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Season 5: Sick Killer's Brain: Pt 3: No Good Leads
169 Plays21 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we talk about some true crime news and a series of serial killings that may indicate the work of several serial killers in the same geographical area outside the PNW.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Great Basin Murders - Bitter Creek Betty
00:00:49
Speaker
This is True Crime XS
00:01:00
Speaker
All right, so where we left off with this little series that we're doing was with Bitter Creek Betty. Now, we're going to keep going with the Great Basin murders here, and then I'm going to tie some stuff into it that I found pretty interesting.
Case Study: Shafter Jane Doe
00:01:19
Speaker
In order to do that, we have to look at this 1993 case where an unidentified young woman is found on November 16th, a motorist discovers her nude body right off the I 80 exit for Shafter Nevada. So this is going to be an Elko County, Nevada. And because of that, she's going to get a couple of nicknames. The first nickname she's given is the Shafter Jane Doe. Later on, they refer to her as the Elko County Jane Doe.
00:01:55
Speaker
The coroner who worked on her autopsy, in their opinion, established that she had been murdered five or six days prior to her discovery. So that puts her being killed sometime early November of 1993.
Forensic Evidence and Ritualistic Aspects
00:02:14
Speaker
In her system, they find a couple of drugs. They find some alcohol. They find some marijuana. And investigators at the scene, they found drag marks near the crime scene. So they formulated the idea that she had been killed elsewhere and that this was not a crime scene as much as it was a body dump.
00:02:39
Speaker
From what I've read from what is now in the Wiki and from a number of other sources, they did some interesting analysis analysis here on the tire tread patterns. They came up with a theory that her killer had been traveling in a medium or large vehicle. It could have been an early SUV, a pickup truck, or even a van.
00:03:06
Speaker
We find something new with her. It's not unique in the Great Basin murders, but in terms of time, we're only in 1993 here. And that is the killer had posed her on her back. She's naked and the the whoever had left her there had spread the corpse's arms and legs out in order to resemble a cross.
00:03:38
Speaker
The coroner believes that Jane Doe had been beaten before she died, but that the ultimate cause of death was two gunshot wounds to the chest. Forensics was only able to extract a partial right thumbprint for Jane Doe, but there have not been any fingerprint database matches.
Forensic Analysis and Wyoming Connection
00:04:01
Speaker
According to the name of profile here, the woman has all 32 teeth in her mouth. They were all in excellent condition, except they did note that there was a root canal in process, which I thought was pretty interesting. So she has blonde hair. She has brown eyes. She measures out to be around 140 pounds and five feet, seven inches tall.
00:04:30
Speaker
Doing an analysis later on on her teeth indicated that she was probably 27 or 28 years old at the time of her death. She had a scar on her right shin. Both of her ear lobes had been pierced, but according to investigators, there was no jewelry at the crime scene.
00:04:51
Speaker
She ends up being, ah this case ends up being evaluated by a Utah crime lab and they analyze isotopes from her hair, which indicated that the victim had spent the last months of her life somewhere in the area around Star Valley in Lincoln County, Wyoming. Okay, that's a lot of stuff there, a lot of geographic information.
00:05:19
Speaker
She's found in Nevada. She's analyzed by a Utah crime scene and her autopsy is done locally, but they believe that she had spent and like I've seen it as narrow as seven to nine months in Star Valley in Lincoln County, Wyoming. It seems like they could attract the root canal.
00:05:40
Speaker
how How would you track a root canal? I thought that like when I saw it. like she was only as So she had spent the last seven months in Star Valley.
Root Canal Identification Theory
00:05:50
Speaker
So if a root canal is in process, that means like she had gone in and they had done part of it. And then I don't really know what the steps are, but then you would, in theory, in a short time later, go back in and they would perform it. Right. And I don't know exactly where she was in that process, but to me,
00:06:09
Speaker
if I recall correctly, it's a two-step process. And how many endodontists could possibly be in Star Valley? It's interesting that you say it that way. it's It's sort of a two, I think of it as a three-step process, although the root canal itself is two steps, but you have to identify that you need it, right? Well, that would just be at a dentist and they would send you to, well, and this may not be the way it is everywhere.
00:06:35
Speaker
But the dentist can tell you need a root canal because they do the dry eye ice test, right? Right. And once they do that, they ah they may have a more sophisticated way of testing now. I don't know. But back then, probably a piece of dry ice and your reaction to it indicates you need a root canal. And unless the dentist just happens to do it, they would send you to an endodontist who specializes in root canals. and you go in and they, you know, a couple of things and then they're like, okay, come back next week or whatever. And then you get the rest of it done.
Star Valley, Wyoming's Significance
00:07:13
Speaker
I don't really know the rhyme or reason to it. Well, I was thinking that that you then come in for a crown. Like you get a temporary after the process and then you come in and you get the crown fitted. So my guess is, my guess is she's somewhere in between those steps and you're right. Like you could probably find,
00:07:33
Speaker
if you're looking at Star Valley. So we have this seven hour drive basically six hours and change from where our bodies found to get back to Star Valley. I, before we started looking at this, knew nothing about Star Valley, Wyoming. Have you ever looked at that area? start out just on account So I had pulled it up just to like know a little bit more about it. The reason was, this is my thinking, Star Valley,
00:08:01
Speaker
seems to be another place kind of like the Great Basin. So it's located in the Salt River Range. So this is going to be like Idaho and Wyoming.
