Full Transcript for Don

kind person willing to help others. Quote, you killed her, putting her family in darkness. 00:04:00 Speaker 5: Melissa, Noel and I had spent an emotional few hours with Don. We'd had him walk us through what he'd gone through after Keith had brutally murdered his mom, Julianne Winningham, How hard it was to be surrounded by the things that reminded him of his mom and the tails spin it had put his life in. But the thing that Melissa wanted to truly understand was after carrying such anger, how did Don come to a place where he truly felt healed and how did he learn to forgive? Did you think about bringing a gun into the Oh? 00:04:34 Speaker 6: Yeah, they didn't have mental detectors every day of the trial. They didn't have metal detectors. One day I walked out of the court. I was from me to your father. There was nothing stopping me. He was full of shackles, nothing stopping me from just going at him. I didn't know then, but I know now why I didn't do it, because he would have won. We are not here to take another life. Okay, it would have been over. He would have won because I went to his level of killing another human being. And now I am happy he's in there because your life has been miserable. My life has been miserable. I have healed. Your father will never heal, and that is no longer your burden, no longer your burden. Do you know about the two people that were convicted for the crime. 00:05:45 Speaker 8: I know that Laverne was assisted, that her boyfriend friend John was guilty of this crime, and that she manufactured evidence to got him convicted and ultimately got her convicted as well. But they were found guilty, that they serve some prison time. 00:06:01 Speaker 6: And can I ask you a question, do you think they deserve to stay in prison for what they said they did or do you think they should have been released? 00:06:08 Speaker 4: They should have been released. 00:06:11 Speaker 6: Okay, well, my opinion is he should have been released and she should have stayed in because she's the one who made the accusations. But they get out. As soon as they get out, they make a movie about it instantly, within a month, about their life story. Who are they to bring this up? I was really pissed off because if they wouldn't have confessed, they may have caught your father before my mom. But no, and it screwed everything up. He could have been caught, It may have never happened to my mom. It could have saved four or five women. Because this lady confessed to a crime she didn't commit to get out of an abusive relationship. I've had to forgive her also to be able to move on. I have to forgive the detectives for not doing a thorough investigation. I had to forgive all these people for not doing their job. And then I had to truly forgive your father. I had to truly forgive my own father. I've had a lot of forgiving, and you have to forgive, not forget, to be able to move on. 00:07:23 Speaker 5: For all of Don's words about forgiveness, it was apparent that

jessperson had very much gotten into his head. 00:07:32 Speaker 6: Do you know who Sondra London is? 00:07:34 Speaker 5: No, I've never heard the name. 00:07:36 Speaker 6: This is what your father did. Sondra London, who was in love with a serial killer named Van Rawlings in Florida. He executed seven women with the machete. She wrote a book about him. Your father wrote Sondra London to ask her to write a book. She said no, but I will create a computer book, diary or whatever. So your father proceeds to write her telling her how great it is to be in jail, how to get away with murder, how to do this. It's still on the internet today. It's like twenty two pages. 00:08:18 Speaker 7: From The Oregonian, September tenth, nineteen ninety seven by J. Todd Foster. Last year from prison, Jesperson wrote a Jacksonville, Florida woman who's fascinated with serial killers and thinks society should have unfettered access to their minds. Sondra London, fifty then posted Jesperson's letters word for word on the internet, as she has other killers letters. On Jesperson's page, which features a rotating skull, he compares his victims to garbage he discarded along America's roadways as a long haul truck driver. His most disturbing writings, however, are contained in the Self Start Serial Killer Kit, which offers web browsers a line life size blow up doll named for one of his victims, Julianne Winningham. Winningham's son Don Findley, twenty five, of Vancouver, Washington, read Jessperson's website Tuesday and was appalled. 00:09:16 Speaker 6: He put in part of this stuff that he wrote Get yourself Start Serial Killer Kit. It comes with a two hour VHS tape of life and death situations that are guaranteed to scare the piss or, arouse you or both. Take your Julie Winningham blow up doll with an extra spring back neck, take her mouth, put it over the head of your cock, and you'll soon have the living strength to squeeze the shit out of anybody. Why did he pick my mom? 00:09:58 Speaker 9: Your mother calls, don't wink at me in court? It was fucking funny as I jumped over the fucking barrier and was grabbed because this man. 00:10:23 Speaker 5: You could see how much down was affected by Keith. He still carries that hurt. But perhaps what's most impressive is, even in that emotional state, how he handled himself on the. 00:10:37 Speaker 6: Stand Tanya's brother and sister. You know didn't really do in court like I did. Yeah, you know you didn't see the whole thing on court. You know I had to. I did the rebuttal to your father, and I told him this is the last thing I told him. I said, as Christians, I forgive you, and God will punish you in the way you deserve to be punished. Your father put his head down. The judge had a tear coming out of his eye. The only reason your father is not dead is because he didn't kill two women in the state of Washington. But he did kill one right over there and right over there, just a mile and a half difference. What are your triggers like?

