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According to her children Gladys Bellamy Jesperson's culinary skills were the least of her qualities. The Bellamys came from English stock by way of the windswept wide-open spaces of Grande Prairie, Alberta. Her father, Roy, a dairy farmer, went broke during the same Dirty Thirties that defeated the blacksmith Art Jesperson. The Jespersons and Bellamys became acquainted after Roy Bellamy gave up on cows and opened a billiards parlor in Chilliwack, B.C. Unlike the irreligious Les Jesperson, Roy Bellamy and his wife Marjorie were devout Protestants and strict teetotalers. When a friend brought them a bottle of Christmas cheer, they ordered him off the property.

In the passage of time the elder Bellamys made a favorite of their grandson Keith, the future murderer. “Leslie always favored Bruce and Brad,” Marjorie Bellamy once explained. “Our daughter Gladys favored Jill and Sharon. I always had a heart for Keith because he's the one that got left out.”

 

Gladys Bellamy Jesperson grew up in a puritanical home in which the slightest mention of sex and sexuality was taboo. She was banished from the barn when the bull serviced the cow and when any of the animals gave birth. No one in the family, including her husband, ever saw Gladys naked. “That was her preference,” Les said of his wife years later. “Her parents taught her to be ashamed of her body. I never saw one Bellamy touch another.”

 

Keith and his four siblings remembered their mother as a workhorse and immaculate housekeeper who held the family together. “Dad's whole thing was making money,” his daughter Jill recalled. “Mom did everything else.”

Gladys Bellamy Jesperson was a large, plain woman, a half-inch shorter than six feet, with rich curly hair that she passed on to her son Keith. Resolute and dignified, she tried to shield her children from their father's harsh discipline, but with indifferent success. She seemed to keep a little distance between herself and others, even her own brood. When Les took them camping each summer, Gladys was happy to stay home. In Keith's memory he saw her posed primly on the couch, glasses reflecting the TV screen, her knitting needles giving off little flashes of light. He thought he knew why his mother stayed home. “She was Dad's slave. She was relieved when he was gone. It gave her a little breathing room.”

 

Gladys was as meticulous about her person as she was about her home. She designed and made her children's clothes, including trousers and suits. As she put on weight through the years, she altered her own dresses and created new wardrobes to conceal her amplitude. She knitted “Indian sweaters” for every member of her extended family. She was sensitive about her appearance and kept her bedroom door firmly shut after chemotherapy forced her into wigs. But she didn't stop knitting. By then her children were grown.

Keith was regarded as the slowest of the Jesperson children, “the one who dawdled,” as a sister described him. He was born on April 6, 1955, and his earliest memory was of rolling a rock down a slide in a play park. It hit his little brother Brad on the head, drew blood and made him cry. His sister Sharon took the blame, and not for the last time.

Keith was toilet-trained by two, obedient, quiet, but easily distracted. “He couldn't focus on anything for very long,” a relative recalled. He took continual ragging about his sluggish ways but didn't seem to mind.

In later years his father liked to screen a home movie of a family hike. Little Keith lagged twenty feet behind the others, staring up at trees, dragging his moccasins. At some point on every outing, he got lost. The family watchword was: “Where's Keith?” Siblings thought of him as the “now what?” brother. He was ungainly, a slow runner, bored by team sports or parlor games except cribbage. He learned how to manipulate the pegs on a cribbage board before he could read.

 

The Jesperson children grew up in a rural atmosphere, first in Chilliwack, B.C., later 250 miles south in Selah, Washington, an apple-scented orchard community of ten thousand. No one could remember a time when the family didn't own horses, sheep, ducks and/or dogs. His perpetually mobile father built the family's Chilliwack home on land that his ancestors homesteaded in 1909, moved the house from the city to a pastoral area outside of town, cleared five acres with a borrowed bulldozer, built a barn with a loft for his children and a wooden bridge big enough for the family horses to cross the little creek that rose from springs above the property line. Later he dammed the creek and built a waterwheel to trap chinook and silver salmon as they swam up from the Vedder River to spawn. Sometimes the family's anglers were joined by the odd black bear, deer, fox or a nearby farmer's fractious bull. Les attached a rope swing to a maple that reached almost to the far side of the creek, and Tarzan yells resounded all summer.

Gladys Jesperson grew tired of rounding up children who were usually deployed over a compass rose of directions, and so she bought an orange whistle with a unique warble that could be heard for miles. At its sound the children sprinted for home. Years later Keith sometimes jerked awake to the sound of his mother's whistle, blowing down the prison corridors in his dreams.

 

Even before he started school the boy was unusually shy. He seemed content to play alone, digging tunnels in a mound of dirt, building forts, lofting pebbles at rising trout and salmon. “Keith is such a happy child,” his mother told friends. “He can sit in one spot all by himself. You come back an hour later and he's still right there.”

The child found comfort in his own company. “I never really felt at home in our house, so I fantasized. In those days we called it daydreaming. I'd pretend to be a miner or a heavy-equipment operator. I would take my bow and arrow and be a great white hunter in Africa. I stood along our creek and fired torpedoes at enemy U-boats, created the ocean in my mind and sent destroyers off to war. When I finally got my own BB gun, I became a sniper shooting at the enemy. I saw myself as an enforcer for good, a war hero,
superboy!
Keith would save the world.”

 

Sitting inside the walls that would enclose him for the rest of his life, the would-be hero remembered his household as “quiet and peaceful when Dad was away and tense when he was home.”

