Keith Hunter Jesperson

Keith Hunter Jesperson (born 6 April 1955) is a Canadian American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and prosecutors. Many of his victims were prostitutes and transients who had no connection to him.

Strangulation was his preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.

After the body of his first victim, Taunja Bennett, was found, media attention surrounded Laverne Pavlinac, a woman who falsely confessed to having killed Bennett with the help of her abusive boyfriend, John Sosnovske.

Jesperson was upset that he was not getting any media attention. He first drew a smiley face on a bathroom wall (hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime), on which he anonymously confessed to killing Bennett.

When that did not elicit a response, he began writing letters to the media and prosecutors.

Happy Face Killer (film)

Happy Face Killer is a 2014 Canadian-American television film inspired by real-life events of the hunt and capture of serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson. The film premiered on March 1, 2014, on the Lifetime network and starred David Arquette as Jesperson. Gloria Reuben played Melinda Gand, the lead FBI case investigator.

Plot

Over the course of two years, Keith Jesperson (David Arquette), a long-haul truck driver, kills at least eight women, following his failed marriage and an injury which prevented him from joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He meets his first victim in a Portland, Oregon bar and kills her after an argument in his rented home. When Delores Parnicke falsely confesses to committing the murder with her boyfriend, Jesperson sends disturbing letters to the press and even writes confessions on the wall of a highway rest stop and at the body dumps. He signs his notes with a smiley face, earning himself the nickname, "Happy Face Killer", as he resumes his killing spree.

Happy face

Happy face may refer to:

See also

Happy Face

Happy Face is the debut novel by African-American writer Christopher Reel. The novel was published in 2010, released simultaneously in digital and hardcopy formats. The novel is about a loner dealing with the suicide of his mother, love, trying to figure out his existence, and other situation in the human condition.

Plot summary

The novel is narrated in the first person by the protagonist Archibald Johnson. Recently released from doing a five-year sentence in prison he falls into a sort of existential crisis, quit his job and then tried to commit suicide. His attempt at committing suicide, like his mother, was stopped by an epileptic seizure personified by The Guy. Archibald sitting across the street from a bank ponders about his life; jobless, haunted by the appearance of his dead mother with himself as a little boy, falling in love with a prostitute and barraged by the psychological rambling of the Clerk. He decides after watching an old man come out of the bank that he would rob it. Thus tossing him into a comical spree of heist and self-discovery.