Perhaps for the first time, I realized there was no dream left for Keith Jesperson. He was a man, like all serial killers, born incomplete. A psychopath, yes. But beyond that clinical diagnosis, something else was missing from this man. All that rejection and ridicule he claimed his father projected onto him—real or imagined—had fed into an obsessive desire for power and control: over me, the public, the cops, his lawyers, his victims. It was something he couldn’t change and didn’t understand.
I brought him around to the topic of who Keith Jesperson, the serial killer, is. Or, at least, my calculation after all the research I’d done. I’d noticed the five years we’d spent together produced growth in him I hadn’t realized until this visit. Not that he’d suddenly become a sympathetic, morally adjusted human being, but he’d started to think about who he was in a bigger context and under a different light. I told him one of the most powerful stories he’d shared with me that explained how his mind worked was the divorce court scene, in which he witnessed how much pain his kids were in and stood in front of them feeling warm and fuzzy because of their suffering.
“You wrote about that?” he said, surprised.
“Of course.”
“I have no idea why I felt that way, Phelps.”
“Do you think you’re broken?”
He looked down at the unwaxed floor below our feet. The visiting room was empty. Quiet, almost still. There was no guard breathing down our backs, no one listening on the phone, no one reading our mail. We could talk freely. He took a long minute. Then, still not looking at me, he began: “I remember playing blocks with my boy . . . you know, those wooden building blocks.” He explained how his boy would excitedly build up the blocks, laughing, smiling, just enjoying a bit of childhood fun with his dad. Without the boy knowing, Jesperson said, he’d flick the bottom corner block and watch the wooden mountain tumble. His boy became more frustrated and upset each time his dad did this. As the child built up the blocks, Jesperson kept knocking them down. The boy finally had a fit and cried.
“It felt good,” he told me, still staring at the floor. “I’d gotten a kick out of my son’s pain. My daughter, Melissa, wants to paint me as some sort of evil dad who killed kittens in front of his children and held these deep, dark secrets about killing people. But that’s just not how it was.”
As he finished the story, he looked at me. His eyes welled up. He didn’t cry. I’d never seen him look or sound so serious. I could sense that, in this moment, he had feelings.
“I didn’t want to hurt my son,” Jesperson concluded. “I never wanted to hurt people. Not anyone. I don’t know why I am this way.”
On this day, in that moment, I believed him.
*
WITH JANE DOE RIDING shotgun, Jesperson drove north on I-75 for eighty miles, entering Wildwood, Florida. He pulled into a truck stop, fueled, and parked.
“I’m going in to grab a shower. If you want one, you can grab one. If you want something to eat, get it now, because we have to leave.”
He sensed Jane was worried he might take off without her. Her luggage was stowed inside the truck in a place she didn’t have access to.
“She watched everything I did.”
After showering, he noticed she didn’t have any grooming implements that most women carry: comb, brush, makeup. She shook her hair out and sat down with him at a table inside the stop.
“You want to eat?” he offered. “You can have whatever you want.”
She ordered the all-you-can-eat spaghetti—three plates.
“When was the last time you ate?”
She didn’t want to talk about it.
“Can we go down to Miami before we get loaded up in Georgia?” she asked.
Although there was zero chance he would consider this, he asked why.
“I have some stuff down there I would like to retrieve before I go [west].”
“That’s almost [six-hundred miles] round-trip! I don’t . . . Listen to me. I can’t go out of the way. Just because you’re in here with me doesn’t mean you can start running me here and there.”
This one question from Jane made him think about the women he’d murdered: They all want something from me.
Realizing she’d hit a nerve, Jane backed off; she agreed to go to Georgia and then west from there, and never mention Miami again.
Jesperson drove into Cairo, Georgia, just over the Florida state line.
“She slept most of the way,” he told the FDLE. She’d had a shower. Ate. She was clean and full. “I told her that the bed is mine, too. We got some kind of sleeping arrangement.” Per his normal routine, Jesperson brought up sex. Was that going to be a problem?
“Sleeping arrangements?” she asked. “I have no problem with you in the truck with me in the bed—with your clothes on.”
Jane’s position was clear: no sex.
As Jesperson loaded his truck in Cairo, he watched as she stood near the telephone on the dock. At one point, she picked up the receiver, as if to call someone. Jesperson walked over. Tapped Jane on the shoulder, startling her, and she “gave a quick scream.”
“It’s time to go,” he said.
Happy Face was under the impression that whomever she’d been trying to call, Jane could not reach. In fact, everywhere they stopped en route to Cairo, she used the phone. She was trying to call someone, he assumed (she never told him), in Reno/Lake Tahoe to let them know she was on her way.
With his load strapped down, Jesperson headed south, back into the Florida Panhandle via Interstate 10. Heading west on the 10, he drove “for about an hour or so” and pulled into a rest stop. They were about two-and-a-half hours east of Pensacola. Looking for a spot to park the rig, he noticed “three cop cars,” one parked next to the other.
“As a truck driver, I always know where cops are,” he told the FDLE. “Not just because I kill people.”
With no other available spaces, Jesperson parked behind the security kiosk, not too far from the cops.
“She was [lying] there up against the wall in the sleeper. And I just crawled right in, laid in right behind her, and just started to go to sleep.”
Then, out of nowhere, he claimed that “she started screaming.”
He was “very aware” of security and those cops parked nearby. “And I was also very aware of what my past history had been. And I didn’t want no altercation, whether it was true or not. So I just put my hand on her to shut her up—to tell her to shut up.”
Within “three minutes,” Jesperson said, “she was dead.”
He looked out his side window to see if security or the police had heard anything.
They hadn’t.
He drove a few exits west toward Pensacola, pulled onto an exit ramp, stopped, and dumped Jane off the road in the wild weeds. She would be found in three months by an inmate who, collecting garbage on the side of the highway, walked into the brush to urinate.
Jesperson rifled through Jane’s suitcase. He found a set of tarot cards and a few pieces of clothing, nothing more. He drove into town. Located the first Dumpster he could find in back of a strip mall restaurant and trashed the suitcase and trolley. He kept her boom box.
43
ALL IN
“Those who seek to do forensic art should accept the
responsibility with seriousness.... The victims of violent
crimes . . . deserve your full efforts.”
—Karen T. Taylor, Forensic Art and Illustration