Happy Face

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Speaker 8 Previously on Happy Face.

Speaker 9 After the second murder, the Happy Face killer says he realized he liked what he was doing. This triggered something in me, he says.
It was getting easy. Real easy.

Speaker 1 He started killing in 1990, and he stopped in 95.

Speaker 10 The five years is not an isolated event. It was an escalation.

Speaker 11 I think...

Speaker 1 He was groomed to be who he is. Keith's father, Les, was a very resourceful, ingenious man, but he could be a monster.
He was horrible.

Speaker 10 I hated him.

Speaker 8 He dragged me to a nursing home to visit one of his hunting buddies. He said, my friend Smitty's not doing too good with his lung cancer, Keith.
Talk to him, son. Nobody likes to die alone.

Speaker 8 I never feared a dead person after that.

Speaker 1 One of the few people that Keith opened up to about his childhood was psychologist Al Carlisle.

Speaker 13 So even by the age of eight, there was a lot of anger.

Speaker 8 I went back to my truck and rehearsed the lies I planned to tell when I was arrested. What made me cross the line into murder?

Speaker 8 Maybe it was my nature.

Speaker 11 In the pines,

Speaker 11 in the pines,

Speaker 11 where the sun don't ever shine,

Speaker 11 I would shiver

Speaker 11 the whole

Speaker 11 night through.

Speaker 1 The psychologist Al Carlisle interviewed a number of the most notorious serial killers. Ted Bundy, Arthur Gary Bishop, Wesley Allen Dodd.

Speaker 1 But he had a particular fascination with Keith Hunter Jesperson.

Speaker 1 Here's his writing partner, Carrie-Ann Keller, explaining why.

Speaker 14 Keith told Al he was always 100% reality when he killed.

Speaker 14 He was not in fantasies. Keith said to Al, and this was a really honest observation that gave Al some really good understanding.

Speaker 14 Fantasies are left to the times when we are alone to ponder over what we had done and what we wish we could have done. It was a different

Speaker 14 type of I mean Ted Bundy would drink alcohol to be able to do it, you know, every time. So he was blurred a little bit.
Keith didn't have to be drunk. He remembers 100% he is there 100%.

Speaker 13 There was not a real anger. It was like I was taking care of business.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 13 It was like a mindset. You just put yourself in this mindset that you're doing a job.
And that's the way it is.

Speaker 13 And that's why I think like Bundy and then when they say, well, this entity stepped out and did this.

Speaker 13 What it is, it is not an entity.

Speaker 13 It's actually they're trying to cast the blame off to something else and say, well, I'm really a nice guy It was that evil side of me that did this and I'm just saying I did it.

Speaker 13 I was in full control of my emotions. I knew what I was doing

Speaker 13 you

Speaker 13 know

Speaker 13 Dreamlike state no basically the same I'm the same person. I knew right and wrong.
I knew everything. I was like it wasn't into the twilight zone

Speaker 13 Like the one that I dragged into the truck there. I said I after I killed her I went to McDonald's and I sat down I bought I bought myself a meal and I bought her a meal.

Speaker 13 And I came back out in the truck and I I said it right there in front of her. She's dead.
And then after I'd done it,

Speaker 13 I ate her meal. I said, see, if you wouldn't have got me all fucking mad here, you could have ate something.
Why do you think you bought her a meal?

Speaker 13 Was it a way of part of your mind pretending that they were still alive,

Speaker 13 like you didn't want to kill them?

Speaker 13 Well, I don't know if that's the case.

Speaker 13 That's where you come in.

Speaker 1 For so much of our story, the Happy Face Killer has existed almost as a specter, a background entity that looms over everything.

Speaker 1 We know about Keith's childhood, his wife, and family, and we've heard from his victims' families. We talk about Keith almost in passing, like a boogeyman.
But the fact is, he's real.

Speaker 1 He is a serial killer. And as Melissa works to distance herself from Keith's legacy, we wanted insight into the psychopathy that drives him and to hear about it in his own words.

Speaker 1 I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco and this is Happy Face.

