After I got hold of the logbooks and some of Jesperson’s ATM transactions and the other reports, I sent copies to Ken and asked him to dig in, find me a missing person from that Blueberry Hill Café/Turlock area that could fit Jesperson’s description of his supposed Turlock victim and match any logistics we could prove with the documents and logs. I then asked him to put together a lineup—with Cynthia Wilcox’s picture—so I could present it to Jesperson when I next went out to visit him. If Jesperson identified her in the lineup, we’d know he’d killed her. He was confused. I’ve always worked under the assumption that, though it had been twenty-plus years, a serial killer of Jesperson’s caliber would have a hard time forgetting the face of a victim if he saw her again.
“One more thing,” I told Ken. “Jane Doe, in Florida. I need your help there? I’ve involved the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office behind Jesperson’s back. Can you talk cop-to-cop with those guys and get us a starting point? Introduce yourself. Let’s try to do everything we can to force Jesperson’s hand on that case. He knows something about Florida he’s not saying.”
Ken thought about it.
“Does Jesperson know I’m working with you?”
“No. He knows nothing about you.”
“Good, because I have a plan for Florida.”
Sometime later, we were back discussing Cynthia Wilcox. By now, Ken had a chance to go through the documents. I’d also expressed some excitement to Ken that I was leaning toward believing Jesperson. The autopsy report, after all, claimed Cynthia Wilcox died of an opiate/heroin overdose. She had not been murdered.
“This is the first of several inconsistencies I’d found between Jesperson’s Turlock victim and Cynthia’s death,” I told Ken.
“Well, I must admit that I was leaning toward being with you as I read through everything . . . but not anymore,” Ken said. “Jesperson killed Cynthia Wilcox. I’m sure of it. Give me some time to explain.”
For almost five years, I was certain Jesperson was playing me where this case was concerned. When those reports came in—especially the autopsy and Cynthia Wilcox’s photo—I grew more certain every time I opened the case that Jesperson was telling the truth. Now my right-hand man, whom I trusted more than anyone, said I was wrong.
*
JESPERSON “ASSUMED” FOR SIXTEEN years—1993 until 2009—that the woman he killed at a Turlock, California, rest stop and dumped in Livingston, in back of the Blueberry Hill Café, was Cynthia Wilcox, a woman he knew by her maiden name, Cynthia Rose. Throughout that entire period, he never questioned it. When Merced, Colusa, Riverside, and Multnomah County (Oregon) investigators presented him with the case after he gave his Turlock/Blueberry Hill account, at face value it all fit.
“I had no reason not to think I killed her,” he said. “Until I saw a photograph in 2009.” It was a photo, according to him, that changed everything.
In 1995, after turning himself in, investigators in the jurisdictions where he’d claimed bodies came to interview him about each case. Jesperson gave details about the eight he’d murdered: how, where he met each woman and dumped each body, sharing specifics only the killer could know. During the course of those admissions, he mentioned the woman from a Turlock southbound rest area he’d met and murdered and dumped in back of the Blueberry Hill Café. She was petite, he told investigators. He called her “the blond hooker.” Her hair was short, just above the shoulders. He claimed she did not have any identification on her (Cynthia Wilcox had left her purse inside the car her husband had dropped her at the Turlock rest area). He said she wore a red sweater, blue jeans, and tennis sneakers.
Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox had dark hair (“seven inches in length,” according to the coroner’s measurements). On the night she went missing, she was wearing a brown skirt, “slip-on, flat, black shoes, with a small bow on the toe and very low heels,” and a jean jacket.
Jesperson never mentioned any of this during his Turlock admission.
Fast-forward to when he saw that crime scene photo in 2009 that he was told was Cynthia Lynn Rose, shown to him by investigators—and he knew he hadn’t killed her.
My goal was to disprove Jesperson’s claim. One fact kept reemerging, however, as I went about this confusing, gargantuan task. I’ve learned in five years of dealing with Jesperson that there can be no mistaking a victim he put his hands on. Also, I would come to find out in 2016 that Jesperson had left a second signature never publicly reported: many of his victims were found with a zip tie or ligature (rope, tape) fastened around their necks. When asked why he did this, Jesperson told investigators, “So I could mark them as mine.”
In his first interview (1996) regarding Turlock/Blueberry Hill, Jesperson said he arrived at the Turlock “southbound rest area” at 4:00 A.M. “Jesperson told us he was ‘contacted’ by a ‘gal’ who asked him if he wanted company. . . . He parked his truck . . . the woman got into his truck and got into his sleeper,” the MCSO reported. “Jesperson said a ‘scuffle’ ended with [him] strangling the woman.” He panicked because he heard voices and two more ladies “peering in” his cab. His victim had been dead by then for “possibly twenty seconds.” Spooked by the two girls, he took off, merged onto Highway 99, and stopped at the next off-ramp to “make sure the victim was dead.” The entire scenario took about thirty minutes.
I asked him what “contacted” meant. The reports clearly indicate Cynthia Wilcox used a CB radio to set up a lot of her dates. Was this how Jesperson met his victim that night?
“No. I never used the CB for that. She jumped up on my running boards. That’s how we met.”
Leaving the off-ramp, his Turlock victim dead inside the sleeper cab, Jesperson came upon a familiar place: the Blueberry Hill Café. It’s late, he thought. No one is up. Perfect spot to get rid of her.
He parked in back of the restaurant, with the front end of his truck about fifteen feet away from the back of the building. He got out to see if anyone was around and to search for the best place to dump her. As he walked, he realized that near the back of the lot, along the edge of grass (the borderline of that field), a tree in the field just beyond that, there was a rut where trucks pulled into the lot and made a turn to face the exit, so they wouldn’t have to back up and turn their trucks around when they decided to leave. He told investigators it was “eight inches of powdered dirt.”
“Jesperson described he placed the victim’s body in the tumbleweeds near a tree in the parking lot . . . facedown into the dust and stood on the victim’s head ‘to make damn sure’ she was dead,” investigators reported. He denied having sexual intercourse with her before or after she was dead.