Episode 7: Don

Though Jesperson has clearly left his mark on both of their lives, Don and Melissa manage to find solace in their shared experiences. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Previously on Happy Face. John Finley is the son of
Julie Winnie Ham, my father's last victim. I had heard
that he wanted to do the things that my dad
did to his mom to me. I want him to
know how sorry I am for what my father did.

(00:22):
And he's behind me. He he looks, he looks tense.
She walks up to down and without saying anything, he
opens up his arms and they embrace. She was a
kind hearted, good soul, and he broke every rule that
he ever had said for victims that he was going
to do this to right. My mom broke every rule

(00:43):
because of her soul. He felt something different with her.
The detectives came up to Spokane and they questioned my
mom that she said, your dad's jail for ruder. I
want to know what you saw. No one knows this.
I haven't told me anybody. They opened up a room,

(01:03):
white walls, silver table. My mom has a sheet covered
up to her. Nick that's the last time I saw that.
This was a multi year relationship. And if he could
do that to her, he could do that to anybody.
Julie was found when a local resident stopped to take
a scenic picture. Why did the universe tell that person

(01:24):
to stop right here? If your mom's body wasn't found,
he would still be out there today and the sun
don't shine. Oh oh nice room? What did you think

(02:00):
about doing? Keep? Do you really want to know that? Yeah?
I mean I've had I wanted to torture him. I've
thought of burying him up, dude, And you know what
I mean, just cutting little cuts, linen animals. You know,

(02:20):
all kinds of sick and twisted thoughts. Those aren't normal thoughts.
What do you think when you had those thoughts? They
were wrong? It's not right, but it was Yeah, I've
had wild, wild, wild thoughts. Gandhi once said the weak

(02:48):
can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
But how does some find the strength to forgive the unforgivable.
I'm Lauren Bright Checko and this is happy face from

(03:10):
the Oregon I In December by John Painter Jr. The
last of Keith Hunter Jesperson's sentences for three Northwest murders
was handed down Tuesday, when a Clark County judge ordered
him to serve a minimum of thirty four and a
half years in prison for killing a Camus woman last March.
He earlier had admitted strangling Julie Winningham and the sleeper

(03:33):
of his long haul truck. The sentence will be served
consecutively to two consecutive Oregon murder sentences, guaranteeing that Jesperson
forty will die in prison. At the sentencing, Winningham's son
Don Finley, described the mother as a kind person willing
to help others. Quote, you killed her, putting her family

(03:54):
in darkness. Melyssa, Noel and I had spent an emotional
few hours with Don. We'd had him walk us through
what he'd gone through after Keith had brutally murdered his mom,
Julianne Winningham. How hard it was to be surrounded by
the things that reminded him of his mom and the

(04:16):
tails spin it had put his life in. But the
thing that Melissa wanted to truly understand was after carrying
such anger, how did Don come to a place where
he truly felt healed and how did he learn to forgive?
Did you did you think about bringing a gun into
the Oh? Yeah, they didn't have mental detectors. Every day

(04:39):
of the trial, they didn't have mental detectors. One day,
I walked out of the court I was from me
to your father. There was nothing stopping me. He was
full shackles, nothing stopping me from just going at him.
I didn't know then, but I know now why I
didn't do it, because he would have won. We are

(05:00):
not here to take another life. Okay, it would have
been over. He would have won because I went to
his level of killing another human being. And now I
am happy he's in there because your life has been miserable.
My life has been miserable. I have healed. Your father

(05:23):
will never heal, and that is no longer your burden,
no longer your burding. Do you know about the two
people that were convicted for the crime. I know that

(05:45):
Laverne was assisted, that her boyfriend John was guilty of
this crime, and that she manufactured evidence too got him
convicted and ultimately got her convicted as well. But they
were found guilty in that they served some prison time.
And can I ask you a question, do you think
they deserved to stay in prison for what they said

(06:06):
they did or do you think they should have been released?
It should have been released. Okay, Well, my opinion is
he should have been released and she should have stayed
in because she's the one who made the accusations. But
they get out. As soon as they get out, they
make a movie about it instantly, within a month, about
their life story. Who are they to bring this up?

