According to Keith, the one member of the family leading the cause to get his hands on what old Charlie had worked a lifetime for was Les Jesperson, Igor’s dad, the root cause, according to Keith, of all his childhood suffering. Les would adopt Charlie’s Scrooge-like ways later, Keith said, by doing the same thing to him. After making his mark in the machining business, Les bought land and made Keith work the land, but he never once shared its prosperity with him. “He gave it all to my brothers and sisters, nothing to me,” Jesperson told me.
After not making much headway convincing Charlie to share, as the Jesperson legend goes, the family got together and sent a doctor to see Charlie. He was acting strange, family members claimed. One report included Charlie publicly displaying “incessant masturbation” and also making “death threats” against people, family, friends, and neighbors. He was said to have not made much sense when he spoke, while threatening trespassers by waving the barrel of his shotgun at them.
“They wanted to commit him,” Keith said. “Talk around town was that Charlie was crazy. Why? Because the Jespersons said he was.” Where we lived then, Keith added, was “like a chicken coop, all wanting to peck at someone.”
Charlie stood at his door, his wife by his side, demanding to know what the doctor wanted.
The psychiatrist explained.
“Well, you can take your ass off my property right now,” Charlie responded. “All this amounts to is another way for them to steal my land.”
As he got older, after having experienced the same treatment from his father, Keith realized that Charlie wasn’t stupid or mind sick. It was the Jesperson way: take what you wanted, implications aside, by lying, cheating, and stealing.
Charlie threatened the doctor with bodily harm if he didn’t hit the bricks.
The doctor left “rattled,” Keith heard. So much so, he called the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) constable, who then took Charlie into custody, as the doctor insisted Charlie was suffering from what he determined to be a hereditary disease of the psyche: dementia praecox, or “precocious madness,” a psychotic disorder passed somewhere down the genetic Scandinavian line of Jesperson DNA. Medical records claimed Charlie was diagnosed as delusional and paranoid.
Committed to the local mental facility, Charlie was beside himself. The family had managed to initiate a plan to pinch his land out from underneath him and get rid of him in the process. He was doomed to a rubber room, tiny paper cups filled with colorful pills, his slippers sandpapering down the hallway to his seat in front of a window.
After losing all hope of ever convincing the facility he was sane, Charlie surrendered. Medical records indicate he managed to get hold of a three-and-a-half-inch spike and hammer. Alone one night, he placed the spike into his eye socket and used the hammer to bang the sharp piece of ragged metal through his head, a half-inch piece sticking out of his eye socket.
He survived the night. It wasn’t until an orderly pulled the spike out the next afternoon that an infection set in, swelled Charlie’s brain, and killed him.
Les Jesperson would forever make the claim that his homicidal son and Keith’s certified “crazy”/suicidal great-uncle shared the same psychotic bloodline: “That’s where crazy Keith got his antics—Charlie.”
As Jesperson told me many times, however, details from the tale might be true, or might not be. However, it was Les, making his son the butt of all the family jokes and his savage “belt punishments” and alcoholic madness, that turned what was an eccentric, awkwardly large, hardworking, shy boy, living on a farm in Canada, into a hardened, violent man who learned how to kill from the same man who had given him life.
“There are real times we all wish we could go back to change, especially the force of the blows with our belts or spoons,” Jesperson told me, speaking of his father’s punishments. “But we would rather say, it didn’t happen like that. We, as children, remember it differently. We remember pain.”
Les didn’t recall raising Keith in this way. In everything he later said about raising his serial killer son, Les denied being an alcoholic and an abuser.
“Selective amnesia,” Jesperson said of his father’s memories. “That’s Les Jesperson.”
20
DEATH—AS A PERFORMANCE
“The most loving parents . . . commit murder with smiles
on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we
really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
—Jim Morrison
THE TOWN WHERE I LIVE TODAY IS A SUBURBAN PASTORAL; ROLLING green hills and meadows amid thousands of acres of cow corn; maple, birch, willow and white oak trees, poison ivy snaking around their trunks in candy cane–like swirls, canopies of branches towering over the immediate skyline. Geese fly in flocks above like the Blue Angels. There’s a peaceful, community, New England charm emanating outside my door: red barns, John Deere tractors, rolled-up bales of hay in the shape of cinnamon rolls, men wearing blue jean coveralls and ball caps while working the land, signs denoting “fresh farm eggs.” A gazebo dots the center town green, the antiquated fa?ade of the library just west of that, a marble stone war memorial monument at the foot of our flagpole, a greasy spoon called The Chuck Wagon we all love to eat at, Siv’s Scandinavian Gift and Food Shop, with the orange-and-blue Swedish horse sign out front, two churches (Congregational and Catholic), their spires like swordfish pointing into the clouds, a small hardware store across from the grammar school on Main Street.
At times I leave my driveway and find myself in back of a tractor with wheels higher than my car, its yellow hazard lights blinking, towing tons of cow manure piled in throwers. Welcomingly, this slows life down for a few moments and allows me to focus on what’s important and how fortunate, blessed and grateful I am for the opportunity to live amid such serenity and grace.
From my home office it’s a thirty-minute drive to PO Box 3215, in Vernon, Connecticut. That’s the town where I came of age (twelve to twenty-nine years old) and lived. I check my box once a week so mail doesn’t pile up. With Jesperson writing to me, however, it became a twice-a-week job. Heading there one afternoon, passing an old Quality Inn nearby, I started to think about Jesperson once mentioning in a letter that he wanted to help with my sister-in-law’s unsolved 1996 homicide. My brother and Diane once lived at the same Quality Inn. Funny how the mind works: smells, songs, a photograph, a building, they take you right back.
Staring at the hotel, I rolled my eyes. Jesperson’s gesture felt insulting. How the hell could a serial killer three thousand miles away, who knew nothing about this crime, nothing about my brother or his wife, help? Why would Jesperson even go there? Her murder was a family matter, I’d expressed to him many times. He understood I shared as little as possible about my personal life and he needed to respect that space.