Free Lust Killer by Ann Rule

to compare it to. (FBI fingerprint files had single-print information only on the ten most-wanted criminals.)
    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 they are so few and far between, it would seem that someone reading news stories of her disappearance would have come forward if she had been seen that night. A search of ditches 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, the men and dogs that searched would have found her.
    There seemed to be no ready explanation for the fact that her car was found in the parking lot at the foot of the Santiam Pass. Jan Whitney had been headed for McMinnville, and a detour toward the pass made no sense. Yet her car was there. Why?
    Jan Whitney was gone, just as inexplicably as Linda Slawson had disappeared in Portland ten months to the day earlier.
    Thanksgiving came two days after Jan Whitney vanished. Jerry Brudos took his family away for the holidays to visit friends and family. While they were gone, there was an accident. A car went out of control on Center Street, sliding on rain-slick streets and crashing into Brudos' garage workshop, damaging the structure and punching a hole in the exterior wall. The Salem police investigated the accident, but they could not get into the garage to estimate the damage because the doors were all locked.
    When the family returned, Jerry was agitated to see that there was a hole in the wall of his private workshop. He told Darcie he would take care of some things and then call the police.
    A few hours later, he contacted the Salem police accident investigator who had left a card and unlocked the garage so that the officer could check the damage from the inside. When this was accomplished, Jerry nailed boards over the splintered wood and the workshop was completely closed off again.
    Jerry was away from home that night for some time, but Darcie didn't think much of it; he was often gone for hours, and he never explained where he had been when he returned.
    The Oregon State Police continued their probe into the mysterious disappearance of Jan Whitney, but all the man-hours of work netted exactly nothing.
    Oregon State Police Lieutenant Robert White attempted to trace the anonymous correspondent who had mailed a letter from Albany. Sent in a plain envelope, and tediously printed as if the writer wished to disguise his handwriting, the letter said the writer had been at the Santiam rest stop where Miss Whitney's Rambler was abandoned, and, more startling, indicated that he had been present when Jan Whitney disappeared.
    Lieutenant White appealed to the public, asking the informant to come forward. But that was the end of it. If the writer was telling the truth, he chose for his own reasons to remain silent. He might have gleaned his information from newspaper accounts of the missing woman, or he might have had actual knowledge, either as a witness or as a perpetrator. There was no way of telling.
    Jerry Brudos continued to commute to his job at Lebanon, Oregon—a tiny hamlet just east of the I-5 freeway-beyond the Albany exit.
    Christmas came, and the new year, and Jerry Brudos celebrated his thirtieth birthday. His headaches had improved for a while, but then he felt nervous again and they returned worse than before.
    Darcie thought about leaving him. But she had no skills to get a job, and there was no money, and she did not believe in divorce.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Jan Whitney had been missing for four months when spring came again to the Willamette Valley. Linda Slawson had been gone for fourteen months. They had disappeared fifty miles apart, and