The cop who took the report drove her home. It was 1:17 A.M. when they walked in and woke her husband.
“He blamed me,” she claimed. “It was my fault for taking off alone.”
By 3:40 A.M., Corning Police, one hundred miles south of Mt. Shasta, pulled Jesperson over and took him into custody. (He told me later, “I turned myself in.”) After contacting the MSPD, Corning allowed Jesperson to drive back to Mt. Shasta “on his own agreement to return [there] and clear this matter up.” He got into his car and drove himself back to Mt. Shasta.
At home, Daun Slagle was ready to press charges against Keith Jesperson for sexual assault and battery, maybe forced imprisonment, kidnapping, whatever fit. She wanted justice. In her view (later), she’d been attacked and her child was nearly killed. Jesperson needed to be prosecuted.
“Just let it go,” Slagle claimed her husband told her. “Forget about it.”
“Discuss this between the two of you,” a police officer suggested. “But don’t take too much time.” The impression was: file a report as soon as possible.
Slagle and her husband were at odds, still arguing. She wanted to press charges. She claimed her husband kept insisting no, she shouldn’t. So she left the house and walked to a phone booth, called, and told the MSPD she wanted to move forward with charges.
By now, the sun had come up and it was late morning.
“Well, it’s too late for that,” she said the cop told her. “We’ve already let him go.”
*
JESPERSON SEIZED ON THE idea that if Daun Slagle had pressed charges against him and saw the case through, seven women might still be alive. “I think about what might have happened, had they charged me and put me in jail. I seriously considered heading back to Canada, where I had lived a good portion of my life,” Jesperson said, “just to run from what I believed was a case they could still make.”
Tragedy and trauma seemed to follow Daun Slagle. She had been pregnant when she met Jesperson. According to Slagle, that baby would be killed in 1991, at four months old, by her second husband, who spent five years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.
Quite incredibly, in 2014, Slagle claimed to be attacked again. In July of that year, she said a man with a weapon grabbed and cornered her in an alley in back of her house just after sunset. She said he had a weapon and forced her to masturbate him (his semen was later found on her).
Slagle claimed to have gotten out of this situation in a similar manner she used on Jesperson: “I’m on my period, please don’t touch me there,” she said. “Sorry, that’s not part of my religion.”
According to Slagle, “I was constantly just throwing a wrench in there. You have to counteract it from a physical sense and bring the situation into a mental battle.”
The man, thirty-year-old Claudio Sanches, was arrested a few blocks away from the incident after she phoned police. After claiming that she had actually come on to him and asked him to pull his pants down, Sanches was charged with assault and battery. One trial ended in a mistrial. In December 2015, after a second trial, Sanches was found guilty.
In a startling turn of events, in March 2016, Daun Slagle was charged with stabbing her boyfriend in the ribs, along with a host of other crimes, including leading police on a high-speed chase, putting her credibility into question. Claudio Sanches’s attorney, Stephana Femino, had filed a motion for a new trial before the stabbing incident—and, in April 2016, a judge agreed. As of this writing, Sanches awaits his third day—mistrial, conviction, and now new trial—in court on this matter.4
“My client vehemently denies Slagle’s allegations and maintains the sexual contact was consensual,” Femino told me, adding how her “client passed a lie detector test.” In the judge’s ruling overturning the conviction, thus granting a new trial, he pointed out there was “no physical evidence presented” to suggest the contact between Slagle and Sanches was “anything but consensual, which is why Slagle’s credibility (or lack thereof) is an essential part of the case,” Femino said. “A prime example of this is she claimed she was violently attacked and dragged by her hair down a gravel and cement alley, yet she did not have one scratch or bruise. She also claimed my client dragged her down the alley by her hair to get to a place where he could continue the attack in private, yet for some reason, according to her, he gave up in the middle of the alley.... Keep in mind, this happened during the broad daylight. Just as in Jesperson’s case, Daun’s story in my client’s case changes each time she tells it.”
17
TRUSTY AND TRUE
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of
bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
SOME HAVE ASKED IF KEITH JESPERSON SCARES ME. NO. HE DOES NOT scare me. Despite headlines such as TEN GRIM FACTS ABOUT SERIAL KILLERS YOU WISH YOU NEVER KNEW and all the insipid serial killer lists compiled on the Internet, spelling out alleged “facts” we should know about them, all of which is meant to instill fear, serial killers in general don’t frighten me and shouldn’t frighten the general public. Being murdered by a serial killer is a rare crime. According to the FBI’s most recent statistics, serial homicide accounts for about 1 percent of all homicides committed in the United States, while homicide rates themselves have dropped 50 percent since the 1990s.
In speaking with Taunja Bennett’s brother, Dave Rowe, checking into what he’d said, I am convinced he never met Jesperson on the front porch of his home during those months before his sister was murdered. Dave is traumatized and devastated by the loss of his sister. My heart goes out to the guy. I understand that pain as one I’ve seen on the faces of my nephews, niece, and other family members. What’s clear to me is that Jesperson was in Tualatin, Oregon, outside Portland, and Eugene, staying near the University of Oregon, at the time Dave claimed to have met Jesperson before he picked up Bennett and drove her to Seattle. Likely, Jesperson never met Bennett before the night he killed her. I don’t see any reason why he would lie about this now. Furthermore, the one piece of evidence proving Jesperson acted alone, despite rumors and reports of him conspiring with Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske to kill Bennett, including what Dave Rowe added to that speculative narrative, was uncovered on October 14, 1995.
Jesperson was in custody, having been arrested after mailing a letter to one of his brothers and turning himself in. After Thomas Phelan secured a deal and convinced Jim McIntyre and his troops that Jesperson had killed Bennett, sparking a storm of controversy and legal battles to get Pavlinac and Sosnovske out of prison, while speaking with detectives, seeing there had been so much talk about Sosnovske and Pavlinac playing a role in Bennett’s murder, Jesperson told them he was the only one who could point to where Bennett’s wallet and ID card were located.
“Wouldn’t that prove I acted alone?”