With several documentaries on the Happy Face Killer already out there and so much information available in the media, I guess most of us already know who Keith Hunter Jesperson is, and about all the gruesome murders he committed during the early 1990s. Keith was a pretty simple family man who lived a decent life with his wife, Rose Marie, and his three kids. He worked as an equipment operator for a business owned by Rod Muffett. A few years after his marriage, Keith and his family moved to Canada, as he wanted to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) but couldn’t make it through the training due to some injury. He returned to America and started working as a long-haul truck driver to support his family, though the marriage didn’t last, as Rose suspected that her husband was having affairs with different women. In 1990, Rose took the kids and left for her parents’ house in Spokane, Washington, and this was the exact moment when Keith lost his mind. It was this loss that triggered something and released a rage that had been building up inside him since childhood. So, without further ado, let’s get inside the mind of the vicious monster to explore what motivated this sadistic man, and why he’s never felt so much as a pinch of remorse.
A Rough Childhood Mixed With Narcissism
Janine Beghtol, Keith’s classmate, recalled that the lad had trouble fitting in after his family moved to Selah, Yakima County, Washington. Keith always looked bigger than other kids his age, which made him self-conscious about his stature. In school, he tried to make new friends, but students only made fun of him. They called him “Baby Huey,” which made him feel like an outcast. Keith even tried to have a girlfriend, but he was just awkward. It was obvious that Keith yearned for some attention, which also explains the reason he wrote a 6-page letter to The Oregonian in May 1994, as soon as he found out that someone else was being charged with the murder of Taunja Bennett. In his letter, he explained how and why he killed five of his victims, and the kind of mental space he was in. He wanted credit for the perfect crimes he had committed and couldn’t stand to see anyone getting all the attention. The letter was marked with a happy face next to Keith’s confession, “All 5 of 5.” Because of this “smiley face,” he was dubbed the Happy Face Killer in most media outlets that covered the news, since no one knew his real name until the next year.
Janine further added that Keith’s father, Les, was really hard on him. As per the reports, Les used to beat his younger son with a belt whenever he misbehaved or acted inappropriately, which could explain the suppressed anger inside him trying to come out over a long period. As Keith grew up, he wouldn’t let anyone belittle him or make fun of him. His recorded interviews with the officers pointed out that Keith often snapped whenever some girl mistreated him, for example, Taunja, whom he took home on 21 January 1990. Inside the house, Taunja commented, “Why don’t you just hurry up and get it over with?” which made Keith lose his mind, likely because the young girl treated him as some sort of “sex object.” This was the exact moment when Keith raped her and beat her brutally. He finally ended her life by pushing his fist down her throat. Similar incidents happened with his other victims, where one sex worker tried to charge him double and where one of his romantic partners, Julie Ann Winningham, got into a heated argument with him regarding the bill of sale of her car, which she had recently sold to a woman named Bonnie Valsnie. According to Keith’s confession, Julie came back to his truck at 12 o’clock in the night. She was drunk, and the couple got intimate. But soon after, Julie accused Keith of rape, which, in his own words, gave him reason to kill the woman and get rid of her. She started to scream and yell, which was when he blew a gasket and grabbed her by the throat. He pushed her down into the blanket to stop her from screaming.
The thing is, due to the nature of his job, i.e., being a truck driver, Keith was always on the move. He often encountered new women at different locations, which made it extremely difficult to track down his victims. He told his fellow inmates in prison that he didn’t always kill the victims, and sometimes just assaulted them to the brink of death if they disrespected him in any way. As per the few reports, Keith, from a very young age, started strangling birds and strays to death, which, according to him, made his father feel proud. If that’s really what happened, no matter what Les’ reasons might be for approving of such behavior, I think it made young Keith believe that killing living things was the right way to shut them down. They won’t make fun of him or mistreat him once they are dead, and that’s what was drummed into Keith’s head as he grew up. He told the officers that he had a high sex drive and couldn’t resist talking to new women he’d come across, but what came afterwards was what made Keith lose his mind. He suffered from malignant narcissism and didn’t know how to socialize. If something wasn’t about him, he didn’t know what to say next, and that complicated affairs quite a bit. He couldn’t let women leave him like his wife left him, because it would hurt his ego and make him feel lesser, reminding him of his traumatic childhood, which he didn’t want to relive at any cost. To sum up, Keith checks all the boxes of being a serial killer, and his reasons for killing his victims weren’t any different than the rest of the narcissistic predators out there.
