Original subtitles

The biggest problem with this whole thing was that

he admitted to a killing that two people had already been convicted of.

NEWSCASTERS: The Happy Face Killer... Number of victims...

There are eight. The so-called Happy Face Killer...

Washington, Oregon, California.

It was him against us. We were playing mind games here.

How do we prove it?

There were things that just didn't add up.

This one is kind of a crazy one.

This is the last picture I took of her.

That's how I remember, cos she's fixing her hair,

and she got mad cos I took it. (LAUGHS)

I am Michelle White, I am the sister of Taunja Bennett.

This is when we moved into the house, which was...

Maybe she was two.

Two, and I was four. 1968 picture.

I basically was the big sister.

You know, we didn't always have food in our house.

We grew up poor, so I kind of had to take care of her.

It was on a Sunday, I remember.

She said she had to go somewhere or do something.

I said, "Well, it's a Sunday! Where are you going to go?"

"Oh, I'm going to go to my friend's house."

I don't know why, I had a weird feeling.

I watched the news.

NEWSCASTER: Her identity is still unknown.

They were showing pictures of her pants and her shirt.

I thought, "Oh, my God." I went in her room,

took a look to see if they were there,

and of course, they're not there.

I called the detectives.

They asked me what beauty marks.

All I could think of is, she had a mole on her hand,

a little, tiny mole.

"What colour eyes?" and all that, because her head...

What he did was, he hit her so hard in the face that

they couldn't really... (SIGHS)

She was so puffy that they couldn't figure out who this person was.

(SIGHS) Oh, God.

When I walked up to where the body was actually located,

it was pretty obvious that this was a victim of a homicide.

There was a rope around the victim's neck,

her face was beaten.

A section of her jeans had been cut out,

the fly section was missing.

My name is John Ingram.

In 1990, I was assigned to the Detective Unit

of the Sheriff's Office in Portland.

The body was found about 1.5 miles east of a monument

called Crown Point or Vista House.

There was no identification.

It was several days after this before we determined

who the victim was, this being Taunja Bennett.

A phone call was placed anonymously to the Sheriff's Office in Portland.

A person by the name of John Sosnovske

apparently was involved with the murder

of the person found in the Columbia Gorge.

This phone call was from Laverne Pavlinac,

John Sosnovske's live-in roommate.

She said that, on a Sunday night,

John asked her to pick him up from a local drinking establishment

called JB's Lounge.

The girl was laying on the ground.

She rolled down the window and said, "Is she sick or what?"

and John says, "No, it's worse than that, she's dead."

John was responsible for Taunja's death, this is what she told us.

He denied any knowledge of the homicide.

He denied having known Taunja Bennett.

She kept changing her story.

The final story was that, when she picked John up,

Taunja was alive.

So he gets out of the car, Taunja gets out of the car,

Laverne stays in the car.

Then John comes back to the car

and he says, "I want you to come watch."

He grabbed some rope out of the trunk of the car,

and he made Laverne go with him to where Taunja was lying.

John began to have sex with her...

..and told Laverne to put the rope around Taunja's neck.

I just can't believe that she is telling me this.

You know, I'm thinking,

"My God, how could this woman do this?"

It went to trial.

She was found guilty by trial, and John pled no contest.

It was found in the men's room of a truck stop in Livingston, Montana.

It says, "21st January, '90. Killed Tanya Bennett in Portland.

Two people got the blame, so I can kill again.

Cut off buttons on jeans - proof."

That's written on the door, in ink.

It was found during the trial.

But it wasn't admissible because it was hearsay.

I mean, you couldn't identify the writer, you know?

"I would like to tell my story!" exclamation mark.

(SIGHS) Oh, well, OK - you and 20,000 other people.

My name is Doug Bates.

In 1994, I was co-leader

of The Oregonian newspaper's crime team.

We had a news clerk who would bring - I'm not kidding you -

a big stack of mail to go through every day.

She would open it, and one day, she said, "There's a weird one here."

There was something about it.

I'll read the opening to you. "I am a good person, at times.

