration of affection, was discouraged in the Brudos home. He heard jokes at school, and laughed with the other boys—remembering particularly a joke about a girl sliding down a banister—but he never admitted he didn't understand the punch line or the point of the joke. And he was completely unable to make the connection between the strange excitement he had when he was around women's shoes and his own sexual drives.
    It was just something that was peculiar to himself. But he sensed that it had to be a secret thing. Why else would his mother have been so enraged over his shoe theft when he was only five? Why else would the teenage visitor have been so angry with him? And his very need for subterfuge and secrecy made his obsession all the more thrilling.
    Looking at the fair, bland-faced Jerry, the child who seemed dull in