“And that is just a small example,” he told me. “As we get to know each other and build a trust, I’ll explain more sinister and even deadly instances regarding Les.”
With a failed marriage, a girlfriend who had taken off on him, unemployed, thinking about a job that would place him in the cab of a truck 24/7, Jesperson held a strong emotional connection to someone who had been kicked out of the world or tossed aside, a common delusion many mass murderers (which he is not) would share.
I wanted to understand what went on in the deep recesses of a serial killer’s mind and the psychological torment these types of people wrestle with daily as they contemplate taking a human life. I read mostly all material (clinical, journalistic, highly creative, true or not) available about Jesperson. In those days before I reached out to him, I’d made up my mind about Happy Face, judging and hating him with an intensity I made clear on Dark Minds. I decided he was bad, evil, broken, however you want to put it. I felt he should be included in a group the central Alaskan Yup’ik Eskimos call kunlangeta: males within the tribe who rely on lying, stealing, cheating, and sexual exploitation of females to guide them through life.
As I got to know him, however, I never expected to come to the place I did with Jesperson and learn things about myself, my family, about his crimes and motivations, his thoughts about other crimes and killers, his philosophy about life and art and culture. Nor had I planned to interview him for five years.
“Be ready,” John Kelly, also a certified forensic therapist, warned. “You better be ready emotionally when you pick up that phone or write a letter or sit in front of this man. Don’t let him catch you off your guard. Always be the brand, M. William Phelps, with him. Never be Mathew.”
Kelly, who had been corresponding with and talking to a serial killer for ten years by then, helped me understand I needed to play a role when speaking to Jesperson. Be his “friend,” if he needed one. His confidant. His conduit and connection to the outside. His Clarice.
“You will become the surrogate ‘good’ father he never had,” Kelly explained. “But there will be psychological issues that you will have to deal with yourself—a price to pay. Don’t fall for his charm. It will break you.”
I kind of laughed inside at Kelly when he said this. I thought I was tough.
*
THROUGHOUT OUR FRIENDSHIP, WHENEVER an issue with prison mail not getting to him arose, or maybe the phones not working correctly, a crackle or hiss on the line while we spoke, or even when he was disciplined for bad behavior, Jesperson maintained that “the man” was trying to stop him from telling the “real Taunja Bennett story.” He believed there was some sort of conspiracy to keep him from telling his truth.
“They don’t want it out,” he said.
It got to the point where he would begin to qualify a rant about corruption or censorship with, “Call me paranoid, Phelps, but . . .”
Hearing this, I’d roll my eyes. The reality is that the type of wrongful conviction involved in the Bennett murder happened. Not often. But no court of law is 100 percent flawless. It is part of the course of justice. Both Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske admitted to killing Taunja Bennett. They provided evidence. They gave statements about evidence cops had not released publicly, and Pavlinac, as cops brought her out to where Jesperson had dumped Bennett’s body, pointed to within “ten feet” of where Bennett had been found. In court, on the witness stand, Pavlinac admitted to murdering Bennett with Sosnovske.
Jesperson had heard stories from fellow inmates accusing cops of abuse and corruption. The chatter inside a prison about law enforcement and the court system is, as one might suspect, abundantly negative. On top of that, we’ve all seen death row inmates released after some miracle DNA analysis came through. But this Times article had set Jesperson on a different path, supposedly giving him a clear view of his case (six years hence), one of which he’d not seen before that moment of so-called clarity in his cell. He believed an injustice had occurred, not a mistake. He felt, after reading and re-reading Barry Siegel’s article, there was no end to how far “they” had gone to make a case against Laverne and John. When I came on board, his entire narrative was built around this argument.
“Understand this. After reading Siegel’s article, I knew their arrests and convictions were not a mistake,” Jesperson said. “And the problem is, if you go back into this case and look at how it developed”—he meant the investigation and prosecution—“you will see they knew what they were doing when, in my opinion, they went after [Laverne and John].”
From the moment he agreed to take part in Dark Minds, Jesperson sent me page after page, letter after letter, debasing Oregon politics and judicial incompetence. I’d open these letters, sit in my office, and sometimes read for hours.
His first murder, he maintained, and everyone involved on an investigatory and prosecutorial level, became an abyss of venality. What’s important within the context of his narrative is that Jesperson would often tell me that had he been arrested for the Bennett murder—or an attack on a woman months later—in 1990 and charged with either crime, seven of his victims would still be alive. He was, effectively, blaming the wrongful prosecution of two people for the murders of seven women.
Was he looking for someone—the incompetence of law enforcement—to shoulder the blame for his crimes? I thought. It seemed about right.