Episode 5: Misdirection

How did Keith get away with murder for so long? It comes down to luck... and the bizarre story of a couple who tried to take credit for the crime. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Previously on Happy Face. Keith Age Jesperson forty made his
admission Friday to Detective Rick Buckner in a telephone conversation
in when I heard the news about my dad, I
was dating a guy named Nick Mitt, was a very
dysfunctional relationship. When things were good, they were good. When

(00:22):
things were bad, they were extremely bad. Physical. There was
something about your dad you wanted to tell me, and
you weren't sure what to believe that. It was shocking,
and I didn't know what to think either. I went
back to my truck and rehearsed the lies I planned
to tell when I was arrested. What made me cross
the line into murder? Maybe it was my nature. There

(00:46):
was a statement from the son of Julie Winningham, the victim.
Obviously he was torn up at devastated, rightfully so, and
wanted my dad and be killed. I got pregnant my
freshman year, so right after fund out is when the
news hit about my dad. So I felt like the
only option for me to break out of this boys

(01:06):
to not have the baby. A couple of months later,
I got a letter from my dad. He said he
deserved to be in prison with me, your killer, just
like me the biggest appearance that I can be like
my father. I look like my father. I wonder about
DNA and the fees. I don't know, shine, Oh night through.

(01:51):
One of the things people ask is how did Keith
get away with it for so long? And people offer
a variety of reasons. Some say he was smart or
careful in many ways, But when you look at the
case of his first victim, Tanya Bennett, he really just
got lucky for a few years at least. I'm Lauren

(02:13):
Bright Pacheco. This is happy face from I The Creation
of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen. On a chilly
winter day in Portland, Oregon, Tanya Bennett kissed her mother
goodbye and said she was off to meet a boyfriend.

(02:33):
She disappeared from sight in the direction of a bus stop.
Her walkman plugged into her ears. Tanya was mildly retarded
from oxygen deprivation at birth. She'd been a difficult child.
In a cooking class at Cleveland High School, she assaulted
a classmate in a quarrel over a piece of cake.
Addicted to alcohol and drugs, she hustled drinks, shot pool,

(02:56):
and got into trouble with men. Recently, she'd complained to
her mother that a man had taken her home from
the B and I tavern, beaten her and quote pimped
me out. Quote she said she was afraid to go
back to the same bar, but her memory had always
been short. When you read the Jack Olsen book or

(03:19):
the news articles from the time, it's apparent Whitanya been
Itt was chosen as pray. She comes across as pretty
and sweet, but also naive and troubled. What happened to
her as tragic. But what's strange about the crime is
that there's so many people who wanted to take credit
for it. There's a couple, Laverne Pavlinak and John Sevsnofsky,

(03:44):
who come forward and get arrested. The Oregonian January by
Fred Leeson, Laverne A. Pavlonak is accused of four counts
of aggrave aided murder, rape, sex abuse, kidnapping, and felony
murder for the death of Tanya A. Bennett, a twenty

(04:06):
three year old woman whose nude body was found last
January in the Columbia Gorge. Deputy District Attorney James McIntyre
told him Multonoma County Circuit court, the Pavlonak fed police
anonymous tips that led to the arrest of her longtime
boyfriend John A. Sasnovski. Then McIntyre said. Pavlonak later told

(04:26):
police that she had tied and held a rope around
Bennett's neck while Seznovski beat the woman and sexually assaulted her.
But Laverne and her boyfriend John weren't the only ones
trying to claim credit for this case. When they were
arrested for the Bennett murder. Keith wanted credit for his crime,
so he started sending anonymous letters to The Oregonian and

(04:49):
graffiti in truck stop bathrooms for attention. But the thing is,
Keith gets so many of the details wrong, and you
can start to wander or did he really do it?
We wanted to hear the details from Phil Stanford, the
Oregon journalist who received those letters and covered the case.

(05:12):
Quote honor about January picked up Sonya Bennett and took
her home. I raped her and beat her real bad.
Her face was all broke up. Then I ended her
life by pushing my fist into her throat unquote right away.
Something doesn't fit in the first place, as you already know.