00:11:28 Speaker 10: What triggers you? Even now, having done all the work and feeling like you've healed, you were saying that it's everywhere, It's like Emuji's, it's Walmart. 00:11:39 Speaker 4: Why? 00:11:40 Speaker 6: Oh, it was because only because of the simple fact of the title they gave him on the Happy Face Killer. Psychologically, that messed with my head. Everywhere I saw it would be a reminder of him. Now that I'm healed, I'm over it. But it was his thing. He's not I can't let that beat me up because he'll still win. As long as I have something going in me that he did, I'm never gonna hear. So I have to release it, no matter how much it hurts. So you would you saw it everywhere everywhere, everywhere, back of jeeps, Walmart, people's clothes. How many people walk around with the happy face with the bullet in the head, You know how many people walk You know what I'm saying. All that stuff goes through my head, you know, and I'm like just a flashback everywhere I go. I see this guy. Now many years it took me to get past that. I don't even know. 00:12:30 Speaker 10: God, it's like it's literally like being haunted by a real life boogieman like it. 00:12:35 Speaker 6: And I am an overthinker, and I believe your father did that on purpose. But then on the other hand, I think that he was just being mischievous and smart ass and signing it with the happy face, not realizing why. 00:12:52 Speaker 11: It's exactly why he winked at you in court. It's his taking something so sinister and heinous and spinning it to the polar opposite of like putting. It's his sixth sense of humor. It's his way of mocking people's pain. It's he gets pleasure from that, and this smiley face is as a mockery. 00:13:13 Speaker 6: I get it. Yeah, But why do you feel that your dad used my mom's name in the thing I told you about that you never knew about and didn't use Tanya Bennett or one of the other six victims. 00:13:27 Speaker 11: She was not his typical victim. I mean, he broke all of his rules with her. 00:13:33 Speaker 5: I think it's because she stopped him. She's the reason he got caught, and so. 00:13:41 Speaker 6: He resents her. 00:13:46 Speaker 7: From I the creation of a serial killer by Jack Olson. From his County jail cell, his curly brownish Maine shorn by an inmate barber, Keith Jesperson continued his campaign to muddy the legal waters. Most of his confessional letters were sent after his own lawyer told him to shut up. The notes were uniformly upbeat quote have a nice day from happy face. 00:14:26 Speaker 5: Regardless of how Don defines the relationship between Keith and Julie, Melissa saw her as a woman who could have been her stepmother, that in some parallel universe Melissa and Don could have been would have been step siblings instead. There now forever linked by the emotional scars of Keith's crimes. 00:14:49 Speaker 6: This is a. 00:14:51 Speaker 3: I don't I have my own answer to it. But do you think justice was served at first? 00:14:58 Speaker 6: No? 00:15:01 Speaker 9: Now? 00:15:03 Speaker 6: Yeah, because he loses I told you he has a miserable, horrible life. Me and you, we still have the opportunity to have this open freedom, positivity. He's around, No, he's. 00:15:20 Speaker 12: Around nothing but negative energy all day as his daughter, take back your power, take back that guilt and turn it into a positive, which you've tried to do by helping and reaching out and doing what you do for people. 00:15:36 Speaker 5: Melissa has tried throughout her adult life to use her career to connect the families of victims with the families of perpetrators in order to bring about closure and healing and ultimately forgiveness. 00:15:52 Speaker 3: I think you're right, yeah, that there is some sort of divine intervention. But this is what I struggle with, don I struggle with this, like, if there is divine intervention, why didn't that divine intervention intervene and save your mom? If the universe was telling this man to come and take a picture, couldn't the universe have told your mom to not be with my dad? 00:16:20 Speaker 6: Like I said, there's a plan. We are supposed to help the screw the world that's out there. We need to show them that it doesn't. The evil doesn't always win, the villain doesn't always get away. We are here, we are survivors. We did this. It's been twenty two years. We're done, We're over it. Let's do us. The only animosity you have is something that you had no control over, and I had no control over. So why should we let it control us any longer. It wasn't your choice to do what he did. It wasn't my choice. But yet we're letting his choices control ourselves. 