Credit: Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department
In July 2007, serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson—also known as the Happy Face Killer—confessed and was convicted of felony first degree homicide in the June 1993 sexual assault and murder of a woman along a dirt turnout on Highway 152 in Santa Nella, California.
Although investigators found her body on the side of the road on June 3, 1993, they could not find her name. Until now.
On April 13, 2022—29 years after her murder— the DNA Doe Project (DDP) and cold case detectives at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department identified the once-unknown woman as Patricia Skiple. She is believed to be Jesperson’s fifth victim—of eight. Two victims, one found in Blythe, California and another in Crestview, Florida, are still unidentified.
Arrest and confessions
Although Jesperson has claimed to have killed as many as 185 people, only eight murders over a 5-year span have been confirmed—a number that matches what Jesperson confessed to his brother days before his arrest.
Jesperson was arrested on March 30, 1995 for the murder of his former girlfriend Julie Winningham just weeks before. Their previous relationship caused the police to question him, although they had no grounds to arrest him at the time. However, Jesperson became convinced he was going to be arrested and turned himself in, hoping for leniency. It was then Jesperson began revealing details of his other killings, and making false claims of many others.
In 2006, after already serving years of his consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary, Jesperson submitted a letter to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office admitting to the sexual assault and killing of an unknown female, who we now know was Skiple, along Highway 152. A year later, he was convicted of this murder.
Genealogy provides a lead
The lead in the Skiple case, however, didn’t come until 2019 during a routine follow-up by cold case detectives at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department. They decided to partner with DNA Doe Project, hoping investigative genetic genealogy could be used to identify victim number 5. DNA Doe Project started researching genetic matches right away, finally arriving at a likely candidate in 2021.
“This case was exceptionally challenging due to recent Norwegian ancestry, which resulted in very distant DNA matches on GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA,” said DNA Doe Project team leader Cairenn Binder. “It would not have been possible to solve this case without the dedication of our law enforcement partners at Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, especially Sergeant Shannon Catalano, whose tenacious efforts to solve the case made our job as genealogists as effective as possible.”
According to DDP, Catalano made the most of the information they discovered through genealogy, contacting potential family members and encouraging them to voluntarily upload their DNA profiles to GEDmatch.
On April 13, 2022, after pursuing multiple leads, the cold case detectives were finally able to identify Skiple, confirming the identification through DNA testing.
“Every single DNA match made a difference in this difficult case,” said DDP team leader Harmony Bronson.
Two more unidentified victims
Ultimately, Jesperson was tied to the strangulation killings of eight woman between January 1990 and March 1995.
His first victim was Taunja Bennett, a 21-year-old he met in a bar in Portland, Oregon. On January 21, 1990, after taking her to his rental place, they got in an argument. Jesperson then raped her and strangled her to death before disposing of her body.
Early in the investigation into Bennett’s murder, a woman named Laverne Pavlinac came forward to confess, saying she murdered Bennett with and at the direction of her abusive boyfriend, John Sosnovske. Pavlinac and Sosnovske were both arrested on March 5, 1990, and both convicted of the murder on Feb. 8, 1991. After sentencing, Pavlinac admitted to the false confession, but her claims were ignored.
Presumably miffed that Pavlinac and Sosnovske were receiving attention for his murder of Bennett, Jesperson began to write letters to media outlets and police departments confessing to his murders. His first letter was a six-page document sent to The Oregonian in which he revealed the details of his killings. Jesperson signed each letter with a smiley face, prompting the Happy Face Killer moniker.
At this time, there are still two unidentified victims of the Happy Face Killer. Jesperson’s second victim, who he calls Claudia, was found murdered on Aug. 30, 1992 in Blythe, California. Jesperson says he met “Claudia” at a truck stop and agreed to give her a ride before turning on her, raping and strangling her. In September 1994, another Jane Doe was found in Crestview, Florida. Jesperson claims her name was Susanne, and that he raped and strangled her the same way he did the others.