Speaker 1 One of the things that's so jarring about Keith is that he comes across as almost earnest at times

Speaker 1 like he honestly wants to be helpful here's Keith again talking to Al Carlisle well I hope this is what I'm giving you is helping you it is it is because I've always been very

Speaker 13 direct I think and a lot of people can't understand why I want to be direct they think I should like the biggest consensus in this prison they say well

Speaker 13 you're talking to a psychologist or I'm talking to a movie deal or I'm talking to this well are are they paying you and I says no they're not and he said well I wouldn't tell them anything I said well then how do you get the truth out I mean does it have to have a price tag to it I mean that's why interviews with convicts they put a price tag well we're going to pay you fifty thousand dollars it taints the truth and I look at it this way is that I fucked up I did I mean I know I did I threw my life away pretty much except for a prison life.

Speaker 13 And you have a good life in prison, but I look at it as the truth means if it hurts, well, so what? You know, at least

Speaker 13 anything I can do to make

Speaker 13 people understand.

Speaker 1 It isn't just strangers and journalists who could be under Keith's spell. Melissa too used to feel it.

Speaker 10 His air of certainty definitely played a part in other people believing in him and why probably his his victims believed in him and trusted him over their own voices.

Speaker 10 And that's something that's been very difficult for me: trusting my own intuition

Speaker 10 when someone seems to have the answers and seems to know with certainty where things are going.

Speaker 10 And if I don't feel right about it, to trust myself over the appearance of confidence. And that's something that's been difficult to navigate.
But my dad was very much that.

Speaker 10 He exuded confidence and certainty, and

Speaker 10 whatever he said was truth, and you can rely upon it and you can trust it, but

Speaker 10 not really.

Speaker 1 It was Phil Stamford, crime reporter for the Oregonian, who first coined the name Happy Face.

Speaker 1 Almost playful, almost a little too disarming for the monster behind the symbol.

Speaker 10 A lot of people ask me how did your dad get the name the happy face serial killer? And I believe it came after your series of articles. And maybe you could explain that to me.

Speaker 15 well yeah I guess you could say I named him in those articles but in another sense he named himself by

Speaker 15 putting the little happy face on that letter I mean that's that's strange stuff someone confessing to five murders and the little happy face which is have a nice day there's a serious

Speaker 15 disjuncture in a personality like that. But the reason it stuck, the reason it was a good nickname is that it was really true.
There was something about it.

Speaker 15 The killer who signed his letters with a happy face. Murders like this are fascinating because

Speaker 15 they're acts of compulsion. He didn't plan to do it.
There was nothing he could gain from it. He did it for reasons he didn't understand.

Speaker 15 And that's, I guess, why serial killers who just kill for the sake of killing are so fascinating to us.

Speaker 15 What struck me when I was sitting across from him in the Clark County Jail is: here's this big, slightly, you know, dull, very slow-moving person

Speaker 12 who

Speaker 15 wasn't a threat to me. He wouldn't be a threat to most people.
He was a threat to women who sort of triggered something in him.

Speaker 15 And when that happened,

Speaker 15 something else came out.

Speaker 18 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 20 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So, why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 20 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster: Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer: The Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 21 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 24 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 24 Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 6 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 24 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansle season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 10 You know, there's this quote that I've heard from Margaret Atwood, and she has said, men are afraid that women will laugh at them.

Speaker 10 Women are afraid that men will kill them. That's our deepest fear.
And when I heard that quote, I thought, that sums up my dad.

Speaker 10 You know, the greatest fear of women laughing, when women laughed at my dad or rejected my dad,

Speaker 10 that's when he seemed to snap.

Speaker 14 Correct. Because he didn't kill everybody he was with, not every woman.
It was spread out a little bit, you know.

Speaker 14 It was when someone hit that correct button, whatever had come out of their mouth that shouldn't have in his fantasy or his reality,

Speaker 14 that was the cutoff for her

Speaker 13 well I listened to their the way they talked about life and the way they treated people you know Cindy Rose I didn't give her a chance to talk that was just a brutal murder

Speaker 13 the other ones that were with me for any given time

Speaker 13 as soon as they opened their mouth and they had other alternative motives behind it they acted like men were a piece of shit anyway and they need to be used and that's when they came up with that kind of a scenario i kind of like i had no no feelings for them.