00:17:14 Speaker 5: Melissa's most deeply rooted fear is that she is somehow like her father, capable of terrible things. Don almost immediately sensed the opposite. He didn't see the capacity for evil in her at all. 00:17:34 Speaker 6: You obviously are not him. Okay, obviously you're not, So that needs to be the first thing. I'm scared, though, That's the first thing you need to get out. You're nothing. 00:17:52 Speaker 1: But I'm scared I look like him. 00:17:54 Speaker 6: No, I have no from him. That's okay, because my heart is so turned off. 00:18:00 Speaker 2: I'm afraid I've built like him that I don't know I don't hurt people, but I'm scared. 00:18:06 Speaker 6: You're not like him because of that. You're like blocking feelings and being cold, whatever you think it may be. Because this has been damaged so bad, all it did was get covered up and covered up and covered up and covered up a scar. You can bring this up one hundred more times on television and that scab wouldn't reopen. It is a scar. I am okay. I am convinced that he is where he deserves to be. My mom's in a better place, and he gave this to me and you to pass on to people, and no matter what we go through in life, we can make it. 00:18:55 Speaker 5: Don also believed there was nothing accidental about the in which his mother's body was

found. 00:19:04 Speaker 6: Life leads us in a weird path, and we are the ying and the yang of one in three point one million. Did you know that the odds of what your dad did to my mom is one in three point one million. Have you met that many people in your life? No. I have traveled to the United States. I have gone as far as the Caribbean to run away, and I still the universe brings me back here. I moved all the way to Saint Thomas to the top of an island. Leave me alone. No one will know anything about me unless I won't tell them. But I still end up right back here. I worked in the town for six years as a local bartender, heard stories about my mom. People come across me every day and say, your name's not Leeroy, or people call me up out of the blue, I've seen her on television again, I saw you on television, so out of the blue, I would get random calls. People would be facebooking me from all around the country, thinking I can help them, you know. So there was a lot going on. But to be able to heal, I told myself that your father needed to be put away. My mom lived a fulfilled, happy life. It was her time to go to a better place. Yes, no, because God has a plan. Okay, no, God has Yes, he does. Well, let's not call it God. Let's call it the universe. Our universe has a plan for each and every one of us, and it isn't a kind world. I can't believe you see it so nice. I wish I could see this. I want to help you feel it. You gotta have to let me because otherwise you're gonna end up the old cat lady. 00:21:09 Speaker 4: Yeah, that would be. 00:21:19 Speaker 5: Don Lee Roy, whomever he believed himself to be at that moment. Also believed that the universe kept putting people in his path for a reason, including a man in the back seat of his cab. 00:21:36 Speaker 6: I drive taxi and the weirdest stuff happens. I met a gentleman who was about seventy two years old. He proceeds to tell me that he had a family, and after raising his family, he got got tired of working for the man, so he decided to start robbing banks. Well, he ended up getting eighteen years. He ended up in osp We proceed to talk. It's a five hour journey. Come to find out he's been locked up the whole time. Your dad's been locked up. So this man proceeds to tell me what I already knew, how bad life was in prison, but how bad your father his life is. The stuff he told me made me happy because I am able to eat a steak, see a beautiful lady, go out and fish. You are still able to do that. He will never be able to do any of the pleasures in life. 00:22:37 Speaker 4: Again, what did he say that his life is like in prison? 00:22:42 Speaker 6: Well, basically, your dad lives in one building. He's not allowed to go out of the building. He isn't outside, can't go outside. He is in PC's protective custody. 00:23:02 Speaker 1: From I The Creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen. 00:23:07 Speaker 7: Most of the cops and detectives who'd worked the case were pissed that I'd gotten two people out of

