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Still in his road-warrior mood, Keith added another set of grievances to his growing list of complaints against females. It was springtime, 1988, a year and a half before he would begin his murder spree with Taunja Bennett. “At a truck stop south of Weed, California, I met a skinny little brown-haired waitress named Peggy Jones. I flirted with her for a while and got her phone number. Then I had to leave for my run north.

“A few weeks later I stopped in Weed for a ten-hour lay-over and called Peggy's number in Dunsmuir. I dropped my trailer and ran bobtail to her place to pick her up. All I was looking for was a quick lay on the way back to Seattle. We went to a tavern in Weed and had a few drinks and played pool. Later we got into the back of my truck and had sex. Then I drove her to the truck stop and had sex again and drove her home and had sex one more time. Peggy was the only woman I ever met who could keep up with me and still want more. She asked, ‘Will I ever see you again?' I said, ‘In a few days,' and I kept my word.

“I told her I wasn't married. She said she was divorcing her husband and he had custody of their two kids. Since Dunsmuir and Weed were right in the middle of my north-south runs, I started spending my sleeping time with her. Pretty soon I was falling in lust with her and then in love. I was spending more time with her than with my wife and kids.

“After I took her on a couple of trips to Los Angeles, we began to think of ourselves as a couple. But what would I do about my family? Peggy forced the issue. She called information in Yakima and Selah and talked to several Jespersons, and they all told her that I was married. I explained that I was getting a divorce and considered myself single. She said she was in love with me and asked if I was in love with her—if I wasn't, I wasn't going to get laid that night. So I told her I loved her, too.

“Peggy told me to divorce Rose and get out from under Dad's thumb. She said she wanted to move to Yakima to make sure I went ahead with my divorce. At the moment I would agree with anything she asked to get into her panties.

“I knew I was gambling with my family's future, but I brought her back to Yakima and dropped her off by the Twin Bridges Tavern. I gave her money to look for a job and then drove home. I kept playing over in my mind what Peggy wanted. But what did
I
want? Same as always—I wanted my kids. I wondered if I'd ever been in love with Rose, or did I just use her to get away from Dad?

“I played with my kids that night and put them to bed. I laid next to Rose and said, ‘I'm not happy with the way our lives are going. I want some major changes.' She asked what kind. I said, ‘I want a divorce. I'm tired of coming home to problems.'

“She rolled on her side and went to sleep. I laid there thinking of what I'd just put on the table. Why didn't she argue? Why didn't she say that she loved me? She just accepted the idea of divorce and nodded off!

“In the morning I had more fun with the kids. Rose said nothing, just played her part as mom before I left on a run to Los Angeles. When I came back four days later, I found an empty house and a Dear John letter—she'd taken the kids to Spokane to live with her mother. She demanded everything except my golf clubs, bowling ball, bicycle and clothes. I read her letter and cried.

“I went over to Peggy's little apartment and told her to sit tight. Then I drove two hundred miles to Spokane. When I pulled into Rose's mother's driveway, my three kids met me with tears in their eyes. I wondered,
Is this what I really want? A separation might do our marriage good, but…a divorce?

“I thought and thought and thought, and then I made my usual mistake—I let my crotch decide. Back in Yakima I had a willing piece of tail to satisfy me day and night, four or five times a day if I wanted. I couldn't walk away from that. I put a higher value on sex than on my family and friends. That's when my life went off the rails.

“When I thought about it, I realized that my troubles began the very first time I cheated on Rose. If I hadn't been seduced by Ginny Smith and learned that some women are better lays than others, I'd have stayed home and lived happily ever after. Instead, I was losing everything.

“I drove my kids to a restaurant and we had a good cry. I promised I would always support them and be a part of their lives. Then I rushed back to Peggy. She moved to White Pass Lodge and took a job as waitress. I moved into her room, and in a few days Dad and his second wife, Betty, showed up to have dinner and be waited on by Peggy. Afterwards they came over to our room to see how we lived. Dad didn't take to Peggy. He said she was ‘tougher than banjo strings with turpentine sauce.' He never could handle strong women. Maybe that's why I stayed with Peggy so long, because it pissed him off to see us together. He would say, ‘This affair is over, Keith. It's time for you to go back to Rose.' I got up the strength to say no. I was tired of being told what to do.”

