2 Corrupting Influence

[The psychopath] has a completely defective sense of property.

—Robert Lindner, M.D.

In seventh grade at Selah Middle School, Keith and a dozen other boys were sent to the principal’s office for throwing snowballs. “I felt better, knowing that I wasn’t alone in the snowball business. Each kid that went into the office came out crying. My turn came and the principal ordered me to bend over. He took a paddle made of plywood with holes drilled in it and hit my ass just once. I looked up and waited for more, but all he said was, ‘Go to your next class.’ I told him it didn’t hurt and if that was the best he could do, I would go outside and throw some more snowballs. I was never punished again in the Selah school system. A year or two later the school board banned all paddling.”

 

One day Keith’s new friend Tom Haggar introduced him to shoplifting. “He told me how easy it was at Viking Village—‘Just slide the stuff up your sleeve and walk out.’”

On a Friday afternoon Tom loaded up on durable goods like small tools, padlocks and penknives while Keith filled both sleeves with Hershey’s Kisses, Life Savers, Juicy Fruit gum and the Kit Kat bars that were made in Canada. He had the same feeling that would always accompany him in the commission of a crime, petty or otherwise. “I felt like the whole world was onto me, like they knew I was stealing before I even started.”

In a sense he was right. On their way out the thieves were intercepted and frisked. Owner Bob Mead told them he’d been watching their operation through one-way glass. All Keith could think of was his father’s belt. It was wielded less often now that he was almost as big as Les, but surely this offense would bring back the old-style punishment. He wasn’t sure he could take the belt again. He might just run back to Chilliwack.

The police inflicted their own punishment first. “They drove us to the school parking lot and made a display of us in front of the other kids, driving slowly around the lot three or four times—dirty little shoplifters on parade. Then they took us to the station and booked and fingerprinted us. The captain gave us a lecture on how we were headed to the penitentiary. He ordered us to tell our parents what we’d done. If we didn’t, he said he’d put us in jail.”

The senior Jespersons were visiting friends in Canada for the weekend. When they returned late on Sunday night, Keith blurted out, “I sort of got caught shoplifting at Mead’s Thriftway.”

Les ordered him to his room and called the Haggar boy’s father for details. He was told that the shoplifting had been Keith’s idea and that Tom was innocent. “Dad said he wasn’t surprised. I expected him to start taking off his belt, but he told me to go to bed and he’d see me in the morning.”

 

After a sleepless night Keith was driven to the store and ordered to apologize. The owner seemed disposed to drop the matter, but Les said, “Give him some work so he can make it up to you.”

Mead told him to clean up the back alley. “Fair enough,” his father said. “He’ll work for you every day for two weeks.”

On the way home Keith got the clear impression that his father was more upset about the public disgrace than the shoplifting. “I’ll never forget and I’ll never forgive,” he quoted his father later. “You humiliated me in front of the whole damn town.”

Keith described the scene that night at the dinner table. “Dad gave me a lecture in front of the others. He told me not to bother calling home for a ride when I was finished each day. He said, ‘It’s only two miles. When I was a boy, I walked farther than that in ice and snow.’ He called me our little thief. For a long time afterwards he would say, ‘How’s our little thief today? Stolen anything lately?’”

 

Word traveled around the school that Keith was a corrupting influence on the other children and that Canadians couldn’t be trusted—“They said we’re all a bunch of thieves.” His partner in crime snubbed him on the school bus. “So I was back where I started—no friends. Old stuff to me.”

 

Soon afterward he got into his first fight and knocked out his opponent’s front tooth. “It was a fair fight, and the other kid picked it, but I got the blame because I was bigger.” Getting in trouble was becoming a habit.