00:08:13
Speaker
The altitude of the valley gets ah pretty high. ah they They range it out between 5,500 and 7,000 feet for altitude. There are three major rivers that connect here. So you've got Snake River, Gray's River, and the Salt River all coming together near Alpine Junction.
00:08:34
Speaker
ah There's a reservoir there. ah There's a number of things about Star Valley that I found pretty interesting, and I was going to do like a quick population check for Star Valley. It's actually kind of hard to do that because it has 20 communities there. But some of them have populations as low as like today, 120 people, and as high as 6,000 people.
00:09:00
Speaker
But for the most part, you're talking about little tiny communities all around Star Valley, and I don't know why they haven't tracked down like where she was potentially getting her dental work done. I thought that would make the most sense to try and figure out who she was. And possibly they did. um Another thing at this point in time, because we're talking about 31 years later now at this point, right? I don't know that they would have it, but you could still potentially see who didn't get their root canal finished. That's interesting. I wonder, I don't know how common that is now that we're sitting here talking about it. Well, that was the first thing I thought of. So yes, a dentist even because so we don't know
00:09:48
Speaker
if it could be distinguished any further. I don't even know how accurate the isotope test ah is, but if you could find a dentist who referred somebody from their records, they'd have to look back at this point. You know, 31 years ago, she has an age range. They have a general idea of what she looked like, right? Right. Then they would, it's I feel like that would be the best way to do it, but I also feel like the record retention might have been there because she didn't get it finished. and so I don't know how they track that, but like a lot of times they would try for a while to get the person back in. She missed an appointment. There's all kinds of little sort of think like and don't know caveats that might make her record stick out for somebody. yeah Getting a um root canal halfway done, of course,
00:10:48
Speaker
That is considering that she had just had it done and hadn't done had it done years earlier and not gone through with the process. I don't think they would have said all her teeth are in excellent condition if she had had part of a root canal done and not had it finished.
00:11:06
Speaker
it tends to have a lot of damage to the tooth and there's only so long it can go before it gets capped or whatever they're going to do to it. Right. So I think that I'm sure they've thought of that except maybe not. Maybe they, cause I'm looking more in like hindsight, right? Like what could we possibly distinguish about this person? And to me, the root canal is a huge deal.
Case Summary and Suspect Links
00:11:35
Speaker
I think it's a huge deal too. I had gone over to the unidentified wiki for her. For people who don't know, there's this unidentified awareness. ah I think it's like a fandom page. So it'd be like fandom dot.com slash wiki. And then it has like different relatively well known Jane and John Does on it. And I pulled their page on this and kind of put it in with the Great Basin Murderers, because I thought it gave us a little bit more specificity. And it talks about some of the things that ah you just mentioned. So here's what they had said and kind of their summary of her.
00:12:11
Speaker
Elko County Jane Doe, also referred to as Shafter Jane Doe, was a young woman who was found murdered near the Interstate 80 off-ramp to Shafter Elko County, Nevada. they She has 15 rule-outs.
00:12:26
Speaker
like up to pretty recently so they're still looking for her but it says the victim had been shot twice once in the chest and once in the back which is a little bit different information than we get elsewhere it says it was a small caliber gun and she had been severely beaten about the face i thought this was interesting there were no signs of sexual assault Her body was found approximately six days after her death, but she was in an advanced stage of decomposition. She was dumped between Windover and Wells at the Shafter off-ramp of Interstate 80. The area where her body was found is on the edge of a vast and desolate desert bisected by one of the country's busiest highways. Investigators believe that she was killed in another location and dumped at the off-ramp.
00:13:18
Speaker
Her murder may be linked to other Great Basin murders that occurred between 1983 and 1997. And it says that Dale Wayne Eaton has been named as a possible suspect in her case, which I find that significant because they go so far as to name him as opposed to just kind of speculate. In 2009, isotope testing on a hair sample indicated that she possibly lived much of her life in the Southwest, but included Southern California, New Mexico, and Arizona.
00:13:48
Speaker
It was reported she'd lived in Lincoln County, Wyoming near Afton. So we get a slightly different location than just Star Valley for the last months of her life, likely between April and November of 1993. And then they note something interesting that I'm gonna come back to in a second. It said she was being treated for endometriosis. She had a history of childbirth.
00:14:14
Speaker
The marks that they identified on her right calf, they thought were either a 2x4 inch burn scar or potentially a birthmark, and that her teeth were all in excellent cared for condition. One tooth was in the process of getting a root canal, but her wisdom teeth were impacted and had not been removed.
00:14:36
Speaker
Her fingernails were painted pink and they look to have been professionally completed. Now the rule outs for her are Sherry Daughtry, Rebecca Dunn, Andrea Durham, Katie Eggleston, Deborah Frost, Cat Fry, Teresa Kaiser, Penny Lease, Amy Lovely, Gail Marks, Parley Pate, Patricia Schmidt, Stephanie Stroh, Sherry White, and Lily Nguyen, which kind of in and of itself is like an episode that we should do at some point.
00:15:05
Speaker
They note on here the case of Evelyn Colon.
Evelyn Colon Case and Comparisons
00:15:10
Speaker
So Evelyn, do you know her case? I don't think so. So previously she was called Beth Doe. She was born April 17th of 1961 and died December 19th, 1976. As Beth Doe, she was a teenage girl discovered in Carbon County, Pennsylvania in December of 1976.
