The Oregon State Police interviewed Pavlinac and Sosnovske and built a case based on her admissions and knowledge of details never made public. A jury deliberated for three days before convicting Laverne Pavlinac on three counts of aggravated murder. Scared of facing the death penalty, John Sosnovske pleaded guilty not long after.
In many of his long-winded diatribes written and spoken to me about the Bennett case, Jesperson maintained that Laverne could not have known as much as she did about Bennett, the crime scene, and the murder if those details had not been “given to her” by police. Hearing this from Jesperson year after year became nauseating. I felt as if I were speaking to a child at times; at others, talking to someone who could not accept (or was in denial of) facts. For example, in our discussions about the so-called frame-up, Jesperson never mentioned that Laverne Pavlinac and Taunja Bennett knew each other. I found out later that Laverne was a former psychiatric aide at Dammasch State Hospital, where Bennett had been admitted several times because of her mental state. If I’m a cop investigating this murder, that piece of information alone, put together with an admission, becomes almost a smoking gun.
“Look,” I told him one day, “did cops maybe put blinders on once Laverne and John came into the picture? Maybe. Did they give Laverne details without realizing it? Perhaps. But the one thing you’ve overlooked is that they had two people admitting to a murder, sharing intimate details about the crime that had never been made public. Once that occurs in any investigation, everything seems to line up unless it’s blatantly obvious the suspects are lying.”2
*
AFTER DUMPING BENNETT’S BODY, Jesperson spent the night at the Burns Brothers Truck Stop on I-84 heading back to Portland. Not having control over the actual location of where he placed Bennett’s body began to bother him. He knew she would be found sooner rather than later. Yet what could he do?
Jesperson collected his thoughts and figured he’d have to deal with the consequences.
After watching the sunrise, having breakfast, several cups of coffee, even stopping by a table to have a short chat with three Oregon State Police troopers, near 8:00 A.M., Jesperson walked out to his car. Looking to see if there was any evidence of Bennett inside the vehicle, he discovered her purse underneath the passenger seat.
“So I pulled it out and rifled through it.”
She had $2.11 “to her name. Blood money. I kept it.”
He’d already found her Sony Walkman inside the car and threw it out the window “on the Sandy River Bridge, right before Troutdale.” But now he had her purse, which included an ID card. As paranoia set in, Jesperson thought of where he could get rid of the purse and ID card. Those Cannondale bicycle shoes he had worn had to go, too.
Continuing on I-84, he tossed one shoe out the window and watched it fly down an embankment. A mile later, he hurled the other shoe.
Her purse? Shit.
The purse went out the window. But her wallet needed a special place. No one could find it. Also, he needed to put it somewhere he could recall. So he drove past the town of Troutdale, parked off the road close to the Sandy River, got out of the car, walked up a path “where nobody could see me [and] found a wide spot up the hill a ways.” He looked around to make sure no one was around. There were bushes “about forty feet off the road.” He tossed the wallet.
As we talked through the Bennett case, Jesperson asked if I had spoken to Jim McIntyre, the prosecutor, who had convinced a jury to convict Laverne and John.
“I’m going to,” I said.
Four days later. “Well, what did he say?” Jesperson asked. I could tell the anticipation of this call had eaten him up during the interim.
“I’ll go through this one more time, and that’s it. The idea that a ‘cover-up’ or conspiracy took place to ‘frame’ John and Laverne, as you have obsessively upheld, is not something I have found. Not even close.”
He ignored the comment. Instead, saying, “One thing I want to clear up. I haven’t lost sight of the idea that the guy who’s made the mistake here is me. . . . I’m not trying to take the high horse, trying to say that I didn’t do anything wrong. I want to let you know that I have not lost track of why we’re here doing this.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“The only guy who did the really bad thing is me.”
There were days when I thought, while speaking to him, he was telling me what he believed I wanted to hear. At times, I could sense no feeling in what he said, no direct link between his words and emotion. He was a man prone to eruptions of bilious misogyny. He’d hurl a fusillade of insults about his victims while in a constant state of turmoil with his past, the present, and his future. The only part of life that was absolute for Keith Jesperson was where he woke up every morning and went to bed every night. Denuded of basic human rights, though some would argue access to cable TV and other amenities is hardly a man stripped of luxuries, he complained about everything.
As we talked about my interview with McIntyre, the first words out of Jesperson’s mouth, that reckless arrogance he could not control exuding from each breath, was: “I bet he regrets doing the L.A. Times story.”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
In speaking with McIntyre, I explained, I found a humble man who admitted his mistakes. He’d moved on from this mess many years ago. I didn’t tell Jesperson, but I felt a bit embarrassed calling McIntyre about this case.
“What is it that [Jesperson] wants me to admit to? He wouldn’t know the truth if it was a train that ran him over,” McIntyre told me. “Not [only] did all of the evidence point to [Laverne and John], but Laverne confessed to her own daughter after she knew she was being charged.”
I told Jesperson he needed to move on. When talking Bennett, however, he has an unyielding doggedness pushing him to come up with an answer for every possible scenario that doesn’t fit into his paranoid theory.
“That makes sense,” he said, referring to McIntyre’s comment about Laverne convincing her daughter. “The reason why it makes sense is she wants to convince her daughter that she is telling the truth to get John put away.”
“So what?”
“Have you followed any of this?” he asked. He grew impatient, angry.
The next comment I shared from McIntyre riled him even more: “He’s saying that law enforcement framed [ John and Laverne]?” McIntyre asked rhetorically. “We did think we had a rock-solid case, because that’s why we tried Laverne to a jury. All the manufacturing of the evidence was Laverne being shrewd enough to spot ‘the tells’ in the detectives indicating to her . . . what she should say. I’m convinced she’s one of the most premier borderline personalities I’ve ever met.”
Jesperson wouldn’t buy this. “That’s absurd,” he said. “Laverne has a history of going to law enforcement to get [John] incarcerated.”
This was true. But again, so what?
He had no answer. He was back to the cut-out button-fly section of jeans, wondering how Laverne could have possibly known this fact about the crime scene.