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Despite the flareups in the letters, Les and his second wife Betty continued to be Keith's only visitors, arriving twice a year in their thirty-five-foot “fifth-wheel” trailer pulled by a Dodge Ram diesel that cruised smoothly at sixty-five, as the old man proudly told his son.

Keith noticed that whenever Les took his seat on one of the hard metal seats in the open visiting room, his eyes began darting toward the exit, and he usually left before the scheduled visiting period was over. The son observed this behavior with bemusement. He looked forward to the visits, but he reminded himself that he and his father would always be out of sync. He wrote about one of the visits:

With the last threads to his family broken or under strain, Keith thought about making new connections. But how? And with whom? He certainly didn't want more contact with his fellow inmates. There were too many crosscurrents, feuds, racial divisions, too many snitches, opportunists, angle-players. And there was too much resentment of him and his notoriety.

He tried to decide what type of person might want to correspond with a serial killer. Bleeding heart social workers? Teenagers looking for kicks? He'd had enough of that kind of attention.

The answer came to him with a jolt—why, other serial killers, of course! Maybe they strangled and stabbed and shot innocent people, but that doesn't mean they're unfeeling monsters.
Just look at me!

They could exchange advice and information, discuss mutual problems, pass along their artwork and photos, share their fears, hopes, news, legalese, holiday cheer, and their courthouse smarts and savvy. He reckoned himself the ultimate arbiter on issues of crime and punishment. “When I went down, I had ignorance of the law. I was flying blind. I had to sit in my cell and analyze things before I wised up. Now I could help other lifers. And by figuring them out, maybe I could learn a little more about myself.”

Most of his correspondents were on death row, and he prided himself on being the rare exception. He seldom tired of explaining how he'd outmaneuvered the authorities. “A feat in itself!” he wrote to an admirer. “A serial killer that does not get executed.
Unheard of!”

 

His first attempt to establish contact with a marquee murderer had taken place early in 1996, while he was still juggling legal problems in Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. He'd written a friendly letter to Danny Rolling, facing execution in Florida for the massacre of five college students. Jesperson's letter to “the Gainesville Slasher” congratulated Rolling on finding a new girlfriend—“she sounds like a neat and great person.” The letter had a whiff of sycophancy. “Hope all will go well with you, my friend in Christ,” wrote the lifelong agnostic. “God bless you. No response is needed.”

None was received. While Keith was awaiting a reply, the fastidious Rolling was telling a third party that he found the Self-start Serial Killer Kit and Keith's other attempts at Internet gallows humor in atrocious taste. “That kind of humor doesn't impress me,” said the man who'd slashed four victims to death and decapitated a fifth. “There is NOTHING, absolutely nothing about KILLING that is humorous.”

 

After the rebuff Keith waited a year before contacting other killers. Then he started a correspondence with Jeff Shapiro, a triple-murderer who was being held in a supermax prison in Colorado. Shapiro's approach to cruelty and violence seemed as lighthearted as his own. “You must have an encyclopedia of different pen pals and the like,” Shapiro wrote admiringly.

The correspondence was short-lived. “Shapiro began to act annoyed that I got so much media coverage. He's a foot shorter than me and I guess it made him jealous. I wrote, ‘If you want some press, go out and get it, man! It's not hard. Just stick your nose where it doesn't belong. Act arrogant. Do something weird. The media will make you famous.' Then the silly son of a bitch hinted to me that he was the Green River Killer. His stupidity meant that from now on the prison would be studying every word we exchanged. I didn't need that kind of attention. I cut him off.”

 

An enthusiastic “Greetings from Paris!” opened an exchange with Nicolas Claux, “the Vampire of Paris,” a former mortuary assistant serving life for cannibalism. Claux enclosed a photograph of himself in his cell, working on drawings that were eerily similar to the pictures that Keith was just beginning to turn out for his friends. Also known as “the Ghoul,” the Gallic gourmand was pleased to share his own expertise:

A less-inspired correspondence began after Keith saw the serial killer Arthur Shawcross on the TV program
Justice Files
and sent off a letter: “Instead of writing groupies, why don't you write to another convict?”

