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Keith remembered being impressed into his father's workforce when he was eleven. “Dad had a huge work ethic. He said that if we worked our asses off we would grow up to be big and strong and successful. If we didn't work hard, we'd grow up to be bums. Me, I just wanted to be a kid for a few more years. Mom thought my brothers and I should start Sunday school, but Dad said the Bible was a crutch for the weak and we could make up our minds about religion when we were grown. “Right now,” he says, “you're gonna work on Sundays. And you're gonna pay room and board.” He said his dad charged him and his brothers room and board, too, and it taught them the value of money.

“He put us to work cleaning nuts and bolts that he'd soaked in barrels of oil as part of a contract for salvaging a Fraser River bridge. We scrubbed them with wire brushes till they gleamed. Sharp little shreds kept getting under our fingernails—hurt like hell.

“When we finally finished with the nuts and bolts, he made us mow and bale our hay. If he didn't have a job for us, he'd create one. Work was his church, and he was the preacher. He put my older sister Sharon out of the house when she was sixteen and told her not to come back till she got a job.”

In addition to working for his father, eleven-year-old Keith began delivering morning newspapers. The
Province
was published daily, and the boy took pride in delivering in the harsh Canadian weather. On the worst days his mother chauffeured him in her Ford Falcon.

Adults on his seven-mile route took a liking to the curly-haired boy, and for the first time he began to feel a slight kinship with adults. On collection day some of his customers would leave exact change on their front porches, and others would put out larger bills and notes and expect him to leave the correct change. He was surprised by the show of trust from strangers. “I liked everybody on my paper route. I even liked the dogs that snapped at me till I got to know them. I gave good service, and I got good tips. Some of my customers would have a cup of hot chocolate waiting when I rode up on my bike. I began to get the idea that people were pretty good at heart—a few, anyway.”

 

In fifth grade Keith began a friendship with a neighborhood boy named Reg Routley. Close personal relationships were still rare in his life, and this one flourished. Every day the boys met after school, fished for salmon and trout, hunted rabbits and squirrels, explored the woods, flirted with girls and enjoyed each other's company. Then the head of the Jesperson clan announced that they were leaving the country.

A month after I found out that two innocent people had been sentenced to prison for my murder, my girlfriend Peggy and I headed east with a truckload of lumber for Illinois. As we pushed through an Iowa storm, the heavy wet snow built up on top of our trailer. At the Rock Island check station, the scale master red-lighted me and made me pull around to the parking area. She said we needed to pay eighty-four dollars for overweight and knock off the snow. Otherwise, we couldn't leave.

I said, “I'm not gonna pay. It's your Iowa snow!” In the back of my mind, I'm thinking,
Goddamn it, whenever I get in trouble, it's always a woman.

She told me to wait right there while she stepped inside the shack to check something. She ran my name in her N.C.I.C. computer and came up with a warrant from Shasta County, California. She placed me under arrest on a charge of sexual assault.

Peggy yelled that it was a mistake. I gave her a look that told her to shut up. She was pissed, mostly because she knew she would have to deliver the load by herself and con somebody into doing the untarping.

The scale lady let me clean off the snow so Peggy could drive away. We sat together in the cab for a few minutes and I told her that I might be going down for a long time. I was feeling paranoid and I made the mistake of telling her that while she'd been driving with that other guy in Tennessee, I'd killed a girl in Portland, and they might hold me for that, too. I didn't tell her who I killed. I explained that I did the killing to get in practice for the ex-husband she'd asked me to execute.

At first she acted like she didn't believe my story, but when the truth finally sank in, she flipped, called me every name in the book and then started bawling like a baby. I didn't know what to say to calm her down. Before they drove me away in a sheriff's car, I gave Peg all my money. She was still sniffling when she hauled ass with our load of lumber.

 

At two in the morning I was locked into the county jail. Eight hours later I was arraigned on a charge of first-degree sexual assault and informed I would be extradited to California.

I told the judge that I wouldn't fight the warrant. I said, “I'm innocent, Your Honor, and I want to go back and prove it. But I want you to drop your eighty-four-dollar ticket. It's wrong!” I was sensitive about bum raps, I'd taken too many as a kid. The judge voided the ticket.

 

I was put in a holding cell with sixteen other guys. It was my first real experience with jailbirds. I got up to change the TV channel, and a big black dude said, “You can't do that. You gotta arm-wrestle me for it.”

I pinned him quick. He says, “I wasn't ready.”

“Are you ready now?”

I took him down again. He says, “I slipped.”

I said, “You slipped, huh? Let's do it one more time.” I flung him across the table. I stood up and said, “It's my TV, asshole.” I ruled the roost.

After a few days in the tank one of the Rock Island detectives told me that California's felony warrant was too weak and that they'd reduced the charge to a misdemeanor. The cost of extradition wasn't worth it to them. He said that the next time I was in California, I should report to the courthouse in Yreka and clean things up. No big deal. I knew that Shasta County's hottest blow job would never testify about the night she spent with me and her baby—not for a chickenshit misdemeanor.

Rock Island kicked me loose and I walked to the I-80 truck stop to call my trucking office in Spokane. They sent me two hundred dollars for a Greyhound ticket. On the bus ride I told myself,
Dead people tell no lies, and the next time a woman resists like Jean, she will fucking well die. I am not taking any more of this bullshit!

 

The long bus ride gave me time to think, and I went over things in my mind. Maybe it was just dumb luck, but I killed the girl in Portland and two innocent people took the fall. I assaulted a woman in California, and the cops turned me loose. I'm arrested in Rock Island, and I wiggle out of that one, too.

