I (4 page)

I left Rogue River on I-5 and stopped at the Pear Tree Truck Stop in Phoenix, Oregon, to see if any female hitchhikers were around. For a change there wasn't a lot lizard in sight.

I drove to a shopping area in Shasta, California, and bought myself some celery and peanut butter for dinner. It was all I could afford, and I was watching my weight again. I certainly didn't need to get any bigger. I always thought of myself as a nice-looking extra-extra-large-sized guy with glasses. I had the same blue eyes and brown hair as James Dean, and I combed it straight back like Elvis. I walked with my chest out and my back straight. I wore cowboy boots to add an extra two inches. I never had a problem attracting female attention, but if I put on too much weight they might shy away.

 

At the Shasta Shopping Center I tried to decide if I wanted to sleep in my car or take a cheap motel room. I had the retarded girl on my mind and needed some privacy. While I was thinking, a nice-looking woman strolled up. A baby sucked her breast while she sucked a pint of Jack Daniels. She says, “What're
you
lookin' at? It's only natural.”

She took a few steps closer to give me a better look at her tits and sat on a railroad tie. I could see she was half-drunk. She told me her name was Jean (a pseudonym) and her kid was six months old. I told her I was Keith Hunter Jesperson and I was on my way to a temporary job at Copenhagen Utilities in Sacramento. She said she'd just had a big fight with her husband. After we talked a little more, she took the last sip from her pint and asked me to walk her to the Jiffy Mart to buy some beer.

I carried the twelve-pack back to my car and we sat in the front seat and griped about our troubles. Then she had me drive her out in the country to a lookout place where the locals went. She handed me her baby, dropped her jeans, and peed right next to the open door. I couldn't believe a woman would do that. So when she got back, I handed her the baby and did the same thing. She was giving me ideas.

The conversation naturally turned to sex. She claimed to be the best blow job in Shasta County. She was sexy, all right, maybe five-eight, 140 to 150 pounds, comfortable figure. While she was talking, I unzipped my pants and pulled him out. I played with him in the dark in hopes that she'd go down on me.

She laid the baby on the backseat and leaned over my lap. I grabbed her by her hair and shoved her face down—that made me even hotter.

I was about to orgasm when a whimper came from the backseat and she pulled off. She said, “I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm married and I don't need this. Drive me home!” Just like that!

I shoved her back on my cock as hard as I could. A stiff prick has no conscience. When her lips touched him, he shot all over her face.

She started screaming at me, so I put her in a headlock and yanked hard. I was trying to break her neck, but I just couldn't get the leverage. It takes a lot of pressure to break a human neck.

I tried three times before the baby cried in the backseat and she yelled, “Don't hurt my baby!”

I realized that if I killed Jean, I'd have to kill the baby too. I could never kill a kid, and I came back to my senses. I stepped out of the car, took some deep breaths and counted to twenty. All thoughts of killing went away.

Now Jean grabs her baby and heads for town. After she walked a hundred yards or so, I drove up and said, “Get back in! I'll drive you wherever you want to go. It's too cold to walk. It's not good for the baby.” After she got in, I said, “I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me.”

I dropped her off at the same place I met her. That was my big mistake. I should have killed her.

 

Continuing south, I pulled into a rest stop to think about what I'd just done. I'd released a victim that could put me in prison for a long time. And she had my name. But if she went to the cops, it would be her word against mine. I figured I had nothing to worry about. If I'd abandoned her in the cold, it would've been different. But by bringing her and the baby back safely, my story would stand up. If I'd intended to kill her, why the hell would I drive her back to town?

I threw out the last of the beer and drove to a truck stop in Corning. As I pulled in, I noticed a cop staring at my car. He had hands and arms like a gunfighter's.

I parked and asked one of the desk girls for a shower-room key. I was just walking back to my car when I was surrounded by cops pointing their guns and telling me to lay facedown.

“What's this all about?” I asked.

They handcuffed me and read me my rights. They said I was wanted back in Shasta for assault.

They let me up and asked what happened. I told them about the Jack Daniel's and how Jean asked me to buy beer and peed in front of me and bragged about her blow jobs. I said, “I don't know what's the problem. I had my arm around her neck, but I didn't try to hurt her. The car was cramped. There just wasn't enough room to do it right.”

I put all the blame on her. I told them that it pissed her off when I shot my load in her mouth. I told them that she yanked on my arm to pull away, and that made her twist her neck and pissed her off worse. I told them about the baby crying and how she told me she needed to get home. I told them how I drove her back to town and how I didn't do anything wrong except get involved with a half-drunk married woman.

A cop asked, “Why would she claim you attacked her?”

I said, “Maybe she needed to explain why she was out so late with the baby. Maybe she thought her husband would feel sorry for her. Don't ask me to explain women.”

Our two versions were close and only took off in opposite directions at the crucial spot where I tried to break her neck. But my story made more sense than hers. I said, “If I was going to assault this woman, why would I tell her my name and who I worked for and where I was headed? All I wanted to do was grab some sleep and keep on driving. She was the one that wanted to make out. How would I find that lover's lane by myself?”

They took off the handcuffs, and I began to get the feeling they were leaning my way. “Hey,” I said, “if you had an easy chance to get lucky, wouldn't you?”

One of the cops said, “Well, we kinda believe you, but Shasta wants you to talk to a detective.” They photographed and fingerprinted me and told me to check in with the Shasta police. Then they drove me back to my car and took off.

 

I took the interstate to Shasta and went straight to the sheriff's department and identified myself. They threw me against a wall like a side of beef and handcuffed and patted me down. I went through my story again and offered to prove it with evidence.

