The name didn’t go over well with network execs, however. Yet, as the network, my producers, and I began debating various names, like anything I mentioned to Jesperson involving him, he went off to his cell and scratched ten pages of screed with his thoughts on names, his philosophy behind why we choose anonymous names for people, along with page after page of additional drivel that made sense, I’m guessing, only to him.
Jesperson’s suggestion for a stage name was “Noodles.” He told me a story about Noodles being the nickname of a kid he knew in school, who had been given the name “because his dick was a ‘limp noodle.’” Another theory was “because he didn’t have much smarts in his ‘noodle.’”
Was this all some sort of a joke? This type of letter and suggestion disgusted me. It told me he enjoyed the attention being paid to him, and made me sick thinking I was the one giving him this pleasure. Anxiety grew as I thought about his letter, manifesting so severely in my gut, I once again found myself doubled over in the bathroom, a cold sweat coming on, fighting off passing out. The pain was as profound as anything I’d ever felt.
What am I doing? Why would I ever sign up for this?
“Listen, man, I am not calling you Noodles, so get that shit out of your mind,” I said the next time we spoke. “And you are not involved in choosing the name. Understand that you are an anonymous voice on the phone. Nothing else! I gotta go. I’ll let you know your name when I find out.”
After I hung up, restlessness came on. I paced. I could picture him hanging up, walking around the prison with a ballooned head, his ego stoked, once again enjoying the limelight as Happy Face, even though we were never going to tell the public his identity while the series was on air.
Finally we heard Raven was going to be Jesperson’s on-screen name. When he called, I explained that the president of Investigation Discovery, Henry Schleiff, had come up with Raven. We all liked it. It seemed dramatic, metaphoric, television-friendly, and easy to associate with a serial killer.
“Interesting,” Jesperson said.
A few weeks later, he began signing all of his letters—and most of the paintings he sent me—as Raven.
*
AS WE CONTINUED TALKING about Taunja Bennett and the thought process Jesperson went through in order to dispose of her body, he interrupted the conversation. There was something on his mind. It was important to him, he said. We couldn’t continue without discussing it.
Here was the give-and-take part of our relationship. He could control our conversations by withholding information I asked for until he got what he wanted.
“Why true crime?” he asked.
“What does it matter?”
“Because I need to know,” he said, explaining how he wanted to understand what had inspired me down the path of my professional writing career. He was curious about my background, guessing in a previous life I was a cop, lawyer, or involved in law enforcement on some level. This was his way of learning what he could about me to better gauge how much he could trust me.
“I fell into it,” I said. “My passion was writing and I wrote a true-crime story. It was successful and here we are.”
This was somewhat true.
“It had nothing to do with the murder in your family?”
I knew then that someone on the outside was doing research about my life and feeding it to him behind bars. Because I’d not told him about my sister-in-law’s murder. Not yet, anyway.
“I’m not sure that had a lot—or anything, really—to do with it,” I told him.
Like Jesperson, most have assumed the murder of my brother’s “wife” in 1996 started me on a path into true crime. I considered that myself. Perhaps symbolically or subliminally, yes, that is true. Her murder has revealed to me, from a front-row seat, how a murder affects the family dynamic and resonates through many lives. Inside of that unique space, I can speak with authority and empathy about victims of murder and talk to murder victims’ family members with a certain sincerity. We can relate on some levels.
After Jesperson asked, however, I considered the question, the most common among my readers, viewers, and people who attend my lectures and signings. What was it? I asked myself. I took walks and thought about this. When I drove long distances, I allowed the question to fester. What had brought me to a place where I was able to speak with a serial killer, week after week? Besides an irritating and recurring digestive condition, the subjects we discussed didn’t bother me as much as they might others. Why had I been so comfortable with writing about serial murderers and violence all these years? How could I look at thousands of graphic crime-scene photos without being sickened and made cynical by what a small portion of humanity does to one another? How was I able to walk into a prison, hug a woman who had killed five of her kids, sit down with her, and laugh and talk about her life as though she was a long-lost aunt? It’s not courage. Certainly. Where had I developed this indifference and desensitization to all things crime-related?
Driving one afternoon through a neighboring town, I came to an intersection with stop signs on all four corners. On my right was a water tower, rusty and faded blue. Beyond it, the grimy concrete walls and greasy barbed wire of Osborn Correctional Institution, at one time Connecticut’s supermax. To my left was Robinson Correctional Institution, a level-three prison. In front of me, up atop a rolling hill several hundred yards long, pastures of waist-high wild grass, the American and Connecticut state flags flapping against a breeze I recall always having blown up there, was a place I knew as CCIE, the Connecticut Correctional Institution of Enfield, a level-two prison. As I stared up the hill, memories flooded.
I drove through the intersection and pulled over.
Even all these years later, with the sun reflecting in jagged Harry Potter bolts off the circular razor wire surrounding the red-brick building on the hill, as I sat in my vehicle, I could smell the ammonia steaming in invisible, sterile waves from the yellow bucket on wheels the cons passing me in the corridors used to mop the waxed floors. I could hear the echo of guards’ voices over the loudspeakers calling everyone to the “chow hall” for dinner. I could see the steel locks on the doors keeping people out and inmates in. I could envision the same women, week after week, screaming kids with runny noses in tow, waiting to see their men doing fifteen, twenty, even thirty large.
And I knew, right then, as my car idled on the side of the road and people drove by staring at me, gazing up at this past life, the answer to what had eluded me all these years: my journey into true crime began the first night I spent inside that prison.
11
THE “REALITY” OF TRUE CRIME
“Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron
or of gold.”
—Henrik Ibsen, The Vikings of Helgeland
AFTER HANGING UP WITH PAMELA, JESPERSON FACED THE STARK RE alization that he needed to cover up his movements for the night, in addition to the disposing of Bennett’s body. He stood over his victim, staring down at her. She would have to stay behind, right where she was, in the living room. First things first: Jesperson needed to go out and do something he viewed as vital to getting away with this murder.