00:15:34
Speaker
She had been murdered and dismembered. She was also pregnant with a near-term baby girl. So the body of the near-term baby girl was present at the site where Evelyn's body had been disposed of. According to the isotope tests, in that case, they thought she was most likely born in Europe and immigrated to the United States during childhood. In March of 2021, she gets identified and Louis Sierra of New York is charged with her death.
00:16:04
Speaker
Lewis would have been 19 at the time of her murder, and he was known to have been dating her at the time. They give a case summary here that's pretty interesting. It says, the dismembered remains of a pregnant female were located near Interstate 80 by the bank of the Lahai River. So we're on the other side of the country here. The victim had been strangled to death, and after she died, the killer had shot her in the neck.
00:16:29
Speaker
She also appeared to have been raped as she had suffered genital trauma, but it was unknown if this happened before or after her death. Her unborn daughter, who was posthumously named Emily Grace Collin, C-O-L-O-N, colon, at about nine months gestation, had also died during the attack. A coroner ruled that the victim had died less than 24 hours prior to discovery, but some estimates stated that she could have been dead for as much as a week, and that the cold temperatures at the time may have preserved her remains.
00:17:01
Speaker
After her death, Evelyn's body had been sold into a total of 10 pieces. Her torso alone had been dismembered into two pieces. Forensic analysis revealed that the fetus had been removed before the dismemberment took place and that the body had been cut with a fine serrated tool by someone who is probably not professionally trained in medicine or anatomy, but they were still able to dismember her body somewhat competent.
00:17:28
Speaker
Some of the body parts, such as half of the torso, were wrapped in newspaper, while others were wrapped in a bedspread. They were then placed inside of three suitcases without handles that appeared to have been spray-painted black. One suitcase contained her arms and legs, another contained her head and the fetus, and the last, her torso. Her nose, ears, and breasts were severed and were never recovered. Although there was an attempt to disfigure her, perhaps to conceal her identity, she was still mostly recognizable upon discovery.
00:17:59
Speaker
Investigators felt that Beth Doe was killed by someone who was very angry with her, and they highly doubt that she was the victim of a random crime. Her killer then threw the suitcases out of their moving vehicle over a bridge, likely hoping they would land in the river below.
00:18:15
Speaker
However, they missed their mark. Two of the three suitcases, the ones containing the head, torso, and fetus, opened on impact and were later found by a teenage boy on the riverbank in the surrounding brush. In September of 2019, investigators released that they were investigating a possible link to 16-year-old Madeline Maggie Cruz, who who had run away to New York from her foster family.
00:18:39
Speaker
Cruz was last heard from in 1976 when she called a friend asking for money. Cruz admitted that she was pregnant during the phone call, but there was no information at the time to confirm if Cruz was an emig immigrant from Europe. So that relates back to the ISIS TOPE test. On September 25th, the Pennsylvania State Police that announced that Cruz, Maggie Cruz, had been located and was alive and well.
00:19:04
Speaker
In November of 2020, a DNA sample was sent to Othram Labs to be developed into a usable file for genetic genealogy. After the company successfully enriched the sample, it was forwarded to another genealogical research agency where they discovered a link between the victim and her nephew, Lewis Collin. After he was contacted, he confirmed that Evelyn had disappeared within the same timeframe of the discovery of Beth Doe. Evelyn's boyfriend at the time,
00:19:34
Speaker
and the father of her unborn child was then arrested and charged with her murder. So even though we have this isotope testing there, because it's it's referenced ah that she was possibly born in Europe and that she had potentially lived in Tennessee before she was murdered. And they had these potential sort of genetic or ah communal origins where they said she might be Czech, Polish, Italian, or Jewish,
00:20:03
Speaker
it was revealed that Evelyn was actually from Puerto Rico. I mentioned all of this to say that like we're relying on some things that are more difficult at times to discover. And, you know, you're kind of throwing everything you can think of at the wall and it turns out not to be the case with Evelyn. So even though we think Star Valley is the connection here, we've learned that that's maybe not always the case.
00:20:31
Speaker
Right. I have a tendency to agree with you. we're You know, we have this Jane Doe and she goes into the list for the potential Great Basin murders, but then we have to kind of back out a little bit and look at ah one more victim. Do you have anything else on Elko County Jane Doe, Shafter Jane Doe? Not right now, now. Okay.
00:20:58
Speaker
The last victim of the nine who are sort of who we were talking about here in terms of the victims that are all considered to be victims of the great basin murders. It's a girl named Tanya Teske. She was 18 years old when she was murdered on August 15th of 1997. Her nude corpse was discovered in Yukon, Idaho.
00:21:24
Speaker
If you pull up Yukon on a map, they have about a thousand people that live there. It's a little tiny city in Bonneville County, Idaho. and When I went to find census data, I thought it was interesting you know how sometimes census data goes down. Whatever they were doing for the census data in Yukon, Idaho stopped in 2010.
00:21:44
Speaker
They stopped counting people there. I don't know if they have an exodus of people or if it's sort of a a ghost town at this point. So Tanya ends up being identified after her photograph is circulated at truck stops in other public areas along the highway.