Shawcross, murderer of two children and eleven women, was an avid artist like Claux and had auctioned some of his primitive paintings on the Internet before being sent to the hole for violating prison policy. His letters were barely literate and full of whiny complaints. Keith offered the child killer some unsolicited advice on doing time, but Shawcross, nearing his twentieth year in custody, failed to respond.

Keith wrote Pierre Navelot, a French citizen serving thirty years for decapitating a woman, and Javed Iqbal of Pakistan, the confessed murderer of a hundred children, but there was no response from either. Patrick Kearney, a homophobe who had left thirty butchered bodies alongside California highways, proved friendlier. Kearney wrote in an upbeat letter:

Kearney, “the Garbage Bag Killer,” was full of gossip about other imprisoned murderers (“Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson clan was in Oregon for awhile but has been moved elsewhere”). He complained about being transferred so often—“we call it ‘bus therapy.'”

 

Tommy Lynn Sells, “the Coast to Coast Killer,” a carnival roustabout who had conducted a twenty-year murder spree, agreed to join the letter-writers on receipt of “a little good faith.” Keith lost interest when he read that “$100 would be a good start.”

Charles DeFrates, a Washington serial murderer and cop killer, sent erudite letters from the penitentiary at Monroe, Washington. A killer from Kansas called himself “Slavemaster.” A seventeen-year-old Oregon prisoner claimed that “voices” made him murder a seven-year-old girl and hide her body under his parents' floorboards. The boy wrote, “I have my problems but I can get well don't you think dreams can come true?” Keith dispatched several pages of solicitude and advice.

Angel Maturino Resendez, “the Railway Killer,” proved to be the most bizarre member of the group, writing letters that seemed to have originated in a rubber room on a psychiatric ward. Once the FBI's Public Enemy Number One, Resendez awaited lethal injection in Texas for murdering three dozen victims while riding the rails. His envelopes came festooned with slogans, cryptic messages and irrelevancies: “Viva la France,” “9-16-1999 Mexican Independente from Spain,” “Do not purchase anything made in China….” He referred to himself as “the angel of death” and wrote letters almost as long as Keith's.

The pen pals endured a rocky period when one of the Jesperson letters was made public. Resendez had sent it to a third party who posted it on the Internet, resulting in newspaper articles about how easy it was to kill and avoid the death penalty, plus five pages on the fine art of defeating the justice system. When Keith learned of his worldwide exposure, he fired off a message:

A chastened Resendez replied: “Man I fuck-it-up for you. I was especting something good out of this. I do not blame medication, I did not try to reach into my mind to see what could happen….I did you bad my Friend.”

The Hispanic killer promised to avoid future problems by returning Keith's letters after he read them. He wrote:

Like his fellow correspondent, the Railway Killer was given to exposition and exegesis, often for pages on end. He explained that John F. Kennedy, Jr., died because of “a Radra Round antena as the one use to deteck military aircraft.” He described abortion clinics as “temples of Baall and Moleck and must be destroy.” He quoted religious admonitions about homosexuals and reeled off pages of Biblical references that Keith ignored. He sent his “shortest poem”:

It was signed, “par Angel.” Les Jesperson, the only prizewinning poet of Keith's acquaintance, read the poem and observed that it needed work.

 

By the turn of the millennium, Keith's serial killer network was taking up most of his time, but he doggedly answered every letter. “These were my people. When they first got arrested, they were naive, stupid, didn't know how to handle the legal system. I would tell them guilt or innocence makes no difference—it's what the cops can prove that counts. I'd teach them how to get second-degree murder instead of first. I'd teach them about alcohol, drugs, prison medications. The smart ones realized it was a good idea to keep in touch, even some of the old cons.

“Charles Manson was always after new followers. If you wrote and said you'd like to join his family, you'd get a letter that looked like it went through a blender. Most of the time, other prisoners would answer his mail for him, and they used a signature stamp. Another easy one was the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez. Promise to worship him and his demons and Satan and you were in like Flynt. Henry Lee Lucas used to write to anyone who sent him ten dollars. And John Wayne Gacy loved young men. All you had to do was pretend to be gay or bisexual and he would start reeling off his sexual exploits. He even sent money to his young lovers so they'd visit him in the prison. Nobody went into mourning when he was executed.”