He turned around after hanging up, and there she was, standing in back of him.
“Where the hell are you really going?” Jane asked. In one 1996 report, Jesperson said she might have spoken with a slight Latina accent, which could be mistaken for Italian, Greek, or Cuban. She was so dirty, he thought she’d been sleeping outside; her curly hair was ruffled, snarled, and frizzy. Her dress was wrinkled, worn, and torn up. He thought she might have been homeless, even running away from someone, or getting out of a bad situation.
“Probably to the West Coast or into the Northwest,” he told her. “I’m not sure yet.” Frustrated, he walked over to a table and sat down. “I need to eat breakfast.”
She sat across from him.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“I’m trying to get to Lake Tahoe (could be Reno).”9
After thinking it through, he gave her “the option” to go with him. Totally up to her. He never begged “them” to come along, he made clear. He considered Jane, like most of the others, to be a “lot lizard.” These were women who hung around truck stops—the marginalized. He felt they all saw him as a “sugar daddy,” he once told law enforcement. They wanted nothing more than to take what they could from him, and it made him angry.
While sitting with her, talking, eating, he thought about his “problem,” that dark “history” following him around. He didn’t “want to deal” with it anymore.
“I never went out and chased these people down,” he told me. Same as this particular Jane Doe, they had walked into his life.
These people.
Jane got up and walked away. Then she returned to the table “two or three times” as Jesperson ate. She pestered him about when he was leaving, where he was going.
He didn’t answer. He ordered more coffee. She’d gone to the “phone room” after getting up without a word for a third time, though she never said who it was that she called. He watched Jane as she left the restaurant, before coming back in to use the phone a second time. She had “walked around the parking lot” as though lost and looking for someone.
“Tea,” she asked for, sitting across from him five minutes later.
“We sat and talked and she seemed like she had a pretty head on her shoulders, as far as mentality,” he told law enforcement. The “others” didn’t carry luggage. Jane had a bag, which told Jesperson she was heading to, or leaving, someplace. When they have luggage, he explained, “You kind of wonder where they come from, where they live—and you know you can’t do it [kill].”
Orders from dispatch came. Jesperson was told to head north into Cairo, Georgia, pick up a load of electrical conduit, and haul it to Boise, Idaho. His log ends at August 15, 1994, and doesn’t pick up again until October 1, 1994, putting him in Sinclair, Wyoming. So there’s no way to tell if Boise was actually on the schedule. One report claimed he was on his way to Nevada ( Jesperson was seeing a woman who lived outside Las Vegas), while Jesperson recalled heading into “the Northwest.”
“Look,” he told me during our last prison visit when I asked about logistics, “I kept three, sometimes four, logs. You have to keep in mind, the log you have is the log my trucking company chose to give the police so they could stay out of trouble.”
Totally plausible.
“That’s where I’m going,” Jesperson told Jane. “Georgia to Boise.”
“Where is that as compared to Lake Tahoe (Reno)?” she asked.
“Once I get loaded and I head that way, you’ll be that much closer to [Nevada] if you went with me than if you stayed here, but that’s up to you.” He offered to put word out on the CB when they were closer to Idaho to see if he could find Jane a ride with another trucker.
He walked off to get directions, leaving the decision up to her.
Armed with his route, as Jesperson headed toward his truck, Jane followed.
“All right,” Jesperson said. “Get in.”
He looked around.
“I made mental note that no one saw her step into my truck.”
*
THAT CALL I MADE after returning from my Portland/Salem trip to see Jesperson was to a psychologist. I needed to get in and do some serious inventory. I’d just turned forty-nine, on my way to fifty, a scary milestone for a guy who considers himself young at heart, mind, body, and soul. When I was a kid, a man of fifty had gray hair, wore a thick sweater, and sat in his living-room recliner doing crosswords, his reading glasses down on the tip of his nose like Mother Goose. He took naps, smelled medicinal, and stunk up the house with BENGAY. He took hour-long shits with the newspaper, went to bed after Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. That was not me. Strange I was stressing over this—I know, age is just a number!—and I never saw it coming. Pile onto that some personal issues at home, all I’d been through with Jesperson and the temperamental feelings of sympathy I’d developed for him, a desire to hate and cut him out of my life, which wasn’t beckoning, and, well, some therapy was in order. No one could argue that.
I wasn’t on the verge of drinking, mind you, as some around me began to ask with that judgmental, eyebrow-raised, you’re-an-alcoholic stare. I’d decided long ago this body and mind of mine is allergic to booze. It was a struggle early on for me, but as decades of sobriety added up and my abstinence became a part of who I am, I wanted nothing to do with drinking. Alcohol, I knew from experience, has no mercy. Once it secures its talons into you, and you submit, your life is a shitstorm—that is, if it allows you to live. I was treading water, trying to find a safe pocket of air, no doubt about it; but I had a handle on my demons. The therapy was a way to sort it all out and get on with life.
Near the end of my final prison visit with Jesperson, I brought up Les, mentioning how I’d never gotten the chance to interview him and regretted not acting sooner.
This comment made Jesperson pause, look down at the small wooden coffee table between us. I’d bought him a Mountain Dew and pack of peanut butter bars from the vending machines. He took a gulp, a bite, a deep breath.
“What is it?”
“My father . . . that whole thing. Let’s not go there anymore.”