Dead Men Talking

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  I guess, about 00:30 Sunday morning, I carried Taunja Bennett’s body out to the car and sat her in the front passenger seat, shut the door, and her bloodied head, with the rope still tied around her neck, slid up against the window in plain view, she would ride that way, is if asleep, as I drove to the Vista House monument, and further east down to discovering a dark-looking ravine to toss her away.

  Now, you may all be thinking how cold-blooded I may seem to be. But, put yourself in my position where a woman has given me permission to hit her, and the hitting continues until death comes to her. Your options are limited, period. You go to jail for the rest of your life or you try to stay out of prison.

  Once the job is done, it is all about thinking and rationalising on the way to complete the business efficiently. It makes sense to me, and anyway, Bennett was now dead and would know nothing about her body’s disposal, so strip away emotions and look at the options left to me, and then think common sense.

  Now, parked above the ravine, I get out of the car and looked back up the hill at the Vista House to see if any headlights were coming down the hill. None were. So, I went to the passenger door, opened it, and grabbed Bennett’s arm and pulled her out into the darkness. Immediately, her jeans slid to her ankles as her body slid along the cold, wet leaves on the ground.

  At this place, the ravine is really steep and her body slides faster than I can safely walk. I grab at her top and hold onto her sweater to keep the body with me. This causes me to slide over her breasts, then shit happened. I hunched over to squeeze under a bush and, at about eight-five feet down that mean ravine, we stop.

  I could see headlights piercing the darkness from below. Those lights were right at me. I realize my error. Only one switchback on that road we were on and I was trying to hide a body in the middle of it. Now, with people looking up the ravine, I knew that Bennett would be found sometime soon. As for the present? I was about to be discovered and I needed to get THE HELL OUT OF THERE. No time…not a minute, not a second to waste in covering up the body. I scaled the hill, passed that bush, and ran to the car and hit first gear. Lots of things happen for a reason. You want to see a big man sweat buckets in the northwest USA in winter – watch him do what I did with Ms Bennett that night, and understand why a BIG man sweats.

  When I pulled Bennett from my car, what I didn’t know was that her body would drag from the car my jack knife with a red handle for the police to find. I would later miss it, but not know where it went. The switchblade really messed with my head. Over the next years I would think of how stupid I was – or just how lucky, or unlucky I was that night. You know, thoughts like this kinda eat into your head. You know, I didn’t know that on the hour – every hour that passed – a Multnomah County Sheriff’s car patrolled the area…and they kept a good account of the goings on along that Crown Point highway.

  Anyways, in the car I drove east along the roadway towards the only switchback. Into the turn my headlights would light up the side of the car coming in the other direction…we passed like two ships in the night at sea. Neither one knowing who we were, I did read the Multnomah Sheriff’s sign on the side of the car. Had I been a few minutes late, he could have caught me in the act of pulling Bennett into the ravine. Good luck on my part. Bad luck in not being able to hide her body under some old leaves.

  Back on the interstate I kicked off my cycling shoes and tossed them away – one here and one there, a mile apart. Montgomery Gentry – What do you think about that?

  Finding Bennett’s tape player, that Walkman, with a tape by Soul to Soul in it, I tossed it into onto the bridge over the Sandy River. I knew it would soon be nothing but a pile of plastic pieces. Then I pulled into the Burns Brothers truck stop, in Troutdale. Parked my car so I could see it from a booth in the restaurant and put on my running shoes and went inside. Sat down. Ordered coffee, and relaxed – not for long.

  Big man sweats when fear hit again. Three Oregon State Police cruisers pulled in and parked next to my car. One car had been working hard. A hub cap was missing and hot, sump oil dripped onto the ground. Their red/white/blue strobes were off. The law walked into the restaurant. Big men, heavily armed. Mean, confident men. They sat down in the booth next to mine. One even nodded to me a ‘hello’. We knew each other, and there we were, talking to each other and these three ‘super cops’ had NO idea I had become a murderer that night.

