The Happy Face Murderer – Keith Hunter Jesperson –2. Living in America

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Living in America
At the age of twelve, Keith was informed by his parents that they would be moving to Washington State in the US. Leslie had been approached by an American group who wanted him to design machinery on their hop farm. Despite the fact that Keith had experienced a difficult upbringing in Canada, the thought of moving to the States terrified him. He didn't want to leave Canada. He knew the area. He had a paper route. This didn't matter, of course, and the family was soon leaving Chilliwack for Selah, Washington. They moved into a large home in a middle class neighborhood. But just like back in Canada, Keith was unable to get too close to anyone. While he had been a little bit strange and different in Canada, he was considered downright odd in America.

Keith's sister Jill recalls the effect the move had on her brother, suggesting that it changed him. He began to acquire nicknames, always referring to his large frame. Sloth. Fatty. Hulk. Tiny. But they never seemed to bother Keith that much. The real change Jill remembers was in her older brother's humor, which took a turn towards darker subjects. He would laugh at the disgusting, the morbid. He went out exploring with Duke and had soon tracked out about five miles in every direction from the family home. He was always playing by himself.

One incident saw Keith and the closest thing he had to a friend – a boy named Tom Haggar – caught shoplifting. The pair were paraded around in front of their classmates by the police, taken back to the station, and had their fingerprints taken. When Keith eventually told his parents, he was sent to his room, while Leslie phoned Tom's parents. Leslie was informed that Keith had been the mastermind behind the enterprise, a concept that Leslie found unsurprising. Keith was driven to the store the next day and made to apologize. He was told to clean out the back alley behind the store as a punishment. His father would, for a long time afterwards, refer to Keith as his "little thief." Throughout the town, Keith now had a reputation as a corrupting influence. Any friends he had made were now banned from seeing him.

By the time Keith moved into the eighth grade, he was fully ensconced in Keith's World. He lived in his daydreams, without the troublesome friends that he had found so difficult to acquire. Thoughts and ambitions were entertained, especially with the view to becoming a mounted police officer back in Canada, one of the famous Mounties. One slight issue pertaining to this matter was Keith's physical fitness, which was lagging far behind what was required of the Canadian police recruits. An encounter with a distant relative brought the youngster into contact with experiences from the Vietnam War, wherein Keith looked over photos and listened to experiences of soldiers who had killed and tortured the enemies. The ideas brought back memories of Keith's time torturing animals, which he later admitted provided him with sexual pleasure.

In Selah, however, there were fewer targets open to his impulses. Stray dogs and cats were not nearly as abundant as they had been back in Chilliwack. One time, when chasing down a tomcat with his BB gun, Keith managed to corner the animal. It was shot full of pellets until it couldn't move, so the boy moved in with a stone and smashed the cat's paws. He remembers that it took fifty-six BB pellets before the cat finally died.

As he moved into adolescence, however, one of the major problems in Keith's life was left unrequited. The opposite sex presented him with many problems. Often, he would approach girls only to be rejected before he'd even finished his sentence. Always busy at his father's work place, he found himself admiring women from a distance and rarely spending any time in their company. After a few embarrassing fumbles with older girls during a trip to Canada, he decided that he would spend some time researching sex. After looking into various books on the subject, he found himself assuming the role of victim in any potential encounter and mixed the concept of sexual intercourse with rape. When writing about his first sexual encounter, he described the girl who climbed on top of him as having "raped me over and over."

Despite the interactions and experiences he had meeting girls while away in Canada, getting to know any in Selah seemed an entirely different prospect. In the area, he had acquired the nickname "Igor" and "Ig" for short. The name-calling was led by his older brother Brad, who teased and taunted Keith during the move up to high school, where Brad was already a student. Other students picked on the boy, still big for his age. They asked for loans and to borrow items. They rarely had any intention of returning anything. Keith was happy to yield rather than to fight back and get in trouble once again.

Attempts were made to turn his size into something productive. Noticing that the school athletes all impressed the girls, he tried to take part in the football team. Already six foot, two inches and over two hundred pounds, it seemed like a natural fit. Keith resented having to play tackle or guard however, believing these to be "dumb" positions. When the coach encouraged him to "kill" the opposition, he bluntly replied that he would do no such thing. Keith, worried about hurting his teammates in practice, was wary from the outset. When he did get to play in a game against another school, Keith charged into the fray, nearly broke one player's leg, and then smashed two of the quarterback's ribs. Keith was dismissed from the game. The coach was impressed, but Keith was perturbed by the idea of working on a team. The perpetual loner, he quit the team. Wrestling was another brief interest and a more individual sport. But Keith's parents never turned out to watch any of his games. Gladys might arrive for one or two, but never with the enthusiasm shown when any of the other children were participating.

Growing older, Keith Jesperson became more and more exposed to alcohol. With his father already a committed alcoholic, those around him were also beginning to indulge themselves to a greater extent and presented Keith with something of a temptation. Leslie responded to such temptation among his kids by allowing them to drink what they liked as long as they were at home. He sought to remove the glamour and the allure of alcohol and, as Keith remembers, he succeeded. The older brothers would have keg parties at the family home on occasion, events that took on a large level of local notoriety. Keith recalls attending one, getting drunk, and attempting to grope a girl who would later turn out to be his brother's date.

When he turned sixteen, Keith passed his driving test and finally had a means to travel independently further than he could walk. His first car was a brown sedan which he drove until it broke down, and his second car was a Jeep. Gas was always in short supply, and the teenager topped up what he could afford by siphoning fuel out of other people's gas tanks. The freedom of a car allowed Keith to cater to his compulsions. He would be able to drive out into the wilderness with his .22 rifle and shoot at what he found.