I always wanted to be liked.

I have been married and divorced, with children."

Just the childlike way he wrote that makes the reader want to go,

"Let me read just a little bit further."

Right after what I just read,

he says he raped and murdered this Taunja Bennett.

You look at the underlining - "I raped her and beat her,"

then he's got this happy face just up above it.

It's so creepy that it got my attention.

My gut told me that it was probably a hoax.

This guy was confessing to something that

two people had already been convicted of doing

and were in prison for.

Well, long story short, we ran the story...

..and decided to call it The Happy Face Killer.

And as the first part ran, all hell broke loose.

Two police detectives came to the paper.

They said we were victims of a hoax.

Their theory was that one of the couple who were in prison

doing time for Taunja Bennett's killing

put somebody up to writing these Happy Face letters

to get them sprung, and that it was all fake.

But give The Happy Face Killer some credit -

he mailed out enough copies of his letter

that it landed on one desk where

somebody took it a little bit seriously.

I'm sure there were still people who thought that our story was a hoax,

and that we had fallen for a line of baloney.

We were just saying,

there's a guy out there, we don't know who it is,

who's confessing pretty credibly to some crimes here,

and he's out there.

(WOMAN LAUGHS)

What I remember of Rose was just, really a good woman -

a really nice, caring, loving wife.

No, no! Uh-uh.

She wasn't a real loud person,

but back then, neither was I. (LAUGHS)

Um, so, you know, we kind of hit it off.

Rod had invited him home for dinner, that was the first time I met him.

Keith told me that I looked a lot like his wife.

And I said, "There's two of us? Oh, my!" (LAUGHS)

All I remember on Keith Jesperson is the good side.

OK. OK?

He was working for our business as an equipment operator.

(LAUGHS)

Supernice, loveable guy, family man,

friend, and just a good guy.

(LAUGHS)

It was just a typical home -

you know, the mom stayed home and the husband, or dad, worked.

MAN: OK, all right, there.

Smile.

He was an excellent dad.

Never screaming and yelling, having to pick up his kids and swat them

or tell them to go away or anything.

I picked up a little bit of nervousness from Rose

when he would come in for dinner.

She had to make sure that

everything was on the table when he came in for dinner.

The house has to be clean, food on the table when he comes home.

Rod just told me one day that Keith quit.

They just packed up and moved.

I think he was moving to Canada just to try out for a better life.

He still had his Canadian citizenship, being born up there.

I think that's where they started having some real marital problems.

When he did come back, he became a truck driver.

I heard that she was back in town and that her and Keith had split up.

Yeah, I was like, "Wow."

Makes you realise how much a person can change,

you know, over a lifespan.

I think Keith just...something snapped in his head.

(PHONE LINE RINGS)

A motorist sees her over the bank.

It's a state highway that runs through there,

but it's not hugely travelled.

My name is Jane Scott.

In 1995, I was a detective in Clark County Sheriff's Office

here in Vancouver, Washington.

My assignment then was crime-scene investigation,

that was my speciality.

Every now and then, there'd be a drug overdose,

where the body was dumped,

but not a naked woman dumped off the highway,

that just didn't happen.

Skamania County is about 90% national forest.

We are a rural area, just immediately outside

of a very densely populated city, being Portland, Oregon.

My name is Monty Buettner.

Early in 1995, I was actually assigned

as the first full-time detective in Skamania County.

I was considering if this was a rape homicide,

if it was a kidnapping, if it was a suicide.

There's many different things that could possibly be involved

in a situation like this.

In this crime scene in particular, we started with zero.

This is the crime-scene footage.

You can see the Columbia River in background, this is Highway 14.

That's my crime-scene truck back there.

The crime scene is on the edge of the highway.

What's treasure and what's trash,

what's evidence, what's somebody's garbage?

The terrain was not easy.

She's nude, no identification, no witnesses, no nothin'.

Her skin is not damaged by decomposition or anything like that,

she's not been there long.

This was one of the first times I'd ever encountered

rigor-mortis gooseflesh.

