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After a while I began to feel a little bad about what I'd done. I knew she would die if I didn't do something.
Do I want to keep her in this condition for days? Or should I end her torture quickly?
I couldn't take her to the hospital, I'd go to jail for sure.

I had to put her out of her misery.

I choked her till my knuckles turned white, but every time I let loose, she gasped. This went on for four or five minutes.
Why won't she die?
It was frustrating. I felt like I was losing control. I was trying to do one simple thing, and I couldn't do it—the story of my life.

I squeezed as hard as I could. She peed the floor and stopped moving. I went into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee and sat down to think out what I should do next—a guy who'd never even slapped a woman, and now I got a dead body on my hands.

After I drank my coffee, I dressed her. There was blood all over the walls and floor. I never realized how much blood could come out of one girl's body. The light shone on the metal buttons on her fly, and I wondered if they would hold fingerprints. I used a steak knife to cut out the fly and threw it in the fireplace.

I washed and dried my clothes and put them back on. I had to be extra sure she didn't wake up, so I went to the garage for a piece of half-inch nylon rope and cinched it as tight as I could around her neck. I heard one of the ghosts rattling around, and I hollered, “Now you got company, you bastards!” I sat with Taunja for a while, halfway enjoying my power over her and halfway wishing I could bring her back to life. But pretty soon I realized I had to get rid of the body and establish an alibi or I could end up at the end of a rope. I was no criminal, but I watched
Perry Mason
every morning and knew how important a good alibi could be. I said good-bye to Taunja and drove straight to the B&I Tavern to start laying the groundwork.

I drank a Bud Lite and talked to the barmaid and some customers till about 9:30
P.M
. I made sure they saw me leave alone. Then I drove ten miles east to the Vista House, a tourist attraction with a view of the Columbia River Gorge. I found plenty of good places to hide a body.

By now I was beginning to think a little straighter. On the way back home I told myself,
Don't make stupid mistakes when you dump her. Don't run out of gas. Don't throw up.
I had a sensitive stomach. Dirty diapers could make me sick.

At the
A.M
./
P.M
. Market I filled my tank and checked my lights. I didn't need some cop pulling me over for a dead taillight and finding a dead woman in my car.

I backed into my driveway to block off the neighbors' view when I loaded the body. I switched off the dome light so it wouldn't go on when the doors opened. I was feeling unreal, a little woozy. I went inside to take another look. Was this really happening?

 

The girl was right where I'd left her on the mattress. I'm still in a state of disbelief. I'm saying to myself,
Why? Why? Now look what I'm in for!

I decided that I'd just wanted to see what it was like to kill, to see if I could do it. My girlfriend Peggy had wanted me to kill her ex-husband and I told her I couldn't. Now maybe I could do the job and get her back.

The phone rang. My heart jumped. Who would be calling at midnight?

It was Peg. I asked, “Where are you?”

“In the East,” she says. “I'm working my way back.”

What a relief! For a second I thought she was in town and on her way home. My heart slowed down.

She said, “Nothing's working out here.” She asked me to send money for her to come home. She said she hated her codriver because he wouldn't let her drive when he slept. Plus he wanted to jump her at every stop. And he was a “male chauvinist bastard.”

I knew the real reason she wanted me back. She was finally seeing long-distance trucking for what it truly is: hard, tough, demanding work. There was no nice-guy Keith to be patient with her and cover up for her mistakes and let her crash in the sleeper most of the time. She said her codriver estimated her true miles, and it was never more than three hundred per day. Substandard. But she'd always been a lousy trucker, even when she was driving with me. Driving trucks is no job for a ninety-eight-pound ditz that doesn't know her ass from her elbow.

I kept her on the phone while I stared at the body on the mattress. I said, “The ghosts are scared of me now. They know I'm badder than they are.”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “Are they still keeping you up?”

“No! They aren't making their moves and I don't think they want to. Not now.”

She let that pass and told me that she was headed home—promised to call me when she got close. She said she loved me, and I said I loved her too. I wasn't sure if it was true, but I loved our sex life together, that's for sure. Peggy was an Olympic athlete in bed.

That little conversation revived my hard-on. Would I abuse a dead body? I felt the dead girl's skin. Her tits were clammy and turned me off. After a while I masturbated on her to clear my brain. For a lot of years after that, the memory of her dead body spurred on dreams and fantasies, and I could always masturbate at the thought of Taunja. She became my favorite fantasy.

