Apparently the Courant received the memo from victims’ family members, including ours. Five days after that article published, the newspaper printed a “correction” within the body of a second article: THE SLAYING OF 5 HARTFORD WOMEN, ONE WITH A DIFFERENCE—“The Link: Violent Death.” The retraction corrected that four of the women had “never [been] convicted of prostitution or drug offenses,” and “Diana Ferris was never convicted of prostitution,” adding, “If it turns out there is a serial killer preying on women involved with the illegal sex or drug trade—something police appear far from concluding—Hartford would join the ranks of many communities with such a problem.”
The killing of addicts and streetwalkers hit off-the-chart levels in America during the 1980s and 1990s. Serial killers have told me that preying on those types of victims lessen their chances tenfold of being caught, not to mention how easy it is for a predator to wave a fifty-dollar bill in front of a dope addict or sex worker and get him or her into his comfort zone.
Jesperson had killed several “prostitutes.” I asked him why he chose sex workers.
“Because nobody gives a shit. They’re not missed. Cops don’t care. They say they’re investigating your sister-in-law’s murder, but a rich white girl goes missing and they pull out all stops. It’s all over the news. Not so with drug addicts and street whores.”
“My sister-in-law was not a street whore.”
“You get what I am saying.”
I call it the “Natalee Holloway Effect.” Some blond, blue-eyed college girl goes missing and television networks park their trucks in front of the family McMansion. But a dozen prostitutes found murdered all over a city, beaten, raped, strangled, mutilated, and we don’t see anything about it until a transient is on trial—a judicial process of which, in turn, becomes all about him.
“The point I am making is: who you kill matters,” Jesperson added. “We pay attention to the victims we choose.”
Overnight, whoever was murdering Hartford area women and one male was given a catchy Hollywood nickname: “The Asylum Hill Killer.” From that day forward, it became apparent to us that Diane was likely one of his victims. We couldn’t overlook all of the links, however circumstantial. The Courant had made it an easy concept to grasp.
In September 2001, thirty-eight-year-old Matthew Steven Johnson, a man described as a cocaine-addicted “homeless drifter with an IQ of 69,” was arrested and connected to three of the eleven cases, with good reason to believe he’d committed that murder on Garden Street, LaDawn Roberts. His DNA had been part of the sex offender’s database registry. The Asylum Hill Killer had left semen—from masturbating on each of them—and blood at each scene. An identical twin, Johnson was a troubled youth who grew up in the Asylum Hill section of Hartford and spent a majority of his life in group homes. He’d done serious time at Long Lane School, a juvenile detention center in Middletown, Connecticut. Long Lane, where Diane had herself spent time, had one of those legendary reputations among us kids. There was not a parent in my neighborhood that had not threatened: “You better stop or you’ll end up in Long Lane.”
Johnson had a vast criminal history: from assault to theft to vandalism. His most recent obsession, however, was attacking women. A massive and obese black man, Johnson was identified and arrested after abducting a woman from a Hartford street, dragging her into a bush, and holding her hostage for two hours, while repeatedly and violently raping and beating her.
It was said Johnson rode a bicycle to and from each murder and rape, was good for at least three, yet had likely done many of the others, including Diane.
“Not sure,” Mark told me when I asked him about Johnson. Then a week later, changing his mind: “Glad they got that piece of shit. I got people in prison. He’ll pay for what he did to Diane.”
At first, police could not say definitively yes or no whether Johnson was connected to Diane’s murder, giving us the proverbial line—“We’re waiting on DNA”—so many families hear when a loved one has been murdered and a suspect emerges.6
In February 2004, Johnson was convicted of those three murders, all of which were thought to be “similar deaths,” based on DNA results and medical examiners’ reports. Johnson was sentenced to life for killing two women, Aida Quinones and Rosali Jimenez, both aged thirty-three, and thirty-seven-year-old Alesia Ford. All were killed by blunt-force trauma to the neck, their faces beaten into an unrecognizable bloody pulp, their skulls crushed.
I’d been considering writing a book about another Hartford-area serial killer, Berlin native Edwin “Ned” Snelgrove. While looking into the Snelgrove case, I met many of the same cops working the Johnson investigation. Sitting inside the office of one, talking about Snelgrove, when we finished, I made a passing comment: “Johnson’s good for my sister-in-law, don’t you think?”
The investigator sat, glaring at me. I felt he was weighing how much to share. He was still working the Johnson investigation, which made him an expert on Diane’s case.
“No,” he said.
“No? Come on. It’s all there.”
“Turn around. Take a look at that picture on my wall behind the door.”
The photo had been blown up, poster-sized, if memory serves me, and tucked behind the door because of its graphic nature. To see it, you had to know it was there.
Walking over, taking a close look, I wondered what the hell he was talking about.
“That’s one of Johnson’s victims,” he said, standing in back of me, arms folded.
And I knew, as I stood there taking in this brutal crime scene photograph, displaying that distinctive signature—the victim’s grotesquely beaten face and his DNA—he had left at every one of his scenes, that Matthew Steven Johnson had not murdered Diane.
32
RISKY UNCERTAINTY
“The incidence of suicide in rampage murderers (34.7%)
is much higher than in serial killers (4.4%). . . . [Fifty-two
percent] of the suicides in the serial killers occurred
after arrest.”
—David Lester, Ph.D., The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
HE PARKED AT THE FOOT OF AN ARIZONA MOUNTAIN RANGE JUST over the New Mexican border outside Road Forks, likely somewhere near the Dos Cabezas Peaks off the I-10, though he could not recall exactly where. He sat in his truck and stared at the snowcapped points. It was time to put an end to the madness: swallow a bag of over-the-counter sleeping pills and drift off into eternal sleep. Jesperson couldn’t stop himself. Having committed eight murders over the span of five years, each one easier and more violent than the last, he no longer had the control he did when he met that jogger along the trail.
“There was once, when I was on the East Coast, I felt I could easily kill as many as eighty before anyone caught on,” he told me, explaining further how being a cross-country trucker afforded him the opportunity to pick up a woman in, say, Ohio, drive her to North Carolina, kill her there, and dump her body in Georgia. Without any DNA, there would be no connection back to him or her anywhere.
A number associated with Jesperson’s body count has been as high as 166. And Jesperson once told a cellmate (snitch) he killed twenty-two.
“I named dates and places, filled in the time line . . . pulling it all from a hat.”