A fundamental excuse authored by a serial killer to explain away the evil he’s perpetrated, without having to take responsibility for it.
“If I was still out there, I might be dead now,” Jesperson said one day as we got to talking about his philosophy of karma, and how his life had turned out. At this stage of our correspondence, Jesperson was trying to impress me. The way I’d played my hand during our early interviews, while selling him on the idea of helping me on Dark Minds (which wasn’t hard), was that he was one of several serial killers I was communicating with and I was going to make a decision based on which one I felt most comfortable talking to.
“Maybe coming to prison saved my life,” he added. “Had I continued on the road I was on, I could be dead.”
He wanted the show to focus on him, his crimes, his life in prison, and his legend, Happy Face. This became his quest early on.
“No way,” I told him up front. “Not a chance.”
“Why can’t you name me? Why can’t I step out from behind the curtain and speak as Happy Face?”
He didn’t get it. I was never going to allow a serial killer a starring role on a television series I was involved in, at least not in a capacity where he was glorified. He knew it was anonymous or nothing.
With the self-absorbed psychopath suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, everything is about him. Not once did Jesperson ever begin or end a conversation with remorse for what he had done. Here he was telling me that had he continued to kill, he might be dead. He had turned the tables on his victims and made stalking and charming and abducting each of them, along with their murders, about him. No matter what we talked about, all roads led back to Keith Jesperson.
“I could have gotten into a truck wreck next trip out,” he continued, ruminating on destiny. “Who knows? When you start thinking about intervention . . . and all the things that happen in the world, and people start questioning why this happened, why that happened, maybe it was by Divine Intervention”—he laughed—“that I turned myself in—to keep myself off the road.”
We discussed prison life. It was not a subject I was all that interested in. He had adapted well to this world. He was where he belonged. He fit into the correctional system as if it had been designed for him. He butted heads with authority once in a while, but they always put him in his place. He has a few friends he hangs out with, keeps to himself, receives scores of letters from people all over the world, media requests, money, and understands that in prison he is among men who are not only like him, but many of whom can end his life at any time. His nickname in the joint is “Happy.”
“I like my life too much right now,” he told me after I asked about the death penalty and why he was so adamant about not helping investigators in those states where he’d killed women who are still known as unidentified Jane Does.
“Why not help them? Why not give their families some answers? You killed these women. You can identify them.”
Part of me believed then that he knew who they were, their full names, and was keeping that information to himself. All serials hold back evidence about their crimes to use later as a bargaining chip. They also take delight in and get an emotional high and twisted kick from the fact that only they know certain facts about their cases. Many will hold on to where a victim is buried so they can take pleasure in being the only person knowing the information.
“Because, let’s suppose I identify a victim of mine and help cops,” he said, explaining why he didn’t want to help in the Jane Doe cases. “These are cases I have already ‘settled.’ But now you have a family who has put a face to the person who killed their loved one and they want revenge. They go to the courts and make a stink. The prosecutor takes another look. All of a sudden, I am staring at perhaps facing trial and now the death penalty.”
As he carried on, listing more reasons for not helping, I considered that most serial killers, when you come down to it, are cowards. They’re full of fear. Still, I set the topic aside, knowing we would revisit it at a later time. Part of my strategy, especially post-Dark Minds, was to convince Jesperson to help identify all of his Jane Does. I was beginning to enjoy the prospect of going to law enforcement in those states behind his back and outlining the close relationship I had with him, offering to act as a liaison in order to convince him to admit he knew who these women were, and maybe hid identifying markers somewhere. There needed to be some sort of redemptive plan on my part besides his television work. I needed, for my own reasons, to make our relationship pay off for his victims’ families. It was one of the motivations for putting up with all the phone calls and letters, all the idiotic spew coming from his mouth, on top of all the space he occupied in my life. I needed to tell myself that some good could come from it all. It was the only way I could continue.
“So you would never help?” I asked. “Is that what you are telling me?”
“Why, Phelps? Is it important to you?”
“You know it is.”
“If they agree to take the death penalty off the table, I might reconsider.”
There was that power. It reminded me that what we cannot control annihilates our trust and we begin to fear the worst. This is the perpetual state of the serial killer.
*
AS A BOY LIVING in Chilliwack, Canada, a farming community over the United States–Canadian border, northeast of Peaceful Valley, Washington, Jesperson came of age on a large spread of land, with a sister, Sharon, the oldest; an older brother, Bruce (born on the same day as Keith, April 6, two years prior); a younger brother, Brad; and the youngest, Jill. Within the pages of a detailed 603-page manifesto he wrote for me, Jesperson explained that on the farm one day he found “an injured raven, its wing broken.” He put the bird in a box and, over the course of several days, “nursed it back to health.” He was shocked, however, to come home from school one afternoon and find the box and bird gone. Neighbors had been involved with someone else close to him in the theft. They had taken the bird and pinned it to a tree, according to Jesperson, and tossed knives at it until it died.
Deciding on a “code name” for my anonymous serial killer was an important part of preproduction before I hit the road to begin shooting season two, when Jesperson came aboard. I explained this to him, talking about the process we were going through in selecting a stage name for him. My first choice was “Dante,” the implication being that I was entering hell and interacting with the Devil. Time would prove this name to be spot-on.
He liked it.