*
WHEN JESPERSON CAME FORWARD and said he’d killed a woman in Turlock and dumped her in back of the Blueberry Hill Café, it’s easy to see how investigators from several agencies looked to pin Cynthia Wilcox’s death on him. Once you see the light on the other side, it’s not hard to convince yourself the tunnel in front of you can get you there.
Ken Robinson had even gone down this same road when he first looked at the case for me, calling and saying, “While the autopsy shows no evidence of homicide, it really doesn’t need to, if we have the killer saying he killed her and she is dead.”
The problem with that statement is its close-minded vision and the fact that we now had a killer saying he hadn’t killed this particular victim. Further complicating the Wilcox/Turlock cases was that another victim from California, a Jane Doe whom Jesperson called “Claudia,” a woman he admitted killing and dumping ten miles north of Blythe (five hundred miles south of Livingston), was found on August 30, 1992. A third body was then found ten months later, on June 3, 1993, by a trucker, according to the Associated Press, about “twenty-four miles southwest of Livingston” (still Merced County). She was said to be in her thirties. In one of his Happy Face letters to the press, Jesperson talked about meeting this woman at a truck stop in Corning. His logbook shows he was in Corning on May 31, 1993, backing up what he said. She was hungry and needed a ride (typical Jesperson victim, but quite atypical of Cynthia Wilcox’s MO). He called her “attractive,” save for her unkempt hair, adding, “She needed to run a comb through it.” Jesperson said he killed her in Williams, an hour south of Corning, at a rest stop; yet he never logged the location. After logging Corning, his log shows he drove north, not south, up through Ashland, Oregon (June 1), Vancouver and Yakima, Washington ( June 2).
In those two cases, there was never any question: Jesperson admitted killing both women and gave investigators unequivocal proof that he’d committed both crimes.
My conclusion is that Jesperson is likely telling the truth with regard to Cynthia Wilcox/Turlock, which is to say, then, that his Turlock victim, if anything is left of her, should still be buried in Livingston, California, where the old Blueberry Hill Café stood in 1992.
39
QUESTION
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
I FLEW TO PORTLAND/SALEM AND SAT WITH JESPERSON ON MARCH 29, 2016. We talked for three hours inside the OSP visiting room. It was one of the more emotional visits/conversations I’d ever had with him. He was a different man from when I’d last seen him in person, in 2012. Yes, he looked older and walked slower. His hair was a bit grayer. He wasn’t wearing his trademark glasses. He seemed softer, mellower, his anxiety in check. We talked through the Blueberry Hill case. He drew maps on scraps of paper and explained how he’d picked up the Turlock hooker and dumped her in back of the Blueberry. I’d heard all this before.
“I obtained all the reports,” I interrupted as he talked.
He put the short golfer’s pencil down, sat back, his jaw on his chest. Stared at me.
“Merced County reports?”
“Yes. I’ve been using them to question you about everything.”
“Blows my paranoid theory of the cops covering it all up,” he said.
“Sure does. And there’s more—Cynthia Wilcox’s autopsy report proves she died of an overdose. There’s no indication she was murdered. None.”
He looked relieved. It was as though he’d wrestled with himself since 2009: Maybe I did kill Cynthia? He did not gloat. I thought he would. He said he felt vindicated. “I don’t like being blamed for things I didn’t do. Les did it to me all my life.”
I had not mentioned the photo of Cynthia Wilcox. I had the lineup I’d smuggled into the prison in my back pocket: six photos of six different women. Number 1: Cynthia Lynn (Rose) Wilcox. Number 4: a woman, Lori Thiel, Ken Robinson had found. Ken and I believed Lori was a good candidate for the Jane Doe whom Jesperson referred to as Claudia. The composite drawing of Claudia is an identical match to Lori’s photo. Even the circumstances surrounding Lori’s disappearance, and where she’d supposedly run off to, fit.
He looked at the lineup as I gauged his reaction; it was the main reason I’d flown three thousand miles. A visceral response can indicate truth: the body and mind reacting on their own after seeing a woman he’d killed. It was something he would not be able to contain.
He glanced at each image, passing over Cynthia’s photo without a dash of hesitation. He shook his head back and forth.
“Nothing?” I asked.
After a second scan, he stopped at Number 4, Lori Thiel. “She looks like Claudia.” He stared at her face.
“I thought you’d say that.” I then explained that I’d just spoken to the detective investigating Lori’s disappearance. He said the DNA match to Claudia did not check out, adding how he had a solid suspect for Lori’s disappearance.
“The DNA doesn’t match?” Jesperson asked, puzzled.
“Nope. It’s been checked. So have dental, I’ve been told. Listen, forget that. No one else in the lineup seems familiar to you?”
He looked down again. Studied each face a second time. “None of them, besides number four, looks even vaguely familiar.”
I took a moment to focus on his face. Then: “Number one, what do you see there—anything?”
He was at a loss. “Just a woman. Have no idea who she is.”
“That’s . . . Cynthia Lynn Rose . . . Wilcox, man. Her married name is Wilcox.”
He looked down quickly. His face never changed. “Never seen her before. That’s not even the woman I saw in the 2009 photo they showed me when they told me I was looking at the Cynthia Lynn Rose crime scene.”
I was more than convinced. I called Ken later that day. He was far from sold. He’d put together a list of “similarities” and “inconsistencies” regarding Turlock and Cynthia Wilcox and e-mailed it to me before my trip.
“You read that report I sent you?” Ken asked.
“I did.”
“Let’s discuss it. Look, your scenario is certainly possible, and could even be likely,” Ken said.
“It’s not my scenario, Ken. I’m just going by what the reports indicate.”
“After reading the final summation by the detective from the Jesperson interview,” Ken explained, “that first one they did with him, it leads me to believe it’s not his body. But it really doesn’t tell us what all of the inconsistencies are that lead them to draw this conclusion, and they don’t look into a lot of it.”