8 Party-goers

At work and play Keith was constantly exposed to alcohol. He enjoyed the buzz but didn’t like the loss of control. “I was brought up in a drinking and partying family. In Canada my father and mother belonged to the 24 Hat Club—twelve couples that met to have a good time and drink. Dad did most of the drinking, but my mom just went along. In Selah Dad had an open-bottle policy. We kids could drink all we wanted as long as it was in our house. Dad felt that the best way to keep us balanced about alcohol was to take the mystery out of it, and in my case he was right.

“He kept a supply of Seagram’s rye and other hard liquor in his wet bar and a fridge full of beer on the back porch. He’d buy us beer when he drove to Canada or Idaho to stock up on Coors. I rode around with him a lot and learned how to mix his rye and Coke on bumpy roads. When Bruce was a senior, we had keggers at the house. Everybody in Selah was aware of the Jesperson beer parties. I had too much to drink one night and felt a girl’s tits. She turned out to be Bruce’s date. He kicked and punched me, and I deserved it.”

 

As relaxed as the Jesperson family was about drinking, Les was apoplectic about drugs. “Dad drove that message home every chance he got. If he found out that one of the kids in school was smoking pot, he’d make us dump ’em. If he saw us together on the street, he’d say, ‘Find some new friends. I don’t want to see you with that son of a bitch.’ Later on, when I began to kill, he decided that I must have been on drugs. That enabled him to rationalize what I did and take the stain off the Jesperson name. But drugs had nothing to do with my killing, and neither did alcohol.

“In high school I just about quit drinking so I could be the Good Samaritan to drive kids home from keggers. I saw some terrible sights—guys pissing themselves, vomiting out the window of my car. One boy passed out and a car backed over him and broke his collarbone. I never missed drinking at all. It brought out the wild man in me. I was actually afraid to get drunk because I would develop an I-don’t-care attitude and lose control. I liked the feeling of being the only sober person in the house.”

 

When Keith reached sixteen, in the last semester of his sophomore year at Selah High School, he passed his driver’s test and joined in Yakima Valley’s preoccupation with the internal-combustion engine. He spent four hundred dollars of his hard-earned money on a 1961 Super 88 Oldsmobile sedan, a red-and-white 398 V-8 that no one else wanted because it spewed blue smoke, yawed on its shock absorbers, and barely made one hundred miles on a tank of gas. “Dad said he would buy the first and last tank for me and I guess he did. I near went broke keeping it full after that. I had to siphon gas from tractors and neighbors’ cars. One night the neighbors fired a shot in the air to scare me away. They knew it was a Jesperson stealing their gas because I left the can there and it had Canadian addresses on it.” Keith kept the car for a year before the engine seized up and he finished the destruction by trying to make repairs.

His next car was a 1947 Willys Jeep CJ2-A that had belonged to a member of the Yakima Valley Mountaineer Jeep Club, hard drivers who spent weekends lurching up and down the surrounding sand hills. Years later he remembered every detail: “My Jeep had an F-head four-cylinder with three-speed stick. I had to get the seat pushed back four inches and the roll bar heightened by four inches. It was primer gray color till I repainted it sun yellow with black-diamond-plate running boards and corner panels. I drove it two years and sold it for what I paid for it: seven hundred dollars. Then I bought a 1967 Ford Fairlane with a 289 V-8, but that was too tame, so I got a used 750cc motorcycle. I rode that bike to Idaho to watch Evel Knievel jump the Snake River with his rockets. I got so excited I damn near made the jump alongside him. Later on I wished I had.”