“Well, not exactly,” I said. “Not for nothing, but that area where you claim you put her is now a paved parking lot.”
Sometime later, I received a letter. Jesperson spoke of a great need to ask me a “serious question,” apparently ignoring what I’d said about the paved parking lot and not going there. “Let’s say you discover the victim is still there, buried in the back of the lot. . . . You open ground and see she is still there. What will you do? Document the find with photographs and cover her back up until your book is ready to go? Or will you document it with photos and call in the sheriffs to document them uncovering her and hopefully identifying her? She would be there since August 1992—what is another few months?”
This comment further helped me understand how different his thinking is from the average human being’s. The indication that he’d consider the possibility existed for me to hold on to the location of a murder victim (if I dug her up) to use as a publicity stunt for a book proved how far beneath any moral ground he slithered.
Further along, after encouraging me to hold on to the info if I located her, his paranoia let loose. He talked about how Merced County might have “buried” their reports and how I would need witnesses, if I went out there, to “verify the find.” As he continued, it became obvious what this was about: spitting in the face of law enforcement again. We were back at Taunja Bennett.
One of his goals was to get “police to quit sitting on the Cynthia [Wilcox] case and run the DNA to find her real killer and quit blaming [me] for it.” He indicated how “stupid” the police would look if his Turlock victim turned up buried in back of the old Blueberry Hill Café. Why? Because “[they] offered a life sentence for a murder that never happened—and to fulfill the deal they have filled the [toe] tag with Cynthia [Wilcox].”
He wasn’t exactly wrong. But not right, either. There were no cops on record claiming Jesperson had murdered Cynthia Wilcox. Nor was he ever charged with killing her.
Sometime later: “Call me crazy, Phelps. Paranoid again. But what if Merced [County] police went to the Blueberry Hill Café and found my victim and disposed of it, just to be able to point at me for the [Wilcox] case? But destroyed the report in favor of pointing at me for the [Wilcox] case?”
That was ridiculous. Here was the serial killer hating on cops again, now trying to put me in the middle. He still had no idea I had all the reports he was referring to.
“I’ll look into all that,” I told him.
Ken Robison had a plan and contacted me about it. When I got him that photo of Cynthia Wilcox he’d asked for, he put together a lineup of missing California girls from the time frame of Cynthia’s case so I could deliver it to Jesperson in person, ask him if he could point out his Turlock victim, and then gauge his reaction. The photo of Cynthia Wilcox—which Jesperson didn’t know we had—was number 1 on that list.
38
CASE CLOSED
“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our
death by thoughts about life.”
—Michel de Montaigne
THE SCENARIO I KEPT RETURNING TO WHILE SPENDING MONTHS going through all of the available information pertaining to Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox’s death and Jesperson’s Turlock victim—including all he’d written and said to me over the years—became that in Turlock, Livingston, and along that Highway 99 corridor in Merced County during the 1990s, confined to truck and rest stop zones, there was a bustling criminal culture ebbing and flowing on a regular basis. Drug dealing, prostitution, assault, rape, murder, and other crimes were common fare. So when we look at the (Rose) Wilcox/Turlock cases (if they are separate) and consider how improbable a coincidence it could be that a serial killer crossed paths with the victim of an overdose, but murdered another woman, dumping her in the same general location the overdose victim was later found, we need to bring into the argument that this section of California was a busy and felonious world of criminals and violent crime. Thus, I believe the odds for such a coincidence taking place—when Jesperson himself is the one who told me many times, “There are no coincidences in murder”—become impossible to ignore.
As additional evidence of the crime culture existing in that area at the time, the police reports claim Cynthia Wilcox had been choked once to the point “where she almost passed out” by drug dealers to whom she owed money. She’d been threatened. Beaten. Many of the working girls whom police spoke to in the days after her body was found did not seem all that surprised a working girl within this crowd of prostitutes, drug dealers, and truckers had gone missing and wound up dead. They also weren’t shocked the dead girl turned out to be Wilcox, who many described as working in a high-risk atmosphere. Wilcox had reportedly stolen nine hundred dollars from a trucker. In addition, an anonymous witness explained to police a “Mexican truck driver in a white cattle truck” had been giving her trouble for months. He’d been seen at local rest stops on several occasions, grabbing her by the arm, pulling her along, slapping her around. She’d owed him money for drugs. Another witness claimed the Mexican truck driver took Wilcox out to breakfast early that morning (August 27), fed her, and then killed her. It would not have been all that difficult to gift her a few bags of tainted dope and let her kill herself. A kitchen worker at the Blueberry Hill Café told police he saw a white cattle truck (Jesperson’s rig was blue) parked where her body was later found, around the date her body would have been dumped. There was a tablecloth located at the Oakdale Lake campsite where she was staying with her husband. One interview claimed the tablecloth had blood on it and reeked of a terrible “death” stench. Both Cynthia Wilcox and Jesperson’s Turlock victim wore red tops—consistent with what some later called the “red top girls” of Highway 99, a group of prostitutes, all of whom wore red tops to indicate who they were to truckers.
Had Cynthia Wilcox, who was said to have taken her methadone dose late in the day, August 27, fired up a few bags, OD’d in someone’s truck, and that person dumped her at the Blueberry Hill Café? To make her death look suspicious, hoping to perhaps cause confusion for police, maybe the person who’d dumped her rolled up her skirt? Furthermore, why hadn’t Jesperson ever been charged with her murder? Thomas Phelan had cut deals and done a good job of getting the death penalty off the table in exchange for information, but still, California never pursued Jesperson in Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox’s case. The last line of the forty-nine-page report concluded that “Jesperson marked the area where he placed [his Turlock] victim’s body, again inconsistent with the facts of the case.... This is the end of the report.” The case was closed; the report “approved” on December 1, 1996.