August 15, 2025 • 56 mins
Keith Hunter Jesperson wanted the world to know his name.
He wanted the spotlight, the ink, the infamy—so badly that when his first murder was pinned on someone else, he couldn’t stand it. That’s when the crude smiley faces started showing up on letters to police and the media, signed by the man who would become known as the Happy Face Killer.
But in this ReWired episode, we dig beneath the sensational headlines and handwritten taunts to ask the bigger questions: What makes someone so desperate for recognition that they risk everything just to be seen? How do ego, power, and psychological compulsion turn into a deadly cocktail?
And why does society sometimes feed the very monsters it claims to fear? From truck stop highways to the dark corners of a killer’s mind, Dani pulls apart Jesperson’s calculated confessions, his manipulative tactics, and the sociological threads that tie this case to a culture obsessed with notoriety.
It’s a story about murder, ego, and the uncomfortable truth about our fascination with both.This isn’t just the story of a killer—it’s the anatomy of an attention addict.
He wanted the spotlight, the ink, the infamy—so badly that when his first murder was pinned on someone else, he couldn’t stand it. That’s when the crude smiley faces started showing up on letters to police and the media, signed by the man who would become known as the Happy Face Killer.
But in this ReWired episode, we dig beneath the sensational headlines and handwritten taunts to ask the bigger questions: What makes someone so desperate for recognition that they risk everything just to be seen? How do ego, power, and psychological compulsion turn into a deadly cocktail?
And why does society sometimes feed the very monsters it claims to fear? From truck stop highways to the dark corners of a killer’s mind, Dani pulls apart Jesperson’s calculated confessions, his manipulative tactics, and the sociological threads that tie this case to a culture obsessed with notoriety.
It’s a story about murder, ego, and the uncomfortable truth about our fascination with both.This isn’t just the story of a killer—it’s the anatomy of an attention addict.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewritten. We believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. Welcome back, truth seekers.
This is the Guilty Files True Crime Rewired. I'm your host, Danny,
(01:16):
and if you're here, you already know we're not here
to just consume true crime. We're here to flip the
case files inside out, to peel back what was said
and poke at what was left unsaid. This week, we're
picking up right where Brian left off. If you missed
his rock solid episode on the Happy Face Killer, hit
(01:37):
pause and go check out the Guilty Files Uncovered. He
laid out the terrifying, twisted legacy of Keith Hunter Jesperson
with sharp precision and clarity. But here on Rewired, we
ask what really happened and what did we miss? Because
the known facts they're only part of the story. So
(02:00):
today we're diving back into the cab of that eighteen
wheeler with Jesperson at the wheel, but not to rehash
his kill count. We're here to imagine what else might
have been hiding behind that smile. What if he wasn't
as invisible as he thought. What if someone saw more
than we ever knew. What if the ripples of his
(02:20):
crimes reached further into the minds of his children, the
silence of the trucking world, and the wreckage of the
justice system. This is a speculative, fictionalized journey built on
the spine of fact. We will move through eight acts,
each exploring a hypothetical angle of the Happy Face Killer case,
(02:42):
layered with psychological theory, sociological critique, and yes, a touch
of dramatized storytelling. Everything you hear might have happened, some
of it did, some of it didn't, and that gray
area is where Rewired lives. Before we go playing with hypotheticals,
(03:02):
we need to remember exactly whose sandbox we're stepping into.
Let's ground this in reality, because honey, this isn't fan fiction.
This is Rewired. And while I like to stir the
psychological pot and toss a little gasoline on the what
if fire, I still respect the burnmarks left behind. So
(03:24):
let's talk about the real deal. Keith Hunter Jesperson, a
towering six feet six inches mass of ego, gasoline fumes
and barely concealed rage on paper, A long haul trucker
just trying to make a living in reality, a serial
killer who used America's highways like a personal hunting ground.
(03:46):
Between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety five, Jesperson murdered at
least eight women that we know of, likely more, possibly
many more. He chose victims who lived on the margins,
sex workers, hitchhikers, women battling addiction, women whose lives didn't
scream headline in the eyes of law enforcement, but they
(04:07):
should have. His first known victim was Twanja Bennett, a
developmentally disabled young woman just trying to enjoy a night
out at a Portland tavern. Instead, she met a monster.
Quick side note and Danny moment of sass. This victim's
name is spelled tau n j A. Most news coverage
(04:29):
I found on this case pronounced her name as Tanya.
I believe Brian might have mispronounced her name using the
correct spelling as his guide, or maybe he is right
and mainstream news got it wrong. It is always our
aim here at the guilty files to do nothing but
give the upmost respect to victims of true crime cases,
(04:51):
especially in pronouncing their name correctly and respectfully. However, we
are human and mistakes are made to despite our best intentions.
Honest note. I was raised in the South with a
heavy accent and have always been nervous about mispronouncing someone's name.
It causes me significant anxiety and trepidation. Full transparency. I
(05:16):
tend to constantly make up my own words. I'm that
person who literally makes up words, but says them with
so much confidence and they are close enough to the
real word that ninety nine point nine percent of the
time you know exactly what I Am trying to say,
or don't even notice it huh, And I get it honest.
(05:37):
My father was a preacher and I have sermons of
his on tape, and he constantly is mispronouncing words, even
biblical names, And my mom can't say a damn word.
You remember those magnetized alphabet letters that parents would put
on the kitchen fridge to help a child learn their ABC's. Well,
I've got a picture that proves this, But my mom
(05:58):
put them on the damn fridge in the world wrong order.
To this day, I say my ABC's wrong. So for congruency,
I'm going to continue to pronounce this victim's name as
Brian did, just for our Guilty Files audience and listener experience.
And in a twist so absurd it feels fictional, but isn't.
Two completely innocent people were convicted of Tanja's murder. Why
(06:23):
Because Laverne Pavolinak wanted to pin the crime on her
boyfriend to get out of the relationship, and the cops
they took the bait, gift, wrapped it and called it justice.
Keith sat back and watched and then kept killing. He
taunted police with letters signed bathroom walls with crude happy faces,
(06:44):
and only confessed when he realized no one was giving
him the attention he so desperately craved. He wasn't caught
by brilliant detective work. He turned himself in because his
ego couldn't stand the silence. Mean, imagine being such a
narcissist that you start snitching on yourself because someone else
(07:05):
is getting credit for your murders. That's not just a
red flag. That's a whole damn parade. Now, Brian laid
it all out for you, the timeline, the body count,
the investigative failures, and the long, lonely road that led
to Keith's capture. But here's the part that rewired listeners know.
(07:26):
We're not here to rewatch the same horror movie. We're
here to walk behind the curtain and ask who else
was in the room, what were the echoes no one heard?
And what if the truth is more tangled than the
facts alone can show. Because killers don't just act alone.
They operate inside systems, inside silence, inside opportunity. So let's
(07:52):
shift gears and drive this story down some of the
darker backroads. We've got eight acts ahead, each one asking
what if what if someone saw him and stayed silent?
What if a child wrote down the truth before she
could speak it aloud. What if the number of victims
was never eight, but something far, far worse. This isn't
(08:18):
a conspiracy theory. It's a psychological autopsy of what might
have been. Ready, let's begin. Welcome to Act one, The
Trucker Who Knew. Let me tell you about a man
named Carl Redline Dugan. That's not his real name, of course,
but for the sake of this story, let's go with it.
(08:38):
Redline was the kind of guy who could eyeball a
bad tire from fifty yards, fix a broken alternator with
a coat hanger, and tell you which diner off I
eighty had the strongest coffee and the least judgment. He'd
been driving long haul since the late seventies. The road
was in his blood and maybe in his lungs too,
(09:00):
thanks to three decades of Marlborough reds and diesel exhaust.
His truck was his sanctuary, his prison, his church, his
confession booth, and his hiding place. In this fictionalized version
of events, it's nineteen ninety three, Fresno, California, three sixteen am.
(09:22):
The truck stop is ghostly quiet, except for the chorus
of buzzing fluorescent lights and the occasional hiss of air
brakes releasing pressure. The asphalt is slick from a short
burst of rain, and the neon glow from the diner
sign warps across every puddle like a broken memory. Redline
(09:44):
leans against his cab, sipping bitter gas station coffee from
a cracked thermos. He calls all reliable. His eyes drift
across the lot, mostly instinct habit, but then something catches
his eye two slots over a familiar rig, a B
and I truck line unit, white trailer, Oregon plates. He
(10:07):
recognizes the driver, Keith, quiet guy, big, broad, friendly enough,
but with those eyes, the kind that don't blink when
they should, the kind that scan a room and never
seems surprised. Tonight, Keith Jesperson looks off. His face is
tight shirts inside out. There's what looks like a long
(10:30):
scrape on the side of the sleeper cab, fresh enough
that the metal still shines through. Red Line watches as
Jessperson opens the passenger side door, tosses something, maybe a
red stained towel, into a trash bin, and then closes
it slowly, too slowly. Now Redline doesn't know what he
(10:54):
just saw, but his stomach tightens something primal, that kind
of knowledge, your body picks up before your brain is
ready to label it. And here's where it gets complicated,
because this man, fictional or not, knows how things work
in the trucking world. He knows that you don't go
calling the cops every time a guy acts strange. You
(11:17):
don't question your brothers on the road, especially not someone
from a respected outfit like B and I. You definitely
don't bring heat down on yourself. There's an unspoken code
in trucker culture, a kind of masculine honor system deeply
rooted in autonomy, routine, and self reliance. You mind your rig,
(11:38):
you mind your miles, and you don't poke your nose
where it doesn't belong. But sociologically speaking, that code is
more than just cultural shorthand. It's a survival mechanism in
professions like long haul trucking, predominantly male, highly transient, and
isolated from regular oversight. There's a deep investment in a
(11:59):
ton of me. These men are kings of their own
castle on eighteen wheels. They sleep alone, eat alone, think alone.
