I was not anywhere near the bottom of the hellhole Mark and Diane had been swallowed up into, but I was on my way. Who was I to judge her, when my life was on a course of destruction? I was on a path accelerated by the stress of now, at twenty-seven, raising four boys, with a wife I took for granted and treated as though she would always be there, did not matter to me, and would never leave?
I never wanted to be estranged, dislike, or fight with Diane, and certainly deny her and my brother visitations with their children. I loved her—and always viewed Diane as (or maybe hoped her to be) a big sister to confide in. As a teenager, when Mark and Diane had a somewhat normal life and nice apartment, their daughter, Meranda, just five years old, my oldest nephew, Mark, just starting to walk, I babysat. They’d buy me a six-pack. Sitting on their couch, I’d drink my Pabst, smoke cigarettes, and watch Cinemax (when it actually had value for a boy of sixteen). I was the youngest of four boys, but my oldest brother and his wife treated me like an adult, leaving me in charge of their family. I felt honored and grown-up.
I’m not sure where the scales tipped for them and social use turned into addiction, but that was the way it turned out. Just two years and change from the day Diane and Mark drove away from me as I stood on Susan Road and watched them leave without their kids, Mark and I would be face-to-face in my kitchen, Diane dead, the task in front of me left to explain to him what had happened to the woman he loved all his life.
27
GHOST STORIES
“The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him
while he lives.”
—Albert Schweitzer
LES JESPERSON TOOK A DRIVE ONE DAY FROM HIS HOME IN WASHINGTON to the OSP in Salem. A visit with his son was in order. As Happy Face later described him, Les was forever looking for ways to strike it rich. Land. An invention. Machining business. The proprietor of a trailer park. One of the first businesses Les operated was a rental service: he bought a bunch of bicycles and leased them to servicemen on an army base near his Chilliwack home. Whatever way he could facilitate finding the end of the rainbow, Les was willing to begin the journey.
“A book,” Les said after the two of them settled in for a prison visit.
“Book?” Happy Face asked, confused.
“Yeah, the father of a serial killer writes a book about his son.”
Jesperson liked the idea. Jeffrey Dahmer’s father had published a book the previous year. What was good for Dahmer was good for Happy Face.
Jesperson wrote eighty pages of material for his father and sent it off.
They spoke on the phone a few days after the package arrived.
“What do you think?”
“You’re blaming me for everything,” Les stated. He was livid.
“No, I’m not. You asked for my perspective and I am giving it to you.”
But if what Jesperson sent to his dad included a whiff of what he shared with me (the manifesto), Les was spot-on: Les was the source of planting the demon seed in the Jesperson family.
“He didn’t like the way things turned out, and he wanted to whitewash the Jesperson effect,” Happy Face told me.
“I can clearly see, in all you’ve written to me,” I countered, “that Les plays a large role in your anger. Whether it’s how you perceived it then, see it now, or how it was, your father was right. You blame him for everything.”
“Dad was so afraid that he would come off as a monster and that he created me,” Jesperson explained, speaking of their book (which was never completed or published). “There was a lot of me that wasn’t created by him . . . but he always told me to be hard on people because people will run over you. My father had this idea to use a person. That was his nature. A friend to him was someone who had something he could use that he wanted. That’s the way he saw life. Dad saw people as assets. A friend to him is someone that has something to offer. Dad is a taker. And hates all who take from us.”
One story that Jesperson shared, hoping to place some of the responsibility for who he turned out to be on his father, occurred around a campfire “back in the early 1960s.” The Jespersons would sit around an outdoor fire and talk. “We told ghost stories,” Jesperson said.
One by one, they’d share. On this night, when it came time for Les, he nestled up close to the fire, rubbed his hands together over the flame, and asked everyone to pay close attention. What he was about to say, he preferred calling a “premonition story.”
As Les got going, he explained how he was out driving along a dark country road one early morning as the sun was coming up.
“He got a bad feeling and needed to stop on the side of the road,” Jesperson said.
So Les parked his vehicle, got out, and took a walk around.
As he approached the back bumper, an RCMP cruiser pulled up.
Why are you stopped here, sir? the RCMP supposedly asked.
I have this premonition that something bad happened here, Les said. Just cannot get it out of my head.
The cop seemed mystified. Just about twelve hours ago, a man was stopped on this very spot, changing a flat tire in the dark, when a vehicle came by and struck and killed him.
No kidding.
Yes! So I suggest you get back into your vehicle and get going now.
Aspiring one day to be mayor, at this time Les was a prominent member of the city council. It was one more reason, Jesperson said, to be protective of the family name and reputation.
Les concluded his campfire tale there, leaving it as the story of a man with a sharp sense of perception. The kids were thrilled. Dad had special powers.
As the years passed, the story nagged at Happy Face. Les had told it several times, changing certain, however minor, details. Happy would look at the old man and think: Why would you change that? Such subtle facts. Over a period of time, Happy wondered if there was any truth to his father’s story. The tale had to be based on a real event, or was it a story Les had heard?
One night, they sat, together, in back of their Durr Road home at High Valley Ranch near Yakima/Ellensburg, Washington, again around a campfire. Les was rip-roaring drunk.
“Why is it you only had one premonition and no more since then?” the son asked the father. “There has to be something you’re not saying.”
According to Jesperson, his father “began to tremble” and his teeth “chattered.”
“What he was about to tell me,” Jesperson recalled, “no one else had ever heard.”
“What is it?” the son asked the father.
Les explained how “he had been drinking that night before and drove around a corner, his eyes only seeing a flash of something standing up in front of him, before he felt and heard a loud thud.”
So Les stopped the vehicle. He got out to see what he’d hit. He looked in all directions, making sure no one was around.
Just as he did that, however, “he turned to see a car coming and took off.”
Les pulled over several miles ahead, drove into the brush, and slept off his bender.
“Wait a minute,” I said as Jesperson related the story. “Are you telling me that your father hit—”
“Let me finish!”