On November 27, 1995, a Marion County circuit judge in Salem, Oregon, ordered the release of two people who had spent more than four years in prison for the murder of Taunja Bennett. Prosecutors had asked for it. "There's no longer any doubt that these two individuals are innocent," Judge Paul Lipscomb said. "The evidence is compelling." He set aside John Sosnovske's conviction, on the ground that his civil rights had been violated. He refused to set aside Laverne Pavlinac's. He berated her for what she had done to the court and freed her anyway, because keeping an innocent woman in prison would be cruel and unusual punishment. "I'm real, real sorry that this whole thing happened," Pavlinac said.
The man who had actually killed Bennett watched from the Clark County jail in Vancouver, Washington. "God bless them," Keith Hunter Jesperson told a Portland television station. "They finally got out. They needed to get out." He had been convicted of Bennett's murder on November 2. He had spent much of the time since her death trying, in his own fashion, to make someone notice he was the one who did it.
Bennett was twenty-three and lived in Portland. She died on January 21, 1990, strangled by a man she had met at a bar, a truck driver who stood six foot six and weighed about 250 pounds. By Jesperson's account he took her back to a house he was renting and killed her after they argued. The investigation that followed never came near him, because a Portland woman walked into it with a story of her own.
Pavlinac was in her late fifties and had been living with Sosnovske in a relationship she described as abusive. She read the news coverage of Bennett's death and saw a way out. She told detectives that Sosnovske had picked Bennett up at a bar, forced her to help him rape and kill the young woman, and made her hold a rope around Bennett's neck. She used the details she had read in the paper, and she took investigators to the place where the body had been found. Both were arrested in March 1990. At her trial Pavlinac recanted and said she had invented all of it to get away from him. The jury heard her taped confession and convicted her of felony murder in January 1991, and she was sentenced to life with a ten-year minimum. Sosnovske, having watched her trial, pleaded no contest to murder and kidnapping in March 1991 to avoid a death sentence and was given life.
Jesperson went looking for credit. He wrote a confession on the wall of a truck-stop restroom far from Portland and signed it with a smiling face. When nothing came of that, he started writing to newspapers and to police. The letters, each marked with the same drawn smile, gave details of killings. A six-page letter went to The Oregonian, and the paper's Phil Stanford gave the writer the name the case has carried ever since: the Happy Face Killer. Nobody connected the letters to a name, and the two people convicted of the Bennett murder stayed in prison.
He was caught for the last murder, not the first. Julie Ann Winningham, forty-one, of Camas, Washington, had been dating a tall trucker named Keith. She was found strangled and nude beside a road near Washougal in March 1995. Her friends' description of the man she had been seeing led Clark County detectives to Jesperson. They questioned him, and he refused to talk and they had nothing to hold him on. In the days after, he became convinced he would be arrested, made two attempts at suicide, and wrote a letter to his brother confessing that he had killed eight people in five years. A day after learning that investigators were tracking him, he confessed to a Clark County sheriff's detective in a long-distance telephone call. He was arrested on March 30, 1995.
In custody he began to talk, and what he said about Bennett could be tested. He told investigators where her purse was. It had never been found at the scene, and its location was something only the killer would know. That, more than the letters, is what persuaded prosecutors to join the effort to free Pavlinac and Sosnovske. Even then it took two months. In October, days before Jesperson's conviction, Lipscomb said Jesperson's involvement did not necessarily clear the pair and that he needed more.
On October 18, 1995, Jesperson pleaded guilty in Clark County Superior Court to the murder of Julie Winningham. The rape and kidnapping counts were dropped under the agreement, and he was never charged with aggravated murder, the only charge in Washington that carried death. The judge set sentencing for November 27, the same day the couple convicted of his first murder would walk out of prison in Oregon. "He's guilty but he has no remorse," Winningham's son, Don Findlay, said outside the courtroom. "I feel he deserves the death penalty."
The letters said eight women in five states, and for once his count held up. The trouble was that several of the eight had no names. He had picked up most of them on the road, at truck stops and rest areas, and most of them were transients or women trading sex for money, people whose absence nobody reported. Oregon settled first. In December 1995 he pleaded guilty to strangling Laurie Ann Pentland, whose body had been found behind a store in east Salem in November 1992, and received a third life term. By his account she had tried to double her price and threatened to call the police.