They live inside the cab of a machine, and that
machine in a way starts to shape them. Now, listen,
I've worked in systems that rely on silence. As a
beat cop in Atlanta, I watched the same damn dynamics
(12:23):
play out in uniform. You stay quiet, you don't rock
the boat. You protect your own even when your gut
is screaming that something is off. This question mark, this
is that turned up to eleven and stretched across ten
thousand miles of black top. So back to redline. What
(12:44):
if in this reimagining, he starts to take notes, scratches
details into his root log that don't belong, things like
Keith headed west alone, lot lizard scene, crying behind dumpster,
bloodstain on mudflap, passenger door dented, no passenger scene. Maybe
(13:04):
he even starts keeping a second notebook, a secret one.
Maybe he asks around quietly at other stops testing the waters.
You seen Keith lately? That guy gives me the creeps, Now, man,
jesperson solid never laid on a load. Why you asking
that notebook? He hides it in the lining of his
(13:24):
bunk because he's not sure what he's documenting. He just
knows he has to. But here's the psychological rub, and
I want y'all to really sit with this. Redline isn't
a bad man, He's not evil. He's just conflicted. He
exists in that moral gray zone where fear, pride, and
(13:45):
masculine identity collide. He's afraid of being wrong, afraid of
being the guy who rats on someone without proof, afraid
of losing his community, one built on trust, even if
that trust sometimes times hides rot beneath the chrome. And this, friends,
is the sociological truth in tightly bound male subcultures, silence
(14:09):
often equals loyalty, even when that silence comes at the
cost of someone else's life. This is where I get
a little loud, because we love to ask how did
Keith get away with it for so long? And the
answer is he wasn't invisible. He was ignored. People like Redline.
(14:31):
They may have seen the blood, heard the screams, noticed
the inconsistencies, but they stayed quiet, not because they were cruel,
but because the culture taught them silence was survival. And
don't get it twisted. This doesn't just happen in truck stops.
This is police departments, churches, locker rooms, frat houses, boardrooms.
(14:54):
The rules of silence are almost always written by the
people with something to lose and for by the people
with everything to lose.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So, in this fictional account, Redline finally sees Jessperson's face
on the evening news in March of nineteen ninety five.
He's at a truck stop in Nevada, eating chili off
a plastic tray when the happy Face Killer segment airs.
He freezes his thermos drops and then he walks out
(15:33):
into the parking lot and pukes between two semis. He
digs the notebook out from under his mattress that night
and burns it in a trash barrel because he can't
bear to have proof of how close he was and
how long he did nothing. I imagine that man carried
that weight until the day he died. I imagine he
(15:54):
saw every missing woman's face in his rear view mirror.
I imagine he won every time he crossed a state line,
how many bodies they might have passed along the way.
So why open the rewired file with this fictional man?
Because Redline, as imagined, represents the maybe the might have seen,
(16:17):
the should have said something and in true crime, it's
not just the killer we need to study, it's the
world that lets them keep going. What does masculinity look
like when it's afraid to speak? What does loyalty cost
when it protects monsters? And how do you tell the
difference between a good man with doubts and a silent
(16:38):
witness to murder? That, dear listener, is the first wire
we're pulling loose. Let me ask you something. Have you
ever met someone who wanted to be in the middle
of a tragedy? They didn't experience? Someone who inserts themselves
into other people's trauma like it's a casting call. The
ones who, when the world catches fire, can't help help,
(17:00):
but inch toward the flames, not to help, but to
be seen standing there. That's the vibe Laverne Pavlinak gives me.
But what if it was more than just a lie?
Let's zoom in. Welcome to act too, LaVerne's last lie.
Laverne was fifty eight years old when she confessed to
(17:22):
a brutal murder she didn't commit, and not just any murder,
the violent, high profile killing of Tunja Bennett. She told
detectives her boyfriend John Sosnovsky had strangled Tanya, that she
had helped dispose of the body. She gave them timelines, locations, details,
(17:42):
except none of it added up. She didn't know what
Twnja was wearing. She got the dump sight wrong, the
timeline was off, but she kept going and worse. She
watched as John, her live in partner, was dragged down
with her lie. She knew, she knew the police wanted
(18:03):
a clean answer, so she gave them one. Now, most
folks stop here and say, well, she wanted to get
out of the relationship. She lied to frame him. Sure, maybe,
but that's the surface story. Let's get in deeper. Here's
the thing about false confessions. They're not always rooted in fear.
(18:25):
Sometimes they're rooted in fantasy. Laverne was a woman who,
for most of her life had been invisible by society's standards.
She was aging out of relevance, no career to speak of,
no fame, no spotlight, and by all accounts, a partner
who treated her with increasing cruelty. But when the news
(18:47):
of Taunya's murder broke, when the reward posters went up,
when the community whispered about who might have done it,
suddenly there was a story, and maybe Laverne wanted in.
What we might be seeing here isn't just manipulation. It's
a psychological phenomenon known as factitious disorder imposed on self
(19:11):
or what used to be called Munchausen syndrome. But this
time it's not medical symptoms. It's criminality. It's the compulsion
to place oneself in the center of chaos, to make
the narrative bend around you, to become essential in a
story that doesn't belong to you, because being hated is
(19:32):
still better than being ignored. This ain't law and order.
People don't confess for no reason. Even a lie is
trying to tell you something. Let's take it one step further.
What if Laverne kept a scrapbook, not of memories, but
of murders, clipped newspaper articles, carefully folded and pressed between
(19:54):
floral print recipe cards. What if she cataloged unsolved crimes
like recipe one victim, isolated, one cruel boyfriend, sprinkled in
add trauma, stir until arrest. And what if she rehearsed
her confession in the mirror every night, eyes wide, voice trembling,
(20:14):
practicing how she'd cry not because she was delusional, but
because she wanted to be needed. Imagine Laverne sitting on
the edge of her bed, staring at the static of
a TV screen, whispering, I helped him. I was there,
even if she wasn't, even if she never left the
(20:34):
damn house. Now, let's not forget this lie. Didn't live
in isolation. Her confession triggered a full police investigation. It
consumed resources, It landed two innocent people behind bars. Johnsonovsky
pled no contest to a crime he didn't commit because
he believed the evidence stacked against him, evidence that Laverne fabricated.
(20:58):
And this is where we should from psychology to sociology,
because what Laverne did worked. Why because the system was
primed to believe her. They wanted the story tied up,
and she served it on a silver platter. Police departments,
especially those under pressure to solve a high profile case,
(21:21):
often fall prey to confirmation bias. It's not that they
don't notice the inconsistencies, it's that they don't want to.
They'd rather win with a lie than lose while searching
for the truth. So when Laverne spoke, they didn't ask why.
They asked how fast she could testify. But here's the
twist we're playing with today. What if this wasn't LaVerne's
(21:44):
first performance. What if she'd tried to tell other stories
before ones no one cared to hear. What if this
was the only time someone actually listened. And what if
after all the interrogations, all the headlines, all the flash bulbs,
Laverne sat in her cell and realized, this is the
(22:06):
most attention I've ever gotten in my life. What do
you do with a truth like that? This act isn't
about forgiveness. It's about understanding the depth of what people
will do when the world stops looking at them. LaVerne's
lie cost lives, It cost credibility. It handed Jessperson a
(22:27):
free pass to keep killing. But it also tells us
something chilling about identity. Sometimes the hunger to exist, to
matter will drive people to the edge of reality, and
sometimes they'll drag someone over with them. So we've explored
the silence of a man who saw something and the
(22:49):
confessions of a woman who needed to be seen. But
what happens when someone is caught in the middle when
they don't lie, but they also don't speak up. Next
a journal a daughter and a truth written in the
spaces between words. Let's move into Act three, the daughter's journal.
(23:09):
There's a kind of horror that doesn't scream. It just
lingers in the corners of a room, in a word
left unfinished, in a drawer that won't quite close. This
isn't the horror of blood and screams. This is the
horror of almost knowing, of seeing something again and again
(23:32):
and only realizing years later what it actually was. So
let's imagine something. A girl thirteen years old somewhere in Washington,
Let's call her Carrie, And one night she finds a journal,
her own, half filled, spiral bound soft cover. But when
(23:53):
she flips to the middle, the handwriting isn't hers. The
foreign entries read January twenty fifth. Dad came home again.
He smells like truck grease and something else, not like roadkill,
not like sweat, like metal. He was quiet during dinner.
(24:14):
Mom kept looking at his hands. February second, I found
a bracelet under the seat of his rig. It had
someone's name on it, not Mom's. February fourteenth, he got
me a Teddy Bear for Valentine's Day. I asked where
he bought it. He said, don't worry about it. There
was red thread stuck in its fur. March third, I
(24:36):
woke up last night and he was standing in my doorway,
just standing watching me sleep. And Scene. Now, let me
be very clear, Jessperson's real children have spoken out publicly,
and they've done so with grace, honesty, and unimaginable strength.
(24:56):
Melissa Moore, his daughter, has become an advocate, a truth teller.
There is no record that any of them ever knew
what he was doing, this fictionalized act. It's not an accusation,
it's an exploration. It's what if someone had seen the
cracks but didn't know what they were looking at. Back
(25:20):
to Carrie's journal entries March nineteenth, there's something buried behind
the shed. I asked him about it. He laughed too loud,
said it was old junk. March thirtieth. He told me
you're too curious for your own good. Then he smiled,
but it wasn't his smile. April first, I dreamed he
(25:42):
dragged someone out of the truck, woke up screaming, but
I don't think I was asleep And Scene. That's the
thing about monsters, they don't always hide under the bed
sometimes they tuck you in. Can you imagine the dissonance?
One day he's teaching her how to tie a fish,
not the next she's watching him scrub what looks like
(26:03):
blood out of his pant leg in the sink. He
says it's rust. She nods, but the image stays. That's horror,
Not the act, but the waiting, the slow burn, dread
of being right about the worst thing you could imagine.
