Dead Men Talking

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  I really never had enough time for killing. It seemed to present itself at the moment. A fast decision to end a life based on an inner set of requirements. And, that list seemed to be adding more things to it, to include reasons to kill. Never saw myself as God or Judge or Jury. Just someone that took care of business. Murder is a job. Something once you start, you have to see all the way through. No stopping in the middle to change your mind and say: ‘I’ve decided to let you go today. Let this be a lesson to you. Now, scoot.’ You have to end it once you start moving on them. Once you commit to it there is no going back.

  Angela Subrize’s last day on Earth found her trucking with Jesperson in icy conditions, leaving Wyoming and crossing into Nebraska on I-80, and ‘then it happened’, writes Jesperson…

  I hit a patch of blade ice in a corner at mile marker 58, or so. My trailer tried to pass me and I rode the gas and steered into the skid. When I got all straightened up, my nose of the tractor pointed into the rest area and I drove into it and parked up far away from the other rigs.

  This near fatal incident scared Jesperson and decided to stay where he was and catch up on his much-needed sleep. However, he says that Subrize would have none of it. Every time he nodded off she woke him up, demanding they move on. Suddenly Keith snapped:

  I grabbed her by the neck and pulled her onto the bed, my weight shifted and my arm’s pressure pushed her into the mattress. ‘You said you weren’t going to hurt me,’ she said, ‘why are you hurting me now?’ My arm pushed down on her and she lost her voice. Her eyes – her gray, wolf-like eyes started back at me. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Angela, I’m going to kill you and save your boyfriend a lifetime of pain being with you.’ Several minutes later I smelled her body release her fluids and solids. She was dead. I sat there, looking at her. ‘Stupid bitch!’ I yelled at her.

  ‘Then I got to thinking as I played it all out in my head. I fucked up. I’d called her father using my AT&T calling card. Certainly Angela had a criminal record. They find her body and retrace the records and Daddy remembers two phone calls…back-track them to me and I’m in prison. There had to be a way to get rid of her identification. I would think of one. But all of a sudden I was awake and alert and hungry. I rolled Angela into a blanket and layed her against the sleeper wall and got back into the driver’s seat and pulled back out onto the interstate. As luck would have it ran out of ice and snow just east of that rest area.

  Keith Jesperson, in a letter to the author.

  Just ahead, Jesperson saw a signs for McDonald’s and Burger King. He pulled in and ordered. Now sitting in his sleeper he ate the burger as well as one he had cynically bought for the dead woman. ‘You could have been eating this if you just could have left me alone. What? Cat got your tongue…nothing to say, huh?’ he muttered to her. ‘I laughed at the one-sided conversation.’

  Jesperson hit the road again, all the while thinking how he could dispose of Angela Subrize’s body. Then it came to him: ‘I remembered the tale of some guy tying his dog’s leash to the trailer hitch and forgetting to untie it and driving off. By the time someone had pulled him over, the dog was a pile of flesh – what was left of it.’

  My plan was to put Angela under my trailer and drag her flesh along I-80 for several miles to grind away her identification.

  The way the traffic flowed late at night and early that morning offered me a way to get away with doing it. The cars and trucks were gathering in clusters of vehicles. One cluster would move along at 70 mph, then nothing for about three miles and another cluster of cars and trucks would come along. Figured I could pull out onto the interstate behind a cluster of cars and rigs and cruise at my governor speed of 64 mph…that over a period of time, the cluster ahead of me would leave me behind and the cluster behind would catch me. Then, I could just exit the road and pull onto the shoulder and cut what was left of Angela away from my trailer and deposit her in the tall grass on the shoulder before the next cluster caught me. About three minutes to do it all. Then pull along the shoulder and come in behind the cluster of rigs. It worked out in theory in my head. All I had to do was is implement it and pull out onto the freeway undetected by anyone.

  Keith Jesperson, in a letter to the author

  At this point, on page 309 of his correspondence to the author, Jesperson drew three pen sketches: the first was a side view of his rig; the second was a drawing of Angela with a noose tied around her neck; the third shows how he had trussed her up.

