“Yes.”
“I had wanted to make love to a woman,” he claimed, recalling that night he met Bennett. “Not kill her. Looking back . . . I tried to justify her death. Had put myself into the situation. Didn’t look past the end of my penis. Sex had been my motive to follow her from the bar. To pick her up and take her home. It just didn’t go as planned. She said I could have it—to take it and let her go ASAP. Not the sexual encounter I saw in my head taking place.”
Was this the serial killer simply telling me what he believed I wanted to hear? Was Jesperson trying to show me he was capable of empathy? He had told me by then I was all he had left. Family had written him off. His kids never contacted him. No one that meant anything to him on the outside had written or visited in years. Nobody would accept his calls.
“You answer my calls,” he said. “At least right now.”
Thinking about this call later, I considered there had to be a wounded mess somewhere inside of me in order for me to speak with a psychopath for years and, during that time, begin to search for the good in him. I told myself this many times. Maybe to feel better. Maybe so I could continue. Maybe to help convince my gut to calm down so I could control those intestinal episodes. Either way, I began to think that to overly demonize someone—anyone—must be wrong.
My job, in going into and continuing a conversation with a serial killer, was not to stare at him under a condemnatory microscope focused on what he had done. It was an opportunity to unravel the emotional state—body, mind, and soul—of men like Jesperson. If my only purpose in what I was doing was to see him as a madman and evil incarnate, which he certainly is, then I would never allow myself the opportunity to understand anything else about him, those like him, or their malicious behaviors and crimes. We get nowhere thinking this way. I needed to concentrate on what makes us uncomfortable about them within ourselves.
A question that arose near this time became: Do serial killers want to be who they are? Did Jesperson wake up one day and become that killer he is? Or, perhaps, did an evil seed germinate and evolve, and then he embraced it?
As would be the case, time after time over the course of our relationship, as I began to ponder these ideas—whenever I thought I had the right questions—information that I had been searching for, for years, would arrive and radically change my feelings and goals.
13
HIGH HORSES
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell
it about other people.”
—Virginia Woolf
SHE WAS OUT “FOR A SPIN” ON THE SCENIC HIGHWAY ALONG THE snaking roads of the Columbia River Gorge. It was early morning, January 22, 1990. A Mt. Hood Community College student, the young woman on her bicycle was thinking about class later that day when she looked into the woods and saw what appeared to be an arm sticking up out of the brush. Scared and startled by the sight, she hit the brakes on her bike, parked it on its kickstand, and walked down the embankment. Realizing what she’d stumbled upon, she rode ten minutes up the road to a café and called police.
Bennett’s head was grotesquely distended because of that length of rope Jesperson had tied around her neck, which effectively acted like a knot on the bottom of a balloon. Postmortem decomposition fluids caused her brain and tissue to swell and bloat. Her jaw and teeth were caved in and pushed down into her throat. What the college kid had seen of her face was covered with dried blood, dirt, leaves, and bruises. Her pants were down around her ankles, her panties intact, untouched, her bra stretched above her breasts, exposing them. Jesperson could later play the na?ve card of novice killer with me, unaware of what he was doing when dumping Bennett’s body, but this crime scene, once the location had been chosen for him by that slip down into the switchback, had been staged for dramatic effect.
No doubt about it.
As the Oregon State Police arrived and word spread of the gruesome discovery, none of the details privy to only Bennett’s murderer—the cutaway portion of her jeans, rope around her neck, the extent of her injuries, how she was found, exactly where her body had been recovered—were publicly shared. The Oregonian newspaper reported a few identifying markers:
. . . unidentified woman, between the ages of 18 and 25, with dark brown hair and brown eyes, 5 feet 5 inches tall . . . found below an embankment of East Crown Point Highway, about a mile and a half east of Vista House.
It wasn’t until a week later when Bennett’s mother, Loretta, saw a sketch of her daughter released by police and called that Taunja’s brothers made a positive identification. In speaking with family members, police learned Bennett hung out at the B&I Tavern. After interviewing the daytime bartender, Detective Al Corson reported Bennett arriving at the bar “sometime around noon to one P.M. . . . alone.... [She] appeared to be in a happy mood, and she purchased a beer at the bar, paying for it with small change . . . [before] talking to . . . two men who were playing pool.... At approximately four to four thirty P.M., Taunja walked over to the bar and asked [the bartender] if she wanted to go out disco dancing.... [The bartender] told Taunja she should not go with these two men because Taunja did not know them and it was not a safe thing to do. Taunja replied she would be okay and returned to where the men were playing pool.”
A second bartender recalled arriving for work at 5:00 P.M. She watched Bennett, whom she knew to be a regular, “hang around with two guys who were playing pool on a table at the east end of the tavern.... One of the men [was] about thirty years old, about six-two, with short blond hair.” All the bartender could remember about “the second one was that he was somewhat shorter.”
None of this information pointed in any way to Jesperson. Once Laverne Pavlinac absorbed enough of the news accounts about the murder, crime scene, and, most important, Bennett’s life (from an Oregonian interview with Bennett’s mother), she initiated a plan to frame her live-in paramour, John Sosnovske, a man Pavlinac claimed routinely beat her. First, she phoned in anonymously. But when that call failed to yield his arrest, she called again with a new version, implicating herself in the abduction and murder, giving cops a story of her and Sosnovske’s bringing Bennett to the Vista House, where she helped John commit rape and murder. She then produced a purse and a cutoff fly portion from a pair of jeans (both later proven not to be Bennett’s).