“That’s not true,” Jesperson said. “Never happened that way.” (A police report backed up Jesperson’s version.)
Slagle was puzzled, she said. They’d left the shopping mall parking lot and talked about where he worked, his kids, his wife; then out of nowhere, he broke into a rant about never having gotten oral sex from Rose. The conversation, for the most part, revolved around sex. That was all Jesperson wanted to talk about.
“I don’t even know where [the sex talk] came from,” she recalled.
“We drank the beer,” Jesperson said. “We talked. She wanted to have sex with me.”
When Jesperson returned to the vehicle, Slagle claimed, she sensed something wrong. She said Jesperson looked different. Walked different. Sat down in the car different. A look on his face unlike anything she had seen. Something had come over him.
Without speaking, instead of backing the car out of the woods, where he was parked on the edge of the street and grass, Jesperson pulled forward, deeper into the woods, so as to be out of eyesight to anyone around (according to Slagle’s version).
“I knew I was in trouble,” Daun Slagle said.
15
TRANSFORMATION
“Change the way you look at things, and the things you
look at change.”
—Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
BEFORE I MADE CONTACT WITH DAUN SLAGLE, I’D BEEN CHUGGING along with Keith Jesperson, feeling as though I’d made progress, especially in understanding the mind of the psychopath. My intentions and emotional state were another thing. I suffered bouts of anxiety and felt, on some days, I could not continue and needed to end our friendship. Murder, my day job, was enough. Adding the obsessions, rants, and constant drivel from a serial killer became overwhelming. I’d quit smoking three years before I met Jesperson, but I was thinking about picking it up again.
As I went over what I’d learned thus far, putting my health—mind and body—to the side, it occurred to me that I’d proven to myself what clinical research had contended, but society and the media had not been too interested in. There is, essentially, no specific serial killer typology. For one, there are far too many versions of him, with far too many variables at play. The common myth that all serial killers are diabolical and like to play cat-and-mouse games with cops, want to be caught, are solitary figures, is entirely grounded in Hollywood mythology. I’d crushed this common belief with my Jesperson interviews.
The one constant with Jesperson throughout my research was that the fantasy he gravitated to most was sexually motivated and paired with trying to find a willing partner, or, as an alternative, a prostitute. When met, the fantasy was emotionally and physiologically rewarding and stimulating. When not met, rage arose and he needed to release it. He would harness his anger into an asset later when he became proficient as a killer, but in 1990, as he was getting started, he had little control over his thoughts or temper.
Back talking on a regular basis as 2014 began, I wondered if Jesperson, with almost two decades now behind bars to think about his crimes, focused on his victims within the fantasy that held such a grip on him while he was killing. He’d told me once he did not like to “go there”—that place where his victims resided in his memory. It was one thing to repress certain aspects of his kills he did not want to face, talk openly about graphic details of his crimes, but quite another to deal with recurring flashbacks or recollections he couldn’t control or stop. Did he still view his victims as sexual “things” within the context of his past obsessions? Were the women he murdered still fixed figures in his mind? One of the narratives many serial killers claim is the illusion that they can effortlessly detach from their crimes, let go of their victims and erase them—and the violence—from memory. I wanted to know if this was true for Happy Face.
“I think about them at different times throughout my days of being incarcerated,” he explained, his answer surprising me. I was under the impression that the psychopath/sociopath3 could not care less about the people he’d hurt or harmed; writing off the women he’d murdered and forgetting about them were part of that. Psychopaths, particularly, are generally unable to form emotional attachments.
He said it wasn’t how he murdered them, or their actual deaths, he chose to revisit; it was how they met, what they might have talked about, and how they interacted.
“I think about that a lot. I go back and maybe in a dreamscape try to change the outcome. Hoping that I wake up, let’s say, and I open my eyes, and I’m not in prison.”
No matter how hard he tried, or how much he wanted to make me believe he’s “not a bad guy,” his narcissism was impossible for him to suppress. The killer is who he is, part of his ego and id. His answer proved as much. He views life, not just his kills, through a prism of self. The world does not exist for any other purpose besides what he deems important and what he can take from it.
After he killed Bennett, a change occurred inside Jesperson. Once the anxiety of being caught left, he embraced and “enjoyed how he was becoming somebody he wasn’t normally.” Now there were two versions of himself—and he liked how it made him feel.
Staring out my office window through the slits of my blinds one afternoon, watching the sky turn from bright Caribbean blue to a dull gray, thinking about what he’d said, I considered that the answers I sought from this man were complex. A second question I’d been thinking about nagged: Is there a difference between, say, a worldwide hated psychopathic creature such as Hitler and a serial killer like Jesperson? Can evil and a level of disregard for human life some human beings harbor be weighed on a scale from eight to eight million victims? Is it even fair to ask this question? How can we judge one psychopath’s behavior as more significant or violent or hurtful than the other? Whether the killing of millions of innocent men, women, and children was done for ideological purposes or out of a sexual obsession, can we classify one as more evil than the other? I could call a forensic psychiatrist friend and ask, but the simple textbook answer was not of any interest to me.