In the summer of 1988 Keith decided to seek domestic counsel from his wise sister Jill. “I felt like she could help me talk it all out and maybe pick up the pieces of my life. Early in the evening I drove my number 45 truck up I-405 toward her place just north of Seattle. Running bobtail is a tough job in any traffic. I should have taken it easy, but my mind was on my problems and I pushed it.

“Traffic was moving along at sixty and sixty-five when suddenly the whole line stopped. I drove into the median to avoid rear-ending the guy in front. My truck flipped end to end and I ended up in a meat wagon. When I healed up, I was fired. I swore to myself I'd never have another accident in a big rig.”

 

On Peggy's days off from waitressing, she began to accompany Keith on short hauls. “She became undependable on her waitressing job because she
loved
being in my truck. The restaurant manager told me to find a new girlfriend. He said he'd seen her flirt with truckers and almost ride off with one. I just passed it off as her usual flirting.

“Peggy and I moved into a one-bedroom mobile home in a trailer park and she went to work as a truck-stop waitress in Union Gap, just south of Yakima. Sex was great, but everything else was bad. Rose and the kids were out of sight and I began to fall behind in my child support. I was on my way to being a deadbeat dad, all because of Peggy. We were getting poorer and poorer and I got pissed off and thought about leaving.

“My father was still sticking his nose into my business. If he would have butted out, I might've gone back to Rose and my kids. But he kept yammering about Peggy and what a terrible thing I was doing and no decent man would leave his own kids and blah blah blah. I sued for divorce just to spite him, just to shut him up.

“I cried when I filed the papers. The divorce was final on our thirteenth anniversary. Rose was a good mother and housekeeper and a fine woman. Maybe marrying her just out of high school was a mistake, but getting involved with Peggy was a worse mistake. And losing my wife and kids was the worst mistake of all.”

After Keith and Peggy had been together for a year, he decided that it might improve their finances if she became his permanent driving partner. “That way we could rack up a lot more miles and I'd get a good piece of ass every time we stopped.”

Peggy quickly earned a combination truck-auto driving license, but an abrupt change of mood came over Keith before they hit the road together. “Every time I saw Dad, he would drill me about dumping Peggy. Every time I called my kids, they begged me to come back. I felt whipsawed. Sometimes I'd be on the verge of dumping Peggy, but then we'd have some more great sex and I'd change my mind. I didn't realize that I was being pussy-whipped.

“After three months without seeing Rose or the kids, I couldn't take it anymore. I was having nightmares about letting my kids down. I decided to go back. I told Peggy she might as well head for California.

“We had a good-bye drink before I started to move my stuff out. I left our mobile home for a few hours and when I got back, she'd smashed the TV. She was passed out on the bed in her blue jeans and loose top and tennis shoes. It turned me on to see her like that. It made me want to have her one more time. I decided to leave her some sperm as a memento.

“I pulled off her shoes and size-three jeans and gently entered her. After I got off, I laid inside her and waited for my penis to get hard again. I kept screwing her until I got sore on the fourth try.

“When she finally woke up, she couldn't remember taking off her clothes and I didn't tell her what I'd done. She was still groggy. When she passed out again, I laid down with her and kissed her and fondled her breasts for the last time. Then I drove to Dad's house to spend the night.

“The next morning she showed up in her Pinto and asked me if I'd had sex with her last night. I told her yeah, I did. She said, ‘And you still want me to leave?' I said, ‘Yep.' She said,
‘You're gonna miss me, you son of a bitch!'

“For the next two to three weeks I stayed with Rose and the kids even though it meant no sex. I realized how much I'd missed them. I'd been with Rose for fourteen years, and most of that time I was faithful. So we had something together, no matter how bad things got. But the rape of Peggy kept playing in my mind. I missed her hot sexy ways. I tried to do the right thing by Rose and the kids, but…I had to go back.”

 

Keith called his trucking boss and got an okay to enlist Peggy Jones as his codriver. It took him a few days to locate her. She'd hitched a ride to Los Angeles with another trucker—“an old guy,” as she described him to Keith.

