Cops tried for months to get Diane to talk about that night, but she wouldn’t budge. Diane knew how to handle herself around anyone (she was feared on the streets for her ability to defend herself), but she had a special way of dealing with cops.
The great irony—or maybe tragedy—of their lives was that Mark and Diane were perfectly matched as a couple, maybe too perfectly. They were inseparable. Soul mates, if such a thing exists. When they had the emotional stability and the drugs had not yet controlled who they were, where and when they ate, where they slept and shit, who they slept with, they deeply loved and cared for each other. Yet, with the drugs and booze becoming a third member of the relationship, they could never figure out how to make it work. Because of that, and the fact that they could better utilize state and city welfare services as individuals, they never got officially married.
*
I ANSWERED THE PHONE one morning. “Call me back in ten minutes, would you? I just walked into my office. But I need to talk to you.”
This was, for the psychopath, the ultimate invitation: He knew I needed him.
The only reason I answered the call was because I had to touch base with Jesperson for logistical reasons. Development on my planned documentary was expanding. My production company and I were focused on the research and I needed a few questions answered. I’d just walked into my office after exercising and had been waiting for his call. I was winded, out of breath, sweating.
He ignored the comment: “Did I ever tell you about a marathon I once ran?” I could hear the air inflate into his head. “I was quite the runner. I would . . .”
“Dude, come on. I am out of breath. You need to call me back.”
Every call, every letter, every moment between Keith Jesperson and me, was about him; this phone call illustrates that dynamic. The psychopath is continually focused on himself. There is no respite. He cannot view the world under any other context except for how he lives in it and what others can do for him. Jesperson does not have in him the capability to say, Oh, I caught you at a bad time. Catch your breath and I’ll call you back in ten minutes.
This sort of narcissistic grinding, the constant churning of me, me, me, was never more evident than the writing within his 600-plus-page manifesto/family history I opened that day in my car. As I continued to read through Jesperson’s Canadian childhood memories, it became evident that his view of that life was now being rewritten through the lens of the serial killer he’d become.
Sketching out a biography of his father, Jesperson smeared Les’s reputation, something he knew the Jesperson clan had a low tolerance for. After talking about how Les, as a young man, “mastered the skills of forge and hammer,” learning from his father that change was not something a man should accept without question and reason, he accused Les of taking the “easy” way through life, making others do most of his bidding, while conning his way through whatever predicament the family faced. “Shortcuts,” Jesperson reiterated, were what Les would be “punished” for by his dad if he ever took another track. The one anecdote Jesperson used to explain how scheming and revenge-driven Les could be was when Les put flypaper down on several farm outhouse toilet seats, which were for use by Les’s hop field pickers, after discovering outsiders using the toilets at night when no one was around. Les had even stayed up late several times to watch “people leaving the outhouses naked,” afraid to put their clothes on, just to enjoy the moment.
“So your dad was a mischievous young adult,” I commented. “He lived in a different time. Cut the guy some slack.”
By now, I’d taken a defensive position of sarcasm and resistance. I could not allow the stress of this guy to put me back in the emergency room, where I’d ended up once, doubled over with stomach pain, having an episode. I was going to win this battle.
Ignoring me, Jesperson mentioned how Les had once told him he enjoyed “derailing a train with metal left on the tracks” and “killed chickens with carbide bombs.”
Les liked to make Super 8 films of the kids, like any doting father from the 1960s and 1970s. The Jespersons traveled more than most families, heading south from Canada into the United States, to all the major tourist destinations: Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Disneyland, and Disney World. Les liked to film the kids. Later, Les turned a lot of the film into VHS, narrating certain scenes. In one particular moment, according to Happy Face, the kids were out in the woods somewhere along the road, chasing gophers out of their holes. Little Keith, just five years old, had a club in his hand, same as, he said, his siblings. He was on the hunt to whack any gopher he saw coming up out of its hole. Dad, he said, set a voice-over track to the scene later on, which, in terms of who his son became, was a chilling portend: “Here [is] my natural-born killer.”
Memory, Jesperson explained, is a tenuous part of the psyche we might rely on a little too much. Although he said he can recall details about each of his murders as if he’d recently committed the crimes, he saw childhood, teen, and early-adulthood memories tarnished by the context of how we view those memories later.
“So it’s safe to say a lot of my memory is of those films of us kids playing way back when we were . . . and I can only gauge life’s memories by what is not on film—time lines.”
“Memory is funny,” I responded. “But also, for you, rooted in your father. He infiltrates just about every memory of childhood you have shared with me—do you realize that?”
Whenever his dad had a problem and wanted to know if Little Keith did something he didn’t want to admit, “he would pull out the belt and beat it out of me. That was the way Dad dealt with me. Just pull the belt out and go for it. I didn’t respect my dad. I feared him. I knew that had I gotten in trouble at school and my brothers and sister told on me, when I got home I was going to get a beating.”
I wondered if he’d subconsciously thought that by killing and eventually being caught, part of it was smearing the Jesperson name Les had fought so hard to keep clean all those years. This was a major contention in Jesperson’s version of his family history: Les would do anything to save the Jesperson name from tarnishing. It was the main focus of their lives, Jesperson said. Thus, within that dubious explanation, I wondered, was his need for media attention and exposure based on committing the ultimate sin against the family reputation?
“I actually believe that I killed and continued to do these crimes, and in my mind while I’m doing this, I am tearing down the Jesperson family name.”
“That could be your ‘cop-out’ at this point—hindsight?”