  This episode sort of relaxed me from being totally paranoid over what I had done to Bennett. The talk on the phone with Roberta had come at a time when I needed to slow down and think it all out. That hour of talking ‘I love you’s’ to her had done that for me. Good luck.

  I guess that you’ll never understand me. Big man, trucker and used to using his hands for his work – never beating on a woman and then killing her. But, when the sun came up I returned to my car and discovered Bennett’s purse under the front passenger seat. I went through it. $2 dollars plus 11 cents, thereabouts. It went into my pocket. What to do with the purse and the other contents? This is the key evidence to her existence. This is the real evidence that could link me to the Bennett murder. Her existence, in picture form…an Oregon State identification card with her photo on it. I thought of just tossing it into a trash can. If I had, then history would have been different, today. What I did would secure in time, her existence.

  My decision is to drive up the Sandy River Road and find someplace no one would ever go to look for something. So, I drove through Troutdale, past the local police station, and crossed the Sandy River on the old bridge and turned south on the river road. Miles later, I found the road rising up and turning east away from the river. A ‘Y’ in the road went sharply up the hill to my left. On my right is an entanglement of blackberry bushes. I looked for a wide spot to park. About a hundred yards further south I parked on the east side of the roadway. On the river side, just twenty feet down the embankment, I saw an old stump of a cedar tree just under the telephone lines. It would serve to me as a beacon to identify the spot I’d throw away Bennett’s purse and its contents. Just forty or so feet south of the stump, and forty feet down into the poison oak and blackberry entrails, I tossed all of the purse’s contents and her purse. No one drove by. No one saw me do this. Time to get back home. But, today, looking back, I should have poured gas over the purse and reduced the item to ashes.

  The stench of death hit me when I entered the house at 18434 NE Everett Street. It was as if Taunja Bennett was still there, in the home – her smell hung in the rooms. That was when I noticed just how much blood spatter there was on the walls and ceiling.

  Opening all the windows, the cool air smelled and felt good. Warm water and Dipsol with a rag helped to remove much of the blood. Down at Albertson’s store, I’d next rent a stem-vacuum cleaner to hopefully remove the urine from the carpet. This cleaning process lasted all afternoon. After returning the cleaner, shutting the doors and windows, I finally found the bed and slept. I would have no idea that by noon Bennett’s body had been found and removed from the ravine.

  At about 10 am, just nine hours after I put Bennett’s body down the ravine, a cyclist noticed something out of place. The woman got off her bike and went closer to see what it was. Realizing it to be a dead female, she rode to the nearest phone to call up the police, and, in doing so, she became the first suspect in the murder of Taunja Ann Bennett.

  Keith Jesperson, in a letter to the author.

  It might be somewhat long-winded, but is this an accurate account of the murder? No, it is not. In fact, once he had taken her inside the Jespersons’ home, he locked the door and drew the curtains, imprisoning Taunja. When she refused his predatory advances, he raped her several times, which totally contradicts the story he gave to me, for elsewhere he has claimed:

  I pumped another orgasm into her and then I looked down and with my dick inside her, I decided to knock her out with one punch… I smashed this girl twenty times – rights, lefts, jabs, uppercuts, hooks, I punched her till I couldn’t recognise her fa
ce and then I punched her some more. When I stopped her face was squashed – broken nose, broken jaw, teeth sticking through her lips…then I strangled her until my hands turned white.

  Subsequently a 57-year-old woman called Laverne Pavlinac, and her dim-witted, abusive boyfriend, John Sosnovske, 43, were arrested and found guilty of Taunja’s murder. They would spend five years behind bars until Jesperson confessed the killing, but that is a story for another day.

  * * *

  Soon after killing Taunja Bennett, Jesperson found work as a long-haul truck driver working from Washington to Oregon, zigzagging to California, Montana, Nebraska, even New York and Florida, with all states in between. And we may imagine this 6ft 5in, good-looking man, hauling potatoes, steel, and aluminium across the USA, his plum-coloured Peterbilt gleaming, and his plaid shirt well pressed, all-American clean.

