The Bennett murder details are no secret, at least those that have been made public. Jesperson never went to trial, so the only source is his personal testimony, any evidence left behind, available law enforcement reports, hearings, and interviews with those involved. This murder, arguably Jesperson’s first, is the egg from which seven others are hatched. I wanted a detailed account of this crime, from the moment he woke on that day until he dumped Bennett’s body along the Columbia River Gorge and considered taking his next victim. I asked for his story backward and forward, from the middle to the end, from the end back to the middle. The truth, I’ve learned from interviewing hundreds of sources throughout my career, is not something one can lie about repeatedly and get right. The truth is absolute. It never changes. To catch a liar, you ask him or her to tell the story over and over. Cops do this with the proverbial, Okay, let’s go through it one more time.
Now, while we could argue for and against Jesperson’s motivations in wanting to tell the Bennett story and, following along with his delusional way of thinking, charge that a conspiracy to railroad two innocent people took place, the murder itself tells us a tremendous amount about who Keith Jesperson—the serial killer—is. For one, serial killers fall into two categories: organized and disorganized. The organized killer leaves behind his unique mark of logic and planning, carefully and methodically, over a period of time, he puts into the crime. He cautiously chooses his victims, selecting only those he deems the perfect fit for whatever fantasy runs on an endless loop inside his head. All of his victims are easy to handle and he can get them into his comfort zone without much resistance: kids, prostitutes, homeless, elderly, and the sick. The organized killer is in control throughout the entire process: from the hunt to the ruse he uses to abduct or convince his prey he is harmless, until the kill itself. He is cautious about leaving evidence behind and meticulous about cleaning up after himself. He conceals his victims’ corpses with the utmost attention and perfection and will tend to leave his victim in a posed state, however obvious.
The disorganized serial killer, on the other hand, kills in the heat of the moment. His victims might fight back because he did not choose well. He’s sloppy and dumps his victims without thinking about where, or any potential (or subsequent) consequences. He might abduct or kill in “high-risk” environments. He has little control over himself, his impulses, or his anger.
With Jesperson’s first murder, he fell somewhere in between organized and disorganized. The murder itself, his victim of choice, and the location of the kill were disorganized, while everything he did afterward was somewhat organized. It was as if once he set that killer inside free, the knowledge to complete and conceal the job was there and, after being called upon, kicked into action. He knew what to do.
“My beginning as a serial killer,” Jesperson explained, “started on Saturday, January 20, 1990, when I met Taunja Bennett. Before that day, I did not plan on killing anyone—and never thought about becoming some sort of diabolical, evil, infamous serial killer the media has turned me into. It didn’t happen that way.”
“You did embrace who you became, however?”
“Embrace?” He laughed. “I am that person.”
4
SOME SICKNESS
“Evil would never bring Good, however much they wanted
to believe that it would. By the time they discovered the
truth, it would be too late.”
—Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
HE SLEPT IN THE LIVING ROOM, A MATTRESS ON THE FLOOR. THIS morning, the television was flickering, a pulsating, snowy storm of tiny dots and strobes, which eventually woke him. He’d fallen asleep while watching a late-night movie. Opening his eyes, adapting to this day where, by its end, he would go to sleep a killer, Keith Jesperson felt different. The moment he got out of bed on any morning, Jesperson said, was his favorite part of the day. A fresh twenty-four hours lay ahead. Anything was possible. The past was gone. The present there in the moment. The future unknown. A new day offered a chance to start over.
On this particular morning, the fog hovering over Portland, Oregon, gave him a peculiar feeling. The sun, as he recalled, was “trying to break through,” but couldn’t quite manage. When he got up from the floor mattress and opened the front door, a cold rush of northwestern air struck him. He didn’t mind. But there was, as he called it, a “Groundhog Day” sense to his life recently, a feeling of déjà vu he had a hard time shaking.
“Each morning had become . . . just like the other,” he said.
Jesperson was not a drinker. In contrast to a majority of serial killers, Jesperson maintained that—save for killing—he had no addictions.
On Saturday, January 20, 1990, Jesperson was living alone in a small one-level ranch-style home at 18434 NE Everett Street in downtown Portland. He’d moved into the house with his girlfriend, Pamela Madison (pseudonym), who had run off with another man, a trucker, he said, to Tennessee in the weeks before he met Bennett. The house, owned by Pamela’s mother, was not far, “just five blocks,” from the B&I Tavern on Stark Avenue in the east end of Portland.
Early afternoon, Jesperson found his way to the B&I Tavern to “shoot some pool.” He’d spent the morning roaming through town on foot, stalking a few women, checking the lay of the land, a need for sex driving every step. He liked to jog or walk most places. Growing up in British Columbia amid acres of farmland, it was in his nature to be on foot as much as possible.
I asked how he felt that day. I wanted a sense of what was going through his mind. Anger? Rage? A sexual desire so strong he could not suppress? Was he upset? Was he missing Pamela? Thinking about his ex-wife? Mad about something in particular? What was it?
“Right or wrong, guilty or innocent, it is no longer black or white, but gray,” he said.
This was in response to a direct question I’d ask many times throughout our interviews: Did you rape these women you murdered? You read anything about Keith Jesperson and rape is part of the narrative. Yet, he told me many times he never raped any of them. I was under the impression—though I didn’t share my thoughts at this time—that his idea of rape and the actual crime hold different meanings.
“Rape is not about anger,” he said. Anger being, without a doubt, Jesperson’s foremost trigger in committing any act of violence. “It is about sex. Period. But society has gotten used to blaming it on some sickness.”
On days like this, after speaking with him, my chest tightened, my stomach twisted in knots. I’d suffered issues with digestion most of my adult life. As I allowed Jesperson into my head, those disorders, for which I’d always had a handle on, became more profound and difficult to manage. He was getting to me.