They agreed it would.
Phelan had actually gone into a meeting with everyone and mentioned his client wanted to confess to killing Bennett and they nearly laughed at him.
“That’s fine,” Phelan said. “But what if you’re wrong? You do not want to be wrong about this.”
McIntyre went to see his boss, returned to the meeting, and decided to hear them out.
It took some time, but after a group of Explorer Scouts set out in that area forty feet off the road by the Sandy River, where Jesperson had tossed Bennett’s wallet, just underneath a blackberry bush, which searchers had chopped down during an unproductive search a week prior, stuck in a muddy patch of debris, there was Taunja Bennett’s wallet and ID. No one but her killer could have known where that evidence was hidden.
18
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO RAVEN
“I’m guilty of giving people more chances than they
deserve, but when I’m done, I’m done.”
—Turcois Ominek
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 2014, THE SOUND OF THE RINGING phone in my office as I stared at the prison Telmate number on the LCD screen, pausing a moment, picturing Jesperson, the phone receiver up to his ear, smiling, waiting for me to accept his call, became like the chirp of a smoke alarm going off inside my head. Every day, as the number popped up and I contemplated ignoring it, an emotional ulcer grew inside me. My stomach had that perpetual feeling one gets when he knows he needs to end a long-term relationship but puts it off because he doesn’t want to hurt the other person. A pit. A thousand fluttering butterflies.
When Dark Minds was canceled after three seasons in 2014, I faced a dilemma: Jesperson was sucking the life out of me. I was depressed. Emotionally empty. On top of all the calls, whether I answered or not, there were all of those letters, maps of dump sites he’d drawn on scraps of cardboard, photographs of him and his “cellies” (additional lowlifes who’d committed savage acts of violence), newspaper clippings, birthday and Christmas cards, artwork, his continuous obsession with the Bennett case. All of this drove me once again to question my ethics. Here was a person the rest of the world viewed as an enfant terrible, a monster—a twisted psychopath who uses, abuses, and discards people. Yet to Jesperson, his incorrigibly manipulative and psychotic ways were nothing more than social imperfections: This is who I am. Deal with it.
Well, I grew tired of it all. Enough was enough.
“Doesn’t it bother you that everyone you’ve killed has been someone other people have loved?” I asked one day, fed up, in a mood to cut him off. “You took their loved one away from them forever. If someone—”
He interrupted. “I understand what you’re saying. . . .”
“Wait, wait, wait. Let. Me. Finish. This doesn’t bother you at all?”
“No,” he said, his voice firm, serious. He meant what he said. Right then, a faint rustling of optimism I’d had of maybe dredging the bottom of some scummy pond, hoping to find a film of empathy, or perhaps getting him to see what he’d done in the framework of morality and being human, dissolved. A nauseous feeling—right before you know you’re going to throw up—came over me. I knew in that moment there was likely no good in this person. I’d been kidding myself believing maybe there was and I could find it.
“What if someone you cared about was murdered? How would that make you feel?”
“Well, I would care about my loved one being killed. I would be upset about it, yes, because I care about my loved ones. But I didn’t know these people I . . . I dealt with. These people are not in my lifestyle . . . my . . . my . . . my world. They don’t exist in my world. They are in their world. They are not in my world. I don’t know who these people are, so therefore I have no feelings for these people. I know there is a loss here, Phelps. I know there is a loss and I should feel there is a loss. That I should feel sorry for them. I feel for their loss. However, I don’t know who they are”—he sounded like a child unable to say what he wanted—“and so it is hard for me to have an emotional commitment to these people without knowing who they really are.”
The fact that he referred to eight human beings as these people said it all. He couldn’t even dignify their lives or memories by calling them victims.
During another call, I asked about his logbooks. Being a trucker, he kept a record of all his movements during the time he killed. These records would help me figure out other victims he could have killed and also answer questions about his known victims. I had been trying to get my hands on the logbooks for three years.
“You need to get those,” he said. I sensed a patronizing tone to his voice. “Good luck with that.” He laughed.
Because his cases had never gone to trial, he knew the records were almost impossible to come by. In a way, he could hide behind them: act as though he wanted me to obtain them, under the personal belief I never would.
Hearing this, I made it a priority to find them.
While figuring out my next move, I’d accept his calls, listen to him rant about prison officials, a woman who self-published what was an unreadable book about him and how she had let him down, pen pals who had abandoned him, how they messed “with my mail in here all the time,” among all sorts of other complaints. I’d hang up hating him with vigor. Then he’d call and say something that piqued my interest about a potential crime he might have committed, which, in turn, fueled an urge in me to keep digging.
I had this desire to crack him. I figured he was admitting to about 75 percent of the crimes he’d committed and roughly the same in terms of what he’d told law enforcement. I felt several Jane Does he was on the books for were women he could identify, if he chose. Plus, there had loomed the outside chance he’d murdered more women than he had self-confessed and would one day come clean and explain to me where authorities could find additional bodies. Internet reports accused him of murdering as many as 166. That was impossible, I knew, and he told me it was a lie he once told cops during a period when he was playing with them. Still, after the years I’d put in, I deserved truth—and demanded it from him.
Some time went by and I stopped answering his calls altogether. I needed the space to heal, think, and work on television projects and other books, without the interruption of a raging serial killer, mad at the world, writing me so many letters every week I didn’t have time to read.
He called and called and called: six, seven, ten times a day. Relentless was the word that came to mind most often. I had a Trac-Fone I used on Dark Minds that he could call me on when I was out of my office and on the road. He blew that thing up with calls, figuring I was traveling.