Convicted ‘Happy Face’ serial killer’s eighth victim now identified, Florida cops say

The eighth victim of the notorious convicted serial killer “Happy Face” has been identified nearly three decades after a woman’s skeletal remains were found beside a Florida highway, deputies said.

The woman has been identified as 34-year-old Suzanne L. Kjellenberg, according to an Oct. 3 news release from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.

Keith Jesperson was working as a long-haul truck driver in the early ‘90s when he stopped at a truck stop outside of Tampa, the sheriff’s office said.

It was August 1994, and Jesperson saw Kjellenberg standing around the trucks at the stop, he told investigators in a video interview shared by the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.

He asked Kjellenberg where she was headed, and she told him she was trying to get to Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Jesperson said.

Jesperson was based out of Washington, so he told the woman — who he said introduced herself as either “Susan” or “Suzette” — he was going the same direction and could give her a ride as far as he could, according to the interview.

The two rode in his truck toward the Florida panhandle, then stopped to sleep at a rest area off of Interstate 10, according to the sheriff’s office.

Jesperson parked behind a security guard for the stop and told investigators that authorities were cracking down on having unauthorized passengers in long-haul trucks.

Kjellenberg was asleep in Jesperson’s bed when he sat down next to her to ask if she needed the facilities and woke her up, the sheriff’s office said.

He said she started screaming and the “more I told her to shut up, the more she screamed.”

“I don’t need that because I wasn’t supposed to have people in my truck anyways, unauthorized rides and all that, so I just killed her,” Jesperson said in the interview. “After murdering too many people, it was just an easy thing to do.”

The sheriff’s office said Jesperson pushed his fist against her neck until she stopped breathing, and then wrapped zip ties around her throat, according to the release.

29-year-old mystery solved

The sheriff’s office says Kjellenberg was Jesperson’s sixth victim in a string of killings that took the lives of eight women across six different states, Sheriff Eric Aden said in an Oct. 3 news conference streamed by WEAR.

Jesperson is currently serving seven life sentences in Oregon in connection to killings that took place between 1990 and 1995, Aden said. He was arrested in 1995.

Jesperson admitted to killing a total of eight women, Aden said, but his final victim had remained unidentified – until now.

In September 1994, an inmate work crew was doing landscaping along Interstate 10 in Holt, Florida, when they found the skeletal remains of a woman in the treeline, Aden said in the news conference.

That same year, authorities sent the remains to a crime lab in Gainesville that identified her as a woman in her late-30s to mid-50s, according to the sheriff’s office.

Aden said Jesperson admitted in 1996 to killing a woman in the area where Kjellenberg was found, but without the identity of the body, Jesperson could not be connected to her death.

Investigators created a clay facial reconstruction, but her identity remained a mystery until 2022 when the medical examiner’s office began working with a forensic genealogy company, Othram, according to the release.

The Texas-based company uses genomic sequencing to create a profile for an unidentified person, which can then be compared to the DNA of a living relative, the sheriff’s office said.

Her family, who lives in Wisconsin, was contacted, and a positive identification was made, deputies said. Her remains were officially identified in March.

Jesperson has been charged with an additional count of murder, according to the sheriff’s office.

The ‘Happy Face’ killer

Jesperson earned his name as the “Happy Face” serial killer through a series of letters and notes he wrote to law enforcement at the time of his crimes, Aden said in the news conference.

“He is known as the ‘Happy Face Killer’ because he sent the media details of his homicides and would always end it with a smiley face,” Aden said.

Aden said a woman had claimed she killed Jesperson’s first victim when she was accused of killing her abusive boyfriend, and Jesperson became upset that she was getting the attention.

Jesperson then decided to write a letter detailing the killing and sent it to local media outlets, Aden said. When they didn’t pick up the story, he sent the letters, always signed with a smiley face, to law enforcement. Those letters eventual led to his arrest, Aden said.

“Unfortunately, not before several other women had been killed,” Aden said.

Holt is about 170 miles west of Tallahassee.

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