I realized that I was making fools out of everybody, but it was still a little annoying that nobody knew it. I had mixed feelings of frustration and power, cockiness. I'd finally reached my father's level—smarter than anybody else. I could get away with murder.

 

I couldn't resist rolling the dice again. As I sat on the throne at a Greyhound rest stop in Livingston, Montana, I pulled out my pen. Who reads that graffiti shit anyway? I wrote, “I killed Tanya Bennet January 21, 1990 in Portland Oregon. I beat her to death, raped her and loved it. Yes I'm sick, but I enjoy myself too. People took the blame and I'm free.”

That summed up my attitude—arrogance, pride, superiority. Why not taunt the cops a little? I was in such a good mood that I signed my graffiti with one of those silly little Happy Faces. I was so happy to be free again.

 

I was disappointed that nothing came of my message—not a word in the papers or TV or on radio. I waited two months till I was driving through Umatilla, Oregon, and wrote another restroom note: “Killed Tanya Bennett in Portland. Two people got the blame so I can kill again. (Cut buttons off jeans—proof).”
Let's see them ignore this one.

But they did. When would those stupid cops catch on that they had the wrong people?

My trucking boss in Spokane fired me when he got word about the Shasta case, and Peggy quit the company in protest. In February of '91 I went to Alaska to work on a fish-processing ship, the
Ocean Pride
out of Dutch Harbor. I crewed on that boat for a month and set a new record of 136 boxes an hour, breaking the old record by forty boxes, but the job was a little too dull for my taste. The ocean wasn't for a kid who grew up fishing rivers and streams.

I flew back to Peggy in Portland, caught a few freelance laboring jobs, and then got hired as a trucker out of Yakima, Washington. Peg and her kids stayed at her house in Portland, and I lived in my truck to save money till we could get a place together.

 

I still fantasized about Taunja and how I should have let her live and used her as my personal sex slave. I tried to keep myself busy and healthy and in good physical shape. I kept an Igloo cooler full of Slim Fast diet drink in a cabinet in my truck. On long hauls I could live on one hundred dollars' worth of Slim Fast for a week. I tried to avoid high-bulk foods that made me sleepy. I could chase a can of Slim Fast with a quart of ruby grapefruit juice, pop a handful of NoDoz, and drive for three or four days without sleeping. More than once I drove from one coast to the other, stopping only for fuel.

I didn't think my diet would hurt me, but I noticed that I was getting a little antsy. Sometimes I would pull off the road and jog till my nerves settled down. Late one night I parked my truck on Highway 97 at Lava Butte, just south of Bend, Oregon. A corkscrew road led up to a lookout tower that was usually unmanned. I'd run up there a few times and once talked with a lady lookout, and I knew they had a portable TV and radio. Just for a little excitement I decided to steal their stuff.

I took a pry bar out of my toolbox and headed up the road. When I got near the top, I saw a parked car. It didn't hit me till I was starting to climb the tower steps that the lookout might be manned—better yet, womanned. I began to think about rape.

I felt strong, confident. I felt sweaty and cunning, almost panting. I fantasized about sliding between the woman's legs without any foreplay and making her take it, ready or not. My ex-wife Rose always said that she hated sex because I forced it on her. Now was my chance to force it on a total stranger.
It has to be tonight, sister, right now! And no back talk!
To me forced sex was a total turn-on.

But as I climbed closer I began to see the downside. I realized that I could get my ass in a crack. Was a midnight jump in a lookout tower worth risking the Shasta County bullshit all over again? Getting bit in the ass months after I had my fun? No way. I decided to climb up to the top and jack off to my fantasies.

On the catwalk I looked out toward Bend like a tourist. I was taking my peter out when I saw a flicker of motion below. A car was pulling alongside my truck.

It had to be a cop, so I ditched the pry bar and climbed down. At the bottom I started running wind sprints on the shoulder. By the time I finished, the trooper was gone.

 

When I got back to my trucking office, the boss asked me why I was climbing Lava Butte at midnight. I told him I was jogging like I'd done lots of times before. He said the Bend sheriff called to tell me to stay the hell away from Lava Butte. My boss told me to avoid the lookout trail or he'd fire me.

 

Two weeks later I jogged up Lava Butte and talked to the lookout in broad daylight. I told her I was sorry if I startled her when I made my climb. She said that she was the one who'd reported me. I told her that from now on I'd jog during the day. She said she would tell the other lookouts that I was a regular. I think she liked me. That was the end of another near miss.

The whole incident made me decide that if I had to have forced sex, I'd better stick to hookers. They were in no position to blow the whistle. I figured they deserved whatever they got. Most of them were dopers anyway. I picked up two or three and treated them rough—not beating them, but manhandling them, taking hard sex, getting my money's worth.

 

One night I delivered at Smith Foods in Phoenix and then picked up a hooker with nice titties and hard nipples. After I got her in my sleeper, I wrestled her down and told her to shut up if she knew what was good for her. She panicked and gave up, and I rode her hard for an hour or so before I told her to get lost.

“What about my money?” she yelled when she was out of the cab.

I said, “You weren't a good-enough fuck. Get outa here!”

She stepped up on the running board and sprayed me in the face with a can of pepper mace. My lungs caught fire and I was coughing and trying not to vomit. The only thing that saved my eyes was my glasses.

I drove away fast with my head out the window to dry the stuff off. Now I wasn't just a killer, I was a rapist. What next? I was good and scared. That pepper spray could have been a gun.

I decided to make sure of what the next hooker brought into my truck. It was a year and a half since Taunja, but the thought of taking a woman by force was stronger than ever. God help the next gal that gave me trouble.