(06:29):
I was really piste off because if they wouldn't have confessed,
they may have caught your father before my mom. But no,
and it screwed everything up. He could have been caught.
It may have never happened to my mom. It could
have saved four or five women. Because this lady confessed
to a crime she didn't commit to get out of

(06:50):
an abusive relationship. I've had to forgive her also to
be able to move on. I have to forgive the
detectives for not doing a thorough investigation. I had to
forgive all these people for not doing their job. And
then I had to truly forgive your father. I had
to truly forgive my my own father. I've had a

(07:11):
lot of forgiving, and you have to forgive, not forget,
to be able to move on. For all of Don's
words about forgiveness, it was apparent that Jasperson had very
much gotten into his head. Do you know who Saundra

(07:33):
London is? No, I've never heard the name. This is
what your father did. Sandra London, who was in love
with the serial killer named ban Rawlings in Florida. He
executed seven women with the machete. She wrote a book
about him. Your father wrote Sandra London to ask her
to write a book. She said no, but I will

(07:57):
create a computer book, diary or whatever her So your
father proceeds to write her telling her how great it
is to be in jail, how to get away with murder,
how to do this. It's still on the internet today.
It's like twenty two pages from The Oregonian September by J.

(08:22):
Todd Foster. Last year from prison, Jesperson wrote at Jacksonville, Florida.
Woman who is fascinated with serial killers and thinks society
should have unfettered access to their minds. Sandra London fifty
then posted Jesperson's letters word for word on the Internet,
as she has other killer's letters. On Jesperson's page, which

(08:44):
features a rotating skull, he compares his victims to garbage
he discarded along America's roadways as a long haul truck driver.
His most disturbing writings, however, are contained in the self
Start serial Killer Kit, which offers web browsers a size
blow up doll named for one of his victims, Julianne Winningham.

(09:06):
Winningham's son Don Finley of Vancouver, Washington, read Jesperson's website
Tuesday and was appalled he put in part of this
stuff that he wrote get yourself Start Serial Killer Kit.
It comes with a two hour VHS tape of life

(09:27):
and death situations that are guaranteed to scare the piss
or arouse you are both. Take your Julie Winningham blow
up doll with an extra springback neck, take her mouth,
put it over the head of your cock, and you'll
soon have the living strength to squeeze the ship out
of anybody. Why did he pick my mom? Your other

(09:59):
ha goals to wink getting court, it was fucking funny.
Almost I jumped over the fucking barrier. It was grabbed
because this man. You could see how much Dahn was

(10:25):
affected by Keith. He still carries that hurt. But perhaps
what's most impressive is, even in that emotional state, how
he handled himself on the stand. Tanya's brother and sister
you know didn't really do in court like I didn't.
You know, you didn't see the whole thing on court

(10:46):
you know, I had to. I did the rebuttal to
your father, and I told him, this is the last
thing I told him. I said, as Christians, I forgive you,
and God will punish you in the way you deserve
to be punished. Your father put his head down. The
judge had a tear coming out of his eye. The

(11:09):
only reason your father is not dead is because he
didn't kill two women in the state of Washington. But
he did kill one right over there and right over there,
just a mile and a half difference. You what are
your triggers? Like? What triggers you? Even even now, having

(11:31):
done all the work and feeling like you've healed, you
were saying that it's everywhere, It's like Emoji's, it's Walmart. Why? Oh,
it was because only because of the simple fact of
the title they gave him on the Happy Face Killer. Psychologically,
that messed with my head. Everywhere I saw it would
be a reminder of him. Now that I'm healed, I'm

(11:53):
over it. But it was his thing. He's not. I
can't let that beat me up because he'll still win.
As long as I have something going in me that
he did, I'm never gonna him. So I have to
release it no matter how much it hurts, So you would.
You saw it everywhere everywhere, everywhere, back of jeeps, Walmart,

(12:13):
people's clothes. How many people walk around with the happy
face with the bullet in the head, you know, how
many people walking You know what I'm saying. All that
stuff goes through my head, you know, and I'm like
just a flashback everywhere I go. I see this guy.
Now many years it took me to get past that.
I don't even know. It's like it's it's literally like
being haunted by their real life boogie man like it.

(12:35):
And I an overthinking and I believe your father did
that on purpose. But then on the other hand, I
think that he was just being mischievous and smart assets
signing it with the happy face, not realizing why. It's
exactly why he winked at you in court. It's his

(12:56):
taking something so sinister and heinous and spinning it to
the polar opposite of like putting it's it's his sixth
sense of humor. It's his way of mocking people's pain.
It's his he gets pleasure from that, and the smiley
faces as a mockery. Yeah, but why do you feel

(13:16):
that your dad used my mom's name in the thing
I told you about that you never knew about, and
didn't use Tanja Bennett or one of the other six victims.
She was not his typical victim. I mean he broke
all of his rules with her. I think it's because
she stopped him. She's the reason he got caught, and

(13:40):
so he resents her from I the creation of a
serial killer by Jack Olsen. From his County jail cell,
his curly brownish mane shorn by an inmate barber, Keith
Jasperson continued his campaign to muddy the legal waters. Most

