Keith Hunter Jesperson | The Smiley Face Killer
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. If you're a fan of this podcast, feel free to visit my Patreon page at patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast.

Any donation, no matter how small, helps keep the podcast going and is greatly appreciated. Great things are happening for the podcast, and big things are coming in the near future. And I really appreciate all my fans staying tuned and contributing.

As many of you have noticed, the podcast now has a fan page on Facebook at facebook.com slash the SK podcast. And my webpage has finally its own domain at www.theserialkillerpodcast.com. You, dear listener, are downloading one of over two million unique downloads.

That's incredible, and makes me very proud and motivated to continue giving my dear listeners quality content on the world's serial killers. Before we dive into the dark story of tonight's killer, I want to give you, dear listener, some good news. The next episode will finally, because I know a lot of you have been waiting...

Feature the serial killer superstar par excellence, Ted Bundy. I really think it's going to be a quality episode. Tonight, however, we travel to North America, but not only the United States of America. We go to the land of maple syrup, vast wilderness, flannel shirts, and long winters. I am, of course, talking about Canada.

But although Canadians have a reputation as a pleasant and polite populace, not all Canadians live up to the stereotype. Canada actually has a rich serial killer history, with many killers ranking up body counts rivaling their more famous U.S. colleagues.

Many of you, dear listeners, are avid users of the internet, and you may even have come across the modern and internet myth of the smiley face killer. It's a true urban legend, and it's about a serial killer, or should I say serial killers, plural. As the story goes, many college-age men have been victims of an unknown killer operating freely in the U.S.,

The authorities are, according to this ongoing legend, either too incompetent to see the clear killing pattern or deliberately covering the murders up. And according to the myth, the killer always leaves a smiley face close to the murder site. Personally, I am not a follower of the smiley face killer legend, as I am not a professional criminologist or law enforcement professional.

According to the professional criminal profiler Pat Brown, the smiley face killer theory is, and I quote, ludicrous. He follows up stating that a smiley face is one of the most common graffiti motifs there are. And again, I quote, if you look in an area five miles square, I bet you could find a smiley face.

The FBI also posted an official press release back in 2008, saying that we have not developed any evidence to support links between these tragic deaths, or any evidence substantiating the theory that these deaths are the work of a serial killer or killers. The vast majority of these instances appear to be alcohol-related drownings."

If that was not enough, in 2010, the Center for Homicide Research released a document detailing a full 18 reasons why they think the theory of the smiley face killer is false. So, that's the end of the story, is it? Why would I, your humble host, call this episode the smiley face killer, if it's all a bunch of nonsense?

Because, dear listener, there is a true-life serial killer that actually uses smiley faces as his signature at crime scenes and in communication with the authorities and media. He was a Canadian, but he murdered at least eight women in the great states of Nebraska, California, Florida, Washington...

Oregon and Wyoming. His name was Keith Hunter Jesperson. And this is his story. It was in the age of innocence in North America and the West. The 1950s. Dad hard at work. Mom the happy housewife. Car in the garage. The lawn identical to all the other lawns. And traditional Christian values about politicians are honest.

People are pleasant and polite, or at least, that's the stereotype we in the 21st century are told via TV shows and films.

Their reality was very different, with a lethal Cold War raging between two superpowers, modern witch trials in America and McCarthy, and a rampant nuclear arms race. And far from everyone was pleasant and polite.

something the child, born on the 4th of June, 1955, to Les M. Gladys Jesperson in Chilliwack, British Columbia, would learn to know. Keith Hunter Jesperson was a middle child with two brothers and two sisters. His family was not destitute, but far from rich.

It was a brutal household, where Keith would be relentlessly mocked from an early age due to his very large size, and a father who deliberately neglected him in favor of his siblings. Already at age five, Keith was the family's black sheep, the outcast. His mother was meek and submissive in the face of Keith's domineering and violent father. Her father

regularly beat Keith savagely, beat his mother regularly, and drank heavily. Few times Keith's father, named Les, gave young Keith any positive attention was when Keith acted violently towards others. Les then spurred him on and bragged about his tough son to his friends.

As you, dear listener, may have read, an early indication of psychopathic personality traits is the torture and killing of small animals. Many serial killers are reported doing just this at a young age, but few as young as Keith. Already at age five, Keith displayed severely disturbing behavior. His earliest memory is one of violence.