(05:35):
If you follow local crime news. The name is Tanya,
not Sonya Bennett, and she was killed according to the
experts who examined the body on the night of January.
But that's not the biggest problem here. The problem, if
that's the word for it, is that two people are

(05:55):
already serving time in prison for the crime. After her
dad's arrest, Melissa started reading Phil Stamford's articles in The
Oregonian at her local library. It's how she learned the
horrific details of her dad's crimes and who her father
really was. So naturally she had a lot of questions

(06:16):
for Phil about why her dad wasn't caught earlier. Could
you tell me who these people are, these strangers, and
how they're associated with my dad's case. Well, the reason
Laverne Palman back and John Saysnowski and in prison for
the time you've been at murder is that Laverne, who's

(06:38):
this sixty three year old dingbat I was trying to
get rid of her boyfriend, who was actually much younger.
The bar fly. You can get out work at the
sawmill every day and head for the bar, and she'd
have to go pick him up at the truck stop
bar and bring him home, put him to bed, and
he at least he was working. But she wanted to

(06:59):
get him out of house, and she had tried before
several times, calling his parole officer try to get him
at least taken out of the house. It didn't work.
So when she read the story inside of the Oregonian
about how body had been found in the gorge, she
made an anonymous call to the Sheriff's office saying she

(07:22):
thought it was this guy, John says Naski. And when
that didn't work, she made another call like that that
they eventually figured out who was coming from. So the
Sheriff's office went out and talked to her and she said, yeah,
she was at the bar and she heard him bragging
about wasting a woman in the gorge. And they came

(07:44):
back the next day with a search warrant and she
didn't have anything more to say, but on the search
warrant they said they were looking for that fly that
had been cut off her jeans and her first that
was missing. The next day, Lavere called in and said
she had the fly and the first she found him
in the trunk of John's car. So they said, oh boy,

(08:08):
So they came out and got him. Well, they analyzed them.
Then they realized it wasn't the fly from her jeans,
and it wasn't her purse. I wasn't aware of that,
and without telling the whole story, she kept lying again
and they'd find out the next lie was wrong, and
so she opted it, and after about five visits she
convinced them by saying she had participated in the murder

(08:31):
with John Sisnovski. In fact, it held the rope around
her neck while he raped her, which was nonsense, and
they said, thank you very much. So she wasn't any
longer a witness who might be making up story. She
was an accomplice. They charged her and the boyfriend she
was trying to get out of the house. Of course,

(08:52):
by the time the case came to trial, she said no,
I was just making it up at the videotape they
had made of her false confession. As the jury, they
convicted her, and when Sazanovski saw what was happening, he
took a plea because he realized that if he went
to trial and they convicted had already convicted Laverne, he'd

(09:13):
probably end up getting executed, so he pled guilty. That's
Laverne Palanak and John Sisnovski. So this is all intriguing,
but we wanted to know how did the police get
this so wrong? We spoke with private investigator Chris Peterson,

(09:37):
who worked as a detective for the Maultonoma County Sheriff's
Department at the time of Tanya Bennett's murder. So they
were already tried and found guilty and sent to prison
when I got involved. They were they had been in
prison for some time. What what was the police reaction
to the letters and the graffiti claiming the actual killer

(09:58):
was still at large? Um, you know, I really don't
have a good answer for that. Detective Ingram wrote the
report on the night Bartender and Wilson. Quote. Miss Wilson
was asked specifically about January nine, and she recalled Tanya

(10:20):
Bennett being in the tavern at five pm when she
arrived for work. Miss Wilson said Tanya Bennett semed to
hang around with two guys who were playing pool at
a table at the east end of the tavern. Unquote,
Wilson described one of the men as being about thirty
years old, about six too, with short blonde hair. All
she could remember about the second one is that he

(10:42):
was somewhat shorter. Although the detectives never did succeed in
identifying the two young men seen playing pool with Tanya
on the night of the murder, at the time, they
could have been excused for thinking that they were on
the right track. Before the day was over, though they
would have reason to change their minds. It's like a

(11:06):
sick comedy of error. I mean it's oh yeah, it's
a very dark, dark comedy. The caller, a woman, said
she had overheard a man in JB's, a restaurant at
the Burns Brothers truck stop in Wilsonville, bragging that he
had killed Tanya Bennett. A week later, February twelfth, the

(11:29):
same woman called the Clackamus County Sheriff's Department and gave
them the same information as she reminded them. The man,
his name, she said, was John Seisinovski, was on probation
in Clackamus County. Maybe they could check him out. Ingram
called Seznovski's prole officer, Steve Bracey, and together they figured

