Paramount+ series Happy Face is inspired by the true story of Keith Jesperson, aka the Happy Face Killer, who killed eight women during his reign of terror.
As of late, you’ve probably been hearing and seeing a lot about the notorious Happy Face Killer. From a book and podcast series by one of his own daughters, in addition to individual episodes on other true crime podcast series, to film and television adaptations, his story has been a hot topic, especially since Paramount+ began advertising their upcoming adaptation Happy Face, starring Dennis Quaid and Amanda Seyfried. While these adaptations are inspired by true events, they contain fictionalized information and thus remain mere adaptations. So, let’s explore the true story of Keith Jesperson, also known as the Happy Face Killer.
Jesperson is confirmed to have killed at least eight women across California, Florida, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming between 1990 and 1995, boasting about the slayings in letters on bathroom walls and signing them with a smiley face. He raped and strangled each victim, and all but one were strangers.
While Paramount+ series Happy Face is inspired by the Happy Face Killer, it jumps off from the true story to focus on his daughter Melissa as she works to free an innocent man on death row serving time for a Happy Face murder. The information below does not serve as a spoiler for the series.
Keith Jesperson’s early life / Who is Keith Jesperson?
Born in 1955 in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada, Jesperson was a middle child with two sisters and two brothers. Per “I: The Creation of a Serial Killer” by Jack Olsen, Keith was on the receiving end of abuse and violence, claiming his father was an alcoholic who regularly beat him with a leather belt. As a result, Jesperson started abusing, torturing, and killing animals at a young age.
At 5 years old, he captured cats, birds, small dogs, and other animals just to inflict pain on them through brute force and strangulation, gruesome activities of which his father approved. When he was 10, Jesperson escalated his violence from animals to humans when he attacked his friend after repeatedly being blamed for his wrongdoings. He beat the boy unconscious, insisting he “would have killed the kid if his father hadn’t pulled him away,” later describing the experience as akin to a dissociative one, in which he felt like he’d stepped out of his own body and watched someone else pummel the boy.” The following year, Jesperson was swimming in a lake when another boy—a bully—held his head under water until he blacked out. In retaliation, Jesperson tried to drown the boy, but a lifeguard intervened.
At 12 years old, Keith’s parents moved the family to Selah, Washington, where he had trouble fitting in. Because of his large stature, kids teased and called him names like “Monster Man” and “Igor”. Jesperson started shoplifting and attacked an adult for the first time when he shot an arrow with an exploding tip at one of his teachers. During his teen years, he was frequently rejected by girls and did not attend any school dances before graduating in 1973. He then worked for his father pumping gas, and this ultimately developed into a passion for long-haul trucking.
Keith Jesperson’s family
When Jesperson turned 20, he married a local student named Rose Hucke on her 18th birthday, and together the couple had three children: two daughters, Melissa and Carrie, and a son named Jason. It was around this time that Keith started working as a long-haul truck driver.
Several years into their marriage, Hucke began to suspect her husband was having an affair after strange women started calling their house. This, of course, caused tension in their marriage, and it motivated Rose to move herself and her kids to Spokane, in with her parents. Keith and Rose divorced in 1990. That same year, Jesperson relocated to Cheney, Washington and his murder spree began. Over the next five years, it would span across the United States.
Decades later, Melissa recalled to BBC News that her father had tortured kittens in front of her and her siblings as a child by—and this is sick—tying kittens to a clothesline by their tails and letting them claw each other to death.
Becoming the Happy Face Killer
After moving to Cheney, Jesperson was said to be angry, mostly at his ex-wife and women in general, but what’s more is that he was so angry, he tapped back into his childhood violence. This led to him releasing his rage on unsuspecting victims at truck stops, where he raped or sexually assaulted them before killing them via strangulation.
The more Jesperson killed, the more his desire for true crime notoriety grew. After his first victim was discovered in January 1990, a woman named Laverne Pavlinac lied to police and confessed that she had aided her boyfriend John Sosnovske in committing the murder. Why? Pavlinac told The New York Times that she wanted to escape her abusive relationship. She later recanted her confession, but the damage was already done, and in 1991, a jury found her guilty. Sosnovske pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.
So, what did these convictions mean for Happy Face and that investigation? Well, they meant that Jesperson was unlikely to ever face charges for his crime, and they completely derailed the Happy Face investigation. Pavlinac allegedly seemed to know some very specific and intricate details of the case, which made her confession believable. But her confession didn’t just result in two wrongful convictions; it also resulted in Happy Face being free to kill seven more women.
They also incited a one-man campaign to win the release of Sosnovske and Pavlinac. Thanks to Jesperson’s narcissism, he wanted to claim credit, so he wrote about his first murder in a bus terminal bathroom and signed it with a smiley face. He then moved on to scribble out a series of taunting confessions by sharing details of the crime on other bathroom walls.
