*
DURING THE ENTIRE COURSE of this journey trying to identify Jane Doe, I’d been trying to sell a documentary based on my Jane Doe (California and Florida) work, with this new art form Moody had somewhat made trendy and mastered as part of that docu-narrative. It was going to be a homage to all the work I’d done on cold cases. Moody, the PBSO, along with Haley and the FDLE, were on board to keep the Raven secret until the documentary was completed, revealing to a national audience those images of Jane Doe that Moody and Jesperson had worked on with my help. I thought, if I could get that info—Jane’s image, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Jesperson’s story of meeting and killing her—on national television, Jane’s family would come forward and we could bring her home.
The problem with the documentary became that the two networks first interested in coproducing wound up rejecting the idea (after months of development). I couldn’t find any other takers. True-crime television had moved on to a more cut and paste, murder, chase, arrest, courtroom and conviction type of cookie-cutter programming, where open and uncertain endings—like on Dark Minds—were frowned upon and vetoed across the board.
I felt beaten. Terribly disappointed. This had never been about me; it was about getting that computer rendering of Jane Doe out into a national audience I could reach via cable TV. I picked up the phone, quite upset, and explained this to Moody. He expressed his disappointment in the network not to see the value of the documentary and thanked me for all the work I’d done.
A few weeks later, Moody called with a brilliant idea he and the PBSO had come up with to solve our problem.
47
VICTIM NUMBER SIX
“You can’t go home again.”
—Thomas Wolfe
COMPLACENCY CAN SOMETIMES BECOME A DANGEROUS, LONELY, dark hole we can fall into from time to time. Such a false sense of security can then become a place where we fail to recognize life’s warning system because we have become too jaded, cynical, accepting, or accustomed to a situation. There were many times throughout those years of dealing with Jesperson when I was in there, scratching at the sides of the hole, searching for a way out, no light to guide me.
Well into our fifth year, however, I felt a sense of empowerment, as though I had somewhat taken my life back. Therapy had helped me refocus and refuel. I realized I needed to wash my hands with Jesperson, Raven, the Jane Does, the Happy Face murders, and all the horrific details he’d shared and I had consumed. Our friendship over the years had taken me into places I thought I would have never gone, into depths of depression I never knew existed within me. I told myself when I started I could handle anything. John Kelly had warned me about inviting the Devil into my life, and he was right: Evil of this magnitude gets into your blood, rattles your spirit, shakes you to the core—and if you’re not ready to defend yourself, you’ll succumb to it without ever knowing what the hell hit you. Maybe it was the amount of time. Or the profundity and detail we discussed. I couldn’t explain it. Nor did I need to. I just knew it was there, poking at me, grinding me down, tossing me around on the floor of my office and bathroom, doubling me over in somatic pain. I’d suffered chronic bouts of anxiety, of course capped off by Jesperson’s needy, selfish tendency to overwhelm and smother.
“You’re describing demonic possession,” a friend told me one day as I explained what was going on in my life, why I had lost so much weight and felt depressed.
“I need to be exorcised for sure.”
The letter I received from Jesperson regarding his brain was everything I’d expected. It was a long and tiring explanation of why he was saying yes. Not only did he send a notarized letter giving me permission to use his brain any way I chose, but he gave me complete control—which I did not want—over his remains. He asked me to claim his body upon his death.
That was not going to happen. The brain I would donate to any researcher who wanted it. But I was done with him. For good. I was not about to give him a proper burial after he died in that shithole of a prison that has been his home. The State of Oregon could deal with the corpse of a serial killer.
*
THE IDEA MOODY CAME up with was to produce a mini version of what I had wanted to do. Titled Who Am I? Victim #6 of the Happy Face Killer, the PBSO produced a comprehensive, detailed, short documentary focused on Jane Doe, using the images Jesperson created and Moody’s computerized renderings as the catalyst pushing the story into the public domain. To protect my Raven secret, Moody and Haley did a great job of keeping me out of it, save for a brief shout-out at the end of the video, which I must say caused me a bit of concern, thinking someone would put it all together. 11
The six-minute and four-second YouTube video did not go viral, but the story took flight. Newspapers and websites picked it up. The PBSO received e-mail tips from Web sleuths regarding who Jane could be, over half of which included the name Ylenia Carrisi.
Word spread that Ylenia Carrisi was a potential Jane Doe match and the Italian media detonated this thread of the story, blowing it up. One story published on November 19, 2015, in OGGI, a weekly newsmagazine out of Milan, below the headline YLENIA CARRISI, SENSATIONAL BREAKTHROUGH . . . THEY FOUND THE BODY?, included a photo of Jesperson, Carrisi, and Moody’s Jane Doe image melded together into one graphic. Reading the story, you’d think the case had been solved:
Keith Hunter Jesperson admitted killing a girl . . . determined to get to California or Nevada, a girl called Suzanne, just as, according to investigators, used to be called Ylenia [in] America.
Some of those facts were speculative, notably the California addition. The OGGI report explained how Interpol had contacted the girl’s father, Albano, in October (2015), and extracted a DNA sample to send to Florida for testing.
With that, the Carrisi/Jesperson connection was made.
After only one local Palm Beach story and those few in Italy placing Jesperson’s face next to Carrisi’s, websites and newspaper front pages all over the world, on top of television news reports and chat room and blog discussions, erupted into a frenzy.
At the time, Jesperson had no idea. We all agreed not to tell him.