| At one point, according to an account by the Happy Face Killer
himself, Jesperson was visited by investigators from what was then
left of the Green River Killer Task Force wanting to know if he was
responsible for any of the still unsolved killings in their
jurisdiction. Since many of Jesperson’s victims were known
prostitutes and strangulation was his preferred method of murder,
Jesperson naturally looked like a feasible candidate in at least
some of the Green River killings. The fact that he was
trucking in and out of Seattle and the surrounding areas on an
almost daily basis in the early-to-mid 1980s hauling flatbeds of
scrap steel into the steel mills of Seattle and Tacoma made him look
even more viable as a suspect. Jesperson, in his own words,
claimed that he told the following story to an unnamed investigator
from the Green River Task Force:
“One day they had me in a room and told me to tell them
about Seattle. They have reason to believe that I am one of
the killers that is responsible for some of the Green River
murders. They still believe this but are waiting for more
information to flow through my lips on the subject. Thinking
for only five minutes, I thought up this story to tell them to
throw them off. But it backfired instead. The story
involved two sisters, and the police had never mentioned to the
press that two sisters had become victims of the Green River
Killer….
“It was about 8:00 p.m. as I drove north up the
(Seattle-Tacoma) Strip…instead of taking Intersate 5…this
roadway is full of hitchhikers and hookers at this time of
night…I was eyeing two cute hookers as they talked at a bus
stop. Both were good lookers but I wanted one by herself.
About a quarter of a mile up the road I spotted a bitch walking
fast up the sidewalk. Her hips were swinging from
side-to-side, and she had nice long legs that climbed up to her
butt. Her body was slender and firm. She seemed to be
in a hurry. As I was approaching her at 35 miles per hour, I
thought for just a moment about her but knew I first had to get
the rest of my steel on. Fun will come later.
“She reached the bus stop before I got there,” Jesperson
continued, “and without looking out for traffic, she stepped
right out in front of me. With a car passing me on my left,
I could only brake to hope from hitting her. I heard the
impact as her body struck my bumper and felt her tumble under my
tires. I had managed to stop the truck quickly and with the
emergency flashers going, I stepped out of the truck a little
shaken. I had stopped the truck and her body was still under
my trailer. She was dead, and I looked around for witnesses.
But there were none and the traffic was little to none. No
one had witnessed the accident. I felt I could get away with
it, if only I could get her body away from there. So I
dragged her body out from under the trailer and placed her in the
cab of the 1964 Kenworth and got in and drove north up the Strip
for a half-mile. On the right was an open field with tall
trees and enough brush to hide behind to dig her a shallow
grave.”
As he continued his tale, Jesperson told of how he had grabbed
his shovel after throwing the dead woman over his shoulder. He
carried her back into the field, tossed her body on the ground and
removed all of her jewelry, placing it inside his pocket, he
claimed. As he dug her grave, he explained that he heard
something or someone coming toward him. Not wishing to be
seen, he knelt down and watched. The man, like Jesperson, was
carrying a body, but his was inside a black plastic bag. He
placed it on the ground and proceeded to dig a grave nearby as
Jesperson watched. Jesperson said he decided to approach the
man, and startled him as he did so.
“I was about done when I saw you walking towards me,”
Jesperson said he told the man. “I couldn’t help but be
amazed that two of us had to get rid of two bodies at the same
time. Now that I know what you came out here for, I will get
back to what I was doing….”
After they had both buried the bodies in the field, said
Jesperson, the two of them decided to stop at a restaurant and have
coffee together.
“I couldn’t help but notice that yours and mine
looked a lot alike,” Jesperson said he told the man.
“They had the same features. Only difference was the
necklace I took off mine…I pulled the jewelry from my pocket and
placed it on the table. He picked up the jewelry and studied
it and…a tear came to his eyes.” Jesperson said he asked
the man what was wrong.
“It seems we have a lot more in common than just
burying two girls at the same time,” Jesperson said the man told
him. “We both have killed identical twins. Yours is
the sister to mine.”
The foregoing story was obviously a fabrication concocted by
Jesperson’s imagination. It serves as a good example of his
ability to lie easily and quickly, without giving much advance
thought to the process. According to profiler and serial
killer expert Dr. Maurice Godwin, who often works closely with law
enforcement investigations to assist the police with his expertise,
there were no sisters as victims in the Green River case. In
fact, Jesperson later proudly proclaimed that he had made it all up.
Interestingly, in his “I Am A Liar” essay that was published
widely on the Internet, he also denied most, if not all, of his
prior admissions of guilt. The Green River Task Force seemed
to quickly lose interest in him after his telling of the tale of two
sisters, but it remains interesting that he would choose to identify
so closely with a case involving so many victims whose deaths, at
least in some cases, closely parallel those of his own known
victims. When taking into consideration the outdoor locations
of the Green River crime scenes, the nude bodies, strangulation as
the cause of death, prostitutes and transient types as victims, and
so forth, and when making a comparison to Jesperson’s victims and
crime scenes, one can only wonder if Jesperson had in reality
committed any of the murders attributed to the Green River Killer.
So far, however, he has not been charged nor has he been listed as
an official suspect in connection with any of those murders.
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