“I accept my guilt,” Jesperson concluded. “Embrace it. Not proud of it. I accept it as fact. I’m broken. But not making excuses. Whatever you come up with, Phelps, I’m sure it will be serving a purpose that reflects what you want people to know about me, my crimes—your suspicions. I’ve taken lives from those who deserved better.”
In 2016, the FBI released its report on the Highway Serial Killings initiative, a comprehensive, twelve-year study that began when the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation discovered “a pattern of murdered women’s bodies being dumped along I-40 in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi.” That investigation led to the FBI compiling a list of 750 murder victims found near U.S. highway systems across American roadways, with nearly 450 potential suspects. Staggering numbers.
In a statement accompanying the report, the FBI stated: “If there is such a thing as an ideal profession for a serial killer, it may well be as a long-haul truck driver.”
51
THE PAST AS RANSOM FOR THE FUTURE
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be
lived forwards.”
—S?ren Kierkegaard
IT HAD BEEN TWO DECADES SINCE I’D VISITED MY SISTER-IN-LAW DIANE’S grave site. I knew I had to do it if I was to move on. I needed to face those memories in front of her, forgive Diane, and especially myself, for hating her the way I did at the time she was murdered. Diane was not all bad. There was a kind, gentle, caring human being inside her that addiction took possession of. I understood this as I grew older. I could not have known it when she was alive.
My daughter and I were on our way to a volleyball tournament in Hartford. We stopped for pizza down the street from the cemetery where Diane is buried.
“Come on,” I said after lunch. “I need to show you something.”
I drove into the cemetery and parked along the edge of the grass, in a spot close to where I had at her funeral. When Diane was buried, the cemetery was new; hers was one of the first grave sites dug. I recalled it being on the border, by the entrance road in, near the gate, in the first row of stones. How could I ever forget? The darkness of that day is a part of me.
We stepped out of the vehicle. There were hundreds of gravestones now. I was confused and flustered, kind of like when you’re looking for an address and anxiety kicks in while studying a map. Everything looked so different.
“Start there,” I told my daughter, pointing to the first row. “I’ll look over here.”
My daughter, sixteen at the time, is a smart girl. National Honor Society. Straight A’s. Excellent student in every manner of speaking. She’s an EMT. Extremely headstrong: a bull. Involved up to her eyeballs in everything under the sun at school and our parish. She is planning on going into medicine. She’s a straight shooter. Tells it like it is. Has not an ounce of naiveté in her. She’s a skeptic and does not take things as they are, how people say they are, but as she sees them. She, like me, appreciates evidence as a precursor to believing a story, such as the one we were about to experience.
We searched every row, every gravestone and ground plate, for twenty minutes.
“Can’t find it,” my daughter said. “You?”
“I swear it was right here,” I said, walking up and down the first row of headstones and grave markers flush with the ground, this after scouring the entire cemetery, knowing damn well Diane had been buried in the first quadrant of gravestones that ran along the fence line by the entrance road in. I was certain of this.
We took another look.
Nothing.
Being January in New England, the cold was biting. The wind blew and our skin burned. We needed to get inside the warm car and to my daughter’s tournament.
Sitting inside the vehicle, letting it warm up, I found one of those find-a-grave websites on my iPhone. There was a picture of Diane’s gravestone, just as I had remembered it. The website, however, did not give any specific directions or coordinates in the cemetery indicating where the grave might be. I was disappointed.
As I scrolled up and down the Web page, my daughter leaned over and stared at the image without saying a word. She then looked up, as if lost in thought (or, come to find out, listening). She put her hand on the door to exit the car.
Still not a word, she got out, took a few steps toward the back of the vehicle.
I stepped out. “What are you doing?”
My daughter, standing fifteen feet from me, looked down and said, “Dad, it’s right here.”
“What?” I walked toward the back of the vehicle.
There it was. Not ten feet from the back end of my car, the first headstone in the cemetery, same as I’d remembered. There was a bush shading it from view, which must have been why we’d missed it.
“How did you know?” I asked.
My daughter stared at me, looked down. I’d never seen this expression on her face. Not ever. She wasn’t scared, or spooked; she had a look of absolute clearheadedness, as though one of life’s secrets had been revealed only to her.
“What is it, kid?”
“When I looked at the picture of the headstone on your phone, I didn’t see it. I held this blank stare—and then I heard a voice.”
“What? You heard a what?”
“The voice said, ‘Sweetie, it’s right over there, just get out and go look.’ So then I said to her, ‘But it’s too cold out and we have already looked over there.’ And she said, ‘Just do it. Trust me, sweetie. I promise you. It’s right next to the bush.’ And then I said to her, ‘Okay, but I am only looking there.’”
Diane used to call Meranda “sweetie.” I can hear her say the word as clear as, apparently, my daughter heard her dead aunt explain where her grave was located.