00:22:02
Speaker
She was a resident of Shoshani, Wyoming. She was a known sex worker who had dropped out of school in 1995. She had been known to travel out of state with her clients who were almost exclusively truck drivers. On August 10th, several witnesses saw her leaving Shoshone, so this is five days before she's killed, in the company of at least four men. The four men all appeared to be in their early fifties.
00:22:32
Speaker
Friends and acquaintances claimed that Tanya had told him she wanted to move down to Utah. She was going to live in Salt Lake City. Two days before her death, so on August 13th, she had been arrested in Belgrade, Montana on charges of prostitution and theft. She was questioned by the police, but she's released due to lack of evidence. At the same time, a warrant is issued for her by the authorities in Utah County, Utah on a charge of forgery.
00:23:06
Speaker
During this investigation, the suspect in her murder was an Idaho truck driver who, according to witness accounts, had been seen with Teske in Billings, Montana between August 10th and August 13th. He's supposedly one of the last people to see her alive. No evidence implicating him in the murder has ever been made public. He never ends up being charged and his name is never released to the public.
00:23:37
Speaker
There's a number of things about that that I find very interesting. First is the idea that like it was potentially more than one person. I'm pretty sure that's been shot down at this point because they don't bring it up again and they kind of hone in on this one truck driver. I don't think truck driver serial killers would be operating in tandem, let alone a quartet. Do you? No. For all intents and purposes, that is our list of victims that come out of the Great Basin murders. Now, where this gets interesting is we've already named the number of the suspects. We talked a little bit about Clark Perry Baldwin. We talked about Robert and Rhodes.
00:24:20
Speaker
We talked some about Dale Wayne Eaton. I want to bring Dale Wayne Eaton back up for a minute, but I also, I think we covered how Williams also that he's not a suspected serial killer. That turned out to be a one-off murder, just kind of in the mix of all of this, but who we end up with. So we have Scott William Cox.
00:24:40
Speaker
And we have Keith Hunter Jesperson. And I'm going to talk about him for a minute because I don't think we really, we mentioned him in passing, but we never really get into him. You and I have danced around him at different times because he has such a weird name. He ends up with the nickname, the Happy Face Killer. Do you know much about Keith Jesperson? um I know quite a bit about him. Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian American serial killer.
Keith Jesperson's Background
00:25:10
Speaker
He has eight women attributed to him, but he has this confession list that the last time I remember someone talking about it was something like 160 or 170 women. He is born April 6, 1955, up in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada.
00:25:32
Speaker
He has two brothers and two sisters. He is dead in the middle. By all reports, dad is abusive and a domineering alcoholic, and he has a grandfather who is prone to violence. According to Jespersson's dad, he said he was not an abusive parent, but multiple family members at this point have ah basically said he is. Jespersson ends up being sort of ostracized by his family. He gets teased a lot. One of the interesting things about Keith Jesperson was his size. Have you ever seen how tall he was? Very tall. Yeah, he's six foot eight or six foot nine inches tall, according to all reports. And the early memories I have of him, like when he was finally arrested, he looks like the killer in like those old kind of campy slasher movies.
00:26:29
Speaker
like Jason and Michael Myers. He is a very large, very filled out individual. According to ah reports on him and a book by author Jack Olson, Jesperson was a lonely kid who was teased by children for being so big. He's shown ah propensity for torturing and killing animals.
00:26:51
Speaker
His family had moved around a little bit when he was younger, but after he moved to Selah, Washington, that's S-E-L-A-H, ah he was not a very social kid and he had a lot of trouble fitting in or making friends. It's attributed to him being so big, but his brothers, so he has two brothers, two sisters, his brothers made fun of him. They called him Igor or Iggy.
00:27:17
Speaker
This nickname ends up sticking with him all through school. Jespersson is described as shy, being content to just be by himself, but also getting into quite a bit of trouble. He had been punished by his father from a pretty early age. The justification that his father uses is that he was a big kid and he would lash out sometimes violently.
00:27:41
Speaker
His dad would give him beatings. um He would beat him with a belt in front of other children. And on at least one occasion, it is documented that his dad shocked him with some kind of ah electric shock. From as early as five years old, Jesperson was documented capturing and torturing small animals.
00:28:06
Speaker
According to him, he said he enjoyed watching animals kill each other and he gets this feeling from it ah that he's taking their lives and kind of owning them. And later on, this is going to be how he describes his killings of people. It is reported that Jespersson would capture birds and strays around a trailer park where he had lived with his family. He would beat the animals and then strangle them.
00:28:35
Speaker
and By all reports from Jespersson, who pops up in weird media from here to there, like kind of consulting on other serial killer cases, he felt like it was the only time his dad was proud of him when he was doing this to animals. So as he gets older, he is continually fantasizing what it would be like if he were to do what he had been doing to animals to other human beings.
00:29:04
Speaker
And ultimately, that is what he sort of is known for it today. According to Jesperson, and again, I'm gonna i'm going to give a couple paragraphs here that I don't have any way to like verify because it's a lot of words from him.
00:29:22
Speaker
His desire early resulted in two attempted murders. When he was 10 years old, it is said that he was friends with a boy named Martin, that she would get into trouble, and that Keith Jesperson claimed that he would get punished for things that Martin had done, because Martin would tell adults that Keith had done them. At some point, Keith Jesperson violently attacks Martin,
00:29:48
Speaker
And his father pulls him off of him, but he states that his intention that day was to kill Martin. About a year later, Keith was swimming in a local lake. Another boy held him underwater so long that he blacked out.
