How often have you watched something on TV or read an article, shaken your head in disbelief and said… “Only in America, could that happen?”
Well, I heard those exact words this weekend from a serial killer who remained free while someone else confessed to, and was arrested for his crime.
The History Channel featured a fascinating programme called American Justice that took a probing look at an unusual serial killer who was known as The Happy Face Killer.
Criminal psychologists say that for all their horror and brutality, serial killers are often a predictable lot. Nearly all share certain characteristics: abuse as children, urges to set fires and violence against women. But The Happy Face Killer defied these stereotypes, and it helped him remain free for five years.
Keith Jesperson was by all accounts a pretty normal guy, from a pretty normal family and background. He never went to college, but seemed more at ease with doing practical things. He married, had three children and then divorced his wife after 13 years of marriage. There were no incidents or accounts of violence reported during his marriage.
But then his life changed. Without any roots or encumbrances he became a long distance truck driver and spent months at a time on the road, moving from one state to another.
One evening while in a bar he watched a young woman named Tanya playing pool. She was 23 years old, pretty and was described as being “a little retarded.” Jesperson invited her to dinner and she agreed, but he said he needed to go back to his place to get some more money.
She accompanied him and when they arrived at his place, he kissed her and tried to unzip her pants. It seems the woman was not unwilling but she told him “to hurry up and get it done because she was hungry.”
I know that’s not exactly sexy talk, but it freaked Jesperson out completely. In his interview he said, “he just snapped,” and hit her. It got really ugly, ending up with a rape and her being beaten and strangled to death. Jesperson dumped the body about 15 miles out of town in a wooded gorge. He wasn’t the type to take too much care and guessed that it might take a few days before they found her body. He was wrong, it was discovered the next day and made public in the press.
Then the most bizarre thing happened.
An elderly grandmother aged 57 contacted the police and told them that her live in lover, a man of 43, had murdered the woman. She said that she had overheard him talking about this murder and that he was the perpetrator. The police set about questioning this man but were not convinced.
The crazy thing was this elderly woman had been in an abusive relationship with this man and all she wanted to do was to get him arrested and out of her life. So she made up the false confession. When the police remained unconvinced she became desperate and contacted them again. This time she said she hadn’t been completely truthful and that she had also been involved in the murder. She spun the cops a story that she had been there when her boyfriend had sex with the woman and he had killed and dumped her. The investigating officers were still dubious but they couldn't ignore a confession of that type, and they had the woman take them to the site to identify where the body had been dumped.
As it turned out, neither of the policemen gave anything away about the location, either with words or with body language. The woman went with them, told them to stop at the designated point and pointed out an area within a couple of metres of where the body had been found. The press had indicated the general area of where the body was found but bizarrely she had pointed out almost the exact place. This was all a mammoth effort to get her boyfriend arrested, but it backfired with her “confessions.” She was now an accessory to murder.
Eventually when she saw that she was about to really be indicted for murder, the grandmother admitted that she had made it all up in an attempt to get rid of her abusive boyfriend, but by then it was too late. A jury found her guilty of murder based on all the circumstantial evidence and her original confessions
Both her and the boyfriend were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment.
As the killer said… “Only in America.”
Jesperson had gotten off free, but he was not happy.
It irked him that the media attention had fallen away from him with the “solving” of this crime and that he had not got any credit for it. So one day, at one of the truck stops he wrote a message on a bathroom wall, along with all of the other graffiti that was there. In it he said that he was in fact the murderer of this girl and that the police had the wrong people in jail. He ended off by saying, "Now that the wrong people were arrested, he was free… free to kill again."
And kill again he did.
He began picking up prostitutes, raping them, beating them up and strangling them to death. Not necessarily in that exact order either. I got the idea that sometimes the beatings and the strangulation happened before the sex, but let’s not split hairs here. This guy was one brutal and disturbed dude. All six foot seven inches of him.
Over a period of five years he killed seven more women.
The police had not made the link that it was all the work of one man, since his job kept him moving from place to place. However Jesperson was getting pissed off by the fact that he was not getting the publicity he deserved.
While in Oregan, he sent an anonymous letter to the local newspaper in which he said that he was the killer of Tanya and once again reiterated that they had the wrong people behind bars. He even gave a clue that her buttons had been torn off her jeans ( a fact that was true but had never been reported). In addition he said that he had killed more women and would continue to do so. He signed off the letter with some drawings of happy smiling faces.
From then on he became known as “The Happy Face Killer.”
Handwriting experts verified that the same person who had scrawled on the bathroom wall at the truck stop had written the letter to the newspaper since the handwriting matched. They now realized they had a possible killer and a complete whacko on their hands.
Strangely Jesperson changed his modus operandi and it was the killing of a woman that he knew and not some unknown prostitute that finally got him caught.
Julie Winningham, a woman who was also a truck driver had got involved in a regular type relationship with Keith Jesperson. According to him, one evening they had an argument over money and “he snapped.” He beat her, strangled her until she passed out, drove her out to some woods, raped her and then killed her before dumping her body in a gorge.
When her body was discovered her mother put police on Jesperson’s trail.She had never actually met him but had once got a glimpse of him in the truck when he came to fetch Julie. The mother recalled that he was huge with big hands and had taken up the whole front of the truck cab. On going through Julie’s papers they found an agreement for the sale of a car on which Keith Jesperson had signed as a witness.
The police finally had a name. They called him in for questioning and surprisingly let him go afterwards. Jesperson decided to go back the following day to confess his crime and all the other crimes too. But he seemed obsessed with making sure that it was reported in the media.
The police refused to believe his claims on the first murder of Tanya as they had two people who had been tried and sentenced for it. Eventually Jesperson gave them details about where exactly he had thrown her purse and her identification card. When the specified area was searched they found the purse and the card exactly where he said he had tossed it.
Jesperson’s defence attorney said he had never had to fight so hard in all his life to prove that his client was guilty!
Jesperson was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 and still has an obsession with media attention and publicity. As such the prison authorities no longer allow face to face interviews with him and all interviews that take place, including the one done for the History Channel, are done telephonically.
The police inspectors who arrested the wrong people live with their sense of failure and have regrets that they were perhaps too hasty in wanting the crime solved. In so doing, they sent innocent people to jail.
What can you do when so-called 'normal' people go on killing sprees and crazy old ladies confess to crimes they didn’t commit? You do the best you can under the circumstances.
But still… This could only happen in America!