Dead Men Talking by Christopher Berry-Dee

Author:Christopher Berry-Dee [Christopher Berry-Dee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843586432
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2011-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

Keith Hunter Jesperson was born Wednesday, 6 April 1955, in the city of Chilliwack, British Columbia. He is known as the ‘Happy Face Killer’ because he sent taunting letters to the newspapers with a ‘smiley’ drawn on them. Not that he has much to be happy about these days; he is serving natural life sentences for murdering eight women from as far afield as Nebraska, California, Florida, Washington and Oregon, during a killing spree that started on 21 January 1990 and continued until 1995, when he was finally arrested.

The Jesperson family name originated in Sweden, where the name is not uncommon. The clan migrated to Denmark, New Zealand, USA, and Canada. Keith’s immediate ancestors left Denmark in the late 1880s, entered the USA and, apparently driving Conestoga wagons (I prefer to think it was actually in a box car), they eventually rolled onto the west coast where they took a left turn and settled in San Francisco for a short while. Deciding that the hot climate wasn’t quite to their taste, the Jespersons headed north to colder climes. After months on the trail, these determined pioneers crossed into Canada and arrived in the Fraser Valley, settling just north of Chilliwack in the province of British Columbia.

Keith Jesperson devoted some 300 double-sided pages to his ancestors. His great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, school teachers, friends, relations, workmates, and just about every person he has ever met gets a mention in his new autobiography. He recounted pretty well every movement he made during his formative years. He can recall just about every single trip he made as an interstate trucker. To give you a taste of this, instead of just saying that he drove a truck, he would come up with: ‘I landed my dream job driving a massive plum-colored, dripping in chrome, Peterbilt that had a four-hundred-horsepower Cat engine, a twelve-ton cherry picker for loading heavy equipment. The tractor had twin sticks with nine forward speeds. Truck and trailer had twenty-six tires and hauled loads up to 210,000 pounds.’ The only things he missed out was the tyre pressures, all 26 of them… which I considered a major oversight on Keith’s behalf, and it was all I could do to prevent myself asking him, ‘Did you inflate or deflate the tyres according to load and road conditions, and what happened in snow or icy conditions?’ -but I didn’t.

Of course Keith had blessed what must have been an extremely patient Jack Olsen with exactly the same methodical exercise years ago. For the record, and to gain a better understanding of Mr Jesperson’s penchant for writing, it is worth pointing out that in any one year he will mail out some 400 letters and will receive treble that number in return. He makes around 500 collect telephone calls a year, and he will send out War and Peace-length correspondence to anyone who shows the slightest interest in his life and crimes. However, with that being said, I can tell you –

in an extremely abridged

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