Everything You Need to Know About Keith Jesperson, the Real-Life Happy Face Killer, and His Brutal Offenses

In the early-to-mid ’90s, a Washington-based long-haul trucker pursued women on the very routes he was tasked to navigate. One by one, his targets — often sex workers and transients — were discovered along highways and interstates across the country as victims of sexual assault, beatings, and strangulation. Some would not be identified for decades.

In 1995, the man behind the killings, identified as divorced father-of-three Keith Hunter Jesperson, would turn himself in as the man dubbed “The Happy Face Killer.”

His story was featured in a 2021 episode of Snapped: Notorious, part of a Snapped special like many you can find on Oxygen and Peacock.

Keith Jesperson’s early life

Keith Jesperson was a serial killer born in Chilliwack, British Columbia, about 20 miles north of the U.S. border and 60 miles east of Vancouver, according to a profile published by Radford University’s Department of Psychology. Born in 1955, he was raised by his mother, Gladys, and father, Leslie ‘Les’ Jesperson, the latter of whom many described as dependent on alcohol and extremely abusive.

Jesperson would later confess that as a child, his father publicly whipped him with a belt and subjected him to electric shock and beatings that rendered him unconscious.

This could account for why Jesperson’s violence started at a young age. At around 5 or 6, he began torturing and killing animals, a proclivity that he would take into adulthood.

Years later, Jesperson’s daughter, Melissa Moore — now an outspoken advocate for killers’ relatives — described a horrific moment when she watched her father hang kittens on a clothesline. Another time, Melissa said, he strangled one with his bare hands.

“I remember the smile on his face, and I could see blood coming off my dad’s forearms, but that didn’t seem to faze him,” Moore recalled to The Daily Mail. “He just continued until all of a sudden, the cat went limp.”

By then, Jesperson lived in Washington state, where he married Rose Hucke in 1975, according to ABC News. Together, the couple had two daughters and a son, while Keith Jesperson gained work in Cheney, Washington, about 20 miles southwest of Spokane, as a long-haul truck driver.

They divorced in 1990, the same year Jesperson killed his first victim.

Keith Jesperson’s victims

Taunja Bennett

Jesperson, standing at a towering 6’6”, raped, beat, and strangled eight women between 1990 and 1995, beginning with 21-year-old Taunja Bennett. On January 21, 1990, Jesperson met Bennett — who reportedly lived with intellectual disabilities, according to Radford — at a Portland, Oregon, bar before bringing her to his suburban rental.

Jesperson told author M. William Phelps in the book Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer that he “beat her senseless,” raped, and strangled Bennett before dumping her body at a wooded scenic outlook near the Columbia River Gorge outside Portland, according to ABC News.

Jesperson said he wanted to have sex after a night of heavy drinking.

“Comments were made of different things, and an altercation happened, and I struck her,” Jesperson said in a 2015 interview with ABC’s 20/20. “I actually hit her in the face and, for some reason, I just kept on hitting her in the face, and because of that, I feared going to prison for slugging her in the face and causing bodily injury, and so I killed her.”

California Jane Doe

On August 30, 1992, the body of a still-unidentified woman was found strangled to death and bound by duct tape on a roadside in Blythe, California, just a few miles from the Arizona border. Known as “Claudia,” the victim was killed by Jesperson, who said he killed her after he agreed to give her a ride, and she allegedly tried to “play” him.

Cynthia Lyn Rose

One month later, the body of Cynthia Lyn Rose, 32, was found behind the Blueberry Hill Café in Turlock, California, more than 500 miles north of Blythe. She was believed to be a sex worker and, like the others, was strangled to death.

Laurie Pentland

In November 1992, the body of 26-year-old Laurie Pentland was found in Salem, Oregon. Jesperson claimed she was a sex worker who tried to double her price.

Patricia Skiple

On June 3, 1993, the body of an unknown woman was discovered on the side of California State Route 152 near Gilroy in the San Francisco Bay area. According to the Radford profile, the Jane Doe was dismissed as an overdose victim and listed as “a street person.”

In 2006, Jesperson wrote a letter to the county D.A. and confessed to killing the woman, according to CBS News. She was identified in April 2022 as Patricia “Patsy” Skiple, a mother from Colton, Oregon.

Jesperson confessed to raping, beating, and strangling another unidentified woman in August 1994, stating he “put her out of her misery,” as revealed in Snapped: Notorious. The Jane Doe was identified in 2023 as Suzanne Kjellenburg, a Tampa-based drifter whose body was left in a wooded area off Interstate 10 near Holt, Florida, according to Oregon’s Statesman Journal.

Angela Subrize

Jesperson’s seventh victim was Angela Subrize, 21, of Oklahoma City, whom Jesperson reportedly met at a Spokane, Washington, truck stop in January 1995, per The Spokesman-Review. Jesperson agreed to take her to Colorado to visit her father before killing her inside his truck in Laramie County, Wyoming. She was eventually discovered in Nebraska.

“He strapped the woman beneath his big rig,” the New York Post reported. “Her body disintegrated against the hot asphalt as he drove.”

Julie Ann Winningham

Jesperson’s final victim was his 41-year-old girlfriend, Julie Ann Winningham, as detailed in Snapped: Notorious. Per Radford University’s report, he killed Winningham in Washougal, Washington, about 20 miles northeast of Portland, believing she was only after Jesperson’s money.

“When contacted by sheriff’s detectives, [Jesperson] said he had gagged her with duct tape, raped her in the sleeping cab of his rig, and strangled her,” per the Spokane outlet.

Eventually, Jesperson would confess to upward of 160 murders but recanted most of them later on.

Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske’s false confessions

Shortly after Jesperson’s first victim, Taunja Bennett, was found dead near Portland, 57-year-old Laverne Pavlinac went to authorities and confessed to helping her longtime boyfriend, John Sosnovske, kill the young woman. Pavlinac later tried recanting on the grounds that she only wanted out of an abusive relationship, but it was too late. In February 1990, the couple was arrested for Bennett’s murder, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

One year later, a Multnomah County jury convicted Pavlinac of felony murder, and she was sentenced to life in prison. Sosnovske then pleaded guilty for fears he’d receive the death penalty and was slapped with a life sentence.

What prosecutors didn’t know at the time was that Jesperson already confessed to killing Bennett on a bathroom stall in Montana. Purportedly upset by Pavlinac and Sosnovske getting the credit for Bennett’s homicide, he wrote: “I killed Tanya Bennet [sic] January 21, 1990, in Portland, Ore. I beat her to death, raped her, and loved it. Yes, I’m sick, but I enjoy myself, too. People took the blame, and I’m free,” New York Daily News reported in 2020.

The admission was not taken seriously, and Pavlinac and Sosnovske would spend nearly six years behind bars, their convictions overturned only after Jesperson’s conviction.

Both Pavlinac and Sosnovske have since passed away.