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At rare intervals in his dreary childhood reminiscences, Keith would admit to occasional moments of joy. “Yeah, we had some fun when I was growing up. It wasn't all work. Dad allowed us to have horses, and I was in 4-H and the Selah Red Hot Riders. I entered shows at the Yakima County Fair and won some ribbons, but not as many as my sisters, Jill and Sharon. We hunted deer on horseback, but I didn't like that style. It seemed too lazy. I preferred stalking my prey on foot with a bow and arrow.

“On summer weekends Dad would take us camping up the Little Naches River. During the day we'd trail-ride up the mountains on horseback, and at night we'd sing songs around the campfire and roast marshmallows while Dad got drunk with his cronies. Sometimes he'd take us to Goose Prairie in his trailer, and I would fish in the American River.”

Keith had long been the family's champion angler. “When it came to fishing,” his father admitted later, “he outshone us all. He had the patience and always came home with fish. We had many a delicious meal of salmon or trout, thanks to Keith. Catching fish was one thing he did well.”

The oversized boy was proud of his role as the family's star fisherman, and he boasted about it in later reminiscences. But his tales of happy times always seemed to short-circuit back to his limitless repertoire of misery—slights, insults, injustices, cruelties, misunderstandings, inequities, obligations unmet, favors unreturned, debts unpaid, requests spurned. “Rimrock Lake was one of our favorite spots to go water-skiing. I nearly drowned when I was with Bruce and Sharon. They threw the towline to me and a loop went around my neck. Before I had a chance to get loose, Bruce hit the throttle and dragged me a hundred yards before Sharon got him to stop the boat.

“On another trip Bruce brought along a ‘horse' for me to ski on—I guess he thought it would make me ski better. The horse is a chair with skis attached. I fell off when they whipped a sharp turn. They offered to tow me again, but I said no thanks and swam back to shore with the horse. It was like swimming in a wheelchair.”

He seemed to reserve his storytelling zest for tales of friction, disturbance and loss. “On one of our hunting trips, Brad was riding my quarter horse Dawn when she reared up, came down on a sharp rock and cut her front tendon. Dad went out to investigate, and when he came back, he was carrying her tack—he'd put her out of her misery. I blamed Brad and we got into a fight. He threw a shovel at me and I had to have stitches in my fingers. Then Bruce beat up Brad for hurting me. I never took any revenge. I just kept it inside. No one paid me for my horse.

“My little sister, Jill, loved horses and she'd ride every day if she got the chance. One winter day she rode Flicka out on an ice patch and the horse rolled on her and broke all the toes on one foot. Mother found me in the clip plant and told me to pick her up in the field. I used a wheelbarrow to haul her to Mom's car. I really felt good about helping out like that. Made me feel like part of the family. But it didn't happen often.”

At work and play Keith was constantly exposed to alcohol. He enjoyed the buzz but didn't like the loss of control. “I was brought up in a drinking and partying family. In Canada my father and mother belonged to the 24 Hat Club—twelve couples that met to have a good time and drink. Dad did most of the drinking, but my mom just went along. In Selah Dad had an open-bottle policy. We kids could drink all we wanted as long as it was in our house. Dad felt that the best way to keep us balanced about alcohol was to take the mystery out of it, and in my case he was right.

“He kept a supply of Seagram's rye and other hard liquor in his wet bar and a fridge full of beer on the back porch. He'd buy us beer when he drove to Canada or Idaho to stock up on Coors. I rode around with him a lot and learned how to mix his rye and Coke on bumpy roads. When Bruce was a senior, we had keggers at the house. Everybody in Selah was aware of the Jesperson beer parties. I had too much to drink one night and felt a girl's tits. She turned out to be Bruce's date. He kicked and punched me, and I deserved it.”

 

As relaxed as the Jesperson family was about drinking, Les was apoplectic about drugs. “Dad drove that message home every chance he got. If he found out that one of the kids in school was smoking pot, he'd make us dump 'em. If he saw us together on the street, he'd say, ‘Find some new friends. I don't want to see you with that son of a bitch.' Later on, when I began to kill, he decided that I must have been on drugs. That enabled him to rationalize what I did and take the stain off the Jesperson name. But drugs had nothing to do with my killing, and neither did alcohol.

“In high school I just about quit drinking so I could be the Good Samaritan to drive kids home from keggers. I saw some terrible sights—guys pissing themselves, vomiting out the window of my car. One boy passed out and a car backed over him and broke his collarbone. I never missed drinking at all. It brought out the wild man in me. I was actually afraid to get drunk because I would develop an I-don't-care attitude and lose control. I liked the feeling of being the only sober person in the house.”

 

When Keith reached sixteen, in the last semester of his sophomore year at Selah High School, he passed his driver's test and joined in Yakima Valley's preoccupation with the internal-combustion engine. He spent four hundred dollars of his hard-earned money on a 1961 Super 88 Oldsmobile sedan, a red-and-white 398 V-8 that no one else wanted because it spewed blue smoke, yawed on its shock absorbers, and barely made one hundred miles on a tank of gas. “Dad said he would buy the first and last tank for me and I guess he did. I near went broke keeping it full after that. I had to siphon gas from tractors and neighbors' cars. One night the neighbors fired a shot in the air to scare me away. They knew it was a Jesperson stealing their gas because I left the can there and it had Canadian addresses on it.” Keith kept the car for a year before the engine seized up and he finished the destruction by trying to make repairs.