What we're exploring here is early stage traumatic intuition, a
(26:26):
phenomenon where children pick up on emotional or behavioral inconsistencies
long before they can verbalize them. The subconscious knows what
the conscious mind refuses to accept. Carrie might not have
known the words predator or sociopath, but her body knew,
her dreams knew the creak in the floorboards, and the
(26:49):
flicker of a smile too wide. Those were data points,
and if no adult believed her, she wrote it down.
This act also touches on something I SA saw far
too often during my time in law enforcement. Kids who knew,
kids who saw, but no one ever read the journal.
No one ever asked the second question, because it's easier
(27:12):
to pretend you didn't hear the whisper than to investigate
the scream. There's this idea that evil announces itself that
will recognize the killer. But what if he's got a
gentle voice and rough hands and a damn good story.
What if he's a father. Carrie's final journal excerpt reads,
(27:35):
April twelfth. I'm hiding this where I think no one
will find it. If someone reads this and I'm not here,
tell them I tried to say something. End scene. Now
imagine years later that same journal is found by a
cold case investigator. The inks faded, but the story is
(27:55):
still screaming, and someone finally realizes she's aw everything. So far,
we've seen silence, we've seen a lie, and now we've
witnessed a truth too small to save anyone. But what
if I told you the next victim never even got
a chance to leave her name behind. What if all
(28:18):
she left was a smile and a shadow in act
for the lost Jane Doe. We meet the woman no
one claimed, But that doesn't mean she didn't have a story.
She had no name, no missing person's report, no family
crying out on TV, no candlelight vigil. All she had
was a shallow grave, A guest at her age and
(28:40):
the company of Silence. We call her a Jane Doe,
but maybe her name was Lena. Let me tell you
about Lena. She was born in Bakersfield or maybe Barstow.
She had a mother who drank too much and a
brother who taught her how to fix a flat tire.
She got good at hiding bruises, got even better at
smiling when she wasn't okay. By fifteen, she was hitchhiking
(29:02):
north on I five with nothing but a duffel bag,
a walkman, and a laminated photo of her and her
brother at the fair. Maybe she got clean once, Maybe
she relapsed twice. Maybe she liked strawberry pop tarts and
old motown records. Maybe she always called her lover's baby
no matter how long she knew them. She wasn't broken,
(29:24):
she wasn't disposable. She was trying, but no one saw that. Now,
imagine this jessperson pulls into a rest stop in Oregon.
Lena is sitting on the curb, legs crossed, looking tired
but alert. He offers her a ride. She hesitates, but
he has that look, the practiced one, the kind that
(29:46):
says safe, the kind of lie wrapped in a face
the world doesn't question. She says yes, and that is
the last time anyone sees her.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty. We'll be right
back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
This is where I want to sit for a second,
because we have to talk about why people like Lena disappear.
Why is it that when a woman with a nine
to five job and a golden retriever goes missing, she's
plastered across every TV screen, But when a woman like
Lena vanishes, she's met with a shrug and a stack
(30:26):
of old assumptions. It's class, it's race, it's addiction. It's
the myth of bad choices. We don't search for Lena
because she doesn't fit our narrative of innocence. She doesn't
have the right kind of grief waiting for her, and
in that vacuum, predators like Jessperson thrive. He didn't just
(30:49):
pick women he could overpower. He picked women the world
wouldn't look for. Maybe Lena fought back, Maybe she scratched
his face, Maybe her last word was no oh, or
maybe she cried, told him she had a son, told
him she used to sing Aretha Franklin with her mother
in the kitchen before everything went sideways, and when she died,
(31:10):
maybe Jessperson dumped her off a logging road near the
Columbia River. No marker, no mercy, just cold earth and
a man humming to himself as he drove away. The
medical examiner said she was in her early thirties, dark hair,
five feet six inches, signs of previous injury, likely unhoused, strangled.
(31:32):
That's all the file says, but I think she was more.
This act forces us to confront what I call the
hierarchy of victimhood, the deeply embedded belief that some lives
are worth more than others, that some deaths are more tragic,
that some people are easier to grieve. Jesperson used that
(31:54):
to his advantage. He knew society didn't protect women like Lena,
he knew no one was watching, and he weaponized that invisibility.
So today we give Lena back what she was denied,
a story, a voice, a moment in the light, because
whether her name was Lena or not, she deserved to
(32:16):
be remembered as someone who mattered up. Next, we meet
a man who should have said something, who had power,
who had doubts, and who buried both Welcome to Act five.
The cop who covered it up. Every cop has that
one case, the one they wish they could go back
and do differently, the one they still dream about years
(32:38):
after the badge is turned in and the guns locked away. Now,
let me introduce you to Detective Malcolm Ross. Fictional, yes,
but real enough to bleed. He's late forties, worn leather jacket,
lives alone with two ashtrays, a neglected plant, and an
ex wife who still calls to remind him what time
(32:59):
court is. He's not corrupt, not a bad cop. He's
one of the good ones, which, frankly, is the most
dangerous kind. Malcolm was assigned to the Tanja Bennett case
as a secondary what we'd call supporting lead. He was
there when Laverne Pavlinak started talking there when she said
(33:21):
she helped her boyfriend kill a woman in the gorge.
There when her timeline didn't make sense and the forensics
didn't match, and her eyes darted left every time she
said strangled. And he had a feeling, you know, the one,
that tightness in the chest, the whisper in your gut
(33:41):
that says something ain't right here. But Malcolm didn't speak up,
not loud enough anyway, Because the lead detective was already
holding press briefings, the DA's office wanted indictments, and the
department was riding high off a series of recent clearances.
The pressure to solve Tanya's case fast wasn't just coming
(34:02):
from the top, it was coming from everywhere. Here's what
the public doesn't always understand. Policing isn't just crime scenes
and interrogations. It's politics, it's optics. You start raising doubts
about a clean confession, you're not just questioning the case.
You're questioning your colleagues, your unit, the department's credibility. And
(34:27):
when your supervisors start pulling you off side cases and
skipping your name from the rotation, you get the message.
So Malcolm kept quiet, but he recorded his internal monologues,
tapes that would go something like this, it's all wrong.
Her story doesn't track, no DNA, no hair, no motive
other than spite. And yet here I am watching the
(34:51):
press shake her hand. They called it decisive detective work.
What a joke. Now, Ross isn't evil, but he's in institutionalized.
He's been in this machine long enough to know how
it punishes dissent. Let's break this down with some real
talk on police policy. In most departments, there's no formal
(35:12):
punishment for speaking out against a faulty investigation. But informal
you get pulled off big cases, your promotions stall, your
name stops coming up for special assignments. You become that
cop the problem. And Ross he had bills to pay,
a pension to protect, and a job he wasn't ready
(35:32):
to lose. So he sat in silence, even as LaVerne's
story twisted itself into knots, even as john Sonofsky, who
said almost nothing, was dragged into a plea deal just
to avoid death row. This is what I want listeners
to hear. Sometimes the system doesn't fail because of malice.
(35:55):
It fails because nobody speaks when it counts. And if
you think that's changed since the nineties, spoiler alert, it
hasn't not enough. It's nineteen ninety five now, Ross's off duty,
sitting on his recliner with a beer and a dog
eared case folder in his lap. Jessperson's mugshot flashes across
(36:17):
the screen. The Happy Face Killer arrested in Yakima County.
The report starts listing names, Tanja Bennett among them. Ross
drops the beer and he realizes he helped put the
wrong people away, and the right man had kept killing.
(36:37):
His hand trembles as he pulls that old journal from
the drawer, flips to the back, and starts writing. He
writes every detail he overlooked, every time he looked away,
every moment he swallowed his voice. Not to exonerate himself,
but because the guilt finally outweighed the fear. This act
(36:59):
is about moral injury, the psychological toll when someone knows
the right thing and doesn't do it. It's also about
the limitations of institutional culture, when silence becomes policy, truth
becomes a liability. And look, as someone who's worn the badge,
let me say this, I get it. I've been the
(37:22):
one who watched a supervisor bend a report to fit
a narrative. I've been in the room when an officer said,
let's not overcomplicate it. I've been the one who asked
a second question and got that look, the one that says,
not your place. And here's the truth. If your system
punishes people for asking questions, then your system's not broken.
(37:46):
It's designed that way. So what happened to Ross? Maybe nothing?
Maybe he retired. Maybe he wrote that letter and never
mailed it. Maybe he died with the knowledge that silence
can be a killer too. Next up, we're shifting from
silence to noise, and not just any noise, the kind
(38:08):
that echoes in locker rooms, truck stops, and CB channels
across the country. Because Jessperson claimed he killed over one
hundred sixty people, and we laughed, we dismissed it, But
what if he wasn't alone? Up next is Act six,
The Scoreboard Killer. When Keith Hunter Jesperson was arrested, he
(38:31):
claimed to have killed over one hundred sixty people. Most
dismissed it, called it bravado, labeled it attention seeking, and sure,
maybe it was. But what if it wasn't. What if
Jesperson wasn't lying, at least not entirely. What if he
was tallying something bigger than just his kills. What if
(38:54):
he was part of a network. Let me paint a
picture a twenty four hour truck stop outside AM, dim lights,
CB radios buzzing like angry flies. Inside the driver's lounge,
there's a backroom not on any manifest, no security cams,
just a few chairs. A map of North America tacked
(39:15):
to the wall, and a scoreboard a real one with
names but not of players of victims. Each pushpin a body,
each scratch mark a silence, each win scored with a
bottle cap in a box under the counter. Welcome to
(39:35):
the league. We're in full fiction now, but it's not
impossible because the trucking industry. It's the perfect cover. Constant movement,
no centralized oversight, jurisdictional confusion. Victims often last seen at
unregulated locations, rest stops, service stations, roadside motels, a culture
(39:57):
that prizes privacy to toughness and silence. A killer could
rack up bodies across the map, and it might take
years for anyone to connect the dots unless someone's keeping score.
So let's imagine a CB based network of predators. They
use code words. Nightcap means a body, new passenger means
(40:20):
a target, I'm full up, tonight means they've killed recently.
