Keith Hunter Jesperson

• 1. Introduction

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  Keith Hunter Jesperson was born on the 6th of April 1955 and spent his working life behind the wheel of a truck. At some point he stood in a truck stop bathroom and wrote a confession to murder on the wall. He signed it with a smiley face. His motive was grievance. A woman's killing had made the news, yet the attention had settled on other people, and he resented it. That petty hurt set off a long campaign of letters, and a reporter eventually gave him a nickname: the Happy Face Killer. This documentary asks what kind of childhood came before. It asks how the open road hid him, and who else paid for his crimes. It asks what finally brought him down, and what his daughter later told the world.

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• 2. A Boy Called Igor

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  Chilliwack, British Columbia, was the town where Jesperson was born, the middle child of Les and Gladys Lorraine Jesperson, with two brothers and two sisters. His father was a domineering alcoholic. Jesperson said his own grandfather had a violent streak too. The father denied ever being abusive, but other relatives told the author Jack Olsen that the abuse was real.

  The family later moved to Selah, Washington, and there his size became a burden. Other children teased him and he struggled to make friends. His brothers gave him no protection. They called him "Igor" or "Ig," and the name followed him through school. He grew shy and often played alone.

  When he misbehaved, sometimes violently, his father punished him hard. The punishments included beatings, one of them with a belt in front of other people, and on one occasion an electric shock.

  As young as five, he was catching and tormenting animals. Around the trailer park where the family lived, he trapped birds and strays, beat them, and strangled them. He said his father was proud of this. He also said he began to wonder what it would be like to do the same to a person.

  At about age 10, he turned on a friend named Martin. Jesperson felt he was punished over and over for things Martin had done, and he beat the boy until his father pulled him away. He later said he had meant to kill him. About a year afterward, another boy held Jesperson under the water of a lake until he blacked out. Later, at a public pool, Jesperson tried to drown a boy by pushing his head under, and a lifeguard stopped him.

  Jesperson said he was raped at age 14. He finished high school in 1973 but did not go to college, because his father did not think he could manage it. He never went to a school dance or his prom. By his own account he had little luck with girls, and the next chapter of his life began with a marriage.

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• 3. Marriage and the Road

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  In 1975, at age 20, Jesperson married Rose Hucke. They had three children, two daughters and a son. He drove a truck to support them.

  Over the years, strange women began phoning the house. Hucke came to suspect he was having affairs, and the tension grew. After 14 years of marriage, while he was away on the road, she packed up the children and their belongings. She drove 200 miles to her parents' home in Spokane, Washington. Jesperson kept seeing his children when he was in town. The couple divorced in 1990.

  By then he was 35 years old, 1.98 metres tall and about 255 pounds. He set a new goal: to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. An injury during training ended that plan. He moved to Cheney, Washington, and went back to trucking.

  It was in that job that he came to see something sinister. Long hours alone on highways, far from the places where he lived, meant he could kill and not be suspected.

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• 4. The Women He Killed

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  The first known victim, Taunja Bennett, died on the 21st of January 1990 near Portland, Oregon. Jesperson met her in a bar and invited her to a house he was renting. They argued, and he strangled her with his hands and disposed of her body.

  Several of the women who followed went unnamed for a very long time. On the 30th of August 1992, the body of a woman who had been raped and strangled was found near Blythe, California. She remains unidentified. Jesperson gives her name as Claudia. A month later, in Turlock, California, the body of Cynthia Lyn Rose was found. Jesperson claims she was a sex worker who climbed into his truck at a truck stop while he slept.

  Laurie Ann Pentland of Salem, Oregon, was found in November 1992. Jesperson said she tried to double her fee after he had paid for sex with her. He said she threatened to call the police, and he strangled her.

  In June 1993 he killed a woman in Santa Nella, California. She was later identified as Patricia Skiple, though he said she had called herself "Carla" or "Cindy." Police at first took her death for a drug overdose.

