Misdirection

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Investing in our neighborhoods, boosting the economy, making the Valley stronger.

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Learn how our cash management services can support your business at valleystrong.com. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At Valley Strong Credit Union, we know that local businesses are the backbone of the Central Valley.

Investing in our neighborhoods, boosting the economy, making the Valley stronger.

But when it comes to their finances, where can they turn?

A big bank that just sees another number?

That's not good enough.

Valley businesses deserve Valley support.

For payroll, credit, cash flow, and everything in between.

Valley Business is Valley Strong. Learn how our cash management services can support your business at valleystrong.com.
Previously on Happy Face. Keith H.
Jesperson, 40, made his admission Friday to Detective Rick Buckner in a telephone conversation. In 1995, when I heard the news about my dad, I was dating a guy named Nick.
It was a very dysfunctional relationship. When things were good, they were good.
When things were bad, they were extremely bad. Physical.
There was something about your dad you wanted to tell me, and you weren't sure what to believe, and it was shocking, and I didn't know what to think either. Yeah, we were just young.
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? Maybe it was my nature.
There was a statement from the son of Julie Winningham, the victim. Obviously, he was torn up and devastated, rightfully so, and wanted my dad to be killed.
I got pregnant my freshman year. So right after I found out is when the news hit about my dad.
So I felt like the only option for me to break out of this was to not have the baby. A couple months later, I got a letter from my dad.
He said, you deserve to be in prison with me. You're a killer just like me.
The biggest fear is that I can be like my father. I look like my father.
I wonder about DNA. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don't ever shine, I would shiver the whole night through.
One of the things people ask is, how did Keith get away with it for so long?

And people offer a variety of reasons.

Some say he was smart or careful in many ways.

But when you look at the case of his first victim, Tanya Bennett, he really just got lucky.

For a few years at least.

I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco.

This is Happy Face.

From I, The Creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olson.

On a chilly winter day in Portland, Oregon,

Tanya Bennett kissed her mother goodbye

and said she was off to meet a boyfriend.

She disappeared from sight in the direction of a bus stop. Her Walkman plugged into her ears.
Tanya was mildly retarded from oxygen deprivation at birth. She'd been a difficult child.
In a cooking class at Cleveland High School, she assaulted a classmate in a quarrel over a piece of cake. Addicted to alcohol and drugs,

she hustled drinks, shot pool, and got into trouble with men. Recently, she'd complained to her mother that a man had taken her home from the B&I Tavern, beaten her, and quote, pimped me out, end quote.
She said she was afraid to go back to the same bar, but her memory had always been short. When you read the Jack Olson book,

or the news articles from the time,

it's apparent why Tanya Bennett was chosen as prey.

She comes across as pretty and sweet,

but also naive and troubled.

What happened to her is tragic.

But what's strange about the crime is that there's so many people who wanted to take credit for it. There's a couple, Laverne Pavlinak and John Zavznovsky, who come forward and get arrested.
The Oregonian, January 17, 1991, by Fred Leeson.

Laverne A. Pavlinak is accused of four counts of aggravated murder, rape, sex abuse, kidnapping, and felony murder for the death of Tanya A.
Bennett, a 23-year-old woman whose nude body was found last January in the Columbia Gorge. Deputy District Attorney James McIntyre told the Multnomah County Circuit Court

that Pavlinak fed police anonymous tips that led to the arrest of her longtime boyfriend, John A. Sosnovsky.
Then, McIntyre said, Pavlinak later told police that she had tied and held a rope around Bennett's neck while Sosnovsky beat the woman and sexually assaulted her. But Laverne and her boyfriend John weren't the only ones trying to claim credit for this case.
When they were arrested for the Bennett murder, Keith wanted credit for his crime. So he started sending anonymous letters to the Oregonian and graffitiing truck stop bathrooms for attention.
But the thing is, Keith gets so many of the details wrong,

and you can start to wonder, did he really do it?

We wanted to hear the details from Phil Stanford,

the Oregon journalist who received those letters and covered the case.

Quote, on or about January 20th, 1990, I picked up Sonia Bennett and took the case. Quote, On or about January 20th, 1990,

I picked up Sonia Bennett and took her home.

I raped her and beat her real bad.

Her face was all broke up.

