“Sure,” he said, pointing to his car. “Get in.”
In a second scenario she later laid out, Slagle claimed Jesperson invited her into his car to “warm up.” And once inside, he suggested they “drive around” for a while.
Either way, along with her baby, Daun Slagle had just stepped into Keith Jesperson’s comfort zone.
*
THE NOTION OF A serial killer enticing a potential victim into his comfort zone was a topic I was interested in. This was one area within my work with Jesperson that could benefit women. If would-be victims knew what to look out for, maybe a situation could be avoided. In this respect, Jesperson could help.
I asked him how a woman might avoid a predator and, if she does find herself in his comfort zone, is there anything she can say or do that might convince him to let her go? I’ve always told women (and children) to fight to the death at the first location if they sense an abduction is taking place. Meaning, never allow an abductor to take you to the second location. Let’s say you’re jogging and an attacker rolls up on you. Fight to the death there. Because you will die—and likely be tortured and raped for hours—at the second location he takes you to after the abduction, regardless of what he promises. The idea is to not allow a predator to get you into his comfort zone. When confronted with resistance (i.e., throwing them off their game) and a determined person fighting back, most predators will run away. They won’t risk getting caught.
Jesperson thought about my question, but didn’t immediately answer. My experience told me he either took it seriously or was trying to come up with a response he thought the public wanted to hear.
“You know, that’s an open-book question,” he began. “I mean, there are so many variables. The person, the killer, must also want to be a killer at that time. You’re not a killer all the time.” He laughed. “If people were killers all the time, there’d be a lot more dead bodies out there. There is a choosing of when it is convenient to kill and when it is proper to kill. And each [serial killer] has [his] own set agenda, or trigger, so to speak. Now, if someone is in our clutches, well, let’s say this, if the person stayed honest . . .,” he said, but then stopped.
“What is it? ‘If the person,’ you were saying?”
“If you were . . .,” he tried to continue, but stumbled. He did not know how to answer.
“So you don’t know?”
Whenever I confronted him with a question he had trouble facing, Jesperson couldn’t admit defeat. He’d talk his way through it. He now collected his bearings and continued: “Some killers catch and [the victims] know right away they’re caught. Other killers sit back and decide at a later time whether that person is going to die or not.”
He further explained how a victim might not even know she is in the midst of a killer’s fantasy. In that sense, he said, none of his victims knew. He wooed and charmed them, convincing each they needed something from him: a ride, booze, cigarettes, food. And then he decided to kill them.
*
JESPERSON DROVE DAUN SLAGLE to a rural section of town, all under her direction, he later told me, adding, “How could I have known where to drive?”
There were houses along winding roads. He said Slagle pointed him toward a dead end, a cul-de-sac with no houses, thickly settled woods nearby. He claimed she wanted to use nature’s bathroom. He also said she was drinking and had asked him to stop at a store so she could buy more alcohol, which he did.
They’d talked along the way. Mostly about the predicament she found herself in on that night. She explained she was waiting to go back home to her husband, who she’d hoped would be in bed sleeping when she walked in.
“I’m just returning from Washington,” Jesperson explained. “I had a birthday party I went to. . . .” Traveling through California, having murdered Bennett months before, Jesperson understood he had within him the potential to kill. His emotions were volatile. If it happened again, he might not be so lucky in getting away with it. At this time, he claimed, he was not a serial killer. He had killed Bennett. But in picking up Daun Slagle, he was not only attracted to her sexually, but from his view, she had come on to him.
“Name’s Keith,” he told her. “I’m from Portland. I’m heading to Sacramento to start a trucking job.”
Two scenarios played out here: Either Jesperson planned on not doing anything to her, other than giving her a ride, or he knew in that moment she’d wind up dead by the end of the night and her knowing identifying information about him wouldn’t matter.
“I did not plan on doing anything to her,” Jesperson told me. “She said she wanted to party. That narrative she gives you of us meeting, her feeling ‘eyes on her,’ all lies. She was sitting, breast-feeding her kid. When I rolled up, she showed me her tits. She asked for a ride. She had me stop at the store. She bought us beer.”
“Specifically, before the attack started,” Slagle claimed, “he asked me about blow jobs. He asked me if I was the kind of girl that did that for my husband.” She told Jesperson it was none of his business.
“She told me,” Jesperson countered, “that she gave the best blow jobs in Shasta County and that was how we got started on the subject.”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Slagle told me, “you are the only person that I ever told this to. I told him that at one time one of my boyfriends had told me that I was the best blow job.... But I did not say it in the context that he is saying it, like I was ‘trying to entice him.’”
“There I was talking sex with her,” Jesperson explained, “expecting to get the best blow job in Shasta County and then didn’t get it. Why talk about it if we were not going there? Even Daun will have to admit to how anyone could be confused over her intentions.”
Slagle had her baby with her. She needed to use the bathroom. She was in distress over a fight with her husband. She asked a stranger for a ride. They talked. She says one thing; he says another. Jesperson insisted that after she bought beer, she asked him to take her to park somewhere in the woods so they could drink and she could go to the bathroom.
“I took it as a come-on,” he said.
“None of that happened,” she claimed. According to her, before she got out of the car to urinate in the woods, Jesperson talked about how “pissed off at his wife” he was that “she never would do [oral sex].”
When she came back to the car, Jesperson got out and walked into the woods without an explanation. Slagle assumed he was going to the bathroom himself.
“I didn’t see him for what felt like a long time,” she said.