That was a little disconcerting for me at first

because I wasn't sure you could have goosebumps and still be dead.

When you look a little closer...

..her cheek has um,

some real distinct lines of adhesive.

We all immediately thought she had been duct-taped over her mouth.

The sooner we get our Jane Doe back to the office,

the sooner we can get her fingerprinted and examined.

They told me they had found my mom dead

on the side of Highway 14, up in the Columbia River Gorge.

I started to walk home, collapsed in the middle of the street.

You can't explain it, you can't explain the feeling.

I just basically fell to the ground.

My name is Donald Findlay, and I'm Julie Winningham's son.

There's only one photograph of me and my mom as a child,

and I really don't remember it.

I was probably three years old, on Easter.

She came and visited, cos she had visitation rights.

I remember, when I was, like, ten,

we had met up again.

This is when the movie ET came out.

I remember it because she asked me, "What's ET?"

and I'm like, "It's a movie, Mom!"

My mom was a cheerful, happy, free-spirited woman.

She didn't really have stability, you know?

She just kind of did her own Julie thing.

I show up to the coroner's office...

..and my mom was laying on a metal-slab table

with a white sheet up to her chest,

and a bruise from cheek to cheek as dark as this table,

brush marks on the side of her face.

Physically seeing her, then hearing how she got that way,

it was just horrible.

That's my last image of my mother.

As it turned out, Julie Winningham had been arrested in our jurisdiction

two weeks before for drunk driving.

My name is Rick Buckner.

I had probably worked on 20, maybe 25 homicide cases at that point.

This was not my first rodeo, that's correct.

The investigation was going to be a joint investigation

with the Skamania County Sheriff's Department

until we could determine where she was killed at

because we knew that the body discovery over the embankment

was just a dump site.

The autopsy determined that she died from manual strangulation,

and she had actually been sexually active.

We were wanting to get a picture of Julie.

We also wanted to find out who she was last known to be with.

Many of the friends are describing this very large man.

Some of them described that they were romantically involved

to the point that they were talking about marriage or living together.

When we spoke with Bonnie Valensteen,

she told us that she had recently bought a car from Julie.

During the sale of that car,

that man signed his witness on the bill of sale.

On that bill of sale, there was a very clear name,

very clear signature, Keith Hunter Jesperson.

We didn't know if Keith Hunter Jesperson killed her,

but we knew that they were last seen together.

By then, we also knew that, all of a sudden, this Keith Hunter Jesperson,

who possibly was going to marry Julie Winningham,

is completely gone out of the picture, and we don't know why.

We had no idea what his date of birth was, where he's worked at,

other than, he was a truck driver.

We found somebody with that name

that is an employee of TWT Trucking out at Spokane, Washington.

They told us that he was en route to Hurley, New Mexico,

to a mining company, to drop off his cargo.

Rick Buckner and I thought it would probably be a better plan

if we somehow brought Keith to us.

After he dropped his cargo at Hurley,

he was told to travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico,

specifically, the Dona Ana County Fairgrounds,

to pick up a load of steel.

The truck approached the main gate, the gate stayed closed.

Keith got out of his truck,

allegedly to go to this pile of steel

that was going to be loaded on his truck.

At that point, basically, he was walked right up

to where Detective Buckner and I were waiting for him.

He was shocked, he didn't say much of anything.

I said, "We have a warrant signed by a judge.

We're from Clark County, Washington, and you need to come with us."

We had no probable cause to arrest him at this point.

He said that he'd been friends with Julie for a while,

and they'd hooked back up,

I think, a week and a half, two weeks before.

It became clear to me that

Keith Jesperson is all about Keith Jesperson.

He spent a lot of time telling us how great a cribbage player he is

and all this stuff that has nothing to do with why we're there.

(LAUGHS)

Detective Buckner told him that we are there

investigating the death of Julie Winningham,

and it was a dead-pan reaction.

It was like he was being told that his truck had a flat tyre.

So we had a problem.