(14:02):
of his confessional letters were sent after his own lawyer
told him to shut up. The notes were uniformly upbeat
quote have a nice day from happy Face. Regardless of

(14:27):
how Don defines the relationship between Keith and Julie, Melissa
saw her as a woman who could have been her stepmother,
that in some parallel universe Melissa and Don could have
been would have been step siblings. Instead, they're now forever
linked by the emotional scars of Keith's crimes. This is

(14:49):
a I don't I have my own answer to it.
But do you think justice was served at first? No?
Now yeah, because he loses. I told you he has
a miserable, horrible life. Me and you, we still have

(15:15):
the opportunity to have this open freedom, positivity. He's around no,
but he's around nothing but negative energy all day as
his daughter. Take back your power, take back that guilt
and turn it into a positive, which you've tried to
do by helping and reaching out and doing what you

(15:35):
do for people. Melissa has tried throughout her adult life
to use her career to connect the families of victims
with the families of perpetrators in order to bring about
closure and healing and ultimately forgiveness. I think you're right, yeah,
that there is some sort of divine intervention. But this

(15:58):
is what I struggle with, don I struggle with this, like,
if there is divine intervention, why didn't that divine intervention
intervene and save your mom? If the universe was telling
this man to come and take a picture, couldn't the
universe have told your mom to not be with my dad?

(16:20):
Like I said, there's a plan. We we are supposed
to help the screwed to the world that's out there.
We need to show them that it doesn't the evil
doesn't always win. The villain doesn't always get away. We
are here, we are survivors. We did this. It's been
twenty two years. We're done, we're over it. Let's do us.

(16:45):
The only animosity you have is something that you had
no control over and I had no control over. So
why should we let it control us any longer. It
wasn't your choice to do what he did. It wasn't
my choice. But yet we're letting his choices control ourselves.
That's wrong. Melissa's most deeply rooted fear is that she

(17:17):
is somehow like her father, capable of terrible things. Don
almost immediately sensed the opposite. He didn't see the capacity
for evil in her at all. You obviously are not him. Okay,

(17:41):
obviously you're not, So that needs to be the first thing.
I'm scared though. That's the first thing you need to
get out is you're nothing. But I'm scared I look
like you. I have came from here. That's okay, we
can't because my heart is so turned top. I'm afraid
of built like him that I don't don't hurt people,

(18:05):
But I'm scared you're not like him. Because of that,
you're like blocking feelings and being cold, whatever you think
it may be, because this has been damaged so bad,
all it did was get covered up and covered up
and covered up and covered up a scar. You can

(18:25):
bring this up a hundred more times on television and
that scab wouldn't reopen. It is a scar. I am okay.
I am convinced that he is where he deserves to be.
My mom's in a better place, and he gave this
to me and you to pass on to people that
no matter what we go through in life, we can

(18:48):
make it. Don also believed there was nothing accidental about
the in which was mother's body was found. Life leads
us in a weird path, and we are the ying

(19:10):
and the yang of one in three point one million.
Did you know that the odds of what your dad
did to my mom is one in three point one million?
Have you met that many people in your life. I
have traveled to the United States, I have gone as
far as the Caribbean to run away, and I still

(19:33):
the universe brings me back here. I moved all the
way to St. Thomas, to the top of an island.
Leave me alone. No one will know anything about me
unless I won't tell him. But I still end up
right back here. I worked in the town for six
years as a local bartender, heard stories about my mom.
People come across me every day and say, your name

(19:55):
is not le Roy. People call me up out of
the blue. I've seen her on television again, and I
saw you on television, So out of the blue, I
would get random calls. People would be facebooking me from
all around the country, were thinking I can help them,
you know. So there was a lot going on. But
to be able to heal, I told myself that your

(20:16):
father needed to be put away. My mom lived a fulfilled,
happy life. It was her time to go to a
better place. Yes, wasn't her time? No, because God has
a plan. Okay, No, God has a Yes he does. Well,

(20:41):
let's not call it God. Let's call it the universe.
Our universe has a plan for each and every one
of us, and the it isn't a kind world. Can
you see it? So nice? I don't. I wish I
could see this. I want. I want to help you
feel it. You gotta have to let at me because
otherwise you're gonna end up the old cat lady. Yeah,

(21:10):
that would be horrible. Don Lee Roy whomever he believed
himself to be at that moment, also believed that the
universe kept putting people in his path for a reason,

(21:30):
including a man in the back seat of his cab,
I dried taxi, and the weirdest stuff happens. I met
a gentleman who was about seventy two years old. He
proceeds to tell me that he had a family and
after raising his family, he got tired of working for

(21:51):
the man, so he decided to start robbing banks. Well,
he ended up in eighteen years. He ended up an
osp We proceed to talk. It's a five hour journey.
Come to find out he has been locked up the
whole time. Your dad has been locked up. So this
man proceeds to tell me what I already knew, how

