‘Happy Face Killer’ pens Banfield again, signs with a smiley
- 'Happy Face Killer' continues to write to Ashleigh Banfield
- Jesperson clarifies details of 1995 murder
- He recounts how he lied to prosecutors
Convicted murderer Keith Jesperson, right, shown here at a Nov. 2, 1995, court appearance in Portland, Ore., with attorney Thomas Phelan, has recanted all his previous murder admissions. Jesperson, also called the “Happy Face Killer”, who is serving two life sentences in Oregon in connection with guilty pleas to two murders in that state and has been sentenced to life in prison in Washington state for a third murder, is scheduled to be extradited to Wyoming for another murder. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)
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(NewsNation) — Keith Jesperson, the convict known as the “Happy Face Killer,” continues to write letters to NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield.
In his fourth and most recent letter to Banfield, he includes his signature smiley face.
Jesperson was convicted of killing eight women, earning his nickname by drawing “happy faces” on many of his letters to the media and authorities before being arrested in 1995.
Jesperson wrote to Banfield to correct the record about a gruesome murder he carried out in 1995.
“Ashleigh, I didn’t kill Angela Subrize in Wyoming. I killed her at the rest area at mile marker 58/59 on interstate 80 in Nebraska. I was in Wyoming because of Ken Lee Monsebroten, a jail house rat-informer that dealed his ‘rape using a knife’ down to ‘sexual misconduct’ charge promising to help kill me in Wyoming.”
He continues with the story on page 11. He drew a smiley face at the top.
“Ken’s story was I killed Angela at exit 377 in Wyoming, tied her body under my trailer and dragged it to mile marker 210 in Nebraska,” he writes. “Of course, my first request was to experiment with a corpse tied under a trailer and dragged and checked every few miles to when the body would look like what was left of Angela’s. That wasn’t going to happen. And prosecutors revisited Monsebroten to go over his ever-changing story. Ten days after I arrived, they wanted a deal and send me home. We played the game for months until June.”
A lot of Jesperson’s lengthy letter recounts ways he either outsmarted prosecutors or flat-out lied to amuse himself.
On page 13, he says, “I also got Tom Jensen of the green river task force writing me in hopes I’d confess to being that killer. After Ridgeway was arrested, his lawyers came to see me to see if I had cases in the Seattle area. Crazy, because I was in the area between 1983 and 1986. The Seattle weekly news magazine did a story in a January 1998 issue called “The Confessions of the Happy Face Killer” by Mike Romano. The last paragraph summed it all up. Because I am a convicted killer, anything I tell people can be taken as something it isn’t.”
His latest round of letters comes after he penned Banfield describing his prison routine. Jesperson has also spoken with NewsNation’s Laura Ingle, who received five double-sided, handwritten letters from Oregon State Penitentiary.
