With his wide, menacing grin, Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of real-life Happy Face killer Keith Jesperson gives chills as he uses the promise of an unfound victim to lure his daughter back into his web.
And while parts of Paramount+’s riveting new crime thriller series Happy Face have been fictionalised, Melissa Moore’s experience with her father is equally troubling.
What did the Happy Face killer do?
Melissa was just 15 when she came home from school one afternoon to learn some shocking news – her father had been arrested for murdering his girlfriend, Julie Winningham.
“As a little girl, I adored him, and he was my hero,” she told US Today.
However, Melissa had seen signs of troubling behaviour. She had witnessed her dad torture cats and he had often talked to her about his girlfriends in a sexually explicit nature.
After visiting him in prison with an aunt, Melissa soon came to a shocking realisation about the crimes.
“ ‘Missy, my best advice is you change your last name’, ” she recalled in her interview with Today he had told her. “That’s when I knew that the charges were true, that he was guilty.”
Shortly after Jesperson had split with Melissa’s mother, Rose Hucke, in early 1990, he was out on a long-haul job when he met Taunja Bennett in a bar. He raped and beat her before dumping her body in the woods near Portland.
“I actually had hit her in the face and, for some reason, I just kept on hitting her in the face, and because of that, I feared going to prison for slugging her in the face and causing bodily injury, and so I killed her,” he later told 20/20.
Over the next five years, he would strangle and sexually assault at least another six women across Florida, California, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. His victims included Cynthia Lyn Rose, Patricia Skiple, Suzanne Kjellenberg, Laurie Ann Pentland, Angela May Subrize and an unidentified woman he has referred to as Claudia.
Why was Keith Jesperson nicknamed the Happy Face killer?
Despite leaving clues and sending letters to the press, all signed off with a smiling face, authorities from those states failed to link the cases. He may never have been caught if his final victim had not been closer to home.
On March 11, 1995, investigators identified the body of a woman found alongside a highway as Jesperson’s girlfriend, Julie. Thanks to their close relationship, he was brought in for questioning but released without charge.
Within a few days, though, he turned himself in and started to confess to over 100 brutal murders, though he has since recanted many of his statements.
Jesperson is currently serving multiple life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
What happened to the Happy Face killer’s real daughter?
In contrast to the TV drama, Melissa is not now in touch with her father – and has spent years coming to grips with his cruel actions.
“I have rebuilt my life. But my dad got a life sentence; I got a life sentence,” she told US Marie Claire magazine. “I’m always going to be a daughter of a serial killer, and I have to choose how that’s going to affect me. I’m always having to make that choice: do I want to hide today or do I want to live today?”
She has largely chosen the latter option. Melissa released her memoir, Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter, in 2009. She followed up with another titled Whole: How I Learned to Fill the Fragments of My Life with Forgiveness, Hope, Strength, and Creativity in 2016. She also created two podcast series called Happy Face and Life After Happy Face.
Melissa is now an advocate on behalf of people who are related to serial killers, building a network of over 300 people whose lives have been upended by a loved one’s crimes.
In work that she says has given her life “meaning and direction”, she speaks to them regularly, on the phone and in person.
“All these people have their own story, and each of them is on his or her own journey of recovery,” she wrote for the BBC. “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.”
Start streaming now on Paramount+ from $6.99/mth.
