In between our conversations, be it a day, week, or longer, I pondered what had been said. I’d reevaluate where he and I were coming from. It was strange. The world between us, so small and compact, confined to that telephone line and words on paper, became a place entirely closed off to what was going on around me. I live in a small farming community. Cornfields surround our homes. When the farmers fertilize, watch out, you go outside and the smell is pungent and vile, hitting your sinuses like a busted sewer main. But then I’d hang up from a conversation in which I believed a human being actually existed within him, step outside into the reality of my life, now forced to face a sobering thought: He’s a serial killer doing life. He’s not a nice guy, no matter how much he can manipulate me. He killed eight women. That’s what he does. He lies and he charms and he kills. What the hell am I doing?
Was I softening up? Had I lost my sense of what I did for a living? Or was I like so many others: a human being with feelings, going through a process for which there was no precedence? How many writers—or people, for that matter—spent years of their lives talking to a serial killer about every subject imaginable?
There was one writer I knew of and had read about, Jason Moss. He wrote a memoir about his “exploration into the minds of incarcerated serial killers.” But that situation did not end well for Mr. Moss: he committed suicide on June 6, 2006—or 6/6/06.
*
JESPERSON BEGAN SENDING PIECES of art he’d sketched specifically for me. Donkeys. Sunrises. Parrots and parakeets. Elephants. Tropical landscapes. All of them boldly colorful. Over the years, the drawings became darker and more in line with the subject matter we focused on—cartoonish, strange sketches, mostly done in reds and blacks and blues: Ted Bundy, Freddy Krueger, the shower scene from the Hitchcock film Psycho, Hannibal Lecter, and Charles Manson, a bleeding swastika tattooed on his forehead. He signed all of them as Raven. I could sense that during the twenty years he’d spent behind bars, he’d learned how to express his feelings with colored pencils and charcoal and a modicum of talent. Some of the art he’d sent to pen pals and others had sold on the Internet for hundreds of dollars because of his Happy Face legacy. These early pieces he mailed me sent shivers down the spines of anybody I showed them to. I wanted to frame an Oregon duck (the local college football team’s mascot) and hang it in my office. My family shared an opinion that there was no way I was going to be allowed to do this. “Creepy” was the unified opinion at the household dinner table. Everyone around me saw his art—regardless of the subject—as the essence of evil, scribed by the psychotic hand and mind of a madman.
Indeed, it is. Yet, without telling anyone, I felt the paintings—even the most disturbing among them—to be nothing more than a gift from a friend. It scared me that I was not offended by them. I had changed, somehow, without realizing it.
As he broke into a soliloquy about his “nice guy” status one morning, I countered by saying nobody gives a shit how he views himself or the world. “You are a serial killer. No one cares about your feelings, how I feel about you, what you think caused this malicious need in you to kill those women, or the notion that you want to right some wrong in the Bennett case. On top of that, you are paranoid. There’s no proof of your accusations. It’s all speculation bouncing around inside your manic mind. Pure supposition. You want someone to go down with you—that’s all this Bennett thing is about. And that someone happens to be a couple of cops and a prosecutor. Big fucking surprise there. Twenty years after the fact and you are still trying to keep attention focused on you.”
“I need to go to work,” he said, hanging up. I’d pissed him off.
At one time, Jesperson was employed in prison as one of those annoying telemarketers calling your house while you’re eating dinner, trying to sell you windows, solar panels, cheaper electricity, maybe asking for a donation to the policeman’s union, or any number of other products/services. He loved this job. There was triumph in his voice whenever he talked about it, as though he’d beaten the system somehow.
“I spoke to someone in Vernon today,” he said one day. “Isn’t that where you live?”
Then he called to say he got fired. My assumption was that a victim’s family member found out the serial killer who had murdered his loved one was calling unsuspecting homes to try to sell them a free vacation to Mexico.
What became an oscillation of hatred and friendship pushed back and forth: I sympathized with a serial killer on some days, wondering how in the hell I could possibly feel this way; on other days, I wanted to end what we were doing because I felt I needed to honor his victims’ memories by not giving him what he wanted: more media space and notoriety. It went on for years, really, me leaning more toward tossing in my inhibitions and questions and listening to him for as long as I could emotionally handle it. Then, I didn’t know why, but I started to feel sorry for him.
I told no one.
Working on Dark Minds and writing the types of books I do, getting through it without crumbling from all the darkness and pain, and curling into a fetal ball in the corner of my office, I tried to take myself out of it as much as I could and focus on the writing and work, not the consequences or results of the violence. That space between collapsing and allowing the pain to take total control of my days is a flimsy wire I walk every day that I sit down at my desk or head out on the road.
Speaking with Daun Slagle about her ordeal with Jesperson became an anomaly within all of this. Slagle claimed to have lived with a monkey of guilt on her back weighing her down after she ran across Jesperson. For many years, she believed that had she stopped Jesperson after she interacted with him, seven women would be alive. This comment spun me around to face the true commitment I’d made to this project when I began in 2011: to expose this man for who he truly is.
16
SPECTATOR
“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it,
whatever it is?”
—Sylvia Plath
KEITH JESPERSON WAS ON HIS WAY TO DUNSMUIR, CALIFORNIA, IN April 1990, on the night he met Daun Slagle. The story he gave her regarding why he was in town was true. Dunsmuir is about fifteen miles south of Mt. Shasta. Jesperson was on his way to meet Pamela in Weed, California, when he took a detour into the town of Mt. Shasta, he said, “to get a bite to eat.” The plan was to pick Pamela up at a local Weed truck stop that night and drive to Dunsmuir, where Pamela’s brother lived. But Jesperson had gotten into town early. Making matters more complicated for him, he said, was that Rose’s new husband grew up and lived in Dunsmuir.
“Our sex life was great,” Jesperson said of his and Pamela’s relationship before she took off to Tennessee and he killed Bennett. That fabulous sex life came to a screeching halt, however, after Pamela returned home from her fling and wound up with custody of her kids. Jesperson said he hated being “Mr. Mom.” It cramped every part of his lifestyle.
“I missed my kids. The situation just made me want to leave it all behind.”