Ponder Jesperson’s comment, if you will, after I asked about victims of murder in general: “Consider a victim an apple on a tree,” he shared. “This apple has matured all of its life and becomes ripe for the picking. And the person who wants this—a rapist or pedophile—looks at that person as the ripe peach he is waiting for. In the end, all it is, is a victim, and when he’s done, he is going to discard it because it’s not going to tell him no.”
Holding my contempt in check, I listened as he then broke into a story about being rejected by his wife and only wanting, at the time he became a killer, a fresh start. Not with Rose, but any woman.
“We’ve been down that road,” I told him.
“Hear me out. There’s always been a disassociation toward victims,” he insisted. “We do not want to associate them as human beings. I don’t see them as someone I care about. I don’t know who they are. It’s really hard to have emotions for someone you don’t know.”
I didn’t respond. So he continued, adding how his “hatred” for his victims was so profound he even despised the family of his victims as well, because “of what their loved one did to me.”
Which was?
“They caused me to trigger and blow off and kill.”
“Of course, it was their fault, right? Not only blame the victim—but her family, too! Get serious, man.” I was growing tired of keeping my feelings checked, allowing him to smear the memories of his victims.
“I knew you would say that, Phelps, but you just don’t get it, do you?”
“I guess not.”
In his manifesto, he talked about an incident when he was three, his brother Brad Jesperson two. It was as if this one situation between Brad and Keith set up a life of disunion and rivalry. Within the manifesto, Brad is the good son who can do no wrong in Les’s eyes. “Was told I rolled a rock down the slide and it hit Brad in the head causing a scar.”
Because of that single incident, Jesperson’s paranoia later told him he was forever viewed as the child in the family who caused pain, the one who inflicted scars on the Jesperson dynasty. He used the incident as a metaphor in his writing to justify the “black sheep” sentiment he felt growing up and, later, as he murdered.
“Brad and I lived in a room the size of the prison cell I live in now,” he explained. “That pitted us against each other. And it never went away.”
Any torture or death Jesperson had brought upon animals became someone else’s (generally Dad’s) doing. He claimed when they first moved to Chilliwack, into the Hickman Road house on a large spread of land, there were “thousands of garter snakes” roaming the countryside, infesting their living space. So “Dad gave us kids a chore. Kill the snakes whenever we saw them. Get rid of them.” Jesperson took to the job passionately, calling it “slaughter.” He used “shovels and hoes” and went about walking the land in a gridlike fashion, chopping the heads off hundreds of snakes, their headless bodies, rubbery and slithery, scattered about the property.
He wrote of scattered “memories,” saying, “Life seems all mixed up . . . scrambled over.” Living in Canada was “easier” for him and “made more sense.” He called it a “quiet” life. It wasn’t until years later when they moved to the States that he was viewed as an “oddball” by his peers and had a hard time fitting in with American kids.
It was on the Hickman Road farm in Chilliwack, as a young teenager, that Jesperson first “felt something different” brewing inside his mind. He described an almost me-against-the-world sentiment, while blaming his family, especially Brad and Les, for feeling this way. He spoke of his father coming home one day with two chocolate Labradors.
Jesperson named one Duke, a dog “who was with me every moment.” Duke and Keith went fishing and hunting and took walks together. Duke slept with Keith.
It wasn’t until Jesperson got to know some of the boys on Hickman Road that he understood just how mean and abusive kids could be. He said certain neighbors and others close to him were into “animal abuse,” but not him.
“I witnessed [those boys] throw knives at cats and dogs they caught. Strays. They’d nail down their paws and use their bodies as targets.”
He was proud of himself for never telling on any of them. By contrast, “My siblings couldn’t wait to tell on me.”
Jesperson once smashed his brother’s toys when his brother made him mad. His dad walked in. Keith explained how his brother had made him angry. He was upset, and so he smashed Bruce’s model plane to bits.
“Dad bought [Bruce] a new plane. I got the belt.”
Several days later, he was down at a swimming pool located west of Cultus Lake, a popular hangout for area kids. He ran into a neighbor. “Hey,” Jesperson said. He thought maybe they could become buddies.
The neighbor didn’t say much. Instead, he grabbed Jesperson by the head and held him underwater until the lifeguard broke it up.
“I never got even with him,” Jesperson said. “I just stayed away.”
Growing into his teens, Jesperson was always the biggest kid; yet the way in which he outlined life then, he was the butt of all the jokes and picked on more than anyone else. They called him “Baby Huey” and “Tiny.” Hazing became a daily part of his life. By then, the family had moved to Selah, Washington.
Dealing with American kids was difficult for Keith. He was a freshman in high school. A bunch of upperclassmen gathered and waited for several freshmen one day to walk by an area of the hallway. There were girls standing around, giggling, pointing, making fun of the new class of zit-faced kids coming into the school. Jesperson’s older brother, Bruce, was among the upperclassmen waiting to initiate the freshmen.
“It was [something] to humiliate us,” Jesperson said. “I saw it as stupid.” He decided: “I’m a big kid. No one is going to tell me to, or make me, drop my pants, so they can all laugh and make jokes.” All the time, Bruce and his friends were calling Jesperson by the nickname of Igor. “Enough was enough.” He’d had it.
Every time he walked by a hazing platoon of kids and a senior told Jesperson to drop his pants, he responded: “Go ‘f’ yourself. It’s not going to happen.”
After a time, Jesperson found out Bruce had been told by his peers to do something about his brother. He would have to submit to initiation, same as everyone else.
Bruce and ten of his friends cornered Keith one day in the hallway.
“[Screw you], Bruce, no way.” Jesperson knew what they wanted.
Soon, a flock of girls gathered. A fight broke out. Jesperson hurled blows. He tossed one kid down the stairs. He punched a few others and hit Bruce a couple of times in the face. Still, even with his size, they managed to get hold of his arms and legs and dragged him into the hallway, where everyone waited.
One of the boys pulled Jesperson’s pants off while the others held him down. There he was for the entire class to see, naked from the waist down.
About twenty girls, he said, stood around and laughed at him.
Bruce went home with a black eye and told their dad that if Keith would have only allowed them to initiate, like everyone else, there would have been no trouble.