(11:49):
out who was probably making the calls. Her name was
Laverne Pablinac. As we heard the detail of the story.
There is a little doubt that creeps in Keith got
the names and dates wrong, and as Melissa realized, there's
one detail Laverne got right. She did come up with

(12:12):
one really critical piece of evidence. And I don't know
how she manufactured this, but she brought the detectives to
where Tanya Bennett's body was found. How well, they drove
her out to the the place along this old scenic highway.
And one of the things that the sectors thought was
so convincing was that she said, oh, it was over there. Well,

(12:34):
they'd already marked the place with red die or some
sort of red marker along the highway. So Laverne saw
the marker on the highway and realized that's probably where
the body was. Yeah, there's obviously a crime scene. On

(12:57):
the strength of Pablinac's confession, which she tried to explain
away at trial, a jury convicted her to avoid a
possible death sentence for aggravated murder, Saysnovski, then pleaded no
contest to felony murder and rape. Three years later, Saysnovsky
has exhausted all his appeals. Pablana's plea for a new

(13:20):
trial was rejected this month by the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Never a high profile case to begin with the murder
of Tanya Bennett became a closed one, and quite likely
if it weren't for the anonymous letter that arrived at
The Oregonian earlier this month from a man claiming to
have killed five women in Oregon and California, including Tanya Bennett,

(13:43):
the case might well have remained forgotten. As reporter Phil
Stamford told us, had Keith not started writing the newspaper,
police might never have found him. But to hear more

(14:03):
about that, Melissa and I reached out to Jim McNeely,
a retired detective from the Moultmoma County Sheriff's Department. I
got involved when we started getting the letters sent to
us from your dad. Somebody sent us some pictures of
from writing on the wall in the restroom in Montana

(14:24):
where they said two people were in jail for something.
The idea that was followed up by a letter that
came to the Washington County Courts or something, and they
forwarded it to us. And then another letter came to
a Phil Stanford, a reporter in the Oregon and in
that letter against they came to us, and then when

(14:45):
we followed up on the case, when your dad came,
there was a lot of talk around the department that
we still had the right people and whoever was writing
these letters was making this stuff up. So that's when
I got involved with it in my part that Chris Peterson.
We followed up on it from there. In an interview

(15:11):
this week at the Oregon State Prison, Saisnowski, once the
passive bar fly, bristled with anger when asked whether he
was guilty of killing Tanya Bennett. I never met the girl,
he said, I never killed anybody in my life. He
blames everything he said in a rambling diet tribe, on

(15:31):
a conspiracy that includes the Oregon State Bar, the Moultlama
County District Attorney's office, the detectives who investigated the case,
and of course his former housemate Laverne Pablinac. She framed me.
He said, So, then, when you get this letter from

(15:55):
my dad and he said I killed Tanya Bennett, did
you instantly believe this letter was true? What did you
think about this letter? Well, there was something very believable
about it. He knew what he was talking about, and
he had information on those murders that hadn't been in
the papers down wherever the bodies were found. So there

(16:16):
was something to it. And it was a matter then
of going back and analyzing the Time You Bennett case,
the investigation, and what I contributed really was sort of
a deconstruction of the case, showing that they manufactured the case,
they manufactured the confession. So when you got that letter,

(16:36):
that was one letter, but you ultimately received more letters.
Is that correct? Yeah? After he was captured, we corresponded.
We were trying together to prove that the d A
was wrong and he was guilty of the Time You
Bennett murder. Which is interesting that he's trying to prove

(16:59):
his guilt. I wanted he wanted credit. Yeah. Did you
ever meet my dad in person? Oh? Yeah. After he
was arrested, I talked to him in the Clark County
jail and they just let him out. There was a
big folding picnic table, and here I was sitting across

(17:21):
from this hawking guy. I mean he's very big, I
guess six seven something like that, and talking to him
about the Tanya Bennett murder. And as the conversation quickly developed,
how we were going to prove that he was guilty
of the Tanya Bennett murder. What was he saying to you?

