In 1990, Keith Hunter Jesperson would turn thirty-five years old. He had recently received two major blows to an already dangerously fragile ego. The first disappointment was getting rejected by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) because of an injury he suffered while still in high school. The second personal setback to shatter him was when his wife, Rose, left him after fourteen years of marriage, took their three children across state, and would later pursue a divorce. These two events are what the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit call ‘stressors’: an external event, or in this case a series of events, that sets a killer off and prompts them into their first murder. A stressor doesn’t necessarily immediately send a person into murderous rampage, but it essentially creates a pathway towards creating a murderer. 
It was in January of 1990 that Keith strangled Taunja Bennett following an argument they had after sex. This was only the beginning of a twisted trail of rape and murder that spread across six state lines in California, Florida, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
The Lifetime movie Happy Face Killer stars David Arquette as Jesperson, depicting the serial killer’s five year stretch of murders between 1990 and 1995. Nobody expects much other than popcorn entertainment from Lifetime, but this film particularly is an egregious piece of fiction based on the real killings. The biggest problem with the screenplay, by Richard Christian Matheson (writer of the two Tobe Hooper-directed episodes from the Masters of Horror anthology series, “The Damned Thing” and “Dance of the Dead”), is how the events depicted rely heavily on the confessions of notorious liar Jesperson. One glaring reason this sticks out is due to the recent podcast from HowStuffWorks, Happy Face, which features extensive interviews with Keith’s daughter Melissa (who now goes by the last name Moore). 
In the podcast, Melissa goes into detail about her father’s personality, such as the narcissism that would drive him to write letters to newspapers and prosecutors when he felt he wasn’t getting enough media attention for the crimes, and the same ego that would go on to lie about killing nearly two hundred people, as well as attempt to smear anybody good in his life, including Melissa, her mother Rose, and his victims, too. In light of what Melissa reveals in the twelve episodes of Happy Face, the depiction of Jesperson’s crimes comes off as irresponsible, sensationalistic, and even offensive in its disregard for the actual story. Any real story fictionalized for the screen will be altered, even in the slightest ways, for dramatic effect. That doesn’t change the fact Happy Face Killer is yet another morally compromised serial killer film.
The best, most accurate thing the screenplay does is portray the stressors which pushed Jesperson over the edge. The film opens with Keith returning from the road working as a long haul truck driver where he discovers a double whammy: his rejection from the RCMP and a letter from his wife explaining she left with the kids. 
Although the looming divorce from his wife left Keith with anger and resentment, his inability to become a police officer was equally devastating for him. On one episode of Happy Face, Melissa talks about how her father would ritually watch Unsolved Mysteries and other shows about crime at the time. She speaks about how he was obsessed with becoming a cop because he felt he could do a better job investigating murders, and she’s likewise positive it was part of his studies as a killer learning his trade— she mentions that, as an early teen, she remembers how Keith would tell her and her brother how he would be able to commit the perfect murder. Many serial killers have an interest in law enforcement, some of them were actually police at one time, and others, like Jesperson, were rejected from service. Keith’s wife leaving him doesn’t get much screen time, which actually speaks volumes because he stopped treating his wife with any respect long before their divorce, so her leaving him was less a romantic loss and more a loss of power. A Mountie picture he keeps in the cab of his truck is a recurring image suggesting the rejection he suffered in his professional life was ultimately more upsetting for him than the loss of his family. Despite the screenplay’s other issues this inclusion seems true to the real man’s character.
Happy Face Killer’s problem is not the acting, and its scenes featuring the murders never falls into graphic or exploitative territory. The problem is the screenplay’s willingness to depict situations from the perspective of Keith, whose penchant for lying is well known. 
One of the significant lies the killer told was after he’d been arrested when he implicated himself as being responsible for some of the possible victims attributed to the Green River Killer. More spectacularly, he told a story about how, when he was dumping the body of a victim, he came upon another man doing the exact same thing: Gary Ridgway. The outrageous claim all but confirmed Keith’s lies, and law enforcement easily lost patience with listening to any further bogus confessions. On top of his own extraordinary lies, his daughter Melissa’s stories in the podcast Happy Face shed much needed light on how truthful her father was in reality versus what parts of his confession make the story seem. It isn’t that Melissa exposes huge lies pertaining to her father’s case, it’s that she shows the small lies he told over the years— about their family, the affairs he had, Melissa herself, and, most hideously of all, his victims. In one episode of the podcast, Melissa refutes a story about her mother Rose going to her father-in-law’s house – a man Rose never felt comfortable around – after leaving Keith. While a story like this might seem minor compared to the killing, it’s little stories from Melissa such as these that chip away at the lies her father used to try and hurt everybody in his orbit. In light of all the lies, and Melissa giving personal insight into her father’s truthfulness, is this really the man whose point-of-view ought to be used as the foundation for a film’s screenplay?