  Shortly after murdering Taunja Bennett, Jesperson, who was seeking work in California, raped a young woman whom he met while she breastfed her baby in a bar at a shopping centre in Shasta. The woman had just argued with her husband, who had stormed off, and she was downing a few Jack Daniel’s to settle her nerves when Jesperson approached her. With her drink finished, she asked him if he would walk her to a nearby Jiffy Mart to buy some beer. They carried the twelve-pack to his car, and drove out to the country, where Jesperson said they enjoyed mutual sex – at least this is what he says in his ‘new’ autobiography: ‘Chris, I never raped this woman. She was drunk. I promise you it was a mutual thing. Then she called the cops on me and I got arrested. I would never have done that in front of a baby.’

  Nevertheless, he has previously told an entirely another story, one which has been corroborated by the victim in her police statement:

  I grabbed her by the hair and shoved her face down – and that made me even hotter. I was about to orgasm when a whimper came from the back seat and she pulled off. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m married and I don’t need this. Drive me home, please.’ I shoved her back on my cock as hard as I could. […] She started screaming at me, so I put her in a headlock and yanked hard. I was trying to break her neck, but I just couldn’t get the leverage. It takes a lot of leverage to break a human neck. I tried three times before the baby cried in the back seat and she yelled, ‘Don’t hurt my baby!’ So, I dropped her off at the same place I met her. That was my big mistake. I should have killed her.

  Jesperson was later charged with first-degree sexual assault (rape), and the punishment was combined with his sentences for multiple murders.

  According to Keith Jesperson, he didn’t kill again until the late summer of 1992, when he murdered a woman, known only as Jane Doe, and dumped her body ten miles north of Blythe, California. He was certainly in the area at the time, working for the Cheney Trucking Company, and he remembers her name being ‘Claudia’.

  He says that he was parked at the brake-check area on I-15 close to San Bernardino, California, ‘when a girl, wearing tight bleached-out blue jeans, loose white top, big tits, called out to me. She wasn’t beautiful, but pretty enough,’ he said, and according to Jesperson they rode for a while, enjoyed mutual sex until she demanded money. Trapped in his ‘Pete’, he raped her again and again. ‘At the next truck stop, I screwed her till I couldn’t get it up anymore. It was supreme, it was total gratification. I’m running this show, bitch, you’re mine.’

  In truth, Jesperson did a lot more than rape the young hitchhiker, he tortured her:

  I started to play a little death game with her, use her like a toy, an amusement. I choked her, let her wake up, choked her again, let her wake up again. That’s the kind of game I should have played with Taunja Bennett….After I choked her the third time, I waited ten or fifteen minutes till she revived. I said, ‘Take a deep breath. Count to ten. Now – hold your breath.’ Then I choked her out again. When she woke up, I told her to count to nine and squeezed her neck again. I was playing with her like a cat with a mouse. As the game went on I’d tell her to count to eight, seven, six, five. I was breaking her mind. I wanted her to accept that one of those times she wouldn’t wake up. Finally she caught on and just accepted the game.

  ‘Claudia’ gave up the will to live.

  When I asked Keith to give me the details of this murder, all he would say was, ‘I remember giving her a ride, we had a fuck which was nothing special, then she demanded money. That pissed me off so I just strangled her. There was no rape or torture at all.’

  We can also be 100 per cent sure that Jesperson killed 32-year-old Cynthia Lynn Rose, whose body was found along US Highway 99, near Turlock, California. She had been dead for some weeks and it was originally thought that she had died of a drugs overdose, but the medical examiner determined that she had been strangled. Jesperson would later tell police that she was a hooker. He had picked her up for sex and then killed her.

