Trucker Investigated In ‘Happy Face’ Killings Police Look For Links Between Letter, Man Who Allegedly Admitted 8 Murders
Authorities are investigating whether a truck driver who allegedly wrote a letter in which he admitted killing eight people might be linked to a letter sent to a newspaper last year detailing similar slayings.
Long-haul trucker Keith Hunter Jesperson, 40, is being held in the Clark County Jail here without bail in the slaying of Julie Winningham, 41, of Camas, Wash. He allegedly confessed to that killing in a telephone conversation in March with a sheriff’s detective.
Investigators later learned that on the day of that confession, Jesperson allegedly wrote a letter to his brother, saying he had killed seven other women along his trucking route.
In a letter to The Oregonian newspaper of Portland, a man who said he was a trucker claimed to have killed five women beginning five years ago - the same period of time covered by the killings Jesperson allegedly claimed.
The person who wrote to the newspaper was dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” because he had drawn a smiling face on his letter.
“We intend to follow any and all leads that are available to us,” Dennis Hunter, Clark County’s chief deputy criminal prosecutor, said last week.
In a series of stories in May 1994, the newspaper reported that slain women had been discovered at each of the locations described by the “Happy Face Killer.”
The letter writer had said his first victim was Sonya Bennett. The body of a victim named Taunja Bennett was found under the same circumstances described in the letter.
Two other people have been convicted of killing Bennett, but they have maintained they are innocent.
The “Happy Face Killer” also described four other killings, saying he had dumped the victims’ bodies near Blythe, Turlock and Santa Nella, Calif., and Salem, Ore.
A search warrant affidavit for Jesperson’s car quotes a trucking co-worker of Jesperson’s as saying that Jesperson had told him “someone in this line of work could do this type of thing and get away with it.”
The “Happy Face Killer” also said in his letter that trucking’s “nomad way of life” allows such killings without fear of being caught.
Jesperson is scheduled to stand trial Sept. 11 in Clark County Superior Court on charges of first-degree murder and first-degree rape in Winningham’s death.
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