00:30:05
Speaker
And then at ah at a public pool, Keith got into ah some type of physical altercation with a boy and ended up attempting to drown him by holding his head under the water and a lifeguard pulled him away. Also, according to him, he claims that he was raped at age 14.
00:30:29
Speaker
He graduates high school in 1973. He doesn't go to college. His reasoning behind that as an adult now, he states that his father had told him that he would not graduate.
00:30:44
Speaker
So although Jesperson is not successful with girls in high school, never goes to a school dance, never goes to a prom, he does end up having a girlfriend. And in 1975, when he's 20 years old, he gets married. The couple has three children, two daughters and a son. And Keith Jesperson goes to work as a truck driver to attempt to support his family.
00:31:07
Speaker
Several years later, his wife began to suspect that he had been having affairs. Strange women would call the house. They had tension in their marriage. And after 14 years, while Keith Jesperson was on the road, his wife packs up the children and the belongings and she drives 200 miles away from where they were living to live with her parents in Spokane, Washington. Keith does continue to spend time with his kids and they get divorced.
00:31:36
Speaker
At age 35, he is measured as having been either six feet, seven or six feet, eight inches tall, weighing approximately 260 pounds. Keith Jesperson starts working towards the goal of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He suffers an injury during training and he has to stop. So he goes back to being a truck driver. He moves back from Canada to Cheney, Washington, and According to him, this stint as a truck driver, he realizes that he can kill people and no one will suspect that he's killing them. So Jespersson's first known victim is a woman named Tanya Bennett.
Jesperson's Victims and Arrest
00:32:26
Speaker
According to all accounts, he introduces himself to Tanya at a bar.
00:32:33
Speaker
And he invites her back to a house that he was renting, but at some point they get into an argument. He strangles her to death with his bare hands and he gets rid of her body. This would have been on January 21st of 1990 on August 30th of 1992, a body is found near Blythe, California. And I believe she's still unidentified, but Keith Jesperson calls her Claudia.
00:33:03
Speaker
This woman had been raped and strangled and she is attributed to be a victim of Keith Jesperson. A month after her body was found, the body of Cynthia Lynn Rose is discovered. According to his claims, he met her at a truck stock where she was a sex worker. She had gotten into his truck and he raped and strangled her.
00:33:27
Speaker
His fourth known victim is another sex worker named Lori Ann Pentland out of Salem, Oregon. Her body was found in November of 1992. According to Jesperson, she had tried to renegotiate the fee, basically doubling what she wanted him to pay for sex. And their mid they're in the middle of having sex and she tells him she's going to call the police, so he strangles her.
00:33:55
Speaker
His next victim is in June of 1993. This is a woman who for a long time was unidentified. She's out of Santa Nella, California. According to Jesperson, he said her name was Carla Orsendi. Police originally had considered her death to be a drug overdose, but they end up identifying her as a woman named Patricia Skipple.
00:34:21
Speaker
In September 1994, a Jane Doe is found in Crestview, Florida. Jesperson identifies her as a woman named Suzanne, and in October of 2023, she is identified as Suzanne Jellenberg.
00:34:39
Speaker
So for Jespersson's criminal career, he's arrested March 30th of 1995 for the murder of a woman named Julie Winningham. He had been questioned by police a week before this arrest, but they didn't have any grounds to arrest them because he refused to talk.
00:34:56
Speaker
In the days following, Jesperson decided that he was probably going to be arrested, and after two suicide attempts, he turned himself in, hoping he would get some kind of leniency during his sentencing. While in custody, Keith Jesperson began revealing details of his killings and making claims of having killed many others, much of most of which he has later recanted. A few days before his arrest, he wrote a letter to his brother which is all sounding familiar, right? you Suicide attempts, writing a letter to family. He confesses to having killed eight people over five years. This leads police agencies in multiple states and multiple jurisdictions to reopen cold cases, and they start trying to identify possible victims of Keith Jesperson. At one point, Keith Jesperson's claim of how many people he's killed gets really high.
00:35:55
Speaker
But he's only attributed to having killed eight women in Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Nebraska, and Wyoming. These are the only confirmed killings. He is currently serving three consecutive life sentences at the OSP or the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon.
00:36:14
Speaker
He has been indicted in Riverside County, California on murder charges. He gets extradited there, and I think it's in 2009, and he has been convicted of another murder. In January, 2010, he gets his fourth life sentence. Okay. He gets dumped in this mix as being part of the Great Basin Murders. And I noticed some interesting things about his timeline there.
00:36:42
Speaker
I think that's enough of Keith Jesperson for the moment. We may come back around to him in the future. In 2004, an analyst from the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation had started to see different patterns along the I-40 corridor. So this is not directly related to the Great Basin murders, but it's giving us a piece of a town of a timeline.
FBI's VICAP and Crime Analysis
00:37:09
Speaker
If you go looking now, April 6th of 2009, the FBI starts taking this seriously. And when that analyst, they get together with a colleague down in Grapevine, Texas, who works for a local police department there, and they start stacking all of these different cases together, and they refer it to the FBI's VICAP program.