Speaker 13 I just threw my feelings to the wind. That was kind of a trigger.

Speaker 13 That was kind of, I would say, a kind of a trigger was the fact that they had they thought that they were the ones controlling or that they were going to manipulate whoever they wanted to.

Speaker 13 They didn't give a shit of who it was. And they were so arrogant when they talked.
They didn't care who that I heard about it.

Speaker 13 They just figured I was so much interested in their body that I'd look past that.

Speaker 1 And despite the brutality of these crimes, a pattern emerged with several of the people we spoke to, that Keith was quiet, cooperative, and in many ways came across as almost pleasant.

Speaker 1 But ultimately, Keith was only concerned with getting attention for his crimes. Here's Jim McNelly, retired detective from the Multonoma County Sheriff's Department.

Speaker 10 What do you remember hearing about Jesperson, my dad, before you met him?

Speaker 26 Not a lot.

Speaker 26 Just that he was anxious to talk,

Speaker 26 and that's where we got him, picked him up in Vancouver, and brought him down and did some drive-arounds with him.

Speaker 10 When did you actually meet him, and how did you size him up in person?

Speaker 26 The only interaction I had with your dad was when I talked to him in the penitentiary, and I found your dad to be pretty charming, actually.

Speaker 13 I learned a technique of just taking my fist because when you hang on to somebody, your arms get tans, you get extremely tired because the muscles are trying to push away and you're fighting, the body is very resilient.

Speaker 13 So you have to stay away from the muscle tissue. You have to go directly to the larynx, right in the vocal part.
So I laid a fist like this, and I locked my elbow and I just pushed down on it.

Speaker 13 And with my elbow locked, and I could just take away the time.

Speaker 13 I listened to her. I smelled, I was waiting for the smell of urination and I was just watching the time.
Like I was just waiting for my date.

Speaker 10 In your opinion, what drove his need to confess? Guilt or attention?

Speaker 12 I think it's attention.

Speaker 26 And I say that because he just was so upfront with everything.

Speaker 26 And when he was speaking to the sheriff from Iowa, he made his comment about getting ready to leave. Well, I know a lot about this stuff.

Speaker 27 And if you need any more help, come on back.

Speaker 10 That seems pretty arrogant, though, that he's an expert.

Speaker 26 He wants attention, is what he wants.

Speaker 13 I played that back and forth in my mind for months, even especially when Detective Buckner in June of 95 went ahead and he exploited everyone and said, well, we think we have the happy face killer in prison in county jail here.

Speaker 13 And I arrested him, you know, so to speak. I knew the glory seekers were out there, and they wanted to prove that I was this person.

Speaker 13 And I felt, well, why should they have the glory of proving it when I can just say I did it anyway? And they lose that glory. They lose all their chances of proving anything.

Speaker 1 And here's Chris Peterson, also a retired detective. from the Multnomah County Sheriff's Department.

Speaker 10 When did you actually meet my father? And what did you think when you saw him?

Speaker 28 I met him in the Clark County Jail.

Speaker 28 And this was after he was telling cellmates that he had killed someone in Multnomah County.

Speaker 28 And

Speaker 28 there was nothing particularly unique about meeting him when I did meet him because he was one of hundreds of inmates that I had gone into the jail to interview.

Speaker 28 So I went to talk to your father with a very serious doubt about the accuracy of what he was claiming. And there was nothing particularly impressive about him or memorable.

Speaker 28 I mean, he was a great big guy that was very calm and collected and was not macho and didn't swear and didn't use a lot of jail terminology because he hadn't been in jail a lot.

Speaker 13 There's a constant, even though I know the cops really don't know I'm who I am, but I still have to think in the back of my mind that they're looking.

Speaker 13 And I have to worry about what people see all the time, even though I know

Speaker 13 they don't see me as the murderer I am. They see me as a nice guy or someone that is just there.
You know, I'm just, I don't look out of the ordinary.