The reconciled lovers became trucking partners. There was trouble from the first trip. “Peggy let her emotions steer her driving. She would drive four to six hours a day and then say she'd had enough, she wasn't in the mood anymore. I had to drive all the mountain miles and snow miles while she played games with other male truckers over the CB radio. She would promise to meet some guy for sex, then wouldn't show up. She thought that was fun. I thought it was childish.”

Christmas was an ordeal. Les and his wife, Betty, a pleasant middle-aged woman from an old Yakima Valley apple-packing family, invited Keith for dinner, but conspicuously omitted Peggy. “When I walked in the door, the first thing I saw was Rose and the kids. The old control artist planned to push us back together. It made my blood boil. At dinner he gave a little lecture about how unnatural it was to live without a wife and family. I told him that I knew somebody who could live without a family just fine—
‘Just watch me, Dad!'

“I left early and broke my children's hearts again. I told Peggy about Dad's meddling. I took her advice and didn't talk to him for six months.”

 

It didn't take long for Keith's trucking boss to decide that Peggy was a liability and order her out of his cab. He sneaked her back into the jade-green Kenworth conventional but regretted his move. “She never developed a sense of direction or any road smarts, and all she thought about was men. On one trip I was so exhausted as we drove out of Yuma, I showed her the route to Bakersfield and slid into the sleeper to take a nap. She yelled at me that she wasn't stupid and she already knew the route. I just tuned her out and fell asleep.

“When I woke up, we were parked in a truck stop on I-40 at Exit 76 in Kingman, Arizona. I put a towel over the steering wheel—that's the trucker's sign that nobody's in the sleeper—and I went into the restaurant. There she sat with a bunch of other drivers, drinking coffee and bullshitting. One guy had his hand on her knee, and I heard him say something about driving with her. They'd met on the CB and she'd followed him here.

“I pulled up a chair and put my arm around her. I looked straight at the guy and said, ‘Why are we in Kingman, Peggy?'

“She got all wide-eyed and said, ‘Isn't this where we're supposed to be?'

“I asked the other driver, ‘Do you
really
want this girl as your codriver?' He nodded yes. I said, ‘When you go to sleep and wake up two hundred miles off course, just remember what I'm telling you. We're supposed to be in Seattle by midnight tonight, and instead of being on our way in Bakersfield or Santa Nella, here I am looking at your ugly face in Kingman. You want her?
You can have her!'

“I got my thermos filled with coffee and headed back to the truck. Peggy was dogging my steps, crying and whining—‘I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' What a sorry bitch! Before we left Kingman she gave me a quickie in the sleeper.”

 

Through 1988 and 1989 the odd couple stayed together, with indifferent commercial success. Keith was drained from sex and overwork. “We made a good team in good weather. In bad weather it was hell on wheels. I had to drive 80 percent of the time. And when she was driving I had to stay awake to make sure she didn't follow some other trucker to Dallas when we were en route to Chicago. On the good side, we had sex two or three times a day in the sleeper. In rest areas we kept that semi rocking, and when we were waiting for loads, sex occupied our time. Sometimes I wished our arrangement would never end. But it did. It ended and started and ended and started more times than I can remember.”

 

The Jesperson-Ellis driving team was laid off in April 1989 and moved in with Peggy's mother in her crazy little haunted house in northeast Portland. While Keith was recovering from an injury to his arm, he drew unemployment and then went from job to job—excavating, plumbing, sewage, construction, heavy labor. “My friends kept telling me to get rid of Peggy. They saw what I couldn't see. It took me a long time to realize that she was dragging me down.

“Our worst times came when I was hurt and she started driving with other guys. One night she called me from California and told me she'd lost her codriver and wanted me to meet her in Tigard, Oregon, just south of Portland. She took four hours longer than normal for the run. When she unloaded she couldn't handle the three-hundred-pound tarps and had to sweet-talk other truckers and lumpers into helping. I could only imagine how she paid them back. When she finally showed up that night, it turned out that the only reason she wanted to see me was because she needed money to finish her run. I went back to our little house with an empty wallet and a hard-on.”