UBC: Olsen, "I"

[truepenny]

I: The Creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



TBH, I don't think the conceit of this book works terribly well. Keith Hunter Jesperson is such a prolific autobiographer that Olsen was able to assemble what looks like a fairly complete first-person account of his eight murders, which he interleaves with a more standard biographical account of Jesperson's life. I'm rarely a fan of intercutting timelines, and this book feels like soft-poached eggs in a string bag: a mess that fails to be contained by its arbitrary structure. (Whereas a book should either feel like a whole egg or like an art installation of a knitted egg being unraveled by an algorithm programmed into a music box: a mess, but a deliberate mess.) As with The Serial Killer Whisperer, this book is an antidote to the romanticization of serial killers; Jesperson's mind is as bleak and empty a place as Shawcross', Metheny's, or Gore's. He has the same recall of his murders that they, particularly Gore, evidence, with such perfect recall of details that everything starts to look as flat as a Polaroid (and, as Stephen King points out in "The Sun Dog," Polaroids never do look quite right), combined with very similar claims about sex drive. According to these men, they have the sexual stamina of porn stars, but prostitutes who "dated" Shawcross and escaped with their lives told a very different story. Jesperson, also like Shawcross, further claims that his victims thoroughly enjoyed sex with him, even after they knew he was going to kill them. The word, of course, is "over-compensating," and you can see Jesperson doing it a hundred different ways in his narrative, and another dozen in the 3rd person parts.

It's not something Olsen pursues, although since his sex drive is one of the many things Jesperson blames for his having turned out a serial killer (along with his father, his mother, his ex-wife ...), he might have done well to push a little harder at it. ESPECIALLY because, as with Faryion Wardrip, Jesperson's version of his childhood does not synch up with his siblings' memories, and a lot of the tension in the book comes from the impossible question of which side to believe: Jesperson's accounts of his wretched childhood under the tyrannical thumb of an alcoholic father, or his brother's flat denial that any such thing was true. Jesperson's father, also, of course, denies Jesperson's version, but whichever of them you believe, they clearly have a dysfunctional relationship where they attract and repel each other turn and turn about--unlike Jesperson Sr's relationship with his other children. And Jesperson Sr's own testimony, and the evidence of the outward and verifiable facts (Jesperson Sr was a heavy drinker; he's a man who could do almost everything well and easily, resulting in his doing, basically, nothing at all; he's a narcissist--that is all over his letters to Jesperson, no need to wonder), do show him as someone who rewrites history freely to please himself. The only point in the narrative at which I felt any sympathy for Jesperson was when he tells his father in exasperation that of course he doesn't remember some of the things Jesperson remembers since he was blackout drunk during them.

Jesperson, though, is also out of his own mouth and through his own pen, convicted as an endless liar, one who doesn't even care about contradicting himself because what he wants is to make all versions of the story untrustworthy, so it's not like he's a reliable narrator. Except (maybe) for those affectless but vivid accounts of murdering eight women.

Jesperson does not seem to have the affinity for the landscape that Bundy, Ridgway, and Shawcross do, but he has that same photographic recall--like Ridgway identifying the places where he'd left his victims twenty years earlier--of every vehicle he's ever driven. He claims to love his children, but genuine affection only shows when he's talking about trucks. There's a Peterbilt semi that you feel like Jesperson would have married if he could. Of course, he murdered his victims in the sleeper cabs of the semis he drove, so it makes sense (in the twisted logic of sociopathy) that he would love and remember them the way Bundy and Ridgway loved and remembered the landscape. (And Rule noted more than once the fact that Bundy felt more affection and empathy for inanimate objects than he ever did for real people--which may be another thing underpinning his necrophilia.)

Olsen was a good writer and a good researcher ("was" because he died the same year this book was published), so a "mediocre" Olsen is a "pretty good" from somebody else. And it does do what he said he was trying to do: "explain how this 7 or 8 pounds of protoplasm went from his mommy's arms to become a serial rapist or serial killer" (NYT 1993, quoted on Olsen's wikipedia page; also one of the epigraphs for The Serial Killer Whisperer, although come to think of it, I'm not sure what relevance the quote has to the book). Or rather, it explains the dimensions of the thing we cannot see in Keith Hunter Jesperson, the thing that would be the answer to Olsen's question: what makes Keith Hunter Jesperson a serial killer? That answer remains out of reach and unknowable, but this book does give a sense of the space it carves out in what, for lack of a better word, we will call Jesperson's soul. And of how little is left of a human being around it.



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Comments

[larryhammer]

like an art installation of a knitted egg being unraveled by an algorithm programmed into a music box

See: every book by John McPhee. The structure looks random but feels deliberate and useful, but exactly what's going on and how he's doing it is rarely clear (to me, anyway) until the end.