Jesperson also sent anonymous letters to The Oregonian newspaper about his multiple murders. Because smiley faces again served as his signature, a journalist dubbed him the “Happy Face Killer”.
The eight Happy Face victims
While the Happy Face Killer has claimed in interviews, diaries, and court records to have killed 166 women, only eight murders have been linked to him. Each of those eight murders occurred between January 1990 and March 1995, shortly before he was captured.
The Happy Face Killer’s first victim—whom Pavlinac said she aided her boyfriend in killing—was Taujna Bennett, a 23-year-old developmentally disabled woman he met at a bar in Portland, Oregon. Happy Face drank with and convinced her to go back to his rental house, where he beat, sexually assaulted, and strangled her on January 21, 1990. Later that month, he dumped her body near Columbia River Gorge, and a college student found her.
His second victim was Daun Slagle, whom he sexually assaulted in April 1990 after a parking lot encounter in Mount Shasta, California with—and this is horrific—her infant in tow. However, Slagle managed to escape alive. Happy Face waited more than a year before striking again, murdering three women in 1992. They included a woman he referred to as “Claudia”, Cynthia Lynn Wilcox, and sex worker Laurie Anne Pentland.
He claimed to have met “Claudia” that summer at a truck checkpoint in California. On August 30, 1992, her strangled, duct-taped body was found. While her true identity remains unknown, investigators have said in numerous interviews throughout 2024 that they are close to discovering who she was. That August was also when Happy Face struck again, murdering Wilcox at a truck stop in Turlock, California. However, he reportedly later told crime author and investigative journalist M. William Phelps that he murdered another woman and did not recognize Wilcox’s picture. In November, he had an encounter with sex worker Laurie Pentland that ended when he strangled her and left her body in Oregon.
In June 1993, remains were found near a highway in Gilroy, California that were attributed to a Happy Face Killer victim he called “Cindy”. The two met where? You guessed it: a truck stop. Nearly two decades later, his fifth victim was identified: 45-year-old Patricia Skiple. After her killing, Happy Face divulged that he staved off his “murderous urges” for more than a year by committing arson as a trucker while on the road. But in September 1994, when the body of an unknown woman who’d been strangled was found in Florida, Happy Face was confirmed as the killer because he knew intimate details about the murder. It wasn’t until October 2023 that Florida authorities identified her as 34-year-old Suzanne Kjellenberg.
Jesperson’s seventh victim came in January 1995 after he met her at a bar in Spokane. Angela Subrize then traveled east with him in his truck. In an interview with The Spokesman Review, Jesperson said he strangled her because she wouldn’t let him sleep. He said they’d spent days together and he even let her use his credit card. He decided to drag her body underneath his truck to impede identification and later left her remains in Nebraska, although Subrize was likely killed in Wyoming.
The Happy Face Killer’s eighth and final victim was his girlfriend Julie Winningham, whom he murdered in Washington state on March 10, 1995. Her body was discovered the next day, and it marked the end of the serial killer’s reign of terror.
The Happy Face Killer’s arrest, conviction, and current status
Jesperson became a suspect in Winningham’s murder because he was her boyfriend. After being questioned by police, he attempted suicide but ended up confessing to her murder. Prior to his arrest, he’d written a letter to his brother saying he’d been a killer for five years and had murdered at least eight people. His brother gave the letter to law enforcement.
While in custody, Happy Face revealed graphic details about his murders and provided the location of Taujna Bennett’s purse, which only her killer would have known. That revelation led to the release of Pavlinac and Sosnovske from prison in November 1995.
Even though Jesperson later recanted his testimony about his eight murders as the Happy Face Killer, he remains convicted of his crimes. Since his first conviction in 1995, Jesperson has received four life sentences. He is currently serving out his sentence at the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he allegedly spends most of his time making art—pieces of which have appeared on “murderabilia” websites. Happy Face is also a prolific letter writer, as he has attempted to correspond with journalists at NewsNation on multiple occasions.
In November 2023, Jesperson claimed in an interview with “The Lighter Side of Serial Killers” podcast that he was pen pals with the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann, and in February 2024, he told The Independent that he’s still being investigated for several other murders and offers DNA whenever he can to rule himself out as a suspect in open cases.
“I don’t need murders I didn’t commit being pinned to me just because,” he explained. “I don’t need to be made to be even more of a monster than I already am.”
Happy Face will be available to stream globally on Paramount+ on March 20, 2025, with new episodes released every Thursday and the series finale on May 1. Read our review of Happy Face and click here to try Paramount+ for free!
