“Anytime you want me to delve into her case, let me know,” he said, ending it there for the time being.
Stepping out of my car, shaking my head at his arrogance, opening my PO box, there were a few letters from fans, a series of nonsensical, waste-of-paper solicitations, and a yellow card, which meant I had a package they couldn’t fit into my box. After retrieving a vanilla, spongy, plastic-bubbled envelope the size of a small couch pillow, sitting inside my vehicle, I thought: What the hell is he sending now? I’d forgotten the task I’d set before him—to write about his childhood—that last time we chatted.
When I say Jesperson is a prolific writer, I mean it with every ounce of jazz the word conjures. Inside the package were three black-and-white Norcom Composition books grammar school teachers hand out to their fifth-grade writing classes on the first day of school. Six hundred pages of writing—a manifesto detailing the Jesperson family saga, the first volume titled: “Life of Keith Jesperson—Family History, 1800s to August 1975.”
I opened the cover of volume one. The first entry: “Denmark 1800s.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. Denmark? Seriously?
What could a literary stroll down the Jesperson Danish heritage of ancestors do for me or my research?
Volume two: “Keith Jesperson’s Life for Phelps: August 2, 1975,” where volume one left off, “to basically 1990.” Volume three: “1990 to 1995 (’96 to 2013) Stories Nonfiction and Fiction, Keith Jesperson.”
The embodiment of pathological sat on my lap in front of me. The overstated and lurid visions stirring in Jesperson’s brain, fused by a narrative brimming with what he perceives as great moments of deus ex machina, were nothing more than woven-together anecdotes from the disturbed and knotted memory of a psychopath. I sat, contemplating: Am I kidding myself in what has become a futile quest to uncover a drop of compassion inside the mind of a man who’s looking to do nothing more than to keep himself occupied and in the spotlight while serving several life terms? What a pathetic creature.
The theme that arose out of volume one included Les Jesperson being the manufacturer behind the public having to live with the violence and horror of Happy Face. Here was 201 pages of handwritten text in blue pen, single-spaced. Keith Jesperson had mentioned his mother only twice, in passing. Les, on the other hand, was a presence on nearly every page. Reading this, I knew, if nothing else, Jesperson had put a bull’s-eye on his father’s back for a reason.
Going through volume one, taking notes, searching for an answer as to why he turned into one of the nation’s most notorious, violent, sexual serial killers, actually helped me to focus on and face what had happened in my own life—to take a look back when my brother and his “wife” were two of the most hated individuals in my family. Our familial history shapes us; it is the only part of our development we can look to for the answers we seek later in life. Sometimes we embrace what we find. Other times, we sink deeper into the abyss. I’d already been swallowed, so why not try to perform a bit of alchemy while there and possibly move on?
I decided to pick Jesperson’s brain and find out what he was thinking at the time he killed. This might give me an indication into the thought process behind the man who had killed the mother of my niece and nephews, kids who had sometimes looked to me for answers. I had none. We’d always assumed a serial killer working the streets of Hartford at the time of her homicide had taken Diane’s life, as well as close to a dozen other women. But we, and the early news coverage, were wrong about that: strange as it might sound, Diane’s murder was far more complicated.
“What’s going through your mind at the time you decide to murder a human being?” I asked Jesperson one morning as we got back into our weekly calls. This was something I’d tried to emphasize within the overall narrative arc of my television show. It was a question, answered honestly, that could put us a step closer to how serial killers evolve and develop into the murderous fiends they become.
I wanted images. What, precisely, was going on inside that boundless portion of Jesperson’s brain, the spot where, similarly, we all go to judge ourselves? Not the anger, the emotional toil of pulling the trigger, so to speak, or the decision to commit the murder. But after the fact: when murder has been decided and the act itself has commenced. Has a wellspring broken open and, maybe like a heroin addict, a rush that can be compared to none other has been unleashed? Euphoria? A dreamlike state? Did the same tape play over and over inside Jesperson’s head during every murder? Or was each murder different? Each feeling varied?
“Tell me,” I said. “Be brutally honest. I need—and deserve—that from you.”
“When I kill, I decide at that time it is going to happen. The thought process is, basically, I have committed myself to this. It’s not a . . . I don’t dwell on maybe other things around me. I have decided that she is going to die. It’s basic instinct. I don’t dwell on past events.”
He insisted that his upbringing and nurturing had something to do with his later behavior. So I wondered if he was killing those memories with each victim. “Are you in a happy place, you know, at the ocean, in that moment? Or enjoying the suffering of this person?”
“My mind-set is probably more of that I am in the moment. I know at that time this person is going to die and I’m just going through the motions of performing the death. It’s not a . . . a . . . going off into la-la land somewhere, into euphoria. It’s about taking care of business. It’s basically just doing the task. That’s the easy part. Once the death is over with, the hard part is actually just getting away from the body without being detected.”
I began to wonder what he did between the time he killed Taunja Bennett and allegedly assaulted Daun Slagle. This was an important period of his life. According to Jesperson, at one point he walked a fine line of being a one-off killer and becoming a serial killer. As he started to work as a short-haul truck driver, Jesperson didn’t have time to do much of anything else, he said. He went on short runs, from Portland to Salem, Salem to Spokane, Seattle to Portland. But once he stepped into a long-haul trucking career, the “time to think” became available, explaining it this way: “Driving time, sleeping time, screwing-around time, killing time.”