Full Transcript for Happy Face

said, I. After I killed her, I went to McDonald's and I sat down, I bought I bought myself a meal, and I bought her meal. And I came back out on the truck and I said it right there in front of her, she's dead. And then after I done, I I I ate her meal. I said, see, if you wouldn't have got me off looking Maddie, or you could hate something, why do you think you caught her a meal? What was the way of part of your mind pretending that they were still life like? He didn't want to kill? Well, I don't know if that's the case. That's where you come in. 00:04:04 Speaker 4: For so much of our story, the Happy Face Killer has existed almost as a specter, a background entity that looms over everything. We know about Keith's childhood, his wife and family, and we've heard from his victims' families. We talk about Keith almost in passing like a boogeyman, but the fact is he's real. He is a serial killer, and as Melissa works to distance herself from Keith's legacy, we wanted insight into the psychopathy that drives him and to hear about it in his own words. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is Happy Face. One of the things that's so jarring about Keith is that he comes across as almost earnest at times, like he honestly wants to be helpful. Here's Keith again, talking to al Carlisle. 00:05:09 Speaker 3: Well, this is what I'm giving you is helping you? 00:05:12 Speaker 8: It is? 00:05:13 Speaker 3: It is because I've always been very direct, I think, and a lot of people can't understand why I want to be direct. They think I should like the biggest consensus in this prison. They say, well, you're talking to a psychologists or I'm talking to a movie deal or I'm talking to it said well, are they paying you? And I said no, no not. They said, well I wouldn't tell anything. I said, well, then how do you get the truth out? I mean, does it have to have a price tag to it? I mean that's why interviews with convicts they put a price tag while we're going to pay fifty thousand dollars. It taints the truth. And I look at it this way as that I fucked up. I did. I mean I know I did. I threw my life away pretty much except for a prison life, and you have a good life in prison. But I look at it the truth means if it hers also what you know, at least anything I can do to make people understand. 00:06:12 Speaker 4: It isn't just strangers and journalists who could be under Keith's spell. Melissa too used to feel it. 00:06:18 Speaker 9: His air of certainty definitely played a part in other people believing in him and why probably his victims believed in him and trusted him over their own voices. And that's something that's been very difficult for me, is trusting my own intuition. When someone seems to have the answers and seems to know with certainty where things are going, and if I don't feel right about it, to trust myself over the appearance of confidence. 00:06:48 Speaker 5: And that's something that's been difficult to navigate. 00:06:51 Speaker 9: But my dad was very much that he exuded confidence and certainty and whatever he said was truth and you can rely upon it and you could trust it, but. 00:07:03 Speaker 5: Not really. 00:07:06 Speaker 4: It was Phil Stamford, crime reporter for The Oregonian, who first coined the name happy Face almost playful, almost a little too disarming for the monster behind the symbol. 00:07:19 Speaker 5: A lot of people ask me, how did your dad get the name the happy face serial killer? And I believe it came after your series of articles and maybe you could explain that to me. 00:07:32 Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I guess you could say I named him in those articles, But in another sense, he named himself putting a little happy face on that letter. I mean, that's that's strange stuff. Someone's confessing to five murders and the little happy face, which is have a nice day. There's a serious disjuncture in a personality like that, Isn't it stuck. The reason there's a good nickname is that it was really true. There was something about it. The killer who signed his letters with a happy face. Murders like this are fascinating because their acts of compulsion. He didn't plan to do it, there was nothing he could gain from it. He did it for reasons he didn't understand. And that's I guess why serial killers who just kill for the sake of killing are so fascinating to us. What struck me when I was sitting across from him in the Clark County jail. Here's this big, slightly you know, dull, very slow moving person who wasn't a threat to me. He wouldn't be a threat to most people. He was a threat to women who sort of triggered something in him. And when that happened, something else came out. 00:09:12 Speaker 5: You know, there's this quote that I've heard from Margaret Atwood, and she has said men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. That's our deepest fear. And when I heard that quote, I thought, that's something my dad, you know, the greatest fear of women laughing. When women laughed at my dad or rejected my dad. Correct, that's when he seemed to snap. 00:09:40 Speaker 7: Correct, because he didn't kill everybody he was with, not