I explained to him whenever we spoke that there were major problems in accusing cops and prosecutors of wrongdoing and bias in the Bennett case: Namely, Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske had admitted to the murder and were convicted by a jury. What cop would not take a confession with details of the crime and facts about the crime scene from two suspects claiming they had committed it? “I didn’t plan to kill her,” Laverne Pavlinac had said during her trial while crying on the witness stand. “I didn’t mean to.... It’s my fault. . . .”
How much more evidence does a cop, prosecutor, or jury need? Pavlinac came across as a grandmother: fifty-seven years old, gray hair, large tortoiseshell glasses, a calm and gentle demeanor. After Bennett’s body was found and the media reported it, she first told police while calling in an anonymous tip that Sosnovske had “bragged about the crime” to her. Then, after failing to get the response she desired (Sosnovske’s arrest), she met with investigators and told them flat-out Sosnovske had murdered Bennett, whose body had been found near the bank of the Columbia River Gorge. Bennett had been strangled and beaten to death, a ligature tied around her neck. Her face had been so brutalized the medical examiner (ME) could not at first tell if she was male or female, Caucasian or African American. Her pants were down around her ankles, her panties still on. Some reports claimed she was raped. (“There was some vaginal trauma,” the prosecutor, Jim McIntyre, told me.) A piece of her jeans—the button fly—had been cut out and Pavlinac had produced what appeared to be that missing piece of Bennett’s jeans, along with Bennett’s purse, which Pavlinac claimed to have found in the trunk of her car after Sosnovske had used it on the night Bennett went missing. She told police she and Sosnovske met Bennett at a Portland bar, and Sosnovske forced her to help him rape and kill Bennett and dispose of her body.
When Jim McIntyre heard Pavlinac utter those words in open court, he pointed at her and told jurors: “You listen to those words and that emotion and you will look at Laverne Pavlinac and see the face of a murderer.”
Every piece of evidence, at least from the jury’s perspective, fit. Laverne Pavlinac was tried and convicted in 1991. John Sosnovske, scared of facing the death penalty, took a plea bargain months later.
“And I had a free ticket to continue killing,” Jesperson told me. “I saw this on the news [in 1991] and could not believe it. I had killed this woman and these two had not only admitted to it, but were in prison for the murder.”
3
A DARK MIND
“The answer is that we don’t choose our freaks, they
choose us.”
—Steve Almond, Candyfreak
INTRODUCED MYSELF TO JESPERSON IN A LETTER DATED SEPTEMBER 5, 2011. Between then and late 2016, I maintained consistent and constant contact with him, resulting in over 600 letters he wrote to me, culminating in approximately 7,000 pages of text. I have received twenty to thirty pages of letters per week (some of which remained unopened until I started writing this book, simply because I did not have the emotional fortitude or time to keep reading the ramblings from a mind unhinged). We spoke on the phone weekly for most of the five years, sometimes three or four times per week.
Serial killers suck the life out of the people around them. They harbor an effortless capability of donning what psychopathy pioneer and psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley coined in 1941 as “the mask of sanity.” It was Cleckley’s work before his death in 1984 that flexed Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare’s mental muscle enough to develop his Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R): twenty characteristics defining psychopathic behavior. Used properly, the PCL-R checklist is an accurate way to determine the psychopath from the non-psychopath.
At first, it was difficult for me to toss out any preconceived notions—He’s just plain evil—I had about Happy Face and enter into a new way of critical and clinical thinking. What I realized during those early months while talking to him was that Jesperson, a teenage coal miner (among other blue-collar jobs he held) from Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada, loved who he has become in the spectrum of American crime history. He relished his identity of being known in and out of prison as an infamous serial killer, a label that both defines and gives him an identity of celebrity status many serials crave. He projected the notion that his story is the serial killer story all others should be modeled after and studied. The obsessive nature of his personality was obvious in the way he steered nearly every comment and analysis about justice and the legal system toward his argument that “two innocent people were arrested, convicted, and sentenced for a murder I committed” because of manipulation and a cover-up. That so-called injustice was the point of launch for Jesperson’s entire existence today.
As Jim McIntyre pointed out to me during a conversation, without the controversy surrounding Jesperson’s first murder and two people being arrested, convicted, and sent to prison for four years for a crime he committed, the Happy Face moniker (a total media creation, according to Jesperson), and additional misconceptions about what he’s done, Keith Jesperson is just another serial murderer doing time. He would be a Mr. Nobody, a pathological liar, and a con. After all, there are over one hundred serial killers, sans nicknames and notoriety, unknown to most, serving time in American prisons. The arrest and conviction of Laverne and John, Jesperson agreed, turned him into Happy Face, the diabolical serial murderer, and forced him into behaviors he would have never considered, including the “Happy Face” letters he wrote to the media, the cat-and-mouse ploy with law enforcement that followed, many of his big lies, and, especially, the smiley face he doodled on a letter one day that has become his legacy.
I asked Jesperson if he considered himself a freak of nature, abnormal.
“No,” he said. I could tell the question made him mad.
“Explain.”
“Freaky people are people out of the norm. A misunderstood person is someone who is different than someone else. We [serial killers] have our way of looking at things, and if we don’t look at things the way ‘normal’ people do, we’re considered an off-lander, a freak.”
I asked if he thought he was misunderstood.
“All the time.”
“In what way?”
“I look at things differently than a lot of people do because I have an open mind—I don’t have a closed mind. A lot of people have this closed idea of what life should be. I’ve seen both sides of it. I feel that I understand it differently.”
“How is it that I misunderstand you?”
“Well, you’re not a murderer. You take the stance of law and order. You cannot understand a killer’s concepts one hundred percent. You try to, but you are caught between a rock and a hard place because you never crossed that line into murder.”
Utterly ridiculous, I thought, without telling him.