I began to sense that Jesperson was reaching on all of this, and I was wasting my time.
“They had to know she was lying because John never drove a car,” Jesperson said. “McIntyre’s whole prosecution and how he handled it is why we’re here now. . . .”
I asked Jesperson if he was being paranoid again. Was he making McIntyre out to be the big, bad wolf? Was he trying to say the investigators involved made mistakes they did not want to admit—that it was ego-driven? I mean, serial killer (bad guy) and cop (good guy). It’s inherent they should hate each other and point fingers, right?
“But it wasn’t a mistake,” Jesperson insisted. “They built a story based on speculation that this is what happened.”
At times, Jesperson sounded like one of those killers representing himself in court. Desperate. Unable to articulate his story clearly—or, rather, a serial killer who wound up without full credit for his first kill and was now anxious to reclaim it. The fact of the matter is: Jim McIntyre prosecuted the wrong people. They were convicted by a jury based on the evidence. Jesperson came forward years later and was able to get them both released from prison, after four years, and exonerated. No one can change what happened. Thus, for Jesperson, the argument has to harken back to the way in which the investigation was conducted. It’s his only recourse.
All of Jesperson’s opinions, whether he will agree, are built on a foundation of speculation. For example, in a forty-seven-page letter outlining the problems he has with the Times article, Jesperson claimed the Bennett story was in the news after John and Laverne’s arrests—which is true, obviously. He said John and Laverne could have read reports in the media about the murder and used that information to confess. True again. But he also says Laverne “would have been schooled by friends to expect visits from police and prosecutors seeking a solution to the problem” of their stories later falling apart. He claims when “guilty people get caught in the same type of crime . . . their answer” to law enforcement’s question of “what happened?” is always “I don’t know.” Whereas Laverne and John had every detail sketched out for police when they came knocking.
Pure speculation. In the scope of the case, what Jesperson contends doesn’t mean anything.
The first indication of John Sosnovske killing Bennett came in the form of two anonymous calls to the police, both of which claimed the caller had overheard him “bragging about killing Taunja Bennett.” Sosnovske’s name was then put into the system by police. He was on probation. He’d committed violent crimes in the past. On paper, he was a solid suspect. And once that first domino fell—albeit set in motion by Pavlinac—the rest followed.
Jesperson believes law enforcement took Laverne out to where he dumped Bennett’s body and showed her the location. Yet, Laverne had a reasonable explanation for how she knew where to point when law enforcement drove just past the Vista House historical monument on the Historic Columbia River Highway in Corbett, Oregon, and asked if she knew where John had placed Bennett’s body.
Bennett’s body was found in a ravine along the Columbia River Gorge, about seven miles from where Jesperson lived with Pamela. From Portland, you drive past the Lewis and Clark State Park on I-84, head south into the mountainous terrain in Corbett, then drive due east toward Rooster Rock State Park, where you come to the Vista House monument, a popular tourist observatory at Crown Point. The Vista House became a common, tired subject Jesperson always went back to. Pavlinac had told law enforcement she’d assisted Sosnovske in raping and strangling Bennett (with a ligature) on the steps leading up to the Vista observatory. The news had reported only that Bennett was found “about 1.5 miles from the Vista House, before Latourell Falls.”
Pavlinac, while sitting in back of the cruiser as they drove near the area where Bennett had been found, stared at the odometer of the vehicle and counted the 1.5 miles after driving by the Vista House. “Right there,” she said, pointing. So they stopped the vehicle. Along the roadside were spray-painted markings made by detectives indicating the approximate dump site.
It all seemed to fit.
“Look,” Jesperson explained, “when I went out there with them later, I had trouble finding the spot myself—and I was the son of a bitch who put her there. What’s more, think about this—they killed Bennett on the steps of the Vista House? How could cops believe this? That place has constant traffic, tourists, in and out, no matter what time or day or month of the year.”
*
WHEN JESPERSON AND BENNETT arrived at Pamela’s mother’s house, Jesperson decided he was going to have sex with her. Not rape Bennett, mind you. That was never his intention, he said.
Timid about going into the house with a stranger, Bennett said, “I’m leaving my Walkman and purse here.” She placed her Walkman on the seat, purse on the floor.
Jesperson said his “plan B,” had Bennett insisted on waiting in the car, was to get her drunker than she was already at a local bar and take advantage of her after that. As he explained this, he mentioned his true fantasy was to wake up next to “a woman” the following morning. Any deviation from that perfect picture of a man and woman nestled together, spooning and snuggling, was grounds for his anger to appear.
Bennett got out of the car. They walked inside.
Jesperson went into his bedroom under the ruse of getting more money. She walked into the kitchen/dining room.
“My penis was telling me to try and bed her now while she is behind closed doors.”
From his bedroom, Jesperson stepped into “the darkness of the hallway.” He stood alone, in silence, for a brief moment, “watching her move around the [other] room. Her warm body available to my touch. All I had to do was reach out.”
He decided to make a move and see what happened. His rationale? “She had made the first move on me at the B and I.” Here he was back to that hug—a simple friendly gesture of affection by a mentally challenged, drunk girl in a bar.
“Now it was my turn to hold on to her.”
As she stared at a “portrait of Jesus Christ on the wall” while standing in the kitchen, Jesperson snuck up behind Bennett and wrapped his arms around her midsection, as if they were two teens in love.
“My hard-on pressed against her back.”
This was precipitated by a compulsive, patent sexual need he could not contain. Jesperson believed Bennett could “feel me, all of me.” The scene as it now played out fit the fantasy: as she turned and (perhaps tried to wiggle away), he took her reaction as an invite to kiss her.
Bennett recoiled. She wouldn’t kiss him back.
“I guess sex is out of the question, then, too?” he asked Bennett.
She walked toward the door.