A memory of him rolling a rock down a slide in a play park, the rock then hitting his little brother Brad on the head, drawing blood. A frequent activity for young Keith was a bash in gopher heads. Maybe he had played whack-a-mole at a local carnival and decided he would have more fun doing it for real. However, gophers were not the only hapless animal victims of Keith.

crows suffered a cruel fate in his custody as well he captured them then nailed them via their wings to wooden boards and proceeded to throw knives at them other times he would escalate this activity and find small dogs and cats

Once he had lured them in, he nailed them to his wooden torture board and tortured them with nails and needles until they were dead. But none of these things gave him more satisfaction than his very favorite pastime. He would find two cats in his neighborhood, lure them to him, then hold them down as he tied their tails together with steel wire.

He would then throw the cats over each side of a clothesline, or a rope tied between two trees. Then he would sit back in the grass, calmly looking on as the two cats would tear each other's flesh to shreds until both were dead. His father was not opposed to such activities. Instead, he encouraged it.

Once he witnessed young Keith hold a cat by its tail as he repeatedly slammed the cat onto the concrete pavement until the cat passed out. Then Keith would sit over the cat and strangle it, slowly to death. Instead of chastising his son for such evil and deviant behavior, Les would brag about his son's exploits to his drinking buddies.

Unfortunately, dear listener, I could find very little information about his mother, whether she ever challenged Keith's deviant tendencies or not. All I could find was that she was a housewife, whom Les controlled and probably beat regularly. Although Keith grew to be a giant of a man, he could never stand up to his abusive father, a man far smaller than him.

Keith's later penchant for torture can, as many other aspects of his troubled life, be traced to his childhood and adolescence. Being the family's black sheep, he was often the victim of more or less justified punishments. Once, his father took him out to the garden greenhouse. There he subjected his son with an electric shock from an electric wire.

Mless claimed it was only 12 volts. Heath claims in later interviews that it was 220 volts, the same voltage as the regular American domestic electrical outlet. 220 volts will not kill a person, but it will cause a large amount of searing pain. Heath never had a good relationship with women. Not his mother, not his sisters, and not his female schoolmates.

When Keith was nine years old, in 1964, he called a woman a bitch to her face, causing her 16-year-old son to jump out of his car and beat Keith in the face, and kicked him twice while on the ground with ponty-toed cowboy boots. When his father found out, he was outraged. Being beat up,

instead of beating someone else up, was unacceptable in the Jesperson household. So Les beat his son until Keith was unable to scream anymore. Pain and violence was a regular factor in young Keith's life, and it culminated in two attempted murders when he was only 10 years old, in 1965.

Keith never had many friends, but he had one for a brief period called Martin he would often get into trouble with. Martin would then, more often than not, blame Keith when they got caught, even though Martin often was the main perpetrator. Naturally, Keith got very angry with Martin about this, so he tried to kill him. He violently beat Martin to a bloody pulp, only stopping when his father dragged him off the near-dead boy.

This experience didn't deter Keith from pursuing more violence. Instead, about one year later, Keith was out swimming, and another boy ambushed him and held him underwater until he passed out. Keith, now 11 years old, did not take it well. Some time later, he was at a public pool. The boy who had attacked him was also in the same pool.

He went over to the boy and easily forced him underwater. And he held him there until the lifeguard saw what was happening and pulled him away from the drowning boy. In his early adolescence, the Jesperson family moved from Canada to the United States of America. More specifically, Sella in the great state of Washington.

They moved to a trailer park, a move Keith did not approve of, and it enraged him. In America, he got bullied even more, exasperated by his brothers calling him Ig or Igor because of his abnormal large size. No one in school could do any real physical harm to Keith. He could easily beat any boy in school, as he was almost twice their size, but a psychological bully.

was relentless and merciless. His anger towards people in general, and women in particular, only increased. And if not familial violence and bullying wasn't enough to ruin a childhood, then sexual molestation might. In 1966, when Keith was 11, he and some schoolmates were forced to strip off their clothes by a neighbor dairyman.

who also stripped off his own clothes. The milkman then told the kids to touch his genitals. The other kids did as they were told, but Keith managed to run away. In a rare instance of fatherhood, Les gave Keith a BB gun for his 12th birthday. This was probably not the best gift to give young Keith, as he immediately started using it for target practice.

