Keith Hunter Jesperson (born April 6, 1955) is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was Jesperson's preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.
After the body of his first victim, Taunja Bennett, was found, media attention surrounded Laverne Pavlinac, a woman who falsely confessed to having killed Bennett with the help of her abusive boyfriend, John Sosnovske. Upset that he was not getting any media attention, Jesperson drew a smiley face on a bathroom wall hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime and wrote an anonymous letter confessing to Bennett's murder, providing proof. When that did not elicit a response, he began writing letters to the media and authorities.
Jesperson's last victim was the crime that ultimately led to his capture. While he has claimed to have killed as many as 160 people, only eight murders have been confirmed. Jesperson is currently serving a sentence of life without parole at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
Early life
Jesperson was born on 6 April 1955, to Leslie (Les) and Gladys Jesperson in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada,[1] the middle child with two brothers and two sisters.[2] Jesperson's father was a domineering alcoholic; according to Jesperson, his paternal grandfather was prone to violence. Jesperson's father denied being an abusive parent; however, while investigating for his book on the killer, author Jack Olsen was able to confirm much of the claimed abuse with other family members.[3]
Treated like an outcast and a black sheep by his own family and teased by other children for his large size at a young age, Jesperson was a lonely child who showed a propensity for torturing and killing animals. After moving to Selah, Washington, United States, he had trouble fitting in and making friends because of his large size. His brothers did not help him, instead they nicknamed him "Igor" or "Ig", a name that stuck throughout his school years.[4] Because of this, Jesperson was a shy child, content to play by himself much of the time. He would often get into trouble for behaving badly, sometimes violently, and would be severely punished by his father. This included beatings, sometimes with a belt in front of others, and in one case he received an electric shock.[1]
At a very early age—as young as five—Jesperson would capture and torture animals. He enjoyed watching animals kill each other as well as the feeling he got from taking their lives.[5] This continued as he got older. Jesperson would capture birds and stray cats and dogs around the trailer park where he lived with his family, severely beating the animals and then strangling them to death, something for which he claims his father was proud of him. In the years following, Jesperson said he often thought about what it would be like to do the same to a human.[5]
That desire manifested in two attempted murders. The first happened when Jesperson was around age 10, when he was friends with a boy named Martin. The two would often get into trouble together, and Jesperson claimed he was often punished many times for things Martin had done and shifted the blame. This led Jesperson to violently attack Martin until his father pulled him away. He later claimed his intention was to kill the boy.[6] Approximately one year later, Jesperson was swimming in a lake when another boy held him underwater until he blacked out. Some time later, at a public pool, Jesperson attempted to drown the boy by holding his head under the water until a lifeguard pulled him away.[6]
Jesperson reported that he was raped at age 14.[6] He graduated from high school in 1973, but did not attend college because his father did not believe he could do it.[6] Although Jesperson was not successful with girls in high school, having never even attended a school dance or his prom, he did enter into a relationship after high school. In 1975, when Jesperson was aged 20, he married Rose Hucke, and the couple had three children: two daughters and one son. Jesperson worked as a truck driver to support the family.
Several years later, Hucke began to suspect Jesperson was having affairs when strange women would call. Tension in the marriage increased, and after fourteen years, while Jesperson was on the road, Hucke packed up her children and belongings and drove 200 miles (322 km) to live with her parents in Spokane, Washington. The oldest child, Melissa, was ten years old.[7] Jesperson continued to spend time with his children when he was in town. The couple divorced in 1990.[8]
At age 35, standing 6feet 7inches (2.01m) and weighing approximately 255 pounds (116kg),[9] Jesperson began working toward the goal of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), but an injury suffered while training ended this endeavor. He then sought work again as an interstate truck driver after relocating to Cheney, Washington.[10] Jesperson soon realized that this job afforded him the opportunity to kill without being suspected.
Victims
Facial reconstruction of the unidentified woman found in 1993, who, Jesperson stated, was named "Carla". She was identified as 45-year old Patricia Skiple in 2022.
Jesperson's first known victim was Taunja Bennett on 21 January 1990, near Portland, Oregon, United States. He introduced himself to Bennett at a bar and invited her to a house he was renting. After getting in an argument with Bennett, he strangled her to death with his hands and disposed of her body.
On 30 August 1992, the currently unidentified body of a woman Jesperson had raped and strangled was found near Blythe, California, United States.[11] Jesperson gives the Jane Doe's name as Claudia. A month later, in Turlock, California, the body of Cynthia Lyn Rose was discovered. Jesperson claims Rose was a sex worker who entered his truck at a truck stop while he slept. His fourth victim was another sex worker, Laurie Ann Pentland of Salem, Oregon, whose body was found in November 1992. According to Jesperson, Pentland attempted to double the fee she charged for the sex he had been engaged in with her. She threatened to call the police, and he strangled her.
