“Why did you end up killing Julie?” I reckoned it wasn’t to keep her from court. That answer was classic Jesperson, the smart-ass quote machine.
“It . . . it just got to that point where I wanted to . . .” Then he stopped. “She was a user. I wanted to rid the world of a user. I knew the moment she got into the truck with me, there was a plan. Something in her head. She was always looking out for Julie.”
He went on, blaming Julie Winningham, knowing how I felt about this. Yet it was, perhaps, the first time I understood he was speaking of his actual thought process. It was how Jesperson saw the world: Bad people needed to disappear (or pay, or own up to their mistakes) before they hurt anyone else. He had designated himself the gatekeeper, the hand of God, making sure whatever punishment came to pass.
“It was, like, in 1995, when I picked Julie up again. She got into the truck and I was just, like, waiting for a drumroll. I was, like, why is she so in love with me again? And it came down to, she had two DUIs and she needed somebody to bail her out. I just felt that . . . well, I’d get rid of her. I just felt I needed to destroy all that was left of her.” He then explained, without realizing, the predominant trigger regulating his thirst for blood: “This is the punch line. After we went out . . . everything was going to be hunky-dory now and it was all good that she was a changed woman. And later that night, as we sat in the truck stop, she said, ‘We got to get married.’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’” He laughed. “It was one of those, you know, deal breakers.”
He’d brought it up, so I asked about the death penalty. He’d given me the impression that when he first turned himself in, he’d welcome the needle. He was arrested later that day (after calling Buckner) and subsequently admitted to eight murders, pleading those cases out over many years. Attorney Thomas Phelan worked diligently and successfully to make certain the death penalty was off the table for Jesperson. From there, he became comfortable in OSP as System Identification Number 11620304—and even more comfortable as Happy Face.
“They think it’s a deterrent to give the death penalty, when, in fact, it’s actually a welcome sight because death row is protective custody all the way.” He spoke of automatic appeals, millions of dollars of “taxpayer money spent on trials and appellate lawyers and courts—all for nothing. I saved the taxpayers money by pleading my cases. I could’ve dragged each [case] out.”
He’d done us all a favor, in other words.
Settling into prison was easier for Jesperson than he expected. The letters he and his cellies receive from women all over the world kept him occupied. Jesperson has shared many of them with me. Pen pals from Australia, Germany, England, Italy, and other countries—women writing to men either doing life or condemned to die.
“Basically, I am a trophy. That’s how they see serial killers in prison—trophies. We’re like the trophy husband. We’re always where we’re supposed to be. They have control over us. I really don’t like those types of women. I had one come in here to visit me and she wanted me to be on Jerry Springer. She made it out where she was the dominating woman and I was just the bitch.” He terminated the visit and told her to never contact him again. “They use us to catapult their careers. There is a girl in Texas who writes me and she is actually infatuated with Jeffrey Dahmer, even though he is dead. Even on the recording of her phone, she says she is ‘Mrs. Dahmer.’”
I asked if his pen pals were the type of women he would have killed.
“I figured you’d ask that question. I’m not sure. But it could very well be.”
His state of mind was important. It’s quite a cliché to say that the serial killer has no conscience. Yet, what does this actually mean in terms of how Keith Jesperson viewed the world?
“We have one when it pertains to us,” Jesperson concluded. “To our needs. To what we value in our lives. Our victims are collateral damage in dealing with our own personal demons in the baggage that we carry.”
*
WHEN YOU ARE IN their presence, serial killers project a nervous, calculating, saturating energy, draining your vitality. They understand that the public, mostly, fears them in some way. They tend to have a look of guarded satisfaction; they recognize society views them as a scourge, but they are able to play off it, instead of allowing it to affect them negatively.
Jesperson agreed he was hated. He knew that the majority saw him as a vile, inhumane creature. Yet, he was okay with that and, in many ways, embraced it, feeding into the public perception of him.
After years of talking, I noticed there was a visceral, childlike intensity about Happy Face. This constant and aggressive inner dialogue running on a loop inside his head, which I could, at times, almost hear. He was motivated to figure me and the public out. Where was I coming from? What was my hidden agenda? What had people said about him? What did people think of him?
“You’re my last hope, Phelps,” he said many times.
One has to keep in mind that in befriending a serial killer, you are entering into a pact with the Devil, allowing him a portal into your life and soul. I never once discounted or underestimated this fact, however much I probably convinced myself it wasn’t real. And as Jesperson tried, to no avail, to help me understand the mind-set of the man who had murdered my sister-in-law, which I felt by this time I understood already, I stepped up my presence at Mass (even with my faith slipping), took to fasting more often, read and meditated more. I dreaded that if I did not have an antidote to evil, it would take control of my life. Even though I now understood that the imperturbable calm I chased, so contrary to all of my anxiety, didn’t exist for me.
33
WHEN GRACE ABANDONS
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
—C.S. Lewis
MARK LIKED TO CATCH THE BUS FROM A STOP OUTSIDE HIS APARTment in Rockville, across the street from a Dunkin’ Donuts, Dollar Store, and CVS. One day in early March 2004, my brother stood at what he perceived was that bus stop.
On this day, however, Mark waited, unknowingly, about twenty yards away from the designated stop. The bus driver came to a complete halt near him, puffed the air door open, and shouted, “This isn’t the bus stop!” Then closed the door. Took off.
My brother must have tripped—or perhaps he jumped in front of the thing, possibly it was nothing more than an accident, or the bus driver didn’t see him—and somehow got tangled up with the bus, which flung him against the curb, dragging Mark for a short distance.