Keith Hunter Jesperson

What the record shows

Keith Hunter Jesperson is a former long-haul truck driver known as the Happy Face Killer, a name taken from the smiley faces he drew on confession letters sent to newspapers and police. Eight killings of women between January 1990 and March 1995 are considered confirmed, in Oregon, Washington, California, Florida and on the Wyoming-Nebraska line. He pleaded guilty or no contest in Washington and Oregon in 1995, was later sentenced in Wyoming and, in 2010, in California, and was charged in Florida in 2023. He is serving his sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.

His first known victim was Taunja Bennett, 23, who was strangled near Portland, Oregon, in January 1990. Two other people were convicted of her murder: Laverne Pavlinac, who had falsely told police that she and her boyfriend John Sosnovske killed Bennett, and Sosnovske, who pleaded no contest to avoid a possible death sentence. Pavlinac later said she invented the story to escape an abusive relationship, the Wikipedia article says, and Jesperson later led police to Bennett's purse, a detail that only the killer was likely to know. Jesperson has said he wrote a confession on a truck stop restroom wall after the killing and later sent anonymous letters, including a six-page letter to The Oregonian; a columnist there gave the writer his nickname, the Wikipedia article says.

Over the next five years he killed women he met on the road. According to the Wikipedia article, the body of a woman he called Claudia was found near Blythe, California, on August 30, 1992; the body of Cynthia Lyn Rose was found in Turlock, California, about a month later; and Laurie Ann Pentland was found dead in Oregon in November 1992. A woman found in Santa Nella, California, in 1993 was initially thought to have died of an overdose and was identified in 2022 as Patricia Skiple. The remains of a woman found off Interstate 10 in Okaloosa County, Florida, in September 1994 were identified in October 2023 as Suzanne Kjellenberg, who was 34. Angela May Subrize, 21, of Oklahoma City, was killed in late January 1995 near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and her body was found in western Nebraska, Laramie County sheriff's detectives told the Associated Press in October 1995.

The last killing was that of Julie Ann Winningham, 41, a former girlfriend, whose body was found in March 1995 below a viewpoint off Washington 14 near Washougal, Washington. Clark County investigators traced him through a car she had wrecked and sold. According to the Wikipedia article, police questioned him about a week before his arrest; after two suicide attempts he surrendered, and he was arrested on March 30, 1995. Before and after his arrest he wrote letters, decorated with smiley faces, claiming eight killings in five states. He later claimed far more, as many as 160 according to the Wikipedia article, most of which investigators have not confirmed or he has withdrawn.

In October 1995 Jesperson pleaded guilty in Clark County Superior Court to the first-degree murder of Winningham, and prosecutors dropped rape and kidnapping charges. Judge Robert Harris sentenced him in December to 34 years and four months. In Portland in November 1995 he pleaded no contest to Bennett's murder and was sentenced to life with a 30-year minimum; prosecutors agreed not to seek death partly to speed the release of Pavlinac and Sosnovske, who were later freed. In December 1995 he pleaded guilty in Hillsboro, Oregon, to strangling Pentland, 23, of Carlton, and received a further life term, with all three sentences to run consecutively.

Prosecutors in Cheyenne rejected an offer from his lawyer, made in late 1995, to help solve the Subrize killing in exchange for not seeking the death penalty. A 2008 Spokesman-Review article described him as serving life sentences for killings in Oregon and Wyoming. On January 8, 2010, he pleaded guilty in Riverside County, California, to the murder of the woman he called Claudia and was sentenced to 15 years to life, according to the Riverside County District Attorney's Office. In October 2023 the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office announced that Kjellenberg had been identified through forensic genetic genealogy and that Jesperson had been charged with her murder; KPTV did not report a resolution of that charge.

Jesperson was born on April 6, 1955, in Chilliwack, British Columbia. The last of the confirmed victims to be named, Claudia, was identified in 2026 as Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, who had reportedly disappeared from Texas, after DNA and genealogy research, KTLA reported; the district attorney's cold case team said her identification closed the final case tied to his convictions. His daughter, Melissa Moore, has spoken and written publicly about growing up as his child.