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Keith's first sexual fumblings began at five. He kissed a four-year-old girl in the backseat of his mother's station wagon and enjoyed more-intimate sessions in the hayloft. “We practiced sex for a year or so—not sex as adults think, but sex for kids, kissing, touching a little bit, showing what we had. Mostly we kissed. We would kiss until we thought we had it right.”

He met a redheaded beauty at the Unsworth School and felt his first romantic stirrings. “But I only knew kissing, I didn't know romance. We were in the same class from first to sixth grade, and I still think about her. It's part of my fantasizing. When I was grown and living in the States, I would go back to Chilliwack to see her brother, but the real reason was to see her. She developed a rare disease, and the last time I saw her, she was in the hospital. I heard that she died.”

 

Keith's early interest in sex soon led to curiosity and confusion about what went on between his parents. “My first realization was that anytime us kids got the belt, it was in their bedroom. That's where I killed my victims later, in my sleeper with the curtain closed. Maybe there was a connection in my own mind.”

Late at night the boy would sit on the staircase trying to interpret bedroom sounds. “In the daytime I'd hear Dad say, ‘Gladys, why don't you try to look sexy for me? Go to the store and buy something sexy.'
Sexy?
I wished I knew what he meant. It was such a loaded word. Our parents expected us to learn sex by watching animals, but it didn't take long to find out that was only a small part of the story. I wanted to ask Mom to explain, but I couldn't get up the nerve.”

 

Keith and some schoolmates were playing at a neighbor's dairy farm when a workman offered to advance their sexual education. “He stripped and made us do the same. He said that sex was touching our peepees together, and he started to play with his pecker until it got larger and erect. Then he asked us to touch him. He was making a move on a boy when I grabbed my clothes and ran. He yelled at me to not tell anyone. I thought,
Don't worry! I won't.

“Later I asked the boy how he liked it. He said that it hurt and he told his father what happened and his father told him to keep it quiet. The dairyman did it to him doggy style and after it was over he forced him to lick his pecker. I was disgusted and didn't want to hear about it. We never saw that man again. I always wondered how he got that way.”

 

Keith became even more confused about sex during a camping trip with his father and friends. He'd learned a song from an older boy, and he sang it to one of his father's friends en route to the campsite. “He laughed so hard he nearly ran his car off the road. Around the campfire that night everybody was drinking, and he told my dad that Keith knew a cute song. Dad ordered me to sing it. I said, ‘Dad, it's got some bad words.' Dad said, ‘Sing it, Son!' I said, ‘Do you promise not to hit me?'”

Les promised, and Keith sang a long, bawdy song that began:

And ended:

Keith feared dire punishment, but his father kept his word. “After that, Dad turned me into his little monkey on a string. He'd haul me out in front of women and everybody else to sing that song. Around the house we couldn't even whisper words like
breast
or
sex
. But in front of company I could use words like ‘buttfuck.' I couldn't figure adults out.”

Throughout his life Keith remained troubled about an incident that happened when he was nine and still living in Chilliwack:

To Keith one of his rural acquaintanceships seemed to echo his relationship with his father. A neighbor boy was the same age and in the same class, and the two should have been close friends. But something about Keith seemed to provoke the boy. “I was his punching bag. We were swimming at Cultus Lake when he tried to drown me. He held my head below the surface, let me come up for air, then pushed me down again. After five or ten minutes of this I started to see black. I believe my life was spared by the counselor that jumped in the pool and pulled him off.”

Keith realized that he had to stand up to the bully sooner or later. “At the public swimming pool I held him under till a lifeguard pulled me off. I had every intention of drowning him. I guess you could say it was the second murder attempt of my childhood. The other was that little bastard Martin. It was like I only had one way to fight—all-out.”

With a shaky balance of power established in the Jesperson neighborhood, a small clique of boys accepted Keith and began to teach him some of their techniques of animal torture. “They would blow up a sparrow with a two-inch firecracker. I can still hear the sound, smell the smell.
Boom!
A puff of feathers would float down. With the robins and jays it just blew their legs off. They nailed crows to a board and threw knives at them. That's how they killed Blackie.”

The boys force-fed Alka-Seltzer to seagulls till their stomachs burst, nailed cats and small dogs to a board and stuck them with nails and needles. “Our favorite thing was to crimp a couple of cats' tails together with wire and hang them over a rope. They'd claw each other till one was dead. The winner would yowl and scream till it died from its own wounds while we sat and watched.”

 

Before long Keith had become a participant in the torture games, always leaving his dog Duke home in case the blood lust got out of hand. “We'd take firecrackers and set 'em off in a cat's mouth or up its ass. We'd do this till the cat died. In the winter we used a box and string to catch birds eating our grain. We'd inject them with bleach and watch them shake and die. That's what we did for fun. Pretty soon it felt like a normal thing to do.”

 

Soon Keith added the excitement of arson to the excitement of animal torture. He'd always found an odd comfort in watching fires dwindle down to the last ember. “I'd ask to be the one who lit the burn barrel. I found that aerosol cans blew up in fire. I'd act like it was an accident when I threw in a half can of hair spray. A ball of flame would jump up like a miniature atomic bomb. Butane lighters exploded, too.

“Campfires were so soothing, I'd sit there for hours after everybody else had turned in. Sometimes I'd find bugs and toss 'em in, hear 'em crackle and split their skins. Or I'd throw an old log full of bugs in the flames and watch 'em scramble. When I was ten, Joe Smoker and I got hold of some Roman candles and shot them at each other. One of his grandfather's junker cars caught fire and we spent the next ten minutes putting it out. Nobody found out who did it.”

 

The companions weren't so lucky when they accidentally torched an empty house owned by a neighbor named Webster. “We started a fire in the fireplace and a spark flew into a stack of newspapers. We put it out and ran. A half hour later we heard the fire trucks. That old house burned to the ground. Someone saw me running and told on me, and I had to take the blame.

“I knew better than to argue with Dad about it. In his eyes, denying blame was as bad as being guilty. I was punished and had to pay off my neighbor with my life savings—almost fifty bucks. Later on the neighbor told Dad he collected on the insurance and was glad we'd burnt the place down. He never thought to give me back my money.”

 

In his endless accounting of raw deals and childhood disappointments, Keith claimed that he was forced to take the blame for the bullying of a smaller boy by his younger brother Brad. As in almost all his reminiscences, he cast his father as villain. “Brad came home in a panic and asked me if a grown-up had called. He told me that he got in a fight with a kid and the parent threatened to call Dad. When the phone rang later that afternoon, I answered it. The man accused me of beating up his son. Then he asked me my name and I told him. He said he would call back to talk to Dad that evening.

“When the call came, Dad answered. I saw him stare hard at me. As usual he'd been drinking. When he put down the phone, he punched me with his fist.
⁴
He said he would teach me what it felt like to be beat up by a bully. I told him it wasn't me and he called me a liar. After he was finished, Brad stepped up and took the blame. Dad taught him a lesson as well. When it was all over, I waited for an apology. As usual Dad told me to consider it a learning experience.”