My grandfather had a decaying tooth. He explained to his son that this was how the Phelpses dealt with these types of setbacks in life: You man up and take care of the problem yourself. You get good and trashed and you pull that problem out with whatever tool can get the job done, bleed into a bucket, finish that damn rye, and continue on with your day. The world did not owe anyone an easy life.
Hearing this horrific story, I realized that we don’t choose our lives; our lives choose us and we decide how to respond. My paternal grandfather, Harold Phelps Sr., a man I’ve never met, died at “thirty-nine or in his early forties,” my father told me, “I don’t know. Your grandmother kicked him out of the house long before.” Harold drank himself to death. Dad was a witness to the sickness of his alcoholism. This tooth-and-bucket story was one of several my dad shared—shielding us, of course, from the more violent and abusive tales. Another favorite was how my grandfather used to turn the gas stove on in their Hartford apartment and leave it running without lighting the burner. My dad never knew whether he did it intentionally, or passed out while trying to cook something to eat. Either way, those experiences of living with an alcoholic were enough to send my father running in the opposite direction, never having touched a drink himself.
My oldest brother, Mark, and I, however, inherited the addiction gene, which was what put me in CCIE, that prison on the hill, every Monday night for five years of my life. I’ve never gone to prison as an inmate. I’d step into CCIE on Mondays and speak to hundreds of men serving time, many of their crimes a by-product of alcoholism and/or drug addiction. I was part of a group on the outside supporting the in-house drug and alcohol abuse programs. This is why I believe having had that experience drove me toward wanting to understand the criminal mind later on in my professional life—my motivation for focusing on true crime.
I could relate to these men. Standing in front of hundreds of convicted criminals, incarcerated for a variety of serious crimes—murder to manslaughter, DUI to theft, battery to violent assault and rape—and having each one of them stare back at you, expecting something profound to come out of your mouth every Monday night, is a humbling experience. It instills the absolute belief that we take the most basic gifts of life—a sunset, the smell of a flower, the sight of a boy and his dad walking in a park—for granted.
“You need to do it,” I was told by a friend the first night, terrified to step into a prison and tell my “story” through a microphone, pacing, delivering a monologue about my drunken history like a stand-up comic in front of hundreds of men I’d never met. It was 1995. I had been sober six months. Yet, those men taught me more about making judgments than I could have ever figured out on my own, regardless of how many times this guilt-saddled Catholic had heard otherwise. Before going up to the prison, I’d condemned and prejudged them. I’d made up my mind that men in prison were all bad—and deserved to be where they were. My brother Mark had done hard time. We often visited him. It was awful and sad. Before CCIE, I’d written men in prison off as the dregs of society who merited no empathy from me.
One of the many challenges I faced with Jesperson was putting my judgments aside, as well as culture’s judgments regarding vicious, bloodthirsty serial killers. I had to talk to him under the pretext of wanting to understand what he wanted to say, while grasping what criticisms and problems he had with society, allowing him the opportunity to speak freely and talk about why he committed his crimes. But as we entered our third year, what worried me most was: If I accomplished that, would I feel the slightest hint of a human being talking back to me? Would I find a person who once wasn’t a killer, but a simple workingman, married with children?
The meetings I attended at CCIE took place in the cafeteria, which smelled of a revolting combination of stale, institutionalized foods, bleach, and body odor. Standing in front of men who had ripped and ran on the meanest streets, with the worst society produced, men who had grown up without guidance and discipline, feeling all that bottled-up energy radiating back at me, made me realize I was on the same page as far as trying to stay sober. Week after week, this meeting filled me with a real-world judiciousness I could not have gotten anywhere else. I never looked into their eyes and saw their crimes. Addiction, desperation, a self-effacement (at least in those men who were serious about sobriety) stared back. I went to prison to stay out of prison. For years, I stood and bared my soul to these men, sharing my secrets and arduous journey into and out of active alcoholism.
By the time I began speaking with Jesperson, I’d been away from that atmosphere for eleven years, sober for sixteen. Yet, as I thought about it, I could never forget the emotional influence and permanence behind the stories I told and heard. I hadn’t stumbled into true crime, after all, as I had told Jesperson, and maybe even convinced myself. Nor had I chased some hidden understanding within my sister-in-law’s murder. True crime was, it turned out, where I felt most comfortable.
12
WOUNDED BIRD
“There are some wounds that one can heal only by
deepening them and making them worse.”
—Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER IS ALL ABOUT LUCK,” JESPERSON SAID. He was explaining how he dumped Taunja Bennett’s body on that cold January early morning in 1990. “Timing—and the luck of good timing—is key.”
As he scurried up the steep hill, slipping and sliding, grabbing at branches and tree stumps, pulling his large frame up and onto flat land, his one thought was to get the hell out of there. A car had driven by. The only people out at that time of night, Jesperson’s growing paranoia convinced him, were cops and killers.
Jesperson had put on a “different pair of shoes” before he left the house. “A pair of Cannondale bicycle shoes.” It was the reason why he had slipped down the hill, he said. “There was no flex in the shoes.”
Back inside his vehicle, he spun the tires and took off.
“At the corner of that switchback, our cars came into view of each other. My headlights hit the side of a Multnomah County Sheriff’s cruiser.”
It had been a cop whose lights flashed across his face.
There was little concern on the sheriff’s part; Jesperson was one more car out in the middle of the night. Still, as they drove away from each other, what-ifs careened inside Jesperson’s head. It had been a close call. He knew where Bennett’s body had landed would make it vulnerable to being found sooner rather than later. There was nothing he could do about that, however. As he drove away, the feeling he struggled with the most was that this goofy, overgrown kid from Canada, a divorced father, was now a killer, a part of himself Jesperson claimed to have not known existed before that night.
As our friendship developed, Jesperson now trusting me with his secrets more and more, he said something about this murder and the ones that followed I thought I’d never hear.
“She didn’t deserve it. No one did.”
“Your victims?”