were humans, but a target. First he shot a neighbor in the testicles. Then he shot an overweight neighbor in the buttocks, as he was bending over to pick raspberries. At age thirteen, in the seventh grade, his acquaintance Tom Hager introduced him to shoplifting, a habit he would excel at. At age fourteen he shot an arrow with an exploding tip at the home of one of his teachers. If the arrow had hit the teacher,

it would have been murder. Now, dear listener, you will hopefully have noticed a pattern. Keith suffered a lot of abuse, physical and psychological, but his deviant behavior went beyond what could be considered to be normal reactions to such experiences. He enjoyed causing people harm, and he did not care about the difference between right and wrong. When asked about Keith,

A former classmate would say, and I quote, He could be bright when he wanted, but then he would do something stupid. He'd be too kind or too mean, too generous or too stingy. He never saw the in-between. I always wondered if he was in control of his own brain, if he might have had a brain damage. He sure acted like it. End quote.

in the locker room with other boys in junior high and high school. He heard them brag about sexual encounters. Encounters he would have little chance of experiencing since he was shunned by all the girls at school. But this did not stop young Keith. In later life, he would say he lost his virginity at the age of 14. He lost it by raping a local girl. She never reported it,

and he didn't face any consequences for this act. At this age, he also started experimenting with making homemade pipe bombs and cans, something that was far easier to do in the late 1960s America than in today's world. Luckily, he never got around to using bombs against anyone. In 1971, Keith's lifelong companion and only friend, Duke,

His Labrador retriever was shot dead by his father. Les said the dog was dragging his legs and didn't look good. According to Les, the dog looked like it had been fed some sort of poison. Although Keith didn't have anyone who showed him any love anymore, not even his dog, he did manage to graduate high school at age 18.

He finished 161 in a class of 174, and his IQ was measured at 102, which is considered average. Although he clearly wasn't unintelligent, his father did not support his going to college, saying Keith would never be able to do it.

So, instead of pursuing going to college, Heath instead dreamed of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP. He was actually accepted into the RCMP program. However, after sustaining a fall from a rope climbing exercise during RCMP training that severely injured him, he quickly found that his hopes were dashed.

Unable to complete his training due to the injury, he was permanently dismissed from the program. Lacking any significant job skills, Keith would instead take up truck driving, and soon realized that he could do the job, and that it would become one that he liked. As it turned out, a long-haul trucking outfit in 10A Washington, near Spokane, hired him.

And before long he was zigzagging across the U.S., from Washington to Oregon, California, Montana, Nebraska, even New York and Florida, and all of the states in between. And so it was. On Tuesday evening, January 23rd, 1990, pretty 23-year-old Poncho Bennett

decided to go out for a few drinks and to hopefully meet up with a few of her friends it was a cold damp night typical weather for that time of year important oregon which could arguably be placed among the top ten rain capitals of the world and thornjohn dressed appropriately

After grabbing her purse and umbrella, she climbed into her car and drove toward the B&I Tavern, one of her favorite haunts in Portland's southeast side. Upon her arrival at the tavern, Tonja, unable to make up her mind what she wanted to drink, settled on a beer and then a wine cooler, and continued to switch back and forth between the two drinks. As the evening wore on,

Before long, Tonja, who has been described by family members and friends as mentally slow and slightly retarded, became visibly intoxicated. At first, Tonja never paid much attention to the tall, burly-looking, loud-mouthed man sitting at the bar.

And, judging from all of his outward appearances, bar patrons would later say that he hadn't paid much attention to Tonja until later in the evening, after it had become apparent that Tonja was feeling the effect of the alcohol. But he had been watching her all right, mentally making plans for the remainder of the evening.

A little later, the man casually walked over to the pool table's area where Torja had been watching the players. A glass of beer in his hand, he introduced himself to her and offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and, unbeknownst to her, had set into motion a series of events that would ultimately end her young life. The man's name was Keith Hunter Jesperson.

the taunt-show may have known him only as keith or perhaps even by some other name jespersen was known to use a number of aliases often a variation of his real name and in all likelihood he had used an alias on this particular night whatever he had called himself that night the thirty-five-year-old six feet six inches tall hulk of a man who weighed in at two hundred and forty pounds

had made quite an imprint on young, impressionable Tonja. She had been easy to befriend, she trusted everyone, and hadn't yet really learned just how horrible some people can be. At one point Jesperson excused himself and left the tavern for a while, without explaining to Tonja where he was going.

When he returned a short time later, he met Tonja outside and offered to buy her dinner. However, when he checked his wallet to see how much money he had left, he realized that he didn't have enough cash to buy himself dinner, much less himself and Tonja. He told Tonja that he had more money at home and invited her to accompany him there to get it.