They don't know each other's real names, only handles, Throttle, splicer, Grimace,
happy face. That last one, Yeah, that's jessperson. And maybe
he wasn't the top of the chain. Maybe he was
(40:40):
just the loudest one in the room, the only one
dumb or vain enough to sign his work. Now, let's
zoom out, because whether this network existed or not, the
conditions for it absolutely did still do. The FBI's Highway
Serial Killings Initiative, Yeah It's Real, was launched in response
(41:02):
to a disturbing pattern hundreds of unsolved murders and disappearances
tied to America's highways, victims found near interstates, truck stops,
and shipping routes, and many of them still unidentified, still unclaimed.
Jesperson is just one dot on that map. But what
if there are dozens more? What if some are still driving?
(41:26):
In twenty twelve, a retired trucker dies in a hospice
bed in Illinois. His daughter finds an old cigar box
in his garage, inside receipts from states he never told her.
He visited photos of women, tiny scraps of jewelry, a
matchbook from a Nevada truck stop with five tally marks inside,
(41:48):
No names, no context, just a haunting pattern. The police
are called, but by then he's ashen an urn. This
is what I mean when I say Jesperson was a glitch.
He was a feature, a symptom of a culture. That
values men's freedom of movement more than women's freedom to live.
(42:09):
This fictional network, this scoreboard might not exist on paper,
but the conditions for it are real as hell, and
we as a society helped build it. Predators look for opportunity, yes,
but they also look for models, and if someone like
(42:30):
Jesperson gets away with it long enough, others notice, others copy.
This isn't just about trauma, It's about my medic violence,
where people absorb and reproduce behavior they see rewarded. When
Jesperson bragged about his kill count, he wasn't just gloating,
he was teaching. When I was a beat cop, I
(42:52):
used to think evil had a shape, a pattern, something
we could recognize and shut down. But you know what,
it really has a schedule. It's patient, it's silent, It
waits until no one's looking, and then it keeps score.
So maybe Jesperson didn't kill one hundred and sixty people,
but maybe someone did, and maybe they're still watching. Up next,
(43:15):
we open a locker that was never supposed to be found.
Inside it the manifesto of a man who didn't just
want to kill, he wanted to explain it. Coming up
in Act seven, the manifesto in the locker. You ever
wonder what someone like jessperson writes down when he's not
confessing in a letter or drawing smiley faces on a
(43:37):
bathroom wall. I do, And in this fictional act, I'm
going to take you inside the kind of hell most
people wouldn't dare open. Let's say it's twenty twenty three.
A young freelance journalist, let's call her Riley Benton, gets
an anonymous tip, no return address, just a note, locker
number forty one, desert springs CB handle, happy face. She
(44:01):
thinks it's a prank, but curiosity's a tricky thing. It
wears a press badge and bites like a dog. So
Riley drives ninety miles into the Nevada Desert, finds the
old travel plaza, abandoned, mostly stripped, and finds locker number
forty one, the keys already in. It turns like butter
(44:21):
inside a warped milk crate, three spiral bound notebooks, rubber bands,
loose polaroids, and on top a Manila folder labeled my rules.
Now tell me something. If you found the writings of
a serial killer, unedited, handwritten raw, would you read it?
(44:42):
Would you publish it, because Riley does. She takes it home,
reads every page, catalogs every contradiction, and what she finds
isn't just a confession. It's a playbook. And that playbook
contains rules and pointers, like you can tell a lot
about a woman by what she carries in her purse.
(45:05):
I always checked before I dumped the body. They stopped
screaming in my dreams after number four. After that, I
had to turn up the volume to feel anything. Never
take a victim from the same state twice in a row.
That's how they catch dumb ones. I'm not dumb.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Stay tuned for more of the Guilty Files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Being famous doesn't make you a monster. Being ignored does.
It's horrifying and compelling because it's not just about what
he did, It's about what he wanted us to think
about what he did. This is narrative as manipulation. Jesperson
doesn't want forgiveness, he doesn't want justice, He wants mythology.
(45:54):
What Jesperson is doing in this fictional manifesto is what
psychologists call cognitive framing. He's rewriting events with selective moral rationalization.
He's not just justifying his murders, he's staging them like art.
And that's where the danger lies, because when we let
killers narrate their own legend, they don't just tell us
(46:17):
who they are. They tell others how to follow. And Riley,
she's smart, but she's also ambitious. She starts cross referencing
Jessperson's notes with unsolved cases, and some of them line up.
A missing woman in Elko, Nevada, nineteen ninety one, a
Jane Doe in Kansas found with plastic zip ties like
(46:40):
the ones described in the manifesto, a matchbook from a
truck stop in Saint Louis that shows up in both
the book and an old crime scene photo. And she's
not the only one watching. Soon, forums light up podcasts,
drop teaser episodes. Someone starts a Reddit thread titled Scorecard
(47:02):
two point zero. What started as journalism becomes fuel for obsession.
This is the ethical edge, the sharp thin place where
information becomes glorification, where the line between exposing evil and
platforming it vanishes. I've seen it before. We love true crime,
(47:23):
but sometimes we forget the crime was true. This act
speaks to the power of media, how stories shape perception.
How notoriety can act like legacy, and how the worst
people can become household names while they're victims. Are footnotes.
Jessperson wanted to be remembered, and in this version he
(47:46):
is not because of the damage he did, but because
someone opened the locker. So now you tell me, if
you were Riley, would you burn the manifesto or publish it?
Would you hide them monster's words forever? Or let the
world read them and hope it learns something. There's no
right answer, but I'll say this. The moment we start
(48:09):
understanding these men more than we remember they're victims, we've
already lost something we can't get back. And now we
shift once more from the man with the pen to
the child who carried his name. In our final act,
we meet a son who refuses to inherit a legacy
(48:31):
of murder, a man raised in the shadow of infamy,
fighting every day not to become the monster in his blood.
Coming up act eight, the son who refused to inherit
the darkness. Blood is a blueprint. It can tell us
who we came from, but it doesn't get to decide
(48:51):
who we become. So let me introduce you to a
man named Jason, Jessperson's real son is a private figure,
and in this fictionalized story, we don't claim to know
his truth. But we imagine a man, a son, a
survivor in his own way, a boy who grew up
watching his dad pack bags, disappear for days, come back
(49:15):
with road maps and souvenirs from places Jason had never
heard of, a man who, in his late thirties, changed
his last name and moved to a small town in
Oregon under a new identity, and then spent every day
trying to silence the voice in his head that whispered,
you're his son, your next. In our story, Jason becomes
(49:39):
a criminal psychologist, maybe out of morbid curiosity, maybe to
try and make sense of the thing that tried to
claim him. He lectures at community colleges, he volunteers at
a youth rehab program, and every year, on the anniversary
of his father's arrest, he doesn't talk. He hikes alone
(49:59):
for hours. Not for peace, for penance. Take a seat
in Jason's classroom. In a calm, steady voice, he begins
to speak. When I was a kid, my dad used
to whistle through his teeth. I never knew why it
made my stomach turn until I heard the same whistle
(50:19):
described by a surviving witness. That's when I realized I
wasn't remembering my childhood, I was remembering his hunting pattern.
You don't grow up under a monster and not absorb something,
but you do get to decide what you do with
that knowledge. This act touches on epigenetic trauma. How trauma
(50:43):
doesn't just affect the victim or perpetrator, but echoes through generations.
Jason didn't ask for this legacy, but it lives in him,
in the way he double checks locks in the nightmares
he doesn't talk about, in the way he's ever allowed
himself to have children, because deep down he's terrified there's
(51:05):
something in his blood, something sleeping, and if he passes
it on, it wakes up. You don't have to kill
someone to be haunted by murder. Sometimes surviving the fallout
is the harder job. Jason grew up with a name
that became headline shorthand for horror. He'd hear it in
whispers at school, he saw it carved into bathroom stalls.
(51:28):
He read it in Reddit threads and BuzzFeed lists and
cable reruns and all the while he kept trying to
carve out a self that wasn't shaped like a happy face.
Step into a therapy season with Jason, this private moment
might sounds something like this. I was eleven when I
(51:49):
found a woman's earring under the passenger seat. I asked
my dad about it. He said, that's not yours to
worry about. I still dream about that earring, not because
I think I could have saved her, but because I
wonder what if I had tried. End scene. This act
is about choice about what it takes to live in
(52:11):
spite of the legacy you've been given. Because it's easy
to tell the story of the killer, but the story
of the ones who stayed behind, the daughters, the sisters,
the sons, that's the harder story, the quieter one, but
in many ways, the more powerful one. We glamorize redemption,
(52:34):
but what Jason represents isn't redemption. Its resistance. In a
society obsessed with origin stories and generational curses, it's radical
to say this ends with me. I will not carry
this forward. I am not him. So maybe Jason doesn't
do interviews, Maybe he never writes a book. Maybe the
(52:57):
only person whoever hears his full story is himself. But
every day he chooses silence over spectacle. Every day he
keeps the darkness inside him from reaching anyone else. That's
a victory. And there it is. Eight acts, eight fragments
of reality refracted through imagination. We started with a man
(53:19):
who saw too much. We end with a man who
carries everything and still chooses peace. Jessperson wanted to be remembered,
But I think it's the people like Jason, the ones
who refuse to be consumed by that memory, that deserve
our focus. That was the guilty files, True Crime rewired,
(53:41):
And what a ride we just took. We walked with
truckers who stayed silent, lied with women who craved spotlight,
grieved for daughters who sensed danger in their father's eyes,
and opened lockers that should have stayed shut. We didn't
change the facts. We just asked harder questions. What do
(54:03):
we miss when we focus only on the confession? How
many systems failed, how many bystanders stayed quiet? And how
close are we really to someone just like him? We
explored sociological blind spots, psychological echoes, and just maybe we
gave voice to a few people who never got one.