(17:44):
He I'm not sure to this day how to read
him at that point. I at the time I thought
he he was sort of unburdening his soul and he
wanted to confess. Another way of looking out, of the course,
would be that he wanted to get credit for this,
and it was his way of sort of proving that

(18:06):
he was establishing this identity. Did he come across as
wanting your help, Well, he wanted my help, and of
course I wanted his. You know, what I needed was
some way to prove that he was telling the truth
about Tanya Bennett. And so he offered two ways of
proving it. One was that when he told her, he

(18:29):
said blood was everywhere and even splattered on the ceiling.
Oh my gosh. I actually stayed in the house where
Tanya Bennett was murdered, and there was a night that
I went and slept in the living room on the couch,
and I remember looking up at the ceiling and seeing
splatter on the ceiling, thinking it was spaghetti sauce, and

(18:53):
just staring at it as I was starting to go
to sleep. And when you just said that, I wonder
if I was looking at h blood. Oh yeah, yeah.
So I went back to the house. It had been

(19:13):
bought and sold, and they had the new owners had
painted that room, the bedroom, including the ceiling. I went
to the d A with that and I said, you
could scrape the paint off and do a DNA analysis,
and he said, no, we don't want to do that.
The other thing he said, the key said, was after
he dropped off Tanya's body in the gorge, driving back,

(19:37):
he threw her purse out of a certain place, and
he remembered where it was as a field. And in fact,
that is eventually how it was proud to the d
a's satisfaction, to the court satisfaction that he was telling
the truth and that he killed Tanya Bennett, because one

(19:58):
of the sheriff's deputies and McNelly, who's really the hero
in this, took a troop of boy scouts out to
that field and for two or three days cut away
the BlackBerry bushes that had grown up there. I mean
they grow fast in Oregon, and it's his four years
growth up there. It's it gets dense. And they found

(20:18):
the purse with her I d wow, So Jesperson kind

(20:39):
of saw you as as a partner in this. Yeah,
it was very strange. We were conspiring together. Here we
were as working for a newspaper and he was trying
to confess to a murder. We both knew that two
people were in prison for a crime he'd committed. But

(21:00):
the authorities, the Sheriff's department and the d a's office
certainly weren't good. Admit they've made a mistake like that.
And basically what developes that we were conspiring to prove
that he was guilty. Now you have to remember this

(21:22):
is Phil's opinion on the way the investigation was handled.
The police have their own story. I got word from
a friend of mine at the Sheriff's office that the
detective had been the leader in getting the false confession
from the Burne Pablanack, and the time had been the

(21:43):
case had been down in the state prison talking to Jesperson,
encouraging him to say that I had given him the
information that he had given to the police to prove
that he killed. Time had beene in other words, trying
to get Jasperson to frame me and to his eternal credit,

(22:07):
as far as I'm concerned he did not lie about it.
He said, no, it didn't happen, and it would have
been very easy for him to lie, and after all,
it wouldn't hurt him at all, and he might have
even been able to bargain it into extra privileges for
helping out this detective. But he didn't, and I I

(22:27):
have to say I honor him for that. Keith's code
of honor is more than a bit twisted here. He
wouldn't tolerate dishonest cops, thought himself above them, and yet
he was a brutal rapist and murderer. So when my

(22:50):
dad was ultimately convicted for Tanya Bennett's murder, what happened
to John and Laverne? Well, they were released, of course.
And how much time did they serve in prison before
they were released. I think about a couple of years. Wow.
And I don't know anything about Luverne's experience in prison,

(23:13):
but it was particularly hard on John, Saysnovski, who was
not a very strong person to begin with. I mean,
he was an alcoholic and he was sort of he
sort of lost it. They they put him in a
room in prison for the people who were mentally disturbed.
It's called the thunderdome. What a thunderdome? Why? What? What

(23:37):
happens in the thunderdome? Uh? It was a big holding
tank with a guard sort of suspended in the middle
on on a great And what I remember about the
story is that Saysnovski would just how here he was
locked up for life for something he had pled guilty too.