Forger willingly agreed to accompany Jesperchen to his residence located nearby, and when they arrived she followed him inside, unaware that the quest for cash had merely been a ruse to separate her from the tavern and the patrons inside it. Instead of retrieving money to buy dinner, he coaxed her into having sex. Later, as would become his custom,

The pent-up anger that had been seething inside Jesperson for so long made its way to the surface. Even before getting dressed after their sexual tryst, he began taunting Tonja, and before long was making mean, cruel remarks to her. And soon they were into a full-blown argument, during which Jesperson, by his own later admission, began striking her.

When Tonja attempted to fight back and defend herself against this giant of a man, Jesperson began to viciously beat her about the face and head. In one swift movement, he placed one of his massive hands around her frail neck, and with the other he grabbed a rope, without even taking the time to think about his actions. Jesperson wrapped the rope around Tonja's neck and pulled it taut,

as he strangled her and watched the life slowly leave her body. When she ceased to struggle and her body became limp, he let her partially nude body slump to the floor. Jesperson didn't panic after killing Tonja. Leaving her inside the rented house, he drove back to the B&I tavern and sat around drinking and talking to anyone who would listen to him, presumably to establish an alibi for himself.

after a few more beers jesperson drove back to the house and calmly loaded tondre's body into the front seat of a friend's car knowing that he had to dispose of the body he drove eastward

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As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.

For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.

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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. Past Portland's city limits, the airport, past Gresham and Troutdale, toward the Columbia River Gorge.

Sticking to the old highway, which was much darker, far less travelled, and consisted of a series of pergs and switchbacks, Jesperson found a suitable place near Crown Point, where it was secluded and dark. Just the right place to dump a body. He pulled the car over to the side and stopped. It was quiet. There were no sounds of traffic in the distance.

Confident that he was alone, Jesperson pulled Tornj's body out of the car and tossed it over an embankment of one of the switchbacks, discarding her corpse as if it were a piece of unwanted rubbish. After discarding Tornj's body, Jesperson exited the highway and tossed the Walkman she had left inside the car out of the window. He then drove to a truck stop near Troutdale and drank coffee the remainder of the night.

yet another attempt to establish an alibi for himself, if it turned out that one was needed. Afterward, just after dawn and now wide awake from apathy and high, this person drove up the sandy river highway and flung the contents of Tonja's purse, which included her Oregon identification, as well as the purse itself, into a brushy area near the river.

Days later, a passerby found Tonja's body where it had landed in a ditch after tumbling down the embankment. Horrified by the grisly discovery, the passerby notified the police. Photos were taken, the crime scene was processed in the usual manner, and the body was taken to the morgue, where it was initially identified only as Jane Doe.

Torja's death didn't make much news at first in the local newspapers. The articles that first appeared consisted of only a few short paragraphs outlining the discovery of her body and police statements that she was found half-dressed, beaten and strangled to death, that one of her teeth had punctured her lower lip and the fact that she had a rope around her neck.

A description of her physical appearance was also published, and it didn't take long for her body to be positively identified. The police had no suspects in the case, but for the time being, Keith Jesperson was free to roam, hunting for other victims. After getting his first experience in crossing the line from killing animals to killing a human being by murdering Tonja Bennett,

Jesperson soon found that he had become addicted to killing, depending on whose account of Jesperson's activities one chooses to believe, either his own account or official accounts. It appears that Jesperson waited nearly a year and a half before committing his second murder, after which the others appeared to come in rapid succession.

According to Jesperson's account, the next murder attributed to him occurred sometime in late July or early August 1992. An unidentified woman's body was found on the 30th of August that year, approximately 10 miles north of Blythe, California, and investigators determined that she had been dead for a number of weeks.

labelled a "Jane Doe" by the police, Jesperson would later tell authorities that her name had been Claudia. The following month, the body of Cynthia Lynn Rose, age 32, was found along US Highway 99 near Turlock, California. She too had been dead for some time, and her death was originally listed as a drug overdose.

Keith did not appreciate this, and began writing letters to the media, in particular to the newspaper The Oregonian, setting the record straight. In one letter, he had claimed that Rose was a prostitute he had picked up and murdered. He signed his letters with a smiling, happy face, and the columnist for The Oregonian quickly dubbed him, for lack of any other name, the Happy Face Killer.

