Dead Men Talking (27 page)
Authors: Christopher Berry-Dee
Sedrick Cobb was sentenced to death in 1991. The former deliveryman from Naugatuck was convicted of the rape and murder of 23-year-old Julia Ashe of Watertown, whom he kidnapped from a Waterbury department store parking lot on 16 December, 1989. Cobb flattened one tyre of Ashe’s car using a valve stem remover and, when she returned, offered to help her change the tyre. When he asked her for a ride to his car, she obliged. He then forced her at knifepoint to drive to a secluded road and raped her. Cobb then bound and gagged Ashe with fibreglass tape and carried her to a concrete dam. He pushed her, and she fell 23 feet into the shallow, icy water below. She managed to free her hands by rubbing the tape across wire mesh protruding from the concrete and gouged her face trying in vain to remove the tape across her mouth. When she tried to crawl up the bank to freedom, Cobb forced her, face down, back into the water. Her ice-encrusted body was found on Christmas Day, 1989.
Ivo Colon beat two-year-old Keriana Tellado to death. He was the mother’s live-in boyfriend. He was also beating another child called Crystal, as well. He would hit the girls with his hands and a belt because they were slow in potty training. Two days before she died, he picked up Keriana by the arm after she wet herself and, ‘heard something go pop’. He refused to let the mother take the girl to the hospital to treat the broken arm, because he feared the doctors would see the cuts, bruises and burn marks that covered her little body. He began beating Keriana again, kicking this poor baby and cutting her with his rings. When she threw up after dinner, he took her to the bathroom and began banging her head against the shower wall. Little Keriana could not stand up, so he kept on picking her up by the hair, He picked her up a couple of times and her hair was coming out in his hands. The medical examiner ruled that little Keriana died of blunt force trauma to the head. As of December 17, 2004, the death sentence of Ivo Colon was overturned by the State Supreme Court. The prosecuting attorney has indicated that he will move towards a second death sentence.
Richard Reynolds, a Brooklyn, New York, crack dealer, was convicted for the murder of 34-year-old Waterbury Police Officer Walter T. Williams, on 18 December, 1992. While being searched by Williams, Reynolds bumped against him to determine if the officer was wearing a bullet-proof vest. Reynolds then shot Williams point-blank in the head with a handgun.
Todd Rizzo confessed to, and was convicted of the 1997 murder of thirteen-year-old Stanley Edwards of Waterbury. He lured Edwards into his backyard under the guise of hunting snakes and then hit him thirteen times with a three-pound sledgehammer. As of October 6. 2003, the death sentence of Todd Rizzo was overturned by the State Supreme Court. The prosecuting attorney has indicated that he will move towards a second death sentence.
Daniel Webb was convicted of kidnapping and murder for the 1989 slaying in Hartford of Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old Connecticut National Bank vice-president. Prior to this, Webb already had an extensive criminal record including a 1983 robbery conviction, 1984 rape and kidnapping conviction and an arrest in 1987 for rape. While out on bail after the 1987 arrest he raped one woman, robbed and assaulted another and murdered Gellenbeck.
* * *
When I visited Ross, it was obvious that he was proud of his cell. It was piled high with books and writing materials; indeed he boasted about the fact that he was allocated a second cell next to his own where even more of his books were stored. He also bragged about the dozens of pretty young women who courted his attentions, one of whom was as pretty as a starlet and had even signed her photograph, ‘With Love’. Her letters contained promises that she would marry him in a heartbeat. It would have probably been the last heartbeat she would have ever had, for he would have killed her in an instant.
And, while he was not busy writing letters, or studying the law, he was learning how to transcribe Braille. The pompous and self-opinionated Michael Ross was a very busy Death Row inmate indeed.
Michael Ross is not unique among the serial killer breed but, to his credit, he did try to understand why he had been driven to commit such terrible crimes on young women. In fact, he was striving to understand the forces that propelled him into such severe anti-social behaviour in the first place. To this end, he had volunteered for a series of treatments, which included chemical and surgical castration, the latter being refused by the state.