Jesperson killed his next victim in June 1993 in Santa Nella, California. She was a previously-unidentified woman named Patricia Skiple,[12] who, he claimed, was named "Carla" or "Cindy".[13] Police originally considered her death a drug overdose. In September 1994, another Jane Doe was found in Crestview, Florida. Jesperson had previously said that her name was Suzanne,[10][14] and she was identified as Suzanne L. Kjellenberg on October 3, 2023.[15]
Jesperson was arrested on 30 March 1995 for the murder of Julie Winningham. He had been questioned by police a week before, but they had no grounds to arrest him after he refused to talk. In the days following, Jesperson decided that he was certainly going to be arrested, and after two suicide attempts turned himself in hoping it would result in leniency during his sentencing. While in custody, Jesperson began revealing details of his killings and making claims of many others, most of which he later recanted. A few days before his arrest, he wrote a letter to his brother in which he confessed to having killed eight people over the course of five years. This led police agencies in several states to reopen old cases, many of which were found to be possible victims of Jesperson.[16]
Although Jesperson at one point claimed to have had as many as 160 victims,[17] only the eight women killed in Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Nebraska, and Wyoming have been confirmed. He is serving three consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. In September 2009, Jesperson was indicted in Riverside County, California, on murder charges; he was extradited in December 2009.[18] He was convicted of another murder and received a fourth life sentence in January 2010.[19]
Laverne Pavlinac
Early in the investigation of Bennett's murder, Laverne Pavlinac read the news reports surrounding Bennett's death and saw it as an opportunity to force an end to the long-term abusive relationship she had been in with her live-in boyfriend, John Sosnovske. Pavlinac set up a meeting with investigators and gave a false confession, using the details she had read in the newspaper to give a detailed story of how Sosnovske forced her to help him rape, murder, and dispose of Bennett's body. Pavlinac and Sosnovske were both arrested on 5 March 1990 and both were convicted of the murder on 8 February 1991.[20] To avoid the possibility of facing the death penalty, Sosnovske pleaded no contest. He was sentenced to life in prison while Pavlinac was sentenced to no less than ten years, much more than she had anticipated. Pavlinac soon admitted to making up her entire story, but her claims were ignored.[21]
On 7 January 1996, more than five years after their conviction, Pavlinac and Sosnovske were released from prison after Jesperson and his attorney offered his confession with convincing evidence of his guilt. He had given police officers the location of the victim's purse. The purse had not been found at the crime scene, and its location was considered information only the killer would know.[22]
"The Happy Face Killer"
Following Bennett's murder, as all the attention was going to Pavlinac and Sosnovske, Jesperson wrote a confession on the bathroom wall of a truck stop and signed it with a smiley face. When that did not create the attention he desired, he wrote letters to media outlets and police departments confessing to his murders, starting with a six-page letter to The Oregonian in which he revealed the details of his killings. Jesperson signed each letter with a smiley face.[8][17] This led Phil Stanford, the journalist working the story for The Oregonian, to dub Jesperson "The Happy Face Killer".[8]
In 2008, Moore published a book titled Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter. Moore recounts living with Jesperson until her parents' 1990 divorce, and noticing how her father was different when she was in elementary school. Their house bordered an apple orchard, and Jesperson killed stray cats and gophers that wandered nearby. One day, she watched, horrified, as he hung stray kittens from the family's clothesline. She ran to get her mother, and when they returned, the kittens lay on the ground dead.[7] He had watched and laughed as the kittens clawed each other to escape, then he killed them.[28] In November 2014, she wrote an article about her father for the BBC.[29]
In March 2018, she was featured in an episode, titled "Put on a Happy Face", of the Investigation Discovery true crime series Evil Lives Here.[30][31] In September 2018, podcast network HowStuffWorks began releasing a show called Happy Face[32] featuring interviews with Melissa about her childhood and her father.[33] The series had 12 episodes.
In June 2021, a trailer appeared on iTunes for a new true crime podcast called Life After Happy Face, to be hosted by Melissa Moore and forensiccriminologist Laura Pettler.[34] The episode was released on July 9, 2021.
Gary Leon Ridgway is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders committed between the early 1980s and late 1990s. As part of his plea bargain, another conviction was added, bringing the total number of convictions to 49, making him the second most prolific serial killer in United States history according to confirmed murders.
Henry Lee Lucas, also known as The Confession Killer, was an American convicted murderer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.
Colin Ireland was a British serial killer known as the Gay Slayer, because his victims were gay. Criminologist David Wilson believes that Ireland was a psychopath.
Paul Charles Denyer is an Australian serial killer currently serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 30 years for the murders of three young women in Melbourne, in 1993. Denyer became known in the media as the Frankston Serial Killer as his crimes occurred in the neighbouring suburbs of Frankston.
Robert Christian Boes Hansen, popularly known as the Butcher Baker, was an American serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska, between 1972 and 1983. Hansen abducted, raped and murdered at least seventeen women, many of whom he hunted in the wilderness with a Ruger Mini-14 and a knife. Hansen was captured in 1983 and sentenced to 461 years' imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He died in 2014 of natural causes at age 75.
David John Birnie and Catherine Margaret Birnie were an Australian couple from Perth who murdered four women at their home in 1986, also attempting to murder a fifth. These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.