I looked at my watch and it was after midnight—time to dump the body. I turned off the lights and made sure the coast was clear. She'd stiffened up, and I tied a rope around her neck to make her easier to drag. I pulled her out the front door by her feet, squeezed her onto the front seat of the Nova hatchback, folded her legs inside and pushed the door shut so it wouldn't make a loud click.

Her head rested against the window, but there was nothing I could do about that. Other drivers would just think she was drunk. I brought an extra pair of shoes to put on after I finished dumping her body. My triple-E Cannondale bicycling shoes had a flat, ribbed sole with a tread pattern that would be easy to trace. I would miss them—I used to ride forty or fifty miles a day.

I locked the little brown house and drove back out to Crown Point, being careful not to speed or cross over the center line. Vista House is locked in the wintertime, but five or six cars were in the parking lot. I talked to the dead girl as we looked for her final resting place. “Where will you sleep tonight, sweetheart? In that culvert over there? That ditch? Those briers?”

I drove a mile past Vista House to a straight stretch of roadway. Pretty soon my headlights showed a ravine. I grabbed her hand, pulled her out of the car and dragged her down the embankment. It was a steep grade, and I tripped on shrubs and bushes. About sixty feet from the road, I let loose of her and said, “This is it. Your home!” Her head was pointed downhill, and one arm stuck out backward.

I should have covered her with leaves, but I thought I saw some lights below me and rushed toward my car to get the hell out. Scrambling up the slope I saw a big bony hand backlit by the moon. I panicked before I realized it was the silhouette of a dead tree.

I drove off fast. When I reached the first sharp turn, my lights hit the side of an oncoming Multnomah county sheriff's car. I watched in my rearview mirror to see if he stopped. He never slowed down.

I was pissed at myself for leaving the body so close to the road, but it was too late now. I threw my biking shoes in the underbrush along the shoulder. I dropped her Walkman on the Sandy River Bridge deck so cars and trucks would flatten it. Then I took I-84 west to the Burns Brothers Truck Stop in Troutdale, one of my hangouts when I was driving truck.

 

I'd just ordered coffee when three state-patrol cops headed straight toward my booth. I thought,
These guys know. They know!
And her purse is outside in my car!

They took seats in the next booth, and I recognized a couple of them from my days on the road. After my heart slowed down, I started a conversation to build up my alibi. One of them asked if I was still driving truck, and I told them I was in between rides. We talked for a while and they left.

 

I stayed at the truck stop till 8:00
A.M
., making sure that plenty of people saw me and talked to me. Then I drove three miles up the Sandy River Road, took two dollars from the dead girl's purse and flipped it into a blackberry patch where nobody would ever find it. A smart move, too. It stayed there for five years and finally saved two people's ass.

Back home again, I opened up the house windows to get rid of the faint smell of death. I scraped dried blood off the walls and washed the sheets and blankets, vacuumed the floor and cleaned the rugs with a carpet cleaner. Eventually I had to deodorize the carpet twice and steam clean it.

I tried to wash the bloodstains off the ceiling and decided to paint it over with latex as soon as the blood was completely dried. Cops have a spray that makes bloodstains fluoresce like headlights. I'd seen it used on some TV shows. I reminded myself to finish the paint job before Peggy showed up.

 

Later in the day I went out and looked at some used cars to help my alibi. Would a killer shop for a car the next day?

I tried to forget the details of what I'd done, tried to pretend that someone else did it. That was the only way I could get through the next few nights. I couldn't get her face out of my mind. What kind of animal would pound an innocent young woman's face into mush? I decided I should commit suicide. But then I thought,
No, I won't. I can't do this to the Jesperson name. My kids would be ashamed. Dad would be so angry.

 

A few mornings later, after I watched
Perry Mason,
I walked to Albertson's Market for the paper. I read that a biker had found the body of a woman in the Columbia Gorge. The article said the cops were looking for two six-footers who'd been seen shooting pool with her in a bar. It was a relief that nobody was looking for me.

I decided to put suicide out of my mind. But I couldn't shake the feeling that everybody knew I was a murderer, even the people I passed on the street. Ever since I was a kid, I'd always felt guilty about something or other.