00:37:35
Speaker
The VICAP program, are you familiar with VICAP like in terms of like how I got started? Yes. Okay. um I'm not going to like belabor this, but I do want to give a little bit of ah a description of it. Cause I don't know that like everybody knows this, but the violent ah violent criminal apprehension program or VICAP, it is a section of the United States federal bureau of investigation. So this is falling under the department of justice.
00:38:04
Speaker
It is responsible for the analysis of serial violent crimes and serial sexual crimes. It's technically created in 1985 by the FBI and it's based out of Quantico, Virginia. The first director of VICAP was a guy named Pierce Brooks, who was, he was a homicide detective in Los Angeles and he had been the first to sort of propose collecting all of this information. He had,
00:38:31
Speaker
paid very close attention to the Harvey Glatman case, who's come up kind of in passing. He gets a grant to like start putting together how to look at serial killers. He ends up meeting with Robert Ressler, discussing this idea. And a lot of the work that Ressler had been doing at the time, people know it as like Mine Hunter work.
00:38:51
Speaker
the behavioral science unit, the profiling unit, all of those things in media. But they get together and they decide that they should put this in Quantico, Virginia. So they base this in the Critical Incident Response Group's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
00:39:12
Speaker
What they're going to be looking at is how to put software together to track sexual assault cases, solved and unsolved homicides, but they're particularly looking at kidnapping cases. Or if they they are apparently motiveless, they want to look at ah either sexual or random crimes. And they want to also look at anything that's suspected to be a part of a series like the Great Basin Murders.
00:39:37
Speaker
They also put in to this missing persons cases where either foul play is suspected. And I noticed that like, this isn't available online, but I know it to be true. Missing persons cases where they do not have a suspected outcome, meaning there's no path of travel. I think like,
00:39:59
Speaker
You recognized early on that there's a lot of people in water in their vehicles. There's no domestic link. There's no obvious criminal organization ties, but basically where like they're looking at it from the perspective of, if not all these things that we normally rule out, what then? Those missing persons go in here. And then unidentified persons suspected to have been the victim of foul play also go into Bicab. In the summer of 2008,
00:40:28
Speaker
VICAP becomes available as a database to all law enforcement agencies through secure internet links. It now has real-time access and agencies can enter and update cases directly into this database. That's sort of a huge deal. But the other thing that comes about during this is what's known as the Highway Serial Killing Initiative.
Highway Serial Killing Initiative
00:40:55
Speaker
That's literally an FBI webpage at this point.
00:40:58
Speaker
We have gotten some really interesting cases out of that. But like one of like the big ones that we get is Samuel Little, who really was not who they were thinking. I find him to be fascinating for a number of reasons, because he was really like a roving nomad. And in my head, I think he is what Henry Lucas and Otis Toole were describing themselves as.
00:41:24
Speaker
But in April of 2009, they announced all of this publicly and they they say that they're doing it to raise awareness among law enforcement agencies and the general public about this really unique issue. VICAP, when they start dumping this information into it in 2004,
00:41:43
Speaker
they start seeing patterns on highways all over the place. They determine that the victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high risk transient lifestyles often There are elements of substance abuse or sex work in their life. They were frequently being picked up at truck stops or service stations. They were being sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped along a highway. When they originally announced this, they state, the suspects are predominantly long-haul truck drivers.
00:42:14
Speaker
It's the mobile nature of these offenders, the unsafe lifestyles of the victims, the significant distances and multiple jurisdictions involved with the scarcity of witnesses and sometimes forensic evidence that make these cases tough to solve. I find it interesting that that's where this kind of ends for now.
00:42:35
Speaker
According to them, they say that 10 suspects believe responsible for 30 homicides have been placed into custody, including a trucker arrested in Tennessee charged with four murders, a trucker arrested with one murder in Massachusetts, and another in New Jersey. There's this whole thing that started this all as well, two people who are working together ah to try and document this.
00:43:01
Speaker
which interestingly enough was a series of murdered women being dumped along interstate 40 corridor and Oklahoma with three other States. They state in this news release that just like the two people working together started this, that there were two people working together that have been charged with some of the murders and the investigation to tie them to others continues. Here's my question for you. Do you know who those two people are? Should I? I don't.
00:43:29
Speaker
No, I don't think so. And I was digging through trying to figure out like who this would be. I do not find a pair anywhere in here. I find all these individual killers mentioned.
00:43:45
Speaker
I went through the wiki, I went through ah multiple other websites, and I'm not saying it's not available and someone won't find it. I just found it really interesting that they put that in this 2009 press release.
