From January 1990, when he killed Bennett, until 1992, when he took his next victim, Jesperson obsessed over murder. He had done it once, gotten away with it—and two people were doing life for that crime. He would look at people he passed throughout his day: I could kill you. Murder itself became part of the sexual fantasies he’d had since two years before divorcing Rose.
“It’s almost like you dwell on this idea of death. I’ve done it. But do I want to do it again? I don’t need to do this, I can move on. I got away with it. Someone else is in prison for it. I don’t have to play that game. I can stay focused on my life and do what is right for me.”
Then, in November 1992, he pulled into the Burns Brothers Truck Stop in Wilsonville, California, and Laurie Anne Pentland walked into his life. She was twenty-six, lean, pretty. She approached and asked if he wanted a date. He invited her into his truck. She said something after they had sex that he didn’t like and her murder happened in the spur of a moment. One minute they were arguing, the next he had his hands around her throat and she was dead.
“How did that feel?” I wondered.
“It was like the stars were all aligned.”
It was her time, in other words. He was there. She was, too. She needed to die. He needed to kill her.
“Karma.”
Before he took Pentland’s life, Jesperson said, “I wasn’t a serial killer. I killed someone and I moved on.” Killing Pentland made Jesperson a serial killer. In his view, once he crossed that line, he gave in to this “other side” of himself. “Everyone thinks I was a serial killer the moment I killed, but that’s not true.” This was important to him.
In between Bennett, Slagle (1990), and Pentland (1992), Jesperson played the role of dad as best he could when with his children. He spent Christmas and other holidays with them. He picked them up and gave them rides in his truck. Bought them toys. Took them to the park.
“Pamela was with me again throughout that period, we were riding together.” He worked in Spokane and spent one Christmas there. “I got a motel. I grabbed the kids. They went swimming. We all ate pizza. I took them shopping. I even bought my ex-wife something.”
He adored his kids and had no trouble showing them love. “That relationship was as normal as it could be, with me being a truck driver and divorced.”
Jesperson’s worst fear was for his kids to find out he was a killer. And, he said, contrary with what his daughter Melissa Moore would later write about him in her book, he was able to hide who he was from them. “I never wanted to put that on my kids.”
The possibility they’d find out was something that scared him. He was embarrassed to stand before them as a known killer.
After listening to a man describe killing another human being with the same affect he’d use to describe a football game he’d watched with his cellies, I’d hang up and feel anxious, a need to unwind and get the stink off myself somehow. I couldn’t just immerse back into my life as a writer, father, husband, son, Christian, friend, community member. I needed some sort of buffer zone between the Devil and me. Reading helped. As I’ve mentioned, taking strolls with my dog and just sitting, petting her, calmed me down. I’d take a walk or sit out on my back porch with a cup of coffee and think about what he’d said.
It occurred to me during one of these downtimes that a certain trepidation I’d picked up on in his voice early on wasn’t there anymore. Not because he was watching himself and what he said, or even what he wanted to say but couldn’t quite articulate. It was desperation, I now understood. He was trying to provide an explanation that covered him. Every time I felt this way, it provoked in me a greater and clearer acceptance that he was a pathological liar, a master charmer with a disregard for social mores, the rights of others, who felt no remorse, and I should be aware at all times. I could not allow him ever to think he owned me; it would exacerbate and stimulate the disease he had become in my life, aggravating my health issues.
21
I REMEMBER
“A family without a black sheep is not a typical family.”
—Heinrich B?ll
ON FEBRUARY 14, 1993, DIANE FERRIS, MY BROTHER’S THEN–THIRTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD common-law “wife,” met a guy at the Windsor Court Hotel & Conference Center bar. It was a locale where she and my brother were holed up in one of those weekly, prorated rooms that transients frequent. Thomas Myers was a thirty-seven-year-old Windsor Locks native, a heating and air-conditioning installer, who hung out at what was a neighborhood gin mill to him. He was described as “quiet,” “pleasant,” someone who grew up in town and kept to himself. He lived a mile down the road from the bar.
Thomas and Diane sat together and had cocktails. My guess is Diane watched him stroll in after a hard day’s work, smiled at him, and charmed the local blue-collar guy into buying her drinks. She and my brother were heavy drinkers and drug users by then, deep in the throes of their addictions. I loved them both, but could not stand to be a part of their lives, hear from them, or be taken in by whatever drama—criminal or financial—that had befallen them. I’d just turned twenty-six. Facing demons of my own, I was trying to raise not only my two kids, but my then-wife and I were also foster parents to two of Mark and Diane’s children, my nephews. I had four young boys, ranging in ages from four to eight, running wild in my house.