His next car was a 1947 Willys Jeep CJ2-A that had belonged to a member of the Yakima Valley Mountaineer Jeep Club, hard drivers who spent weekends lurching up and down the surrounding sand hills. Years later he remembered every detail: “My Jeep had an F-head four-cylinder with three-speed stick. I had to get the seat pushed back four inches and the roll bar heightened by four inches. It was primer gray color till I repainted it sun yellow with black-diamond-plate running boards and corner panels. I drove it two years and sold it for what I paid for it: seven hundred dollars. Then I bought a 1967 Ford Fairlane with a 289 V-8, but that was too tame, so I got a used 750cc motorcycle. I rode that bike to Idaho to watch Evel Knievel jump the Snake River with his rockets. I got so excited I damn near made the jump alongside him. Later on I wished I had.”

Now that he had transportation of his own, Keith was able to vent some of his darker impulses in private. He would drive a few miles to the Wenas Valley and plink animals with his twenty-two. “I'd pretty much got rid of the stray cats in our neighborhood, but out in the sagebrush there were still plenty of targets—rats, rabbits, deer, coyotes, the odd dog or cat. I shot everything that moved. I liked watching their guts trail behind as they tried to run away. I perfected my shooting eye by knocking out a leg first, then the next leg. Or I'd shoot 'em in the balls or up the ass. A rabbit will scream and so will a deer. The will to survive is great even in the little sage rats. There was an infinity of dumb animals out there. I would sit behind a rock and look down my telescopic sight, and sometimes it would take three or four rounds to finish one off.

“Playing sniper was fun. My dad was a hunter and I knew he would approve. Higher in the mountains I found new targets—rattlesnakes and squirrels and chipmunks, rockchucks, porcupines. I killed sixty-eight snakes one day while out fishing in a little creek between Ellensburg and Selah. The next week I killed twelve. I didn't feel guilty. It was the all-American pastime to go out in the country and blast away. I shot a cow, watched it fall and listened to it bawl for help. I exploded gopher mounds with long, accurate shots and pretended I was firing mortar shells.

“When no one was home, I experimented with dampening the noise of gunfire. Sometimes I'd fire a couple of rounds out our windows and see who jumped. I set up a target and a bullet ricocheted off a piece of steel and caught me in the meat part of the thigh. I could see the end of the slug, and I dug it out with a pocketknife so Dad wouldn't punish me for being careless with weapons.

“I experimented with pipe bombs and cannons, machined the shells on Dad's lathe in the basement and filled them with Red Dot smokeless powder that I bought by the pound. I would drive six or eight miles into the country for firing tests. One of my projectiles carried to a house. The owner chased me down, confiscated my cannon and told me if he ever saw me around again, he'd call the sheriff. Luckily he didn't tell Dad.”

 

The boy's passion for high-speed driving soon brought him to the edge of a manslaughter charge. “On one of our trips back to Chilliwack, I took Brad and Jill and two other kids to a drive-in movie in Dad's 1969 Chevrolet three-quarterton pickup. They sat in the truck bed to keep away from me. I paid for the movie because they said Dad forgot to leave them any money. They had to have pop and popcorn, and I had to buy that, too. I thought they'd pay me back later. I was so furious, I could barely see the screen.

“When the show ended, the brats insisted that I take them to the A&W drive-in, where they ran up a big bill with food and shakes. Paying for their food was the last straw, and I decided to get even. With the five of them in the back of the pickup, I drove all over the road, jerked the wheel, floored the gas and hit the brakes till I could hear them rattling around and yelling.

“Just before the Keith Wilson crossroad there were some elevated railroad tracks. With Iron Butterfly at full volume on the radio, I crossed the track at top speed. The pickup flew through the air and landed hard. There was dead silence in the back. They were all scared shitless. A few minutes later I pulled into the lodge parking lot and got out.

“The truck bed was empty. My heart began to pound. In my mind I saw four bodies laying by the road. I was a mass murderer! I wanted to shake the brats up, but I never dreamed they'd go airborne.

“I drove to the track to search for bodies. Everything was quiet. No blood, no patrol cars, no ambulances, nothing. I got back to the lodge just as Dad and Mom and their friends pulled in. They'd been drinking and wanted to know where their kids were. I couldn't say I'd lost them. I couldn't say I flipped them into outer space. I didn't know
what
to say. Then two police cruisers pulled into the parking area with the kids in back, yelling and crying, and the cops explained what they'd just been told about the mad driver, Keith Jesperson.

“Turned out that the kids had jumped out of the pickup at a stop sign two blocks before the railroad crossing. They were already terrified about my driving. The cops had picked them up for curfew violation.

“Dad sobered up fast. The cops wanted to book me for reckless driving and endangerment, but Dad told them that he was a former Chilliwack council member and he could handle the problem himself. That was me: the Problem.
His son
. The cops read me the riot act and left.

“I tried to explain, but whatever I said, Dad called me a liar. He clenched his fists and said he intended to teach me a lesson right there in the parking lot. I was two inches taller, but I could never swing on him, so I kept backing up till I came to a steel pole under an awning. He took a wild swing and
ping!
He hit the pole. He cussed, and I ran for the cedar groves and hid behind a log.
⁵

“I woke up around 9:00
A.M
., snuck down to the lot next to the lodge and waited for everyone to go out boating for the day. Then I grabbed my bag and stuffed it with my clothes. I was sixteen and it was time to leave for good, but I didn't have the guts. Just then I saw Mom and learned that the kids had had plenty of money the night before. They just wanted to pull my chain. Nothing was said about it again. That was the last time Dad ever tried to hit me.”