“That’s not true,” Jesperson told me. “I had met Snooky several times before this day. That story was trumped up later on, published in the papers. Just another one of those recollections of people after they realized I was the infamous Happy Face serial killer. It never happened that way.”
By the first week of March 1995, when he stopped with Julie by her mother’s house in Camas, Jesperson was a man filled with increasing inner chaos, a bloodlust pumping through his veins. He had killed seven thus far, three Jane Does among them, along with Angela Subrize, the woman he strangled and dragged underneath his Peterbilt. Paranoia drove every Jesperson emotion, thought, and decision by this point. There was not going to be a woman who crossed paths with him, made Jesperson the least bit angry, and lived to talk about it. He’d hit his stride as a killer and had little control over his rage.
“I hated myself. Every time I killed, I told myself it was the last time. I wanted it to end. I was thinking then about turning myself in, mostly just to stop it all.”
He had suicide on his mind, too.
With an addiction to violence and acting on impulse governing his life, although he considered admitting to his crimes, Jesperson feared walking through any door, stepping out of his truck, or paying a dining bill at a rest stop, turning around, and finding himself in the clutches of waiting cops. His antisocial behavior was now controlling his life. The only obstacle standing in the way of Happy Face committing suicide and ending the desperation he claimed to have felt—an attribute many serial killers in this regard lack—was the guts to get the job done.
Julie Winningham came across as a pretty, wholesome forty-one-year-old housewife next door. Jesperson was attracted to this quality. She appeared clean-cut, but could fulfill most of his sexual fantasies, however dirty or twisted. Jesperson was into duct-taping his victims’ mouths, securing their arms behind their back, and having his way with them. As he evolved as a pervert and killer, each murder became darker and more sadomasochistic.
Julie wore her brownish-blond hair in a bouffant, and its shiny, thick texture accentuated her tanned skin and arresting, sky-blue eyes. She’d divorced a trucker in the years leading up to meeting Jesperson. Happy Face ran into Julie in 1993 at a truck stop and began dating her on and off. Born and raised in Washougal, Clark County, Washington, Julie personified that Northwestern Pacific charm Jesperson had come to find favorable in his women. He picked up Julie from time to time while on the road whenever he traveled through the state, if only to use her as a sexual partner during the trip. He frequented prostitutes, yet loathed the notion of spending money for sex, feeling it was beneath him.
“And with Julie, I didn’t have to pay her for sex, so it was perfect.”
Julie had traveled with Jesperson for a week in his truck once. Scheduled to head east on a run, however, and not wanting to take her along, Jesperson found Julie a room with a friend, where she stayed, according to Jesperson, for “a few months” while he worked (and committed an additional murder).
The guy Julie roomed with was a family man. Jesperson called from the road to find out how things were going. His friend said, “Hey, man, she needs to go.” Julie was too much trouble. She might have come across as the girl next door, but she was a full-fledged partier. “She’s corrupting my family.”
Jesperson picked Julie up and, dropping her off in Clark County, said his good-byes, telling Julie he’d see her around. By then, he was fed up with Julie and needed—“for her sake”—to put as much distance as possible between them.
“She went to Utah, Salt Lake City, I think.”
One of the first points Jesperson made when we got to talking about Julie was how “hard” it had been for him in 1993, after the incident involving his friend, “to walk away from her without ending her life.” She had embarrassed him. He wanted to kill her then, but he decided against it for reasons he didn’t know himself.
After parting ways in 1993, it became “impossible” for Jesperson to “avoid” Julie. Every few weeks, no matter where he parked, there she was—quite a common theme whenever he described the excuse of “fate” and “karma” playing a role in his murders: They were there. What could I do? Julie was, same as several Happy Face victims, a piece of rotting fruit on a counter Jesperson forced himself to walk by—and she needed to be discarded. In his damaged way of viewing himself in the world, Julie magnified Jesperson’s failures. As he saw it, she and the others brought out the beast within, thus everything Julie did while around him became a check in the wrong box. Sex with Julie, he told me, “always came with a price.”
Knowing her for two years by the time he and Julie visited her mother in early March 1995, Jesperson said, “I’m [at her mother’s] and I’m very surprised I hadn’t killed her by now.” He’d once wanted a relationship with Julie. Feeling it wasn’t worth the effort, when “I saw her that March. I saw her out of lust. I had time to party with her. Maybe too much idle time to think too much into what she meant to me.”
“What did she mean to you?” I asked.
“She wasn’t more than a romp in the sack.” He claimed Julie “gave off two sides of herself—an image to some people was not what she showed to others.”
He believed Julie viewed him as a free ticket, a ride, someone with money to hang around and party with. Yet, he could have been talking about any of his victims, with the exception of Bennett. Under Jesperson’s code of conduct, they were all out to use him and walk away.
By 1995, “I had become not a good person.” Jesperson grew “angrier and angrier” by the day “at how things were happening.” He was “mad at life in general.” The silver lining, perhaps keeping him from going entirely off the rails, became his kids. “The love for my kids kept me going to try to support them. The sinking ship was about sunk, though. My murders were consuming me.”
Back inside the truck after visiting her mother, Julie explained that she had a court date coming up and needed Jesperson to take care of it for her.
Jesperson had just told his boss he wanted a load to drive east and had been waiting for the trip to come in. He’d decided Julie wasn’t going with him.
“I need your help,” she said. “Do you not hear me?”
Jesperson looked at Julie. “I know of one way to get you out of your court date.”
“Thanks.”
The man who had murdered seven women turned and looked at his on-again, off-again girlfriend and smiled.
“And I knew right then that Julie would not have to worry about court.”
*
“COME IN, SIT DOWN.” His office was much smaller than I would have assumed a guy specializing in all types of cancers worked in. Clean as a sacristy, but also cramped, with lots of dark-colored, cherrywood furniture, which, same as a funeral home, gave me the creeps.