Friends: Week after week we talked on the phone discussing cases for Dark Minds. Talking to Phelps became an out for me to escape to from prison. He was genuinely concerned about my day-to-day wellness. Phelps is more family to me than my own family is. We are like very close friends that have been friends for a long time. I know that from our extensive talks he will investigate fully my story to give the world the truth about who is Keith Jesperson. Being Raven on Dark Minds allowed me to tell the side of being a serial killer without my crimes becoming the focal point to the show. We didn’t want people to dwell on me.
Next, Jesperson pondered the notion that if Angela Subrize was alive when he dragged her underneath his truck, “Wouldn’t that make a better story?” If he’d had sex with his victims after death, and went back to the dump sites to continue to have sex with them, “Wouldn’t that make a better story?” What if “I was a cannibal and ate parts of my victims?” Wouldn’t that be what the general public wanted (and expected) of him?
I had no idea where all of this was coming from. It didn’t make sense. I felt, in a way, he was trying to interject more intrigue and mystery into his legacy: Listen, Phelps, there’s a lot I haven’t told you, because he realized our time was coming to an end.
“Thanks for that letter,” I explained during our next call. “I’ll have a look at it soon.”
I had no intention of stepping back into what felt like a new beginning he was trying to impose on me. I needed all of it to stop. My focus was following through with the Ylenia Carrisi lead, hoping like hell that she was Jane Doe, and then cutting off this cancer that had been eating away at my humanity for five years.
49
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“Everything just got messier and more consuming.”
—Keith Jesperson, 2016
A MAN CANNOT OUTRUN OR OUTSMART HIS GHOSTS; THEY’RE EMBEDDED deep within the marrow of his soul. Sooner or later, however, without any prodding of his own, a resurrection occurs. If nothing else, this is the lesson I will take away from corresponding with Keith Jesperson for five exhausting years I can never get back: to be prepared when those apparitions reappear.
In the early part of our fifth year, Jesperson called one morning. As the phone rang, I considered picking up and telling him to stop. By now, I was resigned to answering every fifth or sixth call, allowing ten days, sometimes several weeks, to pass, with the thought of weaning him off me being there for him. It was early spring 2016, just after he’d sent me an eighty-page letter describing each of his murders with a self-imposed promise of “new” details and insights he’d not shared with anyone else. To which I rolled my eyes and told myself, Not this time.
“I could write out each murder to be what people would believe, coming from the killer,” the letter began. I sensed he was in an odd place. As with any Happy Face explanation in letter form, he started this one with a soliloquy, putting what he was about to say into some sort of ideological, contextual logic, however twisted and self-serving. The guy feels the need to justify every action. Every admission. Every “new” disclosure. Maybe every single word and thought. With all of his banal platitudes, Jesperson holds on to a desperate compulsion to convince himself—more than any of us—that no matter what he says, the public should view it as relevant, not only to his overall story, but the grand serial killer narrative.
Jesperson then pointed out something he’d said on several occasions: How most people will believe whatever a serial killer says because it strikes at their worst fears and facilitates the public’s core beliefs regarding what serial murder—and the psychology behind it—should involve. “Make it TV, sitcom-style—Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon,” he added, and they’ll believe all of it. “The blank canvas is filled with stories and it’s up to someone to pull out what really happened.”
After a killer of his caliber is arrested, Jesperson explained, “We are schooled by the law and lawyers telling us what is important to and not to tell juries/prosecutors/police.” Thomas Phelan had told Happy Face to “never admit to premeditated crimes.” Ignoring that advice, Jesperson claimed there had always been an uncontrollable impulse inside him to search for a victim. Whenever I’d asked Jesperson about a “need inside him” to kill, he’d played it down, claiming it was not like that for him. That “story” had become a part of a legacy created by the media, further expedited by the Internet and his daughter years later, a carefully constructed narrative designed to demonize him and make him appear to be more in line with the Hollywood prototype. Jesperson’s argument had been that karma put him and his victims together and, as such, that celestial path played into those lives coming to an end. The murders happened in a moment of rage after a trigger had been squeezed; they were never planned. He’d not once roamed the countryside in his truck, seeking out females to have sex with and then kill.
Now, suddenly, this was the big lie, he said: “Tell a story to whitewash it so it doesn’t sound so bad.” He’d hid behind that kismet mantra, he added, “To make murder sound softer. Take the sting out of it. There have been so many people talking about what I have done to my victims, the canvas is filled with several versions of each case.... I need to come clean.”
Because of the holiday season, it had been more than two weeks since we’d spoken. I tried to make a habit of never accepting his calls on holidays, my birthday, or important personal days. I did not want that part of my life to become anything we shared. Whenever I’d slipped and mentioned a private “thing” I had to do, he’d begin the next call asking: “How’d it go?” After telling him not to go there, I’d receive ten pages of text in my PO box a week later describing how he knew and understood he was not my top priority in life and wanted to recognize I had a life beyond serial killers and talking to him and he needed to be more attentive to that boundary. His way of apologizing, I guess.
“What do you mean ‘come clean’?” I asked next time we spoke.
“I have not been totally honest with you,” he said.
“Okay.”
He began (again) on the Bennett case, claiming a need to resolve a few minor discrepancies and clarify what actually happened inside his house on the night he murdered Bennett and those hours before.12
As he talked about his actual true motive and mind-set during the years he’d killed, the impression was that I’d hit on all of it about a year into our discussions. It was Jesperson’s way of telling me I’d figured him out, had been right all along, without him having to admit total defeat.