  It would take time to get it all ready to pull off. First I tied a rope around her neck with one end and made a loop in the other for a handle to pull her body out of the cab and along the ground.

  Next I had to tie a rope to her ankles – one end to each ankle. This would be the rope I would tie the frame rope to, and it also gave me a handle to position the body under the trailer.

  I needed her arms to wear off first. So, I taped them in front of her in a cross so to sit them on the ground’s surface and they would have her weight on them. I got a length of rope and got under the trailer and tied it to a cross-member in front of the trailer tines. I pulled it tight as I looked to see where the body would ride. I wanted it to lay under the axles so the tires would shield any prying eyes should I get a flyer flying by at mach speed. […] I could feel the extra drag on the power as I applied more power. The friction was very real. I picked up speed and got to 64 mph longer than I had hoped for. It was a waiting game. My nerves were tight. Still a lot could go wrong. The miles clicked by. At ten miles the cluster coming up behind were gaining fast. At eleven miles, I turned on my turn signal to exit onto the shoulder, then coasted up to mile marker 210, twelve miles from the rest area.

  Keith Jesperson, in a letter to the author.

  After the following cluster of cars and rigs passed by, Jesperson climbed down from his cab and under his trailer where he cut the rope and pulled what was left of Angela into the grass on the shoulder, leaving it about three feet from a fence. He drove on to Grand Island, pulled off the road, parked up and went to sleep.

  The following day, Keith carried on east to Lincoln, crossed Highway 2 to Interstate 29 south, and ended up in Kansas City, Missouri. But what of Angela Subrize?

  Reflecting back, Jesperson says:

  Her arms were gone. The front of her skull from her ears forward was gone. All of her chest cavity was gone – as well as her internal organs. The Jesperson sure-fire weight reduction plan was a success. About 60 per cent of her weight had been ground off by the rough surface of Interstate 80.

  There had been a tense moment after I dropped my pliers and it took me 20 seconds to find them. Then a driver called on the radio to see if I needed help and my answer made me laugh to myself, ‘No, thank you. Just getting rid of some dead weight. I need no help doing this.’

  Was I worried? No one would see the birds eating her as strange. Deer die all the time and are eaten along I-80. The people in the cars and trucks would just assume it had to be a road kill…only this dead deer had only two legs. Feeling that I had gotten rid of her identity, I felt safe, but when her body was found in late 1995, she was identified by a pin’s serial number in her hip. As a child she had broke her hip and it was pinned together. Another ten miles would have taken care of that.

  Jesperson’s final ‘road kill’ was that of 41-year-old Julie Winningham, of Camas, Washington State. She was strangled and dumped nude, like the others, along a roadside on Friday, 10 March 1995. The body had been dumped over an embankment alongside State Highway 14, just east of the Clark and Skamania county line. However, this time everything was different. Keith had been dating Julie on an on-and-off basis and Julie’s friends and relatives soon suspected Jesperson as being the killer. Here, published for the first time, is Jesperson’s account of the murder:

  It was Saturday, 4 March 1995, and he was waiting over the weekend for a new load at the Burn Brothers truck stop, in Troutdale, Oregon. While sitting in the truck stop’s restaurant, he saw a ‘cute woman who was trying to g
et a ride east’. He recalls that, ‘she smelled like she had worn those clothes for several days so I offered her the use of the bathroom in my room to clean up in. She accepted.’ Keith tried his luck by asking her if she’d like to share his bed. She politely refused and she spent that night sitting in the restaurant.

  The following morning, Jesperson checked out of the motel. All of the rooms had been booked for a convention and they could not spare him another night. Putting his bags in the cab, he unhitched his load, planning to visit a few local spots he wanted to see. He ate breakfast, and again noticed the woman, who appeared tired and hungry. Then he left, asking the waitress to give her what she wanted to eat and that he would pay for it when he returned later in the day. Moments later he saw Julie Winningham talking with two other people in the hallway:

  Our eyes met, but I just didn’t want to see her. Had to think about this, so I sat down in the washroom and thought it through. She could be had, she had a weakness to alcohol and marijuana. Should I hook up with her? Sure I would get laid, but so would my bank account. I thought long and hard.

