I (31 page)

Even with the finding of the purse, Oregon authorities doggedly refused to admit that they had prosecuted an innocent man and woman. The comic opera continued for nearly a year before justice finally limped onstage and Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske were freed.

The question of how the hapless couple had managed to get themselves convicted in the first place was answered in bits and pieces. The grandmotherly Pavlinac explained that her pickled paramour's amorous techniques had escalated from blackening her eyes and beating her bloody to threatening murder. After complaints to police produced no action, she set about putting Sosnovske behind bars by implicating him in various crimes and misdemeanors, including a bank robbery that she reported to the FBI. Veteran lawmen put her down as an enabler and crank and continued to ignore her claims.

When Pavlinac heard the news about the Bennett killing on TV, she saw an opportunity. She told police that she'd overheard her bearded boyfriend talking about strangling a girl in the Columbia Gorge. To lend verisimilitude she added a few original touches of her own. She said that she'd helped Sosnovske to dispose of the body and backed up her claim by producing the fly front that she claimed she'd sliced from the victim's jeans.

After the swatch failed to match up with the evidence, Pavlinac cried and admitted that she'd cut the swatch from her daughter's pants.

 

A few days later she produced a second swatch that came closer but still didn't match. Then she broke down and admitted that she'd been creating false evidence to “make sure that the son of a bitch is convicted.” Her position made a degree of sense to police and prosecutors after she claimed that Sosnovske had threatened her and her four children with death. “It's terrible to live your life in jeopardy,” she said through tears. “I want him caught. He's guilty anyway.”

Investigators chauffeured her to the old Scenic Highway and asked her to point out where Taunja Bennett's body had been dumped. After a fifteen-minute ride in the police car, the blue-eyed woman peered into the brush and said, “Here!” She was thirty yards off but claimed later, “The cops said I was close enough.”

Some of the homicide detectives believed her story, but an assistant D.A. felt that the case was too weak. Plans were made to release Laverne and her mean-drunk boyfriend. She was terrified that Sosnovske would go straight to the nearest bar, drink himself into a rage and exact his revenge. In desperation she committed the ultimate act of self-preservation. She claimed that she'd held Taunja Bennett down while Sosnovske committed rape and murder.

 

After she was booked on homicide charges, Pavlinac hugged the arresting detectives. Out of her own mouth she'd made herself an accomplice to a capital crime, but she'd also convinced the most cynical investigators of her truthfulness. With the ragged edges of her tale neatly rounded off, she was led into an interrogation room to make a full confession into a tape recorder.

But in the lonely hours in her cell before her trial, the confused woman lost her taste for confinement. She confessed that every word of her story was false. Detectives asked how she'd been able to take them to the spot where the body was found. At first she explained that she'd peeked at the car's odometer till it showed that they were exactly 1.5 miles from Vista House as they approached Latourell Falls, a location that had been described on TV and in the newspapers. When detectives expressed their doubts, the sweet-faced woman admitted that she'd spotted a red splotch of crime-scene spray paint along with broken branches and tire tracks.

None of the investigators believed her latest revised scenario. In the district attorney's theory of the case, she knew the location of the retarded woman's body because she'd helped to dump it there. John Sosnovske was a frail drunk with weak knees. He wouldn't have been able to carry a dead weight down a steep slope without assistance.

 

At Pavlinac's trial the prosecutor had wasted no time in playing her confession for the jury—“I didn't plan to kill her….I didn't mean to….I feel like it's my fault.” As jurors frowned, the courtroom walls resounded with tape-recorded sobs and cries. It was at once the dramatic high point and low point of the trial.

After the woman's lawyer sawed the air in a seven-hour closing argument (“It's not logical to assume that this fifty-eight-year-old grandmother strangled a girl to death….”), the prosecutor calmly replayed the tape. He allowed a suitable pause for his client's Biblical weeping and wailing to have its effect, then said, “You listen to those words and that emotion, and you will look at Laverne Pavlinac and see the face of a murderer.”