Speaker 13 I'm just like a normal guy just doing my job and going on with business.

Speaker 13 In my career, I worked with violent offenders on a regular basis.

Speaker 29 Your dad did not fit that profile.

Speaker 28 In terms of his demeanor, in terms of his appearance, in terms of his vocabulary, he was the farm boy next door, literally. I mean,

Speaker 28 if I had been a female and met him in a bar, I wouldn't have been particularly frightened because he had a very unassuming presence about him.

Speaker 10 That's what I noticed, too, when I was around my dad and we would be around other females or in public.

Speaker 10 He seemed to be charismatic and people didn't seem intimidated, even though he was so tall and so big.

Speaker 10 And I think that might have been maybe to his advantage when he was finding his victims. Do you think he was really calculated in finding his victims, or do you think he was more of an opportunist?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I wouldn't assume that he was particularly cutting in this whole thing.

Speaker 27 I mean, he had a demeanor about him that was

Speaker 29 very mellow. I mean,

Speaker 29 so I wouldn't attribute his series of murders to being a particularly cunning person.

Speaker 28 I would attribute it more to the fact that he didn't have any kind of a threatening demeanor about him. I mean, there was...

Speaker 28 If he was your next-door neighbor and you saw him every day mowing his front yard, you wouldn't be concerned about him being your next-door neighbor.

Speaker 10 And knowing my dad he would offer to mow your lawn.

Speaker 10 That's what was so interesting about my dad. He was generous and kind in so many ways, you know, but then now looking back, it's very, very eerie.

Speaker 13 There are some people that are down in their luck

Speaker 13 and they'd say, you know, I'm broke. I don't have no money.
I said, that's all right. I'll stop up here and we'll buy dinner.
and get the other end.

Speaker 13 I hand them a $20 bill, sit here, grab a cab, go home or whatever, or I take them them right to their home. I'd gotten lots of numbers from girls that I'd give them rides and guys I've given rides to.

Speaker 13 Hey, when you ever in town, we'll go party, we'll have a good time, you know.

Speaker 13 I've put in kids on greyhound buses and sent them home to their mom and dads, paid for the ticket, just so that they get home safe.

Speaker 18 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 20 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 20 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 21 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 22 Run a business and not thinking about radio? Think again. Because more people are listening to the radio and iHeart today than they were 20 years ago.

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Speaker 22 Radio's here now more than ever, and iHeart's leading the way. Think radio can help your business? Think iHeart.

Speaker 22 Streaming, podcasting, and radio, where the reach is real. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com.
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Speaker 23 Or call 844-844-iHeart.

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Speaker 24 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 24 We've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 6 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 24 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 Season one of Crying Wolf is here. We're thrilled to keep sharing these jaw-dropping stories with you.
And now there's even more to discover.

Speaker 4 With an iHeartTrue Crime Plus subscription, only on Apple Podcasts, you'll unlock 100% ad-free listening on Crying Wolf and other fan favorites like Atlanta Monster, What Happened to Sandy Beale, and Sympathy Paints.

Speaker 4 Don't wait. New episodes are ready for you now.
Open Apple Podcasts, search iHeartTrue Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

Speaker 1 Keith spoke to Jack Olson in prison and lamented the fact that he wasn't going to see his children again and that he'd wished he'd moved back to Canada 30 years earlier.

Speaker 1 Here's Stephen Booth, psychologist Al Carlisle's publisher.

Speaker 27 He had his freedom going out and driving the truck, but when he thought he was going to get what was was rightfully his, a relationship, happiness, whatever, and he didn't get it, he didn't like that very much.

Speaker 27 And it reminded him of all the traumas that he had as a kid, not necessarily at the hands of his father, but at the hands of everybody. It felt like everybody was victimizing it.

Speaker 17 I think with your father, he was feeling awful for himself.

Speaker 29 He doesn't really care about...

Speaker 17 anybody else.

Speaker 17 It sounds to me like he lacks the empathy that we've been talking about.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 remorse to me is, gosh, I've done a bad thing.

Speaker 29 I really need to make up for it.

Speaker 17 Why would he need to make up for it if he doesn't care what other people think? But he does care about himself.