Many acknowledged experts seemed to believe that this treatment could separate the beast from the decent Michael Ross and, for an extended period, he was treated as a human guinea pig, and prescribed the female contraceptive Depo-Provera to reduce his enormous sex drive. At the same time as he was taking this drug, he was being prescribed Prozac – a powerful anti-depressant – and this cocktail certainly reduced his abnormal sexual cravings. Unfortunately, the excessive use of Depo-Provera ballooned his weight by several stone and, as a result, he suffered pathological changes in liver function and hormone levels. He was troubled by abdominal pains, headaches, asthenia (weakness or fatigue), and nervousness, and his depression reappeared, as one might well expect.
Before these drugs were prescribed, Ross claimed he masturbated constantly. Occasionally, when in the company of a female correctional officer, he experienced an overwhelming desire to kill her. The Depo-Provera reduced his sex drive, and Michael said:
You know that everybody has had a tune playing over and over again inside their heads. And if you have this tune that plays all day, over and over, it can drive you nuts. An’ just imagine having thoughts of rape an’ murder, an’ you can’t get rid of it. Well, just like the tune, it’ll be driving you nuts. No matter what you do to get rid of that tune, it’s going to stay in your head. And that’s how I am. I don’t want these thoughts.
Asked if he thought this tune was, in reality, the monster, he replied with one of the most chilling statements I have ever heard from any serial murderer:
No, I think he’s separate. He goes to sleep for a while and, uh, you never know where he’s gone, and that’s very true. I mean, sometimes he’s there, and especially with the Depo-Provera, I can feel him back here
[Ross touched the back of his head]
. I don’t know how anybody is going to understand this, but he used to be always in front of my mind, and was always intruding, like an obnoxious roommate, always butting into your business and you can’t get rid of him.
In a letter to the author, Ross described what happened to him when he became used to the drugs:
I would do anything to clear my mind. The medication gave me some relief but my body has adjusted to it now, and the thoughts and urges have returned. Now, my obnoxious roommate has moved back in and things seem worse because now I saw what it was like without him. Today, I feel like a blind man from birth who was given eyesight as a gift, but was taken away a month later. It’s really hard to understand what is normal for everybody else if you’ve never had it yourself.
Excluding the two years he spent in prison before his first trial, for the better part of fourteen years, Michael Ross lived in a state of limbo, volunteering for execution, while at once thinking that the State would never execute a man who was ‘mad enough’ to want to die using a method known as ‘State-sponsored suicide’. When I interviewed Mike, in 1984, he was the very picture of health, but after he was transferred to the newly opened Northern Correctional Institution, in 1995, his physical and mental well-being deteriorated to the point that I would have hardly recognised him. To those who came into contact with him he came across as a man literally begging to die.
Following years of legal wrangling, and after nine days of deliberation, the Superior Court jury finally reached a verdict. On Thursday, 6 April 2000, he once again received the death penalty for the murders of April Brunais, Wendy Baribeault and Leslie Shelley. He stood impassively as the verdicts were read, whereas the families of the victims wept or sat with bowed heads. It had taken the state a total of sixteen years to secure a death sentence against him and they were determined to make it stick this time around, despite the fact that he had an automatic right to appeal.
‘It’s over until the first appeal,’ Edwin Shelley said. ‘But I don’t think any appeal will hold up now.’ Sixteen years of court proceedings, the Shelleys said, have taken their toll emotionally. ‘We did all of the 1987 trial. We did all of this trial,’ Lera Shelley added. ‘If we have to go through it again we will, for our daughter.’