(22:13):
bad life was in prison, but how bad your father
his life is. The stuff he told me made me
happy because I am able to eat a steak, see
a beautiful lady, go out and fish. You are still
able to do that. He will never be able to

(22:36):
do any of the pleasures in life. Again, what did
he say that his life is like in prison? Well, basically,
your dad lives in one building. He's not allowed to
go out of the building. He isn't can't go outside.
He is in PC protective custody from I the Creation

(23:03):
of a serial Killer by Jack Olson. Most of the
cops and detectives who had worked the case were piste
that I had gotten two people out of prison and
beat the death penalty myself, but some of them still
had a morbid interest and happy face. When we pulled
into the intake center and Clackamus, one guard asked if
I would pose with him for a picture. I was

(23:25):
put in solitary confinement in D Block to keep me
safe from other prisoners. Lady killers and rapists ranked near
the bottom of the food chain in the prison system,
barely above child molesters and crooked cops. I was allowed
one hour of yard time a day, no books, no cards,
no nothing. Wherever I went, the pointy fingers came out.

(23:48):
Everyone wanted a piece of the celebrity. So I'm telling
this guy the whole story, and he proceeds to tell
me how he's seen your dad get beat up many
of times. Your dad is known as a snitch. Your
dad is locked in his cell. He comes out like

(24:10):
an hour or two hours a day. How big is he? Now?
I can just imagine with no exercise in a cage
that's as big as he is a foot wide. Think
about his six ft eight the sales six by nine.
And if all you do is put on weight, you
gotta be uncomfortable. He never gets interaction with anybody. So
this guy proceeds to tell me that he's even met

(24:32):
your dad and had controversy with him. And I have
every right to believe this guy because I feel it.
I've seen the tattoos and this is too odd. And
this man told me that he wanted me to stop
at a bank so he could rob it and go
back in to shank this guy because he deserves to die,

(24:55):
because he knew you, explained who you were to him,
and the whole time in the ca A Brad, he
kept calling me the last victim's son instead of by
my name. He's like the new generation of inmates aren't
willing to do like the old school. Some up a
long story. He told me that he talks to someone
inside once a month, he said. The next ass weapon

(25:19):
Jess personal notes from me. Did it happened? How am
I gonna know? I don't know. This was just a
few months ago. Don't you find that kind of odd
that added the blue. A guy like this gets in
my taxi, all of Melissa's fears about confrontation, about God's hatred,

(26:00):
anger about her father and what he'd done to Don's mother, everything,
it was just finally over and there was peace. In
a sort of strange, if not slightly broken way, there
was love. Uh. I'm glad it's not the word. Um.

(26:22):
I'm thankful that you were willing to take me out
here and show me. I know this isn't I can
tell that after this much time, you you know this
is a place you can go to. But my mind
is just racing. I'm thinking of a million of things.
I'm thinking about thinking about my dad, and I'm picturing

(26:46):
it in my mind. I've been in that cab of
the truck. I'm picturing exactly what he said, what he
must have done, Like how quickly we have taken off.
I mean, it's it's definitely I can I can visualize it.

(27:06):
But how has healing on your own? How has it
shaped you as a person? How is it shaped like
you didn't ask to become this person? How does it
shaped me? Well? People will tell you now that you've healed,

(27:27):
are you gonna find Donald, or are you gonna stay
le Roy? Well, I'm not sure yet Donald. When Donald
was the victim, Leroy was the survivor. So in my
story would go how it went from Donald Bernard Finley

(27:50):
two le Roy because of the traumatic events that have
happened in my life. And then at the end, when
we're all done with this, we will see Donald. We
got a beginning, the middle, and an end, and Donald

(28:12):
came out because I hit We hit the final piece,
the puzzles complete. Two people that have no answers from
anybody else, we can now answer ourselves after all of us,

(28:38):
what is just person to you? Now? What is Jess
person to me? Now? Just a tax penny at waste?
Meeting one another was so therapeutic for both Melissa and

(28:58):
Don was really a testament to human resiliency and the
triumph of good over evil. When we left with Shugel,
it was with the feeling that ultimately Jesperson had lost
because two of his residual victims had used the power
of forgiveness to transcend the horror and hopelessness he'd foisted

(29:22):
upon them. Happy faces of production of How Stuff Works

(29:47):
executive producers are Melissa Moore Lauren Bright, Pacheco mangesh A
ticket Or 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 Shacoin

(30:07):
special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper,
and the Carlisle family. All his love place where they
catch you when you fall. Who He's place where they

(30:39):
catch you when you fall. And we are