I (14 page)

By eighth grade Keith had begun to retreat into dreams and fantasies. In Keith's World he was bigger, brighter and handsomer than the other boys, and his slightest smile made girls melt in his arms. He saw himself riding tall as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the scarlet jacket and leather boots accenting his buff physique. He wrote to his uncle Russell, veteran Mountie and staff sergeant major, and soon was poring over RCMP literature with his father. The only problem was a requirement that a Mountie had to be able to run ten miles, a feat still beyond the bulky boy's capacity.

A relative by marriage showed up with photo albums of enemy soldiers whom he claimed to have killed in Vietnam. At first Keith was uninterested, but after several viewings he felt a stir. “He told me how he pulled out the gooks' teeth with pliers, and how the troopers used prisoners for target practice. He admitted that hearing Vietnamese women scream in pain gave him a hard-on. His stories brought back memories of the dogs and cats I tortured in Chilliwack, how I threw rocks at ducks and broke their skulls. Some of those Polaroids made me wish I'd been in Vietnam. He explained that it's a real rush to snipe people. He told me about shooting the fingers off gooks at one hundred yards. When I thought about it, I got a hard-on as well.”

Keith set about finding something to kill, but the prospects were leaner than in Canada. The Selah house was only a mile and a half from the center of town, and weeks passed without his sighting a single stray. When he found targets of opportunity, his armament proved weak. “I only remember killing one cat with my BB gun—I cornered this big tom and shot him over and over till he finally just laid there and bawled with each new BB shot into his flesh. I shot BBs up his ass and lower body parts. I used rocks to smash his paws and poked his flesh to make him jump. It took fifty-six BBs before he died.”

By Keith's fourteenth birthday Les had built a shop on the property and put his three sons to work manufacturing the spread-lock clips that were eagerly sought by hops growers all over the world. The pay was $1.50 an hour, and Keith was happy for the opportunity since he hadn't been able to line up another newspaper route. “Bruce was oldest, so he ran the press. On alternating days Brad and I would change boxes and reels of wire weighing upwards of 250 pounds. I carried them around like matchboxes. Once I straddled a 394 V-8 short block motor and pulled it right out of the car. I was as strong as a weightlifter, but for a long time I didn't realize it. One day I was jacking around with Frankie Williams and broke his wrist. After that I had to back off a little. People warned me I didn't know my own strength.

“Working for Dad wiped out my afterschool activities. There were nights when we worked till ten or eleven o'clock to reach our quotas. We used up a half ton of steel every day. When the operation was smooth, we punched out two thousand clips every 2½ minutes. If Bruce couldn't run the press, Brad took over, even though he was the youngest brother. If there was a job that involved sticking your hands in grease and oil and dirt or getting burnt or gassed or scarred, my brothers made sure I got it. I argued with them, but Dad always took their side.

“One day Brad and I got into it, and he said he wished I was dead. I yelled, ‘You want to kill me?' I went to the gun cabinet and pulled out the twelve-gauge side-by-side. I handed it to him and said, ‘Go ahead and kill me, prick!' Bruce separated us. From that day on I considered my brothers dead. I'm sure they felt the same about me.”

 

After a violent disagreement with his father, Keith turned to his mother for help, the standard protocol in the family. “Dad had set us up with checking accounts and taught us to balance our checkbooks. But he was also charging room and board, thirty bucks a week for me, and I had to buy my own clothes. After six months I found out that Bruce and Brad weren't paying. Mom complained to Dad, and he stopped charging me. When I asked him to reimburse me for what I'd paid, he told me to consider it another learning experience.”

 

After each blowup, the boy found comfort in the nightly campfires that he set in a far corner of the pasture. “Fire always fascinated me. There's nothing like piling on old broken boards and sticks till the flames shoot high in the air. When I was a kid in Selah, I didn't see it as an addiction, just something to ease the pressure. But it got a lot more serious later. Maybe it's genetic. I heard that Grandma Jesperson had a strange attitude about fire. But nobody would ever talk about it.”

Sometimes Keith came perilously close to being arrested. “I put exploding tips on my arrows. I shot one at the home of one of my teachers, ran like hell, and heard it explode. I used a 30-06 shell casing—pulled out the lead and filled it with gunpowder. I'd ram the staff of the arrow into the mouth of the shell and wrap the casing with baling wire. For a detonator I used a nail in a piece of copper tubing. When I shot those arrows into a piece of half-inch plywood, they blew out a hole the size of your fist. I decided that wasn't big enough.”

Through his middle school years the troubled boy remained in a quandary about women. “I didn't understand them. I was hopeless. When I saw a nice girl, I would tell her I liked her, and then she'd reject me. I never went to a prom or a dance. I liked girls from a distance—some I loved. But mostly I worked.”

