What’s it like to have a serial killer for a father? Melissa G. Moore knows.
She’s spent most of her life dealing with the fact that her father, Keith Jesperson, is a notorious serial killer known as Happy Face who slaughtered multiple women across several states during his time as a truck driver in the 1990s.
Moore grew up under the same roof as her father in Spokane, Washington, but she didn’t see him much, as he was always out on the road for his long-distance trucking job. It wasn’t until she was teenager that she discovered her father’s twisted side.
When Jesperson was convicted of his crimes and sent to prison, Moore distanced herself from him and changed her name.
For years, she guarded her secret. But in 2008, she was faced with having to explain to her own daughter about their family history. So she decided to speak out — and in turn, ended up helping others.
Moore wrote a memoir, appeared on talk shows and produced a podcast. Hundreds of emails flooded in from family members of other serial killers thanking her for telling her story.
Now, that story will be brought to life in a new Paramount+ Original Series “Happy Face” that premieres on March 20. Instead of directly focusing on Jesperson’s heinous crimes, the series will play out from the point of view of his daughter, Melissa Reed.
Annaleigh Ashford plays Melissa, who must find out if an innocent man is going to be put to death for a crime her father committed, according to the press release.
“He wasn’t always a monster. He became one,” she says in the series. “Before that, he was just my dad.”
Melissa discovers the impact her father, played by Dennis Quaid, had on his victims’ families and must face a reckoning of her own identity.
“If I don’t deal with him, there is a family who lost a daughter, who will never get answers,” she says in the trailer for the drama.
The eight-part series, which is based on the Happy Face podcast and book, will premiere March 20 with the two episodes, and then new episodes will drop weekly ahead of the season finale on May 1.
“The reason why I wanted to tell my story is because I felt alone. We don’t really see about serial killers’ families,” Moore told Deadline in a recent interview.
“We see serial killer documentaries, and it really focuses on the offender, but there’s a lot of other people affected by the criminal … I just never felt seen in any true crime films, and so for me, it was really important to put my story out there to connect with other families.”
Who is Keith Hunter Jesperson aka ‘Happy Face’?
Keith Hunter Jesperson was born in Canada but spent his childhood in Washington State where he endured an allegedly abusive father and a distant mother, according to the 2018 documentary Monster In My Family. Jesperson allegedly set fires and tortured animals during his troubled childhood.
In 1975, when Jesperson was 20, he married Rose Hucke and they had two daughters, Melissa and Carrie, and one son, Jason. He worked as a truck driver to support the family who lived in Spokane, Washington.
Jesperson committed his first known murder in January 1990, after he and Hucke divorced. He met his victim, Taunja Bennett, in a bar and raped and strangled her.
When a couple were wrongly convicted of her murder, Jesperson left “confessions” for the authorities scrawled all over the bathrooms of truck stops — signed with a smiley face. He wrote letters to the Oregonian newspaper confessing to multiple murders — also signed with a smiley face. It became his signature and he became known as the Happy Face Killer.
“I am who I am. ‘Happy’ or ‘happy face’. That’s how they know me,” Jesperson previously told The Independent from the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he’s been incarcerated since 1995.
Jesperson wasn’t captured until 1995, after he became a suspect in the murder of Julie Winningham, whose body was found in March 1995.
He confessed to her murder and then revealed graphic details about all eight murders, which led to four murder convictions. Jesperson is currently serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders of eight women.
His slayings spanned Nebraska, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington and Florida between 1990 and 1995.
For decades, some of Jesperson’s victims have remained unidentified. But advances in forensic genetic genealogy have helped investigators by using DNA to link them to living relatives.
Jesperson has claimed to have killed as many as 160 women, some of whom have never been identified, but only the eight women have been confirmed to be his victims.
Growing up with a ‘monster’
Melissa Moore was just a teenager when she found out her father was a serial killer.
Before that, she has fond memories of the family going on camping trips and riding the ATV around their farm.
Moore told 20/20 that she looked forward to spending time with him when he returned home from trips and that he “never spank or hit” her. But years later, she recalled catching glimpses of his dark side.
She said she remembered seeing her father hanging a kitten by its tail and squeezing it. He appeared to enjoy it, she recalled.
When her father’s crimes finally came to light, Moore was overcome with grief and had a hard time processing that he was capable of such despicable things, she later wrote in an essay for BBC News.
“It was just overwhelming, and I ran to the bed I was sleeping on and started crying. I couldn’t fathom how my dad could have done such a thing,” Moore wrote.
“It was like there was another Keith Jesperson. I had caught glimpses of this other man, but I also remembered when my dad came home from long-haul truck drives he would be so doting and kind. He seemed like such a good dad at times."
Life after ‘Happy Face’
Moore visited her father in prison on two occasions, once as a teenager in 1995 and in 2005 after she had her own family.
The visits only confirmed Moore’s decision to distance herself from her father despite him continuing to send her letters through the years.
Since opening up about her connection to Jesperson, Moore has spent years advocating for the families of serial killers — and wrote in her essay for BBC News that it has given her “life meaning and direction.”
“All these people have their own story, and each of them is on his or her own journey of recovery. But there are some emotions and processes we all go through. We all have a period of denial, we all ride that pendulum of shock and grief. Then comes the anger,” Moore wrote.
This led to two books: Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter and WHOLE: How I Learned to Fill the Fragments of My Life with Forgiveness, Hope, Strength, and Creativity in 2016.
Moore then launched two podcast series called Happy Face and Life After Happy Face, helped create the A&E series Monster In My Family, and was an executive producer on the latest Paramount+ series Happy Face.
In Moore’s BBC News essay, she explained that she was finally able to find closure in her relationship with her father while writing her 2009 book Shattered Silence.
She wrote that her grandfather told her that during a prison visit, Jesperson had admitted to once having thoughts about killing Moore and her siblings.
“Maybe people won’t understand this, but hearing that gave me freedom. It allowed me to see that in truth there had been no double life — there had only ever been one Keith Jesperson and he had been able to manipulate everyone around him and present different facades to the world,” Moore wrote.
“And finally I knew the answer to the question that had been bothering me every time I thought about our last breakfast together in the diner. 'Would he have killed me if I had told the police about his crimes?' Yes, he would. Understanding that allowed me to say goodbye to him.”
The first two episodes of Happy Face will be released on Paramount+ on March 20, with new episodes airing each Thursday.
