It didn’t take long to identify thirty-two-year-old Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox (her married name). She was actually a “white” female (not Hispanic), five-two, about one hundred pounds (though an accompanying photograph of her in the report claimed she was 120 pounds), brown hair, hazel eyes. Cynthia had a distinctive mole on the right side of her cheek. Investigators learned the last time anyone had seen her alive was August 27, 1992. Cynthia’s husband had reported her missing. He told police his “wife was a prostitute and she was supposed to meet with an old friend named ‘Charlie’ at the Highway 99 rest stop in Turlock to ‘turn a trick.’”
With no clear indication of how she died, investigators sent Cynthia’s body off to the Delta Pathology Associates Medical Group in Stockton for complete toxicology analysis and autopsy. If she had been murdered, a manner of death many investigators believed to be a strong possibility, an autopsy would, by showing cause, give them good reason to begin searching for a suspect.
*
BEYOND KEITH JESPERSON’S WORK on Dark Minds—the insight into the mind of the serial killer he shared—beyond all the stress, physical, spiritual, mental, and medical complications I battled, beyond anything we discussed between 2011 and 2014, the next two years of our “friendship” would prove to be the most important I’d spend interviewing him—work that began with, of course, yet another telephone call.
“I’m ready to talk about some things I’ve kept from you,” Jesperson said. It was early May 2015. He sounded out of breath and frenzied, unable to get the words out fast enough.
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. I mean, I haven’t told you everything, obviously.”
I’d never gotten around to interviewing Les. One thing led to another, writing books and filming several television shows got in the way. I put it off. Then a report crossed the wire one morning: Les had died.
“Listen, Phelps,” Jesperson added, “Dad’s dead now. I’m ready.”
“Explain what you mean.”
“With Dad gone, I can clear up a few things.”
Les had served in the Canadian Merchant Navy. He wasn’t a large man like his son, but Keith and Les looked a lot alike. Les had said publicly and in print he did not understand why his son blamed him for the way he turned out and denied any of the abuse Happy Face accused him of. He was well appreciated by his surviving family and eulogized as if he was a simple outdoorsman, a man who loved nothing more than riding his four-wheeler on the property he owned, running businesses, and being a loving father and grandfather to seventeen grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren—someone who adored life and contributed to his community, many of his later years living in the shadow of having a serial killer for a son.
My focus was not—nor had it ever been—on Les and how many stories Jesperson could spin in order to trash the old man, but rather on something Jesperson had said a few times throughout the years in passing. Now, as he brought up the topic again, it seemed urgent. I’d paid little attention to the comment until 2015. To me, it fell into that scatological category of the serial killer jabbering about another law enforcement mess-up. Still, as I sensed a natural end to our friendship approaching, it was the first of several salient comments Jesperson made that reinvigorated me: “Number three, Cynthia Lynn Rose [Wilcox]7—I did not kill her.”
“What?”
“Cynthia Rose. I’ve been trying to tell people for years. I had no part in her death.”
Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox lived in Modesto, California. The Blueberry Hill Café was six miles south of Turlock, where she had last been seen. Jesperson had told investigators (and me) he picked up a victim in Turlock at the Highway 99 rest area, killed her, and dumped her body in back of the Blueberry Hill Café. All of the available information since that admission would lead anyone reviewing the case, along with what Jesperson had said, in addition to the accessible facts, to believe that he had, in fact, murdered Cynthia Wilcox.
“I picked a woman up in Turlock at a rest area, strangled her right away, but it wasn’t Cynthia,” Jesperson explained. He described his Turlock victim as petite, blond, in her twenties. In a common Jesperson restatement pertaining to his victims, he said she was “in need of a shower and a comb.” One more way to debase them, I guess.
In studying her autopsy report, which I obtained in 2016 but did not tell Jesperson right away, Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox was 120 pounds. She had Peter Pan–styled brown hair. She might not have been on any shortlist for a hygiene award, but she kept herself clean. These two women (Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox and Jesperson’s Turlock victim), at least by outward appearances, shared polarizing contrasts. I would come to find out, those minor discrepancies were just the beginning.
Jesperson has always been attached to her murder, admitting to it in 1995, after he started talking to investigators about cases they’d been trying to close for years. He was never charged with Wilcox’s murder, but she is on the books as one of his eight victims.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked. For years, I’d worked under the assumption that he’d killed Cynthia Wilcox and anything he said to the contrary was the psychopath, pathological liar inside of him flexing his muscle, trying to send me down a rabbit hole.
“Because, in 2009, while answering a separate case in Riverside County, I saw a photo of [Cynthia] a detective had out in front of me. I saw her face. I did not kill her. Her murderer is still out there. Somebody else did it. They mixed her up with my victim. But I didn’t know this until I saw her photo for the first time in 2009.”
Through several channels, it took me nearly five years, but I’d managed to get hold of Cynthia Wilcox’s photo and, on top of her autopsy, the entire case report. Getting these documents was a pivotal part of proving or disproving what Jesperson had maintained. I didn’t tell him I had the photo or reports. I needed to question him with the knowledge I now had access to.
An even bigger find, however, maybe the most significant from our five years, was getting my hands on something Jesperson never thought I’d be able to locate: his logbooks. He’d kind of rubbed it in my face many times, knowing the logs were a part of his case history only lawyers and law enforcement had access to.
With all of this new information, I could compare it to what he’d told me over the years in his letters and phone calls and see where we stood.
“So, then, the woman you killed, the victim they think is Cynthia, where is she?” I asked. He’d never denied killing a woman from Turlock.
“She should still be where I put her.” In a rut in the Blueberry Hill Café parking lot, twenty-five feet south, 150 feet west of the building’s back corner, he explained. “Just on the edge of a grassy section of land that dropped off into a ravine.” It was an area trucks used as a turnaround to park or head back out on the road.