“No meant no,” Jesperson explained to me. “I was, in my mind, in line to get sex with her to hopefully provide enough foreplay so she would be a willing sex partner. It was a gamble, Phelps. But I did not look at it not working.”
He described what happened next, using the analogy of her being “a fly and I . . . a spider.” Any hope he had of a “great experience” turned into “wishful thinking.”
Still, this was not what made him angry.
He walked over to Bennett, who was now standing by the door. He then “led her over to my bed in the middle of the living room and pulled her down onto the mattress, kissing her, even though she didn’t kiss me back.”
Bennett stared at him. He could tell, from the look in her eyes, that “she was not in the ‘having sex’ mood. If I was to have sex, I’d have to take it from her.”
Bennett must have known she could not stop a three-hundred-pound man from taking what he wanted. So she begrudgingly obliged, according to him, but not before saying, “Hurry up and get it over with.”
In these words, Jesperson heard his wife: “Go stick it in a keyhole.” Overcome by intense and overwhelming feelings of shame, humiliation, and, of course, anger, a “cue”—he called it—had turned on inside him.
Was this a “trigger,” that common term used when talking about serial killers, a reaction to life’s stressors turning an evil switch, setting the psychopath on a course of which he cannot turn back from? Some experts claim a serial’s “trigger” begins with the choice of victim: Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, and the “young muscular men” he murdered; Wayne Williams and the “poor, young black boys”; Ed Gein and “heavy, middle-aged women who resembled his mother.” In Jesperson’s case, however, one of his triggers centered on what a female in his presence said to him. Her race, what she looked like, color of her hair, age, size, eyes, none of that mattered.
He told me he knew in that moment that having sex with Bennett—if he had gone through with it—would have been rape, adding, “Often, sex with my wife Rose was like that. Not in the mood, she’d spread her legs and tell me to hurry up and get it over with.” What’s more, his life situation made him even “angrier.” Mainly, “Pamela not being there to have great sex with.” In Jesperson’s world, the women are always to blame.
He straddled Bennett. Stared down at her.
“I had never struck a woman before.”
The longer he looked into Bennett’s eyes, “the angrier” he became “over the situation.” He decided that letting her go at that point would turn out bad for him. He’d held her against her will. That alone, he said, would “land me in prison.”
“How hard could it be?” he asked himself during this pivotal moment when he first contemplated murder as an option to resolve an emotional, social, and psychological conflict.
“How hard could what be?” I asked.
“To slug her in the face and knock her out, carry her to the car, and leave her someplace.”
7
THE SPACE BETWEEN
“Why’d they all have to come to me to get killed?
Why couldn’t they kill themselves?”
—Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
TALKING TO A SERIAL KILLER, INVOLVING YOURSELF IN THE MADNESS inside his head on a regular basis, is research I needed to view as a clinical experience, or convince myself that it was, anyway. I’m no forensic therapist or psychologist. I’m a journalist. Generally, my goal is to interview murderers, get their stories, and move on. Speaking for five years to a man who had murdered eight women in such an intimate, violent manner was never part of what I’d signed up for when I got involved with writing true crime back in 1997. But here I was intimately gripped by the Devil’s talons.
As the months passed and we entered into a more structured, interviewer-interviewee relationship, Jesperson became comfortable with telling me his secrets. Some of what he said troubled me. He wrote me a long letter in 2012, for example, not for any particular reason other than to spout off about a fellow serial killer, Tommy Lynn Sells. Sells was executed in 2014 and claimed to be behind “dozens of murders,” linked by law enforcement to seventeen, many of them children. Sells was the bogeyman. He once said: “I am hatred.... I don’t know what love is.”
Jesperson had written to Sells, trying to “organize” a “network” of incarcerated serial killers to trade information about people who write to them. Jesperson wanted to create a database of “good” and “bad” pen pals, those “who help” inmates and those “who are full of shit.”
A serial killer union? I thought while reading this letter. A directory? What in the name of hell?
In corresponding with Sells, not realizing he was looking into a mirror, Jesperson found an arrogant, self-centered, narcissistic, ego-driven, “angry” man, “who felt the need to act tough” toward him.
“I laughed at his arrogance,” Jesperson said of Sells. “If he was put near me, I think he would hide.”
This letter, like many, was beyond the scope of what I’d ever planned to do with Jesperson. It was great water-cooler talk, but not the research I was interested in. Still, what I learned by talking to Jesperson about other serial killers was that in every Jesperson rant or diatribe another layer of who he is peels away without his realization. In this same letter about Sells, he said, “I don’t think too much of him as a person. He claimed more deaths than he did.”
One serial talking about the other: I don’t think too much of him as a person.
In-fucking-credible. You sit back and think about this remark and it makes you realize you’re dealing with someone, a true psychopath, who thinks in a totally different manner than most human beings, which is something the general public overlooks when considering the mind of the serial killer. Unusual and irrational thoughts plague serial killers, as they have no capacity for gratitude or concern. Most people will see a bird with a broken wing and find it within himself to help; the sociopath walks by without considering that the bird is hurt and likely sees himself kicking it out of his way. What’s more, the public can easily get caught up in taking a lot of this for granted while watching serial killer films and dramas on television, along with so-called unscripted true-crime television, Dark Minds included, ultimately becoming desensitized to actual crime victims and their true stories.
Most letters and conversations with Jesperson often began with him talking about someone or something besides himself—Tommy Sells in this case—but then quickly coming back around to focus on him. In the Sells letter, Jesperson went on to talk about “stages of death to us killers.” There were different levels, he explained, referring to his life as a serial killer: “Inside our [heads] we make up our minds on people we meet. Give a life span to those who cross our paths—even if we haven’t physically killed them, our minds are convinced they are dead already. Any good feelings we have are gone. Since we have decided they are already dead to us, to physically kill them isn’t too much of a step up to complete with no real emotion to carry it forward.”