00:44:04
Speaker
and on their webpage, as far as I can tell, that has never been released. If anyone has come across information about that, please email me. I do not know who they might be talking about there. I've listed off the people that I was talking about, Scott William Cox, Keith Hunter Jesperson, Howell Williams, Dale Wayne Eden, ah Robert Van Rhodes, Clark Perry Baldwin. I have not found for these people at this time accomplices. I don't think I feel like you said that was in 2009. Yeah. So that makes sense to me because without like just the very rare situation, is there going to be more than one perpetrator working together? I think um we've gone over that a lot. And the fact that it's now 15 years later and
00:45:00
Speaker
You're like, who was it, right? Right. It makes sense to me because he they're on the wrong track. And a lot of times, especially something that's been memorialized in the form of a press release. and but The federal government. Well, right. But see, if you get, and it's, it's so easy to do because I, I do it all the time. I get,
00:45:27
Speaker
going in the wrong direction, I guess, and it's hard to back up and go the right direction. But clearly, I don't know how far if there's additional information that's been released later or whatever. But I would say that that makes perfect sense that it's gone nowhere because there's not going to be I mean, there have been very rare cases of more than one perpetrator working together, but nothing about any of these crimes makes me think that that would be the case. In fact, I would say that they're on two different, like they would be looking at two distinct different killers with the victims as opposed to trying to connect them.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah, I understand what you're saying. So the end result of all of this, for me, is looking at these great base and great basin murders. As much as like we're able to talk about this series of nine murders, it doesn't wrap itself up at all. And like ultimately, a couple of them have been adjudicated in some way, shape, or fashion. But the FBI themselves, after like All of this gets lumped together by local jurisdictions. They never come around to a point where, like, there's a resolution here that makes sense as to why we still call this the Great Basin Murders. Right, and that doesn't surprise me. It seems like it got off to
00:46:58
Speaker
a ah cohesive start that just didn't go anywhere. A lot of times, investigators, they just want to make some sense out of you know a lot of victims and chaos. And if you start on the wrong track and you don't end up sort of realizing, oh, this probably doesn't have anything to do with the other ones, sometimes it can be really hard to individualize the crime again. Yeah.
00:47:25
Speaker
Well, so I thought the easiest way for me to wrap this up in terms of the Great Basin series was an article that sort of like stuck in my head earlier this year. I read it in passing from a law firm.
00:47:37
Speaker
This guy, Christopher Migolaccio, he had ah written it for Warren and Migolaccio, like the law firm. it's It's really just kind of advertising a book. But i I want to read this little release, even though it feels like a press release. Because like again, it's one of those situations where I'm suddenly seeing names that I'm not really familiar with.
Serial Killers in Trucking Industry
00:48:00
Speaker
It says, multiple serial killers are still stalking our highways, warning by expert.
00:48:05
Speaker
And then it says America's long haul trucking industry is home to multiple active serial killers who are stocking roads and capitalizing on blind spots to kill women and evade detection. According to a retired FBI agent in a new book, Frank Figoluzzi, a former assistant director of the FBI for 25 years told the US son he was floored to learn there had been at least 850 murders along America's highways over the past few decades.
00:48:32
Speaker
Then they throw up the graphics on this that you know everybody's kind of familiar with. that It's the the highway red dots, I call it. Of those cases, more than 200 are still unsolved, and the Bureau has currently a list of roughly 450 different suspects.
00:48:49
Speaker
According to Frank, almost all of the victims are sex trafficked women who are often picked up at truck stops in one jurisdiction, raped and murdered in another, and then dumped at the side of a highway in a third jurisdiction. These serial killer truckers are exploiting the seams in law enforcement jurisdictions, according to Figoluzzi.
00:49:09
Speaker
Essentially, their trucks are 18-wheel mobile crime scenes. Further, there's often no DNA left on the victims, and it can take decades before police can attach a name to a body. There's also the issue of family members not even realizing their loved one is missing, let alone murdered. As a natural survival mechanism, some families have to distance themselves from a loved one who has been repeatedly arrested for sex work, overdosed on drugs, and generated so much trauma. That sometimes means there is No one demanding updates from the police or even searching for this missing victim. I'm certain there are missing and murdered trafficking victims who are yet to be discovered. The crisis of serial killer truck drivers is so pervasive that the FBI opened a special unit, the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, to track these murders and investigate potential links between them.
00:49:58
Speaker
According to Frank here, there are currently 25 long-haul truck drivers behind bars for serial murder, but investigators believe there are multiple others still out there yet to be snared. Despite the fact that 25 long-haul truck drivers are already in prison for these murders, this still hasn't cleared all the unsolved cases, nor stopped the ongoing crimes.
00:50:19
Speaker
Serial killers don't stop killings don't simply stop killing. It would be unusual for that to happen. So if there are 200 unsolved murders and 450 suspects, it's safe to say we have multiple serial killer truckers amongst us, but it would be speculation to guess how many are out there. So then they point out in his new book, of course, because somebody's got to be promoting something, right? Of course.
00:50:41
Speaker
long haul hunting the highway serial killers is the book name. Somebody wants to get into that. ah Frank explores the ominous underworld of killer truck drivers and what drives them to murder. To get a real sense of the long haul lifestyle, Figaluzzi rode along with a flatbed trucker identified only as Mike for 2,000 miles for days on end.
00:51:03
Speaker
The experience exposed Frank to the extraordinary mental and physical challenges faced by truckers with drivers isolated and sedentary for long periods, which main which makes maintaining a healthy lifestyle particularly difficult. There is no simple answer to explain why long-haul truck driving is the number one job for a serial killer, but Frank believes the hermetic and nomadic trucker lifestyle can be a contributing factor. I do ask the nature or nurture question in long-haul, says Figoluzzi. Clearly, the making of a serial killer is a complex process involving a blend of genetic, mental, and environmental conditions. In some of the trucker killer's backgrounds,
00:51:42
Speaker
There is also horrific abuse at the hands of one or more parents or family members, but not always. Some serial killers share an antisocial personality, even misanthropic mindsight, so they seek out a career that affords them isolation and less human engagement. Then, once they're on the job, they realize they can get away with almost anything. This is where their deep-seated issues, particularly violent tendencies toward women, arise to the surface. It's no surprise that long-haul trucking is the number one profession of serial killers. No other job even comes close.
