In the first chapter of that book, which Melissa dates “August 1984,” Melissa writes about being five years old when her father hanged several kittens from a clothesline, pinned by their tails with clothespins, and watched as they clawed one another to death. The book says that she, her father, her mother, and her siblings lived then in a “quiet farming” community in Toppenish, Washington. She describes—in colorful detail—the yard, the alfalfa fields surrounding it, a “huge peach tree,” her “baby sister” and “little brother” playing on the lawn, the “faint rustlings” of her mother, Rose, inside the house, keeping it “immaculately clean.” Melissa recalls the smell of the basement being akin to “luscious flowers,” and describes how a “stray farm cat” found its way onto the property and into the basement to give birth to four kittens Melissa soon adopted as her own.
It is a dramatic, detailed story of a child, drinking tea in the basement of a farmhouse, an almost dreamlike state to the scene. Melissa paints a picture of putting one kitten in her dress, the feline licking her face as she sang “lullabies.” She writes of “grasshoppers” and a warm “breeze” and “blades of grass” swaying in the wind. Then, after setting what seems to be a scene from Little House on the Prairie, Melissa recalls a desperate need to keep the kittens hidden from “him.” She speaks of how intimidated she was by the mere sound of her father’s voice. It’s almost as if Jesperson enters Melissa’s memory as a wolf creeping through a fairy tale, in search of his Little Red Riding Hood, ready to pounce on her and punish the girl for her transgressions. There’s a dark feeling to it all.
“The only thing about this that is true,” Jesperson claimed, “is that Melissa was five in the year 1984. Nothing else.”
“Fiction,” Thomas Phelan told me as I sat in front of him in Vancouver, Washington, and watched him shake his head. “That whole thing has been a joke. What she says never lines up with anything he says.”
They were not living in Toppenish at the time, Jesperson claimed; in August 1984, he, Rose, and the kids resided in Yakima, Washington.
“All the records available prove this—school, and my brother being an accountant, my taxes. In 1983, I moved back from Canada to Yakima, Washington, and we were living at Rose’s aunt’s home. In the spring of 1984, we purchased a mobile home . . . in Selah, Washington. We stayed there until early 1987.”
In her book, Melissa claims that as she held them to her chest and cried, she “begged” her father not to hurt the kittens. She talks about being all too familiar with the look he gave her that afternoon, same as the tone of voice he used, both of which meant big trouble, just like, she writes, his “sinister half smile.”
From there, she describes how her father pinned each kitten on the clothesline next to one another as they “began frantically scratching at each other.” Then she goes on to tell a story of how her father had tracked down a stray cat before this incident and strangled it in front of her and her brother.
According to Jesperson, none of this happened. The truth was that someone in the Jesperson family had routinely told a story of “tying two cats together by the tail and hurling them over a clothesline” to see which one would win the fight and survive. This family tale went around and around and the kids must have heard it at a BBQ or family gathering.
“That is the only way I can see Melissa coming up with this.”
Regarding his daughter’s story of him “strangling a cat in front of her, and it scratching my arms and me tossing it in the woods,” Jesperson added: “That story is born out of a kernel of truth. I was plumbing one day inside a home my father rented [to tenants]. I wasn’t married. I was under a sink working on a plumbing problem and this cat came up inside the cabinet and dug its claws into my arm and just started going berserk. It drew lots of blood. I stood, grabbed the thing, and wrung its neck. As it died, it pissed and shit on me and I tossed it. It was a reaction to defending myself.”
Jesperson’s father, Les, from that day on, would often jokingly shout during family gatherings, or when they all sat around telling stories, “You need a cat killed, bring it to Keith.”
“I know that’s how she exaggerated those stories into being about me. I mean, just look at the detail a five-year-old recalls in those pages of her book. Come on. Please. It’s simply not true. I am a serial killer, yes, but I did not kill kittens in front of my children.”
*
AS BENNETT’S BODY RELEASED a stream of urine, Jesperson took himself back to the moment of being huddled under that sink, a cat digging its claws into him. Based on that prior experience, he believed Bennett was dead. She was not moving. He had beat her so violently, her face was pushed-in, a bloody mess of tissue and torn muscle.
“To be completely sure, I felt the need to make certain she stayed dead.”
He got up and went into the garage. Found a length of nylon rope. Went back into the living room. Tied it around Bennett’s neck.
“Using a knife from the kitchen, I severed the ends of the rope to keep it a short knot.”
Then a thought occurred to him: I touched her jeans. I put my fingerprints on the button of her jeans to unsnap and pull them down . . . shit.
He took the knife and cut out the area of the button fly he’d touched, before placing the playing card–sized piece of fabric in his pocket.
“When I killed her, time seemed to drag on. Her death came slowly.”
What am I going to do?
Jesperson sat on the couch and stared at Bennett. His mind raced: What had he done and how was he going to deal with a dead body in his living room, blood all over his clothes, the floor, the mattress, the walls, his hands, underneath his fingernails?
While considering his next move, a ringing telephone startled Jesperson.
9
KILLER INSTINCT
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary
that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible,
all things.”
—René Descartes
REGULARLY SPEAKING WITH A SERIAL MURDERER, A DESPICABLE human being who killed eight women, began to trouble me as the years passed. Quite alarming, I became comfortable talking to Jesperson. If one is to read my essays, editorials, or books, a feminist melody, however subtle, serenades in the background. I support women’s rights. Certainly no feminist, I stand by women in any capacity I can, especially where abuse of any sort is involved. What was I doing, I asked myself, befriending a man who hated everything about women? Allowing him a venue to speak his most disgusting and disturbing thoughts?
The pains in my digestive tract grew intense, as if my insides constricted and I couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening, but wait it out. After hanging up with Jesperson one morning in November 2013, I felt nauseous. A cold sweat beaded up all over my body. A sense of vertigo turned into dizziness. So as not to pass out, I doubled over the bathroom sink, splashed cold water on my face, stripped off my clothes, and fought it off on the floor. The privacy of the bathroom was the best place to keep these “episodes,” as my doctor would soon refer to them, hidden. My blood pressure was low, then high. My system was breaking down. I kept much of it to myself, not wanting anyone to know the extent of what was happening. I needed to continue with Jesperson; I didn’t want anyone telling me to stop.
“Stress,” my doctor said after I explained. “Keep an eye on it.”