‘Happy Face Killer’ wants Bryan Kohberger as a potential cellmate to solve ‘security issues’

Keith Jesperson, the Happy Face serial killer, wants Bryan Kohberger to spend the rest of his life in the same Oregon prison he’s stuck in, claiming it will be safer for the Idaho student murderer.

“His best hope is to be transfered (sic) to here, the max prison in Oregon to be away from those who want to make a name for themselves by killing him,” Jesperson wrote in a note to Keith Rovere, a former prison minister and podcaster who shared it with Fox News Digital. 

“This prison gets inmates from other states in order to protect them from the drama.”

Jesperson, a former truck driver, killed at least eight women in the 1990s and picked up the nickname for his habit of drawing smiley faces on letters to the media and investigators. He’s also known to trade letters with other high-profile killers and has claimed to have committed dozens more murders, although authorities don’t believe him.

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“I will write to the Idaho Department of Corrections to tell them to consider sending Kohberger here to save them the high-risk security issues in protecting him in Idaho,” Jesperson wrote in another note.

Rovere, host of “The Lighter Side of True Crime,” told Fox News Digital Kohberger may have a hard time fitting in at any prison because he lacks two key qualities, “street smarts and prison smarts.”

Kohberger’s social awkwardness came up repeatedly in his court battles and in the media before a surprise plea deal earlier this month. He avoided the death penalty and will serve life in prison with no chance of parole for the murders of Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.

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Madison Mogen, top left, smiles on the shoulders of her best friend, Kaylee Goncalves, as they pose with Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, and two other housemates in Goncalves’ final Instagram post, shared the day before the four students were stabbed to death. (@kayleegoncalves/Instagram)

The Idaho students’ killer is expected to spend at least a few weeks in isolation before details of his long-term housing at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Kuna are finalized.

Jesperson is serving multiple life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, about 475 miles from Kuna. And there’s a precedent for his claim. Oregon is part of a group of western states that have an agreement to house prisoners across state lines if there are concerns about safety, special housing needs or overcrowding. Idaho, however, is not part of the pact.

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Authorities in the state have given no public indication they were even considering such a move.

“The safety and security of staff and the population are a priority in everything IDOC does, including placement,” said Blake Lopez, public information officer for the Idaho Department of Correction.

Leading up to the trial, a doctor for the defense diagnosed Kohberger with autism, and his lawyers described quirky personality traits, a staring problem, “atypical eye contact, including an intense gaze” and his difficulty carrying on normal conversations. He sat rigidly in court for most of his hearings and stared at the victims’ relatives as they delivered impact statements this week, occasionally raising a smirk, a half nod or swiveling in his seat only slightly.

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Bryan Kohberger in the Ada County Courthouse after his sentencing hearing Wednesday, July 23, 2025, in Boise, Idaho, for brutally stabbing four University of Idaho students to death nearly three years ago.  (AP Photo/Kyle Green, Pool)

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While asserting that Kohberger has a “high baseline intelligence,” his lawyers wrote to the court that he “exhibits slow verbal processing and weaknesses in certain areas of executive functioning, including cognitive flexibility and organizational approach.”

“In the general population, he will be singled out right away to be made a target for those who see him as weak for the crimes of that kind of murder,” Jesperson wrote. “Most likely, Idaho will put him in protective custody like [Jeffrey] Dahmer. But we all know how that ended.”

Dahmer was a cannibalistic serial killer and rapist who targeted men and boys between 1978 and 1991. In 1994, a fellow inmate named Christopher Scarver beat him to death in a Wisconsin prison. Dahmer was 34 years old when he died. Kohberger is 30.

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Serial killer Jeffrey L. Dahmer enters a courtroom Aug. 6, 1991. He was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms for a total of 957 years in prison. Dahmer was killed by a fellow prisoner, Christopher Scarver, in 1994 at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wis.  (Eugene Garcia/AFP via Getty Images)

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Scarver told the New York Post in 2015 that he was disgusted by the serial killer and believes guards left them unattended together just to give him an opportunity to kill Dahmer with a metal bar from a weight room.

The IDOC said earlier this week that Kohberger would be screened and evaluated before authorities would determine appropriate housing and security measures.

“Once in IDOC custody, the person goes through a Reception and Diagnostic Unit (RDU) process to evaluate their needs and determine appropriate housing placement; this process takes 7-14 days,” a spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “We wait until a person completes RDU to determine their classification, housing placement and privileges.”

The Idaho State Correctional Complex in Kuna, Idaho, Tuesday, July 22, 2025. . (Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)

Kohberger has a high profile. His crime shocked the country and much of the world due to the brutality and randomness and the weeks-long search for a suspect who primarily got caught because he left only one piece of evidence, a knife sheath with his DNA on alongside Mogen’s body.

He had no known connection to the victims, a group of young friends who had done him no wrong. And he’s shown no remorse — or any emotion whatsoever — in 2½ years of court appearances.

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Inmates who have killed women and children are often singled out behind bars, insiders tell Fox News Digital. Three of the four Idaho victims were also asleep during the attack, making it even more cowardly. And Kohberger’s social awkwardness is expected to rub other prisoners the wrong way.