David Parker Ray, also known as the Toy-Box Killer, was an American kidnapper, torturer, serial rapist and suspected serial killer. Though no bodies were found, Ray was accused by his accomplices of killing several women, and was suspected by the police to have murdered as many as sixty women from Arizona and New Mexico while living in Elephant Butte, New Mexico. Ray was convicted of kidnapping and torture in 2001, for which he received a lengthy sentence, but he was never convicted of murder. He died of a heart attack about one year after his convictions in two cases, the second of which resulted in a plea deal.
Donald Harvey was an American serial killer who claimed to have murdered 87 people, though official estimates are between 37 and 57 victims. He was able to do this during his time as a hospital orderly. His spree took place between 1970 and 1987.
Terry Anthony Blair is an American serial killer who was convicted of killing seven women of various ages in Kansas City, Missouri, though investigators believe he may have additional unidentified victims.
The Villisca axe murders occurred between the evening of June 9, 1912, to the early morning of June 10, 1912; in the town of Villisca, Iowa, in the United States. The six members of the Moore family and two guests were found bludgeoned in the Moore residence. All eight victims, including six children, had severe head wounds from an axe. A lengthy investigation yielded several suspects, one of whom was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury and the second ended in an acquittal.
Sean Vincent Gillis is an American serial killer and sex offender who murdered eight women in an around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 1994 until his arrest in April 2004. In his initial arrest, he was charged with three counts of first degree murder and three counts of ritualistic acts in the murders of 29-year-old Katherine Hall, 45-year-old Johnnie Mae Williams and 43-year-old Donna Bennett Johnston. Gillis confessed to the murders with little coercion and then informed investigators about five other women whom he had murdered.
Edward Wayne Edwards was an American serial killer and former fugitive. Edwards escaped from jail in Akron, Ohio, in 1955 and fled across the country, holding up gas stations. By 1961, he was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Melissa Ann Shepard, also known as Melissa Ann Weeks, Melissa Ann Friedrich, Melissa Ann Shephard and Melissa Ann Stewart, sometimes given the sobriquet of Internet Black Widow, is a Canadian murderer and habitual offender. Friedrich has been convicted of manslaughter in the death of one of her husbands, convicted of poisoning another, and convicted of numerous fraud offenses.
Happy Face Killer is a 2014 Canadian-American television film inspired by real-life events of the hunt and capture of serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson. The film premiered on March 1, 2014, on the Lifetime network and starred David Arquette as Jesperson. Gloria Reuben played Melinda Gand, the lead FBI case investigator.
David Alan Gore was an American serial killer who confessed to, and was convicted of, six murders in Vero Beach and Indian River County, Florida in the 1980s. Gore was executed by lethal injection in 2012, having been on Florida's death row for 28 years.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering 93 women between 1970 and 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has confirmed Little's involvement in at least 60 of the 93 confessed murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in United States history.
Laverne Arlyce Pavlinac was an American woman who falsely confessed to assisting in the 1990 murder of 23-year-old Taunja Bennett of Portland, Oregon; she also implicated her boyfriend, John Sosnovske, in Bennett's murder. Both Pavlinac and Sosnovske were convicted, with Pavlinac receiving a 10-year sentence. They served almost 6 years before both were exonerated after serial killer Keith Jesperson confessed to Bennett's murder.
The Clearing is a 2019 true crime podcast about April Balascio, daughter of American serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards. It premiered on 18 July 2019 and is a production of Pineapple Street Media and Gimlet Media. In 2009, April began to suspect her father of the 1980 murder of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew. Following her report to the police, Edwards was arrested and confessed to several other murders. He later became the subject of conspiracy theories accusing him of involvement in famous unsolved crimes. Featuring interviews from April and private recordings made by Edwards while he was living, The Clearing discusses April's journey to discover the truth about her father's life.
Colin Frederick Campbell is a British double murderer who in the early 1980s abducted two separate and unrelated women in west London and killed them in sexually motivated attacks. In 2013, 32 years after the event, Campbell was convicted of the high-profile unsolved murder of 17-year-old Claire Woolterton after a DNA match was found to him. He was already in prison for the 1984 killing of Deirdre Sainsbury, but had had his murder conviction in this case downgraded to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility in 1999 after he claimed that he had only killed her due to having an epileptic fit. In an open prison and about to be released in the early 2010s, Campbell was finally apprehended for Woolterton's murder, which had led to one of the UK's biggest manhunts at the time and a large amount of press coverage due to it being a murder of a child. The epilepsy experts who had helped Campbell win his appeal in the Sainsbury case accepted that epilepsy could not explain two violent and sexually motivated murders, and in sentencing the judge said that it had been wrong to downgrade his conviction to manslaughter in 1999. Detectives said that had he not been caught, Campbell would have potentially become a serial killer, a term usually used to describe a repeat killer who has killed at least three victims. Campbell is imprisoned at HM Prison Woodhill.
Carl Millard Patton, Jr. is an American serial killer who committed five murders across Georgia from 1973 to 1977 with multiple accomplices. He was linked to them with the help of DNA in 2003, subsequently pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