Speaker 17 I think he tried to kill himself because he didn't like the idea that he was the person that he'd become in his own mind, you know. But that doesn't mean that he cared about the people that he killed.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I was hating myself. I didn't like what I'd become.

Speaker 13 And that's probably why I was so easy to convince myself to turn myself and get over it.

Speaker 13 Now, if I hadn't have done that, that's why I think in some respect that why is it that so many killers get to a certain point and all of a sudden they just destroy themselves?

Speaker 13 And what is the magic number? And I always keep saying, well, eight is enough.

Speaker 13 Because if you look through history, and I'm sure you have, I bet you go through how many serial killers out there reached the number eight and stopped and basically got caught.

Speaker 13 And there are a lot of them that got caught with number eight.

Speaker 1 Keith began to buy into his own mythology and in the end the victims never mattered. It was Keith's world.
His need to confess was just another extension of his fragile and narcissistic ego.

Speaker 1 Here is retired detective Chris Peterson again.

Speaker 1 He told me that guilt was a factor. I think it's more like

Speaker 1 he was now beginning to be in the limelight a lot, and I think he enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 And that's why he started talking about this simply because he knew that he was likely to go spend the rest of his life in prison anyway.

Speaker 1 So now this was an opportunity for him to get a lot of attention. I think that was really what his motivation was.

Speaker 1 So do you think a lot of his mythology as this macho tough ladies' man killer, it's revisionist history that he's created?

Speaker 28 Yeah,

Speaker 28 he's never come across as a tough guy to me. I mean, I

Speaker 27 still see him as kind of the big dumb farm boy.

Speaker 12 I mean, that's the way he acts. And

Speaker 12 coming from a farming background, I'm not meaning farmers, but he came across as just the kind of a hayseed.

Speaker 28 He's never exhibited a macho attitude in my presence. It's always been more of a, look at me, look at me, I'm somebody, you know, as opposed to blustering and acting like a tough guy.

Speaker 28 He's never done that around me.

Speaker 1 And how did his demeanor change? You mentioned that he even suggested you guys work on a book together.

Speaker 28 It wasn't really a book. He wanted to,

Speaker 29 he suggested that he and I go on a tour.

Speaker 29 And the tour was going to be, we will teach people how not to get murdered, which was, of course, laughable.

Speaker 28 But

Speaker 28 he said, Why don't we go on a tour? And you know, we can make a great presentation out of this. And I never shut him down on that idea.

Speaker 28 I just let him have his fantasies because that was the last thing I was going to do with the serial killer, was take him on a tour.

Speaker 1 So, almost like a road trip media tour, where absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 28 He wanted as much publicity as he could get, and that was what it was about.

Speaker 1 What personally

Speaker 1 bothers you about your interaction that you had with with him to this day?

Speaker 1 I guess more than anything, what bothered me about him was just the fact that he wasn't really trying to hide it.

Speaker 28 He was relishing the attention and

Speaker 27 the number of homicides that I worked in my career.

Speaker 28 I didn't see that very often.

Speaker 29 Most people, once they were charged or convicted, they didn't feel particularly good about it. He just seemed to continue to feel positive about his accomplishments.

Speaker 13 I'm at home in prison here. I told, I had an interview here out here with Channel 8 News one time, back in 97.
They came in, they asked, it was like around Halloween. It was kind of comical.

Speaker 13 We were sitting there. She said, well, I don't believe you killed us.
I told the one detective killed 166 people.

Speaker 13 And right after that, they gave me this interview, and I told them, how many you killed? I said, 166 people. No big deal.
And you can see the guy was kind of half trembling here.

Speaker 13 It's like, he was sitting there.

Speaker 13 I'm not in leg irons. I'm not in handcuffs.
I'm sitting right across from you. And I'm looking right at him.
I said, I'm at home here. Now, I've killed all these people.

Speaker 13 Now, I could kill you here right now. But you know, the only reason why I'm not killing you right now is because I have a TV set in my house and I get to keep it.

Speaker 13 And the only thing that your value is worth, a TV set.