I thought about the killing and gave myself some excuses for what I'd done. That I was angry and depressed. That I just snapped. That the girl pushed my buttons by acting cold. That she asked for it by trying to con me out of dinner. Or that she was nothing but a street whore anyway.

After a while I had to confront the truth. Killing that girl came straight from my fantasies. She could have been any woman. In those last few minutes on the mattress on the floor, nothing could have stopped me.

I wondered why I didn't keep her alive for a week or two, take more time to enjoy her. I masturbated at the memory of her skin under mine. My penis remembered how it felt. It was the only sex I was getting.

 

A month went by and I read in the paper that two suspects were in custody.
Huh?
How could they be guilty of a murder that I committed? I figured the cops had picked up the two blond beer-drinkers from the B&I Tavern and forced them to confess. It bothered me a little that the wrong guys were taking my fall, but I also realized how lucky I was. As long as I stayed out of the B&I, the cops could never lay a glove on me. I'd gotten away with murder.

Then the weird situation turned weirder. The suspects turned out to be a couple of barflies, a man and a woman. The newspaper stories were skimpy, but it looked like the woman had confessed and implicated her boyfriend. She led the police to the exact spot where I dumped the body, out near Vista House. I was going nuts trying to figure out what was going on. It made as much sense as our ghosts.

 

A few days later I read that the D.A. had charged the barflies with murder. It wasn't my problem anymore.

Peggy came home with her two children. Just what I didn't need—another house full of kids. She promised they'd behave. Well, sure! She beat the crap out of them and expected me to do the same. I couldn't. How could anybody beat a kid that was five years old? Or any kid?

She sat around for a while, then took a full-time job waitressing. Now I'm Mr. Mom, dusting the furniture, cleaning the shitter and baby-sitting. It felt bad to take Peggy's kids to the movies when my own divorced kids in Spokane were doing without.

We started having big fights again. Things got so bad, I would walk out the back door as she walked in the front. I just didn't want to confront her anymore, except in bed. We still had good sex, but otherwise it was over. The ghosts would wake me up in the middle of the night and I'd find my hands around her neck. I realized that I got a big rush out of killing that girl and wouldn't mind doing another one. This was crazy thinking and I knew it.

I had to get away from Portland and this house before I lost it completely. I was
already
crazy. A freak. I had nightmares about killing an innocent girl, woke up screaming from guilt and shame, and a few minutes later I would fantasize about doing it again.

In March, two months after the killing, I headed south on I-5 for a construction job in Sacramento. Approaching Rogue River, Oregon, I was thinking about kidnapping women for sex and maybe even killing again. I tried to push the idea out of my mind, but it jumped right back in. I thought about my old girlfriend Nancy Flowers that lived up in the woods, not far off the interstate. I'd met her at a truck stop at Mile Marker 161 in Oregon and stayed with her a few nights. She was forty-four—nine years older than me—good-looking, divorced, a swinger. She advertised herself to magazines and sold photos of herself in the nude. But I got her for free. She'd showed me where she kept her collection of pictures and her loose cash.

As I drove, my mind ran wild with the possibilities. Maybe she wouldn't make me welcome. What difference did it make? If she gave me trouble, I might grab her and put her away for good. Then I'd take her money. I was pissed at the world anyway. I tried to think straight, but I couldn't. I was starting to be afraid of what I'd become.

The closer I got to her house, the harder my penis got. I thought about enslaving her for a few days. I felt her presence as I approached her door. I felt her softness as if she was already hugging me.

I knocked, and nobody answered. I found her spare key under the rock where she kept it and let myself in.

The place was empty. I smelt something a little off, like a rat died in the walls. I could feel a woman's presence. What the hell happened here?

I drove to the little market at the Y-junction and asked where Nancy was hanging out. They told me her ex-husband and another biker had paid her a little visit. One raped her while the other beat her to death with a crowbar. She died in the living room. A few weeks later the rapist ran his mouth and one of his friends ratted him out. They were in jail awaiting trial.

As I headed south, I thought,
What a bummer. I might have killed Nancy myself if she'd been home. Everybody's dying all around me. I'm seeing death everywhere. Where do I turn? What the hell, I killed Taunja Bennett and got away with it. I could kill anybody. It's up to me.
It was a heavy thought.