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From his first days behind bars in Clark County, Washington, where he was charged with the first-degree murder of his girlfriend Julie Winningham, Keith Hunter Jesperson seemed intent on a personal crusade to embarrass the justice system. Thrust onto a public stage for the first time in his life, he began strutting in the limelight like the villain in a silent movie.

To reporters he issued a pious statement that he had no interest in saving his own skin but was determined to free the two innocent Oregonians who were now in their fifth year of imprisonment for the murder of Taunja Bennett. “That takes priority over everything else,” he proclaimed. “Those people have suffered long enough.” He also expressed annoyance that no one in the justice system had taken his earlier graffiti and Happy Face letters seriously.

 

Journalists and behaviorists jumped in to explain why he seemed so eager to be in the public eye, but no two seemed to agree. His sister Jill thought there was a simple answer: “Keith is just trying to get attention. He never got a whole lot when he was growing up.”

Others suspected a darker motivation. By trying to prove himself superior to authority figures, Keith seemed to be repeating his lifelong pattern with his father. It seemed to be an echo of events like the mutual trucking adventure: the experienced, skilled son versus the neophyte dad.

 

Leslie Samuel Jesperson, burdened in his advancing years by his son's claims of child abuse, didn't see the situation quite the same way. From his first stunned awareness that Keith was a confessed killer, the alpha-male groped for an explanation. “The morning I found out, I couldn't think straight. I'd walked into my son Brad's office to say good morning and talk business. He looked awful—eyes red, downcast. The last time he looked that bad was in 1985, when I had to tell him we'd lost his mother. He handed me a sheet of paper. ‘Here, Dad,' he said. ‘Read this.'

“He sat behind his desk with his face in his hands. When I read Keith's letter, I understood why. Brad and his brother shared the same bedroom for sixteen years. I had to read the letter twice to absorb it. When I realized that Keith had confessed to serial murder, the walls closed in. I cried and shook all over. In my mind I saw my little curly-haired son coming home from Sunday school in Chilliwack, dressed in the short pants and shirt his mother made for him.

“Of course I told Brad he had to give the letter to the police or he might go to jail himself. I was so upset I had to go to the doctor. I couldn't stop shaking, couldn't stand up or support my own weight. Doc gave me a shot and diagnosed a nervous breakdown.”

On a menu of tranquilizers and antidepressants, Les recovered in a few weeks and began an intense study program in an effort to understand his middle son's behavior. “There had to be an answer. Keith was raised just like our other four children. There were no signs that he was in trouble. He wasn't on dope, seldom drank and didn't act like he had problems. He was a healthy physical specimen who enjoyed a normal childhood, fresh air, rural and small-town environments, vacations in the north woods, plenty of pets, fine schools, good friends. Keith had it all. If he could become a serial murderer, anybody could.”

 

Les went to the library and took out every book he could find on the subject, including Lionel Dahmer's
A Father's Story,
a poignant work about the cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer. In his opinion it shed little light. He wrote to the elder Dahmer but received no reply. To Les it seemed that the chemical engineer from Milwaukee had taken too much of the blame himself. It was Jeffrey Dahmer who killed and pickled all those people, not his father. Wasn't it obvious that the young man was simply insane?

Les wondered if there might be a streak of lunacy far back in the family tree. As a child he'd heard gossip that his uncle Charlie, his blacksmith father's brother, had died in a Canadian mental hospital, but no one in the closemouthed clan had ever discussed details. He checked with relatives and learned that the uncle had been committed for incessant masturbation and death threats against his physician. Les thought he might be onto something and kept digging.

A request under the Canadian Freedom of Information Act turned up documents. A death certificate verified that Charles Edward Jesperson, a thirty-two-year-old laborer from Chilliwack, British Columbia, had died on May 19,1934. The cause of death was listed as “suicide—by driving a 3
¹
/2 inch nail into his skull.” Only a half-inch of the spike had been visible when he was discovered by an attendant. Charlie Jesperson had been locked in a provincial mental hospital for eight years. The general diagnosis was “dementia praecox,” a catchall label popular in the 1930s. A clinical note on the commitment papers observed, “Patient says whole family are of neurasthenic types.”