In August 2001, while his death penalty appeal was pending, Ross was extradited to the Sullivan Correction Facility, Fallsburg, New York – the same prison that holds Arthur Shawcross. From there he was transferred to Orange County to face arraignment in the rape and murder of Paula Perrera. The filmed admission he had given to the author during the making of the TV documentary series,
The Serial Killers
, was incontestable. On Monday, 24 September 2001, this killer stood before Judge Nicholas DeRosa and pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder charge, and the following month he was sentenced to eight to 25 years in prison for killing Paula. Michael expressed relief when the sentence was handed down, and was quoted as saying: ‘I regret that this has taken so long to be taken care of,’ reported Timothy O’Connor for
The Times Herald-Record
.
Despite his filmed admission to the rape and murder of Dzung Ngoc Tu in 1981, Tompkins County District Attorney said that it was pointless to seek a conviction against Ross because he had already been sentenced to death in Connecticut. Besides, Dzung’s family in Vietnam had no interest in pursuing the case and had no wish to relive the pain.
Ross’s last few days were spent back in his old cell at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers. Two last-minute appeals from his father and his aunt, Ann L Rich, were rejected by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Then the US Supreme Court rejected a final 11.00pm appeal on Thursday, 12 May 2005. The ruling was that Ross was mentally competent to choose death. He opted not to have a special last meal, choosing from the standard menu Ross lunched on a cheeseburger and hash browns, at 3.00 pm. Then he spent much of that Thursday afternoon talking with visitors. For his last meal, he ate the regular prison meal of the day, which was turkey a la king with rice, mixed vegetables, white bread, fruit and a beverage.
Michael was escorted to the death chamber around 2.00 am, Friday, 13 May. He could have stopped his execution right up until the moment the lethal drugs started to flow. Now, strapped down onto the gurney, he offered no final words, and was given a lethal injection. Nine members of his victims’ families witnessed his final moments, and he coughed once and fell silent, being pronounced dead at 2.25am.
I am against the death penalty. I would have rather seen Ross sit in jail. That was more mental torture for him. I believe Connecticut assisted him with his plan of suicide. It’s a shame! I truly pray that he really did become a Christian. I wrote a letter to him but I don’t know if he got it. Well, God is his final judge. I have no feelings of ‘justice has been served’, or ‘he got what he deserved’. State-assisted suicide is just wrong!
Barbara Emery-Willard, Paula Perrera’s best friend.
* * *
Michael Ross was the boy-next-door who turned into a monster, and his own words to the author leave an indelible mark:
You know, they
[the medical examiners]
found strangulation marks around the neck of Wendy Baribeault. They called them ‘multiple strangulation marks’, ’cos they were kinda all around her throat. An’ they got confused. I knew that she was struggling and my hands kept cramping up. I kinda laughed at them for that. I thought that was funny.
Yet Michael’s chilling sense of priorities was masked by the impression he gave to outsiders. Karen B. Clark, an experienced New York journalist, who visited him in Somers, said, ‘Michael Ross looks so normal he could be the guy next door. If I was walking down a dark alley at night, heard footsteps behind me, and turned around, well, I would have been relieved to see Michael Ross. That’s how normal the guy looks.’
Michael Ross is buried at the Benedictine Grange Cemetery, Redding, Fairfield County, Connecticut.
* * *
This chapter is based on video and audiotape Death Row interviews between the author and Michael Bruce Ross on 26 September, 1994, within the Osborn Correctional Institute, Connecticut, and several years’ correspondence.
E
ach and every one of the killers featured throughout this book has been, or still is, bombarded with letters and photographs (often sexual in nature) from men and women wishing to strike up relationships, and even marry them and have their children. For the most part, serial killers – or any type of incarcerated killer – are only after funding. One only has to browse the internet pen-pal sites to confirm that these monsters are only after one thing: your money.
This book highlights just two examples: Mr Robinson and Mr Jablonski, while LeRoy Nash, Melanie McGuire, and Keith Hunter Jesperson don’t ask for a penny. For that matter, neither did Michael Ross, when he was alive.
I recall Kenneth Bianchi, with whom I corresponded with for many years, culminating in me interviewing him for a TV documentary years back. He married several times in prison, and he had the gall to send me his wedding photos, after he had fleeced these women hook, line and sinker. This animal became an ‘ordained priest’, for a short while, and also a member of the American Bar Association.