Then I ended her life by pushing my fist into her throat.

Unquote.

Right away, something doesn't fit.

In the first place, as you already know if you follow local crime news the name is tanya not sonia bennett and she was killed according to the experts who examined the body on the night of january 21st not the 20th but that's not the biggest problem here the, if that's the word for it,

is that two people are already serving time in prison for the crime.

After her dad's arrest,

Melissa started reading Phil Stamford's articles in the Oregonian at her local library.

It's how she learned the horrific details of her dad's crimes and who her father really was.

So naturally, she had a lot of questions for Phil about why her dad wasn't caught earlier.

Could you tell me who these people are, these strangers, and how they're associated with my dad's case? Well, the reason Laverne Pavlenak and John Sosnovsky ended up in prison for the Tanya Bennett murder. Is that Laverne, who is this 63-year-old dingbat, was trying to get rid of her boyfriend, who was actually much younger, a bar fly.
He'd get off, work at the sawmill every day and head for the bar. And she'd have to go pick him up at the truck stop bar and bring him home,

put him to bed, and at least he was working. But she wanted to get him out of the house, and she had tried before several times, calling his parole officer, trying to get him at least taken out of the house.
It didn't work. So when she read the story inside of the Oregonian about how a body had been found in the gorge,

she made an anonymous call to the sheriff's office saying she thought it was this guy, John Sosnosky. And when that didn't work, she made another call like that.
They eventually figured out who it was coming from, so the sheriff's office went out and talked to her. And she said, yeah, she was at the bar and she heard him bragging about wasting a woman in the gorge.
And they came back the next day with a search warrant. And she didn't have anything more to say, but on the search warrant, they said they were looking for that fly that had been cut off her jeans and her purse that was missing.
Right.

Next day, Laverne called in and said she had the fly and the purse. She found them in the trunk of John's car.
So they said, oh boy. So they came out and got them.
Well, they analyzed them and they realized it wasn't the fly from her jeans and it wasn't her purse.

I wasn't aware of that.

Without telling the whole story, she kept lying again and they'd find out the next lie was wrong.

And so she upped it.

And after about five visits, she convinced him by saying she had participated in the murder with John Sosnosky.

In fact, it held the rope around her neck while he raped her, which was nonsense. And they said, thank you very much.
So she wasn't any longer a witness who might be making up stories. She was an accomplice.
They charged her and the boyfriend she was trying to get out of the house. Of course, by the time the case came to trial,

she said, no, I was just making it up. But the videotape they'd made of her false confession

convinced the jury they convicted her. And when Sosnovsky saw what was happening,

he took a plea because he realized that if he went to trial and they convicted,

had already convicted Laverne, he'd probably end up getting executed. So he pled guilty.
That's Laverne Pavlinak and John Sosnoski. So this is all intriguing, but we wanted to know, how did the police get this so wrong? We spoke with private investigator Chris Peterson, who worked as a detective for the Multnomah County Sheriff's Department at the time of Tanya Bennett's murder.
So they were already tried and found guilty and sent to prison? That's correct. When I got involved, they had been in prison for some time.
What was the police reaction to the letters and the graffiti claiming the actual killer was still at large? You know, I really don't have a good answer for that. Detective Ingram wrote the report on the night bartender, Ann Wilson.
Quote, Miss Wilson was asked specifically about January 21st, 1990,

and she recalled Tanya Bennett being in the tavern at 5 p.m. when she arrived for work.

Miss Wilson said Tanya Bennett seemed to hang around with two guys

who were playing pool at a table at the east end of the tavern.

Unquote.

Wilson described one of the men as being about 30 years old,

about 6'2", with short blonde hair.

All she could remember about the second one is that he was somewhat shorter.