Speaker 1 That's another example of Keith's sick sense of humor on display. He did not kill 166 people, but that exaggeration takes away from the lives he did take.

Speaker 1 Here's Melissa.

Speaker 10 It really used to bother me that when all these headlines would happen, like with my dad or with other infamous criminals, we would hear their name all the time and that the victims,

Speaker 10 you would hear just a couple words about the victims. Like with Tanya Bennett, I heard that she was Burnett, her age, that she was mentally slow.
Those were the adjectives I've heard.

Speaker 10 I don't know anything about her life other than that. And it was easier for me to

Speaker 10 be desensitized in a way that she was a real human being because of that. When I went on the quest to really learn about more of who Tanya Bennett was, I reached out to all of her family members.

Speaker 10 Michelle White was her sister. And I reached out to her and her brothers.
And I met with Michelle White. And I sat down and I got to look at pictures of Tanya.
And she told me all about her sister.

Speaker 10 And I got to learn, you know, their relationship and. how they got the news.
And it made this person that was just a name on a newspaper into actually a human being.

Speaker 10 And it made me realize the lives that my father really took. That it's

Speaker 10 not something that you could kind of brush aside and pretend that it's not real now.

Speaker 10 If you're learning that these people existed in real life and that they had real lives and people that love them, and you get to learn about their childhood and growing up, then it makes them a real person.

Speaker 1 Eight people,

Speaker 1 eight women, whose lives were ended by a monster with a wounded ego.

Speaker 1 A warning to the listener. After each of the names follows Keith's thoughts about what he had done.

Speaker 1 Not to glorify his crimes, but to demonstrate just how little these lives meant to this psychopath.

Speaker 1 These were his victims.

Speaker 1 Tanya Bennett, January 23rd, 1990, Portland, Oregon. Raped, beaten beyond recognition, and strangled.

Speaker 13 It wasn't the power, though, there was no power of being like, I'm domination, I'm this and this, but it felt like, you bitch.

Speaker 13 I mean, I could just think back to all the hostilities I've had against people, against women, for one thing, and have never pulled the trigger.

Speaker 13 And here I pulled the trigger once, and I just kept pulling it.

Speaker 13 And I hit her until I hold my hands for a sword or where the, you know, that's what stopped me. It wasn't the fact that her, she's crying and mommy's make them stop, make them stop.
It was

Speaker 13 the fact that my hands hurt.

Speaker 1 Jane Doe, referred to as Claudia by Jesperson, found August 1992 in Blythe, California, raped and strangled.

Speaker 13 And I got into this little game of

Speaker 13 I'd strangle her until she's just about dead and I'd pull her back out of it. I did that probably total of four times, at least four times with her.

Speaker 1 Cynthia Lynn Rose, found September 1992 in Turlock, California, strangled.

Speaker 13 Some people die quicker than others and she died right away. I thought maybe while I strangled her I might have broken her neck.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 13 But my intention was that I was just going to strangle her, then I'd take her down to a wise bot and we'd have fun.

Speaker 13 Or I'd have fun. But that didn't even come about.

Speaker 1 Lori Ann Pentland, November 1992, in Salem, Oregon. Strangled.

Speaker 13 She started talking about her life and how miserable it is, and she can't make a living.

Speaker 13 She wished it all end. And I said, Oh, you know, I think I'm going to do it, and I'm going to strangle you.
That's what I told her. She said, Go for it.
And she said, Go for it.

Speaker 13 She thought I was just kidding.

Speaker 1 Jane Doe, referred to as Cindy by Jesperson, body found June 1993 in Santonella, California, strangled.

Speaker 13 I made the decision that if I should get her into my truck, she would be mine.

Speaker 13 I had to get her in the truck on her own free will. I wanted her to make that conscious decision.
She had to want to come along with me.

Speaker 1 Jane Doe, referred to as Susan Ann by Jesperson, found September 1994 in Crestview, Florida. Raped and strangled.

Speaker 13 I told her, let's have some fun. And she says, I don't want to do it.
I felt in a way that because she was like so

Speaker 13 bossy, telling me, well, I'm going to do this. I felt I'm going to tell you to do this and you're going to do it.
She wouldn't submit to it. And I would say, well, fine.
I don't have to have this.