I recall another moron, called Ronald DeFeo Jr (‘the Amityville Horror’). This old punk ended up marrying a woman who runs a web site for him, while he continues to milk her for money for small prison luxuries. As God is my witness, how can any woman fall in love and marry a man who has blasted to death his family of six, including four of his younger, terrified siblings, in their beds? It defies belief.
It goes on and on, specifically from somewhat deranged women who write to Keith Jesperson. Flashing their photogenic attributes, they pledge their love to a serial killer, who, if they, themselves, had ‘pissed him off’, would have beat them to death in a second.
My book
Murder.com
, also published by John Blake Publishing, highlights the very real dangers of trawling for love and sex over the internet, specifically the final chapter, ‘Men and Women Behind Bars: Internet Lovebirds’.
* * *
For every convicted control freak of a serial killer, man or woman, there must be at least fifty misguided souls who want a serious relationship with them. In some cases this twisted form of morality runs so deep that a woman will kill another person, by proxy, to please her loved one.
This was the case with Veronica ‘Verlyn’ Wallace Compton; an incredibly beautiful creature with looks and a body most men and women would die for, and she almost did die, thanks to sexual-sado serial killer, Kenneth Alessio Bianchi. In attempt to prove that he was not one of the notorious ‘Hillside Strangers’, Ken smuggled his semen out of prison secreted into the finger of a rubber kitchen glove which he hid in the spine of a book, which his dominatrix pen friend, and lover, took out of jail after a visit.
The plan was that she would travel to Bellingham, Washington State (where Bianchi had murdered two co-eds – Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder – and lure a woman called Kim Breed to a motel room. Here, Verlyn would kill Kim, and drip Ken’s semen into the dead woman’s vagina, to make it appear that the true killer was still at large, thus it could not have been Mr Bianchi.
Kim Breed, however, was a martial arts expert, and the result being that Verlyn was soon arrested to spend 15 years in prison. I actually met and interviewed Verlyn at the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW). By this time, she had been writing to one of the subjects in this book. She and Douglas Clark talked about love, and opening up a mortuary and having sex with the dead, if he were to be released.
Ronald DeFeo, of Amityville infamy, Richard Ramirez, ‘The Night Stalker’, Kenneth Bianchi, and Arthur Shawcross, are among hundreds of serial killers who have married while in prison. Thousands more killers, including Michael Ross, Aileen Wuornos, in fact every serial killer alive or dead, is, or has been inundated by people seeking love with a monster. Thousands more write as pen friends to the ‘Legion of the Damned’, and among them are the apple-pie-making, sweater-knitters and Bible-readers who believe that God has ordered them to save these killers’ souls.
It makes one want to weep!
And, I can tell you that Keith Hunter Jesperson has more than his fair share of blue-chip fruit cakes writing and pledging their love to him, too. Around 80 plus. Take it from me, 50 per cent of these women are drop-dead gorgeous. A small percentage are gay, while the remainder, as far as I can determine, are of undeterminable gender. Some of these social strays can read and write; some struggle with simple words like, ‘common sense’. Some have a brain, others half a brain; while others obviously have a ‘To Let’ sign inside their skulls. A minority can actually think, and one of them is ‘Laci’ (name changed to protect her identity).
Astute, street-wise, drop-dead gorgeous, with a figure to die for, erotic and into ‘stuff’ that will make the older reader’s hair fall out, part-time entertainer of gentlemen with the discreet use of a pole, Laci has also been writing to serial killers since she was 18. At the time of writing she is 29. Indeed, she has some 84 of the most heinous killers in her little ‘black book’, and the correspondence from them amounts to over a thousand pages.