(54:24):
That's the real power of Rewired, not to rewrite the truth,
but to reframe how we see it, to entertain, yes,
but to engage, to make space for grief, rage, imagination, sociology,
and psychology all in one breath. Because the system we
have it misses a lot, so we're here to help
(54:46):
you see what it didn't. And if tonight's ride through
the dark felt a little too real at times, good
it should because behind every monster is a system that
let them walk. Behind every missed victim a thousand signs
we didn't want to read. But we're not done, and
(55:06):
now the part I love most Friday, We're back for
the Guilty Files Final Cut, our co hosted wrap up
where I sit down with Brian to get his take,
crack open the case one last time, and bring our
own street stories and psychological scars to the table. We're
going behind the scenes, behind the headlines, and definitely behind
(55:29):
the badge. You do not want to miss it until then,
lock your doors, look twice before you hitch a ride,
and if you see a happy face drawn in a
rest stop bathroom, don't smile back. I'm Danny. This has
been the Guilty Files True Crime Rewired see you Friday
(56:01):
in it
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At The Guilty Files
True Crime Rewritten. We believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. Welcome back, truth seekers.
This is the Guilty Files True Crime Rewired. I'm your host, Danny,
(01:16):
and if you're here, you already know we're not here
to just consume true crime. We're here to flip the
case files inside out, to peel back what was said
and poke at what was left unsaid. This week, we're
picking up right where Brian left off. If you missed
his rock solid episode on the Happy Face Killer, hit
(01:37):
pause and go check out the Guilty Files Uncovered. He
laid out the terrifying, twisted legacy of Keith Hunter Jesperson
with sharp precision and clarity. But here on Rewired, we
ask what really happened and what did we miss? Because
the known facts they're only part of the story. So
(02:00):
today we're diving back into the cab of that eighteen
wheeler with Jesperson at the wheel, but not to rehash
his kill count. We're here to imagine what else might
have been hiding behind that smile. What if he wasn't
as invisible as he thought. What if someone saw more
than we ever knew. What if the ripples of his
(02:20):
crimes reached further into the minds of his children, the
silence of the trucking world, and the wreckage of the
justice system. This is a speculative, fictionalized journey built on
the spine of fact. We will move through eight acts,
each exploring a hypothetical angle of the Happy Face Killer case,
(02:42):
layered with psychological theory, sociological critique, and yes, a touch
of dramatized storytelling. Everything you hear might have happened, some
of it did, some of it didn't, and that gray
area is where Rewired lives. Before we go playing with hypotheticals,
(03:02):
we need to remember exactly whose sandbox we're stepping into.
Let's ground this in reality, because honey, this isn't fan fiction.
This is Rewired. And while I like to stir the
psychological pot and toss a little gasoline on the what
if fire, I still respect the burnmarks left behind. So
(03:24):
let's talk about the real deal. Keith Hunter Jesperson, a
towering six feet six inches mass of ego, gasoline fumes
and barely concealed rage on paper, A long haul trucker
just trying to make a living in reality, a serial
killer who used America's highways like a personal hunting ground.
(03:46):
Between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety five, Jesperson murdered at
least eight women that we know of, likely more, possibly
many more. He chose victims who lived on the margins,
sex workers, hitchhikers, women battling addiction, women whose lives didn't
scream headline in the eyes of law enforcement, but they
(04:07):
should have. His first known victim was Twanja Bennett, a
developmentally disabled young woman just trying to enjoy a night
out at a Portland tavern. Instead, she met a monster.
Quick side note and Danny moment of sass. This victim's
name is spelled tau n j A. Most news coverage
(04:29):
I found on this case pronounced her name as Tanya.
I believe Brian might have mispronounced her name using the
correct spelling as his guide, or maybe he is right
and mainstream news got it wrong. It is always our
aim here at the guilty files to do nothing but
give the upmost respect to victims of true crime cases,
(04:51):
especially in pronouncing their name correctly and respectfully. However, we
are human and mistakes are made to despite our best intentions.
Honest note. I was raised in the South with a
heavy accent and have always been nervous about mispronouncing someone's name.
It causes me significant anxiety and trepidation. Full transparency. I
(05:16):
tend to constantly make up my own words. I'm that
person who literally makes up words, but says them with
so much confidence and they are close enough to the
real word that ninety nine point nine percent of the
time you know exactly what I Am trying to say,
or don't even notice it huh, And I get it honest.
(05:37):
My father was a preacher and I have sermons of
his on tape, and he constantly is mispronouncing words, even
biblical names, And my mom can't say a damn word.
You remember those magnetized alphabet letters that parents would put
on the kitchen fridge to help a child learn their ABC's. Well,
I've got a picture that proves this, But my mom
(05:58):
put them on the damn fridge in the world wrong order.
To this day, I say my ABC's wrong. So for congruency,
I'm going to continue to pronounce this victim's name as
Brian did, just for our Guilty Files audience and listener experience.
And in a twist so absurd it feels fictional, but isn't.
Two completely innocent people were convicted of Tanja's murder. Why
(06:23):
Because Laverne Pavolinak wanted to pin the crime on her
boyfriend to get out of the relationship, and the cops
they took the bait, gift, wrapped it and called it justice.
Keith sat back and watched and then kept killing. He
taunted police with letters signed bathroom walls with crude happy faces,
(06:44):
and only confessed when he realized no one was giving
him the attention he so desperately craved. He wasn't caught
by brilliant detective work. He turned himself in because his
ego couldn't stand the silence. Mean, imagine being such a
narcissist that you start snitching on yourself because someone else
(07:05):
is getting credit for your murders. That's not just a
red flag. That's a whole damn parade. Now, Brian laid
it all out for you, the timeline, the body count,
the investigative failures, and the long, lonely road that led
to Keith's capture. But here's the part that rewired listeners know.
(07:26):
We're not here to rewatch the same horror movie. We're
here to walk behind the curtain and ask who else
was in the room, what were the echoes no one heard?
And what if the truth is more tangled than the
facts alone can show. Because killers don't just act alone.
They operate inside systems, inside silence, inside opportunity. So let's
(07:52):
shift gears and drive this story down some of the
darker backroads. We've got eight acts ahead, each one asking
what if what if someone saw him and stayed silent?
What if a child wrote down the truth before she
could speak it aloud. What if the number of victims
was never eight, but something far, far worse. This isn't
(08:18):
a conspiracy theory. It's a psychological autopsy of what might
have been. Ready, let's begin. Welcome to Act one, The
Trucker Who Knew. Let me tell you about a man
named Carl Redline Dugan. That's not his real name, of course,
but for the sake of this story, let's go with it.
(08:38):
Redline was the kind of guy who could eyeball a
bad tire from fifty yards, fix a broken alternator with
a coat hanger, and tell you which diner off I
eighty had the strongest coffee and the least judgment. He'd
been driving long haul since the late seventies. The road
was in his blood and maybe in his lungs too,
(09:00):
thanks to three decades of Marlborough reds and diesel exhaust.
His truck was his sanctuary, his prison, his church, his
confession booth, and his hiding place. In this fictionalized version
of events, it's nineteen ninety three, Fresno, California, three sixteen am.
(09:22):
The truck stop is ghostly quiet, except for the chorus
of buzzing fluorescent lights and the occasional hiss of air
brakes releasing pressure. The asphalt is slick from a short
burst of rain, and the neon glow from the diner
sign warps across every puddle like a broken memory. Redline
(09:44):
leans against his cab, sipping bitter gas station coffee from
a cracked thermos. He calls all reliable. His eyes drift
across the lot, mostly instinct habit, but then something catches
his eye two slots over a familiar rig, a B
and I truck line unit, white trailer, Oregon plates. He
(10:07):
recognizes the driver, Keith, quiet guy, big, broad, friendly enough,
but with those eyes, the kind that don't blink when
they should, the kind that scan a room and never
seems surprised. Tonight, Keith Jesperson looks off. His face is
tight shirts inside out. There's what looks like a long
(10:30):
scrape on the side of the sleeper cab, fresh enough
that the metal still shines through. Red Line watches as
Jessperson opens the passenger side door, tosses something, maybe a
red stained towel, into a trash bin, and then closes
it slowly, too slowly. Now Redline doesn't know what he
(10:54):
just saw, but his stomach tightens something primal, that kind
of knowledge, your body picks up before your brain is
ready to label it. And here's where it gets complicated,
because this man, fictional or not, knows how things work
in the trucking world. He knows that you don't go
calling the cops every time a guy acts strange. You
(11:17):
don't question your brothers on the road, especially not someone
from a respected outfit like B and I. You definitely
don't bring heat down on yourself. There's an unspoken code
in trucker culture, a kind of masculine honor system deeply
rooted in autonomy, routine, and self reliance. You mind your rig,
(11:38):
you mind your miles, and you don't poke your nose
where it doesn't belong. But sociologically speaking, that code is
more than just cultural shorthand. It's a survival mechanism in
professions like long haul trucking, predominantly male, highly transient, and
isolated from regular oversight. There's a deep investment in a
(11:59):
ton of me. These men are kings of their own
castle on eighteen wheels. They sleep alone, eat alone, think alone.
They live inside the cab of a machine, and that
machine in a way starts to shape them. Now, listen,
I've worked in systems that rely on silence. As a
beat cop in Atlanta, I watched the same damn dynamics
(12:23):
play out in uniform. You stay quiet, you don't rock
the boat. You protect your own even when your gut
is screaming that something is off. This question mark, this
is that turned up to eleven and stretched across ten
thousand miles of black top. So back to redline. What
(12:44):
if in this reimagining, he starts to take notes, scratches
details into his root log that don't belong, things like
Keith headed west alone, lot lizard scene, crying behind dumpster,
bloodstain on mudflap, passenger door dented, no passenger scene. Maybe
(13:04):
he even starts keeping a second notebook, a secret one.
Maybe he asks around quietly at other stops testing the waters.