Speaker 13 I just killed her.

Speaker 1 Angela Sabriz, January 1995, Spokane, Washington. Raped and strangled.

Speaker 1 Jesperson later strapped her body to the undercarriage of his truck and dragged her for 12 miles to remove her face and fingerprints.

Speaker 1 He's implied in a letter to Melissa that she may have been alive when he did so.

Speaker 13 When you stopped and you took the body off and you saw what had been done, did it affect you at all? Did you feel anything? No, I've...

Speaker 13 Because here's a gal you spent some time with.

Speaker 13 And she was basically all that was left of her was her legs, her rib cage was pretty much gone,

Speaker 13 her intestinal tract was gone, her skull was ground in half, her fingers and

Speaker 13 arms, her upper arms, were gone because I taped them like so so they grind off first.

Speaker 13 When I cut the rope from underneath there, just dragged it down the hill, I mean, it was relatively nothing there.

Speaker 1 Julianne Winningham, March 16th, 1995, Weschugel, Washington. Raped, beaten, and strangled.
Jesperson's final victim, and the one that led to his capture.

Speaker 13 Would you have married her? No, I don't think so.

Speaker 13 I would have waited. Well, maybe I would have.

Speaker 13 I would have waited out.

Speaker 13 So what was there about her that?

Speaker 13 She was pretty.

Speaker 13 She was, when she was sober,

Speaker 13 she was fun to be with. But then when she's drunk, she was like being with my dad when my dad was drunk.
She reminded my father. All the times he'd be out drinking.

Speaker 13 Come in and everything was like, you got to do what I say.

Speaker 13 And I just rebelled against it.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I grabbed her and strangled her. Strangled her until she was unconscious.
Then I taped her up

Speaker 13 and I took her out of town because I was going to get rid of her body outside of town there. I went up to the top of this hill up on top of Camus or Washugo Hill going east on 14.

Speaker 13 I got up there, went around

Speaker 13 on the other side, and

Speaker 13 have sex with her again. Only this time she's kind of like

Speaker 13 wanting to play act so that make me feel better that I would let her go, so to speak. What did that do to you?

Speaker 13 Well, it was a turn on because she wanted to... actually enjoy that was all over with.
I said, there's no going back.

Speaker 13 I told her, I said, there's no going back. I've killed seven before you, and I'll kill you too.

Speaker 1 Jesperson would receive multiple life sentences for his crimes, but they'd leave his daughter, Melissa, emotionally imprisoned.

Speaker 1 In two weeks after Thanksgiving break, Happy Face returns to explore the residual impact of Keith's crimes on Melissa's marriage and family when the contents of his unopened letters forces her to face her deepest insecurities and fears.

Speaker 8 Happy Face is a production of How Stuff Works. Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright-Pacheco, Mangesh Hatikador, and Will Pearson.
Supervising producer is Noel Brown.

Speaker 8 Music by Claire Campbell, Paige Campbell, and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle.
Audio editing by Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Shacoyne.

Speaker 8 Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian newspaper, and the Carlisle family.

Speaker 18 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 20 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch them?

Speaker 20 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now.

Speaker 21 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 Season one of Crying Wolf is here. We're thrilled to keep sharing these jaw-dropping stories with you.
And now, there's even more to discover.

Speaker 4 With an iHeart TrueCrime Plus subscription, only on Apple Podcasts, you'll unlock 100% ad-free listening on Crying Wolf and other fan favorites like Atlanta Monster, What Happened to Sandy Beale, and Sympathy Paints.

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Open Apple Podcasts, search iHeartTrue Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

Speaker 24 A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV. In the city of Mons in Belgium, women began to go missing.

Speaker 24 It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved.

Speaker 24 Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.

Speaker 16 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Hi, listeners. I'm M.

Speaker 3 William Phelps, host of Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders Podcast, and I'm excited to share Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murder Story with you and want to let you know that you can get access to all episodes of Paper Ghosts and every single episode of Paper Ghosts 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.