Wyoming came next. Angela May Subrize was twenty-one and from Oklahoma City. On January 25, 1995, at a truck stop in Spokane, she was looking for a ride back to Colorado to visit her father. Laramie County detectives placed her with Jesperson in Cheyenne two days later and concluded he killed her in his truck at a truck stop on Interstate 80 just east of the city. Her body was found months later in western Nebraska, where it had been dumped, and was identified only after he described her. Wyoming convicted him of her murder.
Cynthia Lyn Rose was found in Turlock, California, in September 1992. Jesperson said she climbed into his truck at a truck stop while he slept. The other three women took decades to name, and each was named by the same new science. In the summer of 1993 a woman's body was found along State Route 152 near Santa Nella, on the road over Pacheco Pass. Police first took the death for a drug overdose. For almost thirty years she was known as Blue Pacheco, for the blue clothing found on her. Jesperson, who said she was called Carla or Cindy, wrote to the Santa Clara County district attorney in 2006 to confess, and in July 2007 he pleaded guilty there and was sentenced to life without parole. In April 2022 genetic genealogy identified her as Patricia Skiple, a mother from Colton, Oregon, about forty-five when she died.
Suzanne Kjellenberg was thirty-four and drifting in Tampa in the summer of 1994 when Jesperson picked her up at a truck stop there. Her skeletal remains were found in September of that year in the woods off Interstate 10 near Holt, in the Florida Panhandle. He first admitted the killing in February 1996 but knew her only as Susan or Suzette, and the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office spent the next quarter century on clay reconstructions, anthropological studies, FBI DNA work and isotope testing before a forensic genealogy lab found her family in Wisconsin in 2023. Interviewed again that September, Jesperson said he had parked at a rest area next to a security guard while she slept in his bed, that she woke and began screaming and would not stop, and that because he was not allowed unauthorized riders and did not want attention, he pressed his fist against her neck and later put zip ties around her throat. "Suzanne deserves a voice," Sheriff Eric Aden said. On April 4, 2024, Jesperson pleaded guilty to her second-degree murder and was sentenced to life.
The last to be named was the first found in California. On August 30, 1992, a woman's skeletonized remains were found along Highway 95 about seven miles north of Blythe, a month or so after she died. She wore a T-shirt printed with a motorcycle and had a tattoo of two small dots on her right thumb. Jesperson called her Claudia. He said he met her in August 1992 at a brake-check area on Interstate 15 south of Victorville, that she wanted to go to Los Angeles, and that because his route ran toward Arizona he took her to Cabazon instead. At a rest stop near Indio, he said, they argued over money, and he killed her in the cab of his truck and drove east to leave her by the highway. He was extradited from Oregon and pleaded guilty to her murder in Riverside County in January 2010, and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. By 2024 genetic genealogy had found her relatives on her father's side but not her mother's.
The claims outran the record. Jesperson has at one time or another said he killed as many as 160 people, and has recanted most of what he said beyond the eight. No investigator has accepted the larger figure, and no further case has been charged. What the eight required was not a confession, which he gave freely, but proof of who each woman was, and for three of them it took decades.
His early life is known mostly from the accounts of Jack Olsen, who wrote a book about him, and from his own. He was born on April 6, 1955, in Chilliwack, British Columbia, the middle of five children of Les and Gladys Jesperson, and the family later moved to Selah, Washington. His father drank and was domineering, and family members confirmed to Olsen the beatings the father denied. Large for his age and awkward, he was teased at school and called Igor by his own brothers. By his own account he was torturing and killing animals by the time he was five. He married Rose Hucke in 1975 and they had three children. She left him after fourteen years, taking the children to her parents in Spokane, and they divorced in 1990, the year he killed Taunja Bennett. His daughter Melissa Moore has written and spoken publicly about growing up with him, including the day she watched him hang stray kittens from the family clothesline. She learned what her father had done at sixteen, changed her name, and later co-wrote a memoir, Shattered Silence, in 2009 and hosted a podcast about him; in 2025 her story was the basis of the Paramount+ drama Happy Face, in which Dennis Quaid played Jesperson.
Pavlinac died in 2003. Jesperson is held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, and Oregon's corrections records do not make him eligible for parole until 2063, when he would be 108.
On August 27, 2026, the Riverside County District Attorney's Office announced that a DNA sample from her mother's side had confirmed who Claudia was. She was Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, twenty-six, who had disappeared from Texas in the 1990s. Her sisters had spent thirty-four years not knowing what had happened to her. With her name, every one of the eight women Keith Jesperson is known to have killed now has one.