Reclaimed Identity: Keith Jesperson’s Sixth Murder

“In my head there was a possibility that it could happen, but I wasn’t looking forward to—it wasn’t my intention to do so … but I knew I had the potential [to kill],” Keith Jesperson, also known as the Happy Face Killer, explained over the phone from Oregon State Penitentiary. Reflecting on the sixth murder he committed, he described the narrative in such a detached manner, like he was reciting a work of fiction rather than a real event.

Starting from the beginning, Jesperson described pulling into a rest area in August of 1994, where he saw a woman outside “trying to hitch a ride.”

“She said she was going to Lake Tahoe, Nevada,” he said. “I pointed to my truck and said, ‘I’m going to Washington State. I’m heading in that direction. I’ll be leaving in about an hour or so.”

Sometime during their exchange, she would introduce herself as “Susan” or “Suzette,” one of the few details he’d remember about her years later. Names were not important to him.

Working as a long-haul truck driver, Jesperson said that with picking up the hitchhiker who would become his next victim, he was just looking forward to the rare opportunity to have someone to talk to, which would help keep him awake. He described how the road would become a lonely, quiet place at times.

Although that may be true, Dr. Eric Hickey, a top forensic expert and core senior faculty member of Walden University’s Forensic Psychology, suggests that while all professions have a dark side, serial killers like Jesperson may choose a career like long-haul trucking with ulterior motives. Hickey reviewed some of the transcript of the interview with Jesperson from his perspective as an expert in the psychology of crime.

“I’d say most long-haul truck drivers are decent people trying to make a living,” Hickey said. He explained how an isolated job like trucking might be chosen because it can give someone an opportunity to kill. “Jesperson’s one of those guys, and I’d put my career on the line that his killings were sexual.”

That night, while waiting to receive the instructions of his next load, Jesperson spent an hour sitting in a booth in the restaurant within the rest area. He described the hitchhiking woman as impatient, and said he thought she looked like she’d been on the road for a while. So after they left for a job further north in Cairo, Georgia, he got her a bathroom key to take a shower at the next truck stop where they stopped for their next meal.

After the pickup in Cairo, Jesperson said he started driving back toward Florida.

“At about two or three in the morning, I pulled into the rest area to use the restroom, and that’s when the incident happened.” By incident, he means murder.

“And I dropped her body off at Exit 11, a few exits up the road,” he explains nonchalantly, as if she was simply another thing to be loaded and unloaded from his truck.

In psychopathic serial killers, “the parts of the brain that express empathy, care, and concern—they never relate to the victim,” Hickey said.

“[Jesperson] has more psychopathic tendencies and even less victim empathy. He treats his victims like they were just pieces of material to do with what he wanted and then get rid of them.”

But how did Jesperson go from giving this woman a ride to killing her with his bare hands?

He claims he had learned from previous experiences that when he had a female in the truck he’d ‘never hear the end of it’ if he didn’t pull into a rest area so they could use the bathroom. If he was alone, he had no problem relieving himself in the woods on the side of the road.

On that particular night, allegedly with this intention, he purposely woke up the hitchhiker who had fallen asleep on the mattress in the back of the truck.

What he thought was a thoughtful gesture startled her, causing her to scream, the kind of scream you’d expect if someone was getting murdered, except in that moment, all he had done was sit beside her.

“She was screaming because she didn’t like being woken up like that,” he said, and said that she wouldn’t listen when he told her to be quiet. In an attempt to justify his actions, Jesperson said he was afraid he would be written up by the security guard that was patrolling the rest area.

“The trucking company I was with did not allow unauthorized people in your truck, so I was breaking the rules”—and to make matters worse, she was being loud.

He imagined the report of this violation landing on his boss’s desk, which would cause him to lose his job. So he physically quieted her.

“I put my fist into her throat and leaned on her. I’ve learned that strangling takes too much effort to do so… you don’t have to grab on tight. You make a fist and kinda like lean in, cup your hand over, and push down… once I pushed down, she lost consciousness very soon… about twenty seconds or so.”

In the moment, Jesperson feared the repercussions of getting caught breaking the rules at work more than he feared getting caught for murder. “I’d gotten away with murder five times before, so getting away with murder wasn’t the issue,” he boasted.

However, “getting away with murder”—or rather getting caught—would soon become an issue for Jesperson. On March 30, 1995, he was arrested for the murder of another woman, 41-year-old Julie Winningham.

By May 1995, to avoid the death penalty, he had decided to confess to all eight murders he had committed. However, the woman in the Florida case would remain unidentified for decades, despite the relentless efforts of investigators.

In April 1996, Florida sent one investigator, Glen Barbaree, to speak with Jesperson.

Over the years, investigators would continue to meet with Jesperson and work to identify his sixth victim.