Keith Hunter Jesperson

Victims

8 established - at least 5 covered by convictions across four states: Taunja Bennett and Laurie Ann Pentland in Oregon, Julie Winningham in Washington, Angela Subrize in Wyoming, and an unidentified woman found at Blythe, California, to whose murder he pleaded guilty in 2010. His confession freed Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske, who had been convicted of the Bennett killing. The number of life sentences is reported variously as two, three, four and five; contemporaneous reporting establishes three consecutive terms by December 1995, with the Wyoming and California convictions later. His claim of as many as one hundred and sixty killings is uncorroborated and he has also recanted his admissions

Years active

1990 - 1995

Location

Nebraska/California/Florida/Washington/Oregon/Wyoming, USA

Method

Strangulation

Status

Arrested on March 30, 1995 after the killing of Julie Ann Winningham near Washougal, Washington. He pleaded guilty in Clark County in October 1995 to her murder, the rape and kidnapping charges being dropped under the plea, and was sentenced that November. In Oregon he was sentenced to life for the 1990 murder of Taunja Bennett and pleaded guilty in Hillsboro on December 15, 1995 to the 1992 strangling of Laurie Ann Pentland, receiving a third consecutive life term. He was later convicted of murder in Wyoming over the death of Angela Subrize, and in 2010 pleaded guilty in California to the murder of a woman found at Blythe in 1992 and never identified. Santa Clara County charged him in 2006 over a further unidentified woman found in 1993. His March 1995 confession secured the release of Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske on November 27, 1995, after more than four years in prison for the Bennett murder they did not commit. He has at various times claimed as many as one hundred and sixty killings and has also recanted his admissions. Held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, where he paints and sells his work.

Keith Hunter Jesperson was born in Chilliwack, British Columbia, on April 6, 1955, and grew up partly in Washington state. He was a very large child, bullied for it, and by his own account killing animals from an early age. He wanted to be a Mountie, failed the medical after an injury, and became a long-haul truck driver, which gave him a job in which a man moves constantly between jurisdictions and is expected to be nowhere in particular.

He killed Taunja Bennett in Portland, Oregon, in January 1990. What happened next is the reason the case is unusual. A woman named Laverne Pavlinac told police that her boyfriend, John Sosnovske, had killed Bennett and that she had helped him, a story she invented in order to get away from him. She led detectives to the scene and gave details that fitted. Both were convicted in 1991. Sosnovske took a plea to avoid death and got life; Pavlinac got ten years. They served roughly four years for a murder neither had anything to do with.

Jesperson was enraged that someone else had been given credit. He started writing anonymous confessions on truck-stop lavatory walls, then posted letters to newspapers and prosecutors, signing them with a drawing of a smiling face. Reporters called him the Happy Face Killer. He went on killing: at least eight women between 1990 and 1995, most of them picked up at truck stops or on the road, strangled, and left in ditches and fields in Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Nebraska, Florida and California. Several were not identified for years.

He was arrested in March 1995 after killing Julie Winningham, a girlfriend, in Washington, which was the first killing that connected to him directly. He confessed, and his confession is what freed Pavlinac and Sosnovske later that year. He has since claimed as many as a hundred and sixty victims, a figure no investigator accepts; eight are confirmed and a small number of others are considered probable.

He is serving multiple life sentences in Oregon. He writes letters constantly, has corresponded with journalists and with his own daughter, Melissa Moore, who has written and broadcast about growing up as his child. The Pavlinac and Sosnovske convictions remain the most-cited example in American law of a false confession surviving all the way to a verdict.