every woman. It was spread out a little bit. You know. It was when someone hit that correct button, whatever come out of their mouth that shouldn't have in his fantasy or his reality, that was the cutoff for her. 00:10:01 Speaker 3: Well, I listened to their the way they talked about life and the way they treated people on Sydney Roase. I didn't give her a chance to talk. That was just a brutal murder. The other ones that were with me for any given time, as soon as they opened their mouth and they had other alternative motives behind it, they acted like men were pieces of shit anywhere and they need to be used. And that's when they came up with that kind of a scenario. I kind of like, I had no feelings for them. I just threw my feelings to the wind. That was That was kind of I would say, what kind of a trigger was the

fact that they had they thought that they were the ones controlling or that they were going to manipulate whoever they wanted to. They'd give a shit who it was. And they're so arrogant when they talked. They didn't care who that I heard about it. They just figured I was so much interested in their body that I'd look past that. 00:10:53 Speaker 4: And Despite the brutality of these crimes, a pattern emerged with several of the people we spoke to that Keith was quiet, cooperative, and in many ways came across as almost pleasant, But ultimately Keith was only concerned with getting attention for his crimes. Here's Jim McNelly, retired detective from the Multinoma County Sheriff's Department. 00:11:18 Speaker 5: What do you remember hearing about jessperson my dad before you met him? 00:11:24 Speaker 10: Not alive, just that he was anxious to talk. And that's where we got him, picked him up in Vancouver and brought him down and did some driver around looking. 00:11:38 Speaker 5: When did you actually meet him and how did you size him up in person? 00:11:43 Speaker 10: The only interaction I had with your dad was when I talked to him in the penitentiary, and I found your dad to be pretty charming. 00:11:53 Speaker 3: Actually, I learned technique if he was taking my fist, because when you hang on to somebody, irons get tangent. It's extremely tired because the muscles are trying to push away and you're fighting. The body is very resilient, so you have to stay away from the muscle tissue. You have to go directly to the Larnux right in the vocal part. So I laid a fist like this, and I locked my elbow and I just pushed down on it and with my elbow locked, and I can just take away the time I listened to her, I smelled I was waiting for the smell of urination, and uh, I was just watching the time like I was just waiting for my dates. 00:12:36 Speaker 2: Yea. 00:12:40 Speaker 5: In your opinion, what drove his need to confess guilt or attention? 00:12:47 Speaker 2: I think it's attention. 00:12:49 Speaker 10: And I say that because he just was so upfront with everything, and when he's speaking to the sheriff from my la you made come in about getting ready to leave. I know a lot about this stuff and you need more. 00:13:02 Speaker 8: Help among death. 00:13:06 Speaker 5: That seems pretty arrogant, though that he's an expert. 00:13:10 Speaker 10: He wants attention as what he wants. 00:13:13 Speaker 3: I played that back and forth in my mind for months, even especially when Detective Buckner in June of ninety five, when I hadn't he exploited everyone. Well, we think we have the happy face killer in prison in County jail here, and I arrested him, you know, so let's speak. I knew the glory seekers were out there and they wanted to prove that I was this person, and I felt, well, why should they have the glory of proving it when I can just say I did it anyway, And they lose that glory, they lose all their their chances of proving anything. 00:13:48 Speaker 4: And here's Chris Peterson, also a retired detective from the Moltnomah County Sheriff's Department. 00:13:55 Speaker 5: When did you actually meet my father and what did you think when you when you saw him? 00:14:00 Speaker 8: I met him in the Clark County jail, and this was after he was telling cellmates that he had killed someone in Mullo McCanny. And there was nothing particularly unique about meeting him when I did meet him, because he was one of hundreds of inmates that I had gone into the jail the interview. So I went to talk to your father with a very serious doubt about the accuracy of what he was claiming. And there was nothing particularly impressive about him or memorable. I mean, he was a great big guy that was very calm and collected and was not macho, and didn't swear and didn't use a lot of jail terminology because he hadn't been. 00:14:41 Speaker 3: In jail a lot there's a constant even though I know the cops really don't know who I am, but I still have to think in the back of my mind that they're looking. And I have to worry about what people see all the time, even though I know they don't see me as the murderer I am. See me as a nice guy or someone that is just there. You know, I'm just I don't look out of an ordinary I was like an rormany guy, just doing my job and going on with business. 