6 Author, Author

To supplement his contacts with butchers and maniacs, Keith stayed in touch with criminologists, journalists, TV producers, detectives, high school students, lawyers, teachers, researchers, distant relatives, doctoral candidates, celebrities, “jailhouse Annies” and other aficionados of bloody murder. On the phone it never took him long to launch into his well-worn accounts of resentments, angers, slights, injustices, favors unreciprocated, justice denied, paydays when he was shorted, undeserved punishments, grasping females, males who cheated him or let him down.

He answered all letters in a free-flowing artistic hand with rounded Os and Cs and his trademark Happy Face symbols to verify authenticity. He generously volunteered suggestions to investigators who were working to solve murders, and he often corrected experts in the voodoo art of profiling.

He was careful to alter his tone to suit his audience. To a teenaged gunman in Georgia, he wrote: “Now it is your duty to tell the public why you went to school to shoot it out. Thank God you didn’t kill anyone!”

He had no hesitancy in offering advice about such matters as habeas corpus, Miranda, rules of procedure, courtroom style and decorum. As though he were running for national office, he prepared position papers on capital punishment, religion, law enforcement, the psychology of crime, and fired them off to the media under catchy titles: “From Being to Prison and Beyond,” “The Fears of Murder,” “The Gimmes of Law,” “Who Really Are They? Morons?,” “The True Power of Confessions,” “The Glove of Justice That Covers the Hand of Deceit,” “A Tale of Two Tails….”

 

Certain privileged correspondents were treated to book-length versions of his life and hard times. Since Oregon prisoners were denied access to copying machines, he had to handwrite each new version. A manuscript to journalist Robert Ironside was scrawled across two thousand pages, which were soon followed by a scathing twelve-hundred-page satire titled “The Adventures of King Pin Trisani and Johnny Foreskin Forwood” (variations on the names of Wyoming prosecutors who had sought his execution).

He provided a 900-page version of his life story to a fellow prisoner who immediately put it up for sale but found no takers.

He sent a 60,000-word “novel” to his father, explaining that the fictional form provided more latitude for the real truth about his life. Besides, the novel might be a commercial success and he could use the money. The tone was tasteless and lurid:

A dim light in one of the sleepers allows me a view of two bodies fucking….I hope to see naked skin…. She positions herself to suck me off…. She slides up and straddles my penis and guides it up in her. Moans of false pleasure purr from her lips…. My limp penis falls into the cool air. I lean down to kiss her, but she refuses to be kissed. This was about sex. Not love! Sex and money! Murder! I feel excitement as I ponder the thought….

One book-length manuscript after another kept the prison censors busy. Keith explained that he intended to continue committing his insights and discoveries to paper “till I get it right.” In a version written in mid-2001, he summed up his most recent conclusions about his favorite subject:

My motivation wasn’t to get off. It was to kill these women. The killing itself wasn’t a sexual turn-on. When they were alive, I had sex with them, but the killing was simply for killing’s sake. It wasn’t for the rush of power or to get even with women in general. I like women. I just didn’t like these women. Something just simply caught me wrong with them to have me decide when and where I’d kill them, like putting them out of their misery.

Taunja Bennett reminded me of Peggy and her partying ways. Claudia called herself a throw-away woman, so I threw her away. Cynthia died before I got any sex. Laurie Pentland died because I decided to pay her for sex and then kill her. Cindy died because I knew I would kill her after I got her in my truck. Susanna died because I picked her up knowing she would die. Angela Subrize pissed me off with her lies. Julie Winningham was a doper.

Much of his incoming mail came from social scientists with a professional interest in his case, but some letters were simply exercises in bad taste. He tended to laugh off threats and seldom took unsolicited criticism to heart.

An angry woman sent an oddly punctuated inquiry about his fourth victim, Laurie Pentland:

Did you know that Laurie was a very abused child? She had been raped by old men all of her childhood and then she was raped by her brother that she did not even know. Then she came to live with me and she had a baby his name is Chris you took his mother away from him and he will never get to know her…. Could you please tell me for sure what day Laurie died and what time it was. What was her last words and what did you do to her…and did she suffer how long did it take her to die?…Did Laurie fight for her life or did she just let you kill her?

Keith told a friend: “The woman who wrote that letter was Laurie’s pimp. I knew her very well. When Laurie wasn’t around, she used to blow me in the truck-stop parking lot. She was as big a whore as Laurie. She has a hell of a nerve criticizing me.” His attitude seemed to be that pimps and prostitutes deserved what they got.