  A second Jane Doe was found in Crestview, Florida, in September 1994. Jesperson had said her name was Suzanne. She was identified as Suzanne L. Kjellenberg on the 3rd of October 2023, nearly three decades later.

  His seventh victim was Angela Subrize, aged 21, who was killed in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on the 27th of January 1995. One more killing would follow, and it would be the one that exposed him.

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• 5. A False Confession

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  Laverne Pavlinac was reading the newspaper coverage of the Bennett murder when she saw a way out of her own life. She was living with a boyfriend, John Sosnovske, who abused her, and she wanted the relationship to end.

  She arranged a meeting with investigators and told a detailed story. In it, Sosnovske forced her to help him rape and murder Bennett and to dispose of the body. Every detail she gave had come from press reports. Both she and Sosnovske were arrested on the 5th of March 1990.

  They were convicted on the 8th of February 1991. Sosnovske pleaded no contest so as to avoid a possible death sentence, and he received life in prison. Pavlinac was sentenced to at least ten years, far more than she had expected. She soon admitted that she had made up the whole account. Nobody paid attention.

  The case was finally undone by Jesperson himself. He and his attorney offered a confession backed by convincing evidence. He had told police where to find the victim's purse. It had not been found at the crime scene, so only the killer was thought to know its location.

  Pavlinac and Sosnovske were released from prison on the 7th of January 1996, almost five years after their conviction.

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• 6. A Signature in the Mail

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  A six-page letter to The Oregonian was the first of Jesperson's mailed confessions. In it he described how his victims had died. He went on to send letters to other media outlets and to police departments, each one admitting to killings.

  He signed every letter with a smiley face. Phil Stanford, the journalist covering the story for The Oregonian, took notice of the symbol. He gave the writer the name that stuck: the Happy Face Killer.

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• 7. Arrest and Sentences

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  Julie Winningham was killed near Washougal, Washington, and her death was the one that led police to Jesperson. Officers questioned him a week before his arrest, but he refused to talk and they had no grounds to hold him.

  Over the following days he became convinced that his arrest was certain. He tried to take his own life twice. Then he gave himself up, hoping to win leniency at sentencing. He was arrested on the 30th of March 1995.

  A few days earlier he had written a letter to his brother. In it he confessed to killing eight people over five years. Once in custody, Jesperson began describing his crimes and made claims about many more, most of which he later took back. Police agencies in several states reopened old cases that might be his.

  He once claimed as many as 160 victims. Only eight have been confirmed, all women, killed in Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Nebraska and Wyoming. He is serving three consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.

  In September 2009 he was indicted on murder charges in Riverside County, California. He was extradited that December and convicted of another murder, receiving a fourth life sentence in January 2010. He cannot be considered for parole until 2063.

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• 8. The Daughter's Story

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  Melissa Moore remembers the kittens. Her family's house bordered an apple orchard, and her father killed stray cats and gophers that wandered near it. One day she saw him hang stray kittens from the family clothesline. She ran for her mother, but when they returned the kittens were dead on the ground. He had laughed as they clawed at each other trying to escape, and then he killed them.

  She lived with him until his divorce from her mother in 1990. She noticed even in elementary school that he was different from other fathers. She went on to write a book, Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter.

  Her public telling began in November 2008, when she appeared on the Dr. Phil show. She later spoke on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Lifetime series Monster in My Family, and a 20/20 special on ABC. In March 2018 she featured in an Evil Lives Here episode called "Put on a Happy Face." She also wrote an article about her father for the BBC in November 2014, and she worked as a correspondent for Crime Watch Daily.

  In September 2018 the network HowStuffWorks began releasing Happy Face, a 12-episode podcast built on her interviews. In July 2021 she and forensic criminologist Laura Pettler began a new podcast, Life After Happy Face, with an episode released on the 9th of July.

  On the 20th of March 2025, Paramount+ premiered an eight-episode series based on her podcast. Dennis Quaid plays her father.

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