While we discussed what he has learned in prison from the rapists around him, his ex-wife, Rose, came up. Jesperson’s ex-wife is a focal point of his psychosis. He builds many of his arguments and defenses, including justification for the murders, around the dissolution of his marriage, his divorce, a self-proclaimed nonexistent sex life the last two years of his marriage as the impetus, claiming all of it contributed to him becoming a serial killer.
During January 1990, he explained, he’d experienced sweaty nightmares depicting friends having sex with Rose. He felt as if Rose had replaced him too fast by remarrying within “months” after their divorce, at a time when he still loved her. There were behaviors on Rose’s part, he added, during their later years together, which he hated about her, but he understood that they had taken place within the ebb and flow of a long-term commitment and marriage. The one aspect of their marriage during its final phase that bothered him most was Rose shutting him off sexually. “Go stick it in a keyhole” was a common Rose statement, he claimed—one that made him angry every time she uttered it. He would then be “forced” to masturbate angrily, while blaming his wife for the need he developed to seek other women and frequent prostitutes.
“Rose said ‘no’ to me a lot,” he said. “And no meant no! So if I wanted to get off, I had to masturbate—or find some woman that didn’t say no—and we pay for sex for a reason. We know we will get what we pay for.”
*
THE GIRL STANDING AT the bar when Jesperson walked into the B&I that January afternoon was attractive in a no-frills sort of way: dark hair (more brown than black), pretty eyes (reassuring and playful), a coy, charming smile. The one drawback—or maybe it wasn’t in the end for Jesperson—was that she came across as scatterbrained and distracted. Jesperson didn’t like this about her from the get-go. It was a turnoff. He was thirty-four years old. He didn’t know it in that moment, but twenty-three-year-old Taunja Bennett’s seemingly carefree, “loose” nature was due to what a family member told me was a “retarded condition” she developed from not receiving enough oxygen at birth.
Jesperson described Bennett running up to him as soon as he bellied up to the bar, throwing “her arms around me in a hug,” as if they’d known each other.
She became aggressive, clingy. He could smell the consequence of smoking cigarettes and drinking draft beer on her. It was rank, pungent. Still, as Bennett hugged him, he “got a hard-on” and felt “sex was in the air.”
She likes me for some reason, he thought. But why is she being so friendly?
He looked over at the bartender for insight. The bartender twirled her index finger in a circle next to her head, indicating she thought Bennett was “crazy.” Which gave Jesperson even more reason to believe Bennett was going to wind up in his bed by the end of the afternoon.
There can be no doubt Jesperson views most women inside a prism of what they can do for him. He has no respect for females. He sees women as a means to an end, and that end generally involved sex, either bought and paid for, consensual, or forced. Cautious with Bennett, however, during the early afternoon of January 20, Jesperson felt she was looking to swindle drinks out of him, nothing more. He soon judged her as the type of woman he was uninterested in. Looking around the bar, he felt “angry eyes” glaring back at him whenever he met the stare of the other men. This made him even more uncomfortable. Bennett was a pawn, he considered, sent over to play him.
“She’s not all there,” the bartender told Jesperson after Bennett walked away.
Bennett sat at a table with two men. Jesperson “saw no reason to chase after her when she had two [guys] already wanting to get into her pants. . . .”
He walked out of the bar, around the corner, out of sight, on his way back to the house he shared with Pamela Madison.
At home. Bored. Jesperson made a pot of coffee and took a shower while it percolated. He thought about where to go out that night. He couldn’t stay home. Waiting for Pamela to finish screwing her latest conquest and come home to him was not going to work. Pamela could be back in the morning, a week, a month, who knew?
Married on August 2, 1975, to Rose Pernick, though the relationship had been over long before, their divorce was finalized in April 1989, just under a year before Jesperson ran into Taunja Bennett. “I didn’t really want to divorce my wife, but I didn’t like the way it was going,” Jesperson said. “Once we were separated, it was a foregone-conclusion kind of thing. I didn’t . . . want it to happen this way, but I had no control over it.”
His life—postdivorce, leading up to meeting Bennett—“started spiraling.” He “lost sight of what was important.... I wasn’t seeing my kids. I was just creating a bad situation around me and I was getting angrier at the fact that here I am, I’m working, I am continuing to work, and every time I try to work a little harder and push forward, I am being pushed back.”
In the middle of a winter layoff (that pushback), Jesperson had nothing but free time.
Sex with Rose became “nonchalant,” Jesperson further explained. “It became an issue that probably two years before [the divorce] wasn’t an issue.” Not having sex with Rose was a turning point. “I short-circuited.”
Home that afternoon, he thought about what to do for the rest of the evening. He perceived Bennett as an easy conquest, one he could persuade into coming back to the house for some drinks and sex. So he designed a plan. “Pick up Bennett [with the hope of] being able to seduce her into a sexual episode. I saw her as sex only.” With Pamela gone, “My hope was to have a willing woman to share a bed with me for a while.”
I’m going back, he told himself, getting up off the recliner, that pot of coffee swishing inside his belly. It was almost 5:00 P.M. He drove to the B&I this time.
Although he claimed all of this was random and he was only looking for a “one-night stand” because he and Pamela had a history of “falling apart and making up,” Jesperson understood his limitations. In a letter to me, his first objective in heading back to the B&I, seeking out Bennett, was to “get her in my car.” He’d spent that late afternoon at home building up an invented scenario around Taunja Bennett. He wanted a woman waiting for him anytime he desired her. Bennett was now that target. She was someone who could fulfill this fantasy. It wasn’t about a one-night stand. Until Pamela was back home, begging him to forgive her, he said, “Anyone [could] satisfy my wanting of a woman in my bed.”
First, though, he needed to get Bennett into his comfort zone—that car he was driving, which he’d borrowed from a friend. “Once I did that, I felt my charm would carry me. . . .”
5
THE IMPATIENT MANIAC
“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
—Albert Camus