  I had the time for at least one more night of drama. Why not? How hard could it be? Buy her a few drinks. Promise her the world and her legs flew apart. And, it is just that easy, especially if she needs something I can provide her with at the time.

  ‘Done with business, I turned toward her when I exited the restroom. She looked hot…halter top and little white shorts…no underwear. She had to be hooking. She was advertising everything. We hugged as she said, ‘Hello stranger, want to go have coffee?’ I asked, and we walked to the restaurant.

  After the coffee, Jesperson invited Julie to his truck for a little privacy. He watched as she strutted her ass, putting a wide swing to it, ‘to give me a show of flirting,’ he recalls. ‘She needed something. She had not lit up a smoke yet, could it be that she was penniless? She needed me…she needed something.’

  According to Jesperson, this is what took place next:

  Climbing into the cab, she cocked her leg exposing her pussy. Definitely she wanted me to supply something, but right now all I cared about was to get laid. In the cab she became the aggressor…a long, hard kiss ended with her taking me by my hand to bed. The sex was rushed but good sex. My personal opinion of Julie is she hated to have sex because it was messy. No way would she ever do oral sex on me. From what she talked about, I gather she hooked and the demon for oral sex sickened her. She gave up the pussy because it worked better for her. Then we got dressed and she took me to see her car, a 1981 AMC Spirit, only it had been in a crash. I would hear all about the crash, because, like I said, she needed me.

  Julie had been driving while drunk through Camas, and a traffic cop pulled her car over. He wrote her a ticket and impounded her driver’s license. He knew her and gave her a break – if she had somewhere to drive her car, he would let her go. Julie found a woman to drive her car away, but several blocks away, Julie took the wheel again, ran a red light and was T-boned by another car. The same cop shows up and Julie provides him with a second driver’s license. This time the cop takes her to jail and she bails out pending an upcoming trial to see if she will do some more jail times. The trial was scheduled for March 9th at 10:00 am.

  From her story, I could see she was in trouble and all the help I could give her would not keep her from going to jail. So, for a while, and while I was in town, Julie would do all she could to make me think I could help her out and keep her from jail.

  With Julie trying to use Jesperson to help her out, and with Keith getting all the free sex he could want, both parties were onto a winner – that was until Julie hit the bottle in a local bar and ordered scores of drinks, which she demanded Keith should pay for.

  If anything, Keith Jesperson is certainly nobody’s fool and he was furious, but he soon calmed down. He agreed to drive Julie over to see her mother in the morning, and to visit her lawyer in Camas; all the while, in the back of his mind was the thought that he would be railroaded into paying for her lawyer’s bill and her fines.

  Over the next few days, and, as Julie’s court hearing loomed, Jesperson says she became even more of a drunken liability. She was conned out of her car by a woman she hardly knew, and Keith found himself being conned into signing and witnessing the bill of sale for the car. The sex between them didn’t stop as she tried to make him feel good and sympathetic towards her. In fact, it got to the point where Keith says, ‘I was sexually exhausted and couldn’t get it up any longer.’

  Crunch time came during the evening of 8th March, when Julie and Keith were naked in his cab. She said to him, ‘Tomorrow I go to court. I need you to tell the judge you will be there for me. Tell him you will make sure the fines get paid. Promise me you will do this for me, Keith?’

  He replied, ‘Julie, I can’t be there for you to pay your fines. I just don’t have the money. I’ll show up as moral support only.’

  Apparently, Julie responded with, ‘Damn you, Keith. I need you to tell the judge so I won’t have to go to jail. I can’t go to jail. I don’t like jail.’

  Jesperson was now laughing, and his laughter increased, ‘Julie, you are going to jail,’ he chuckled. ‘Get used to it. You did it to yourself.’

  ‘Keith, I can’t go to jail. I’ll die if they put me in jail. Promise me I won’t go to jail!’