  * * *

  In his new autobiography, and throughout his correspondence with me, Keith has consistently argued that he has never raped anyone, and he is adamant that he never went looking for victims. But this pathological liar, in the first week of November 1992, picked up 26-year-old Laurie Ann Pentland, whom he raped, choked to death and dumped behind a GI Joe store in Salem, Oregon. He was on the Pacific Coast, with a load of meat northbound out of Selma, California, and he went searching for a hooker – a ‘lot lizard’ – he knew who serviced the drivers at a Burns Brothers Truck Stop on the I-5, at Wilsonville. In a sanitised version, he told me that they had mutual sex and then she demanded more money, and because of this she had given him ‘permission to kill her’. In truth, he raped, beat and tortured this victim for hours on end.

  Two more Jane Doe’s followed, the first in July 1993. The body was found near a truck stop on I-5, west of Santa Nella, California. The remains of a second woman, aged about 40, were discovered by a road crew on Wednesday, 14 September 1994, west of Crestview, Florida. Jesperson would later claim that her name was ‘Susan’.

  Victim number seven was 21-year-old Angela Subrize, who hailed from Oklahoma. She was murdered by Jesperson in January 1995. Her body would remain undiscovered until the following September, when body parts were found along a Nebraska highway.

  Jesperson said that during that January, he had been hauling product for California Steel and had headed for Spokane in his Peterbilt. Due to a mechanical failure, his brakes seized and the tractor unit caught fire. The Sterling Fire Department arrived, extinguished the blaze and Keith was forced to wait while another tractor was brought in so he could continue on his way.

  While hanging around in Spokane, his company put him up in Room 425 of the Ridpath Hotel, and it was then that he met Angela Subrize, who was sitting, drinking beer, in a café booth. The date was Thursday, 19 January. According to Jesperson:

  She was a very beautiful woman, and she told me she was an exotic dancer, in other words a stripper. We went to my room…she went to the bathroom and came out dressed in leather. Her dance was actually rather stupid. Rubbing all over me…pushing my hand away so I couldn’t touch her. Then, after she felt how hard I was, she let me kiss her and we fell into bed. The sex was great. We kept at it till nearly three in the morning.

  Jesperson says that over the following days, Angela accompanied him as he drove along his route. However, the novelty of having a such available female company in his cab soon wore off, and she started to get on his nerves by asking him to drive her to visit people in towns not on his itinerary. She obviously had no money, and she asked Keith if she could use his AT&T phone card to call her father for some assistance, but her dad refused her out of hand. Shortly afterwards, Angela asked to use the phone card again; this time speaking with a former boyfriend and telling him that she was pregnant.

  Business is business. Pleasure is what we make of it, some call it ‘Divine Intervention’. Others call it ‘the Butterfly Effect’. What goes on in order for something to materialise into something else. A meeting of souls that could never have met had the stars not been ali
gned properly. I call it fate. That it was bound to happen. Because of the variables at play made the two of us collide into each other’s path. If it is for good, then call it a good thing. If it turns out bad, then the Devil must have been to blame. However we call it, it isn’t called control. For like I have said before, it is hard to control everything that goes around us.

  Keith Jerperson, in a letter to the author.

  Ever the philosopher who expects that every word he utters should be chiselled into stone and passed down to the generations to follow, the hypocrite that is Jesperson writes:

  I get questions all the time from people asking how is it I picked my victims…and I tell them they picked me. They chose to be with me. It was their decision to push me along to do their will. I was just a person listening to them dig their own graves. My reason for killing changed over time. At first it was to get rid of the assault charge I could have faced over Bennett. Then it was to silence Claudia from manipulating others. Then came the tongue-lashing of Cynthia that just felt wrong, and my helping Pentland not to have to deal with her miserable life. Of saving Karla’s family from disappointment. Susan was just too bizarre…a true nut job that gave me clues right away when she wanted me to drive her to Miami.

  I guess the real big issue here is I accepted murder into my everyday life. Normal for me to deal with – to justify it in my life. But also know that society saw it as wrong and that it was to be kept under wraps. ‘Would I kill again?’ I thought to myself. And I answered, ‘Yes – someday. But not today, I don’t have the time for it’.

  These are chilling words enough from the pen of a serial murderer, but what follows sends a shiver up the spine: