His plan was to start a new job in Sacramento and walk away from what he called “the haunted house,” which he still shared with Pamela (and now her kids) in Portland. Being inside the same house where he’d murdered Bennett, interacting with Pamela and the kids, was a constant reminder of what he’d done. And so he made up his mind he was going back to Portland to pack and leave, without telling Pamela.
Before heading into Mt. Shasta and meeting Slagle, Jesperson stopped by an old girlfriend’s house along the way. Previously published reports claimed Jesperson “wanted sex” and was going to rape and kill his ex if she wouldn’t give it up. “The closer I got to her house, the harder my penis got,” Jesperson was quoted as saying in 2002.
“I wasn’t thinking of killing her,” he told me. “But [a previous writer] seemed to imply I could have. That’s ridiculous.”
He didn’t have to worry about losing control, because after finding nobody home at his ex’s, Jesperson heard she’d been raped and murdered by two men in the weeks before he arrived.
“Having killed Bennett and hearing about [my ex-girlfriend], I really wasn’t in the mood, or there wasn’t the idea of murder on my part. I didn’t want to engage in a date. Daun was persistent. And so I just followed along. She showed me her tits. Bought us beer. She was drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel’s when I met her. I took it all as an invitation to sex.”
Like a lot of facts from that night Jesperson laid claim to, Slagle denied that she was breast-feeding her child in the parking lot of the strip mall when she met him, or drinking, or that she ever mentioned partying and asked him to stop so she could buy beer.
*
DAUN SLAGLE WAS WARY of me when we first spoke, and I did not understand why. But as we got to talking, it made sense. “The flashlight,” she said. “Raven, on your show, explained in an episode how he had left a flashlight at one of his crime scenes and I knew then that Raven is Jesperson.”
Slagle wasn’t the only viewer to pick up on that slipup. I’d gotten a few e-mails and had seen comments on social media alluding to the fact that, as much as we tried to cover up who Jesperson was, this clue (and maybe others) had gotten by us.
According to Slagle, after Jesperson walked into the woods, urinated, sat back down in the car, and drove deeper into the woods, she looked over at him and sensed something was off. She claimed that after Jesperson parked the car a second time, without warning, he grabbed her by the back of the head and smashed her against the dashboard.
“Never happened,” Jesperson claimed.
“And then he started trying to break my neck,” she insisted. She said her baby was on her lap and soon fell onto the floorboard by her feet.
“I don’t recall doing any of that,” Jesperson said. “The baby was on the backseat on a blanket, not in the front.”
“What did you do while you were in the woods?” I asked him. During this call, I made a point to confront Jesperson with all of the inconsistencies I’d heard from Slagle. “Daun claims you were gone quite awhile and when you came back you were ‘different.’ Did you go out there to masturbate? Dredge up the courage to rape her? Think about killing her?”
“No, no, I never left the car. She left the car to urinate. That’s why we went out there to begin with. I later showed police where she pissed and the alcohol bottles left behind.”
“She said you changed—and she wouldn’t be the first one to say this about a serial killer.”
He grew subdued. Withdrawn. I could feel him wince. He spoke in a low monotone. I knew the voice. He was angry with me for persisting. He was fighting off, best he could, that rage. “I wasn’t a serial killer at that time,” he said, frustrated.
“But look, man, you were a killer.”
“Right.” He paused. It was difficult to hear him because he spoke in such a delicate whisper. “We’re one in the same.”
“This metamorphosis in the woods—do you recall that happening?” I asked.
“I don’t remember. That’s all I can say.”
“She says you began to smash her head against the dashboard.”
“No, I didn’t smash her face against the dashboard. That’s not true at all. I had my arm, well, I don’t know what happened. I remember it one way. I had my arm around her.”
The police report from the incident tells another variation. Concisely written, it speaks of how Daun Slagle got into the car and Keith Jesperson drove around, parked, and then “pulled his dick out and said, ‘Suck my dick.’” She refused, so Jesperson “grabbed [her] around the neck and tried to force her.” Within that “struggle,” the report continued, her baby wound up on the floor.
Slagle said later that Jesperson stomped on her boy at some point.
Jesperson denied this, saying there was no way he would have hurt the child. The police report backed up Jesperson, indicating “the baby was not injured.”
Slagle believed Jesperson was “trying to break my neck,” as opposed to trying to strangle her. She felt pressure being applied to her neck bones so harshly, “a little more and I knew it was going to break.”
This “struggle” lasted a few minutes. As Jesperson squeezed, trying to get a handle on her neck, according to Slagle, she leaned into his grip, hoping to thwart any leverage he might have over her.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” she claimed she screamed. “I’ll do anything you want! Just don’t hurt my baby. Stop, stop, stop!”
Jesperson continued. She knew she needed to find a way to “get him off of his game and confuse him for a second.”
As she contemplated what to do next, he stopped.
She grabbed her baby, held him close to her chest.
Jesperson came back from whatever place he had gone off to, Slagle claimed; that “change” gripping him was gone.
Jesperson sat. Didn’t say much.
“This metamorphosis was over,” she said. “He started the car.”
She had no idea what he was planning, where he was going.
The car ride was silent. Jesperson drove out of the woods, got onto the main road, headed toward the I-5. As he approached the entrance ramp heading northbound, he pulled over.
Slagle didn’t speak.
He looked at her. According to Slagle, he pushed the frame of his glasses up the bridge of his nose, then said: “Don’t ever get into the car with someone you don’t know again—it might be the last thing you ever do.”
She held her baby tight to her chest and got out.
Jesperson took off onto the I-5.
“Now that is funny,” Jesperson told me. “None of it is true. Remember, I do not know this town one bit. I have no idea where I’m driving. Because of that, she is giving me directions. ‘Turn here, go there, park over there.’ She asked me to pull over by the side of the ramp. Then she got out without any fanfare or words. As far as I was concerned, we’d had a go of it and she wound up not wanting to do anything. I got a little angry. I don’t believe I hurt her.”
The Mt. Shasta Police Department (MSPD) was five blocks from where Slagle stood on the side of the road watching her “attacker,” as she called him, drive away. She walked in and explained what happened. She described the vehicle. Gave them a description of Jesperson and his name. Said he was on his way to Sacramento.
A Be-On-the-Lookout (BOLO) was sent out to all local police.