Dead Men Talking (19 page)

With Julie trying to use Jesperson to help her out, and with Keith getting all the free sex he could want, both parties were onto a winner – that was until Julie hit the bottle in a local bar and ordered scores of drinks, which she demanded Keith should pay for.

If anything, Keith Jesperson is certainly nobody’s fool and he was furious, but he soon calmed down. He agreed to drive Julie over to see her mother in the morning, and to visit her lawyer in Camas; all the while, in the back of his mind was the thought that he would be railroaded into paying for her lawyer’s bill and her fines.

Over the next few days, and, as Julie’s court hearing loomed, Jesperson says she became even more of a drunken liability. She was conned out of her car by a woman she hardly knew, and Keith found himself being conned into signing and witnessing the bill of sale for the car. The sex between them didn’t stop as she tried to make him feel good and sympathetic towards her. In fact, it got to the point where Keith says, ‘I was sexually exhausted and couldn’t get it up any longer.’

Crunch time came during the evening of 8th March, when Julie and Keith were naked in his cab. She said to him, ‘Tomorrow I go to court. I need you to tell the judge you will be there for me. Tell him you will make sure the fines get paid. Promise me you will do this for me, Keith?’

He replied, ‘Julie, I can’t be there for you to pay your fines. I just don’t have the money. I’ll show up as moral support only.’

Apparently, Julie responded with, ‘Damn you, Keith. I need you to tell the judge so I won’t have to go to jail. I can’t go to jail. I don’t like jail.’

Jesperson was now laughing, and his laughter increased, ‘Julie, you are going to jail,’ he chuckled. ‘Get used to it. You did it to yourself.’

‘Keith, I can’t go to jail. I’ll die if they put me in jail. Promise me I won’t go to jail!’

Jesperson’s reaction was terrifying:

Jesperson then returned to his rig. A police car passed by, and he realised that he couldn’t finish the woman off there, so he drove back towards Camas and parked up, a few hundred yards east of the Clark County line, the county that would have had jurisdiction over the murder. This was a subtle ploy, as Jesperson explained. ‘Like in the Bennett case, where the murder happened is where there is the crime. Should I really want to mess with the courts now – I could re-file to move the case to the proper county and make them do it all over again.’

Now parked up, with his engine ticking over, Jesperson lay next to Julie and explained that she was going to die. He told her that he had killed seven times before, and that she would die the next time his hands went to her throat.

Jesperson’s thoughts at that time were that she was too close to the road and would be found quickly. Deep down, he says he wanted her found soon:

The concern of leaving Julie’s body where he had dumped it ate at Jesperson for many days afterwards. He contemplated returning and moving it to a more remote location, instead, he says, ‘I should have put her deeper into the woods, but I didn’t. Nope! I simply drove east.’

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Clark County Washington Sheriff’s Dept Detective Rick Buckner was the lead investigator in the Julie Ann Winningham case. His initial enquiries informed him that Julie had been living in Utah for a while after breaking up with her truck driver husband. She had returned to Camas in February 1995, hitching a ride with Keith Jesperson, who she referred to as her fiancé.

Buckner learned from the Cheney Trucking Company that Jesperson was en-route to Pennsylvania; his route would take him towards the West Coast, through Texas, New Mexico and eventually to Arizona.

By Wednesday, 22 March, Buckner had located Jesperson in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city in the southern part of the state near the Mexican border. With the help of local law enforcement, Jesperson was detained and questioned for six hours about the murder of Julie Winningham. He wouldn’t talk, and since the law didn’t have any concrete evidence to arrest him, Buckner had no other option but to release him. With his work completed down south, Jesperson headed for Arizona, while Buckner returned to Washington. Shortly afterwards, Jesperson was arrested and charged with murder.

*    *    *

In October 1995, just before his trial was due to start, Keith pleaded guilty to the murder of Julie Winningham before Clark County Washington Superior Court Judge Robert L Harris, the same judge who had presided over the notorious Westley Allan Dodd case. Dodd was a serial murderer from Washington state, executed by hanging in 1993. This was the first legal hanging (at Dodd’s own request) in the United States since 1965. Because Jesperson had pleaded guilty, he avoided the death sentence, and, in December 1995, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Risking his life, Jesperson waived extradition from Clark County and was transferred to Oregon, which also has the death sentence. On Thursday, 2 November 1995, he entered a ‘No Contest Plea’ before Multnomah County Presiding Judge Donald H Londer, for the murder of Taunja Bennett. He was immediately sentenced to life in prison, setting a minimum 30-year tariff before becoming eligible for parole.