00:52:16
Speaker
So they point out some stuff here about the how the basically what I just said about how these highway serial killings initiatives get started in this database that comes out of it. And then they point out five killers. They point out Robert Monroe, they point out Keith jeff Jasperson, they point out the redhead killer. So this is Jerry Johns. Do you know about him, the redhead killer?
00:52:42
Speaker
Okay. So he died in prison in 2015. They point out Joe Methany. I don't particularly care for how Joe Methany gets lumped into all of this, but then they bring up Edward Surratt. So Edward Surratt between 1977 and 1978, there are two dozen individuals who were randomly murdered in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
00:53:06
Speaker
Edward Surratt would break into homes inhabited by couples, killing the man instantly, and then kidnapping, raping, and murdering the female. He gets caught in 1978 after he rapes a mother and daughter in front of the a woman's husband. Investigators today believe that he may have been responsible for about 18 murders. According to this in 2007, he confessed to six unsolved killings in Ohio.
00:53:34
Speaker
He goes into detail on some of the other killers, but he doesn't come back around to Surratt. He does say that he talks about the vampire trucker, which is Timothy Vafeeves. So he kept six women as sex slaves in the back of his semi-trailer, and he would rape, abuse, and torment them while he drives across the country. He's an interesting one that comes up here. Edward Surratt comes up here.
00:53:57
Speaker
And then this article just kind of ends. And I was like, all right, I know it's trying to make me read this book. I get it. But what do you do with people like Surratt who like, first of all, I know very little about him. Do you know much about Edward Surratt?
00:54:16
Speaker
I have never heard what you just said at all. Well, he's got a Wiki page that like at some point, like I'm going to go digging through the sources and see. like It's pretty lengthy. According to all of this, he's still alive. He's 83 years old down in Florida, I think is where he's currently in prison. He has like life in prison plus 200 years there. Did he kill anyone? Yeah. he So he killed his sex slaves.
00:54:44
Speaker
According to this, he did. OK, I don't know. I was just curious because holding um sex, ah holding women hostage and you know murdering them, it's not that it doesn't go hand in hand, but it's two different things, right? Yeah. I say all that to say, like, I was just digging into the Great Basin Movers to see if I could figure anything out there. And then I end up, like, learning out people again that I've never heard of. Well,
Task Force Challenges
00:55:13
Speaker
sure. and So it's not it's not like it's in the complete wrong direction for the FBI to have like the long haul murderer task force yeah because dumping bodies was a
00:55:31
Speaker
or continues to be ah like a chronic problem, right? There's a lot of bodies that are dumped in the highway system and it ah tends to lead people to believe that, oh, you know, that might have to do with a trucker. However, I would say that there are a lot of characteristics of truck driving that could just as easily deter somebody who thought that they wanted to be a serial killer, which would lead to a bunch of one-offs.
00:56:02
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know what the statistics are on like wannabe serial killers who can't stomach it, who can't pull it through with it, who kill one person, yeah and then they realize they don't want to do it. We have no idea what the statistics of that are. But to the extent it exposes the cases, I think it's great. Unfortunately, all of those types of task force work have a downside. And the downside is that they get associated with a group and they therefore don't get solved.
00:56:33
Speaker
Yeah. So I say all of this to say that I was going to wrap up, uh, great base on murders today.
Edward Surratt Investigation
00:56:40
Speaker
And like, I was gonna, this is a series that I have titled sick killers mind, uh, from something that Meg said about these people. Uh, but by the end of the year, there may be one more episode or I may open season six in 2025 with one more episode because the deeper I dig into Edward Surat, the more information I find out.
00:57:02
Speaker
the more he changes how I think about these long haul trucker killers. So while I don't have much more to add to the Great Basin murders, and I don't know if you do. I don't know. I feel like we've covered it pretty well for, you know, where we're going with it. Yeah. And while we have mapped out some of season six, I do think I have to come back to Edward Tourette because I am absolutely fascinated about what I'm able to learn about him.
00:57:33
Speaker
That having been said, I think we're due to start our holiday episodes, but we may still do one more episode before that gets here. It kind of depends on timing. ah we do We have a number of holiday episodes that will be in the feed ah kind of from December 1st through the 25th. I don't know where the next two episodes will fall. We have an interesting author we want to talk to that may fall into kind of a New Year's episode. And then there was a trial that we discovered some interesting things about ties back to a case we covered this year. So we may also bring that in. ah Did you have anything else on the Great Basin Murders for now at all, like overall, or like, is that kind of a thing that we can bring up when I bring up Edward Surratt?
00:58:17
Speaker
I think that we can cover it in the future. It's a sad group of cases. all of these always um Anytime females are discarded, it's very sad. And I feel like they deserve a lot more attention. It does sound like they're getting quite a bit of work done on them, but it is a sad situation.
Credits and Zencastr Promotion
00:58:50
Speaker
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00:59:56
Speaker
Crime XS is brought to you by John and Meg It's written, produced, edited, and posted by John and Meg. You can always support True Crime Access through patreon.com, or if you have a story you'd like them to cover, you can reach them at truecrimeaccess.com. Thank you for joining us.
01:00:16
Speaker
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