“My girlfriend Pamela had left weeks before, out trucking and fucking her new man at every rest area and truck stop,” he said of those days before he murdered Bennett. “What I would have been doing if I was trucking with her.”
The image superimposed inside his head on the night he murdered Bennett: another woman who had let him down; another woman who had spurned and replaced him; another woman out having sex with another man. He allowed the anger the situation infected him with to manifest: Pamela and her new man having sex. The jealousy ground him down. Ate at him.
Rose redux.
He blamed himself, now claiming his mind was “full of anger at how I had [screwed] up my life.” He had “destroyed” a “perfect family” with Rose and his kids by acting on “lust,” cheating on Rose, having “sex with different women.”
After accepting Pamela had left him for the other man, Jesperson decided to go “searching for sex.” Thus, for the first time, he admitted he did not simply bump into Taunja Bennett randomly that afternoon at the bar. He’d gone out to find a woman whom he could bed. To me, this admission is significant within his evolution as a serial murderer. He was motivated by lust, sexual urges, and sexual fantasies, which ultimately turned violent. Textbook serial killer stuff.
What’s more: I’d always searched Jesperson’s life for an addiction (a good portion of serial killers are addicted to something). I asked him about booze. Drugs? “So was it sex? Were you addicted to sex?”
“No,” he said. “You got that wrong. It’s gambling. I was addicted to gambling.”
He explained how, after killing Bennett, he initiated a stalking routine by going out in his small world in search of females for a singular purpose: sex. He was driven by a compulsion to have sex and not have to pay for it. “I was always observing females for an opening to enter into their world to be able to offer up something they want/need, in hopes I’d get lucky.”
On the road it became booze, cigarettes, a ride, food, even shelter.
His life post-Rose was a “roller coaster of sex and more sex.” Searching for a new sexual partner to “replace Pamela” after killing Bennett, he assumed, was the initial objective setting him on a path toward committing additional murders. January 20, 1990, the last day of Bennett’s life, Jesperson said, did not start out with him waking up and feeling idle, twiddling his thumbs, bored, sitting around the house, as he had told cops, writers, and journalists (including me). Now he said he left the house that morning to stalk women. He’d not killed anyone yet (so he claimed), but he’d been fantasizing about taking total control over females and being able to do whatever he wanted (sexually) to them. On this particular morning, he walked to the local mall “cruising, to see what I could see. Observing people. Studying people for a way into their lives.”
Typical predatory behavior, no matter how Jesperson shined it up. He was a man looking to exploit the social vulnerabilities of women out and about, associating with community members, neighbors and friends. For example, while at a local supermarket, Jesperson sought out several women who fit his fantasy and stepped into their space by offering “help with their packages/groceries, open a door here, close a door there, carry [their groceries] out for them.” As he did this, he spoke to them: “Have a nice day,” while the tape loop inside his head repeated: Do you wanna play?
He couldn’t spend too much time at the supermarket, Happy Face soon realized, because “that would be too obvious.” So he split his time up among several public places: a local Jeep dealership, Radio Shack, a building center.
By noon, Jesperson found himself downtown, circling a few bars. He drank coffee, so as not to cloud his judgment and “make a mistake.” He decided to “flirt” with the “first girl to smile” at him. By two o’clock in the afternoon, after meeting Bennett inside the B&I Tavern, making mental note she was available (that embrace initiated by her), he walked back to his house, now obsessed with sexing Bennett.
“I had learned,” Jesperson said, “that my father’s hit-and-run had made an impact on my thought process as I went. He got away with it, so can I. If nobody knows about it, then it didn’t happen.”
In this letter, Jesperson distilled each of his eight murders into single thoughts: “Killed Bennett, hurt Daun [Slagle], killed number 2 because she presented herself to me when I had time to play. Number 3 was there and I wanted her with me. Number 4 wanted a better life and I ended it. Number 5 was a conquest to a game to see if I could get her. Number 6 just wasn’t being social. Number 7 overstayed her welcome, and number 8 had been a problem. I justified every murder on how I saw each person I dealt with. You call it playing God.”
In a stroke of ruthless honesty, near the end of the letter, Jesperson described Angela Subrize: “I loved sex with her. Yes, the sex was great. But it had to end sometime. She had become a liability to me. I felt a need to be rid of her. She had to go. She had to die. There would be no rest for me from her if I let her go.”
*
A ROME TELEVISION NETWORK flew into Palm Beach to interview Dennis Haley after the Ylenia Carrisi story broke internationally and media hounded Albano Carrisi and Romina Power. The language barrier among Moody, Haley, and the Italian media, once again, created more mystery surrounding any proven connection between Ylenia Carrisi and Keith Jesperson.
“They all had a hard time understanding that we were not saying we had found Ylenia. We just wanted to eliminate her from possibilities,” Haley noted.
Early into our quest, Dennis Haley thought Jesperson was lying about Jane Doe the entire time; that Happy Face was holding on to information that could identify her. Through the Ylenia Carrisi investigation, along with several other possible victims now being checked via DNA, and corresponding with Jesperson, however, Haley saw a different side of Happy Face, concluding, “I now believe he has been truthful concerning victim number six.”
The one aspect of the Carrisi case that concerned Haley, Moody, and me was all the attention Jesperson received in Europe. Jesperson was on the front page of many websites and newspapers. He’d become that infamous nicknamed serial killer all over again. The only silver lining in it all was that he knew nothing about it.
“They all ran stories on Jesperson and tied him to Ylenia Carrisi. I thought if I was open and honest with [the press there], they wouldn’t screw things up, but they did,” Moody said. “They even ran articles that we had identified our Jane Doe as Ylenia and that Jesperson had identified her.”
As spring 2016 came, the Ylenia Carrisi story faded. Romina’s DNA was put into the system and ran against Jane Doe. When the results came back, it shocked everyone.
No match. Ylenia Carrisi was not Jesperson’s Jane Doe.