(23:59):
But even at the time he pled guilty, he knew
he was not guilty up, it was completely innocent. That
would that would drive me crazy? Yeah, that woul drive
me crazy? Yeah that what else could you do but scream? Oh? Yeah?
Did you ever talk to Laverne or John? Do you
think that they regretted this? Um? I talked with Laverne,

(24:23):
and I don't think she really Uh. I'm sure she
regretted it, but I'm not convinced she was ever really
understood how how wrong what she did was. She was
emotionally dulled herself. I mean, she was taking a lot
of pills, fantasized a lot, read a lot of chief

(24:47):
detective stories, which is probably how she got the idea
that she could turn someone in for murder and it
would just I'll go away, Melissa and I were curious, though,
how did John and Laverne react to being freed. Here's
Detective Chris Peterson again, John Sistovsky. When I went down

(25:11):
to interview him in the prison with the prosecutor a prosecutor,
he was incoherent. He was babbling. It was actually a
little bit scary. Verne acted like a grandmother when we
were working with her. I mean, she was pretty calm, collected,
and she did her very best to convince me that

(25:35):
she wasn't responsible for the murder, which was true. I
think I think we had her take a polograph. I
don't think we had Cisnosky take a polograph because of
his mental state, but it sounds like he was another
one of Jesperson's victims. Indirectly. John Sisovski was definitely a
victim of of Jesferson and Laverne. I mean, those people,

(26:00):
particularly Laverne, had no place in an institution. She created
a space and institution for herself by confessing on a
tape and I was played to a jury and they
convicted her. But uh, he victimized those two and as
well as a lot of victims that didn't survive. Did
she ever, thank you? She was very unappreciative of our

(26:22):
efforts to get her out. The family never really spoke
to us. They were critical. I think of the police,
and I think the District attorney's office in Malma mccunty
and and the Sheriff's office in Portland did a great
job in terms of getting to the bottom of this case,
and a mistake had been made, And the district attorney
and the sheriff both told me that I don't we

(26:44):
don't want you doing anything else until this matter gets
resolved to our satisfaction. And just because I'm curious with
Laverne and John, were they immediately released after my dad
was sentenced that day? No, no, they weren't. Post conviction.
It was a very complicated legal procedure and there's really
no remedy for reversing a jury's decision in the state

(27:09):
of Oregon. If a jury finds you guilty homicide, it's
it's kind of chipped in stone. So they were not
released immediately. It took a while to get them out
of prison. It wasn't like your dad gets convicted and
the doors opened. My understanding is that John Sisnovski, I'm
assuming John still alive, still as a murder conviction. I

(27:31):
his record because post conviction relief, meaning changing the verdict's
opinion of a jury, is very difficult to do in
the state of Oregon, and most dates horrible, How horrible
for John that he would have this still potentially on
his record, even though he was completely innocent. That must
have impacted his employment, his his life after this. That

(27:51):
that's really surprising, though you know that it would be
like that. Yeah, it is, but that that was the
state of the law twenty five years ago, and I
don't know that it's shame ya from I The Creation
of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen in jail awaiting

(28:13):
transport to the state penitentiary, he continued to play the
lead role in his own dramatic production. On the day
that John Saysnowski and Laverne Pavlinac were freed for good,
he described his reaction to the associated press quote, I
started crying. I couldn't help myself. For about ten minutes.
I lost total composure. I was just very overjoyed. Basically,

(28:38):
my feeling is God bless them. End quote. He didn't
explain why he'd allowed them to serve four years for
his crimes, so don Fendley, who is the son of

(28:58):
Jesperson's last known victim, Julianne Winningham. He has a lot
of anger towards Laverne, who is now deceased, but he
believes that if she hadn't lied, if she hadn't tried
to frame John, that there is a chance that Jasperson
could have been stopped before he murdered seven more women,

(29:19):
including his own mother. I mean, I understand his concern,
and of course he didn't murder anybody after he murdered
Julie because he was arrested. But you know, I don't

(29:40):
want to speculate that not this thing would have been
solved any earlier, but it's hard to for I can't
say that if it had meant from Laverne, the keys
would have been arrested, because he was not on anybody's radar.
And in Molmo, MC County, over the tiny beneckets, there's

(30:03):
always been one person Melissa has been afraid to meet
the son of Jasper since last victim, Don Findley. I'm
terrified that he's going to lashadow me and blame me
for his mom's murderer. I texted him for weeks, uh

(30:31):
and when he finally returned my text. He didn't want
to meet you in person. He had a lot of anger,
you know, from his point of view, you're the daughter
of the man who murdered his mother. But we spoke
for a couple of hours and I was finally able
to convince him to meet you. Happy Faces a production

(31:02):
of How Stuff Works. Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Pacheco,
Mangesha Ticketer, and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown.
Music by Claire Campbell, Page Campbell and Hope for a
Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle. Audio editing by
Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Chickoyn.

(31:23):
Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of The Oregonian
Newspaper and k t U News in Portland, Oregon.