She was found guilty of murder. Nine of the twelve jurors had voted for aggravated murder, a crime that carried the death sentence. The judge sentenced her to fifteen years to life.

A week before his own trial, John Sosnovske and his lawyers suddenly realized that he was at risk of the death penalty. He'd already flunked a second lie-detector test—not unusual in suspects under high stress. Prosecutors had found scribbling on a half-sheet of paper in his possession: “T. Bennett: A Good Piece” (apparently planted by Pavlinac).

The defenseless boyfriend realized that his own jury would soon hear his old girlfriend's hysterical voice implicating him in a vicious rape-murder. If the tape recording had convicted her, it might convict him. Hours before his trial was set to open, his lawyers plea-bargained a life sentence.

From his county jail cell, his curly brownish mane shorn by an inmate barber, Keith Jesperson continued his campaign to muddy the legal waters. Most of his confessional letters were sent after his own lawyer told him to shut up. The notes were uniformly upbeat—“Have a nice day, from Happy Face.”

He wrote to the
Columbian
in Vancouver, Washington:

Another letter ended: “I am sane! I know what I want. I want to save everybody a lot of taxpayers money. I want justice to be served.”

 

He buttressed his credibility by using a fellow prisoner to leak information that helped California police to clear three open cases: the strangulation murders of Cynthia Lynn Rose near Turlock, an unidentified woman named Cindy near Corning, and the woman he'd known as Claudia in Blythe. He also confessed to the Laurie Pentland killing in Salem, Oregon, and the murder of Angela May Subrize.

In his cell he drew complex diagrams showing the final resting places of his victims. Bodies found by police search crews turned out to be decomposed beyond recognition, but enough rotting remnants appeared to substantiate his claims.

 

Whenever he was moved, Keith was surprised by the security measures. “They put me in handcuffs and leg irons. I had to take baby steps. Outside the jail people stared at me in my bright jumpsuit. The cops had a neck leash in case I started to thrash around. We were on I-5 when four police cars shut down a rest area so I could use the toilet. I shuffled up to the urinal with cops on my left and right. I said ‘Well, guys, who has the biggest one?'

“A laugh came from one of the shitters, and the cops covered the stall and wouldn't let the guy out till we'd cleared. When he finally came out, he gave me a thumbsup. Later his truck passed us on the highway and he pointed to his CB mike. He was telling the world how Happy Face made the cops turn red.”

As always Keith seemed to enjoy the attention.

As his revelations mounted, the killer turned to the Internet for more attention and notoriety. Members of America Online were inundated with tasteless examples of his lack of empathy, balance and taste.

Through a pen pal with a computer, he opened a Web site and offered a “Self-Start Serial Killer Kit—Now you can be the only serial killer on your block”—and a life-size blowup doll of a murdered woman. In articles that began “Hello my Internet Fans!” he referred to his victims as “my piles of garbage,” and made other emetic comments in the process of soliciting donations for his legal defense.

AOL, prodded by outraged members, shut down his Web site, but outrageous and contradictory statements continued to emanate from his jail cell, most of them in interviews with the media: “I actually killed 166 people in five states over twelve or thirteen years.” “I didn't only kill women. I beat a man to death at the mines in Canada.” “I never said I killed 166. It was much less.” “Sosnovske and Pavlinac paid me twenty thousand dollars to lie for them.” “I only ever killed one person in my life.” “I'm innocent.” “I'm the victim of a fix.” “I'm guilty as hell. Now let 'em prove it.”

He informed a TV reporter that he didn't kill Taunja Bennett and “now you know the truth.” To his most egregious lies he routinely added, “I swear all this to be true as God is my witness.”

