Incarcerated serial killers have fans (groupies) sending them money, food, nude and clothed photos, letters, all sorts of odd things. Days before, a groupie had sent Jesperson a copy of an article written about his first “official” murder—the murder he claims released the Devil inside and initiated an attack on a woman (months later) who got away, thus sparking a killing spree of seven additional victims over the next four years. As he read the article, “A Question of Guilt,” written by Los Angeles Times national correspondent Barry Siegel, published in the Times magazine on September 1, 1996, Jesperson was struck by the “depth of deception” and overwhelmed by how far the prosecutor, Jim McIntyre, had gone to “make [the state’s] case against two suspects, Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske, who had been arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced for a murder [Taunja Bennett] I had committed.”
The article was not a surprise to Jesperson; the Times had visited him in prison that February for “a photo shoot,” he said. “But that was all that had come from the visit.” After snapping the photos, they left. “Seemed what I had to say didn’t matter.”
Hearing him explain this as we started talking on a regular basis, I couldn’t help but ask myself, Does it matter what a serial killer has to say? Furthermore, should we listen? Should we even care?
As he read the article several times throughout that sleepless night, the only conclusion Jesperson could come to was: Are you kidding me?
He felt rage bubble inside him as the night wore on. That anger, surprisingly not so prevalent in most serial killers, is a known motiving factor in only 7.8 percent of all serial murders—but a familiar emotional trigger that led to all of Jesperson’s kills.1
Drawn from Jim McIntyre’s point of view, the Times story is an in-depth, multilayered piece focused on how McIntyre got it wrong and how embarrassed he was by such an investigatory and judicial debacle, thus sending two innocent people to prison for four years.
Jesperson claimed that after reading the story for the first time, he’d finally understood the dynamics of the case the State of Oregon had made against Laverne and John (as Jesperson would commonly refer to them). Jesperson had always assumed—from the time they were arrested until that night in his cell—two people had been wrongly convicted for a murder he committed.
“That it was a mistake,” he quipped. “I watched a lot of Matlock and Perry Mason. Maybe these cops, just like on those shows, simply made a mistake in their investigation. They arrested the wrong people. Put them in prison. Then this bad guy serial killer comes forward and admits to the crime and gets them out of prison with his admissions.”
Indeed, after admitting the Bennett murder, along with seven others, going through the judicial process of cutting deals in all of his cases, Jesperson had written the incarceration of two innocent people off as an error in judgment.
“I thought it was that simple. But this article someone sent me,” he concluded, “well, let me just say, it changed everything.”
In his view, this was where I came into the picture.
*
HUMAN INSTINCT BECKONS MOST to place a label on, and try to understand, the nature of evil. It’s part of what drives the obsession many of us have with true crime in the United States today. We desire to know what the psychopath is thinking and what “made” him bad. One of the mere tenets of philosophy would lay claim that a person cannot be evil unless, at some point, he embodied good—or, at the least, there is good in the world in which he lives. This was not the premise of which I worked as I stepped into the role of employing a serial killer to help me explain why people kill; yet, in the end, it became a mystery I needed to solve, simply because I’d come to believe it.
Approaching Keith Hunter Jesperson to correspond with me was something I set out to do as part of my research for the type of television I produced from 2011 to 2014. Jesperson was known as Raven, the telephone voice on my former Investigation Discovery television series. A good friend, mentor, and colleague, John Kelly, encouraged me to seek out Jesperson for this task. Knowing me, Kelly, an addiction therapist, was confident I’d untangle complicated, maybe even hidden, emotional mysteries within myself by talking to someone like Jesperson. At the least, “You’ll understand your weaknesses.” What’s more, a multiyear, all-inclusive study of Jesperson’s crimes, childhood, mind, and motives was a unique vein of serial killer research, untapped by many. I could get from Jesperson what few journalists had from any other serial killer: a true understanding of why he killed and what was going through his mind before, during, and after each murder, not to mention how he felt each time he took a life, and what made him continue to kill. This would become the fundamental thesis of my work: figuring out what Keith Jesperson meant by his crimes. Every criminal tells us something about him/herself by the crimes he or she commits. A pedophile says, for example, that he was abused in a similar fashion as a child; a burglar may tell us he is perhaps a dope addict and needs to steal in order to survive another day; a “one-off” murderer might be saying with her crime of passion that she surrendered to all of the anger built up over a period of time, and that one spur-of-the-moment act of violence was her way of releasing the pressure valve.
What was the implied psychology behind Jesperson’s murders? What was he saying with his crimes? I understood that when he killed for the first time (Taunja Bennett), he unleashed a narcissistic, violent psychopath already present within him. I learned quickly that he can justify his crimes and believes his truth is the only truth; that he takes pleasure in being the infamous “serial killer” he became, Happy Face. But what was behind the emotional high that he took away from each murder? What did he get out of it? What made him cross the line the first time and allow him to kill seven additional victims?
With those questions in front of me, early into our relationship, as I was doing more listening than digging, I asked him.
“Look, I’m not downplaying who I am or making excuses for the eight murders I committed,” he clarified. “I can explain the way I am and the way I think in this manner. When I got divorced and we were in court, I looked at my kids and they were in pain. But here’s the thing—it made me feel warm inside to know that I was responsible for that pain. I actually was happy that they were suffering and would continue to suffer from the divorce.”
Left there, this statement would feel, as it should, cold and callous. The urge is to write him off as sick. Twisted. A sadistic sociopath who enjoys lighting a match and watching the world around him burn. Yet, as Jesperson finished his thought, the true mind of the psychopath emerged.
“I cannot tell you why I felt this way,” he concluded. “I just did. When my mother died, I felt nothing. It’s like there’s a dead zone inside of me.”
After his divorce, Jesperson isolated himself. He felt lonely and ostracized by those closest to him. When he was young, he said, his father, Les, shouldered the blame unto him for whatever had gone wrong. As an example, he claimed, his father once put the shovel of a backhoe through the side of a house. Young Keith was working with Dad at the time. Dad, Jesperson insisted, went in and told the homeowner that Keith had done it.