This led to taking greater risks. Like, for example, when he was at home in Portland, Jesperson jogged regularly at a nearby park. One day, while running down a popular trail, a woman passed, jogging in the opposite direction. Happy Face stopped, turned around, ran back, and caught up. They jogged, side by side, for a short distance before she looked him in the eye and said, “Not interested.”
Before turning and taking off in the direction he’d been going, Jesperson told her she was “beautiful.” In response, he claimed, “she blushed and smiled.”
Looking back over his shoulder as he ran away, he caught her doing the same. “She is watching me.”
As she ran out of sight, he looked at his watch, noting the time.
The next day, he jogged the same route, same time, hoping to run into the woman again. As they passed each other, he waved.
She smiled.
He did it again the following day.
Then, per his carefully designed plan, he didn’t go back for a week.
Next time he jogged, he saw the woman. She smiled, waved. He responded with the same gesture. Over the next four weeks, he saw her every third day. By then, she felt comfortable and knew him by sight. He was grooming her. “Building a rapport.” Charming her defenses. Allowing her to feel safe within his presence. He’d murdered several women just like her by then. In fact, it was during this period when he’d initiated a cat-and-mouse bait with law enforcement by leaving a note on a restroom wall after Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske were convicted: JAN 21 . . . KILLED TAUNJA BENNETT IN PORTLAND–TOO [SIC] PEOPLE GOT THE BLAME SO I CAN KILL AGAIN–CUT BUTTON OFF JEANS PROOF.
One afternoon, as Jesperson jogged down a narrow part of the trail, he came upon the woman. She was standing, “blocking my path.”
He knew he had her complete trust.
“Name?” she said, smiling.
“Keith.”
“We should have coffee.”
“I’d like that.”
As they sat and talked inside a nearby coffee shop, Jesperson picked up on what he later referred to as a “sexual hint to the meeting.” She was “flirting.” As they chitchatted, he couldn’t stop thinking: I could take you home right now and kill you. You have no idea who you are sitting with. This gave him a thrill, sure, but also a profound sense of being in total control of this woman without her knowing (a major element of his preferred fantasy). Being a serial killer in this moment energized him.
After coffee, they jogged together a few additional times. They’d sit on a park bench afterward, sweaty and out of breath, talking.
“I’m married,” she confessed. “I have children. My husband doesn’t work out.”
Jesperson smiled.
“I made her feel safe,” he recalled, laughing at the thought. “She was easy prey.”
He needed to act on the situation or take himself out of it. Because in the weeks that followed, he fantasized about one day waiting for her to run down a secluded section of the trail as he stealthily waited in the brush. As she ran by, he saw himself grab her with the intention of raping and killing her in the woods. It was the moment when she realized she’d been duped, tricked by a predator, that he sought most. Seeing her face—her eyes, especially—change as she understood she’d allowed a monster into her life would have been a bigger high than killing her, he claimed.
“But that wasn’t me,” he said, after I asked why he never acted. “Too many things can go wrong in that scenario.”
As he thought about it later, he said, “Here I was, a serial murderer of women, protecting a woman.”
In the office of the trucking company he worked for, there was a woman Jesperson walked to her car every evening when he was in town. This was after one of his bodies had been discovered and it had been reported in the news that a potential serial killer was on the loose in the Pacific Northwest.
“I protected her from the serial killer in the news . . . me!”
Jesperson had a way of desensitizing himself to certain behaviors he understood to be ruthless, demeaning, and resentful. He thought it nothing, for example, to set up a scenario in the house when he was married to Rose—during that period when she’d allegedly refused to have sex—where she would walk in on him while he masturbated to photographs of other women, including her friends.
“It’s no wonder why I don’t miss her,” he said.
As a youngster, Jesperson once received a telescope for Christmas. He used it to peep on the female neighbors. One particular house had the perfect view for him to watch as a woman undressed every night. He’d ogle her as she took off her clothes, convincing himself she knew he was watching.
But after a short while, he said, “It was just old news. The telescope was put away. Later on, I kept a pair of binoculars in my truck to be able to observe the goings-on in various areas I parked at. My life was full of spare time just to watch people.”
Specifically, he enjoyed studying women who weren’t “aware they were being watched.” (This was from a man who told me several times he never stalked anyone.)
As the middle of March (1995) dawned, Jesperson felt as though his immediate family, children, ex-wife, and society in general were pointing a finger in his face, backing him into a corner. He anticipated the moment when they realized he was a serial killer. Thinking about that, he couldn’t face the rejection, ridicule, and public scorn about to fall on him. This was what kept him up at night. The only way out, he reconciled, was suicide.
“If that comment is the truth, take me back there then,” I told him, unconvinced. “When you were caught, or, rather, when you gave yourself up, why was it Brad—the one brother you were more at odds with throughout your childhood—you decided to write a letter to and admit what you’d done?”
“Brothers,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Siblings. What an interesting topic.”
*