Keith Finally Confessed
In March 1995, a motorist passing through Highway 14 up in the Columbia River Gorge found a corpse along the road and quickly informed the Washougal Police Department. Jane Scott, a detective in Clark County Sheriff’s office, investigating the crime and the naked body dumped off the highway, found that it belonged to a woman named Julie Winningham. This was the same woman Keith was romantically involved with; at least that’s what the witnesses reported. As per the police reports, Julie was quite serious about the whole thing and was planning to marry the giant truck driver when the “expected” happened.
Monty Buettner and Rick Burner, the two detectives investigating Julie’s murder, came across the bill of sale of her car, which was signed by Keith as a witness. This was the first time Keith was questioned by the police in connection to a murder case of his victims, but during the interrogation, he didn’t share any credible information except for the fact of how great a cribbage player he was. The detective knew this was the man they had been looking for, but didn’t have substantial information against him. They had to let him go, but soon Keith made a call to Rick and confessed his crimes. Likely he believed that his crimes would never come to be known to the world, as the police were too stupid to connect the dots, which was likely the reason why he turned himself in. He had told Rick that he was suicidal and was at war with himself, though it sounded more like he wanted attention and credit for what he had done.
After his arrest, Keith made a phone call to his older brother, Brad, and asked him to get rid of his letter he had sent him on March 24th, 1995. This was six days before he admitted his crimes to Rick on the call. Luckily, Brad didn’t get rid of the letter and turned it over to law enforcement. Through this letter, the detectives found out that Keith had killed eight people and assaulted several more. They soon started interrogating the man so he would reveal the identities of his other victims and where he had dumped their bodies, and this is how Keith, intentionally, opened a huge can of worms so he could get all the attention in the world. As per the sources, Keith and Brad never had a good relationship, even in childhood, which is proof enough that Keith always knew that his brother would turn in the letter, and he likely called him just to trick him into doing that so that the officers would get to know about his glory.
Keith Is Still In Prison
All that bragging around the inmates and the confession letter helped the police to procure the bodies of his other victims. However, the most shocking of all was when he told the detectives that he was responsible for Taunja’s murder and, in fact, he was the one who wrote that “happy face” letter to all the prominent media houses in the country. At first, Rick and Monty believed that Keith was just trying to draw an even bigger spotlight by speaking about a much-talked-about murder case in the 1990s. The biggest problem with this whole thing was that two people had already been convicted of Taunja’s murder, and such a revelation would only raise doubts in the judicial system. But when Keith pointed out the exact spot where he had disposed of Taunja’s purse and her Walkman, the detectives had no other option but to reopen the case.
Keith even agreed to meet with other agencies to discuss other unsolved murders on the condition that he wouldn’t be given the death penalty. The authorities made a deal, and this was when Keith started spilling the beans and informed the agencies about his other victims that he would often pick up while being on the road driving his truck. In November 1995, Keith pleaded guilty to murdering Julia and Taunja, as well as Laurie Pentland, a sex worker whom he killed on 14th November 1992. According to Keith, she tried to scam him and charged him double, which was when he strangled her to death. At first, the court served him with three consecutive life sentences. The families of the victims were quite unhappy with the court’s judgment, because such a monster wasn’t given a death penalty. However, the court couldn’t announce such a sentence because of the deal he had made with the authorities. Later, in 2010, Keith pleaded guilty to the 1992 murder of a woman in Blythe, California. The court added one more consecutive life sentence, which, as you can see, doesn’t change a darn thing. Maybe Keith was mocking the justice system in front of the whole world, showing the public how helpless they were against the giant. As of now, Keith is serving his sentence in Oregon State Penitentiary.
