“Why don’t you go see him more often?” my wife asked from time to time, my mother and brothers echoing. I knew everyone in my family—including my niece and nephews—wondered why I’d distanced myself. Part of it was keeping my sobriety in check. But there was also a voice inside me insisting that I not be a party to watching my brother, the oldest, fade into dust. I couldn’t stand to see him bloated and sickly, his eyes sunken into his skull or bulged like a bullfrog, his teeth falling out and rotting. It was selfish, maybe. But I couldn’t be around someone I loved who was dying. I didn’t want to remember him this way.
Mark had turned thirty-nine a few weeks before Diane’s death. As he hit his forties, the hep C attacked his body like an out-of-control brushfire. I’d look at him as we sat and talked and would think: He won’t see fifty. He looked like an old man. Frail. Wrinkled. Hunched over. His stomach so big on some days, he couldn’t move, literally. As I think back now, I can see his fingernails, abnormally long and white, the tips grungy, like a mechanic, a blue hospital pajama top he wore all the time. The way he’d lean to his left side and force a smile. I’d leave his apartment with a dreaded sense of isolation—that same feeling you get when summoned in the middle of the night and, driving alone in the quiet darkness, you feel like you’re the only person left in the world.
31
OH, BROTHER . . .
“It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the
human heart.”
—Joel Coen
DURING THE PERIOD WHEN HE KILLED EIGHT WOMEN, KEITH JESPERSON trusted no one. He’d murdered Julie Winningham on March 10, 1995, in Washington State. By March 13, Jesperson was in Utah. By the fourteenth, eating NoDoz like Mentos, he’d managed to cross into Pennsylvania, where he dropped a haul and watched as forklifts loaded yards of stainless steel for delivery to Deming, New Mexico. Leaving Pennsylvania, with a new form of paranoia settling on him, Jesperson said, “I expected to meet up with cops everywhere I went.”
In Julie Winningham’s case, it was simple, common laziness (complacency or absolute hubris) that got the best of him. He’d tossed her body about fifteen feet off the side of the freeway, over a guardrail, on the opposite side of the Columbia River Gorge, directly across the river from where he’d put Taunja Bennett. He’d planned to drag her down the embankment and hide her later on that night, but he never got around to it. A passerby ran across Winningham’s body the following day, March 11. From there, it took cops fewer than twenty-four hours to identify her and find out she’d been traveling with a man her friends named, describing Jesperson as “creepy,” and that Julie had been telling everyone he was her “fiancé.” Law enforcement then descended upon Jesperson’s employer.
Going over this turning point in Jesperson’s life—as cops moved in and he sensed an end nearing—became frustrating, sending me in different directions. This man has lied so much, to so many people over twenty years, it’s hard to decipher which tales regarding the end of his murder spree are accurate, simply because of the intensity those fabrications took on as law enforcement circled around him.
“The lies, man,” I said. “Why so many?”
“I began lying the moment I started talking to cops and did not stop for many, many years. Crossing that line of lying to police was like crossing that line to kill Bennett. The more I lied to them, the easier it was to lie to everyone.”
For the serial killer, once the jig is up, he settles in and initiates a game plan. Jesperson made an important point when he told me: “As a serial murderer, I can tell stories and it is up to investigators to prove what is true or not. If it turns out to be a lie, no one can be mad because I am a known liar. If it turns out to be true, I’m credible.” He found this exhilarating. It gave him a sense of power and control, even after he was finished killing.
On March 17, Jesperson called his daughter to wish her happy birthday. They cried, he remembered, because calling home was emotional and difficult.
My bet is, he was upset over the fact that he was about to go to jail and everything he had done would be exposed.
After calling his daughter, feeling “a weight,” Jesperson stopped in Texarkana, an Arkansas-Texas border town, while on his way to Deming to dump that load of Pennsylvania mining steel. From Texarkana, he drove into Dallas, then headed west on the 40, crossing the state line into New Mexico, near Amarillo.
Entering New Mexico, he stopped at the port of entry. After reading through his paperwork, the man behind the counter asked, “What is your full name?”
Jesperson looked around, expecting the troops to swarm in.
“That’s not something they ever ask.”
But no cops, so he drove into Deming.
On March 19, Happy Face dropped his load of steel and called dispatch to find out about another. They told him to call back later that day.
Highly unusual.
Jesperson phoned: “We’ll have something for you in the next day or two,” dispatch said. He held the phone away from his ear and stared. “Last thing they want is for a truck to sit around. They were putting me off all day. Now I knew for sure they were working with law enforcement.”
Leaving the facility, as he drove into town, two cruisers pulled up alongside, slowed down, took a good look at him, and sped off.
It’s over.
Hanging around Deming for a few days at a local truck stop, by March 22, Jesperson still hadn’t received orders from dispatch. He sensed they were trying to figure out with cops where to send him next so he could be arrested without incident.
Over the past twenty-four hours, he’d noticed a black-and-red Ford Bronco tailing him, sitting where he parked or up ahead in traffic, always within sight.
Before leaving the Deming truck stop, he decided to wash his rig.
“Closed,” the man said. “Might reopen later.”
Those rig-washing stations never shut down.
“They were afraid I’d wash evidence off the truck.”
Finally, dispatch gave him an address and told him to drive into Las Cruces, New Mexico.
As he pulled up to a closed gate in Las Cruces, the Bronco parked next to him. A man got out and told Jesperson the business was closed. He needed to pull around to the other gate, in back.
Jesperson went along with the charade. He parked the rig near a shed. The man beckoned Happy Face down from his cab: “Follow me.”
As they walked around the corner, two more men stepped out from the shadows. Both had weapons pointed at Jesperson’s head.
They patted him down.
At the local sheriff’s office, one of the detectives explained: “We’re investigating the death of your fiancée, Julie Winningham. We’re from Clark County, Washington. I’m Detective Rick Buckner.”
Jesperson withstood five hours of interrogation, both detectives telling him they knew he’d murdered his girlfriend. They took hair and blood samples and fingerprinted him. But they could not charge Happy Face and released him.
“I don’t think Buckner had anything on him then,” Thomas Phelan said. “I know Buckner.” He was a cop who could get murderers to crack. “He didn’t have enough then to pop Keith. It wasn’t a question of letting him go.”
Over the next two days, Jesperson was followed wherever he went. Then Buckner cornered Jesperson one afternoon, stuck an arrest warrant affidavit in his face, telling him: “I just filed that.” As soon as the judge signed off, Buckner made clear, Jesperson was going to jail.