We didn't have anything that was concrete enough

to go ahead and call BS on his story.

I think Keith Jesperson thought that he was so much smarter than us

that there was no way we were going to be able to pin this on him,

and that he was going to get away scot-free.

(LAUGHS)

I drove in on Friday.

My name is Kathy Jones,

and I did take 4th in the Baker City Open. (LAUGHS)

Back in 1995, I met Keith Jesperson at a weekend cribbage tournament.

He just came over and started talking to me,

just casual conversation, telling me how good he was at cribbage.

It seemed that he was hitting on me

um, just from the way he was acting.

I had qualified for the play-offs.

At some point that day,

he started saying, "I have a couple jackets

that you might be interested in."

He said, "They were my sister's and they don't fit her any more,

so do you want them? They're out in my truck."

I said, "Just bring them in, and I'll check them out."

Every time he spotted me, if we were in between games, he would say,

"Do you want to come check out those coats?"

and I just kept insisting, "Just bring them in."

In the pit of my stomach, something wasn't right,

the way that he just kept nagging about it.

From that moment on, every time I turn around, there's Keith,

standing there, watching me play.

Sometimes he wasn't standing behind me, he'd stand behind my opponent.

So, it was just creepy.

So we're all done playing, and I'm saying goodbye to my friends,

and he said, "Do you want those coats?"

And finally, I was just done, so I said, "OK, fine."

So we walked outside and over to his truck.

He opened up one of the compartments on the side of the semi,

and pulled out a couple jackets, and handed them to me.

One was a waist-length, kind of a fake-leather, dressy-looking one.

It wasn't my type, or my style.

The other one was what they call a powder-puff jacket.

I had the leather one in one hand and the other one in the other hand,

and I went to hand the leather one back to him.

I said, "I'll never wear this one, you can have this one."

I said, "I'll take this one." He said, "Take them both.

My sister doesn't fit in them any more,

and I'm tired of carrying them around."

So I said, "OK, fine. I'm going to throw it away though."

He's like, "Do whatever. Maybe you know someone that wants it."

And I'm like, "OK, whatever."

I didn't find out about Keith and what he'd done

until I had gone to a cribbage tournament in Hermiston, Oregon.

No-one knew Julie's name, they just knew he had killed a girl

before he had come to the Baker City tournament, and dumped her body.

It was probably her jacket, because she was travelling with him.

I try not to look back and think,

think about, me - could have been next.

Um, I just...

I'm just very grateful that... that I wasn't.

Was there any doubt that

he was responsible for the death of Julie Winningham?

No, no doubt in my mind.

But how do we prove it?

For some reason, he decided to call.

"You're right, I want to turn myself in." That was all he said.

What was I right about, was I right about the fact that he had raped her,

was I right about the fact that he had dumped her body?

I thought, "Is he playing a game here, what's going on?"

I needed a confession.

So I was prepared, I was ready for a call from Jesperson.

He got mad, he just grabbed her by the throat, and he choked her,

he killed her.

He says, "What should I do?"

I says, "I'm going to have the local authorities come and arrest you."

I thought, "OK, he's not telling everything that happened,"

because there were things that just didn't add up.

Number one, if it were a spur-of-the-moment rage incident,

why wouldn't he just tell somebody, why wouldn't he call 911 and say,

"I screwed up, I made a mistake?"

Why make it hard to identify the body, why put tape over her mouth?

I'm thinking that she was alive at the time,

that he duct-taped her mouth shut,

then he raped her, and then he strangled her.

I'm thinking of the terrible,

terrible things she went through before she died.

There was no emotion, no concern at all on his part about what he'd done.

I'm thinking, "OK, is this the first time he's done it?"

How do we know there's not other victims out there?"

I thought "Could there be two, two of these Keith Jespersons?"

I couldn't believe it.

I was in shock.

I mean, it was such a horrible situation.

I had Keith as a freshman.

Then I had Keith as a sophomore.

I believe that would have been '69 and '70.

Selah was a nice, small community of about 3,000 to 3,500 people.

I was a boys' PE teacher.

