Normally, he would have never hung around a bar. But being laid off, no wife, and now no girlfriend, Jesperson found himself with idle time, unable to tolerate the redundancy of his life and that relentless sexual drive inside him. For a guy like Jesperson, with so many negative thoughts constantly running on a loop inside his head, downtime was the enemy; it allowed him to focus on his failed marriage or, he said, his tenuous and abusive relationship with his father, Les Jesperson.
“You’re nothing—a piece of shit on a stick,” his father had allegedly said more times than Jesperson claimed he could recall. “I was his whipping post. His faults in life were my doing. He blamed me for everything.”
At the time that he met Bennett, Jesperson was an out-of-work heavy-equipment operator, collecting unemployment. He’d been labeled an over-the-road trucker near this period of his life. But that was a job he would not take until after he murdered Bennett.
All of his free time was an itch; his inactivity a scab. Jesperson felt inferior. He hated himself and his life.
Compared to Jesperson, Bennett was a peanut. “Petite,” he called her. But anyone, essentially, was petite when put next to this enormous man.
Standing by the bar, Jesperson spied Bennett, now alone, standing by herself, digging through her purse. All that week, he’d obsessed about a recurring fantasy of making a woman his sex slave. It had been some time since he’d had sex. It was an admission that played into a fact that once stalking is set in motion, planning and purpose grow, the fantasy deepens, and this new reality, however contrived, feels genuine, becoming the psychopath’s new normal. Impulse can be difficult to suppress, particularly right after a broken love affair or marital collapse. Jesperson faced both. Princeton political scientist George Kateb once explained it this way during one of his lectures: “You begin by telling a story, and the longer you tell it, the louder you say it, the more you’re taken in by the deception that you thought you were putting over on someone else. It’s now being put over on you by yourself.”
When the same fantasy blows up in your face, in other words, that rejection becomes like acid.
Bennett seemed drunker. But she didn’t have a drink in her hand.
Perfect, he thought.
As he studied her, Jesperson explained in a rather telling letter to me, he gave away how he viewed Bennett in this instance as his possession: “My crazy girl was done [partying] and leaving the building.”
Thus, an opportunity presented itself.
Bennett walked toward the exit.
Claiming it was “something inside” that “made me jump . . . and go out into the parking lot to follow her,” Jesperson decided to “make a move . . . to play upon her earlier expression of hugging me . . . [and] reconnect.”
He saw Bennett “half drunk” and—as he would later describe all of his victims in the same degrading manner by placing the onus and blame on each of them—“looking for a meal.”
If only I could get her into my car, he thought, searching the parking lot, looking to see if anyone else was around and watching. I could get her to do what I wanted.
He followed Bennett. She walked out of the B&I parking lot and wandered over to a nearby restaurant. He watched as she tried the door, then cupped a hand over her eyes to look inside, before realizing the place was closed.
“I don’t have enough money on me to take you out to a restaurant,” Jesperson told Bennett, sneaking up behind her. “But you come with me to my house and I’ll get some more money.”
It was a premeditated plan, he later admitted. Stalking Bennett in the parking lot, he considered: How can I convince her to get into my car? He then found a vulnerability—she was hungry—and made a ploy to exploit it. It was no different from the man with the candy offering it to the child walking down the street alone.
“You remember me?” he said. “You hugged me earlier.”
He could tell Bennett thought about what he’d said.
“I do.”
The sun had set. The air was thin, crisp, and cold. Jesperson used this to his advantage, mentioning how warm it was inside his vehicle, thinking, I cannot force her into my car—there are too many potential hazards in doing that.
Bennett failed to bite.
“Listen, we’ll go eat and then go somewhere else and play pool,” Jesperson told her, figuring she wanted to continue partying.
Without another word, Bennett then hopped into the passenger seat.
People in the neighborhood where Jesperson lived were “nosy and watched what was going on.” He thought about this as he drove to the house.
I need to walk her into the front door without a struggle.
“Something told me to invite her into my house. That it was all I had to do. I was being deviant, Phelps—my motive was to get her inside and hopefully be able to have sex.”
Jesperson parked in the driveway. Turned off the car. “Why don’t you come in for a moment until I find my money?”
He could tell Bennett was suspicious about the request and sensed a problem.
She looked at the house. Then back at Jesperson.
“She really didn’t want to go in,” he said.
6
ROOTLESS TREE
“It is wise to direct your anger towards problems—not
people; to focus your energies on answers—not excuses.”
—William Arthur Ward
JIM MCINTYRE WAS FRANK WHEN I SPOKE TO HIM ABOUT PROSECUTING the wrong people for a murder neither had anything to do with; he admitted his mistakes. The Bennett case and subsequent wrongful prosecution for her murder was not a part of his career McIntyre liked going back to after all these years. But as we talked, the prosecutor opened up, mentioning a theory regarding why Jesperson has become so obsessed with the idea of attributing the blame for the wrongful arrests and convictions of Sosnovske and Pavlinac to corruption and a choreographed conspiracy. Jesperson felt slighted, McIntyre explained, and did not get the attention he thought he deserved, especially from that Los Angeles Times piece.
“It wasn’t about him. That pissed him off.”
Jesperson, on the other hand, responded, “When I got those two people out of prison, McIntyre went to the L.A. Times and got a story made, pretty much trying to make excuses for why they were arrested in the first place.”
That’s unfair, actually. The Times reported a side of the story not generally covered in headline-grabbing, serial killer tales major media sometimes likes to perpetuate into salacious fodder. “A Question of Guilt” went into great detail regarding how McIntyre was at fault. Moreover, it showed that McIntyre was a fallible human being and was going through a sticky divorce involving three young kids at the time he prosecuted Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske. Those aren’t excuses, the prosecutor pointed out. Just facts. Pavlinac’s attorney, Wendell Birkland, was one of Oregon’s most revered and feared defense attorneys. If you look at the trial and study what happened, it becomes clear McIntyre believed he was doing the best job, seeking proper justice, for his county. He led the prosecution against Pavlinac, determined to put away a woman who had confessed to a murder.
Jesperson said McIntyre and his investigators knew Laverne was a liar after talking to John’s probation officer; she “couldn’t be trusted and had a three-year history of crying wolf” about other crimes.