'Happy Face Killer' Jesperson charged in Cali cas

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"Happy Face Killer" Jesperson charged in California case

SAN JOSE – A serial killer who stalked the Pacific Northwest was charged with strangling a woman in California in 1993 and dumping her body near a highway overpass.


Keith Hunter Jesperson, 55, was known as the “Happy Face Killer” for drawing happy faces in letters to an Oregon newspaper in which he boasted of his crimes. He is serving two life terms for murders in Oregon and Wyoming.

Santa Clara County prosecutors said Jesperson boasted of the slaying in a 1997 letter, but they withheld filing charges as they tried to determine the victim's identity.


“We knew he wasn't going anywhere,” prosecutor David Tomkins said.


Prosecutors said Tuesday they haven't decided whether to pursue the death penalty, adding the decision partially depends on Jesperson's willingness to name the victim, who remains unidentified.


Jesperson claimed he met her at a truck stop, had sex with her and strangled her before driving off.


The body was so badly decomposed that authorities could only determine she was a white woman in her 20s or 30s.


“We're hoping someone out there knows her,” Tomkins said. “She deserves a name.”

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Keith Jesperson (8 known victims)

An interstate trucker known as the Happy Face Killer is serving three life terms in Oregon for three killings. Keith, bothered by his guilty conscience, has confessed to and then recanted at least 160 slayings across the United States. He was dubbed the "Happy Face Killer" by authorities after he started sending neatly printed letters to the media with happy faces drawn at the top in which he boasted of his deeds.

After leading police to the purse of one of his presumed victims, authorities realized that they had wrongfully convicted two people for the killing. In 1990, Laverne Pavlinac told police she held a rope around Taunja Bennett's neck while her boyfriend John Sosnovske raped and killed her. She then recanted and said that she invented the story to get out of their abusive 10-year relationship. Nevertheless they were convicted and jailed for more than four years. On November 27, 1995, they were released from prison by an Oregon judge. Jesperson, the real killer, cried out of happiness for their acquittal.

On June 3, 1998 Jesperson, now 42, in a plea bargain that allowed him to avoid the death penalty, admitted to the 1995 strangulation of hitchhiker Angela Subrize, 21, at a truck stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Jesperson, had been extradited from Oregon to Wyoming in anticipation of a death penalty case. Jesperson, from his jail cell, taunted prosecutors in several states, saying his life sentences in the Pacific Northwest would keep him locked away and out of their reach.

An avid media manipulator in 1997 he had his web site (maintained by death-groupie Sondra London) on AOL closed after Wyoming's governor complained about his writings in it.