Keith Hunter Jesperson (born April 6, 1955) is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s.

Upset that he was not getting any media attention, Jesperson drew a smiley face on a bathroom wall hundreds of miles from the scene of the Bennett killing and wrote an anonymous letter confessing to the murder, providing proof.

[3] Treated like a black sheep by his own family, and teased by other children for his large size, Jesperson was a lonely child who showed a propensity for torturing and killing animals.

Jesperson would capture birds and strays around the trailer park where he lived with his family, severely beating the animals and then strangling them to death, something for which he claims his father was proud of him.

In 1975, when Jesperson was aged 20, he married Rose Hucke, and the couple had three children: two daughters Melissa and Carrie and one son Jason.

Tension in the marriage increased, and after fourteen years, while Jesperson was on the road, Hucke packed up her children and belongings and drove 200 miles (322 km) to live with her parents in Spokane, Washington.

[8] At age 35, standing 6 feet 7 inches (2.01 m) and weighing approximately 255 pounds (116 kg),[9] Jesperson began working toward the goal of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), but an injury suffered while training ended this endeavor.

On 30 August 1992, the currently-unidentified body of a woman Jesperson had raped and strangled was found near Blythe, California, United States.

His fourth victim was another sex worker, Laurie Ann Pentland of Salem, Oregon, whose body was found in November 1992.

This led police agencies in several states to reopen old cases, many of which were found to be possible victims of Jesperson.

[16] Although Jesperson at one point claimed to have had as many as 160 victims,[17] only the eight women killed in Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Nebraska, and Wyoming have been confirmed.

[21] On 7 January 1996, more than five years after their conviction, Pavlinac and Sosnovske were released from prison after Jesperson and his attorney offered his confession with convincing evidence of his guilt.

[22] Following Bennett's murder, as all the attention was going to Pavlinac and Sosnovske, Jesperson wrote a confession on the bathroom wall of a truck stop and signed it with a smiley face.

[8][17] This led Phil Stanford, the journalist working the story for The Oregonian, to dub Jesperson "The Happy Face Killer".

[23] She was also featured on an episode of Evil Lives Here, The Oprah Winfrey Show,[24] the Lifetime Movies network series Monster in My Family,[25][26] and a 20/20 special on ABC.

Their house bordered an apple orchard, and Jesperson killed stray cats and gophers that wandered nearby.

[29] In March 2018, she was featured in an episode, titled "Put on a Happy Face", of the Investigation Discovery true crime series Evil Lives Here.

[30][31] In September 2018, podcast network HowStuffWorks began releasing a show called Happy Face[32] featuring interviews with Melissa about her childhood and her father.

In June 2021, a trailer appeared on iTunes for a new true crime podcast called Life After Happy Face, to be hosted by Melissa Moore and forensic criminologist Laura Pettler.