!!!TRIGGER WARNING!!!
This post contains details from gruesome murders, there are mentions of: Abuse, beating, strangling, murder, rape and animal abuse.
Keith Hunter Jesperson was born on April 6th, 1955 in British Columbia. He was the middle child in his family, he had two sisters and two brothers, but this family was anything but loving.
His Father was an extreme alcoholic and would beat him when he got into trouble. Keith would get beaten with a belt, sometimes even in public. Once his Father even gave him an electric shock as punishment for his bad behavior.
Keith was bullied his entire childhood because he was larger in size. It only got worse once he moved to Selah, Washington. The other kids would pick on him and call him ‘Igor’, his brothers didn’t help this problem, they just joined in on the fun calling their brother names.
Keith was shy and lonely, he preferred to spend time alone then be picked on all the time, but that anger was bottling up. Eventually he found an outlet for his rage, but it was not a good one.
He would capture stray birds, cats and dogs around the trailer park where he lived and tortured them. Keth would beat the helpless animals to death as well as strangle them.
It didn’t stop there.
When Keith was 10 years old he nearly killed two other children.
Him and his friend Martin would often play around and get in trouble, but Martin would always blame what they did on Keith. One day he had enough.
Keith grabbed Martin and started violently beating him, he wouldn’t have stopped if it weren’t for his Father pulling him away. He later said his intention was to kill Martin.
Almost a year later Keith and a group of other kids were playing together in a lake. One of the other boys there held Keith’s head underneath the water until he blacked out. When he saw that boy again Keth tried drowning him in a public pool to get his revenge. A life guard pulled him away before he caused the boy any permanent damage.
Keith graduated high school in 1973, he reported that he was raped at fourteen years old, but of course no one around him thought anything of it.
Keith never went to college because his Father told him he wasn’t good enough to do so and that he would never make it.
He was never popular in school, the boys bullied him and the girls laughed at him.
When Keith turned twenty years old in 1975, he married a lovely woman named Rose Hucke. They later had three kids; two daughters and a son.
Keith got a job as a truck driver to help support his family.
A few years had passed when tension began to rise in Rose and Keith’s marriage. A strange unknown woman would call their house, and Rose accused Keith of cheating on her. He denied the claim but Rose was still furious. Their marriage had lasted fourteen whole years, then one day while Keith was on the road Rose packed up her things and left with their children. She drove 200 miles away to live with her parents in Spokane, Washington.
Keith still tried to have a relationship with his children, he visited them whenever he was in town.
His and Rose’s divorce was finalized in 1990.
When Keith turned 35 years old he stood six feet and 7.5 inches tall and weighed approximately 240 pounds. He started working towards his goal of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but sadly he severely injured himself in training and was not able to apply for the position. So he continued his job as a truck driver and moved to Cheney, Washington.
One of the following days Keith realized that his job would give him an opportunity to kill without being suspected.
The year 1990 in Portland, Oregon, Keith was at a bar and met a young woman named Taunja Bennett. They talked, had a few drinks and Keith even invited her back to his apartment that he was renting at the time. When Taunja refused to sleep with him, Keith started yelling at her and ended up beating her. He started to worry that she would report him to the police. So Keith shoved his fist down Taunja’s throat and killed her.
He then went back to the bar and made sure he talked with the others so he had a solid alibi.
When Keith went back home for the night he disposed of Taunja’s body by dumping it in a dumpster in an alley, and he was back on the road the next morning.
Taunja’s body was discovered three days later, the police had multiple suspects and hundreds of different leads. None of which led to Keith.
On August 30th, 1992, Keith killed again. The body of an unidentified woman was found raped and strangled to death somewhere outside of Blythe, California. Keith claims Jane Doe’s name was Claudia, but it was never confirmed. She still remains unidentified to this day.
A month later in Turlock, California, the body of Cynthia Lyn Rose was discovered. Keith claims that she was a prostitute who entered his truck without persmion while he was asleep at a truck stop. In retaliation he strangled Cynthia.
Keith’s fourth kill was located in Salem, Oregon, the woman’s name was Laurie Ann Pentland. Keith claims she was another prostitute and she tried doubling the fee for the sex they had. When Keith refused to pay she threatened to call the police so Keith strangled her. Laurie’s body was found in November of 1992.
Keith’s next victim was found dead in June 1993 in Santa Nella, California. The police originally thought the woman had died of an overdose on the street. Once again this woman was never identified, but Keith claimed her name was ‘Carla’ or ‘Cindy’.
In September of 1994 another young woman Keith killed was never identified. She was found in Crestview, Florida, Keith claimed her name was Susanne.
Keith may have been a serial killer, but he was smart. He knew to kill women who would not be missed so no one investigated too deeply into the situation. His job as a truck driver gave him an alibi for being in the same area as the murders and an alibi for fleeing the scene within hours.
Keith was arrested on March 30th, 1995, for the murder of a woman named Julie Winningham. He got sloppy with his tactics while killing her and ended up getting caught.
The police had interviewed him a week prior to his arrest but when Keith refused to talk they had no grounds to hold him, so they let him go. After that Keith knew he was definitely going to get aressrted for his murders, so after 2 sucide attempts he turned himself into the police, hoping they would go easier on him if he confessed.
While he was in custody he bagn telling cryptic details of the murders that only the murderer would know. Keith claimed to have killed as many as 185 women in total. The police only had evidence of 8 victims so the claim was recanted.
A few days before Keith was arrested he wrote a letter to his brother confessing that he killed eight people over the last five years. Once the police got ahold of the letter, them and multiple other police agencies started opening up old cases that were never solved, many of the cold cases they pulled were possibly more of Keith’s victims.
After he murdered Taunja Bennett, all of the attention that he wanted was given to a woman named Laverne Pavlinac and her abusive boyfriend John Sosnovske.
Laverne sat down with the police and gave a fake confession using the details she had read in the newspaper the day prior. Her story claimed that her boyfriend; John Sosnovske forced her to help him rape, murder and dispoes of Taunja’s body.
Laverne and John were both arrested, he was sentenced to life in prison and she got less than ten years. Laverne was not expecting that she would go to jail for such a long period of time so she told the court that she made the entire story up, but her claims were ignored.
After almost five whole years into their conviction they were both releassed from prison when Keith confessed to all of the murders.
Keith convinced the jury that he was the killer because he knew where one of the victims purses was because it was not found at the crime scene. The court thought that it was information only the killer would know.
Keith was not very happy when all of the attention meant for him was going to Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske. So Keith wrote his confession of killing Taunja Bennett on a bathroom wall at a truck stop and he signed it with a smiley face, but it didn’t spark up enough attention for Keith. He started he sending letters to police departments and newspaper outlets confessing to each murder. Once again Keith signed each letter with a smiley face. The journalist working on Keith’s story for the newspaper dubbed him ‘The Happy Face Killer’.
Keith Hunter Jesperson is now serving four life sentences at Oregon State Penitentiary. He will be 67 years old on April 6th 2022.
There were a few paragraphs that felt repetitive, although you gave a lot of detail I felt that it wasn’t giving enough story. Overall I give your story a 7.5 out of 10 I hope you get your short story into that online magazine!