Well, he was a nice kid, and he was a big kid.

He was kind of jovial.

He was vocal at times.

Keith was involved in the wrestling programme.

I don't think he played football, which surprised me,

cos his brother had played football.

Sometimes, we'd play a game called dodge ball, which he liked.

You line up on both sides of the gym

and you take a volleyball, and throw it at each other.

If you get hit, you're out. I know he liked that game a lot.

He was big, and he could throw it hard.

He was proud of his family.

His dad, I believe,

had some sort of little invention that he'd developed...

..the hop clip that you stick in the ground to hold the hop vines down.

The Jesperson family, I think,

is well thought of in the Selah community.

I think everybody was probably just in shock as much as I would be,

that knew him.

He's in custody, and he was cooperative.

I says, "Keith, you owe it to your family to tell them what happened.

Call and tell them what happened

before they read about it in the papers."

He had an ex-wife, he had three kids.

His response was, "Don't worry about it, Rick,"

he says, "I sent my brother a letter." I said, "OK."

He says, "Can I use your telephone?"

I'm standing probably ten feet away, and I hear him dial the number,

speak to somebody by the name of Brad Jesperson.

He says, "Get rid of the letter."

I'm thinking to myself, "The letter must be a confession

about the death of Julie Winningham."

Fortunately for us, Brad didn't get rid of the letter, he kept it

and turned it over to law enforcement.

He did the right thing.

This is the letter, dated 24th March, 1995.

It says, "Hi, Brad. Seems like my luck has run out.

I killed a woman in my truck during an argument.

With all of the evidence against me,

it looks like I truly am the black sheep.

The court will appoint me a lawyer, there will be a trial.

I am sure they will kill me for this.

I'm sorry I turned out this way. I've been a killer for five years,

and have killed eight people, assaulted more."

It was just matter-of-fact -

"By the way, I've been a murderer for five years and killed eight women."

It was shocking, it was disturbing.

We wanted to find out who the other victims were that he had murdered.

We knew that Julie Winningham was probably his last victim,

but we had no idea who the other seven women were.

He could be in California one day, you know, five states away tomorrow.

He could have been anywhere in the United States.

It went from being a local investigation

to a nationwide investigation.

We set out teletype after teletype to different law-enforcement agencies

along the interstates, asking if they had any unsolved homicides

in which females might have been strangled, sexually assaulted,

anything that could tie Keith Jesperson to the investigation.

We did this for three months, waiting for a response for anybody.

We came up with nothing.

We don't know if there's other victims out there, and if there is,

who are they?

Why would he be concerned about the letter if it was a falsehood, a lie?

When I met Keith, I'm sitting at a table,

and in comes this huge man.

I stood up, told him who I was - "I'm Tom Phelan, your lawyer.

I'll be representing you in this proceeding," and I shook his hand.

My hand literally disappeared in his, his hands were so big.

I could not shake his hand because his hand was too big.

I don't know if you can see this or not, but that is a big hand.

It's labelled "left palm of Mr Jesperson".

Holding my hand up to this,

his hand is probably a good 2" or 3" longer than mine.

It struck me because he was charged with strangulation.

I thought, "My God, his hands are just huge,"

and he's a very big man.

He knew he was in trouble.

He wanted to figure out how to minimise the impact to him.

The best way to attack the case was, I get rid of the confession,

and it truly becomes a circumstantial case.

I said, "Keep your mouth shut.

Don't do anything, don't say anything."

He took my advice pretty well until the Happy Face reveal came out,

when he decided he was going to let the world know.

This morning, you can listen to the entire telephone interview

reporter Bob High had with Keith Jesperson.

(KEITH LAUGHS)

I've got no idea that I was representing a serial killer.

That is a career-changer for an attorney.

How I described it then was,

I would turn the TV on and find out how my case was going the next day.

I think that Mr Jesperson did try to control the narrative.

That's one of the tensions that developed between he and I

during the course of my representation.

I've never, ever done this in 40 years -

I got a judge to issue a gag order on my own client.

