My brother was one of those kids who hit home runs in Little League, and every other kid wanted to be on his team, though he gave up on sports. He quit school and yet excelled later in accounting college, able to work numbers like a savant. But he gave up on that, too, and appropriated his genius math skills to thinking he could somehow beat the horse and dog track. He was one of those dads his kids loved. He was kind, a heart as soft as a poem. His smile made everything all right. He bought his children toys, took them on vacations, made them dinners, taught them how to swim. But he gave up on that also. When the booze and drugs took over, Mark checked out of life. He became unavailable to everyone. He never wanted help. He never wanted to stop. He never wanted for his life to turn out the way it did.
Although he and Diane could scream at each other and rattle windowpanes, Mark was quiet, even when he got high or drunk. Diane, alternatively, was obstreperous. Her voice raised an octave when she got splashed. When she smoked crack, paranoia set in. She’d draw the shades, stand in the corner, freaking out, thinking there were bugs crawling in her hair. At times, she’d be belligerent, vicious, and nasty, but she could also show tremendous love and affection in ways that any mother, wife, and sister-in-law might. She had a deep connection, as did Mark, with their youngest child, Tyler.
“It’s funny because, as kids, they made each of us feel as if we were their favorite, as if we were special,” Meranda recalled. “That was one of their greatest gifts as parents.”
The first published report of Diane’s murder painted a gruesome picture. It claimed she was found “strangled” to death inside a Garden Street apartment in Hartford’s north end “after neighbors and family members had not seen her for days.” In one version, she had been lying on a bed, a pillowcase over her head, a telephone cord wrapped around her neck, bruises on one leg.
I’d heard several varieties of this as time passed. One was that she’d been found wearing only panties. The other was that she was murdered inside the bathtub (no water).
What cannot be disputed is the fact that she was five months pregnant and she’d been in that apartment, dead, for several days before anyone had found her. The fetus, news reports claimed, was stillborn. Blood was never taken from the baby to find out who had fathered the child.
Diane called her oldest, Meranda, in the weeks before she was murdered: “I’m not sure if it’s Mark’s or [the other guy’s],” she said of the baby. “We’ll see when the baby is born.”
“She really felt that it was Mark’s baby,” Meranda said.
In this same Hartford Courant article about her murder, for the first time it was reported publicly that “police believe she was at the scene of” Thomas Myers’s 1993 Dutch Point housing project murder. By then, three years after his death, Diane had stiff-armed cops enough to where they had let her be. The Myers murder went cold, unsolved.
In the early 2000s, the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice, working with the Connecticut Department of Correction and law enforcement agencies across the state, created a cold case deck of playing cards “highlighting fifty-two unsolved homicides, missing persons, and unidentified remains cases” statewide. Each of the fifty-two cards in the deck represented one case, featured details about the crime, a photo of the victim, and a phone number to call with any anonymous tips or important information. In subsequent years, other decks (editions) were printed. The state distributes the cards, mainly, to prisoners in Connecticut state prisons. It is an unconventional method of generating tips and initiating conversation among inmates about unsolved cases. Thus far, I’ve been told, eight murders have been resolved because of information from the cards. In a second-edition playing-card deck, Diane is featured as the ten of hearts.5
29
SMOKED
“What strange creatures brothers are!”
—Jane Austen
THE HAPPY FACE KILLER WAS SEVEN WHEN HIS FATHER OPENED THE door to his room one afternoon in 1962 and ordered him downstairs, pronto.
Little Keith sat as his dad thought for a minute. Then Les came out with it: “Have you been taking my cigarettes?”
“No.”
“Don’t you lie to me, boy.”
Keith broke down.
Les took a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and handed it to his son. “Inhale that like a real man. Come on, I want to see you smoke one.”
Keith thought: The belt or cigarette?
As the child puffed, Les demanded he inhale and stop faking it. Take a big drag, suck that smoke into both lungs, and then “hold it.”
“Before long, I was puking my guts out,” Jesperson recalled. “But it did not stop me from wanting to smoke. I still stole cigarettes from Dad’s stash.”
By the early 1970s, the Jesperson household was used to hearing Les hack and cough for most of the day, as if something had gone down the wrong pipe. During one coughing fit, Les was rushed to the ER because he couldn’t stop. He was diagnosed with pneumonia. Smoking was killing him, his doctors told him. That night, Les coughed so violently he broke three ribs, one of which punctured a lung.
“When his doctors went in to save his life, they found he had lung cancer,” Jesperson explained. “They fixed him and he was told to stop smoking or he’d die.” Les quit and, after a brief battle, was free of cancer. “And my cigarettes disappeared. So I stopped mostly because it was killing my dad.”
In 2012, Les ended a brief letter to his boy explaining he was “on oxygen 24/7,” a “50-foot hose” attached to the tank “long enough to reach the bed and toilet.” Les was in bad shape. Life had caught up to him.
Jesperson told me the cancer story to put his dad into context. Years after he’d quit smoking, Les would sit around, bragging to anyone listening, that he “stopped smoking because he wanted to be a good dad and be around for [his kids]—lead by example.”
“I would tell him much later that he stopped smoking because he stared death in the face, quit or die.”
According to Happy Face, the story demonstrated the deceptive nature his father had instilled in him. He took note: learning that one could twist and shape a life to fit an agenda.
This conversation got me thinking. I was interested in what scared Jesperson. What was it that a seasoned serial killer, doing life behind bars, feared most? Death by disease? The electric chair? Being shanked by some young punk looking to make a name for himself in the prison yard by taking out the resident serial?
Jesperson’s answer surprised me. “Being caught,” he said. “Being found out. That was my biggest fear. Once I realized people would know who I truly was, it terrified me. Everything was fine and dandy until everyone knew I was a killer.”
He enjoyed harboring the secret; walking around, stopping at the table of four cops as they ate lunch, asking for directions; holding the door for an attractive female; pumping diesel fuel into his rig, smiling, waving at fellow truckers. All while knowing the corpse of a woman he’d just strangled to death was lying inside his rig. He got a rush. He felt omnipotent. It gave him a sense of superiority and power: being smarter and having more confidence than anyone else. It was all a component of the drug keeping the psychopath high.