“The lighter side of this was that after each murder they got easier and easier,” Jesperson continued. “The heavier side was that I was out of control. I was not in control of myself any longer. I had lost control of who I was. I was actually somebody else, like I was looking at somebody else doing this.”
During our conversations throughout the years, Jesperson had (without trying) exposed several different versions of himself. Every survivor of extreme violence I’ve interviewed—if what she says is true, Daun Slagle included—shared some part of the same narrative regarding the person they met and the psychopath that person became in their presence: At some point during their time together, a drastic change came over the perpetrator. Generally, the perp disappeared for a moment: to the bathroom or into a store, maybe a bedroom. Walking away one person, he returned another. He looked and spoke different, if he spoke at all. In talking with Jesperson, I sensed various personas on the phone, sometimes saw two different faces during our personal visits, and heard two different people comment on the cold cases I looked into on Dark Minds. Not different personalities. At times, Jesperson could be—and I realize this might be hard for some to grasp (it was difficult for me to come to terms with)—just another member of society I interacted with throughout my day. We could talk like two old friends who knew each other from high school. Those conversations, it’s important to note, were still centered around his feelings, but it was as though I was speaking to someone who liked talking about himself. We all know these types. Yet, at other times, Jesperson could come across cold, dark, unfeeling. He could change his demeanor in the course of a sentence, even a word. I’d sometimes forget about the killer he is and then be jarringly reminded that person had been (hiding) there the entire time.
Once realized, this revelation opened a chasm. I became aware that somewhere deep inside the mind of this psychopath was the faint rustling of a human being. There had to be. In the beginning, I despised the killer Jesperson is and those like him. A journalist is supposed to remain objective, neutral, part of a tacit and invisible team out in the world, there to report news to the public, personalities and opinions aside. But that is impossible when writing books of this nature. One cannot stand idle, lips zipped, and not express feelings. It goes against human nature not to be offended and horrified by what you hear and see and feel. I stepped into this relationship with a serial killer with no interest in digging into his psyche for an extended period of time. I was, as I have said, under the impression there were people in the world born evil and then bred, throughout their lives, to embrace an inherited darkness and make a choice to become violent and murderous. Some serial killers have admitted this about themselves: they do not care about anyone and cannot love.
As our relationship progressed, however, something in me changed. I found myself, same as passing a terrible wreck on the freeway, unable to turn away. Jesperson badgered me incessantly about the Bennett case, how he needed to get the truth according to him out into the public lexicon. I would find myself doubled over with stress pains one day, but then asking him for more details the next, knowing how hard it is for the general public to accept what a serial killer actually has to say.
“People don’t want to understand who I am,” he said one morning. “They want to look at me and see only the murders I committed. Some of these [murders] happened so quick, I didn’t even have time to think about what I was doing. I knew I was killing,” he added, at this point nearly out of breath, a mania I’d witnessed many times pouring out of him as he struggled to connect words and construct sentences. “But I wasn’t in a conscious thought of how it affected my life. I just did it, to do it. I had the opportunity and went with it.”
I asked about the “other” person inside him.
“I became someone I didn’t like. I’m not a split-personality character. I am who I am, but then there’s this other side of me. There’s this voice on one shoulder telling me it’s okay, go ahead and do this. It’s like pushing; it’s got a prod and pretty soon you are the one acting out on it. I’m the one doing it, but they are the one actually doing it for me.”
He knew how I felt: the serial killer he is “repulses me.”
“I know. I cannot do anything about that, Phelps.”
I hesitated. Then: “But you can now. You can help identify your Jane Does. You know who they are. Don’t screw with me on that.”
“Do what I said. Get the death penalty off the table.”
I was working on that, but also debating whether to lie and tell him I’d gotten it done. He’d never ask me for written proof. He trusted my word enough by now.
“You understand that my sister-in-law was murdered, I’m a victims’ advocate, what you’ve done to people, I hate you for that.” Continuing, I explained that over the years we’d spoken, “I’ve become. . .” I stopped. Took a deep breath. “A friend, I guess, to this other person I speak to at times, and I don’t look at you as a serial killer in that moment—and that concerns me.”
Exactly what John Kelly had warned me about: letting my guard down.
“There is a—” he said, before taking the conversation, as he sometimes would, in another direction: “I am a nice guy. I see myself as a nice guy. But by the same token, I know this other person inside me exists. There’s this other side of me that, well, I accept death as okay.”
Weeks went by. I got into a spell where I stopped answering his calls. A feeling of understanding what was happening inside me grew into one of concern. I was baffled by my tolerance for what he could say, how vile and offensive his thoughts were to most, how much he’d opened up to me. At times, I felt as though he didn’t care what anybody thought, and wasn’t thinking about the public consequence or reaction to what he said. He was, instead, telling me what was going on inside him, uncensored. Something of which I’d strived to get out of him from the beginning.