This deal was a nifty piece of footwork by Keith, and it gave him exactly what he wanted. He had spent much of his time in jail studying law books and was able to run rings around most prosecutors when it came down to working a deal. With prison time in Oregon, proceedings elsewhere would require further extradition, meaning considerable expense and a lot of red tape. ‘I had them by the nuts,’ says Keith in a letter. And the Oregon sentence made potential death penalties in other States less likely, and he knew that too. Here was a man who had given first-rate advice to several other killers, and for which he received letters of thanks from their attorneys for spotting loopholes the ‘legal eagles’ never knew existed.

However, there was another Oregon case involving Jesperson that had to be dealt with in the meantime. This was the killing of 23-year-old Laurie Ann Pentland, through which he was linked by DNA. In a letter, he wrote, ‘I felt so much power. I then told her she was going to die and I slowly strangled her.’

For this murder, Keith was sentenced to another life term in Oregon, with minimum 30 years to serve. If he is still alive after all of this, he’ll be sent back to Washington to complete his life sentence there.

Two years later, and despite considerable legal wrangling, the state of Wyoming finally extradited Jesperson for the murder of Angela Subrize. And, if any state had the determined will to execute Jesperson, it was Wyoming. For the next few months, as prosecutors prepared for trial, he taunted the authorities and threatened to force a costly trial by changing his story regarding the jurisdiction in which he had killed Subrize. At one point he said that he had killed her in Wyoming, and at another point he said that he had killed her in Nebraska. After going back and forth for some time, and by surrounding his deliberately misleading statements in his attempts to confuse the authorities on who had jurisdiction to prosecute him, our Keith worked yet another deal – he would admit to the Subrize killing, in Wyoming, if the now ‘mentally fragged’ Laramie County prosecutors would agree not to seek the death penalty against him.

As the result of this ‘deal’, on Wednesday, 3 June 1998, district judge Nicholas Kalokathis sentenced Jesperson to life in prison, and ordered that the sentence run consecutive to the two life sentences in Oregon and the natural life sentence in Washington, leaving us all with little doubt that Keith will die in prison. It remains to be seen whether any other jurisdictions, such as the states of Florida or California, will prosecute Jesperson for the murders that he has confessed to in those states.

*    *    *

Keith Hunter Jesperson has admitted committing eight murders, but the author believes that this is only the tip of a homicidal iceberg. Keith has claimed responsibility for some 160 kills, and he was perfectly equipped to do so. But, as the reader will now appreciate, Keith is a ‘games player’. He recanted his claims of 160 murders, which suited his purpose at the time. Nevertheless, he was an interstate trucker with a grudge, and his correspondence suggests that this man could well have been the most prolific serial killer in US history, making the number of crimes committed by Ted Bundy pale by comparison. In terms of a body count, he could wipe Henry Lee Lucas, and Harvey Carignan, off the map.

Unlike the sociopathic morons such as Bundy, Shawcross and Bianchi, Keith Jesperson stands out as being one of the most heinous, yet lucid serial killers of all time. Yet, he is also a very quiet man. A guy who thinks deep. And, if you think that the Green River killer (Gary Leon Ridgway) or the BTK killer (Dennis Rader) are bad news, you may have seen nothing yet.

At this point I had intended to close Keith’s chapter – frankly, if you haven’t had enough of Keith Hunter Jesperson by now, I have – but something had always bugged me about this guy. It was this: throughout all of his correspondence with me, Keith insisted that he had never raped anyone; he had never stalked a woman in his life; he had never gone out looking for a woman to kill. Guess what? I actually started to believe him. I truly, truly started to believe that maybe Jack Olsen had read Keith Hunter Jesperson all wrong. As the months passed by, I grew to accept his criticisms of me, my silly grammatical errors, the occasional misspelling of a place name, a route number. In a nutshell, and this may seem sad, I actually started to like this big guy, and his sharing with me of his life and crimes – he had almost convinced me that he had killed women just because they had pissed him off.

But it bothered me somehow, because that would mean he was the only serial killer in history who trawled for woman and killed them without any sexual motive… that just didn’t sit right with me.

I pressed Keith on this issue, and then he made a fatal error. Perhaps it was a throwaway statement, or maybe he simply could not resist getting it off his chest, but in a letter, he explained that after several of his victims were dead, he completely undressed them and looked at their bodies. This statement of Jesperson’s sent up a red flag, because, as we now know, he had said the same thing when he recounted the horrific murder of Taunja Bennett, which was a complete lie. Here is what he wrote, here is that red flag:

Of course, Keith was ignorant of the fact that I had read Jack Olsen’s book and that I had read all of the statements he had given to the police. He was ignorant that I already knew about the terrible pain and suffering, the torture that he had inflicted on his living victims. How he had played his sickening ‘murder game’, like the cat playing with a mouse, the shark circling a raft, and how he had lied and lied to me, and just about everyone who has crossed his path. In effect, Keith Jesperson, who has also admitted to being a serial arsonist, is a necrophile who enjoys sexual relations with the dead, and he even masturbated over their corpses; if the truth were known, he probably had sex with them in his cab, after they were dead.