I reiterated that McIntyre said Laverne was an expert at pulling information out of detectives to support her story. She was a woman on a mission.
“The only person framed was John, by Laverne,” McIntyre said.
Was it possible that Laverne somehow got hold of a file while being questioned? Maybe they left it on the table for her? The fact is, she sold detectives a hell of a story and they (along with a jury) bought it and convicted her.
“Look, there’s no way to prove they told her about the evidence—unless they admit it. Get over it,” I told Jesperson. “You need to let this go. Move on!”
“I know Keith Jesperson for what he is,” McIntyre told me. “He is not even worth my time anymore. There’s a double tragedy in the Bennett case. Laverne was able to convince us and be convicted at trial”—which closed the Bennett case. “So nobody continued to investigate, as we should have, which might have led to Jesperson. And Jesperson [later] gets up on his bullshit high horse and begins to confess, but how many others were killed between Taunja Bennett and the time he confessed.... What’s documented? Four? Five?”
I corrected the prosecutor, “Seven.”
There was silence on the phone for a brief moment.
McIntyre told me he believed Jesperson added a few more bodies to his total to make himself appear more notorious. Because Jesperson relished becoming Happy Face, he bolstered the number and lied about other details surrounding the murders to make himself appear to be more like Bundy or the Green River Killer. Whenever he talked about other well-known serials, Jesperson played down their notoriety and how smart they came across. Anytime I mentioned a case I was looking into, how calculating or crafty a particular serial killer had been at avoiding capture, he’d distill the comment down to, “He’s not smart, Phelps—just lucky.” Jesperson was envious and jealous of other serial killers.
Jesperson laughed when I relayed the McIntyre information to him: “I’ve taken polygraph tests and passed every one.”
“Did he skip over the part where he recanted his confession?” McIntyre asked, referring to interviews with Happy Face in Bend, Oregon, conducted after his arrest. “He told them some wild story about killing some woman and that he lied about everything in the Bennett case?”
“I’ve lied about a lot,” Jesperson responded.
McIntyre believes Jesperson made up the story of dragging Angela Subrize’s body underneath his truck for twelve miles to make himself appear more diabolical, adding that shredded body parts would have been splayed over the road, but law enforcement found no such thing.
“That scenario was completely a lie,” McIntyre told me. “The body would have shown wear signs of being ground on the road itself.”
Jesperson said a “coroner would confirm that’s what it was. Body parts? I don’t know! I mean, I wasn’t behind the truck watching.”
“You have to come clean here with me,” I told him. “If you made that up, you have to be honest with me. Please. Let’s set the record straight. If you perpetrated a lie to build yourself up, I want you to admit it—that’s big.”
He grew angry. I felt had we been in a different situation, maybe alone and outside the prison, I would have seen that volcanic rage I knew was inside him.
“I. Don’t. Care. I did drag the body.... I described the case as it is and I’m not going to deviate. I don’t give a shit about big. I want truth.”
“He has a strong moral compass, you didn’t know that?” McIntyre commented in jest, adding how he once asked Jesperson in court about drinking and driving. “I looked at him and, talking about that night with Bennett at the B and I, asked, ‘You were in a bar, had you been drinking before you drove home?’ He then sat bolt upright in the chair, like I had shot his dog, looked at me, and said, ‘I never drink and drive.’ He was righteously offended that I had made the assumption. That was his morality—the women he killed didn’t matter, but the drinking and driving, that was a big deal.”
“It was a big deal for me,” Jesperson responded. “I never wanted to be a drunk driver like my father. . . . I didn’t want to be anything like that man.”
I told McIntyre that Jesperson was adamant about never having raped any of his victims.
“Oh, that’s a lie! In his first interview with us, he admitted that she [Bennett] said something to him about the size of his penis and he punched her in the face—and it all went downhill from there. She laughed at him and he punched her, and that’s when he started choking her out.”
“No,” Jesperson’s lawyer, Thomas Phelan, told me, laughing in response to McIntyre’s comment about Jesperson’s penis. “I’ve never heard that.” What set Jesperson off, Phelan insisted, “was Bennett’s lack of being enamored with him. Her lack of wanting him.”
Further, when I asked Phelan if the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) ever went to Jesperson after his arrest and asked him to “take other cases” they wanted to close, as Jesperson maintained to me, Phelan said, “No, there was never a conversation between me and McIntyre or anyone else in the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office about other cases they wanted to close.”
*
IN A LETTER ANONYMOUSLY sent in May 1994 to the Oregonian, the publication that dubbed him the “Happy Face Killer,” Jesperson admitted binding and raping several of his victims “again and again.” In that same letter, Jesperson doodled a “Happy Face at the top of the first page, two tiny circles for eyes, an upturned sliver of a moon for a mouth,” along with the note: “Have a nice daaay.” That one scribble was enough to tag him with the infamous nickname.
In the letter, Jesperson explained how he took “Sonja [sic] Bennett home . . . [and] raped her and beat her real bad . . . ,” before saying it “turned me on. I got high.” Jesperson sent this letter to the paper, he claimed, because he was upset that two people had taken credit for his first murder. He had killed five in total by then. “I want the world to know that it [Bennett] was my crime. So I tied a half-inch soft white rope around her neck. I drove her to a switchback on the scenic road . . . dragged her downhill. Her pants were around her knees because I had cut her buttons off.” These were details only the killer could have known. Thus, the letter, along with a call from Thomas Phelan, sparked an inquiry into reevaluating Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske’s convictions.
Jesperson, no doubt wanting more credit, described additional victims: