He locked the house. Jumped into his vehicle. Drove back to the B&I Tavern.
Approaching the bar, making sure patrons saw him, Jesperson yelled for the barmaid, “Hey? Can I get a beer over here?”
She looked at him. “Yeah, course.”
When she brought the beer and set it down on a coaster, Jesperson made a point to speak with her. “I needed to make this impression so she knew that I was there by myself.”
As he drank the beer, Jesperson thought about where he was “going to put” Bennett. He’d later promote the notion that the serial killer is most vulnerable just after he commits murder, when he has the body in his possession.
“This is the thing that goes on in our heads: the hardest part is not murder itself, it’s getting rid of the body without being seen . . . The sooner you can put distance between yourself and your victims, the safer you’ll be. We don’t hang around our crimes like [serial killers do] in the movies.”
At the bar, he thought about the Columbia River Gorge near the Vista House monument in Corbett. Jesperson knew the area to be secluded, steep, and with dense forest. He’d spent time hiking there. Knew the layout well. Jagged hills, cliffs, rock ledge. Thickly settled woods all around, winding roads that people rarely, if ever, pulled over on.
Taking one last pull from his beer, he yelled for the bartender.
“Another round?” she asked.
“No. Just wanted to say good night.”
“Yeah . . . sure, man. Take it easy.”
Back inside his vehicle, Jesperson drove toward Troutdale, east of Portland, past Gresham on I-84, beyond the Lewis and Clark State Park. Crossing the Sandy River, heading south on secondary back roads toward the Vista House, he pulled into the monument parking lot. It was packed with cars. Kids, mainly. “Lovers’ lane type of thing.”
If I can get past here, away from those cars, I can drive down to the ravine, and there’s where I’ll put her.
He parked on the side of the road about 1.5 miles past the Vista House.
“All I saw was darkness.”
Perfect.
Leaving the area, backtracking fifteen miles to fetch Bennett’s body in Portland, he stopped at an open-all-night mini-mart along the way to gas up and check to make sure all of the outside lights on the vehicle worked. Last thing he needed was to get stopped by the police for a broken taillight.
As he started the vehicle, a thought occurred to Jesperson. So he reached up and pulled the dome light out of the housing inside the car. Whenever he opened the doors of the vehicle, now the inside lights didn’t go on.
He backed up to the front porch of the house on NE Everett Street. He opened the passenger-side door and went inside to get Bennett’s body.
Before picking her up, Jesperson stood behind the living-room curtains and looked out to “make sure nobody in the neighborhood was watching what I was doing or walking their dog.” It was 12:30 A.M.
“Initially I grabbed her by the arms and began dragging her toward the front door,” he explained. “And that’s when her pants went right down to her ankles.”
He’d cut off the button-fly snap. There was nothing holding up her pants.
After pulling up Bennett’s pants, he “carried her” in both arms—Frankenstein and his bride—“and set her in the front passenger-side seat in an upright position . . . shut the door, and she leaned into the door like she had fallen asleep.”
Certain nobody had seen him, Jesperson drove back to the Vista House, past the monument, and down into the area he’d chosen earlier.
With no one around, he parked on the side of the road, got out, and checked to see if he could find a spot deep enough into the woods, far enough away from the road and secluded, so that nobody would stumble upon her. It was pitch-black. He could not make out his hands in front of himself.
Jesperson opened the door and dragged Bennett by her arms from the car to the edge of the woods, heading deep in. It wasn’t as hard as he’d imagined. The forest was covered with a carpet of “greasy, slimy, dead leaves” that led down into a ravine, making it easy to pull Bennett’s body along.
There was a tree, “or big bush,” about thirty feet in, which poked him in the face as he dragged her by. Crawling underneath the branches, with Bennett’s body in tow, unable to see where he was going, Jesperson slipped on some wet leaves and fell down a steep embankment, an eighty-five-foot drop, Bennett’s body bumping and sliding, headfirst, behind him.
This was the place. He had no choice. He could not carry Bennett’s body back up the cliff. Plus, he considered it to be far enough away from the road, deep enough into the forest, where nobody would ever find her.
Jesperson started to cover Bennett’s body with leaves. As he reached down to pick up a pile of branches and debris, however, a pair of headlights hit him in the eyes.
Shit . . .
But the worst news wasn’t the car driving by—there was no way the driver could see him—it was where he and Bennett had landed after sliding down the embankment. The headlights had shone on an area of the ravine cut in by a dirt road.
“I had placed her body in the middle of a switchback,” he told me.
There she was: one arm over the top of her head (facing south), her pants down around her ankles, leaves and dirt and rubble all over her body, a rope around her neck, her face beaten into a distorted, decomposing pulp.
*
HE HAD A THICK shock of dark black hair, parted on one side, shaved tightly around the ears, slicked over (probably with patchouli oil). He sat on the edge of the couch. His son stared at him from a chair nearby. He’d made the boy sit and watch the display he was about to put on.
In front of him on the floor was a pail, one of those old-school mop buckets with a handle and wooden rollers to wring the long hairs of the cotton mop. On the table was a fifth of rye, half of which he’d consumed. In his hand a pair of pliers. It was 1945. Summertime. My father, that child sitting, looking on, was eight years old.
“Watch me, boy,” the man said. “And learn.”