It was one of the family's continuing paradoxes that Keith also saw himself as his father's sidekick. “Dad and I hung out a lot, played cribbage, rode horses up in the hills. As long as I stayed in line, he was the best dad a kid could have—generous, smart, funny. He made me his helper on a lot of his projects, made me feel special. But he never relaxed his rules, and he was tough. We'd be riding along in his pickup and I'd be holding his rye and Coke for him, and he'd say something like, ‘You spill one goddamn drop, you're no son of mine!' He kept you on edge.”

The patriarch's favorite instrument of punishment was his thick leather belt. “All my children got it,” Les admitted years later. “When I was a kid, I was strapped harder than any of 'em, and I didn't grow up to be a serial killer. A lot of kids could use a little beating nowadays. I was strict but a good father. I raised my kids like I was raised.”

 

Keith remembered hiding under the kitchen table to avoid his father's discipline. “I was four. Dad was yelling, ‘Don't you run away from me!' He threw me down, whipped off his belt and doubled it, held it with both hands at the ends and popped it with a scary slapping sound. Then he hit my butt with the folded end. He told me to stop crying or he'd give me something to cry about.
¹
I bit my lip and kept quiet.”

Keith remembered getting belted after he killed his father's pet duck with a rock. His mother tried to intervene but finally gave way. “Mom was always on our side, but she couldn't stop Dad if he was drinking. Sometimes she smacked my ass with a big wooden spoon, but never hard. She'd usually say, ‘Wait till your father gets home, and then you'll get it.' Dad was our discipline.”

 

Duke, the closest friend of the boy's childhood, came into his life just before his fifth birthday. Keith shared a room with his younger brother, Brad, but the stocky brown Lab always ended up in Keith's bed, burrowing under the covers, growling softly if his sleep was disturbed.

The subject of the dog was one of the few that seemed to animate Keith in belated discussions of his childhood. “Even today I sleep pretty much in a fetal position. I'm still making room for Duke. He trained me good. He was a chaser and a fighter. Chased salmon up our creek and came home smelling like cat food. Chased cars and got hit seven times—he figured that was his job, and since he was a Jesperson, nothing was gonna stop him. When Mr. Hamilton's vicious dogs crossed our yard, Duke ran 'em off. Out of the eleven Hamilton dogs, he killed two and maimed three.

“If I set foot in our pastures, Duke warded off the bulls or heifers. He would herd me like a sheep to keep me out of danger. One day Dad rowed us to the middle of a lake. He looked back and said, ‘What the hell is that?' It was Duke, trying to catch up. He'd swum for half a mile and damn near drowned. For the rest of that summer, he wouldn't let me out of his sight.

“I fed him scraps at the dinner table and let him lick my plate. Having a male dog as my constant companion gave me a head start about sex. He'd jump any bitch smaller than a Great Dane. Maybe that's why I always liked it doggy style—it was the first sex I saw.”

 

At six the shy boy sold eels for sturgeon bait. With his equally taciturn friend Joe Smoker, he embarked on a career as a poacher, snagging salmon from the creek and hooking trout in private ponds. “Joe was a half-breed Indian from a large poor family, and all he had to offer was friendship. Well, Dad's idea was that friendship was a waste of time if it didn't offer any capital gain. He warned me to stay away from Joe. But we stayed friends for years.”

During spawning runs the good companions killed gravid salmon with spears or arrows. “I was caught breaking the game laws so many times that the wardens stopped chasing me. If they saw me fishing, they'd just drive to our house and wait. They knew I sneaked trout and salmon home under my overcoat. Once I was caught fishing in a stocked pond, and the farmer shot me in the back with a load of rock salt. Mom took out the salt with tweezers. Thank God she never told Dad.”

 

Like most of the other residents of the leafy town of Chilliwack, Les Jesperson wasn't averse to a little poaching on his own. He taught his son to lie facedown on the dock and grab salmon by the tail. It was one of Keith's fondest memories. “We would do it together. Poaching wasn't much of an offense where we lived. Getting caught was the crime. Dad was a city official, and he didn't like to be embarrassed in front of the other politicians.”

Sometimes the Jesperson males prowled the creek banks for muskrats. “I'd yank one out of the water by its tail and throw it up on the bank. Then Dad or one of my brothers would club it to death. We also killed gophers, hundreds of 'em. They were a farm pest, and nobody missed 'em. Dad has films of us boys blood-spattered from killing gophers and other varmints. It was our form of recreation. After we grew up and got married, Dad liked to show the film to our wives. He would joke, ‘Watch my natural-born killers as they dispense of their victims! You don't want to run into
them
in a dark alley.'”

To the squeamish Les pointed out, “The farmers wanted those gophers killed. We were doing them a favor.”

 

Like many other rural fathers, the alpha-male encouraged his sons to hunt. When they were small, he provided them with BB guns to sharpen their shooting eyes. He carefully warned his boys not to shoot at people, but Keith had his own interpretation of the rule. “To me that meant, Don't shoot people in the face. Everywhere else was okay. I would pretend to be a sniper and sting the other kids good. I shot my neighbor's penis while he was taking a leak. He pissed all over himself.”

Les handcrafted high-powered slingshots with surgical tubing and warned his sons not to shoot anyone above the elbows. Keith soon learned that marbles produced a true trajectory, and he let loose at the rear end of an overweight neighbor who was bending over to pick raspberries. “I got caught and she took me straight to Dad. She was limping and crying, putting it on. Dad tried to keep a straight face. He told her he couldn't punish me till he got a good look at the evidence. After he finished laughing at his own joke, he gave me a light spanking in front of her. This time he used his hands instead of the belt.”