The Happy Face Murderer – Keith Hunter Jesperson –10. Angela Subrize

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Angela Subrize
A minor accident in January of 1995 meant that Keith was holed up in a hotel in Spokane. After his truck had spontaneously caught fire, he was waiting for a mechanic's report to confirm that he wasn't guilty of error while waiting for his company to give the go-ahead for his next job. While he waited, he sat in the hotel and had a drink. A woman walked into the bar, with long dark hair, pale blue eyes, and a pile of bags. She sat drinking a beer by herself and, soon enough, Keith managed to charm his way into sharing a drink with the girl.

Before she had even checked in, Keith had offered to put her up in his room for the night. She gratefully accepted and said that her name was Angela. Together, they ordered pizza and beer to be sent up to the room. Angela was a strip tease dancer, with a small tattoo of Tweety Bird raising his middle finger to the world. A short talk and a few beers later, the couple spent the night together.

The next day, Keith was awake before his companion. Needing to leave, he placed thirty dollars on the bedside table and a note on how the girl could reach him if she wanted to meet up again. That day, he walked down to the mechanics to find out that he was absolved of guilt for the fire and that his company had a new load ready and waiting to go. A few deliveries later, he checked in with the head office, only to find that a girl named Angela Subrize had been trying to contact him. Keith phoned her and discovered that she was angling for a lift down to Denver. It wasn't on the way, but Keith came to an arrangement whereby he'd pick her up in a few days, and the couple would go together. Angela gave him directions, and the date was set.

They met at Angela's house, and as Keith carried the girl's bags out to his truck, she grabbed hold of his arm and hugged it tight in gratitude. The night they had spent together had pleased Keith, but he still had a long haul of almost 300 miles in the next few hours, so he couldn't think too much about such subjects. They paused to eat at one truck stop and wound up eating alongside a woman named Lady Rose, who ran one of the CB radio stations that truckers turned to for their weather reports. She told Keith that there was snow and ice coming the way he was heading, which would mean a long night ahead with very few miles covered.

The two drove on for the next few days, with Keith driving and Angela sleeping in the back of the cabin. When they pulled to the side of the road, they would find distracting ways of entertaining one another. When they reached Wyoming, Keith overhead his companion arguing in a telephone booth. He had let her use his credit card to make a long distance call, and now it sounded like it wasn't going too well. After speaking with her dad, it seemed that he no longer had any inclination to see her. Instead, she asked Keith whether they could drive to Indiana, where she knew an old boyfriend who might be able to help her out.

By this time, Keith had grown weary of his new passenger. It was clear by this point that she was chiefly interested in him as a means of getting around the country. Now that she had a new man to go to in Indiana, it seemed as though she was someone else's responsibility. They had sex again after Angela got off the phone, but this time – once they were finished – it seemed as though she had started giving orders. Let's go, she told him. Keith didn't take kindly to this sort of instruction. This prompted a long-winded story from Angela about the series of guys who had let her down in the past, culminating in her claim that she believed herself to be pregnant. It was her belief that the baby belonged to the ex-boyfriend in Indiana, though she couldn't be sure. The concept riled Keith, who suggested that she might have even suggested it had been his. He accused Angela of using him as a free ride. They'd both enjoyed themselves, Angela claimed, but now they should get going for Indiana as soon as possible.

With worrying ideas beginning to rise up in his mind, Keith jumped back into the truck with his travel companion and got onto Interstate 80. The roads were thick with snow. While Angela slept in the cabin, Keith's mind ran hot with the ideas of what might happen if the boyfriend in Indiana didn't want to take the girl back. What if he rejected her? What if she claimed the baby belonged to Keith? What if the boyfriend didn't even exist, and she faked the call? Furious, Keith burrowed through the sleeping girl's purse. He found a can of pepper spray and removed it, hiding it where it wouldn't be found.

The weather got worse. They passed a number of jackknifed trucks that were almost wrecked. Visibility fell to just a few feet. There was still two days to go until they reached Indiana, and Keith desperately needed to sleep. They reached a rest area in Nebraska and pulled over. It would take a four- or five-hour lie down until Keith felt up to driving again. But this didn't sit well with Angela. After waking up from the back of the cabin to find that they'd pulled over, she was furious. In a hurry, she wanted to be back on the road instantly and couldn't wait for Keith to sleep. If she wanted to get there quicker, he informed her, she was welcome to get on the radio and beg for a lift.