Laci fell in love with Keith Hunter Jesperson, then, somewhat predictably, six years later, she fell out of love. Below is her completely unedited story, and if Keith had been executed he would turn in his grave. Her story is disturbing yet insightful, all providing food-for-thought for anyone seeking love with a monster behind bars:
It was 1995. I was 18, and in high school, when I first heard of Keith Hunter Jesperson, and that he’d been arrested for multiple murders. Initially I was attracted to the fact that he had killed so many people for no good reason. I also thought he was good looking and that was a huge plus for me. I remember watching him on TV and reading about him in my many true crime books and thinking, ‘I would love to know him’. At the time, I had no way of knowing that in a few years I would know him as a person and not just a vicious killer. I would be his friend and eventually be his lover.
My attraction to killers and extreme violence goes as far back as I can remember. When I was a little girl, I loved seeing killers on TV, watching horror movies and even got enjoyment from looking at car wrecks. I have been this way for so long that it is a natural, normal thing to me. I always knew that I had a love for deviant things, but it did not come full circle until I reached high school. When I was 14 years old, I bought my first crime book. In high school I was known as ‘the girl that knows everything about serial killers’. It was a title that I did not mind having. Most people thought it was just a phase, but I knew it was no phase. It is part of who I am. It started with my crime books, and then I started to watch ‘shockumentaries’ - actual death caught on tape. Films like
Faces of Death, Traces of Death
,
World of Death
, became my favorite type of films.
Fantasizing about serial killers and mass murderers became part of my daily life. I wrote about them in my diary. I was obsessed with them to say the least. These feelings would not come and go, they were constant. I feel that I have a lot in common with them. I can understand why they kill people. I am a lot like them in some ways. I consider myself to be a mean, cold-hearted bitch. I have no feelings or sympathy for other people. I have more consideration for a dead animal on the side of the road than I do to suffering people. I do have a lot of friends but the majority of them mean nothing to me. I have a few that I do love and care about. These people are my lifelong friends. I don’t allow myself to get close to people. In the end, everyone will screw you over. I have been married twice and I walked away from both of them without a second thought. The marriages were meaningless to me. They were something to do at the time. I have no compassion for people at all. So, in this way, I have a lot in common with the serial killer. The only difference between them and me is that I have not killed anyone – yet!
I put myself into dangerous situations hoping to meet a serial killer. When I was a
teenager, I would hang out with a bad crowd. I ran away from home often. I would hitchhike a lot hoping to run into one. I wanted to die and I thought the best way to do that is to find me a serial killer. I tried. In the beginning, my dream was to meet a serial killer that would kill me. A serial killer is a professional at killing and he would get the job done. When this did not happen as I hoped it would, I began to have a longing for wanting to know them as human beings. I knew there was another side to them than being a monster. I knew this is who I was and there was no way to ever escape from it. I do have two distinct aspects of my personality. One side of me is a country girl that loves animals and cartoons. The other side of me loves everything that is dark and sadistic. This is where I feel at home.
When I was 18 years old, I wrote to my first serial killer. He wrote me back. And that is how it all got started. Soon, I was corresponding with all the people that I had read and studied about for so long. I was writing to killers all over the USA and in other countries. I was stunned at the number of them that did write back to me. I was only 18 years old and they still wrote to me, and I was just a lonely kid. Sure, I had a job, a boyfriend and friends but I preferred to be locked in my room writing to my killers. It became a natural part of my life and I stay in touch with them till this day. Sharing with them things that I had never shared with anyone before. I felt comfortable and safe with my killers. They understood me in a way that no one ever had. They accepted me the way I was, and they liked who I was. These killers actually understood everything that I had went through in my life. It felt good to know someone that is just like me in a lot of ways.