You seen Keith lately? That guy gives me the creeps, Now, man,
jesperson solid never laid on a load. Why you asking
that notebook? He hides it in the lining of his
(13:24):
bunk because he's not sure what he's documenting. He just
knows he has to. But here's the psychological rub, and
I want y'all to really sit with this. Redline isn't
a bad man, He's not evil. He's just conflicted. He
exists in that moral gray zone where fear, pride, and
(13:45):
masculine identity collide. He's afraid of being wrong, afraid of
being the guy who rats on someone without proof, afraid
of losing his community, one built on trust, even if
that trust sometimes times hides rot beneath the chrome. And this, friends,
is the sociological truth in tightly bound male subcultures, silence
(14:09):
often equals loyalty, even when that silence comes at the
cost of someone else's life. This is where I get
a little loud, because we love to ask how did
Keith get away with it for so long? And the
answer is he wasn't invisible. He was ignored. People like Redline.
(14:31):
They may have seen the blood, heard the screams, noticed
the inconsistencies, but they stayed quiet, not because they were cruel,
but because the culture taught them silence was survival. And
don't get it twisted. This doesn't just happen in truck stops.
This is police departments, churches, locker rooms, frat houses, boardrooms.
(14:54):
The rules of silence are almost always written by the
people with something to lose and for by the people
with everything to lose.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So, in this fictional account, Redline finally sees Jessperson's face
on the evening news in March of nineteen ninety five.
He's at a truck stop in Nevada, eating chili off
a plastic tray when the happy Face Killer segment airs.
He freezes his thermos drops and then he walks out
(15:33):
into the parking lot and pukes between two semis. He
digs the notebook out from under his mattress that night
and burns it in a trash barrel because he can't
bear to have proof of how close he was and
how long he did nothing. I imagine that man carried
that weight until the day he died. I imagine he
(15:54):
saw every missing woman's face in his rear view mirror.
I imagine he won every time he crossed a state line,
how many bodies they might have passed along the way.
So why open the rewired file with this fictional man?
Because Redline, as imagined, represents the maybe the might have seen,
(16:17):
the should have said something and in true crime, it's
not just the killer we need to study, it's the
world that lets them keep going. What does masculinity look
like when it's afraid to speak? What does loyalty cost
when it protects monsters? And how do you tell the
difference between a good man with doubts and a silent
(16:38):
witness to murder? That, dear listener, is the first wire
we're pulling loose. Let me ask you something. Have you
ever met someone who wanted to be in the middle
of a tragedy? They didn't experience? Someone who inserts themselves
into other people's trauma like it's a casting call. The
ones who, when the world catches fire, can't help help,
(17:00):
but inch toward the flames, not to help, but to
be seen standing there. That's the vibe Laverne Pavlinak gives me.
But what if it was more than just a lie?
Let's zoom in. Welcome to act too, LaVerne's last lie.
Laverne was fifty eight years old when she confessed to
(17:22):
a brutal murder she didn't commit, and not just any murder,
the violent, high profile killing of Tunja Bennett. She told
detectives her boyfriend John Sosnovsky had strangled Tanya, that she
had helped dispose of the body. She gave them timelines, locations, details,
(17:42):
except none of it added up. She didn't know what
Twnja was wearing. She got the dump sight wrong, the
timeline was off, but she kept going and worse. She
watched as John, her live in partner, was dragged down
with her lie. She knew, she knew the police wanted
(18:03):
a clean answer, so she gave them one. Now, most
folks stop here and say, well, she wanted to get
out of the relationship. She lied to frame him. Sure, maybe,
but that's the surface story. Let's get in deeper. Here's
the thing about false confessions. They're not always rooted in fear.
(18:25):
Sometimes they're rooted in fantasy. Laverne was a woman who,
for most of her life had been invisible by society's standards.
She was aging out of relevance, no career to speak of,
no fame, no spotlight, and by all accounts, a partner
who treated her with increasing cruelty. But when the news
(18:47):
of Taunya's murder broke, when the reward posters went up,
when the community whispered about who might have done it,
suddenly there was a story, and maybe Laverne wanted in.
What we might be seeing here isn't just manipulation. It's
a psychological phenomenon known as factitious disorder imposed on self
(19:11):
or what used to be called Munchausen syndrome. But this
time it's not medical symptoms. It's criminality. It's the compulsion
to place oneself in the center of chaos, to make
the narrative bend around you, to become essential in a
story that doesn't belong to you, because being hated is
(19:32):
still better than being ignored. This ain't law and order.
People don't confess for no reason. Even a lie is
trying to tell you something. Let's take it one step further.
What if Laverne kept a scrapbook, not of memories, but
of murders, clipped newspaper articles, carefully folded and pressed between
(19:54):
floral print recipe cards. What if she cataloged unsolved crimes
like recipe one victim, isolated, one cruel boyfriend, sprinkled in
add trauma, stir until arrest. And what if she rehearsed
her confession in the mirror every night, eyes wide, voice trembling,
(20:14):
practicing how she'd cry not because she was delusional, but
because she wanted to be needed. Imagine Laverne sitting on
the edge of her bed, staring at the static of
a TV screen, whispering, I helped him. I was there,
even if she wasn't, even if she never left the
(20:34):
damn house. Now, let's not forget this lie. Didn't live
in isolation. Her confession triggered a full police investigation. It
consumed resources, It landed two innocent people behind bars. Johnsonovsky
pled no contest to a crime he didn't commit because
he believed the evidence stacked against him, evidence that Laverne fabricated.
(20:58):
And this is where we should from psychology to sociology,
because what Laverne did worked. Why because the system was
primed to believe her. They wanted the story tied up,
and she served it on a silver platter. Police departments,
especially those under pressure to solve a high profile case,
(21:21):
often fall prey to confirmation bias. It's not that they
don't notice the inconsistencies, it's that they don't want to.
They'd rather win with a lie than lose while searching
for the truth. So when Laverne spoke, they didn't ask why.
They asked how fast she could testify. But here's the
twist we're playing with today. What if this wasn't LaVerne's
(21:44):
first performance. What if she'd tried to tell other stories
before ones no one cared to hear. What if this
was the only time someone actually listened. And what if
after all the interrogations, all the headlines, all the flash bulbs,
Laverne sat in her cell and realized, this is the
(22:06):
most attention I've ever gotten in my life. What do
you do with a truth like that? This act isn't
about forgiveness. It's about understanding the depth of what people
will do when the world stops looking at them. LaVerne's
lie cost lives, It cost credibility. It handed Jessperson a
(22:27):
free pass to keep killing. But it also tells us
something chilling about identity. Sometimes the hunger to exist, to
matter will drive people to the edge of reality, and
sometimes they'll drag someone over with them. So we've explored
the silence of a man who saw something and the
(22:49):
confessions of a woman who needed to be seen. But
what happens when someone is caught in the middle when
they don't lie, but they also don't speak up. Next
a journal a daughter and a truth written in the
spaces between words. Let's move into Act three, the daughter's journal.
(23:09):
There's a kind of horror that doesn't scream. It just
lingers in the corners of a room, in a word
left unfinished, in a drawer that won't quite close. This
isn't the horror of blood and screams. This is the
horror of almost knowing, of seeing something again and again
(23:32):
and only realizing years later what it actually was. So
let's imagine something. A girl thirteen years old somewhere in Washington,
Let's call her Carrie, And one night she finds a journal,
her own, half filled, spiral bound soft cover. But when
(23:53):
she flips to the middle, the handwriting isn't hers. The
foreign entries read January twenty fifth. Dad came home again.
He smells like truck grease and something else, not like roadkill,
not like sweat, like metal. He was quiet during dinner.
(24:14):
Mom kept looking at his hands. February second, I found
a bracelet under the seat of his rig. It had
someone's name on it, not Mom's. February fourteenth, he got
me a Teddy Bear for Valentine's Day. I asked where
he bought it. He said, don't worry about it. There
was red thread stuck in its fur. March third, I
(24:36):
woke up last night and he was standing in my doorway,
just standing watching me sleep. And Scene. Now, let me
be very clear, Jessperson's real children have spoken out publicly,
and they've done so with grace, honesty, and unimaginable strength.
(24:56):
Melissa Moore, his daughter, has become an advocate, a truth teller.
There is no record that any of them ever knew
what he was doing, this fictionalized act. It's not an accusation,
it's an exploration. It's what if someone had seen the
cracks but didn't know what they were looking at. Back
(25:20):
to Carrie's journal entries March nineteenth, there's something buried behind
the shed. I asked him about it. He laughed too loud,
said it was old junk. March thirtieth. He told me
you're too curious for your own good. Then he smiled,
but it wasn't his smile. April first, I dreamed he
(25:42):
dragged someone out of the truck, woke up screaming, but
I don't think I was asleep And Scene. That's the
thing about monsters, they don't always hide under the bed
sometimes they tuck you in. Can you imagine the dissonance?
One day he's teaching her how to tie a fish,
not the next she's watching him scrub what looks like
(26:03):
blood out of his pant leg in the sink. He
says it's rust. She nods, but the image stays. That's horror,
Not the act, but the waiting, the slow burn, dread
of being right about the worst thing you could imagine.
What we're exploring here is early stage traumatic intuition, a
(26:26):
phenomenon where children pick up on emotional or behavioral inconsistencies
long before they can verbalize them. The subconscious knows what
the conscious mind refuses to accept. Carrie might not have
known the words predator or sociopath, but her body knew,
her dreams knew the creak in the floorboards, and the
(26:49):
flicker of a smile too wide. Those were data points,
and if no adult believed her, she wrote it down.
This act also touches on something I SA saw far
too often during my time in law enforcement. Kids who knew,
kids who saw, but no one ever read the journal.
No one ever asked the second question, because it's easier
(27:12):
to pretend you didn't hear the whisper than to investigate
the scream. There's this idea that evil announces itself that
will recognize the killer. But what if he's got a
gentle voice and rough hands and a damn good story.
