Phelan advised Jesperson to consider how the prosecutor in the case was not offering “immunity” for his help; thus, with no statute of limitations on murder, trusting the State of Florida in this regard would be foolish—and perhaps deadly. Phelan warned that investigators were “motivated by a ‘do-gooder’ attitude.” Or maybe they were looking to prosecute. He encouraged Jesperson to “simply not respond to [Haley’s] letter.”
Far too egocentric, forever needing the last word on anything, Jesperson, of course, couldn’t help himself. He wrote back to Haley, before forwarding both letters (Haley and Phelan’s) to me, which I received in July (2012), along with one of Jesperson’s classic soliloquies regarding his feelings about it all. In his diatribe to me, Jesperson’s suspicion ran amuck: “Why now?” he asked, before blaming his daughter, Melissa, for “disturbing the waters,” forcing cops to “look back at me” and all the old cases, by writing a book about her life with a serial killer dad. He mentioned being “in the news” more these days than after his arrest.
“Be honest, had she [Melissa] not gotten me into the news, you would have never written?” he asked.
“Wrong,” I told him. John Kelly, my Dark Minds colleague, knew Jesperson could not refuse getting involved with the series and suggested I write to him on that basis alone.
“Let’s say they locate her family, then what?” he said. “Florida changes its mind and prosecutes me.”
“They say they won’t.”
“Lies. Of course, they will, Phelps. I’m a killer. I have no rights. Little bit of pressure from some victim’s family and I’m looking at the chair.”
He went through SA Haley’s letter, line by line, picking out where he believed Haley had baited him by sending misinformation. Jesperson saw through each blatant, orchestrated error Haley had purposely made.
“That first letter was designed to get Jesperson talking,” SA Dennis Haley told me, laughing. “And it worked.”
In his return letter to Haley, Jesperson pointed out the errors. He’d not decided to help, but he was open to discussing it. This is typical serial killer behavior: I am smarter than the police.
After that initial correspondence between Haley and Jesperson, using his familiar flippant, patronizing tone, Jesperson sent me another letter: “What Dennis Haley doesn’t know is, Mr. Phelps is doing a book and he [Haley] just became a topic to cover in it. Your book will show the truth.” He assumed that if he helped Florida and kept me in the loop, Florida couldn’t turn around and burn him because I would be monitoring the situation. I became Jesperson’s insurance policy.
After that, he ripped Haley, calling him a liar. He presumed Haley would “take the stand, on principle,” if Jane’s case ever went to trial, and would perjure himself if need be: “Any lie is okay to get to the truth of the case.”
I saw my opening: Act as though I was on Jesperson’s side. He trusted me. Play the middleman. His “yes” man. Tell him what he wanted to hear so we could move forward with identifying Jane Doe. If I needed to lie, well, the guy was a serial killer. He deserved nothing less.
41
THE GIRL WITH THE FAMILIAR LAST NAME
“‘Great idea,’ I said. ‘Call the police. Call the fucking
police.’”
—Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story
SA DENNIS HALEY IS AN OLD-SCHOOL COP. A HARDENED FLORIDA transplant from Illinois, who unintentionally projects himself to be a bit backcountry, but once you get to know Haley, you realize a superior intelligence and boundless charm lurks underneath that Southern veneer. Haley sports a familiar Florida red face, white goatee, mustache. His laugh is deep, phlegmy, unique. He speaks from a place of experience when discussing murderers and serial killers and has tangled with the worst of them. He’s personable and real. Meeting SA Haley for the first time, I knew that if there was a cop in Florida who could identify Jesperson’s Jane Doe, he was that person.
During the fall of 2014 and into early 2015, I made Jane a priority. Since 2012, Happy Face and the FDLE wrote back and forth, while I watched over the situation as a third party. I knew from my own investigative experience, this was a case that, with a few breaks, could be resolved. I also felt my contribution to it would increase the chances of there being a resolution. First thing I did was go through all of the paperwork involved, including hundreds of pages of letters Jesperson had written to me about the case over the years (to see how consistent he’d been), and all of the letters Haley, FIS Paul Moody, and Jesperson had exchanged since. Between 2012 and 2014, Jesperson played hard-to-get with Florida. He’d claim he wanted to help, but didn’t do much to back up his word. My thought was Jesperson had been holding on to information. Afraid of facing the death penalty, he knew identifying markers about Jane he hadn’t shared. Conversely, if this was true, why hadn’t he, like many serials in this same position, used that carrot to deal the death penalty off the table?
“Do you know who she is?” I asked, looking for a starting point. “No bullshit here. I need to know.”
“No.”
“Come on. You have a history of hiding licenses and rifling through your victims’ luggage and personal belongings. Who is she, man? Let’s do this. Be a ‘good guy’ here. If for no one else, do it for me.”
“I have no idea. All I know is what I’ve been saying: Suzette, Suzanne, Susan, maybe Sue-Ellen. We met in Tampa. She was coming from Miami, heading to Lake Tahoe. She pissed me off. I strangled the bitch.”8
I got my hands on the original reports, including an interview FDLE SA Glen Barberree conducted with Jesperson in 1996. I again resisted telling Jesperson. Instead, I questioned him about Jane with the knowledge the FDLE had uncovered, along with Jesperson’s version of events all those years ago.
What he’d told me—in letters, Video Visit chats, and calls—did not differ all that much from what he’d said throughout the years, nor what he’d told the FDLE in 1996.
“They gave me their word about the death penalty,” I told him. “They will not prosecute.”
I was pushing the bar on this; I never got that promise. With his help, finding Jane’s family was a possibility; without it, not a chance. Jesperson had become a decent artist in prison. Could he draw a portrait from memory of Jane? If so, FIS Paul Moody could take that drawing and, armed with the reports, autopsy, and Jane’s actual skull, construct a computerized rendering of Jane similar to the clay busts used in forensic-art identification. Moody could then send Jesperson the computer composite images and, gauging his reaction, tweak the image to Jesperson’s specs until an accurate composite of Jane emerged, one that the man who had killed her agreed with.
“How can you be so sure?” Jesperson asked, adding that he’d been unable to get any Florida cop to write to him on official law enforcement agency stationery telling him they weren’t interested in seeking the death penalty or further prosecution.
It was policy, I told him. Cops don’t write to convicts using department letterhead. Haley had explained this to Jesperson in a letter.
“You’re serving all those life sentences,” I said. “It won’t matter. They just want to find her family and bring her home.”
“I want to help.”
“Then do it.”
“I trust you, Phelps.”