 

He explained later that he'd been deliberately sowing doubts about his reliability and sanity. The resulting headlines reflected confusion: “Ringmaster to His Own Media Circus.” “Happy Face Killer Denies Wyoming Slaying.” “Serial Killer's Cyberspace Forays Push Limits,” “Jesperson Offers Another Confession,” “Murder Admissions Were Lies,” “Man Who Claims to Be Killer Still an Enigma.”

 

As plea-bargaining overtures began, a veteran Wyoming public defender expressed doubt about the Jesperson strategy: “It's a terminal illness to go around confessing to murders…. He is literally pissing in the wind—and, I might add, pissing all over himself in the process.”

The party of the first part disagreed. “I'm still alive,” he said. “I haven't been executed. So is my strategy right or wrong?”

In an open letter to Wyoming prosecutors, he said, “Boy, have I got a deal for you!” He promised to waive extradition and stand trial for the Angela Subrize murder provided he was assigned a court-appointed lawyer at public expense. He promised that if he was sentenced to death, he would draw the case out for so long that taxpayers would be outraged at the expense and demand to know “the name of the idiot that forced the death sentence on me.” He promised to bankrupt any state that dared to try him for a capital offense.

Annoying as his manic arrogance seemed to be, there proved to be some method in his loudness. After early consultations with his lawyers, he'd realized that the main evidence against him was his own words. “That's really all they had. By the time they got to the bodies, they couldn't even determine the cause of death. The Florida woman was bones. Angela Subrize was destroyed under my truck. Claudia's body was eaten on by animals. Cindy laid behind boulders for months. In all those cases they had my confession and nothing else. And a confession without corroborating evidence can't be used as evidence. I knew
that
much about the law.”

 

He was firmly on record that he'd strangled Angela Subrize in Wyoming and ripped up her body on a freeway in Nebraska, but he revised the scenario after Wyoming governor Jim Geringer extradited him to stand trial for capital murder. The U.S. marshal's plane had hardly landed in Cheyenne before the accused man began explaining that he'd lied about the murder site because he wanted to draw Gerry Spence into his defense.

The Cowboy State's famous defense lawyer declined the invitation, and when the Subrize case slid from the front pages and into the cold reality of the courtroom, Wyoming prosecutors began to see the enormity of their task. Now that Jesperson had advertised himself to thousands of possible jurors as a pathological liar whose statements and confessions were as variable as the Rocky Mountain weather, a first-degree murder conviction was unlikely and the death penalty clearly beyond reach.

“I outsmarted them,” Jesperson gloated. “I knew that if I threw enough crap to the media, the more I'd lose my credibility, and eventually the authorities would just want to get me off their hands. The minute I'm not in the news, I could die in my cell that night. The police wanted to kill me so bad, I thought there'd be a setup and they'd say it was a suicide. With a little help from the media and the Internet, I made a mockery of the system. I convinced the whole damn jury pool that I was a liar and my confessions were worthless.”

He referred to his new archenemy, Wyoming governor Geringer, as “the flounder who bit the hook and refused to let go as I reeled him in” and “has sucked the wrong pepper-flavored egg this time.” He derided the Oregon and Washington prosecutors. “They didn't want confessions. They wanted to prove my guilt in court. They wanted the glory of solving the mystery known as Keith Jesperson. They wanted a big public conviction. I took that away from them.”

 

As the killer escalated from excess to bombast, some began to perceive him as a narcissistic, immature man-child, obsessed with getting his way, even if it meant destroying his family's good name and making a public fool of himself. He seemed proud of his chicanery and often repeated his signature claim: “I'm a liar and a damn good one.”

Producers from the Fox Network issued a challenge of their own. They offered to hook him up to a lie detector and hire former O. J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark to ask the questions. “Bring it on,” Jesperson said. “This time I'll tell the truth.”

Privately he said, “I never failed a polygraph test in my life. If you lie all the time, it's easy.” Fox dropped the idea.

 

After the bumptious prisoner had been held in a Laramie jail for five months, the frustrated Wyoming officials gave up and returned him to the Northwest.