She [Bennett] was my first and I thought I would not do it again. But I was wrong. I went to truck driving school and learned to drive. While driving I learned a lot and heard of people that have gotten away with such a crime because of our nomad way of life.... About November 92 I picked up a girl named Claudia in California. On the way out of L.A. my mind went wild with the thought of a sex slave, and when I stopped at a rest area I took her. I taped her up and raped her again and again. I kept her for 4 days alive then I killed her and dumped her body about 7 miles north of Blythe on 95. . . . This triggered something in me. It was getting easy! Real easy! A week or two later . . . I stopped in Turlock, CA, rest area. A hooker became my next victim. This time I just strangled her right there without sex. She was in my truck only five minutes.... I dropped her body off behind the Blueberry Hill Cafe 10 miles south on 99. I placed her body in the dirt and stepped on her throat to make sure she was dead.
My next victim was a hooker I had used three weeks earlier. I summoned her on the C.B. She had a raincoat on. We went through the Normal procedure.... I felt so much power. I then told her she was going to die and slowly strangled her and dropped her off behind GI Joe’s in Salem. I put her against the fence under the blackberry vines and covered her with leaves.
He referred to his fifth victim as “a street person” he’d charmed into his truck while passing through Corning, California. “I stopped at a rest area near Williams and had her. I put her body on or near a pile of rocks about fifty yards north of Highway 152 westbound, about twenty miles from Santa Nella.”
Armed with these details, law enforcement went to work and soon uncovered that, beyond having two people in prison unlikely to have committed Bennett’s murder, they had a serial killer roaming through the country in an eighteen-wheeler, murdering women, now sending letters to a newspaper and including information backed by facts from cases only law enforcement knew of at the time.
As we discussed this period of his life, I figured we were done with the Bennett case. We’d talked about Bennett for years already. One morning, I explained that I needed to move on. I’d done all I could. Fulfilled an early promise I’d made, explaining how he’d felt all these years about the wrongful convictions. On some days, after we hung up, a complete emptiness washed over me. It was as though what we’d discussed was meaningless and what I might accomplish didn’t matter. He was a killer. I couldn’t get through to him. Our opinions would never coalesce.
“Did you speak with Al Corson and . . . ,” he started to ask me after I’d told him I was finished talking about Bennett.
“Ah, ah, ah . . . ,” I said. “Enough about Bennett! No more. Shit, man. Give it a rest.”
A few weeks went by. A source introduced me to Bennett’s brother, Dave Rowe. So I called him. Dave had gone to the morgue with Bennett’s other brother to identify her after their mother called police. Dave couldn’t bring himself to go into the autopsy suite, however, and left it up to his older brother. As we chatted, Dave said he’d wanted to talk about “what really happened” for a long time.
“What do you mean, ‘what really happened’?” I asked.
“That Jesperson committed the murder with John and Laverne.”
“Wait a minute. What did you say?”
“Jesperson killed my sister with John and Laverne. They should have stayed in prison.”
I’d never heard this.
Then Dave told me he once met Jesperson.
“He came to our house about three months before he killed my sister to pick her up and bring her to Seattle, where he was living. I shook his hand on my front porch.”
Seemed no matter what I did, how hard I tried, I couldn’t move on from this case.
14
LONG, LONG WAY
“Survivors look back and see omens, messages
they missed.”
—Joan Didion
THREE MONTHS AFTER JESPERSON MURDERED TAUNJA BENNETT, ON April 14, 1990, twenty-one-year-old Daun Slagle, a new mother with inviting blue-green eyes, sandy-blond hair past her shoulders, left her house in Mt. Shasta, California, having had an argument with her husband. Slagle was not in a good place. She was upset and crying, hurrying away from home with her baby in her arms. Mt. Shasta is about 3.5 hours north of Sacramento, one hour south of the Oregon border. It is a small town of about three thousand, with an elevation of 3,600 feet above sea level. If you are driving on the I-5, the gorgeous snowcapped mountains and dart-shaped evergreens of Mount Shasta creep up and into the skyline.
It was close to 10:30 P.M. as Slagle wandered into downtown. As she walked with her baby, the only “well-lit” place Slagle could think of was the Mt. Shasta Shopping Center, with a drug and retail store, bank, cinema, a few local shops. As she made her way into the parking lot, Slagle spotted two cement planters, about three feet tall: pillars, so to speak, welcoming shoppers as they walked in through the outdoor area entrance. She decided to sit down on one of the planters and take a moment to figure out what to do. Married just three weeks, Slagle had left the house to avoid a heated confrontation. There was a sense of an end, she later told me. Within three weeks of this night, she and her husband would separate and initiate divorce proceedings. Making matters more complicated, Slagle was in the very early stages of pregnancy with her fourth child. She’d dropped her two girls off at their grandmother’s earlier that day.
Slagle passed a couple of vehicles in the parking lot on her way toward those planters. There was nobody around she could see. It was late. The mall itself was closed. Jerry’s Restaurant, situated in front of the parking lot on West Lake Street, was open twenty-four hours. Maybe she could settle there and have some coffee and think things through.
As she contemplated where to go, she said later, she “could feel eyes” on her. “I just kept thinking I was being watched.”
Looking around, she didn’t see anyone.
After fiddling with the baby, who was swaddled inside a blanket and zipped up inside her coat, she looked up again to see a large man standing in front of her, leaning against the hood of a bronze-colored, late-1970s Chevy Nova. He had his arms folded in front of himself.
Oh, God, please don’t come over here and talk to me, she thought.
Slagle had no idea how long he had been watching her.
Go away, go away.
Before she knew it, the man was standing in front of her.
After an introduction, Jesperson mentioned how he’d had trouble with his wife, had separated from her, and was in the process of getting divorced. “I miss my kids,” he said, according to Slagle.
At some point, after the two of them talked, she told Jesperson she had to use the bathroom and asked if maybe he could drive her.