00:15:10 Speaker 8: In my career, I worked with violent offenders on a regular basis. Your dad did not fit that profile in terms of his demeanor, in terms of his appearance, in terms of his vocabulary. He was a farm boy next door. Literally. I mean if I had have been a female and man him in a bar, I wouldn't have been particularly frightened, because he had a very unassuming presence about him. 00:15:34 Speaker 5: That's why I noticed too, when I was around my dad and we would be around other females or in public, he seemed to be charismatic and people didn't seem intimidated, even though he was so tall and so big, And I think that might have been maybe to his advantage when he was finding his victims. Do you think he was really calculated in finding his victims or do you think he was more of an opportunist. 00:16:00 Speaker 8: I wouldn't assume that he was particularly cutting in this whole thing. I mean, he had a demeanor about him that was very mellow. I mean, so I wouldn't attribute his series of murders to being a particularly cutting person. I would attribute it more to the fact that he didn't have any kind of a threatening demeanor about him. I mean, there was if he was your next door neighbor and you saw him every day morn in his front yard, you wouldn't be concerned about him being your next door neighbor. 00:16:30 Speaker 5: And no, my dad, he would offered him mow your lawn. That's what was so interesting about my dad. He was generous and kind in so many ways. You know. But then now looking back, it's very, very eerie. 00:16:44 Speaker 3: There are some people that are down in their luck and they'd say, you know, I'm broke, I don't

have no money. I said, that's all right, I'll stop up here, we'll buy dinner and get the other end. I had him twenty dollars bills to hear he grab a cap go home or whatever where I take him right to their home. I'd gotten lots of numbers from girls that had given rides and guys I've given rides to. Hey, we are, we're in town. We're we'll go party, We'll have a good time. You know I've got I've put in kids on Greyhound buses and sent them home to their mom and dads paid for the ticket just so that they'd get home for safe. 00:17:31 Speaker 4: Keith spoke to Jack Olsen in prison and lamented the fact that he wasn't going to see his children again, and that he'd wished he'd move back to Canada thirty years earlier. Here's Stephen Booth, psychologist Al Carlile's publisher. 00:17:48 Speaker 11: He had his freedom going out and driving the truck. But when he thought he was going to get what was rightfully his a relationship, happiness, whatever, and he didn't get it. He didn't like that very much, and it reminded of all the traumas that he had as a kid, not necessarily in the hands of his father, but in the hands of everybody. It's not like everybody was victimizing it. I think with your father he was feeling awful for himself. He doesn't really care about anybody else. It sounds to me like he lacks the empathy that we've been talking about. And remorse to me is, gosh, I've done a bad thing. I really need to make up for it. Why would he need to make up for it if he doesn't care what other people think? But he does care about himself. I think he tried to kill himself because he didn't like the idea that he was the person that he'd become in his own mind, you know. But that doesn't mean that he cared about the people that he killed. 00:18:44 Speaker 3: Yeah, I was hating myself. I didn't like what I had become, And that's probably why I was so easy to convince myself to turn myself and get it over now if I hadn't done that. That's why I think in some respect that why is it that so many killers get to a certain point and all of a sudden they just destroy themselves? And what is the magic number? I always keep saying, well, eight is enough, because if you look through history, and I'm sure you have, I bet you go through how many serial killers out there reached the number eight and stopped and basically got caught? And there are a lot of them that got caught. 00:19:24 Speaker 4: With number eight, Keith began to buy into his own mythology, and in the end, the victims never mattered. It was Keith's world. His need to confess was just another extension of his fragile and narcissistic ego. Here is retired detective Chris Peterson again. 00:19:51 Speaker 8: He told me that YELP was a factor. I think it's more like he was now in beginning to be in the limelight a lot, and I think he enjoyed it, and that's why he started talking about this, simply because he knew that he was likely to go spend the rest of his life in prison anyway, So now this was an opportunity for him to get a lot of attention. I think that was really what his motivation was. 00:20:20 Speaker 4: So do you think a lot of his mythology as this macho, tough ladies man killer. It's revisionist history that he's created. 00:20:31 Speaker 8: Yeah, He's never come across as a tough guy to me. I mean, I still see him as kind of the big, dumb farm boy. I mean that's the way he acts, and coming from a farming background I'm not meaning farmer, but he came across as just the kind of a hay seed. He's never exhibited a macho attitude in my presence. It's always been more of a look at me, look at me, I'm somebody, you know, as opposed to blustering and acting like a tough guy. He's never done that around me. 00:21:03 Speaker 4: And how did his demeanor change? You mentioned that he even suggested you guys work on a book together. 