  Jesperson’s reaction was terrifying:

  And there it was, my solution…she had said others things as well, like bringing my kids into it. That she would be a good mother for my kids – yes, right! A drunken, pot-smoking crazy bitch that likes to put everyone in danger after she drove a car. No way could I allow her near my kids.

  She opened the door to my way of thinking. To keep her from jail, I could fulfil a promise by killing her. She faced jail, said it would kill her. I was just making sure she didn’t have to face it ever. Better to have been killed by someone else than to die of your own stupidity. My mind was made up in an instant. Julie was going to die. My laughter caught her off guard. She was not happy over the developments in my demeanour. Oh, well!

  The look on her face was priceless to me…total shock when I pushed her under me and held my hand to her throat to keep her from breathing. I wasn’t going to kill here there, just put her under, so to make her more cooperative to deal with. A few minutes later she was unconscious and I used duct tape to secure her so she couldn’t walk or use her hands or talk. Then I got dressed and drove out of the area – heading east on Highway 14 toward Stevenson and the Camas Pass.

  As I drove, Julie woke up and she panicked. Leaning forward she was able to sit on the bed and when I stopped at a stop sign, she fell forward and cut herself on a piece of metal on my seat and layed there on the floor bleeding. I could smell faeces…she had shit herself and the soft diarrhoea sprayed the bottom of my sleeper. At the top of Camas Pass, I got at several pieces of Julie’s clothing and wiped up as much of the faeces as I could…placed Julie back in the bed and wiped her body clean as well…then got out of the truck and carried her soiled clothing over to the woods and tossed them down the hill.

  Jesperson then returned to his rig. A police car passed by, and he realised that he couldn’t finish the woman off there, so he drove back towards Camas and parked up, a few hundred yards east of the Clark County line, the county that would have had jurisdiction over the murder. This was a subtle ploy, as Jesperson explained. ‘Like in the Bennett case, where the murder happened is where there is the crime. Should I really want to mess with the courts now – I could re-file to move the case to the proper county and make them do it all over again.’

  Now parked up, with his engine ticking over, Jesperson lay next to Julie and explained that she was going to die. He told her that he had killed seven times before, and that she would die the next time his hands went to her throat.

  Complete terror filled her eyes as she cried. Before I killed her, yes, I felt like having her again. But she was messy and I felt a need to do it quickly and throw her away before dawn broke
. I said, ‘I promised you, Julie, that you’ll never go to jail. I’m keeping my promise with you by putting you out of your misery. Goodbye. I’ll see you in the afterlife.’

  My fist pressed into her neck and in about four minutes she layed there dead. I got out and pulled her naked body out if the cab. Had removed all of the tape, carried her light body over the guard rail and to the edge of a steep embankment and tossed her lifeless body some 20 feet down into a pile of tossed away garbage, then walked back to the truck.

  Jesperson’s thoughts at that time were that she was too close to the road and would be found quickly. Deep down, he says he wanted her found soon:

  I was tired of this game. I was beginning to take enjoyment in killing them. I had to be stopped. Maybe that’s why I killed and left her body so close to home. And, I had kept her alive for several days, I could have killed her in Eastern Oregon or Idaho, and dragged her body under my trailer or tractor to get rid of her. Then I could have gone on to kill more of them, even turn into a different type of killer, actually seek out victims to kill all of the time.

  The concern of leaving Julie’s body where he had dumped it ate at Jesperson for many days afterwards. He contemplated returning and moving it to a more remote location, instead, he says, ‘I should have put her deeper into the woods, but I didn’t. Nope! I simply drove east.’

  * * *

  Clark County Washington Sheriff’s Dept Detective Rick Buckner was the lead investigator in the Julie Ann Winningham case. His initial enquiries informed him that Julie had been living in Utah for a while after breaking up with her truck driver husband. She had returned to Camas in February 1995, hitching a ride with Keith Jesperson, who she referred to as her fiancé.

  Buckner learned from the Cheney Trucking Company that Jesperson was en-route to Pennsylvania; his route would take him towards the West Coast, through Texas, New Mexico and eventually to Arizona.