I had to because he was holding press conferences

with whoever would talk to him.

I recall distinctly, telling him at one point,

"You need a press agent, you don't need a lawyer."

The Clark County Prosecutor's Office confirms

Jesperson is the centre of an ongoing investigation.

I'm going, "OK, maybe some of this is fabricated, maybe it's not."

Quote, unquote The Happy Face Killer had written to the papers

back in 1994, taking credit for killing five women.

The letter said he was a long-haul truck driver,

he had a nasty divorce that really bothered him,

and he had started assaulting and killing women.

OK, if he was in fact The Happy Face Killer,

and it sounded like it might have been a connection...

..we had letters that Keith Jesperson sent to his brother Brad,

and we had The Happy Face Killer letters, and we compare them.

The handwriting was similar.

He has his unique printing style, if you will.

A layperson could look at this and go,

"Yeah, it looks like it might have been written by the same person."

We contacted the other agencies

that were identified in The Happy Face Killer letters.

We had to contact the local police department and go,

"We've got this person.

Do you have any suspects, what information do you have?"

You look for any clues that might lead you back to Jesperson,

any cases you have that could be connected to Keith Jesperson.

I was not aware of Laurie Pentland.

The initial investigation was still open.

She'd been strangled, and her body was dumped in the blackberry bushes

by GI Joe's in Salem.

The investigator and a district attorney from Oregon came up

to Clark County.

They were more than eager to come up here and talk to him.

They hadn't determined who killed her,

but Laurie Pentland did fit to a tee what Jesperson was doing.

We had a pretty good idea that we were on the right course

because of the fact that everything matches up with the letter.

Cynthia Rose Wilcox was found behind the Blueberry Hill Cafe

in Turlock, California.

He identified her in The Happy Face Killer letters.

She was found behind a pile of rocks.

Local law enforcement determined that was a drug overdose

because she had drugs in her system.

Her neck was crushed, as if somebody had stepped on it.

And there was duct tape near the body - not on the body but near the body.

Jesperson said that was a prostitute he'd picked up.

And only the person who was responsible would know those things.

Yet that's one of those that they said it was a drug overdose.

The bottom line is that yes,

I believe that Keith Hunter Jesperson did do it

simply because of the information he was able to provide -

the location of where the body was,

the fact that he stepped on her neck and crushed it

to make sure she was dead.

You get teased with a bit of information and go,

"Maybe this guy killed more people, maybe he is The Happy Face Killer,

what do we do to find the other people?"

We knew that there were other victims out there,

we wanted to identify who they were.

We have a responsibility to do the best job possible

and get these cases resolved.

At that time, he's in custody of the Clark County Sheriff's Department.

He's two floors above me, in jail.

We knew that Jesperson wanted to be recognised for what he's done.

Everybody up there in the jail started talking to him,

and he liked the attention.

So the information went to the inmates,

and they in turn contacted us and gave us information.

Kenneth was looking at, I believe, a robbery charge,

he wanted help on that.

He came downstairs, and wanted to cut a deal.

He said, "I've got information, I can really help you guys out."

He subsequently told us that there was a body along the interstate

in Nebraska, along a certain mile marker,

and that, you know, it was still out there.

So we called up Nebraska authorities -

"We've got information that is reliable.

Would you go out and make a search for it?"

They said, "We've got a couple of feet of snow on the ground,

but we can do it in the next couple of days, when it clears off."

Then they formed a search party,

and called us back and said, "Yes, we've got the body.

It's the body of Angela Subrize.

She had been killed in Wyoming, and taken into Nebraska,

and the body was dumped along the interstate.

Only the killer would know that.

That was extremely important, because it's another solved homicide

in which the body had never been recovered.

Angela Subrize was in the truck with Jesperson.

He drove her down to Wyoming, which is several states away.

Nobody even knew she was missing.

I'm going, "OK, we've got this one - there's another one."

This is for the victims' family.

Now they have some closure, they have peace of mind,

they know what happened to their daughter.

