In 1994, an inmate crew working off Interstate 10 in Holt, Florida, found the skeletal remains of a woman among the trees. It was the start of two mysteries—one that would be solved two years later, and another that would not be solved until this year.
The first mystery was who killed the woman. The answer came in 1996 when Keith Jesperson, a long-haul trucker better known as the Happy Face Killer, told police he had murdered a woman and dumped her in that spot.
The second question was the identity of the victim, and it would take advances in DNA tracing to answer it. But now, police said, they know Jane Doe’s real name: Suzanne Kjellenberg—who was 34 and hitch-hiking across the country when she was killed.
Investigators from a private lab used a new technique known as genetic genealogy to come up with the name. They created a genetic profile of the woman and ran it against public databases like Ancestry.com that contain millions of other profiles, looking for partial matches.
Through that process, sleuths can create a family tree for a subject—and the one they drew up for the woman found off I-10 took them to relatives in Wisconsin.
“Notification has been made to her next of kin, who expressed gratitude for the perseverance of investigators, the Medical Examiner’s Office, and the FDLE. They also asked for privacy to cope with this new development,” the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Tuesday.
“Suzanne deserves a voice,” Sheriff Eric Aden said. “We’re that voice for her today and this case has been years in the making.”
Jesperson, who is serving a life sentence, has been formally charged with Kjellenberg’s murder—which seems like a slam-dunk case, given his videotaped confession.
After Jesperson was arrested in 1995, he began confessing to a slew of crimes—more than 160 slayings. While he eventually recanted most of those claims, detectives were able to confirm the murders of eight women between 1990 and 1995 in California, Florida, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
After someone else claimed responsibility for one of the killings, he started writing letters boasting that he was the culprit, signing them with a smiley face. Thus he was given the nickname “Happy Face Killer.”
Kjellenberg is believed to be the sixth of his victims, and in a videotaped confession he said he picked her up at a Florida truck stop after she asked for a lift to Lake Tahoe.
He claims that while they were at a rest area off I-10 to sleep, Kjellenberg started screaming when he sat down on the bed next to her—and he freaked out that he might get caught with someone in his truck, which was against company rules.
“More I told her to shut up, the more she screamed,” he told an investigator. “So I just killed her.”
He said he put his fists on her neck and then zip ties around her throat. “After murdering too many people, it was just an easy thing to do,” he said matter-of-factly.
Forensic reconstructions of the victim.
Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office
Jesperson recalled that the woman’s name might be Susan or Suzette, and authorities never stopped trying to identify her.
They reconstructed her face with clay more than once, but no one recognized her. Her remains were sent to the University of West Florida for anthropological analysis and to the FBI laboratory for DNA analysis, but nothing yielded her name.
Late last year, investigators teamed up with Othram, a pioneer in genetic genealogy that had helped police crack scores of cold cases in the last few years. It took them just six weeks to solve the mystery that had stood for 29 years.
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