As I got older, I realized that I was into even more extreme things than serial killers. I love things that most people would never think of. I enjoy a variety of sexual fetishes. I am a hybristophiliac, which means that I am sexually aroused by outrageous or extreme violence. I literally get off on it. If I see a murdered victim, or a rotting corpse I will get aroused. Even hearing about violence will turn me on. I want to see the gruesome crime photos, and hear all the grisly details of murder because it will turn me on. I am also into sexual things like vincilaginia, BDSM, bondage, chains, rope, gags, role play, rape, porn, group sex, bisexuality, rough sex, ECT. The most extreme thing I am into sexually is necrophilia. I have never tried this, but I did go to Mortuary College and have worked at funeral homes just to be close to dead bodies. I do have a respect for the dead and that is the only reason why I did not perform any indecencies on them. I have other fetishes that many would not consider to be sexual but I do because I get turned on by it. Things like cannibalism, vampirism,
bloodletting, self-mutilation, torture, gore, graveyards, decomposition of a corpse, senseless murder, violence; it all drives me into a sexual frenzy.
While I was discovering all of this about myself, I was also discovering things about my serial killers. Of course, I loved all their details of rape, murder, necrophilia and cannibalism. I would often masturbate to their words. But I was also learning about who they are as people. They soon started to call me on the phone. I have even visited a few of them in prison. Many of them asked me to be their girlfriend and to marry them. I have only been with a few of them romantically. I treat them as I would any other boyfriend. They receive no special treatment from me just because they have killed people. They know that I get off on what they did and that is all they get. Honestly, being with a killer is no different than having any other guy doing a life sentence. There are a few of them that I love as people and I will always love them. I wrote to one infamous killer when I was 23 years old. He is a necrophile and killed many. I did not even think he would respond back to me but he did. He is not one of my very best friends in the world. I love him and I adore him. He is the real Hannibal Lecter. He is a brilliant man, but yet he killed many people to satisfy his needs. He is a lot like me; he has two sides to him. We have never been together as a couple. We love each other and that is all we need. I know that he is the one for me, but we can never be together and I accept that because I do truly love him as a person.
In January of 2002 I wrote my first letter to Keith Jesperson. I wrote to him because I remember seeing him back when I was 16 years old. I wanted to know him as a person. I read a book on him titled,
‘I’ - The Creation of a Serial Killer
, by Jack Olsen. I felt sorry for Keith. I thought he had a bad childhood, like me and that women took advantage of him. I did not know if he would write me back, but he did. A week later I received a great, long letter.
That is how it started with me and Keith. We wrote on a regular basis for six years and I considered him to be a good friend. Out of all my killers, he really was one of my favorites. Eventually he asked for my phone number and he would call me on the phone. He called a lot. So much that I had to start hanging up on him when he called. I was not trying to be rude but he was calling multiple times a day trying to reach me.
The first couple of years we basically talked about everyday things. I told him about the jobs I had, my fiancé at the time, the travelling I did. He told me about his job at the prison, his family, his art work, and his cell mates. He did tell me several times that he was in the ‘hole’ for fighting. Most of the time it was because some inmate wanted to be known as the
guy that hit ‘the Happy Face Killer’, some nobody trying to make a name for himself had hit him. In one letter of June 2005 he said to me, ‘I’m in the hole, a guy attacked me out in the yard and I had to protect myself. Ruled a mutual fight. So, I get 60 days.’ It seems like Keith was in the hole often. He did not talk about his case much with me, and I did not ask him anything. He would tell me little things in passing. When I did ask him something he would always tell me what I asked of him and he never held back.
When we were engaged, I began to ask him about the murders. I figured if I am going to marry the guy then I want to know why he did it. I asked him, ‘Did you really do what you’re accused of’, and he wrote back to me and said, ‘Yes! I killed them all.’ From the way he wrote it, I got the image of him dancing with glee: ‘Yes I did it, I killed them all.’ I also asked him why he killed them. He told me it is because these women did something to make him angry. He also blamed the killings on stress and lack of sleep. I did like the fact that Keith did not sugar coat things, he said it like it was. He did talk a lot about the media and all the book deals and interviews that he had lined up. I swear if every book that Keith talked about got published there would be an entire shelf of Keith Jesperson at the book store. Keith truly is a media hound. He will talk to anyone that will listen.
