As Jesperson and I got into the specifics of his crimes and what he thought about his victims, law enforcement, me, other prisoners, his philosophy of life, his childhood, Hollywood’s depiction of serial killers, this man and his entire presence stuck to me like lotion. He occupied space as I went about my life outside my office doors, which I’d rarely experienced with other projects. He’d say something and I’d be drawn deeper into his mania. Some of the details haunted me—Angela Subrize’s murder and the subsequent mutilation of her body being first and foremost. I’d wake in the middle of the night and, there on my ceiling replacing the sheep, was the scene Jesperson described with disturbing details he’d shared far beyond any fictionalized version of murder I’d ever read or seen in a film.
The impetus for Jesperson to mutilate Subrize’s body in January 1995, several months before he and Julie Winningham sat with her mother, came about, he claimed, because he’d allowed Subrize to use Les’s credit card to make a call to her father. He had become connected to her by an electronic paper trail. As he sat in a Burger King, he claimed, eating a Whopper after strangling her in a fit of rage (Jesperson usually took a nap and ate after committing murder), her stiffening corpse wrapped in a blanket inside the cab of his truck outside in the parking lot, the idea that he needed to make certain Subrize was never identified came to mind. He’d not faced this dilemma with any of the other murders, since there had been no direct connection between him and his victims.
“I’m discussing with myself my remedy,” he told me. “What am I going to do? It’s January. Cold out. The ground is frozen. I’m in Nebraska.”
He’d come from Wyoming, via Washington. He’d hooked up with Subrize after meeting her in Spokane. She was looking for a ride into Colorado to visit her father, she said. As they got close to Laramie, a nasty blizzard kicked up.
Arriving in Laramie, Jesperson told her he could take a direct route south to Fort Collins, Colorado, from there. But they needed to wait out the storm.
“I’m really not interested in seeing my dad,” she’d since decided.
“When we got into Laramie, I called her dad a second time, which did not go well,” Jesperson recalled.
Subrize said she wanted to go east now.
“She was afraid I would drop her off at her dad’s house and just keep going. I think all she wanted pretty much was a ride. She just wanted someone to take care of her. I thought all I would end up being was a ride.”
“I cannot carry you on any farther,” Jesperson told her.
“Just take me to Indianapolis, that’s it,” she pleaded.
The snow was blinding. Jesperson could not see the front of his rig. He was stressed. He’d already taken a corner wide and jackknifed the trailer. “Cranky” was the way he articulated his mood. He’d seen several rigs parked, unable to go anywhere. Here it was, this young girl chewing his ear off about a ride east. What’s more, he was illegally driving; his logbook had him stopped for a mandatory rest about one hundred miles before they’d hit the storm head-on.
Abandoning the idea of Fort Collins, Jesperson headed east, Subrize by his side. He’d now made the decision to kill her.
Angela Subrize was a twenty-one-year-old, blond, fair-skinned, average-looking woman from Oklahoma City. Jesperson picked her up in a Spokane bar on January 19, 1995, and, according to him, had no trouble convincing her to spend the night having sex and drinking beer. A few days later, Subrize called the trucking company Jesperson worked for and left a message saying she wanted to talk to him. When he called her, she asked for a ride to go see her father in Fort Collins. So he picked her up. Along the way, besides becoming “demanding” and not “shutting up and letting me sleep,” she shared with Jesperson a plan that she’d initiated, which was something he could not allow her to follow through. According to Happy Face, she was heading to Indiana to trick a man into marrying her.
“She said he wanted to marry her,” Jesperson explained. “She said she was pregnant with someone else’s baby, but was telling this guy it was his. I wasn’t about to let her do that to him and his family.”
“So you killed her?” I asked. “You played God?”
“Yup. She was a liar and I couldn’t let her destroy this guy’s life.”
In Nebraska, as the snow came down sideways, Jesperson pulled into a rest area. “This is it,” he told her. “I’m not going any farther.”
It was time to wait out the storm.
Subrize complained because truck stops had TV and conveniences, such as food and coffee. Rest stops didn’t. What was she to do while he waited out the storm and slept?
“Now she wanted to dictate where I parked,” he explained. This angered him. Explaining this to me over a Video Visit, Jesperson smiled. “She started to act like my wife.”
There was that trigger—Rose.
Jesperson told her if she didn’t like it, get the hell out. He turned over and fell asleep.
Twenty minutes into his nap, she pushed on him. “Get up. I’m bored. Let’s get going.” She stared out the window. “Look, traffic is moving again.”
“Now you listen, I need to rest.”
“Come on,” she pressed.
“Look, you really don’t know who you are messing with—now quit it.”
Jesperson closed his eyes.
“She pushed on me again and I said I’ve had it.”
Jesperson then threw her against the back of the sleeper cab.
“You told me you’d never hurt me!” she screamed.
“I’m not going to just hurt you, Angela,” Jesperson growled. “I’m going to kill you.”
He grabbed her by the neck, flipped her onto the mattress, pushed down on her throat.
“Then, as she gasped for air . . . I told her she would be my seventh murder victim.”
Happy Face “strangled her and put her out of her damn misery.. . . I felt like I was being used, so I got rid of her. Pretty Angela Subrize lie dead in my bed. I rolled her up in a blanket and put the truck into gear and drove on.”
After his rage settled, Jesperson realized, Shit, I used Dad’s credit card. How stupid was that?
While eating his Whopper, after taking a four-hour nap next to her corpse inside the cab of his truck, Jesperson realized he’d have to come up with a way to be certain she was never identified.
Then, as he sat and picked his teeth after the meal, an epiphany: a film he’d just seen “dawned” on him. It was the 1983 comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation. In the film, the family dog is tied to the bumper of the Griswold family car during a pit stop. As they pile back into the vehicle after the stop, they forget the pooch. Thus, the dog is pulled down the freeway, until there is nothing left but a dangling leash.
If I do that, Jesperson thought, I could get rid of her identification. Without a face (teeth) and hands (fingerprints), Angela Subrize could never be easily identified.
So he made the decision to tie her body underneath his truck and drag it for as “far as needed” to “rub” those body parts off. Whatever was left over, he’d discard in the woods along the side of the highway.