3 “Dad’s Slave”

According to her children Gladys Bellamy Jesperson’s culinary skills were the least of her qualities. The Bellamys came from English stock by way of the windswept wide-open spaces of Grande Prairie, Alberta. Her father, Roy, a dairy farmer, went broke during the same Dirty Thirties that defeated the blacksmith Art Jesperson. The Jespersons and Bellamys became acquainted after Roy Bellamy gave up on cows and opened a billiards parlor in Chilliwack, B.C. Unlike the irreligious Les Jesperson, Roy Bellamy and his wife Marjorie were devout Protestants and strict teetotalers. When a friend brought them a bottle of Christmas cheer, they ordered him off the property.

In the passage of time the elder Bellamys made a favorite of their grandson Keith, the future murderer. “Leslie always favored Bruce and Brad,” Marjorie Bellamy once explained. “Our daughter Gladys favored Jill and Sharon. I always had a heart for Keith because he’s the one that got left out.”

 

Gladys Bellamy Jesperson grew up in a puritanical home in which the slightest mention of sex and sexuality was taboo. She was banished from the barn when the bull serviced the cow and when any of the animals gave birth. No one in the family, including her husband, ever saw Gladys naked. “That was her preference,” Les said of his wife years later. “Her parents taught her to be ashamed of her body. I never saw one Bellamy touch another.”

 

Keith and his four siblings remembered their mother as a workhorse and immaculate housekeeper who held the family together. “Dad’s whole thing was making money,” his daughter Jill recalled. “Mom did everything else.”

Gladys Bellamy Jesperson was a large, plain woman, a half-inch shorter than six feet, with rich curly hair that she passed on to her son Keith. Resolute and dignified, she tried to shield her children from their father’s harsh discipline, but with indifferent success. She seemed to keep a little distance between herself and others, even her own brood. When Les took them camping each summer, Gladys was happy to stay home. In Keith’s memory he saw her posed primly on the couch, glasses reflecting the TV screen, her knitting needles giving off little flashes of light. He thought he knew why his mother stayed home. “She was Dad’s slave. She was relieved when he was gone. It gave her a little breathing room.”

 

Gladys was as meticulous about her person as she was about her home. She designed and made her children’s clothes, including trousers and suits. As she put on weight through the years, she altered her own dresses and created new wardrobes to conceal her amplitude. She knitted “Indian sweaters” for every member of her extended family. She was sensitive about her appearance and kept her bedroom door firmly shut after chemotherapy forced her into wigs. But she didn’t stop knitting. By then her children were grown.