Although the detectives never did succeed

in identifying the two young men seen playing pool with Tanya

on the night of the murder,

at the time they could have been excused for thinking that they were on the right track. Before the day was over, though, they would have reason to change their minds.
It's like a sick comedy of error. I mean, it's...
Oh, yeah. It's a very dark, dark comedy.
The caller, a woman, said she had overheard a man in J.B.'s, a restaurant at the Burns Brothers' truck stop in Wilsonville, bragging that he had killed Tanya Bennett. A week later, February 12th, the same woman called the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department and gave them the same information.
As she reminded them, the man, his name she said was John Cezanofsky, was on probation in Clackamas County. Maybe they could check him out.
Ingram called Cezanofsky's parole officer, Steve Bracey, and together they figured out who was probably making the calls. Her name was Laverne Pavlinak.
As we heard the details of the story, there is a little doubt that creeps in. Keith got the names and dates wrong.
And as Melissa realized, there's one detail Laverne got right. She did come up with one really critical piece of evidence, and I don't know how she manufactured this, but she brought the detectives to where Tanya Bennett's body was found.
How... Well, they drove her out to the place along this old scenic highway, and one of the things that the detectives thought was so convincing was that she said, oh, it was over there.

Well, they'd already marked the place with red dye or some sort of red marker along the highway. So Laverne saw the marker on the highway and realized that's probably where the body was.
Yeah, there's obviously a crime scene. on the strength of Pavlinak's confession, which she tried to explain away at trial, a jury convicted her.
To avoid a possible death sentence for aggravated murder, Sosnovsky then pleaded no contest to felony murder and rape. Three years later, Sosnovsky has exhausted all his appeals.
Pavlinak's plea for a new trial was rejected this month by the Oregon Court of Appeals. Never a high-profile case to begin with, the murder of Tanya Bennett became a closed one.
And quite likely, if it weren't for the anonymous letter that arrived at the Oregonian earlier this month from a man claiming to have killed five women in Oregon and California,

including Tanya Bennett, the case might well have remained forgotten. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.

I just knew him as a kid.

Long, silent voices from his past came forward.

And he was just staring at me.

And they had secrets of their own to share.

Gilbert King. I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done

their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to

find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm

literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2.
Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something.

Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th,

subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Hey, esa opción suena más saludable.
Las bebidas azucaradas vienen con riesgos no tan dulces para la salud.

Busca mejores opciones en destapalgomejor.com.

Un mensaje del Departamento de Salud Pública de California, financiado por USDA SNAP.

As reporter Phil Stanford told us, had Keith not started writing the newspaper,

police might never have found him.

But to hear more about that, Melissa and I reached out to Jim McNeely, a retired detective from the Multnomah County Sheriff's Department. I got involved when we started getting the letters sent to us from your dad.
Somebody sent us pictures of some writing on the wall in the restroom in Montana, where they said, so two people are in jail for something I did.

And that was followed up by a letter that came to the Washington County courts or something,

and they forwarded it to us.

And then another letter came to a Phil Stanford reporter in the Oregonian, and that letter

goes, it came to us.

And then when we followed up on the case when your dad came, there was a lot of talk around the department that we still had the right people, and whoever was writing these letters was making this stuff up. So that's when I got involved with it and my partner, Chris Peterson, and we followed up on it from there.
In an interview this week at the Oregon State Prison, Sosnovsky, once the passive barfly, bristled with anger when asked whether he was guilty of killing Tanya Bennett. I never met the girl, he said.
I never killed anybody in my life.

He blames everything, he said in a rambling diatribe, on a conspiracy that includes the Oregon State Bar,

the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office, the detectives who investigated the case,

and of course, his former housemate, Laverne Pavlinak.

She framed me, he said. So then when you get this letter from my dad and he said, I killed Tanya Bennett, did you instantly believe this letter was true? What did you think about this letter? Well, there was something very believable about it.
He knew what he was talking about, and he had information on those murders that hadn't been in the papers down wherever the bodies were found. So there was something to it, and it was a matter then of going back and analyzing the Tanya Bennett case, the investigation, and what I contributed really was sort of a deconstruction of the case showing that they'd manufactured the case, they'd manufactured the confession.
So when you got that letter, that was one letter, but you ultimately received more letters. Is that correct? Yeah.
After she was captured, we corresponded. Okay.
We were trying

together to prove that the DA was wrong and he was guilty of the Tanya Bennett murder. Which is interesting that he's trying to prove his guilt.
He wanted credit. Yeah, yeah.
Did you ever meet my dad in person?

Oh, yeah.

After he was arrested, I talked to him in the Clark County Jail, and they just let him out. There was a big folding picnic table, and here I was sitting across from this hulking guy.
I mean, he's very big, I guess 6'7", something like that.

