He’s describing the process of detachment.
What concerned me morally as we continued was that allowing a serial killer the opportunity to talk about murder was, in itself, a form of stimulation, beyond him reliving his crimes in the silence of his own head. I feared that bringing Jesperson back to those moments when he took a life, which made him, at times, giggle with a schoolboy’s adolescent jubilation, was catering to his stimuli, cravings, and psychopathy. It was unnerving to hear him laugh while explaining a murder in the most horrifically graphic terms, or when he repeatedly blamed his victims. He’d use the same line—“I put her out of her damn misery”—to explain each murder, not out of habit or lack of explanation, but because he truly felt this way about each of them. My insides twisted every time he said it. I could feel anxiety throbbing through my veins. My hands tightened. My muscles tensed. I gritted my teeth, forcing my temples to pulse. It was after these conversations when I’d notice myself becoming impatient with people. Short. Lashing out for no reason. Our so-called friendship was beginning to affect me, not only emotionally, but physically, mentally, socially.
I worried about feeding or fueling his ego. He took pride and pleasure in talking about his crimes. He’d accepted who he was. He relished the celebrity that those murders and becoming Happy Face had provided him. Was I adding to it? Was I revictimizing his victims?
The answer to all is yes. On film, as long as I kept him anonymous, I felt we were not glorifying him or his crimes. Throughout the two seasons of Dark Minds that Jesperson appeared, I needed to keep him as my villain. A violent thug and bully. Someone who pushed his way through life, trying to get people to do things for him he’s too damn afraid or scared of doing himself. I have a resilient and honorable moral instinct. I consider myself a man who strives to do the honest thing all the time, as well as the best I can. I’m relentless and determined when I want something. I stand by my victims’ advocacy work and the fact that in all of my books I strive to put the victim of murder front and center. Whenever I identified with Jesperson on a subject—say film, art, fishing, vacation destinations, television, literature, whatever—or we agreed and held the same opinions about politics or a news item, I’d hang up (or put the letter down), stare out my office window, and question my sense of self. How could I reconcile identifying with a psychopath/serial killer? Going in, I would have argued we had nothing in common. All serial killers are scumbags, cowards, and cannot speak intellectually about anything worth my time. But the more we spoke, it became clear we did. And this frightened me.
He’d ask about my family. I’d ignore the question, instead replying, “Let’s keep it professional.” Or, after not speaking for a few weeks, he’d wonder where I was and, perhaps in a moment of letting my guard down, I’d say my daughter had a series of volleyball games, or my wife’s mother was ill, or I was traveling, researching a project. He’d catch me sometimes after I went to weekday morning Mass and I’d let him know where I’d been. In my emotionally stronger moments, I’d say: “Look, don’t ask me about my personal life—that’s my life beyond what we are doing and you don’t deserve to be a part of it. Do you understand me?”
These tiny snippets of my life I allowed him access to would come up later. He’d work them into a conversation: “Well, you know what it’s like, Phelps, you have a daughter playing highschool sports.”
Any mention of my personal life was confounding; it infuriated me. Understanding a serial killer, what makes him who he is, what motivates the urge inside him to kill repeatedly, requires one to keep a certain amount of distance from the subject, particularly where emotion is concerned. I kept returning to John Kelly’s advice: “Don’t let your guard down . . . he’ll get inside your head.”
As we continued to talk and I felt an unusual comfortableness begin to settle on me whenever speaking to Jesperson, I thought, Maybe he’s already occupying that space.
*
IT WAS QUIET IN the living room. No television. No radio. Just the sound of two people breathing. One heavier than the other. The rhythm of life and death. Outside, night had settled on Portland, and with it a batch of arctic air, crisp, sharp, mountain fresh, blowing in from the north. The moon was about a third visible, a sliver of a reflection magnified by the windowpanes onto the waxy wood floor beneath that mattress where Jesperson had Taunja Bennett restrained.
He straddled Bennett. Then, making a fist, he cocked his arm back and punched her as hard as he could on the side of her face. This one, crushing blow spattered blood everywhere: on his face and clothes, the mattress, the floor, the walls, a few droplets on the television screen.
“Could feel my fist strike . . . the target,” he said matter-of-factly. “So I hit her again . . . then again.”
A frenzy of blows, each one more ferocious than the next, followed. After each strike, Jesperson stopped to check, but “she would not go out.”
“Of course, all Bennett had to do was say the wrong thing and I just exploded on her—that’s where my anger was . . . I had no control over myself.”
Because she was still alive after the initial blows, Jesperson beat Bennett with both his fists. One solid strike after the next. As he continued, he heard Bennett scream: “Mama . . . Mama, please make him stop hitting me.”
Before long, Jesperson entered into a blackout rage. It came on like a hot flash; and by the time it let up and he looked down, he saw nothing but blood. Bennett was unrecognizable. He had no idea how many times he had struck her.
He claimed that no matter how many blows he landed, she would not succumb. So he continued punching and thrashing her face until, finally, she stopped moving.
“Killing someone was not like I had seen it on television,” he recalled.
Stopping once again, he looked down and, now back for a brief moment from that place he’d gone off to, Jesperson saw a “broken face,” adding, “Not only had I failed in getting sex from her, I also nearly beat her to death in my living room.”
In a moment of pure sexual confusion and depravity, he decided “to remind myself why she was there. Sliding down, I unbuttoned her jeans and looked at her pubic hair and vagina.”
He stared for a few moments.
“Looking at her all beaten up,” while she continued to breathe and still squirm, “I knew I had to put an end to her life. No way would I allow her to live after what I had put her through.”
He strangled Bennett with his hands, squeezing “with all” his “might for what seemed like an eternity.”
Two minutes, at least, he assumed. He watched as his hands turned white from squeezing so hard for so long. It got to the point where he could not hold her neck any longer due to fatigue.