Although the letters were turned over to the police, there was little for investigators to go on with regard to identifying the author of the letter, and Jesper C. would maintain his anonymity until 1995. Laurie Ann Pentland, 26 years old, became the next victim. Laurie's body was found in November of 1992.

behind a G.I. Joe's store in Salem, Oregon, the state's capital, about 50 miles south of Portland. Detectives determined that she had been strangled, but were left with no leads as to who her killer might be. However, they would eventually learn that strangulation appeared to be the happy-face killer's preferred method of murder. What most media outlets do not describe

is how Jesperson strangled his victims. According to Kruger, Justice and Hunt of Radford University, Keith liked to choke the women until they passed out, for then to wet them up and strangle them all over again. In at least one case, he is known to have forcefully shoved his entire fist down the mouth and into the esophagus of his victim, causing the woman to both suffocate

and drown in her own blood in july of nineteen ninety three another jane doe was found west of santa nela california on a state highway near a truck turnout the woman had been dead for only a couple of days when her body was found and a county coroner listed her death as a drug overdose

Her case would eventually be reopened and looked at as a homicide, after the Happy Face Killer wrote another letter and referred to her as a street person. The remains of what would be known as Victim No. 6 on the Happy Face Killer's list, another Jane Doe, was found more than a year later, on September 14th, 1994, west of Crestview, Florida.

along Interstate 10 by a road crew working in the Florida Panhandle. The remains consisted of mostly bones of a woman that investigators believe had been approximately 40 years old at the time of her death. Although her corpse would not be found until September 1995, 21-year-old Angela Subries of Oklahoma City would become Jesperson's seventh victim.

Until then, few people realized that Angela was even missing, much less dead, due to the transient lifestyle that she led. Angela suffered perhaps even more than other happy-face murder victims as she was first strangled unconscious. Keith famed in later interviews with criminologists that he was almost sure she was dead,

when he then strapped her body under his truck for them to drive off. This way, her face and prints would be grinded off by the asphalt. According to the reporter during the interview, Keith had a smile on his face when he said he was only almost sure she was dead before he strapped her under his truck. It wasn't until victim number eight

that Jesperson became careless by murdering someone he knew instead of a complete stranger. Julie Ann Winningham, 41 years old, of Camas, Washington, was believed to have been murdered on March 10, 1995, in Washougal, Washington, just a few miles east of Vancouver, Washington. Like the others, she had been strangled.

and her nude body had been dumped over an embankment alongside State Highway 14, just east of the Clark and Skamania County line. Unlike the others, Julie's friends and relatives knew that she had been seeing Jesperson, and provided the first valuable link, his name, that would aid investigators in apprehending one of the most notorious serial killers of the 1990s.

it didn't take long for detective buckner to learn of the cheyne trucking company for which heath jespersen worked company officials told buckner that he traveled all over the country and in the days immediately following winningham's death he was on the road to pennsylvania

The company officials provided Buckner with Jesperson's travel itinerary back toward the west coast, a route that would take him through Texas, New Mexico, and eventually to Arizona. By Wednesday, the 22nd of March, 1995, Buckner had traced Jesperson to Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city located in the southern part of the state near the Mexican border.

With the help of sheriff's deputies in Las Cruces, Buckner and another detective detained Jesperson for more than six hours and questioned him about the murder of Julie Winningham. By Jesperson's own account, Buckner and the other detective tried to get Jesperson to confess to Winningham's murder, but he wouldn't talk. Jesperson would later say that they kept asking him if he wanted to talk about it.

or if he desired an attorney present during the questioning. And when he said he did in fact want an attorney, they asked him why he needed one, whether he had done something that required a lawyer's assistance. Since he wouldn't talk, and lacking any concrete evidence to arrest him, the detectives had no choice but to release him. Afterward, Jesperson immediately headed for Arizona, and Buckner returned to Washington.

While in southern Arizona, Jesperson attempted to assign some kind of reason to the murders of the women he had killed. Or so he claimed. Unable to do so, he claims that he made two attempts at suicide. The first on the evening of March 22nd, and the second attempt the following evening, each time overdosing himself on over-the-counter sleeping pills.

Each time, he said, his buddy had rejected the pills. On March 24th, after apparently deciding that cops would nail him for Julie Winningham's murder and that he might fare considerably better with the judicial system if he turned himself in, Jesperson wrote a letter. The letter was addressed to his brother, and it read, in part, as I quote,

Seems like my luck has run out. I will never be able to enjoy life on the outside again. I got into a bad situation and got caught up with emotion. I killed a woman in my truck during an argument. With all the evidence against me, it looks like I truly am a black sheep. The court will appoint me a lawyer and there will be a trial. I'm sure they will kill me for this.