By the time Keith was a junior in Selah, his dog Duke was starting to get old. Rather than the boundless companionship of earlier days, Keith now needed to help the dog up into his bed at night, up on to the sofa when they watched TV, and had to care for the dog's arthritic limbs as it moved around the family home. Les Jesperson was never a fan of Duke. The dog, he thought, was stupid, useless for hunting, but Keith loved Duke regardless. One day, he came home from school and was informed by one of the workers on the farm that Duke had died. Distraught, Keith tracked down his father, who played off the death with the suggestion that the dog must have eaten some coyote poison and had grown ill. Les had been forced to shoot him. To Keith, this was essentially murder.

Duke was not the only dog in the Jesperson household, but he was the only one Keith loved. After he died, Keith turned his angry attention to the dogs his father liked better. He would sneer and snarl at them and hit them when they got too close. The other dogs learned not to spend too much time around Keith and would often go running as soon as he entered the room. One of the dogs was so scared that it would urinate whenever Keith came near. Another grew so scared on one occasion that it bolted out into the middle of the road, running away from Keith, whereupon it was hit by a passing car.

Sex still played on Keith's mind. He had matured past his awkward youth and was considered something of a handsome, strapping man. Tall and strong, he was still socially misguided. He found some relief through pleasuring himself, which he found to be easier than the circus around talking to girls. Inevitably, anyone who showed interest in him seemed to want to use him as either a source of money or a means of transport. Outside of the social circle and male comradery he might have expected, he was unable to turn to his peers for advice on interacting with the opposite sex. Asking his parents or brothers seemed out of the question. Thoughts and daydreams began to revolve around rape and kidnapping, of overpowering a smaller girl in order to discover the as-yet-unknown world of sex.

By the time he reached his senior year in high school, the prospect of having a girlfriend had all but evaporated from Keith's mind. His sex life was a solitary affair. That was until he met a girl in the year below, a junior whom he thought to be cute and, shockingly to Keith, seemed to like him back. After a few dates and days out at the local drag races, Keith settled into a pattern with the girl as something of a steady girlfriend.

Wrestling was still an outlet for Keith. As a fully-fledged member of the team, he was technically part of the athletic elite at the high school. There were still ambitions and dreams in the back of his mind revolving around returning to Canada to join the Mounties. In better shape physically, he might even stand a chance of passing their tests. One day, the coach arranged for a rope trial. The students were to climb to the top of the rope as fast as they could. A big teenager, Keith had never managed the feat. Still teased about his size and his clumsiness, such a trial seemed impossible for "Igor." But on this particular occasion, Keith dragged himself all the way to the top. Once he reached the pinnacle, the fastenings began to falter and snapped. Keith fell from twenty-five feet onto the hard floor. There was a sharp pain shooting through the left side of his body. Unable to move, Keith writhed in agony as he was told to get up and walk it off. Assisted, he rose to one foot and limped to the showers.

The coach eventually agreed to call Gladys, and an increasingly dizzy Keith was rushed to the emergency room in an ambulance. After several X-rays and help from his older sister Sharon, who was a nurse, Keith was told he had a nasty sprain but would be up again in a couple of weeks. This wouldn't be the case. A few days later, Keith's left foot swelled up to double its size. He had to rip open a boot to force his foot inside. His girlfriend stopped calling, so he braved the pain and drove to her house. Once there, the girl's mother said that Keith wasn't welcome and no one wanted to see him. Despite the relationship, the mangled foot of Keith Jesperson was too much for the girl. Limping was now common, and any attempt to wrestle was met with opponents deliberately going for his injured foot. All trips to the country to kill animals were put on hold, all potential dates with girls forsaken. Keith cut a larger slit down the side of his boot for his swollen foot and returned to work in his dad's business. Now, he really did fit the "Igor" nickname.

School turned out to be a bust for Keith, who graduated with unimpressive grades. College was out of the question, seemingly, while occasional thoughts of a military career were entertained and rejected. His foot still bothered him, though he took a job pumping gas. Foot trouble continued until he went to see a specialist, whereupon Keith was eventually diagnosed with torn ligaments. This meant needing arch support initially, then three surgeries. For the three months after the first operation, Keith was resigned to crutches. Work turned to more sedate, inside jobs while he recovered, during which time there were considerations of whether or not it would be feasible to sue the school board. He moved in and out of the family home, especially when Leslie Jesperson borrowed Keith's motorbike and drunkenly crashed, landing himself in critical care. Keith was charged with the family business while his father recovered. As well as the accident wounds, Les was told he needed to quit drinking lest the alcohol kill him. Struggling, Les told people that it was for his family that he kicked the habit, though Keith knew better.

Romance was still an issue, while the surgeries and foot issues had put an end to Keith's ambition of joining the Mounties. Aged nineteen, working in the family business, and still not entirely recovered, his life appeared listless and directionless. But a wrong order at a fast food restaurant led to him meeting a seventeen year old named Rose. The pair flirted, dated, and eventually got engaged. Rose's mother didn't trust Keith, while Keith's family constantly reiterated just how lucky he was to have met this girl. For Rose, marriage to Keith seemed like the best way out of a busy household. They were set to marry on her eighteenth birthday, despite Keith's misgivings. On the 2nd of August, 1975, Keith Jesperson married Rose Pernick. Thus, with mixed feelings and an amateur appreciation of romantic relationships, the Happy Face Killer was married and began a new chapter in his life, one that would eventually lead down an ever more twisted road.