Angela's mood changed. Instead of anger, she switched into seduction. The pair had sex, though Keith was half asleep. When he finished and rolled over to continue his nap, she went straight back to anger. She wanted to go, and she wanted to go now. Keith didn't care. After he had slept for twenty minutes, she jerked him awake. Angela refused to sit there for one more minute while they were not moving. Turning his back and resuming his sleep, Keith just tried to ignore the girl. This went on for an hour. He'd fall asleep, and just as he was starting to recharge, she'd kick him awake and insist they get back on the road. By this time, the sleepy Keith had already marked her down as a dead girl.

Waking up, Keith started to drive. They drove further through Nebraska until they reached a secluded truck stop with no customers. Stating that he needed to use the restroom, Keith stepped out to make sure that no one was nearby and that there was no traffic passing. There was no one in sight.

Keith climbed back into the cabin and ordered the girl to make the bed. He forced himself upon her, and while she begged him to stop, he pulled out the duct tape. Angela promised to be good, promised to behave. She even started praying for her own safety, her hands clasped in front of her chest, and her words loud enough for Keith to hear. Keith lied to her, saying he'd never hurt her. They had sex again. Afterwards, Angela mentioned that she was hungry and asked to stop at a restaurant. Knowing that this was all it took for her to get out and alert the authorities, Keith laughed it off.

Angela reached for her pepper spray. When Keith accused her of doing so, she tried to plead ignorance. Again, he laughed. And so he reached out his hands and began to choke the girl. Four, five times he allowed her to wake up again before he resumed the throttling. After she had finally stopped breathing, Keith slept for five hours.

When he woke up, the first thing Keith did was put Angela's body in a plastic bag. This time was a little bit different than his earlier murders, as people had seen and would be able to remember him spending time with the dead girl. She'd even used his credit card to call up her boyfriend and father. There might even be a police file on her somewhere, possibly with her finger prints already in the records. This wouldn't be someone he could just dump by the side of the road. He would need to make Angela disappear completely.

But first, he needed to eat. Driving to a McDonald's and ordering a meal for two, he sat in the truck and considered his options. Again, he blamed the girl for her own murder, annoyed that she hadn't been up front with him. Again, he fondled the body, just for once last check over what he had done. Once his food was finished, it was time to go to work.

At three in the morning, just ten days after the fire-related accident that had put him up in the hotel, Keith pulled to the side of the road. The body was already starting to take on the rotten smell that was like nothing else in the world. He had grown used to the distinct aroma and knew that it was incriminating. Taking his duct tape, Keith repositioned the girl's hands so that they were stuck out in front of her body. Rigor mortis was already making this a difficult task, so he laid the corpse out along the ground to make it easier. With a length of thick black rope, he fastened the body beneath the truck's trailer. It had just enough give that the body would be able to drag between the wheels, grazing against the tarmac. Fixing her ankles to the underside of the trailer and with her nose almost touching on the road, Keith would be able to grind Angela's face and fingerprints away. She would be unrecognizable.

Next, he waited for a break in the traffic. Putting about three miles between himself and a convoy of truckers, he moved out onto the road. Travelling at around seventy miles an hour, he dragged the body for about twelve miles at top speed before pulling over to check out his handiwork. Looking on the underside of the vehicle, he examined the dead girl. A shoulder was missing, as was a thigh. The chest had been completely smashed, while her intestines, arms, and hands were left strewn somewhere back down the road. The arms were worn away so badly that she only had her shoulders left. To the other truckers on the road, the body pieces must have appeared as just regular road kill.

Dragging the tattered remains out from under the truck and down into a secluded bank, Keith left Angela in the tall grass about fifty feet from the roadside. Trucks were passing, asking whether he needed any help. Keith laughed them off, suggesting that he was just taking a moment to "get rid of [his] coffee." They drove on by. Next, Keith plotted out his route. Phoning into his company and providing a false itinerary, he drove all night to provide himself with a cover story that placed him nowhere near the body. If anyone were to look at the records, Keith Jesperson would apparently have been in an entirely different state.