We got in a cruiser and they took me to the shopping area where I met Jean. I showed them my tire tracks in the gravel, showed them the empty whisky bottle near the railroad tie where she sat. I still had the receipt for the beer, and a clerk confirmed that I'd bought it. I told the deputies I was on my way to a construction job in Sacramento. I wasn't a bum and I wasn't a sex maniac.

 

Back at the sheriff's office they took off the cuffs and told me to keep in touch till the matter was taken care of. A deputy warned, “From now on, be careful who you party with.”

As I drove away, I began a big argument with my other self. I've always had two sides to my personality—Mr. Nice Guy and the demon. The demon comes out when I drink. He scares the crap out of me. He breaks the law just for the hell of it. It was him that tried to kill Jean.

I also realized that I should have let the demon kill her to keep her quiet. But NO! When Mr. Nice Guy saw her walking down the road with her baby, he had to soften up and give her a ride to town.
Stupid!
At that point it was a simple assault at worst, not even a sexual assault like she'd told the cops. That should have been the end of it. I didn't know enough about the treachery of women.

I worked the Sacramento construction job for a couple of months and never got over feeling paranoid. Every day I expected to be arrested for assault. I kept hoping that Shasta would drop the charges. Maybe they had a file on Jean the slut. Maybe the bitch pulled the same stunt on some other poor guy.

To save money I slept in my car and showered on the job. I brooded a lot. I couldn't help but resent my losses—my wife Rose, my kids, Peggy, the jobs I lost, the trucks I wrecked, the whole sad story. I was becoming withdrawn and depressed.

I began to hang out at the Cinch Tavern in Sacramento. Sometimes I'd play pool with the locals, and I joined the horseshoe team, but my heart wasn't in it. I met a girl in a laundromat and dated her a few times till I found out she just wanted to use my car. I attracted these parasites like flies.

It got hard to conceal my feelings. I'd sit at the bar and stare into the water pitcher. A nice old couple watched me for weeks and the woman finally said, “Someone really must of hurt you in your past.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“It's written all over your face.”

After a few months I headed north to a new job. On the way I checked out a truck stop that we called Panty Hose Junction, but there was no action. I drove on through to Washougal, Washington, to visit my old friend Billy Smith (pseudonym) and return the car he'd loaned me. I bought a 1969 Chevrolet three-quarter-ton pickup and drove to my next temporary job in Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. The work ran out after two weeks and I headed back to Portland. I wondered,
Does Peggy have another boyfriend? Will she want to get back together?

I drove past her little brown house. She was on the lawn with her two kids—no signs of a new man. She looked good, and I did miss her, not just her body. I was getting bored with lot lizards and heads. The good side of me wanted to settle down and live a normal married life. But the bad side just wanted sex. My penis decided the vote.

I parked a little ways down the street. Peggy took one look at me and started to shake. She said, “Come on in, Keith! We need to talk.” She looked ready to cry.

 

In the room where I beat Taunja Bennett to death, Peggy and her kids sat across from me. She was shaking. “Why the hell did you leave?” she said.

We talked about our misunderstandings and our lives, and we got as close as ever. I asked if she wanted to try again and she said yes.

After the kids went to bed, we found out that our bodies missed each other. The next morning it was like I never left.

 

In October 1990, nine months after Taunja, I got bad news about my ten-year-old son Jason. He was living four hundred miles away with my ex-wife and our two daughters. Jason had run into a tree and suffered a bad concussion.

I drove nonstop to Spokane. While I was doctoring my son I realized that whatever else I did in life, I had to be near my kids. They were the world to me, my only real world. They loved me totally, the way I loved them.

 

So while I was in Spokane I called a local trucking company and made out an application. They gave me a driving test and found I handled eighteen-wheelers like I was born in one.

Peggy and her kids came from Portland to join me. She hired a nanny so she could go trucking with me again. Back when we were codriving, we'd have sex two or three times a day. I remembered the fun and games, but I'd forgotten about her lousy driving habits.

The first few months, our trucking deal went okay, even though I had to do 90 percent of the driving. My demon quieted a little. I still thought about taking women by force, but not as much as before. Living in Spokane, I saw a lot of my kids.

But in my life things never stayed good for long. Peggy began to piss me off, and I went back to heavy fantasizing. She was as good as ever in the sleeper, but she'd always been better at fucking than trucking. She used every excuse in the world to get out of driving. She'd say, “Oh my God, Keith! Look at those snowflakes! You can't expect me to drive in this.”

She confined her driving to straight highways or gently rolling hills. We were supposed to be a team, but this was flatbedding and she couldn't even lift the tarps. I did 100 percent of the loading and unloading. The company didn't mind—we were logging sixty-five-hundred miles a week—but I was exhausted. It pissed me off that Peggy got credit for so many of my driving hours. Too many other people got credit for my work when I was a kid, and I'd had it up to here.

In January 1991 we were in Portland between hauls when I heard something crazy on TV. The couple that was arrested for my murder had been convicted! They showed a video of the woman leading the cops to the place where I dumped the body. I thought about the ghosts. Could they be behind this? It was
The Twilight Zone
for sure.

I was still relieved that somebody else was taking my heat, but it was annoying, too—the heaviest thing I'd ever done in my life, and others were getting the attention. I was still the Invisible Man.

Just before trial the woman changed her story and claimed she was innocent, but the jury found her guilty anyway. The guy didn't want to risk a death sentence, so he copped a plea. They both got fifteen years to life—for
my
murder.

I tried to figure it out. Either they were crazy or I was crazy. Or the justice system was crazy. All three of us didn't kill this girl. Were there two Taunja Bennetts? I wondered if those two losers had killed another girl and dumped her at the same spot. Or were they railroaded by the cops?

I had to stop thinking about it or flip out. I was already crazy enough.