And talking to him about the Tanya Bennett murder. And as the conversation quickly developed, how we were going to prove that he was guilty of the Tanya Bennett murder.
What was he saying to you? He... I'm not sure to this day how to read him at that point.
At the time, I thought he was sort of unburdening his soul. He wanted to confess.
Another way of looking at it, of course, would be that he wanted to get credit for this. And it was his way of sort of proving that he was establishing this identity.
Did he come across as wanting your help? Well, he wanted my help, and of course I wanted his, you know. What I needed was some way to prove that he was telling the truth about Tanya Bennett, and so he offered two ways of proving it.
One was that when he killed her, he said blood was everywhere. It even splattered on the ceiling.
Oh my gosh. I actually stayed in the house where Tanya Bennett was murdered.
And there was a night that I went and slept in the living room on the couch, and I remember looking up at the ceiling and seeing splatter on the ceiling thinking it was spaghetti sauce. And just staring at it as I was starting to go to sleep.
And when you just said that, I wonder if I was looking at blood. Oh my.
Yeah. Yeah? So I went back to the house.
It had been bought and sold, and the new owners had painted that room, the bedroom, including the ceiling. I went to the DA with that, and I said, you could scrape the paint off and do a DNA analysis.

And he said, no, we don't want to do that. The other thing he said, that Keith said, was after he dropped off Tanya's body in the gorge, driving back, he threw her purse out at a certain place.
And he remembered where it was as a field. And in fact, that is eventually how it was proved to the DA's satisfaction, to the court's satisfaction, that he was telling the truth and that he killed Tanya Bennett.
Because one of the sheriff's deputies, Jim McNally, who's really the hero in this, took a troop of Boy Scouts out to that field

and for two or three days

cut away the blackberry bushes that had grown up there.

I mean, they grow fast in Oregon,

and it's four years' growth.

Yeah, but up there, it gets dense.

And they found the purse with her ID.

Wow. So, Jesperson kind of saw you as a partner in this.
Yeah, it was very strange. We were conspiring together.
Here we were. I was working for a newspaper, and he was trying to confess to a murder.
We both knew that two people were in prison for a crime he'd committed. But the authorities, the sheriff's department and the DA's office, certainly weren't going to admit they'd made a mistake like that.
And basically, what develops is that we were conspiring to prove that he was guilty. Now, you have to remember, this is Phil's opinion on the way the investigation was handled.

The police have their own story.

I got word from a friend of mine at the sheriff's office that the detective who'd been the leader in getting the false confession from Laverne Padlinak in the Tanya Bennett case

had been down in the state prison talking to Jesperson, encouraging him to say that I had given him the information that he had given to the police to prove that he killed Tony Bennett. In other words, he's trying to get Jesperson to frame me.
And to his eternal credit, as far as I'm concerned, he did not lie about it. He said, no, it didn't happen.
And it would have been very easy for him to lie. And after all, it wouldn't hurt him at all.
And he might have even been able to bargain it into extra privileges for helping out this detective, but he didn't. And I have to say I honor him for that.
Keith's code of honor is more than a bit twisted here. He wouldn't tolerate dishonest cops, thought himself above them, and yet he was a brutal rapist and murderer.
So when my dad was ultimately convicted for Tanya Bennett's murder, what happened to John and Laverne? Well, they were released, of course. And how much time did they serve in prison before they were released? I think about a couple

years. Wow.

And I don't

know anything about Laverne's experience

in prison, but it was

particularly hard on John Sosnowski,

who was not a very strong person

to begin with. I mean, he was an alcoholic

and

he was

sort of lost it. They put him in a room in prison for the people who were mentally disturbed.
It's called the Thunderdome. What? A Thunderdome? What happens in the Thunderdome? It was a big holding tank with a guard sort of suspended in the middle on a grate.

And what I remember about the story is that Sosnovsky would just howl.

Here he was, locked up for life for something he had pled guilty to.

But even at the time he pled guilty, he knew he was not guilty of.

He was completely innocent of. That would drive me crazy.
Yeah, that would drive me crazy. Yeah.
What else could you do but scream? Oh, yeah. Did you ever talk to Laverne or John? Do you think that they regretted this? I talked with Laverne, and I don't think she really—I'm sure she regretted it, but I'm not convinced she ever really understood how wrong what she did was.
She was emotionally dulled herself. I mean, she was taking a lot of pills, fantasized a lot, read a lot of cheap detective stories, which is probably how she got the idea that she could turn someone in for a murder and it would just all go away.
Melissa and I were curious, though. How did John and Laverne react to being freed?

