Jesperson left Burger King and parked at a truck stop “near Mile Marker 198” in Nebraska. It was 3:45 A.M. There were plenty of rigs around, but everyone seemed to be sleeping. He parked his truck in the corner of the lot in order to have a clear view of anyone coming or going.
“I tied a rope around her neck and . . . I left a loop there, like a handle, so I could, like, grab it. I used another rope and I cut the rope about six to eight feet long, tied one end on one ankle and one end on the other ankle, which made another loop.” He dragged her corpse out of the sleeper cab, plopped it onto the tar below, and pulled her underneath the truck. He found a cross member, a steel bar going the length of the truck from side to side. “I wanted to position the body between the duals [axles] and the back of the trailer so it could ride and nobody would be able to see it.” He’d “envisioned all of this in his head” before doing it. “I taped her hands together so that positioning her facedown she’d ride facedown on the pavement, so I’d get rid of her facial features and handprints.”
Certain her body was secure, he conducted a final walk around, “to see if anybody was watching.”
He didn’t see anyone.
Confident everything was clear after a cluster of vehicles passed by, Jesperson revved the accelerator, popped the clutch, and took off.
Merging onto the freeway, he hit the gas and, only able to get the truck up to sixty-four miles per hour because of a company-mandated speed-control governor, he got her up to speed and drove.
His only concern was that Nebraskan state cops had a habit of parking in the median at night, the middle of the freeway, and pointing their headlights out onto the road.
Strangely, he said next, “We drove for about twelve miles.”
We. The way he described this scene made me shiver. He’d sometimes address his victims in disparaging ways: It, That, The Body, Piece of Shit. Never by their names. Now, within this gruesome situation, he opted for We.
Jesperson pulled over after a congestion of cars passed him, worried someone might see her bouncing underneath the vehicle. He then got on the CB radio and told any nearby truckers coming up not to be concerned if they saw him pulled over and his flashers on. All was fine. No help needed.
Pulled over, his rig still running, Happy Face jumped out, grabbed his side cutters, severed the rope tied around her neck and, with the loop he’d made around her ankles, pulled what was left of her body out from underneath the rig and dragged her thirty feet off the road shoulder. He found an area of tall grass, snow, and ice, flinging what was left of her there, where he believed nobody would find her.
“From her ears forward on her skull was missing . . . and her chest cavity was missing, and both arms were missing.”
This image, a corporal nightmare in the fashion of a graphic novel scene, forcibly sketching itself inside my head, had aroused me from sleep on several nights. I’d had a difficult time getting the entire narrative out of my consciousness.
“Her jeans had actually worn down to where there was no fly area left, no internal organs there.”
As we talked through Angela Subrize’s murder and the disposal of her remains, a lingering thought was that perhaps he was lying about her being dead when he tied her up and dragged her underneath his vehicle. Part of an image I’d had dreams about included a woman screaming as she was forced out of a vehicle by a faceless man and then dragged to her death.
I explained to him that Angela Subrize was a victim. A woman loved by those in her life. Pregnant when Jesperson murdered her, this fact hit a personal nerve with me, I explained. Angela Subrize was not a discussion piece, a fictional character (a box of which Jesperson had sometimes placed his victims into) within the context of Happy Face’s spree of murders.
“What do you want me to say, Phelps? I’m telling you how it was. You need to harden up and face the facts. I gotta go now.”
Click.
25
SATAN’S WHISPER
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world
our hell.”
—Oscar Wilde
JESPERSON WAS ALWAYS ASKING ME ABOUT “THE BOOK.” WHEN WAS I going to write his book? You know, finally tell the world about the Taunja Bennett case and all of those corrupt law enforcement officials. This was the drum he beat—constantly.
“You’re my last hope for the truth to come out.”
“You mean your truth?” I said.
“I guess.” He paused. “You’re not ever going to write a book about me, are you?”
“I said I would. I am a man of my word, even if that promise is to a serial killer.”
As we got to talking over the next few weeks, I opened up a bit, explaining that, at times, despite all the horrors he’d shared with me, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of him as another person I’d spoken to or interacted with throughout my day, not the vicious psychopath he is, and these feelings were bothering (and weighing on) me. I couldn’t reconcile being friends with a serial killer, liking him in the least, or thinking there was another side to him. There was no way to explain the way I felt. I’d kept my feelings from everyone I knew. And yet, for some reason, here I was telling him.
“You have been a highlight to me for over three years,” he said. “I look forward to our talks.”
I knew this. Beyond all the groupies he’d acquired, his cellies, those in the general public who wrote to him, he depended on my friendship. I was there for him in more ways than being his storyteller. I’d never sent him money. He’d never been paid for Dark Minds. I would put twenty-five dollars, here and there, on his telephone account so he could call me on my cell phone. And even though he’d send those irritating subscription postcards that fall out of magazines (prompting me to buy him one), a commissary checklist of all the goodies I could purchase for him, I’d given in only one time and purchased a magazine (fishing), which I did not renew. He had plenty of money. He made, on average, sixty-five dollars a month working. A woman in Texas sent him forty a month, “just because”; a woman in Michigan was good for twenty-five to fifty every month; a woman in Australia, twenty dollars; a guy in Wisconsin one hundred dollars “every few months”; in addition to receiving random money orders from twenty to two hundred dollars periodically from all over the world. He’d check his account and find fifty here and twenty there from people he didn’t know. The trimmings of being a serial killer with a household name, I reckon.