What if he's a father. Carrie's final journal excerpt reads,
(27:35):
April twelfth. I'm hiding this where I think no one
will find it. If someone reads this and I'm not here,
tell them I tried to say something. End scene. Now
imagine years later that same journal is found by a
cold case investigator. The inks faded, but the story is
(27:55):
still screaming, and someone finally realizes she's aw everything. So far,
we've seen silence, we've seen a lie, and now we've
witnessed a truth too small to save anyone. But what
if I told you the next victim never even got
a chance to leave her name behind. What if all
(28:18):
she left was a smile and a shadow in act
for the lost Jane Doe. We meet the woman no
one claimed, But that doesn't mean she didn't have a story.
She had no name, no missing person's report, no family
crying out on TV, no candlelight vigil. All she had
was a shallow grave, A guest at her age and
(28:40):
the company of Silence. We call her a Jane Doe,
but maybe her name was Lena. Let me tell you
about Lena. She was born in Bakersfield or maybe Barstow.
She had a mother who drank too much and a
brother who taught her how to fix a flat tire.
She got good at hiding bruises, got even better at
smiling when she wasn't okay. By fifteen, she was hitchhiking
(29:02):
north on I five with nothing but a duffel bag,
a walkman, and a laminated photo of her and her
brother at the fair. Maybe she got clean once, Maybe
she relapsed twice. Maybe she liked strawberry pop tarts and
old motown records. Maybe she always called her lover's baby
no matter how long she knew them. She wasn't broken,
(29:24):
she wasn't disposable. She was trying, but no one saw that. Now,
imagine this jessperson pulls into a rest stop in Oregon.
Lena is sitting on the curb, legs crossed, looking tired
but alert. He offers her a ride. She hesitates, but
he has that look, the practiced one, the kind that
(29:46):
says safe, the kind of lie wrapped in a face
the world doesn't question. She says yes, and that is
the last time anyone sees her.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty. We'll be right
back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
This is where I want to sit for a second,
because we have to talk about why people like Lena disappear.
Why is it that when a woman with a nine
to five job and a golden retriever goes missing, she's
plastered across every TV screen, But when a woman like
Lena vanishes, she's met with a shrug and a stack
(30:26):
of old assumptions. It's class, it's race, it's addiction. It's
the myth of bad choices. We don't search for Lena
because she doesn't fit our narrative of innocence. She doesn't
have the right kind of grief waiting for her, and
in that vacuum, predators like Jessperson thrive. He didn't just
(30:49):
pick women he could overpower. He picked women the world
wouldn't look for. Maybe Lena fought back, Maybe she scratched
his face, Maybe her last word was no oh, or
maybe she cried, told him she had a son, told
him she used to sing Aretha Franklin with her mother
in the kitchen before everything went sideways, and when she died,
(31:10):
maybe Jessperson dumped her off a logging road near the
Columbia River. No marker, no mercy, just cold earth and
a man humming to himself as he drove away. The
medical examiner said she was in her early thirties, dark hair,
five feet six inches, signs of previous injury, likely unhoused, strangled.
(31:32):
That's all the file says, but I think she was more.
This act forces us to confront what I call the
hierarchy of victimhood, the deeply embedded belief that some lives
are worth more than others, that some deaths are more tragic,
that some people are easier to grieve. Jesperson used that
(31:54):
to his advantage. He knew society didn't protect women like Lena,
he knew no one was watching, and he weaponized that invisibility.
So today we give Lena back what she was denied,
a story, a voice, a moment in the light, because
whether her name was Lena or not, she deserved to
(32:16):
be remembered as someone who mattered up. Next, we meet
a man who should have said something, who had power,
who had doubts, and who buried both Welcome to Act five.
The cop who covered it up. Every cop has that
one case, the one they wish they could go back
and do differently, the one they still dream about years
(32:38):
after the badge is turned in and the guns locked away. Now,
let me introduce you to Detective Malcolm Ross. Fictional, yes,
but real enough to bleed. He's late forties, worn leather jacket,
lives alone with two ashtrays, a neglected plant, and an
ex wife who still calls to remind him what time
(32:59):
court is. He's not corrupt, not a bad cop. He's
one of the good ones, which, frankly, is the most
dangerous kind. Malcolm was assigned to the Tanja Bennett case
as a secondary what we'd call supporting lead. He was
there when Laverne Pavlinak started talking there when she said
(33:21):
she helped her boyfriend kill a woman in the gorge.
There when her timeline didn't make sense and the forensics
didn't match, and her eyes darted left every time she
said strangled. And he had a feeling, you know, the one,
that tightness in the chest, the whisper in your gut
(33:41):
that says something ain't right here. But Malcolm didn't speak up,
not loud enough anyway, Because the lead detective was already
holding press briefings, the DA's office wanted indictments, and the
department was riding high off a series of recent clearances.
The pressure to solve Tanya's case fast wasn't just coming
(34:02):
from the top, it was coming from everywhere. Here's what
the public doesn't always understand. Policing isn't just crime scenes
and interrogations. It's politics, it's optics. You start raising doubts
about a clean confession, you're not just questioning the case.
You're questioning your colleagues, your unit, the department's credibility. And
(34:27):
when your supervisors start pulling you off side cases and
skipping your name from the rotation, you get the message.
So Malcolm kept quiet, but he recorded his internal monologues,
tapes that would go something like this, it's all wrong.
Her story doesn't track, no DNA, no hair, no motive
other than spite. And yet here I am watching the
(34:51):
press shake her hand. They called it decisive detective work.
What a joke. Now, Ross isn't evil, but he's in institutionalized.
He's been in this machine long enough to know how
it punishes dissent. Let's break this down with some real
talk on police policy. In most departments, there's no formal
(35:12):
punishment for speaking out against a faulty investigation. But informal
you get pulled off big cases, your promotions stall, your
name stops coming up for special assignments. You become that
cop the problem. And Ross he had bills to pay,
a pension to protect, and a job he wasn't ready
(35:32):
to lose. So he sat in silence, even as LaVerne's
story twisted itself into knots, even as john Sonofsky, who
said almost nothing, was dragged into a plea deal just
to avoid death row. This is what I want listeners
to hear. Sometimes the system doesn't fail because of malice.
(35:55):
It fails because nobody speaks when it counts. And if
you think that's changed since the nineties, spoiler alert, it
hasn't not enough. It's nineteen ninety five now, Ross's off duty,
sitting on his recliner with a beer and a dog
eared case folder in his lap. Jessperson's mugshot flashes across
(36:17):
the screen. The Happy Face Killer arrested in Yakima County.
The report starts listing names, Tanja Bennett among them. Ross
drops the beer and he realizes he helped put the
wrong people away, and the right man had kept killing.
(36:37):
His hand trembles as he pulls that old journal from
the drawer, flips to the back, and starts writing. He
writes every detail he overlooked, every time he looked away,
every moment he swallowed his voice. Not to exonerate himself,
but because the guilt finally outweighed the fear. This act
(36:59):
is about moral injury, the psychological toll when someone knows
the right thing and doesn't do it. It's also about
the limitations of institutional culture, when silence becomes policy, truth
becomes a liability. And look, as someone who's worn the badge,
let me say this, I get it. I've been the
(37:22):
one who watched a supervisor bend a report to fit
a narrative. I've been in the room when an officer said,
let's not overcomplicate it. I've been the one who asked
a second question and got that look, the one that says,
not your place. And here's the truth. If your system
punishes people for asking questions, then your system's not broken.
(37:46):
It's designed that way. So what happened to Ross? Maybe nothing?
Maybe he retired. Maybe he wrote that letter and never
mailed it. Maybe he died with the knowledge that silence
can be a killer too. Next up, we're shifting from
silence to noise, and not just any noise, the kind
(38:08):
that echoes in locker rooms, truck stops, and CB channels
across the country. Because Jessperson claimed he killed over one
hundred sixty people, and we laughed, we dismissed it, But
what if he wasn't alone? Up next is Act six,
The Scoreboard Killer. When Keith Hunter Jesperson was arrested, he
(38:31):
claimed to have killed over one hundred sixty people. Most
dismissed it, called it bravado, labeled it attention seeking, and sure,
maybe it was. But what if it wasn't. What if
Jesperson wasn't lying, at least not entirely. What if he
was tallying something bigger than just his kills. What if
(38:54):
he was part of a network. Let me paint a
picture a twenty four hour truck stop outside AM, dim lights,
CB radios buzzing like angry flies. Inside the driver's lounge,
there's a backroom not on any manifest, no security cams,
just a few chairs. A map of North America tacked
(39:15):
to the wall, and a scoreboard a real one with
names but not of players of victims. Each pushpin a body,
each scratch mark a silence, each win scored with a
bottle cap in a box under the counter. Welcome to
(39:35):
the league. We're in full fiction now, but it's not
impossible because the trucking industry. It's the perfect cover. Constant movement,
no centralized oversight, jurisdictional confusion. Victims often last seen at
unregulated locations, rest stops, service stations, roadside motels, a culture
(39:57):
that prizes privacy to toughness and silence. A killer could
rack up bodies across the map, and it might take
years for anyone to connect the dots unless someone's keeping score.
So let's imagine a CB based network of predators. They
use code words. Nightcap means a body, new passenger means
(40:20):
a target, I'm full up, tonight means they've killed recently.
They don't know each other's real names, only handles, Throttle, splicer, Grimace,
happy face. That last one, Yeah, that's jessperson. And maybe
he wasn't the top of the chain. Maybe he was
(40:40):
just the loudest one in the room, the only one
dumb or vain enough to sign his work. Now, let's
zoom out, because whether this network existed or not, the
conditions for it absolutely did still do. The FBI's Highway
Serial Killings Initiative, Yeah It's Real, was launched in response
(41:02):
to a disturbing pattern hundreds of unsolved murders and disappearances
tied to America's highways, victims found near interstates, truck stops,
and shipping routes, and many of them still unidentified, still unclaimed.
Jesperson is just one dot on that map. But what
if there are dozens more? What if some are still driving?
(41:26):
In twenty twelve, a retired trucker dies in a hospice
bed in Illinois. His daughter finds an old cigar box
in his garage, inside receipts from states he never told her.