I thought it was fantastic - keep talking, keep talking.

We'll let him take responsibility as long as we can prove he did do it.

This is what we call the Fruitspur 1973 Yearbook.

We have all our pictures - sports, et cetera - in here.

There's a picture of Keith.

I think it's a hot dog-eating contest. (LAUGHS)

And all of us put songs by our names.

By Keith, he put, Born To Be Wild.

I read that, and I thought, "Hm, how ironic."

And there I am. (LAUGHS)

My name is Janine Beghtol.

I was actually born in Yakima, Washington,

but I was raised in Selah, Washington,

a few miles out, in the country.

It was just a great childhood.

To me, he was very large, cos I'm only 4'9".

He was almost two feet taller than me.

I think, because he was so big, he was self-conscious.

And a lot of people made fun of him.

Unfortunately, a few of us in the class nicknamed him Baby Huey.

# Huey's goin' fishing Huey's goin' fishing #

Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy - a fish!

We would have little get-togethers -

"So-and-so's mom and dad are gone, let's go to their house," whatever.

He would find out, and he'd always show up by himself, of course.

Yeah, sometimes, I recall, he brought some beer.

I always remember, he'd kind of make an entrance,

and of course, it was easy, cos he was so large -

everybody would kind of look up, you know?

When he walked through the door, he'd have to duck, he was so big.

(MARCHING BAND PLAYS)

He'd say something, and I'd say, "Keith, it wouldn't work."

I'd say, "You're way too big for me." (LAUGHS)

I said, "You can't handle me, I'm small but dynamite." (LAUGHS)

He tried to have a girlfriend, but he just was awkward.

I understand his family wasn't nice to him either.

You want more of that? Yeah.

The dad was really hard on Keith, very hard on him.

I think that's what his problem was.

I think he just tried really, really hard all the time

to fit in wherever.

I felt like he was an outcast.

The biggest problem with this whole thing was that

he admitted to a killing that two people had already been convicted of.

You've got John Sosnovske, who pled guilty to avoid the death penalty.

You've got Laverne Pavlinac, who says, "I was there, I saw it."

That's perfect - I would have taken that to the bank,

I would have gone with that.

Now we have Keith Jesperson coming forward, in the Happy Face letters,

saying, "I did this, this is my case, I'm responsible."

"On or around 20th January, 1990,

I picked up Taunja Bennett and took her home.

I raped her and beat her real bad.

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

Wait - we've got two people in custody for a murder

were convicted of.

We've got a third person who's saying,

"I did this, I'm responsible for it."

We contacted the Multnomah Count Sheriff's Office,

and one of the investigators came over,

and wasn't too receptive to the idea.

He walked into the interview room and says,

"First, I want to say, I think this is all bullshit."

How do we prove this -

how do we prove that Jesperson actually did this murder?

There's got to be something out there that can tie him to it.

What are we missing, guys?

Something's there. What are we missing?

I said, "Look, I have a client I represent, Mr Jesperson.

My client is willing to step up and accept responsibility."

You could hear a pin drop. It was like, "You've got to be kidding me?"

I never, ever in 40 years, have been in that position,

to try to convict a client,

and this is what Mr Jesperson was asking me to do.

"I committed a crime that two people are doing time for,

you've got the wrong people, and I'm laughing at you.

I've told people that you've got the wrong people,

but you guys don't believe it."

He thought that stepping forward

and making it right with Taunja Bennett's homicide,

that he would have some credibility with the other ones.

We're up now to the old location of where the B&I Tavern was.

It was located at 188th and Stark, in Portland, Oregon.

This is where Taunja Bennett and Keith Jesperson first came together.

Taunja Bennett was having a few drinks, playing pool,

and she met Keith Jesperson.

Right here.

This brick house is the house that Jesperson took Taunja Bennett to.

He killed her, took her body out,

dumped it along the scenic highway in Oregon,

where it was discovered the next day.

Nobody had recovered the purse that Taunja Bennett had

the night she was killed, nobody had found it.

Nobody knew where it was, I didn't know where it was, but Jesperson did.

