Keith Jesperson, also known as the Happy Face Killer, is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least 8 women in the United States in the 1990s. Growing up, Jesperson lived with his parents Leslie and Gladys Jesperson, and was the middle child of two brothers and two sisters. Jesperson did not grow up in a pleasant environment as a kid. He had a violent and troublesome childhood, as he lived with an alcoholic father, who would severely punished him for his troublesome habits. Jesperson was not only treated as an outcast in his family, but he was also treated as an outcast at school as well.
As a child, he was very large for his age, and the children at school would tease him for his size. Due to the constant judgement he had to deal with from the children at his school, he hung out by himself the majority of the time and did not learn how to socialize well with others. At the age of 10, Keith Jesperson was friends with a child named Martin, who constantly blamed Keith Jesperson whenever he got into trouble. Eventually, Jesperson attacked Martin, as he was outraged about the fact that he was blamed for Martin’s actions, and beat him violently until his father pulled him away.
Jesperson later claimed that he had the intention of killing Martin. A year later, Jesperson was held under water in a lake by a child until he blacked out, so soon following this incident, he tried to drown this child in a public swimming pool until a lifeguard pulled him away. As a child, Jesperson did not only have unusual habits like these with humans, but with animals as well. He would often torture and beat animals such as gophers, birds, and stray cats and dogs that he would find in his neighborhood.
His method of killing these animals was very consistent. He would beat the animals that he would find severely, and then strangle them to death. Jesperson later claimed that his father was proud of him for these violent acts, and that as a child, he wondered what it would be like to do the same type of torture to a human. Jesperson graduated high school in 1973, but did not attend college because his father did not believe he would be successful. Two years later, in 1975, Jesperson married Rose Hucke and later had three children.
Melissa G. Moore, the eldest of the three children, experienced her father’s unusual habits when she was in elementary school. 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. He had watched and laughed as the kittens clawed each other to escape, then he strangled them to death. Soon after Jesperson’s wife and children noticed these habits, they left him, and Rose Hucke and Keith Jesperson got divorced.
Before Jesperson lost his family, he became employed as a truck driver, and when he was left to live by himself, he realized that his job offered him the opportunity to kill without being found by the authorities. Soon after, Keith Jesperson started his path as a serial killer. On January 23, 1990, Jesperson found a woman by the name of Taunja Bennett at a bar near Portland, Oregon. Later that night, Jesperson invited her to the house he was renting, and the two later shared intimacy that later took a downturn into an argument. Due to this argument that took place, Jesperson brutally beat Bennett, and then strangled her to death.
Two years later, in 1992, Jesperson raped and strangled a woman by the name of Claudia near Blythe, California. A month later, in Turlock, California, the body of a prostitute was found. Keith Jesperson claims that this prostitute climbed into his truck while he was asleep on the side of the road. Within the same year, the body of another prostitute named Laurie Ann Pentland was discovered. According to Jespersen, she 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. In
June 1993, a woman, otherwise known as a “street person” was found dead in Santa Nella, California, who Jesperson claimed she went by the name of “Carla” or “Cindy. ” More than a year later, a woman named Susanne was found dead in Crestview, Florida. Jesperson claimed this crime as well. Soon after, in January 1995, Jesperson agreed to give a young woman, Angela Subrize, a lift from Spokane, Washington, to Indiana. A week into the trip, Subrize became impatient and constantly reminded Jesperson to hurry up because she wanted to see her boyfriend as soon as possible.
Jesperson raped and strangled her as a response to her nagging. After he raped and strangled her, her strapped her to the undercarriage of his truck and dragged her, face down, “to grind off her face and prints. Her body was not found until Jesperson showed it to the police. The final proven murder by Keith Jesperson was of Julie Ann Winningham, who was his girlfriend in 1995. Jesperson believed that Winningham was interested in him for his money, so Jesperson strangled her in Washougal, Washington. Julie Ann Winningham was the only victim he had a close connection with, which ultimately set police on his trail.
Early in the investigation of Taunja Bennett’s murder, Laverne Pavlinac read the news reports surrounding Taunja 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. She set up a meeting with the investigating detectives and gave a false confession, using the details she had read in reports 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 convicted of the murder in February 1991.
To avoid the possibility of facing the death penalty, Sosnovske pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison, while Pavlinac was sentenced to no less than 10 years, much more than she had anticipated. She soon admitted to making it all up, but her claims were ignored. On 27 November 1995, more than four years since their conviction, Pavlinac and Sosnovske were released from prison after Jesperson and his attorney offered his confession with convincing evidence of his guilt. All of 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. He signed each letter with a smiley face. This led Phil Stanford, the journalist working the story for The Oregonian, to dub Jesperson “The Happy Face Killer”. ———— If a forensic psychologist were to characterize the “The Happy Face Killer,” they would say that his mode is disorganized, his mobility was transient, and his motive was power-oriented.
A forensic psychologist would classify Keith Jesperson killings as disorganized because he picked his victims up either enroute, or in a resting point, as his career gave him the perfect opportunity to make it possible, therefore, he had no plan as to where he was going to kill his victims, he just killed them in a location that was convenient for him. Once he would strangle his victims, he would leave their bodies on the side of the road, or left them in the same location that he killed them.
He had no plan to hide the bodies of his victims, and he left them intact, as he liked the attention from the public that he received after he left them out in the open and they were found. Jesperson was not socially adequate not only as an adult, but throughout his childhood. He attempted to kill humans twice at the age of 10, and he showed socially bizarre signs by beating and strangling animals that approached his home. Later in life, Jesperson was able to build a family, but soon after they left him because of his horrifying behavior, and his need to torture live animals.
A serial killer classified as disorganized lives alone, and Keith Jesperson lived alone for the majority of his adult life. A forensic psychologist would also consider Jesperson’s mobility as transient because he seldom stayed in one spot for every murder that took place. Jesperson was a truck driver, which he originally became in order to support his family before they left him due to his strange behavior. Soon after his family left him, he realized that his career gave him the perfect opportunity to kill. He traveled continuously, and ended up murdering victims in California, Florida, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
Finally, a forensic psychologist would classify Keith Jesperson as a power-oriented. Jesperson would be considered a power-oriented killer because he strangled all of his victims, including animals, so he wanted to watch and feel them die. Jesperson said himself that, “it was their fate to die by my hands like a car accident or illness. ” He had his own personal rules and guidelines on how a person should die, and how they should treat him in order not to die by his own hands.
He could have also been considered a sociopath which invested into his oriented motive even more, as he has extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. The “Happy Face Killer” killed because he was truly a sociopath, and had strange antisocial behaviors since childhood. He had no conscience, so whenever he felt the need to kill classmates, friends, or animals around him, he did not think twice about what was wrong with the need to do so. He never thought about how much trouble that he could get into for doing things as horrific as these murders, he just wanted to carry them out.
The father of Keith Jesperson also seemed to make things worse for the killer. Instead of getting him the help that he obviously needed starting from childhood, he beat Jesperson severely, which fueled the rage inside of Keith Jesperson. This rage could have led him to kill more, and take out anger on anything that he could, as a reaction to his father. According to Keith Jesperson, his father also encouraged him to strangle animals, so instead of taking advantage of these strange behaviors and putting them to a halt, Keith Jesperson was never taught a lesson, and killed whenever he wanted to kill.