I am sorry that I turned out this way. I have been a killer for five years, and I've killed eight people, assaulted more. I guess I haven't learned anything. Dad always has worried about me because of what I have gone through, in the divorce, finances, etc. I've been taking it out on different people. As I saw it, I was hoping they would catch me. I took 48 sleeping pills last night, and I woke up well-rested.

The night before, I took two bottles of pills to no avail. They will arrest me today." Later that same night, after dropping the letters he had written into the mail, Jesperson called Detective Buckner from Cochise County, Arizona, and confessed to the murder of Julianne Winningham. According to Jesperson, he confessed to Winningham's murder because he knew that he would either be sentenced to life in prison or executed.

and in either case he would no longer be in a position where he would kill another woman. Six days later, Rick Buckner flew to Arizona to take Jesperson into his custody and return him to Washington State where he would be formally charged with Winningham's murder. According to what Jesperson would later write, Buckner purportedly told him, Wesley Allen Dodd once wore those saving cuffs.

Jesperson said in his writings that he thought to himself after Buckner's purported remarks, if he only knew what was in them now, he would faint. When he arrived in Washington, Jesperson called his brother and instructed him to destroy the letter that he had sent him. However, on the advice of a lawyer and Jesperson's father,

His brother decided to turn the letter over to the police, because they felt it was unlawful to hold onto or destroy evidence. Shortly after it was turned over to the police, the letter was published by a number of newspapers. Meanwhile, Buckner began transmitting information about Jesperson to law enforcement agencies around the nation. He provided information about Jesperson's confession,

and the letter that he had written to his brother, and inquired whether there were any jurisdictions that had any unsolved homicides that might fit into Jesperson's travel itineraries. Within days, Buckner's office received 16 responses from law enforcement agencies as far away as New York and Florida.

and the process of examining unsolved homicides in a number of states had begun. In addition to the several letters to the media confessing to various murders, his letter to his brother detailing his crimes, and his confession to the police, the prosecutors secured physical evidence as well.

According to the Marion County District Attorney's Office, investigators linked Jesperson to Laurie Ann Pentland's murder through DNA and other forensic evidence after learning that Jesperson was the Happy Face Killer. In October 1995, just before his trial was slated to begin, faced with a considerable burden of evidence against him,

Keith Jesperson pleaded guilty to the murder of Julianne Winningham before Clark County, Washington Superior Court Judge Robert L. Harris. Harris would sentence Jesperson to life in prison in December following proceedings in Oregon.

More than two years later, and considerable legal wrangling, the state of Wyoming finally succeeded in extraditing Jesperson for trial for the murder of Angela Subrise. For the next few months, as prosecutors prepared to go to trial, Jesperson taunted the authorities and threatened to force a costly trial by changing his story regarding the jurisdiction in which he had killed Angela.

At one point, he said that he had killed her in Wyoming, and at another point he claimed that he had killed her in Nebraska. After going back and forth for some time, surrounding Jesperson's deliberate misleading statements, in his attempt to confuse authorities on who had jurisdiction to prosecute him, a deal was worked out.

Jesperson agreed to plead guilty to murdering Angela Subrise in Wyoming if Laramie County prosecutors would agree to not seek the death penalty against him.

As a result, on June 3rd, 1998, District Judge Nicholas Kalukathes sentenced Jesperson to life in prison and ordered that the sentence run consecutive to the two life sentences in Oregon and the life sentence in Washington, leaving little doubt that he would die in prison.

Afterward, he was promptly returned to the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he is currently serving a life sentence. According to the U.S. Department of Corrections, his earliest date of possible parole is the 3rd of January, 2063. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, but if you do want to support me, it is greatly appreciated.

I have a Patreon account at patreon.com slash the Serial Killer Podcast, and any donation, no matter how small, helps a great deal in order for me to be able to do this podcast. And patrons are continuing to let themselves be known. Maud, Megan, Thomas, Linda, and Wendy, your patronage is duly noted. Thank you very much. I do appreciate it.

As always, if you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe to it. Finally, thank you, dear listener, for listening. Join me next time for another tale of serial murder. Good night and good luck.

Whoa, easy there. Yeah.

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