Jesperson Admits Slaying Woman He Met In Spokane

“Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson has confessed to another slaying, this one in Wyoming.

The confession came in an interview with two Wyoming police detectives on Friday in Vancouver, Wash.

Jesperson, 40, already has reached plea agreements for a murder in Washington and two in Oregon. He also says he’s killed a woman in Florida and three in California.

In confessing that he killed Angela Subrize, 21, of Oklahoma City, Jesperson carefully avoided admitting circumstances that could lead to his receiving the death penalty. In Wyoming, a person convicted of murder can only be sentenced to death only if the killing is premeditated or is committed during a felony crime.

The Oregonian newspaper obtained a copy of Jesperson’s confession. In it, he said he strangled her in the sleeper cab of his tractor-trailer rig because “she wouldn’t shut up and let me sleep.”

“I got up and grabbed her and strangled her. Then I went to sleep for about four hours,” Jesperson said.

Jesperson said he met Subrize in a bar in Spokane in late January 1995. She rode with him to Wyoming, where she called her father in Fort Collins, Colo., to tell him she was coming, Jesperson said.

After driving through a blizzard, they arrived at Sinclair, near Rawlins. There, he wrote, Subrize decided not to see her father and said she would go to Indiana with Jesperson. “That made me angry,” Jesperson wrote.

A day or so later, Subrize was dead.