Unbeknownst to me, Moody sent Jesperson a popular magazine, loaded with pictures of various female celebrities. Maybe Jesperson could find someone close to Jane and use that picture as a starting point.
As Jesperson worked on his first drawing, he and Moody exchanged letters. The plan was for Jesperson to deliver his best rendition based on his memory and the pictures Moody provided. Then Moody would take the drawing and, using it as a guide, along with Jane’s skull and other investigative materials, turn it into a digitally rendered side and front profile, full-length body view (Jane wearing that floral-patterned dress; a Brandywine replica dress Moody had actually found on eBay), and a computer bust, all of which, including hair and eye color, would be signed off on by Jesperson. Both cop and serial killer, with me in the middle managing, wrote back and forth, the goal being to come up with a portrait of Jane.
*
THERAPY DID ME A world of good. Going in, I honestly felt lost, like I was swimming, searching for dry land. After a few sessions and some changes in my life, my head was above water; I was moving toward a new space. Where that space was going to take me, what would be waiting for me, became the unknown part of my journey. But I had a path and a plan. That’s all I could ask for.
Part of understanding myself while sitting in the comfortable, safe office space of a therapist, sharing my feelings, made me realize that Jesperson’s quest for evil was a way for him to avoid any anxiety and despair he’d suffered for being a failure, a man who could not keep a woman happy and take care of his family the way he should have. Within his marriage, Jesperson became the embodiment of what his wife did not love or need in her life at the time. Furthermore, Jesperson’s victims were a means for him to explore, exploit, and maintain the control and dominance he lacked throughout his life. He struggled to correct what he believed his wife and father had stripped from him.
It all began to feel like an excuse to me, rather than an answer. A cop-out. Keith Jesperson couldn’t face the fact that he was a disappointment to everyone in his life. He did not do anything to change who he was—even after he realized his flaws. He is a guy who, I’ve come to believe, suffers from chronic myopia where it pertains to his victims. Most of his writings attack the very foundation of justice, truth, morality, sympathy, and empathy. He would rather try to convert a reader to his twisted, wicked logic and ideals than try to understand why he killed and why he hates women.
Maybe it’s not his fault. And genetics plays a role. Studying his recollections, I found Jesperson often played the fool, the child who was picked on and bullied (despite his massive size), the boy made fun of and ridiculed, further circumventing responsibility and shirking the blame onto his victims and the people in his life, especially Les.
“What’s going to happen to Raven?” he asked during our last prison visit. He sensed I was almost finished writing the book.
I told him I didn’t know.
As I began to reexamine my life, there was no way I could maintain any type of so-called friendship with a serial killer. I was slowly becoming another one of Keith Hunter Jesperson’s victims. He was beating me down, willingly or not. I felt like a shell of a human being at times. Totally wiped. Emotionally drained.
I needed to get this psychopath out of my life for good.
44
THE MIGHTY MISSISSIPPI
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
KEN ROBINSON HAD NEVER BEEN A “MISSING PERSONS” INVESTIGA tor, though he’d worked a handful of those cases with the NYPD: “I’ve actually found a few missing/kidnapped people myself.”
Throughout his career, Ken had passed photos of missing people, mostly women and young girls. Seeing the flyers plastered on squad room walls of every precinct he went in and out of changed Ken. He’d stop and stare. Over the years, the photos became “like wallpaper” hovering over the framework of his life. It was a tragedy that any kid was abducted, went missing, or ran away, Ken felt. He’d look at one photo after the next and wonder if the child had ever made it home.
When I asked Ken to become my missing persons hunter, he went back to all those moments he felt he could help, but other law enforcement obligations prevented him, saying, “This was my chance.”
We ate lunch in Palm Beach one afternoon after a meeting at the PBSO with Moody and Haley. We’d flown down to Florida to sit with both in the forensic investigator’s Batcave that Moody works out of, there to talk it all through. Moody and Haley had also come to accept and appreciate the help Ken, a fellow cop, offered. The five of us—including Jesperson—made a great team for this task.
First thing Moody did during our meeting was hand me Jane’s skull: “That’s her—basically what’s left, anyway.”
Here was an exact scaled replica—right down to the look and feel—of Jane’s skull and lower jaw. Her teeth were in perfect shape. Her cranium and cheekbones flawless. No bigger than a honeydew melon, her head felt small in my hands.
“Take that back to Connecticut with you,” Moody said. “We want you to have it for all your help.”
I was humbled by the gesture.
During our lunch after meeting with Moody and Haley, “You’re an investigator, Ken,” I said. “Robberies. Car thefts. Rapes. Murders. Missing people. You have that instinct. It’s in your blood, brother. I know you can find a few solid leads here.”
Ken took on the task of searching for candidates fitting the Jane Doe criteria so I could turn around and put them into that photo lineup and present it to Jesperson. As Ken began, the work brought him into a difficult place he’d not expected: the heartbreak of the families, not to mention the sheer numbers of actual missing people in the United States. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) claims, on average, 90,000 people are missing at any given time, about 33,000 of those children under the age of eighteen.
“Story after story after story,” Ken told me. “A person leaving and never being seen again. Reading all these narratives, searching for our Jane Doe, I became overwhelmed by the numbers and lost lives.”
I could see the pain on his face. Ken is a big dude. Tough. Bouncer-type. He has kids himself. This work had rattled him.
“What have you found?”