Les noted some resonances between his suicidal uncle and his homicidal son. In addition to abnormally strong sex drives and violent impulses, they seemed to share other characteristics. He read on: “…The patient's ideas are disconnected…his actions are restless…rather foolish and erratic in his actions and speech…erotic ideas strongly evident…he has no insight…foolish…inclined to be seclusive and does not mix very much….”

To Les the medical report went a long way toward explicating the inexplicable. He realized that it was possible that no one was responsible for what Keith had done—not his parents, not his brothers and sisters, not his wife, Rose, not his victims, and certainly not Keith himself. Like Uncle Charlie he might simply have a screw loose.

Les reported his conclusions to his son in an excited letter. “I read the approximately two hundred pages of text carefully and could see a distinct resemblance to some of your actions. The doctors in this text state that this disease, dementia praecox, is hereditary.” He pointed out “a distinct resemblance to Uncle Charlie in some of your actions.”

Keith ridiculed the idea. He showed no interest in being certified as a member of a long line of neurasthenics and the lunatic nephew of a lunatic uncle. His vehement disagreement made Les doubt his own conclusions. “I guess you're not crazy, Son,” he wrote. “You just let yourself get led around by your pecker.”

Les told a friend, “I think Keith kept some of the bodies around to screw them after they were dead.” Later he wrote:

Les worried that his imprisoned son might be in mortal danger, especially since he refused protective custody. “I expected to get a phone call someday and find out he's in the morgue. He was locked in with a bunch of thugs. They killed on the outside, and they killed on the inside. I don't care how if you're six-foot-six-or eight-foot-six—a blade is a blade. If Keith didn't end his own life, someone might do it for him. That was my greatest fear.”

From his cell near the mouth of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, the confessed lady-killer issued a drumbeat of claims that he was indeed the murderer of Taunja Bennett and hinted that he might have killed others. From their cells in downstate Oregon, convicted killers John Sosnovske and Laverne Pavlinac chimed in with renewed claims of innocence.

No one in the criminal justice system rose to the bait. The case had been closed for four years, and neither police nor prosecutors showed an interest in proving that they'd locked up the wrong people. In offering “proofs” of the pair's guilt, prosecutors asked how Pavlinac could have led them straight to the murder scene unless she'd been involved, and how she'd known so many inside details about the killing. If Sosnovske was innocent, they asked, why did he cop a plea? The Jesperson scenario was a joke.

 

Thus rebuffed, Keith smuggled out a succession of press releases in defiance of a gag order. After several news-breaks he managed to apply enough pressure to force Portland detectives to take him to the venues of the crime to prove his claims. “It was early in October 1995, and they drove me past the little brown house where I killed Taunja. They didn't even slow down. I said, ‘Hey, there's bloodstains in there! I'll show you where she peed the floor. It's soaked into the wood. You can bring it out with Luminol.
There's DNA in there, mine and Taunja's.'

“One of the detectives said, ‘Hey, man, it don't make no difference.'

“We drove past the B&I Tavern without going in. On the way out the Scenic Highway, one of the detectives covered the odometer with his hand. The papers had all said that the body was found ten miles from my house.

“I couldn't be sure of the exact place. It was raining hard, and everything was green and grown over. I'd dumped the body five and a half years earlier at one o'clock in the morning—pitch black. All I'd seen was shadows. I told the cops, ‘I think it's this canyon here. It's down past that tree branch that looks like a hand. I can remember looking back up from the body and seeing a hand against the silhouette of the moon.' I was in handcuffs and leg irons and asked if I could go down the slope to find the spot. They said no.

“They drove us to the place on the Sandy River where I got rid of Taunja's purse and Walkman. On the way I said, ‘You guys don't want to find this stuff. You're gonna bury it. You don't want this thing solved.' They asked me what Taunja was listening to on her Walkman the day I killed her, and I said, ‘How the hell should I know?'

“By the time we reached the river, I was convinced that they didn't believe me and would never give me a fair chance to prove my story. So I deliberately pointed to the wrong spot. I didn't want to give them a chance to mess with the evidence. That night I smuggled a diagram to Phil Stanford, a reporter I'd talked to before I was arrested. A crew of Explorer Scouts took the diagram and hacked through the bushes and weeds. Phil and some other journalists were on hand as witnesses. They found the purse exactly where I said they would. Taunja's laminated driver's license was in perfect shape.”