“I pulled into the Turlock rest area going southbound on Highway 99 at about three thirty in the morning,” he began (not having seen any of the reports or been able to review his interviews). He couldn’t recall the exact date, but he agreed the log should be accurate. “If it says I passed through the area on the twenty-seventh, then I did.”
Just after stopping his truck near the car park section of the rest stop, nowhere near a truck slot, his Turlock victim “stepped up on” the running boards of his truck and asked if he wanted company. He told her no. “Get away. I’m tired. Move on.”
This wouldn’t match Cynthia Wilcox’s husband’s account of his wife going there to meet someone she knew as Charlie. If Charlie, who went by the last name Brown, was a CB handle, maybe Jesperson had one that the girls knew him by.
“What name did you use with the girls?”
“I never gave them a name. Keith, if they needed to know.”
“You didn’t have a nickname?”
“I had a CB handle.”
“What was it?”
“Kingpin.”
Not even close.
With a steely affect I’d seldom heard, Jesperson’s account of the murder became one of the more chilling he’d ever shared. After telling the Turlock prostitute to beat it, she stepped off the running board and left. (This differs a bit from his original account to law enforcement, where he talked about negotiating a price for sex after they made contact, before she started to argue with him.)
Twenty minutes later, she returned.
He was now parked and asleep.
So she opened the door, climbed into the cab, and startled him awake.
“I had basically told her I didn’t want company and she wanted company, anyway,” he explained to me, “so she got into the truck and I strangled her and put her out of her misery. I took her down to the Blueberry Hill Café, where I left her body in the back parking lot. And that’s about it . . . it wasn’t no big thing. I had just taken care of this. It was done. I put her facedown in the dirt. Kicked the back of her head and put tumbleweeds over the top of her and drove off. I assumed they would have found her, but they didn’t, and that’s where we stand right now.” It was an account that mostly matched what he had said all those years before when interviewed by law enforcement.
Cynthia Wilcox had a fractured jaw the coroner believed occurred postmortem. Was it from that kick he said he gave his victim? But she was found faceup underneath a walnut tree, her head leaning to her left, 150 yards from the parking lot. Jesperson claimed to have dumped his victim in the opposite direction, in the parking lot itself, covering her with powdered dirt and tumbleweeds.
“And you think she is still there?” I asked him.
“Well, I think she would be still there. The powdered dirt was about six inches deep. If someone drove over the top of her, she could be like a foot down in the ground.” Tossing her out of his truck and into that soft dirt was “like throwing a watch” onto meadow grass and looking on as it “disappears—I mean, it had the same results.”
This area he described was a well-trafficked section of the lot that trucks drove over all the time. That was part of the reason why he chose it. It was nowhere near that walnut tree, which from this location would have been about three hundred feet to the southeast, in a grassy meadow.
Our conversation took place over a Video Visit. I looked at him. I shook my head in disgust at his predictable, egotistical smugness while describing how he had killed and dumped the Turlock victim. Talking about murder to him was so common, so casual. I never got used to this.
Because the Blueberry Hill Café was a popular trucking area, he dumped her in a rut trucks drove in, hoping that “all her body juices and blood” would dissolve, thus allowing her to “dissipate and petrify.” His hope was that trucks drove over her body, forcing it deeper into the powdered dirt. It had been a week before Cynthia Wilcox was found. One would have to believe a truck would have driven over the victim if she had been dumped where he claimed he placed the Turlock prostitute.
There was zero indication in her autopsy report that Wilcox had been run over by a truck. She was found in an area far from where trucks would have driven.
Jesperson’s account, which never changed, was in total contrast to how and where she had been found.
“Why her?” I asked, referring to the Turlock kill.
“Because she was there. She was the one that got onto my truck. When I pulled into the parking lot, she was the first one to jump up on the side of my truck.”
“You never set up a date with your Turlock victim?”
“No! Would I set up a date and then kill the girl? That’s ridiculous. It’d be a sure way of getting caught.”
While he was in the process of strangling his Turlock victim, “two more [women] jumped up on the side of the truck and tried to get in.” This spooked Happy Face, so he drove off, which became the only reason he wound up at the Blueberry Hill Café.
Several of her regular girlfriends said they never saw Baby Doll that night at the Turlock rest stop. If either of these two women knew Jesperson’s Turlock victim and she was Cynthia Wilcox, why wouldn’t they claim to have seen her get into Jesperson’s truck?
Still, I had many questions, not to mention Ken Robinson sitting on my shoulder, wagging a finger.
“All right, explain the confusion,” I said.
Jesperson shuffled a bit in his seat, displaying body language that told me he was excited and, for him, setting the record straight was important. He said, “Well, they told me initially it was Cindy [Wilcox]. When detectives came and saw me in 1996, they told me they were working the Cynthia [Wilcox] case and I assumed that that was the case we were talking about—the one I left in Livingston. I had no knowledge that it wasn’t the real case. Only in 2009, when I was going down to Riverside County, did they show me the victim’s picture, and when they asked me who that was, I said, ‘I don’t know who that is.’ They said it was Cynthia [Wilcox]. I said, ‘Well, that may be [Cynthia], but it’s not mine. I didn’t do her. Mine is still there.’ I then heard a detective [say], ‘It doesn’t sound like we’re talking about the same case.’ And I heard another detective say, ‘Oh, well, just shut [that] for now. We’ll deal with this later.’”
Later never came for investigators because they knew he was not involved. That’s why he did not recognize the photo of Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox. Still, her case—even though her married name of Wilcox had been dropped from any reporting of it—has stuck to Jesperson all these years.
In November 2015, as I amped up pressure, Jesperson asked again if I was going out to the Blueberry Hill Café with a shovel.