00:21:09 Speaker 8: I wasn't readly a book he wanted to. He suggested that he and I go on a tour, and the tour was going to be we will teach people how not to get murdered, and which of course laughable. But he said, why don't we go on a tour and you know, we can make a great presentation of this. And I never shut him down on that idea. I just let him have his fantasies, because that was the last thing I was going to do with the serial killer, was taking on a tour, so. 00:21:38 Speaker 5: Almost like like a road trip media. 00:21:41 Speaker 8: Tour, where absolutely absolutely he wanted as much publicity as he could get, And that was what it was about. 00:21:48 Speaker 4: What personally bothers you about your interaction that you had with him to. 00:21:54 Speaker 8: This day, I guess more than anything, what bothered me about him was just the fact that he wasn't really trying to hide it. He was relishing the attention, and in the number of homicides that I worked in my career, I didn't see that very often. Most people, once they were charged or were convicted, they didn't feel particularly good about it. He just seemed to continue to feel positive about his accomplishments. 00:22:23 Speaker 3: I'm at home in prison here, I told I had an interview here out here with Channel Light News one time. They back in ninety seven. When they came in. They asked, it was like round Halloween. It's kind of comical. We're sitting there. She said, well, well, I don't believe you were you killed? As see, I told the one detective killed one hundred and sixty six people, and I right after that, they gave me this interview and I told him how many of you kill? I said, one hundred and sixty six people, No big deal. And you could see the guy was kind of half trembline area. It's like you were sitting there. I'm not in leg irons, I'm not in handcuffs. I'm sitting right across from you, and I'm looking right at him, I said, I'm at home here now, I've killed all these people. Now I could kill you here right now. But you know the only reason and why I'm not killing you right now. It's because I have a TV set in my house and I get to keep

it. And the only thing that your values were a TV set. 00:23:11 Speaker 4: That's another example of Keith's sixth sense of humor on display. He did not kill one hundred and sixty six people, but that exaggeration takes away from the lives he did take. Here's Melissa. 00:23:25 Speaker 5: It really used to bother me that when all these heazines would happen, like with my dad or with other infamous criminals, we would hear their name all the time, and that the victims, you would hear just a couple of words about the victims, Like with Tony Benn. I heard that she's burnet, her age, that she was mentally slow. Those are the adjectives I've heard. I don't know anything about her life other than that, and it was easier for me to be desensitized in a way that she was a real human being because of that. When I went on the quest to really learn about more of who Tony Bennet was reached out to all of her family members. Michelle White was her sister, and I reached out to her and her brothers, and I met with Michelle White and I sat down and I got to look at pictures of Tanya, and she told me all about her sister, and I got to learn their relationship and how they got the news. And it made this person that was just a name on a newspaper into actually a human being. And it made me realize the lives that my father really took. That is, it's not something that you could kind of brush aside and pretend that it's not real. Now, if you're learning that these people existed in real life and that they had real lives and people that loved them, and you get to learn about their childhood and growing up, and it makes them a real person. 00:24:51 Speaker 4: Eight people, eight women whose lives were ended by a monster with a wounded ego. A warning to the listener after each of the names follows Keith's thoughts about what he had done. Not to glorify his crimes, but to demonstrate just how little these lives meant to this psychopath. These were his victims. Tanya Bennett January twenty third, nineteen ninety Portland, Oregon. Raped, beaten beyond recognition, and strangled. 00:25:29 Speaker 3: It wasn't the power, though, there was no power of being like a domination on this and this, But it felt like he bitch. I mean, I could just think back to all. 00:25:37 Speaker 12: The hostilities I've had against people, against women, for one thing, and nev never pulled the trigger, And here I pulled the trigger once and I just kept pulling it and I hit her until I owe my hand for a sword or whether you know. 00:25:51 Speaker 3: That's what stopped me. It wasn't the fact that her she's crying, Mommy, make them stop, make them stop. It was it's the fact that my hand's hurt. 00:26:03 Speaker 4: Jane Doe, referred to as Claudia by Jess Person, found August nineteen ninety two in Blythe, California, raped and strangled. 00:26:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, I got into this little game of I'd strangled till she's just about dead, and I'd pull her back out of it. I did that probably total of four

