After releasing his grip: “I could hear her body suck in air to live. She came back. She was not dead.”
He searched for what he called “a solution.”
Making a fist, he buried it into her throat and, with all of his body weight, pushed down hard as he could. Holding this position, his elbow locked in place, Jesperson stared “at her vagina.” He didn’t do this for a sexual thrill, he later claimed; instead, he “waited for a sign of death to come.” It took four minutes, but Bennett then “let go a stream of urine . . . and soaked my carpet.”
8
DEATH BECOMES HIM
“Psychopaths: people who know the differences between
right and wrong, but don’t give a shit. . . .”
—Elmore Leonard
PSYCHOPATHY—WHERE THE POPULAR AND PERHAPS OVERUSED TERM psychopath is born—was derived from the German word psychopathischen . First use is credited near 1888 to German psychiatrist J. L. A. Koch. Translated literally, psychopathischen means “suffering soul.” Interacting personally with a psychopath for as long as I have, you begin to get a sense that when Robert Hare’s PCL-R psychopathy checklist—with items such as “superficial charm,” a “need for stimulation,” “parasitic lifestyle,” “promiscuous sexual behavior,” “impulsivity”—is mentioned within the context of someone such as Keith Hunter Jesperson, you clearly recognize how the psychopath can hide behind “a perfect mimicry of normal emotion.” Jesperson is a master at concealing the killer he was and the psychopath he is. I’ve experienced his anger on a few occasions, knowing in those instances he’d unleashed only a fraction of its full force. Each time it put me in a position of understanding, for one brief moment, on a much, much smaller scale, what his victims might have witnessed.
Dr. Kent Kiehl, neuroscientist and author of The Psychopath Whisperer, a man who’s dedicated his life’s work to clinical brain imaging in order to understand mental illness, especially criminal psychopathy, says, “The best current estimate is that just less than one percent of all noninstitutionalized males age eighteen and over are psychopaths.”
Although a psychopath is said to be born every forty-seven seconds (as compared to 250 births per minute of every day), luckily for the general public they are a rare breed. To speak with one for an extended period of time, however, in order to try and understand what goes on inside his mind, how he views the world, and discuss his innermost thoughts, I needed to allow him to talk at length about a subject not many of us like to confront.
Death.
In what has become a classic American essay, “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argues at one point all narrative is, partly, built on a foundation of, and always traveling toward, death. True or not, I can say that in the dozens of books I’ve written, death is at the center. Death is on our minds daily, not quite often as sex, but a close second. We do things to escape death. We do things to postpone and expedite death. All without having serious conversations about it.
I’ve always thought of a murder in a family as a stone tossed into the water, everything that happens to that family afterward the ripple effect, reverberating generation after generation forever. I’ve seen it in my own family with the murder of my sister-in-law. Though I do not share this feeling any longer, there was a time when I thought I’d had a penchant for understanding or maybe sensing death. Not that I am obsessed with death. Yes, I once volunteered at my local Catholic parish as the altar server for funerals. And my days are consumed with death in all forms. But my need stems from wanting to understand it. There’s far too much we don’t know about death. Most of us want to exist in a world where death is not the final curtain call, for there is life afterward.
In talking with Jesperson, death was a common topic of our conversations, whether openly or in context.
“Death is final,” he said. “I don’t see it in a religious context.” For Jesperson, death is “the end.” You die and become, in his words, “worm food.”
As he talked through this thought, he mentioned how, when a man dies, all of his accomplishments die with him, and cease to move forward any longer.
“So a legacy is important to you, then?” I asked.
“It is to a degree.... I don’t see it as anything other than a remembrance of who the person was.”
Jesperson asked me about intuition once. If I thought some people had the capability to feel the presence of death approaching. I changed the subject. I didn’t want to hear his asinine philosophy about clairvoyance because he’d doled out death at will. His opinions about it didn’t matter to me. Yet, I’ve always believed that if one was to put his ear close enough to his soul and listen, he could hear death coming *
AS SHE GASPED FOR her last breath, the sounds Taunja Bennett made while dying shook Jesperson out of his element. He could hear her choking on her own blood, spittle popping like bacon grease from her mouth, her breaths shorter, quicker, with extended spaces in between—until finally there were none at all. Just the humming of the refrigerator motor in the kitchen nearby.
Jesperson had never killed anyone before Bennett. But as she lay on his mattress, “massive amounts of blood everywhere,” and he watched her take those final breaths, her body stiff and motionless, in his mind he went back to a time when he’d killed a full-grown cat, thinking how it “peed and shit all over me when it died” and how Bennett did the same thing.
The myth of Keith Jesperson capturing and killing birds, cats, and dogs, in addition to strangling helpless kittens, would become renowned in the spectacle of his Happy Face persona. Anytime a serial killer can be linked to hurting, torturing, maiming, or killing animals, it feeds the stereotype and ups his popularity. Indeed, many serials have a history of animal cruelty. But many more don’t. This indelible image of the diabolical serial murderer Keith “Happy Face” Jesperson killing animals was further expedited by Jesperson’s daughter, Melissa Moore, in a book she wrote about him, along with several subsequent television and print appearances Mrs. Moore took part in afterward.