There are a handful of reasons why this film comes off as an offensive adaptation of actual events. Firstly, Lifetime, as a network, has a mission statement in that it claims to advocate “a wide range of issues affecting women and their families.” It’s an odd thing to read in regards to Happy Face Killer, which is entirely told from Keith Jesperson’s perspective, and, more importantly, his lies. The film was also sued by the sole woman to escape the killer’s clutches, Daun Slagle. She’s depicted, under a fictionalized name, as a woman selling herself at a truck stop. The character’s shown having sex with Keith in the cab of his truck with her baby next to them. This portrayal, again, is wholly borne of Jesperson. The issue isn’t that the real woman – who was beaten and choked over the course of hours before escaping the killer’s truck with her child – is portrayed as a sex worker. The issue is the portrayal involves her trying to extort money out of Jesperson, which eventually prompts his violence, and in a way the suggestion is this near victim, in some way, provoked him. Not only that, it made Slagle out to be an unfit mother who put her child in the path of a serial killer, and also made her look like a woman willing to make a false rape claim to police to try and get Jesperson to pay her.
Altogether, Lifetime’s choice to air the film with Matheson’s screenplay as it is was an ethically dubious move. Matheson already takes the reins of creative license too far by having the film’s version of Keith mark his victims’ bodies with a happy face, usually in lipstick, which never happened— the happy faces were only ever found on the bathroom where he left a note and in the letters he wrote to the media and prosecutors. 
Another significant fictional addition is that the FBI were a large part of tracking Jesperson down and arresting him. Local law enforcement across the various states where the victims were found were in fact the ones to do the legwork in the investigation. Furthermore, Jesperson is the person most responsible for his own arrest and capture. His happy faces and letters only began after Laverne Pavlinac went to the police and told police her boyfriend, John Sosnovske, was responsible for the murder of Jesperson’s first victim, Taunja Bennett, and that she was present when the killing occurred. The screenplay shows the FBI seemingly immediately suspicious of Pavlinac, who’s called Delores in the film, when it was Keith himself that made it clear Pavlinac wasn’t telling the truth by his continuous letters taking credit for his crimes. Another piece about Pavlinac left out in the film is that, as soon as she got to court, she began recanting her statements, and she told authorities she’d talked to police as a misguided effort to escape the abusive relationship she was in with Sosnovske— for his part, John only ever pleaded guilty to the crime so he could escape the possibility of being given the death penalty. 
What’s likely the worst sensationalism in Happy Face Killer concerns Jesperson’s post-mortem treatment of victims. One scene shows Keith strap a woman, still alive, underneath the trailer of his truck then drag her along the road. In the screenplay, this moment comes off as a vicious moment of torture, and the actress playing the victim wails horribly, screaming for help before Keith puts duct tape across her mouth and quips something like: “Enjoy the ride.” What actually happened was Keith raped and strangled his victim, then he chained her corpse to the bottom of his truck and pulled her along the road until he was sure her face and fingerprints were effectively removed. Late in the film, the screenplay gives us a moment where an FBI agent discovers the latest Happy Face Killer scene: a woman’s body is laid on the beach in the middle of a giant happy face drawn in the sand. This was never an actual crime scene related to Jesperson. It’s actually a total fabrication based on a photograph of Keith taken on a beach, where he’s crouched down and a happy face is drawn in the sand at his feet. These moments in no way change our view of the serial killer. 
He’s no better because he didn’t drag a woman who was still alive under his truck, or because he didn’t try to turn body dumping into an artform. He remains as horrific as he was before Lifetime churned this out. It’s simply another indication of Matheson’s sensationalized screenplay, and how willing the writer was to diverge from the real story, for all the wrong reasons.
Happy Face Killer suffers from the same disease as other serial killer stories adapted to film: it’s dishonest for the sake of false drama. Many true stories are at least somewhat dramatized, though the best writers adapting real stories into screenplays usually try to stray only when it’s absolutely necessary, and then, hopefully, only in subtle ways. But Matheson’s screenplay interjects too much while simultaneously offering so little in return. For instance, Keith’s shown as videotaping himself and baring his soul to the camera, when this was never the case, and rather than use this as a narrative device to plunge towards the depths of Jesperson’s twisted psychology, it’s really nothing more than ineffective drama.
His psychology is only ever elaborated on in brief cuts, showing quick glimpses of him as a child abusing animals. The film’s many wasted opportunities turn into a fictional soapbox atop which Jesperson stands to spread falsehoods about himself and his victims. If it weren’t any other network, we as an audience could expect better— Lifetime’s not exactly known for its high quality output. Nevertheless, any writer penning a screenplay based on a real killer should be wary of not only how they depict the killer, but also the way in which they choose to depict the victims, too. It isn’t only the writer’s fault, though. Lifetime seemingly never included anything based on Melissa’s perspective, who’d already appeared on Dr. Phil and The Oprah Winfrey Show (in 2008 and 2009 respectively) by the time this film went into production in late 2013. Their choices as a network, as well as Matheson’s as a writer, look even worse now in the wake of the Happy Face podcast premiering in 2018, which makes an even stronger case about Jesperson’s almost pathological lies. Happy Face Killer is near the top in the pantheon of ethically troublesome adaptations about serial killers in fiction, and a mess so hot you may need sunscreen to make it through.
