by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie together, Happy
Face Killer, more or less based on a true
story — I say “more or less” because one of the key characters in the version
Lifetime showed as a dramatization was totally invented, though some of the
factual details Richard Christian Matheson worked into his screenplay weren’t
in the “Behind the Headlines” documentary on the same crimes Lifetime showed
after it (actually a Bill Kurtis production from 2004), including the killer’s
love of torturing animals to death when he was still a boy and his interest in
becoming a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The completely invented
character was FBI special agent Melinda Gand (Gloria Reuben, a compactly built
young woman who turns in an effective performance as a woman on the defensive
not only about her status in the department — at one point her immediate
superior asks her out on a dinner date and she defensively points out that she could consider that sexual harassment — as well as the
usual turf wars between the FBI and local law enforcement even though they
presumably want the same thing, to catch the criminal), who takes jurisdiction
when the first victim, bar hanger-on Sissy Peyton (Emily Haine), turns out to
have been killed in Washington state but dumped across the border in Oregon,
thereby giving the FBI jurisdiction. In reality, at least according to the
Kurtis documentary, the FBI never
got involved in the case of the “Happy Face Killer,” t/n Keith Hunter Jesperson
(David Arquette, who’s so ruggedly handsome in the role it’s no surprise he
turns out to be the villain; usually Lifetime’s good guys these days are tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys
of nondescript appearance and no particular sex appeal). Jesperson, like his
real-life counterpart, was born in Canada but grew up across the border in
Washington, where his parents moved while he was still a child, and though
there are eerie flashbacks to some of his childhood crimes against animals
(like bashing a pigeon’s head in with a hammer and putting a live cat in a
microwave) while he’s committing his adult crimes against humans, the twin
triggers that seem to have set him off were receiving a letter from the RCMP
that his application had been denied and a hand-written hand-delivered note from
his wife that she was leaving him. The real Jesperson had a kind of blond
teddy-bearish appeal as a young man but was considerably more zaftig than David Arquette — and as he grew older his face
and body hardened into the stereotypical image of a truckdriver, which is how
he made his living — thereby giving him the opportunity to move around from
jurisdiction to jurisdiction, while he had enough street smarts (presumably
gained from his study of criminology in preparation for the Mountie exam) to
vary his M.O. each time so it took the authorities two years to realize they
had a serial killer on their hands.
But the real curveball that got thrown to law enforcement — in
life as well as in Matheson’s script — was the confession of a totally
unrelated person to the first murder. Delores Pavlinac (Kelly-Ruth Mercier), a
middle-aged grandmother, grandly informed the police that her ne’er-do-well
boyfriend had committed the crime (in real life her first name was Laverne and
her boyfriend was John Sosnovske, though he had a different name in the film —
in fact, all the characters
except Jesperson himself had their names changed, presumably, in the words of
the old Dragnet tag line, “to
protect the innocent”), and as she embroidered her story she turned from an unwilling
witness to a willing participant in the rape, torture and murder of Jesperson’s
first victim. This got so under Jesperson’s skin that, while still doing
everything he could to elude capture, he left a message on a restroom wall
confessing to the crime and including a detail the cops had not released to the
media (the victim’s fly had been cut off her jeans by the killer and kept as a
souvenir) and also started making a diary on videotape — though the authorities
in Multnomah County, Washington doggedly insisted that Sosnovske and Pavlinac
were guilty of the first murder despite the series of notes Jesperson kept
writing various officials and media outlets saying he had done it — and signing
them with the same “smiley face” emblem he had drawn on his victims’ bodies
either in their own lipstick or their own blood. There’s a sort of backhanded
social critique of the whole concept of police interrogation — the extent to
which sufficiently determined cops can wrest confessions even out of the
totally innocent — and also an intriguing motive for Pavlinac to lie:
apparently Sosnovske had physically abused her and she thought if she could get
him sent up for murder, that would be her way out of her abusive relationship. Happy
Face Killer is a good, workmanlike Lifetime
thriller, powered by good performances by Arquette and Reuben — indeed,
Reuben’s character would probably be a good candidate for a TV series if that
could be done without the producers admitting that she’s completely fictional —
and about the only fault I’d find with it is it’s way too gory; Matheson and director Rick Bota avoid the
kinds of Lewtonian stylistics that could have made their movie more watchable
and actually scarier, in favor of an almost clinical approach that shows what
Jesperson did to the eight women he killed in such graphic detail one wishes
the Production Code people were still around to prohibit the depiction of
“imitable details of crime” in a film.
