Who Was the Happy Face Killer?

For years, Keith Hunter Jesperson led a seemingly unremarkable life. A divorced father of three, he worked as a long-haul trucker, crisscrossing the country in his rig and spending time with his children. But beneath that ordinary exterior lurked a secret life of violence.

Between 1990 and 1995, Jesperson murdered at least eight women across several states, and Jesperson wasn’t content to keep his crimes to himself. He began leaving anonymous confessions on bathroom walls and sending letters to newspapers, which he marked with a smiley face that would earn him the nickname “the Happy Face Killer.”

Jesperson’s killing spree began in 1990, when he raped and strangled his first victim, 23-year-old Taunja Bennett, in Portland, Ore. Over the next five years, he killed at least seven other women in Oregon, Washington, California, Florida and Wyoming, often meeting them in bars or picking them up while he was on the road. Jesperson escaped investigators’ notice until 1995, when he turned himself in for killing his then-girlfriend, Julie Ann Winningham. After his arrest for Winningham’s death, he confessed to the other killings.

Jesperson might have been caught sooner, had it not been for a bizarre turn of events shortly after his first murder. After Bennett’s body was found on January 21, 1990, 57-year-old Laverne Pavlinac falsely confessed that she and her boyfriend, 39-year-old John Sosnovske, had been responsible for the killing. Pavlinac later said she admitted to the crime, even though she wasn’t responsible, because Sosnovske had abused her and she wanted to frame him for the murder.

Pavlinac recanted her confession but was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 10 years. Sosnovske pleaded no contest to murder and kidnapping to avoid the death penalty and was also given a life sentence.

“The greatest human tragedy is that Laverne Pavlinac derailed the investigation in 1990, and in four years, Keith Jesperson killed more women,” Jim McIntyre, the district attorney who prosecuted Pavlinac and Sosnovske in Multnomah County, Ore., told ABC News.

During Pavlinac’s trial in 1991, a confession to Bennett’s murder was found scrawled on the bathroom wall of a bus terminal in Livingston, Ore. A few days later, a similar confession was discovered at a truck stop in Umatilla. Authorities dismissed them both, reasoning that even if the confessions were legitimate, there would be no way to identify the person who had written them.

Three years later, those confessions gained new significance when The Oregonian received an anonymous letter from someone admitting to killing Bennett and several other women. Phil Stanford, a columnist for the newspaper, dubbed the mysterious letter-writer the Happy Face Killer because he had drawn a smiley face symbol at the top of the note.

“It all started when I wondered what it would be like to kill someone,” the murderer wrote to the newspaper in 1994. “And I found out. What a nightmare it has been.”

A forensic handwriting expert determined that the handwriting in the letter matched the writing in the two confessions that had been found on the bathroom walls. After Jesperson was arrested in connection with Winningham’s death in 1995, he wrote additional “happy face” letters to the media, claiming responsibility for eight total murders.

At first, investigators were skeptical of Jesperson’s claims, believing they already had the right people—Pavlinac and Sosnovske—behind bars. But then he led them to Bennett’s purse and provided previously undisclosed details about the killing, helping to confirm his account. Jesperson pleaded no contest to murdering Bennett in November 1995 and was sentenced to life in prison. Pavlinac and Sosnovske were released that same month, though Pavlinac’s conviction was not vacated.

As Jesperson continued to confess, the full scope of his crimes began to emerge.

In October 1995, he pleaded guilty to murdering Winningham and was sentenced to 34 years and four months in prison. Later that year, he pleaded guilty to strangling 23-year-old Laurie Ann Pentland in Oregon and was again sentenced to life in prison.

In June 1998, he pleaded guilty to strangling a 21-year-old hitchhiker named Angela Subrize in Wyoming (though he later said he’d actually killed her in Nebraska) and was sentenced to life in prison. In July 2007, Jesperson pleaded guilty to killing an unidentified woman known as “Blue Pacheco” and was sentenced to yet another life term. Finally, in January 2010, Jesperson pleaded guilty to killing another unidentified woman he thought might have been named Claudia and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Jesperson will remain at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Ore., for the rest of his life. But even after his crimes were adjudicated and Jesperson was locked away for good, investigators never stopped trying to identify his victims.

In 2022, investigators in California identified “Blue Pacheco” as Patricia Skiple, called Patsy by family and friends. She had been roughly 45 years old at the time of the killing. A year later, investigators in Florida named another of Jesperson’s victims—34-year-old Suzanne Kjellenberg, who he had strangled in August 1994. (In April 2024, Jesperson pleaded guilty to Kjellenberg’s murder and was sentenced again to life in prison.)

Meanwhile, in California, cold case detectives were also trying to identify the woman Jesperson referred to as Claudia, whose remains were discovered in August 1992 along U.S. Route 95, roughly seven miles north of Blythe. Investigators used a combination of DNA analysis and public genealogy research to deduce that Claudia was 26-year-old Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter.

The news, announced by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office in August 2026, gave McWhorter’s surviving family members long-awaited answers. Among them was her older sister, Brenda Burks, whose DNA helped confirm McWhorter’s identity.

“I wanted to do [the test],” Burks told the Los Angeles Times, “because I knew if I did the swab that it would prove whether or not the lady that they found was actually my little bitty sister that’s been missing.”