I’d hang up the phone on days such as this and feel the need to take a walk with my black Lab, Ava. She’d run in a nearby cornfield while I contemplated what in the hell I had gotten myself into. After only a few months in and I had begun to suffer bouts of anxiousness, my heart racing, subtle pains pulsing in my stomach, butterflies I sensed would one day manifest into something more severe.
Beyond his work on the television series, I allowed Jesperson to bang on about his first victim, Taunja Bennett, and his absolute fanatical need to make sure the public understood how the facts of that crime (according to him) had been, right down to the smallest detail, misconstrued and lost in the embodiment of a culture and media obsessed with glorifying murderers.
“The Bennett case,” he said—within the context of the psychopath’s grandiose way of trying to convince me how superior his case is to any other serial killer case in history—“will have a serious impact on the death penalty in Oregon, if not the whole United States.”
My aim in the beginning when listening to his gibberish was not to get in the way and counter with the obvious pushback. Instead, I let him say what he needed. Through that, I could better understand whom I was dealing with and design a plan to get out of him what I needed.
Further, he said, “We can only hope we killers can get someone to write the story as it is meant to be told . . . [but] a general consensus is that we never agree with what is [written] about us.”
During the first year, save for his Dark Minds analysis, the Bennett case was all Jesperson talked about. As he explained his position, I asked myself if what Jesperson was so obsessively stuck on could hold any validity. What if he was right? I had to be open to the possibility, despite thinking he was nothing more than a twisted psychopath looking to further his fifteen minutes and take a poke at the justice system in the process, using me as a bullhorn.
“I will point you in the right direction,” he explained before oddly switching to the third person, adding, “and let you dig to your heart’s content to see if Keith is telling you the truth.” He promised that “sooner or later” a “lightbulb” would turn on inside me and I’d experience an “Oh my God” moment as it pertained to the Bennett case. “Just be patient, Phelps. Open to it.”
In January 1991, while Bennett’s real killer was on the loose, preparing to strangle more victims, a jury convicted Pavlinac of “felony homicide.” Weeks later, her “coconspirator” in the murder, the alleged muscle behind the brutal beating and alleged rape of Bennett, Pavlinac’s live-in boyfriend, John Sosnovske, pleaded “no contest” to the same charge. They both received life sentences, were sent upstate to prison, and long forgotten about.
It seemed almost ludicrous to believe that a convicted, admitted serial killer, known to lie about himself and his crimes, years later, after his arrest and admission of eight murders, would still anchor such a deep-seated need to initiate a campaign against the Times, Jim McIntyre, and the detectives involved, to undermine all that had been said. And why, moreover, did it even matter what Jesperson now claimed? Why should anybody care?
Getting the Bennett case right, Jesperson told me, was the sole reason why “I haven’t slit my throat or hanged myself in prison.” As our correspondence and phone calls kicked into high gear during production of Dark Minds, Jesperson explained, “It is time for the public to find out exactly what took place here with the murder of Taunja Bennett, conviction of Laverne and John, and the injustice that followed. I’m responsible for my crimes. I need others to do the same.”
I started to listen more attentively.
“Every time I pull out the L.A. Times story,” he wrote, “I see the same thing.” In this instance, he focused on dates, explaining that one of the detectives in the case had gone over to see Laverne on October 4, 1995. “But is it October fourth for real?”
This seemingly minor discrepancy revealed itself to him when he realized the day he was polygraphed in the case had been “Friday, October 6,” and the article referred to the detective interviewing Laverne “on the following day.” So it could not have been October 4. “And what is stranger,” he added, “they knew I was scheduled to be tested. Why go see Laverne at all just before the test?”
His answer: “To try to get her to include me in their murder story—come up with a deal to save face.”
According to Jesperson’s lawyer, Thomas Phelan, the prosecution, at one time, “wanted to make a case that Jesperson and John and Laverne killed Bennett together.”
It’s a generous leap: from making a mistake on a date to accusing law enforcement of corruption and coercion. But that is the epicenter of Jesperson’s Bennett argument: coincidences and errors and mistakes become grander and more conspiracy-minded as one delves deeper into the case. According to Jesperson, it’s not only about Jim McIntyre and his cops. In his paranoid mind-set, Jesperson believes a conspiracy took place at the highest level in order for the prosecution of Laverne and John to move forward.
“You could say Oregon has a double standard in dealing with the press and me.”