He still fantasized about the red-haired femme fatale of his grammar-school years in Chilliwack. In high school he kissed a few girls and enjoyed it, but he was too shy to proceed. He stood guard for Bruce and the older boys during make-out parties but learned nothing from the sighs and groans in the shadows. As a Jesperson, he was nervous about female nudity and avoided a nearby home where parents permitted their children to run around half-naked.

In his fourteenth year his attitude began to change. He caught his first close look at the female breast and later wrote about the shock.

Later in his eventful fourteenth year, Keith discovered sexual intercourse. In his self-designated role as habitual victim, he described it as rape in his later writings:

In 1969 Keith took his poor academic habits and D average to Selah High School as a freshman and came into immediate conflict with other students. As always he magnified every slight and went out of his way to misconstrue school rituals as personal attacks. “They always pantsed the freshmen in front of the girls, but I didn't know it was a tradition. I walked into the high school and found my brother Bruce and ten other juniors waiting to meet me. I kicked and punched and did some serious damage, but they pulled my pants down to my ankles. Then they giggled and walked away. Right in front of everybody I had to undo my belt and pants and pull them back up. When I became an upperclassman myself, I would never pants the freshmen. I just couldn't see the humor in it.”

 

He soon learned that his established reputation as the Middle School nerd had preceded him. Students began calling him Igor, or Ig for short. “Brad started it, just for a joke. But it caught on. We'd all seen Igor in the Frankenstein movies, but I wasn't short, and I wasn't a cripple with a limp. For a while I thought they might be trying to say that Dad was Dr. Frankenstein and I was his geek, but that didn't make much sense either. So I just swallowed hard and took it—Mr. Nice Guy. That was the only way. After a while I didn't even feel like I was in school. I felt like I was
pretending
to be in school. It was the only way I could get through.”

 

In later years Les Jesperson said of his middle son, “Part of his problem was that he was very gullible. You could talk him out of anything. He was everybody's mark.”

Students worked Keith for loans and handouts, seldom repaid. He was a regular victim of practical jokes. Even though he was the biggest boy in the freshman class, he tended to yield rather than fight back. A classmate recalled, “He could be bright when he wanted to, but then he would do something stupid. He'd be too kind or too mean, too generous or too stingy. You never saw the in-between. His parents made him open a checking account, and in a few months he was overdrawn. He'd written too many checks to other students. He did a lot of generous things like that, but then he'd turn around and do something cruel and hateful. I always wondered if he was in control of his own brain, if he might've had brain damage. He sure acted like it.”

 

When Keith noticed that Selah High girls seemed impressed by athletes, he went out for the football team. He looked like a natural—two inches over six feet, two hundred pounds, well muscled. On the Vikings' first day of practice, he ran into trouble. “Coach wanted to play me at tackle and guard, the dumb positions. In the scrimmage, he told me, ‘Kill 'em, Keith.' I said, ‘Coach, I'm not gonna go out there and try to kill somebody.' He said, ‘Well, give me one-hundred percent effort. Hit 'em with everything you got.' I said, ‘As big as I am, coach, I'd hurt my own teammates.' He said, ‘Son, if you don't do what I say, you won't play.'”

Keith rode the bench for several games before he was sent into a game. “Coach told me to take out the other team's running back. He says, ‘If you hit him hard, I'll put you on the squad.' I ran right through a blocker and near broke one guy's leg. Then I rammed my helmet in the quarterback's chest and broke two of his ribs. I was thrown out of the game.

“Coach said, ‘Great job, Keith.' I thought,
I nearly killed the guy, I got thrown out, and…that's a great job?
I told coach I didn't want to play if he only intended to use me to hurt somebody.

“The next game I sat on the bench. I stayed on the squad for a few more games, but my heart wasn't in it. I never could understand the concept of a bunch of guys working together. It didn't come natural to me, I was a loner. The coach had a way of degrading me. He'd walk into the locker room and holler, ‘Hi, men,' and then say, ‘Hello, Keith.' When he got mad, he referred to us as women or girls. I guess he thought that was a motivator.

“I dared him to call me ‘girl' to my face, and he turned away. After that I knew he wouldn't play me, so I quit to concentrate on wrestling and made the ‘B' squad. Dad never came to our meets. Mom came once in a while. They both watched my brothers play sports, but they seemed bored with anything I did.”

Friendships didn't last long. A fellow student recalled, “Nobody could take all that bellyaching. He was a nice guy in some ways, but it was like he had a permanent toothache. Most of the kids couldn't be bothered.”