I also recall that he tried to reach out to other serial killers with not much luck. He wants to be known as a serial killer. At this point, that is all he has going for him. That made me nervous about him. I am a very private person. I don’t want my life out there for everyone to know. I prefer to keep things to myself, and live my quiet country life. I asked Keith more than once NOT to give my information to the media and he promised me that he would not. Obviously he lied because here I am writing about him. I see now that friendship and loyalty mean nothing to him. He only cares for himself and no one else. He wants the world to see him as a violent serial killer no matter what the cost is.
In the six years that I knew him, Keith and I got along great. Only one time did he express anger toward me. He had sent me some of his art work for my birthday as a gift. I was extremely busy travelling at the time with my fiancé and working so I didn’t write him back right away. Perhaps that was wrong of me. I received a letter from him in June 2005 telling me: ‘It’s been a while. I have called and the phone goes dead when I hear your voice. What gives? So you didn’t like the art I sent? Or were you just waiting for it to come so you didn’t have to pretend any more. Did I do something wrong? Say something wrong? Suggest something wrong?’
I wrote him right away to explain that I had just been busy. When he wrote back he said it was ok and he told me that he is moody at times. No kidding. That is the only problem that we ever had.
After a couple years he started to say that he loved me and asking me to be his girlfriend. He would draw little hearts on his letters to me. At the time I did not know if he was serious or just being cute. I would always thank him for the compliments but turned him down for love. My main reason was because he is so attention, and media hungry. I always trust people until they give me a reason not to but it is the way he craved the attention that made me nervous. I thought I was safe as long as I was his friend and nothing else.
During the time that things were good he always gave me good advice. In 2006, I had a violent ex that just went to jail for various things he did to me. I told Keith what happened. I tried to defend my love at the time saying, ‘He
[my ex]
is not a bad person, he just has mental problems.’ I will never forget Keith’s reply to what I said. In my opinion it will go down as one of the best quotes ever from a serial killer. He told me: ‘You said it yourself, he is not a bad person he just has some mental issues. The same could be said about me, but will they let me go after a couple years for each murder? Hell no. Why? Because they believe that I cannot be cured of my head problems.’
A couple years later, what he said is still in my head because it makes so much sense. In the same letter he told me: ‘I have done eleven years in prison so far and I can say ten years tells me how much my actions have hurt everyone around me. And I am just a murderer. Not a rapist or a kidnapper or worse. My victims died never to feel a long drawn out pain of surviving and living with the questions of why and how and did I do something wrong. Guilt for not knowing who they were messing with. I admit my guilt and I’ll get seven life sentences in a row to think of what I have done.’
In a strange way this made sense to me to. Keith was always there for me, to listen to me and give me good advice. On a few occasions, I asked him for advice or help with assignments I had from college and he always gave it to me.
My romantic relationship with Keith started in January 2008. I was married at the time but going through a messy divorce. I told Keith about it and his response to me was, ‘If you had married me then you would not be in this mess. You know that I have always loved you.’ He has told me things like this for almost six years. He would tell me that I represent his ideal woman because I am so independent and I don’t need a man to make me happy. I thought,
‘Why not, this guy has been pursuing me for years now. He is a good friend and I like him. The fact that he killed people is a huge turn on for me, so why not, I will give him chance.’ I asked Keith what he would expect from me as his girlfriend. He told me he would expect me to love him for whom he is, and he hoped that I would help him out with things. He wanted me to sell his art work, and he said he would even help me financially if his art work would sell. So, there it was. I was the Happy Face Killer’s steady girlfriend.
When we became a couple we would write sexually explicit letters to each other, and I won’t lie, that was fun. It was not long after that we became engaged. He asked me on the phone to marry him and I said yes. Things went downhill after that. He got very moody and mouthy with me. Something that I don’t tolerate from any man. He told me to write him often and when I did he griped that I was writing too much. I stopped writing him. When he called he asked why he had not got any mail from me, I told him, ‘You told me not to write so much,’ and he yells at me, ‘You better start writing me more.’ Geez, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