prison and beat the death penalty myself, but some of them still had a morbid interest and happy face. When we pulled into the intake center and Clacamus, one guard asked if I would pose with him for a picture. I was put in solitary confinement in D Block to keep me safe from other prisoners. Lady killers and rapists ranked near the bottom of the food chain in the prison system, barely above child molesters and crooked cops. I was allowed one hour of yard time of day, no books, no cards, no nothing. Wherever I went, the pointy fingers came out. Everyone wanted a piece of the celebrity. 00:23:55 Speaker 6: So I'm telling this guy the whole story, and he proceeds to tell me how he's seen your dad get beat up many of times. Your dad is known as a snitch. Your dad is locked in his cell. He comes out like an hour or two hours a day. How big is he now? I can just imagine with no exercise in a cage that's as big as he is a foot wide. Think about he's six foot eight, the sale six by nine. And if all you do is put on wait, you gotta be uncomfortable. He never gets interaction with anybody. So this guy proceeds to tell me that he's even met your dad and had controversy with him. And I have every right to believe this guy because I feel it. I've seen the tattoos and this is too odd. And this man told me that he wanted me to stop at a bank so he could rob it and go back in to shank this guy because he deserves. 00:24:54 Speaker 8: To die because he knew you explained who you were to. 00:24:58 Speaker 6: Him, and the whole time in the case, Abrady kept calling me the last victim's son instead of by my name. He's like the new generation of inmates aren't willing to do like the old school. Some up a long story. He told me that he talks to someone inside once a month. He said. The next ass whipping j just personal notes from me. 00:25:23 Speaker 1: Did it happened? 00:25:24 Speaker 6: How am I going to know. I don't know. This was just a few months ago. 00:25:30 Speaker 1: Don't you find that kind of odd? 00:25:31 Speaker 6: That added the blue? A guy like this gets in my taxi. 00:25:34 Speaker 5: Yeah, all of Melissa's fears about confrontation, about Gon's hatred, anger about her father and what he'd done to Don's mother, everything, it was just finally over and there was peace. In a sort of strange, if not slightly broken way, there was love. 00:26:20 Speaker 3: I'm glad it's not the word. I'm thankful that you were willing to take me out here and show me. I know this isn't I can tell that after this much's time, you you know this is a place you can go to. But my mind is just racing. I'm thinking of a million of things. I'm thinking about, thinking about my dad and my picturing it in my mind. I've been in that cab of the truck. I'm picturing exactly what he said, what he must have done, like how quickly I would have taken off. I mean, it's it's definitely I can I can visualize it. 00:27:06 Speaker 5: But how has healing on your own? How has it shaped you as a person? How is it shaped like you didn't ask to. 00:27:17 Speaker 6: Become this person? How's it shaped me? Well, people will tell you now that you've healed, are you going to find Donald or are you going to stay Leroy? Well, I'm not sure yet Donald. When Donald was the victim, Leroy was the survivor. So in my story would go how it went from Donald, Bernard Finley to le Roy because of the traumatic events that have happened in my life. And then at the end, when we're all done with this, we will see Donald. We got a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Donald came out because we hit the final piece, the puzzles complete, two people that have no answers from anybody else, we can now answer ourselves. 00:28:37 Speaker 5: After all of this, what is Jessperson to you? 00:28:39 Speaker 6: Now? What is Jessperson to me? 00:28:43 Speaker 4: Now? 00:28:44 Speaker 6: Just a tax penny at waste? 00:28:55 Speaker 5: Meeting one another was so therapeutic for both Melissa and Don was really a testament to human resiliency and the triumph of good over evil. When we left with Shugel, it was with the feeling that ultimately Jessperson had lost because two of his residual victims had used the power of forgiveness to transcend the horror and hopelessness he'd foisted upon them. 00:29:44 Speaker 1: Happy Faces, a production of How Stuff Works. 00:29:47 Speaker 7: Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Pacheco, Mangesha Tikedur and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by Claire Campbell, Paige Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle, Audio editing by Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Chicoigne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper, and the Carlisle family. 00:30:16 Speaker 4: Oh is love Place where they catch you when you fall. O his love Place where they catch you when you fall. 00:30:44 Speaker 6: And we are