As I entered the visitor’s area, it was loud and noticably humid. Everyone spoke over one another. Women fanned themselves with their hands and newspapers, like they do in the South on Sundays in church. I scanned the room and saw him waiting for me on the opposite side. He was a human being who was hard to miss, clocking in at about three hundred pounds, give or take. He stood six foot six and sported gray-black hair, military buzz cut, hazy blue eyes, the beginning of cataracts. He wore a pair of off-trend, 1970s-era, large-framed glasses, which reminded me of Peter Fonda’s character in the film Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. This massive, handsome man, representing the polar opposite of everything I believe and promote, smiled and waved me over.
We sat across from each other on stiff, wooden chairs. He looked at me with the smooth, glassy shimmer only a psychopath can invoke. The depth of evil was inherent and natural—same as the slight, nervous smile he maintained throughout our conversation. All of it reminded me that a serial killer is a craftsman, a professional, in so many ways.
This was a man who had killed for purpose and reason. Every act and every thought and every word and every lie was carefully structured around an agenda, planned and thought out. Contrary to the public perception that most serial murderers are white males in their thirties living in their parents’ basement, serial killers actually fit no particular stereotype. All are different. This man I sat in front of shredded the common myth that the serial killer psychopath is a solitary figure, a loner, a person without social skills who is afraid to allow anyone inside his head, or get close to him.
His hands are the size of pot holders. He had them cupped over his knees, feet away from my throat. I stared and thought: Those are the same hands he killed eight human beings with—all females, all strangled to death, one beaten bloody and unrecognizable, another allegedly secured with rope and dragged underneath his truck for twelve miles (according to him), until all identifying markers (teeth and fingerprints) and “even her chest cavity” were gone.
The person in front of me was a monster. He and I both understood this. I made no secret about my feelings: I despise him. I view him—and those like him—as scum that cannot be rehabilitated and will reoffend at any given chance. This man killed females for sport and enjoyed it. And these opening moments of our first visit became an existential, enlightening realization, putting the reason why I’d made the trip to begin with into perspective.
“Could you kill me?” I asked him after we exchanged pleasantries.
“If I had to,” he said, pausing and laughing, before pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I need to be clear with you about something. Despite what people say, I never raped any of them—I never needed to.” The tone of his voice, something I’d come to realize is a way for him to express his deepest feelings, sounded as though he’d done his victims a favor by not raping them. He was a “fair-minded killer” for not sexually assaulting women. It’s a skewed piece of logic, I knew, something psychopaths rely on to make themselves feel better about what they’ve done: justification. Every single report led me to believe that he was motivated by sex and had raped many of his victims. Yet he sat staring back at me, telling me no, never.
“That is not who I am.”
The reason I’d asked about murdering me was because we’d known each other by then over a year. I felt uncharacteristically comfortable sitting in front of this man. We’d spoken by phone over one hundred times so far. I’d received no fewer than one hundred letters, amounting to over two thousand pages of text in that time. He’d become quite fond of me. He was on the fringes of trusting me. I was his last hope, he’d often say, for telling a part of his story the way he’d wanted it told. He’d been down sixteen years and change, sentenced on November 2, 1995, to two life terms. His earliest parole date on paper was scheduled for March 1, 2063. He was fifty-seven years old the first time we met in person. This serial murderer—Keith “Happy Face” Jesperson—will never feel the sunshine on his back again as a free man. As he should, Jesperson will die alone, a convicted, incarcerated murderer, in one of the oldest, dirtiest, roughest prisons on the West Coast.
“If you ever got out, would you kill again?” I asked, knowing that 60 percent of psychopaths released from prison go on to reoffend. Those are not good numbers.
“I’d tell you no because that is what you want to hear,” he said. “And I would never want to come back to this place. But the truth is, I don’t really know.”
I made note of his comment: I don’t really know. I sensed a fleeting jolt of honesty in his response.
Prison for Happy Face was easy, as long as he did the time and did not allow the time to do him. On a day-to-day basis, infamous serial killers in prison are either revered or have targets on their backs. Which illustrated a point: so much of this for him was unknown, part of a subtext that many serial killers structured their lives around. You wake up feeling inadequate and angry, maybe not even planning to kill anyone. But the urge to take a life, I would come to find out, is omnipresent, something you can never escape. Much like a dope addict, it becomes all you fantasize about.
That next fix.
He wore a blue, button-up dress shirt, state-issued, and denim blue jeans, same as every other inmate around us (the reason why I had been asked to change clothes). He had a sour smell, same as a musty basement. Two of his top teeth were missing. “I’m in the middle of some dental work, excuse how I look.”
As I sat and listened, he struck me as a country bumpkin. Not that I mean he was dumb, or some sort of Lennie parody from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men—an oversized adult with the brain of a small child. In some respects, Jesperson was a smart man. One study of 252 serial killers found that their intelligence quotient (IQ) numbered from 54 to 186, with a medium score of about 86, with 85 to 114 being a standard average. Jesperson’s IQ fell slightly above average at 115. An artist (colored pencil/charcoal on paper), he is a voracious reader, with strong, vocal opinions about what he reads.
Still, he had this strange, hospitable manner about him, which felt inviting, easy to trust. I’d sense the same temperament from locals I’d meet a week later in British Columbia, where he’s from. As I sat before him, I was on my way into the mountains of a town called Smithers to hunt a serial killer. It’s a regional dialect, I’d soon learn. Jesperson came across the same way: laid-back, slowed pace, comfortable in his own skin. I could grasp how he might have charmed an unsuspecting victim into his comfort zone.