Who is smiley face killer

He signed off with a happy face. In , Jesperson wrote anonymously to the Oregonian and described his murders and how he disposed of the bodies. A smiley face on the letter, like the one in the bathroom, caught the eye of Oregonian reporter Phil Stanford, who coined the moniker the Happy Face Killer. Smiley Face Killer: Many suspected victims were found near water. At some of the sites where the victims' bodies were found, spray-painted smiley face graffiti had been left behind.

Smiley Face Killer : The case is ongoing. Crime Time is your destination for true crime stories from around the world, breaking crime news, and information about Oxygen's original true crime shows and documentaries. Sign up for Oxygen Insider for all the best true crime content. Sign Up for Free to View. A smiley face is usually a universal symbol of joy and laughter, an image basically anyone can recreate to visually demonstrate their happiness.

That made the horrific confession written on a bathroom wall in a Greyhound bus terminal in Montana all the more eerie. The author's missive confessed to raping and killing a woman named Taunja Bennett. Jesperson, who murdered eight women in the s, earned his moniker "The Happy Face Killer" after he sent multiple missives to news outlets about his crimes, signing them all with a smiley face.

His childhood was not an easy one: His father was abusive, and he was often bullied by other kids, according to the New York Daily News.

He soon started acting out in disturbing ways, including torturing animals and attacking other children, the BBC reported in Jesperson eventually settled in Selah, Washington with his wife and three children. He stood at a hulking six feet, six inches tall, and worked as a long-haul trucker, which helped him prowl for victims. He made me anxious. He never molested or beat any of us, it was just a feeling that something was building, seething beneath the surface.

I had once tried to articulate it to a school counsellor, but it didn't come out right," his daughter Melissa Moore told the BBC, adding, "He would leer at women in public, make lewd remarks about them, and harass them. He split from his wife in after 15 years of marriage, the same year he killed his first victim, according to The New York Daily News. In , Jesperson met with a young woman named Taunja Bennett at an Oregon bar.

The two had a sexual encounter, but it soon turned violent: Jesperson strangled her with a rope and killed her, eventually dumping her body by the Columbia River, the Associated Press reported in Jesperson went on to kill at least seven more women, mostly sex workers, although at one point he claimed to have killed over women, according to the BBC..

The report states that there is no uniformity among the smiley face signs, that the smiley face is ubiquitous and is one of the easiest to produce, and that some of the smiley faces were faded, proving that the sign was not put there at the time of the crime.

Another point they make is that homicide by drowning is very rare and is mostly executed by parents who drown their own children. It also points to a LaCrosse, Wisconsin report that was conducted from fall until February where police foot patrols stopped over 50 intoxicated people from walking along the river late at night. Throughout history, society has always needed to produce monsters, often called folk devils, to help explain the unexplainable Homicide and other forms of death then become mysteries.

This information vacuum becomes the breeding ground of rumors, myths, legends, and all forms of monster-making. Is the Smiley Face Killers theory real? Did Dakota James and Paul Kochu simply drown, or are they two victims among many?

Smiley Face Killers — Fact or Fiction? One of the first questions a small child asks is: Why? The Mysterious Death of Dakota James That same desire to know why has haunted many over a death that took place in Pittsburgh.