He visited photos of women, tiny scraps of jewelry, a
matchbook from a Nevada truck stop with five tally marks inside,
(41:48):
No names, no context, just a haunting pattern. The police
are called, but by then he's ashen an urn. This
is what I mean when I say Jesperson was a glitch.
He was a feature, a symptom of a culture. That
values men's freedom of movement more than women's freedom to live.
(42:09):
This fictional network, this scoreboard might not exist on paper,
but the conditions for it are real as hell, and
we as a society helped build it. Predators look for opportunity, yes,
but they also look for models, and if someone like
(42:30):
Jesperson gets away with it long enough, others notice, others copy.
This isn't just about trauma, It's about my medic violence,
where people absorb and reproduce behavior they see rewarded. When
Jesperson bragged about his kill count, he wasn't just gloating,
he was teaching. When I was a beat cop, I
(42:52):
used to think evil had a shape, a pattern, something
we could recognize and shut down. But you know what,
it really has a schedule. It's patient, it's silent, It
waits until no one's looking, and then it keeps score.
So maybe Jesperson didn't kill one hundred and sixty people,
but maybe someone did, and maybe they're still watching. Up next,
(43:15):
we open a locker that was never supposed to be found.
Inside it the manifesto of a man who didn't just
want to kill, he wanted to explain it. Coming up
in Act seven, the manifesto in the locker. You ever
wonder what someone like jessperson writes down when he's not
confessing in a letter or drawing smiley faces on a
(43:37):
bathroom wall. I do, And in this fictional act, I'm
going to take you inside the kind of hell most
people wouldn't dare open. Let's say it's twenty twenty three.
A young freelance journalist, let's call her Riley Benton, gets
an anonymous tip, no return address, just a note, locker
number forty one, desert springs CB handle, happy face. She
(44:01):
thinks it's a prank, but curiosity's a tricky thing. It
wears a press badge and bites like a dog. So
Riley drives ninety miles into the Nevada Desert, finds the
old travel plaza, abandoned, mostly stripped, and finds locker number
forty one, the keys already in. It turns like butter
(44:21):
inside a warped milk crate, three spiral bound notebooks, rubber bands,
loose polaroids, and on top a Manila folder labeled my rules.
Now tell me something. If you found the writings of
a serial killer, unedited, handwritten raw, would you read it?
(44:42):
Would you publish it, because Riley does. She takes it home,
reads every page, catalogs every contradiction, and what she finds
isn't just a confession. It's a playbook. And that playbook
contains rules and pointers, like you can tell a lot
about a woman by what she carries in her purse.
(45:05):
I always checked before I dumped the body. They stopped
screaming in my dreams after number four. After that, I
had to turn up the volume to feel anything. Never
take a victim from the same state twice in a row.
That's how they catch dumb ones. I'm not dumb.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Stay tuned for more of the Guilty Files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Being famous doesn't make you a monster. Being ignored does.
It's horrifying and compelling because it's not just about what
he did, It's about what he wanted us to think
about what he did. This is narrative as manipulation. Jesperson
doesn't want forgiveness, he doesn't want justice, He wants mythology.
(45:54):
What Jesperson is doing in this fictional manifesto is what
psychologists call cognitive framing. He's rewriting events with selective moral rationalization.
He's not just justifying his murders, he's staging them like art.
And that's where the danger lies, because when we let
killers narrate their own legend, they don't just tell us
(46:17):
who they are. They tell others how to follow. And Riley,
she's smart, but she's also ambitious. She starts cross referencing
Jessperson's notes with unsolved cases, and some of them line up.
A missing woman in Elko, Nevada, nineteen ninety one, a
Jane Doe in Kansas found with plastic zip ties like
(46:40):
the ones described in the manifesto, a matchbook from a
truck stop in Saint Louis that shows up in both
the book and an old crime scene photo. And she's
not the only one watching. Soon, forums light up podcasts,
drop teaser episodes. Someone starts a Reddit thread titled Scorecard
(47:02):
two point zero. What started as journalism becomes fuel for obsession.
This is the ethical edge, the sharp thin place where
information becomes glorification, where the line between exposing evil and
platforming it vanishes. I've seen it before. We love true crime,
(47:23):
but sometimes we forget the crime was true. This act
speaks to the power of media, how stories shape perception.
How notoriety can act like legacy, and how the worst
people can become household names while they're victims. Are footnotes.
Jessperson wanted to be remembered, and in this version he
(47:46):
is not because of the damage he did, but because
someone opened the locker. So now you tell me, if
you were Riley, would you burn the manifesto or publish it?
Would you hide them monster's words forever? Or let the
world read them and hope it learns something. There's no
right answer, but I'll say this. The moment we start
(48:09):
understanding these men more than we remember they're victims, we've
already lost something we can't get back. And now we
shift once more from the man with the pen to
the child who carried his name. In our final act,
we meet a son who refuses to inherit a legacy
(48:31):
of murder, a man raised in the shadow of infamy,
fighting every day not to become the monster in his blood.
Coming up act eight, the son who refused to inherit
the darkness. Blood is a blueprint. It can tell us
who we came from, but it doesn't get to decide
(48:51):
who we become. So let me introduce you to a
man named Jason, Jessperson's real son is a private figure,
and in this fictionalized story, we don't claim to know
his truth. But we imagine a man, a son, a
survivor in his own way, a boy who grew up
watching his dad pack bags, disappear for days, come back
(49:15):
with road maps and souvenirs from places Jason had never
heard of, a man who, in his late thirties, changed
his last name and moved to a small town in
Oregon under a new identity, and then spent every day
trying to silence the voice in his head that whispered,
you're his son, your next. In our story, Jason becomes
(49:39):
a criminal psychologist, maybe out of morbid curiosity, maybe to
try and make sense of the thing that tried to
claim him. He lectures at community colleges, he volunteers at
a youth rehab program, and every year, on the anniversary
of his father's arrest, he doesn't talk. He hikes alone
(49:59):
for hours. Not for peace, for penance. Take a seat
in Jason's classroom. In a calm, steady voice, he begins
to speak. When I was a kid, my dad used
to whistle through his teeth. I never knew why it
made my stomach turn until I heard the same whistle
(50:19):
described by a surviving witness. That's when I realized I
wasn't remembering my childhood, I was remembering his hunting pattern.
You don't grow up under a monster and not absorb something,
but you do get to decide what you do with
that knowledge. This act touches on epigenetic trauma. How trauma
(50:43):
doesn't just affect the victim or perpetrator, but echoes through generations.
Jason didn't ask for this legacy, but it lives in him,
in the way he double checks locks in the nightmares
he doesn't talk about, in the way he's ever allowed
himself to have children, because deep down he's terrified there's
(51:05):
something in his blood, something sleeping, and if he passes
it on, it wakes up. You don't have to kill
someone to be haunted by murder. Sometimes surviving the fallout
is the harder job. Jason grew up with a name
that became headline shorthand for horror. He'd hear it in
whispers at school, he saw it carved into bathroom stalls.
(51:28):
He read it in Reddit threads and BuzzFeed lists and
cable reruns and all the while he kept trying to
carve out a self that wasn't shaped like a happy face.
Step into a therapy season with Jason, this private moment
might sounds something like this. I was eleven when I
(51:49):
found a woman's earring under the passenger seat. I asked
my dad about it. He said, that's not yours to
worry about. I still dream about that earring, not because
I think I could have saved her, but because I
wonder what if I had tried. End scene. This act
is about choice about what it takes to live in
(52:11):
spite of the legacy you've been given. Because it's easy
to tell the story of the killer, but the story
of the ones who stayed behind, the daughters, the sisters,
the sons, that's the harder story, the quieter one, but
in many ways, the more powerful one. We glamorize redemption,
(52:34):
but what Jason represents isn't redemption. Its resistance. In a
society obsessed with origin stories and generational curses, it's radical
to say this ends with me. I will not carry
this forward. I am not him. So maybe Jason doesn't
do interviews, Maybe he never writes a book. Maybe the
(52:57):
only person whoever hears his full story is himself. But
every day he chooses silence over spectacle. Every day he
keeps the darkness inside him from reaching anyone else. That's
a victory. And there it is. Eight acts, eight fragments
of reality refracted through imagination. We started with a man
(53:19):
who saw too much. We end with a man who
carries everything and still chooses peace. Jessperson wanted to be remembered,
But I think it's the people like Jason, the ones
who refuse to be consumed by that memory, that deserve
our focus. That was the guilty files, True Crime rewired,
(53:41):
And what a ride we just took. We walked with
truckers who stayed silent, lied with women who craved spotlight,
grieved for daughters who sensed danger in their father's eyes,
and opened lockers that should have stayed shut. We didn't
change the facts. We just asked harder questions. What do
(54:03):
we miss when we focus only on the confession? How
many systems failed, how many bystanders stayed quiet? And how
close are we really to someone just like him? We
explored sociological blind spots, psychological echoes, and just maybe we
gave voice to a few people who never got one.
(54:24):
That's the real power of Rewired, not to rewrite the truth,
but to reframe how we see it, to entertain, yes,
but to engage, to make space for grief, rage, imagination, sociology,
and psychology all in one breath. Because the system we
have it misses a lot, so we're here to help
(54:46):
you see what it didn't. And if tonight's ride through
the dark felt a little too real at times, good
it should because behind every monster is a system that
let them walk. Behind every missed victim a thousand signs
we didn't want to read. But we're not done, and
(55:06):
now the part I love most Friday, We're back for
the Guilty Files Final Cut, our co hosted wrap up
where I sit down with Brian to get his take,
crack open the case one last time, and bring our
own street stories and psychological scars to the table. We're
going behind the scenes, behind the headlines, and definitely behind
(55:29):
the badge. You do not want to miss it until then,
lock your doors, look twice before you hitch a ride,
and if you see a happy face drawn in a
rest stop bathroom, don't smile back. I'm Danny. This has
been the Guilty Files True Crime Rewired see you Friday
(56:01):
in it
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