He was right.
Serial killers trust in the comfort zones they’ve chosen. The FBI specifies a comfort zone to be “defined by an anchor point—a place of residence, employment, or a residence of a relative.” Most serial murderers kill within what the FBI calls “very defined geographic areas of operation”—i.e., comfort zones—and rarely deviate from that space once they feel it is working.
“My comfort zone was in a small area about the size my prison cell is today,” Jesperson explained, referring to the inside of his truck. “I am alone with this person and I have total control over what is going to happen—but not sure it’s a control thing. It’s like a moral thing. When killers kill, it’s because something does not sit well with them.... The control thing isn’t automatic. It’s not something you think about, Phelps. You already know you have it. That’s why it gets easier, because you understand and have them there with you without thinking about it.”
He used a spider and its web as a metaphor to describe how he went about making sure each victim post-Bennett wound up in his comfort zone: “[The spider] knows that’s his kill zone. Basically, a killer instinct is based upon your comfort zone. My comfort zone is a tool to use in murder. It’s like my victim fell into a hole and here I have [her] all to myself. There’s an automatic knowledge that it could happen either way—she can live or die. It’s based on the moral implications of how we look at our victims.”
“Part of that must be rooted in the way in which the victim responds to you, once you have her in your comfort zone,” I suggested. “Seems to me that if she did what you wanted, she’d live—longer, anyway. But any deviation from the fantasy you’d calculated meant she would meet face-to-face with your rage.”
“Yeah, I guess. Take my seventh, Angela Subrize. Everything was going good.” At times, when he started talking about a victim and forced himself to go back to those moments, he grew manic and overstimulated. He’d bounce slightly in his chair, or, if we were on the phone, I’d sense him talking too fast, stumbling over words, almost as if he was dopey. “I was giving her a ride to her dad’s house . . . but then . . . well, well, well, she, she said something I did not like. For several years after Bennett, I never anticipated murder again. Then all of a sudden, it just happened . . . and it was like a switch turned on and I was doing it again and again.”
*
AFTER TYING A ROPE around Bennett’s neck and snipping the ends, while sitting on the couch with his thoughts, Jesperson was startled by that ringing telephone, his girlfriend, Pamela Madison, now on the other end of the line, calling collect.
“Where the hell are you?” Jesperson asked. “Where are you right now, Pamela?”
He was afraid she might be at a pay phone downtown, calling to see if he was around because she was on her way home.
“I would have had to deal with Pamela, had she walked in and saw this,” he said.
A terrible thought occurred to me as we discussed this window of time following Bennett’s murder and the subsequent cleanup. If the entire night out for Keith Jesperson was based on an obsession with finding a woman to please him sexually, did he have sex with Bennett’s corpse? Necrophilia is not common serial killer behavior, contrary to popular thinking. However, several have been known to keep bodies around or revisit them at dump sites in order to have postmortem sexual intercourse.
“No,” he said, insisting that once he hit Bennett, any sexual urge inside him diminished.
As he spoke with Pamela, Jesperson stood over Bennett, who was “stiffening up,” as he put it. “Knoxville,” Pamela told him.
A sense of relief washed over Jesperson. She wasn’t down the street.
“I love you,” Jesperson said.
“I want to come home. I want to be with you,” Pamela said.
A dead woman at his feet, blood everywhere, and Jesperson’s next thought became: The makeup sex when Pamela returns is going to be great.
As the conversation relaxed him, Jesperson looked around the room: at his clothes, the walls, the floor, the furniture, and the mattress. According to him, noticing the blood for the first time “pulled” him out of a panicked state and into a place of awareness, revealing to him the totality of what he’d done for the first time that night.
My God, I did all this? All this happened?
“I wasn’t aware of it until I started talking to Pamela.”
He continued the conversation while stripping his clothes and tossing them into the washing machine. After turning it on, he went back to his bedroom and got dressed.
What am I going to do? I have to set up an alibi. I have to make sure the bartender saw me leave that bar alone.
“For the first time, things slowed down for me as Pamela kept talking. I became rational.”
Again, Pamela said, “I love you,” and explained she was on her way home. She had hoped he could forgive her. It would be a few days, but she was coming back to him.
Jesperson said he was happy to forget and forgive.
They hung up.
As he stood in his living room, understanding that he was going to have to clean the house to hide any evidence of this murder, the instincts to begin the process of concealing what he had done were there, Jesperson explained, because his father, Les Jesperson, had instilled them in him.
“My father had admitted to me that he once killed someone and had gotten away with it. So there was this thought process that I could get away with it, too.”
10
“NOODLES”
“The Devil is always at our door.”
—Pope Francis
KEITH JESPERSON’S IDEA OF RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND/OR GOD is “karma,” the universe. His father had told him religion and God were there for him if he wanted to take that path later in life. However, it was not something Les condoned or approved of for his young family. A strong work ethic, making money, never showing anybody who you truly were on the inside, and keeping the family image and reputation intact were gods inside the Jesperson house, according to a man who equates what happens in his world with there being some sort of celestial plan flung into action by the cosmos. Everything for Jesperson happens by chance, though that unintended consequence can sometimes be expedited by what is supposed to take place in the grand scope of the solar system, Jesperson said—and nobody can change its course once it has been set in motion.