Happy Face Killer’s eighth victim identified

Two years after a major break in the case, the last known victim of serial killer Keith Jesperson has been identified. 

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Jesperson, who got the moniker the “Happy Face Killer” after sending letters to the media with smiley faces, killed at least eight women across the nation. As a long-haul trucker, Jesperson had easy access to victims who were less likely to draw the attention of authorities: hitchhikers and sex workers. He also could dump their bodies in random locations, obscuring his involvement in their murders. It’s believed he began killing in 1990. He had multiple victims in California, including Patricia Skiple in Santa Nella, Cynthia Rose in Turlock and a woman he believed was named “Claudia.” 

“Claudia” was found along Highway 95 on Aug. 30, 1992. According to Jesperson, who is currently serving a life sentence in Oregon, he met the woman at an I-15 brake check area near Victorville. She was looking to hitchhike to Los Angeles, but Jesperson was headed to Arizona, so she decided to hop aboard until he stopped at the Burns Brothers rest stop in Coachella. There, he said he killed her in his truck and later dumped her body near the town of Blythe in remote Riverside County.

In 2024, genetic genealogists used the woman’s DNA to find a match to her father, a Texas man named Alfonso Sandana Gonzales. But, remarkably, this breakthrough led to dead ends. Gonzales was dead, and none of his other children, who were half-siblings to the deceased woman, recalled a girl named Claudia. The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office went public with the news, hoping it would lead to Claudia’s mother and, eventually, the identity of the victim.

One of Gonzales’ daughters, Summer Gonzales, began an investigation of her own from her home in Seattle. She learned her father’s extended family was living in Texas around the time Claudia would have been born, and that her father had been in some kind of relationship with a woman named Betty Lou Wade. 

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Last week, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office confirmed Summer Gonzales’ hunch. The woman wasn’t named Claudia after all: She was Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, the daughter of Alfonso Gonzales and Betty Lou Wade. 

It’s not clear how Lydia’s parents met, but some of the story can be traced through newspaper records. Wade and her husband, Eddie McWhorter, married in 1957 and had three children. Eddie McWhorter died in 1965, and about two years later, Lydia was born, presumably out of wedlock. Lydia grew up alongside the McWhorter siblings, who would later tell investigators they spent decades wondering what happened to Lydia, who vanished from Texas in the 1990s.

No one now living can fill in those gaps, unfortunately. In the summer of 1993, Lydia died at the hands of Keith Jesperson while trying to hitchhike to Los Angeles. She was just 25 years old. The DA’s office said it is “working with Lydia’s family as they determine how they would like to honor and lay her to rest.”

Jesperson, 71, is serving a life sentence at the Oregon State Penitentiary.