“What about Phelan?” I asked.
“[Screw] him. He does not tell me what to do—he never did. I make up my own mind.”
Phelan wasn’t even his official lawyer any longer.
“You’re doing a good thing here. You always talk about people not understanding you. The general public looking at you and judging you as some sort of monster—only a killer. This can begin to change that perspective. You follow me?”
He didn’t sound convinced. “I guess” was all Jesperson said in response.
*
PERSPECTIVE IS EVERYTHING WHEN trying to analyze a serial killer: his motivations, what drove him to it, carried him through the kill, how he turned into a killer, and the way in which he views life in general. That said, we have to keep in mind that serial killers are manipulative, glib, charismatic, and superficial, entirely devoid of remorse or empathy. When they lie, those untruths feel real to them and, subsequently, to us. We’re easily fooled, because serials are experts at playing psychological mind games.
To our advantage, however, difficult, abstract concepts that non-psychopaths can manage their way around quite easily are where psychopaths become confused and get tripped up by.
“Do you argue with the idea that you were a professional killer?” I asked Jesperson one afternoon, trying to mine deeper into who he is. I was looking for him to think differently, to begin to consider empathy—even if he didn’t feel it—or, at least, view himself under a different light.
“I would. I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t bashful about what I did. No one really knew what I was doing because I was good at it.”
When we got onto the subject of God—good versus evil—Jesperson would often wax philosophical in some of his letters and on the telephone. Not that anyone would agree with his sometimes bizarre cultural and spiritual viewpoints or ideas, or even make sense out of them. However, as part of my research, I wanted to understand where he stood on the larger questions of spirituality and faith, especially as my own faith was sinking. I’d read in some of his old letters to the media and other writings long before we met that he was a God-fearing man. I wanted to know where his faith stood these days. We’ve all heard the stories of Bible-thumping prisoners finding the light and falling into Jesus’ waiting arms. I wondered where Jesperson was in this regard.
“Not really [a believer],” he responded. “I’ve read the Bible. I think the Bible is a book orchestrated for the fact of giving [people] hope there’s something beyond death. I think the book was written by people who were persecuted and they decided to write something so they could be forgiven along the way, when the only one who could forgive them would be God. [The Bible] is kind of an okey-dokey type story. You commit a crime and the only one that is going to forgive you is the guy that’s going to allow you into heaven? No, I don’t really think there’s a God.”
The Devil is hard to kill and certainly would never give God any credit, I thought. Even though my faith had taken a tremendous blow by this point, I was still firm on the conviction that there was something beyond death, and I had not totally abandoned the Church or God. To think that this—our lives—is the end, I will always believe, is an egotistical, narcissistic stance—that we have evolved into the superior beings of the universe is beyond the megalomania Jesus has often been accused of by the atheistic community. Still, my faith was dissolving in a pool of indifference; I had entirely stopped going to Mass. I wasn’t on one side or the other, but in limbo, not thinking about God or sins or eternal damnation.
“So what about evil?” I asked. If there was no God, “how do you explain evil in this world? Not necessarily an evil doer, like Satan, but an evil presence—like you, for example?”
He paused. “I . . . I don’t believe there’s an actual Satan. I believe there’s people out there who just have an ‘evil’ heart and will go out of their way to be evil to people, just because they can.”
“And do you believe that you were one of those people?”
No hesitation whatsoever: “I believe that I was a very nice guy most of the time, and one that didn’t care about people part of the time. I could be evil if I wanted to.”
I asked him about ghosts. He’d once told me he saw himself as a ghost—an invisible figure roaming through the world, able to pluck any woman out of society he wanted and end her life. I understood the metaphor, but I wanted clarification.
“Yes, I was a ghost. Nobody knew who I was. I was somebody who was there and gone. Nobody had an idea what I was—if I even existed in the first place. Most of the time, ghosts . . . that’s what they are—a figment of our imaginations. And, of course, if evil happens, somebody must be responsible, so why not blame the ghost?”
Jesperson had pulled aside a friend one day in 1994 and told him, “I’m a serial killer. I have killed women. No one can stop me.”
The friend laughed it off.
“See, right there, I was invisible to him as this person, this killer.”
We’d routinely discuss the serial killer’s opinion of law enforcement. Hollywood projects part of this serial killer–cop relationship as a cat-and-mouse chase. Fiction and film play this up for dramatic purposes, of course. But what was the real world of serial killer versus cop?
“It’s not cat-and-mouse. It’s kind of like us against the public. We do what we’re going to do based on luck. Our biggest concern is getting away from the crying eyes of the public. The police are not even in the picture, as far as we’re concerned. It’s all about perception. I don’t think there’s a killer out there that actually goes out and pokes at the police, like a rattlesnake, waiting for the police to strike back. We live on the basis of getting away with it.”
I brought up his letters to the media. How would he explain those in the context he’d just described?
“When I sent those letters off, I just thought the police made a mistake. I was trying to tell them they needed to reinvestigate this case [Bennett]. I wasn’t trying to egg them on. They took it as the cat-and-mouse thing, like here I was trying to play games. I wasn’t trying to play games. I was trying to get them to reopen a case that was wrongfully prosecuted.”
*