times, at least four times with her. 00:26:28 Speaker 4: Cynthia Lennrose, found September nineteen ninety two in Turlock, California, strangled. 00:26:35 Speaker 3: Some people die quicker in others. She died right away. I thought maybe while I strangled, might have broke her neck. I'm not sure, but my intention was that I was just going to strangle her, that i'd take her down to a wise spot and we'd have fun. All I'd have fun. But that didn't even come about. 00:26:55 Speaker 4: Lori M. Pentland November nineteen ninety two in Salem, Oregon, strangled. 00:27:02 Speaker 3: She would start talking about her life and how miserable it is and she can't make a living, and she wish it all end. And I said, oh, you know, I think I'm going to do it, and I'm going to strangle you. That's why I told her. She said go for it. And she said go for it. She thought I was just kidding. 00:27:22 Speaker 4: Jane Doe referred to as Cindy by Jessperson body found June nineteen ninety three in Santanella, California, strangled. 00:27:32 Speaker 3: I made a decision that if I should get her into my truck, she would be mine. I had to get her in the truck on her own free will. I wanted her to make that conscious decision. She had to want to come along with me. 00:27:45 Speaker 4: Jane Doe referred to as Susan Ann By jess Person, found September nineteen ninety four in Crestview, Florida, raped and strangled. 00:27:56 Speaker 3: I told her, let's have some fun, and she says, I don't want to do it. I felt in a way that because she was like soul bossy telling me, well, I'm going to do this. I felt, I'm going to tell you to do this, and you're going to do it. She wouldn't submit to it. Not he so, well, fine, I don't have to have this. I just killed her. 00:28:19 Speaker 4: Angelusa Breeze January nineteen ninety five spoke Anne Washington, raped and strangled Jesperson later strapped her body to the undercarriage of his truck and dragged her for twelve miles to remove her face and fingerprints. He's implied in a letter to Melissa that she may have been alive when he did so. 00:28:40 Speaker 7: When you stopped and you took the body off and you saw what had been done, did it affect you at all? 00:28:47 Speaker 3: Did you feel anything? No, I because here's a gun. 00:28:50 Speaker 13: You spent some time with you and she was basically all the left of her was her legs, Her rippage was pretty much gone, her intentional track was gone, her skull was ground and half her fingers and arms. 00:29:06 Speaker 3: Their upper arms were gone because I taped them like so, so they grind off first when I cut the ropes underneath there, just dragged it down the hill. I mean, it was relatively nothing there. 00:29:23 Speaker 4: Julianne Winningham March sixteenth, nineteen ninety five was Shuego Washington, raped, beaten, and strangled, just for since final victim and the one that led to his capture. 00:29:37 Speaker 3: Would you have marry you? No, I don't think so. I would have weighed well, maybe it would have. I would have waited out. So what was there about her that she was pretty? Yeah? She was when she was sober, she was fun to be with. But then when she's drunk, she's like being with my dad. When my dad I was drunk. She reminded my father all the time. She'd be out drinking, come in and everything was like, you gotta do what I say, And I just rebelled against it. Yeah, So I grabbed her and strangled her, strangled until she was unconscious. Then I taped her up and I took her out of town cause I was gonna get rid of her body outside of town there, and I went up to the top of this hill, up on top of cameras, so wash you go hill going east on fourteenth. I got up there, went around the other side, down on the other side, and uh have sex with her again, only this time she's kind of like wanting to play act. So that make me feel better that I would let her go? So to speak? What did that do to you? When you well, it was a turn on because she wanted to actually enjoy. I was all over with I said, there's there's no going back, I told her. I says, there's no going back. I've killed seven before you, and I'll kill you. 00:30:59 Speaker 4: Two jessperson would receive multiple life sentences for his crimes, but they'd leave his daughter, Melissa emotionally imprisoned. In two weeks after Thanksgiving Break, Happy Face returns to explore the residual impact of Keith's crimes on Melissa's marriage and family when the contents of his unopened letters forces her to face her deepest insecurities and fears. 00:31:41 Speaker 1: Happy Face is a production of How Stuff Works. Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright Pacheco, Mangesha ticketdur and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by Claire Campbell, Paige Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle, Audio editing by Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Chacoigne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper, and the Carlisle family.