Here's Detective Chris Peterson again.

John Sosnovsky, when I went down to interview him in the prison with a prosecutor, a prosecutor,

he was incoherent.

He was babbling.

It was actually a little bit scary.

Laverne acted like a grandmother when we were working with her. I mean, she was pretty calm, collected, and she did her very best to convince me that she wasn't responsible for the murder, which was true.
I think we had her take a polygraph. I don't think we had Sosnowski take a polygraph because of his mental state.
It sounds like he was another one of Jesperson's victims indirectly. John Sosnowski was definitely a victim of Jesperson and Laverne.
I mean, those people, particularly Laverne, had no place in an institution. She created a space and institution for herself by confessing on a tape, and it was played to a jury, and they convicted her.
But he victimized those two, as well as a lot of victims that didn't survive. Did she ever thank you? She was very unappreciative of our efforts to get her out.
The family never really spoke to us. They were critical, I think, of the police.
And I think the district attorney's office in Multnomah County and the sheriff's office in Portland did a great job in terms of getting to the bottom of this case and admitting that a mistake had been made. And the district attorney and the sheriff both told me that we don't want you doing anything else until this matter gets resolved to our satisfaction.
And just because I'm curious, with Laverne and John, were they immediately released after my dad was sentenced that day? No, no, they weren't. Post-conviction relief is a very complicated legal procedure, and there's really no remedy for reversing a jury's decision in the state of Oregon.
If a jury finds you guilty of homicide, it's kind of chipped in stone. So they were not released immediately.
It took a while to get them out of prison. It wasn't like your dad gets convicted and the doors open.
My understanding is that John Sosnovsky, I'm assuming John's still alive, still has a murder conviction on his record because post-conviction relief, meaning changing a verdict's opinion

of a jury, is very difficult to do in the state of Oregon and most states for that matter.

How horrible.

How horrible for John that he would have this still potentially on his record, even though

he was completely innocent.

That must have impacted his employment, his life after this.

That's really surprising, though, you know, that it would be like that. Yeah, it is.
But that was the state of the law 25 years ago. And I don't know that it's changed.
from i the creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olson. In jail, awaiting transport to the state penitentiary, he continued to play the lead role in his own dramatic production.
On the day that John Ceznovsky and Laverne Pavlinak were freed for good, he described his reaction to the Associated Press. Quote, I started crying.
I couldn't help myself for about 10 minutes.

I lost total composure. I was just very overjoyed.
Basically, my feeling is,

God bless them. End quote.
He didn't explain why he'd allowed them to serve four years for his crimes. So Don Fendley, who is the son of Jesperson's last known victim, Julianne Winningham, he has a lot of anger towards Laverne, who is now deceased, but he believes

that if she hadn't lied, if she hadn't tried to frame John, that there is a chance that Jesperson could have been stopped before he murdered seven more women, including his own mother. I mean, I understand his concern.

And of course he didn't murder anybody after he murdered Julie because he,

he was arrested.

But,

you know,

I don't want to speculate that,

that this thing would have been solved any earlier,

but it's hard to,

I can't say that if it had to,

Thank you. I don't want to speculate that this thing would have been solved any earlier, but it's hard to, I can't say that if it had been for Laverne,

that Keith would have been arrested because he was not on anybody's radar

in Multnomah County over the Tonya Bennett case.

There's always been one person Melissa has been afraid to meet.

The son of Jesperson's last victim, Don Findley.

I'm terrified that he's going to lash out on me

and blame me for his mom's murder.

I texted him for weeks.

And when he finally returned my text, he didn't want to meet you in person.

He had a lot of anger.

You know, from his point of view, you're the daughter of the man who murdered his mother.

But we spoke for a couple of hours,

and I was finally able to convince him to meet you. Happy Face is a production of HowStuffWorks.
Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright-Pacheco, Mangesh Hatikater, and Will Pearson.

Supervising producer is Noel Brown.

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 Chicoin.

Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers

of the Oregonian newspaper, and KATU News in Portland, Oregon.