Jesperson said, "I can take you, I can show you where the purse was

that Taunja Bennett had had."

He took them out there and says, "I threw the purse and her Walkman

over in the blackberry bushes, right here, along the Sandy River."

He pointed out the location.

This is where it was.

This is five years after it happened,

he was able to point out the location of where it was.

That was conclusive proof that Jesperson was in fact

the person responsible for the death of Taunja Bennett.

That was the magic bullet, that was.

Laverne Pavlinac should never have involved herself

in a murder investigation like this.

But then again, you look at her motive, and you go,

"Why is she doing this, what's behind all this?"

My name is Darlene Carpenter, and I'm Laverne Pavlinac's daughter.

She was married 26 years to my dad.

My parents bowled on Wednesday night,

they went to dinner on Saturday night. We went to church.

My dad upset the apple cart when he left her.

After that, she was never the same.

We did not know about it, but for quite a while, evidently,

she had a relationship with this John Sosnovske,

who was 18 years younger than she was.

I did not like him.

He threatened her all the time, and told her that he would hurt us.

She finally needed to get rid of him,

and she wanted to do it and not embarrass her daughters.

That's why she turned him in for a crime.

That was, in her mind, the only way out.

Then she said, "I helped him, I held the rope,"

which actually makes her the murderer.

She said, "I had to tell them that I did it,"

cos they were threatening to let him out,

so she took the fall with the lie

so that he couldn't get out and hurt us.

Does that make sense?

I mean, who concocts a story like that? It's crazy.

Hi!

Once Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske were released from custody,

Jesperson was able to plead guilty to the death of Taunja Bennett.

It all came together for one common good...

..and that was to put Jesperson behind bars.

NEWSCASTER: The so-called Happy Face Killer

appeared grim-faced today as he pled no contest to the 1990 murder

of 23-year-old Taunja Bennett.

He enjoyed killing people, he enjoyed being in control,

he enjoyed the power that he felt over these people, these victims.

He probably enjoyed the fear in their eyes.

I don't think anybody really understands

what the motivation behind Keith Jesperson is.

All his life, he hadn't been recognised as somebody important.

This is his 15 seconds of fame.

He had no remorse.

He didn't say sorry.

Some people, they get up there and they feel a little bit of remorse.

He didn't, in any way, shape, or form.

There's nothing that you can say to a person

that takes another person's life.

Thank you, that'll be all.

This guy is mentally unstable, he's sick.

He doesn't see people as people, he sees them as objects,

things that he can control,

things that he can take or discard any time he wants.

He was sitting probably 15 feet away from me.

He's all in orange and shackled.

I was sitting in the front row.

He just straight looked at me and winked his eye.

He's a monster.

I had a gun. I was going to walk into court with the gun,

put a bullet in his head and put a bullet in my head.

NEWSCASTER: Winningham's son says a life sentence is not enough.

He deserves to fry because he's killed six, seven, who knows.

This thing keeps getting worse and worse, it needs to be put a stop to.

Fry him, get it over with.

If I would have shot him, like I had planned, then shoot myself,

he would have won.

If I would have punched him in the face

or lost my anger, he would have won.

He's rotting way like a...like a corpse. Good for him.

That's torture, that's miserable.

He loses in the end - the bad guy loses.

I'm glad we were able to put it all together,

even though, I think, three of the eight have never been identified.

There's still unidentified human remains.

We have the bodies, but we don't know who they are.

2003 was the 30th class reunion.

Keith had wrote the class a letter

kind of explaining why he wasn't there.

"I'm sorry I will not be able to make it there for the reunion.

I'm sort of at a prior engagement.

Since my incarceration for being a bad boy,

many of my friends have deserted me.

Something about being associated with me turns them off."

It was just strange to...

..to read this letter from somebody

that had done what he had done.

You just killed eight women

over the years,

and it's matter-of-fact.

"It's all about me," and it's not.

It's about the victims...

..and the victims' families

and what they've got to live with all their lives.

It's like, how dare you?