The Daughter of the Happy Face Killer Hosted a Podcast About Her Father and His Crimes

When Melissa Moore was 15 years old, her sister was watching television when their father's mug shot flashed across the screen. Stunned, the siblings asked their mother what was going on. Rose sat her daughters down and told them their dad was in prison. Melissa recounted this story to People, along with the desperate research she conducted immediately upon learning this horrific secret.

This was in April 1995, which meant Melissa had to go to her local library to do some digging. That's when she discovered that her dad, whose name is Keith Hunter Jesperson, also goes by another name: The Happy Face Killer.

Between 1990 and 1995, Jesperson strangled and killed at least eight women while traveling across the country as a long-haul trucker. What does one do with this kind of information? Well, nearly 25 years later Melissa started a podcast about it. Here's what we know.

In November 2018, the folks from How Stuff Works dropped the Happy Face podcast. Hosted by Melissa herself, the 12-part series stood out from other true crime podcasts because the person behind the mic was at the center of the story. The series begins with Melissa's family life before she found out her father was a serial killer. Melissa goes into detail about how perfect she thought things were until they weren't.

We also hear from Melissa's mother Rose, who described a different man than the one her children knew. Jesperson got to be the fun dad to his kids when he would come home from a long trip, but Rose described a man with deep psychological problems. One of the more shocking reveals was Rose's claim that as a child, Jesperson attempted to murder his own family a few times.

In Episode 3, Melissa dives into Jesperson the killer, and even looks at what makes someone want to do such things. She attempts to work out in real-time if this is a genetic trait she might have inadvertently passed onto her own children. It's the kind of questions true-crime fans often ask except they are rarely directing them at themselves.

A decade before the podcast was released, Melissa wrote a memoir titled Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter. Shortly after the release of the book, Melissa sat down with People to discuss it.

"I was always afraid that if people knew who my father was, they would look for my flaws," Melissa shared. "I don't want my children to grow up ashamed — they're not responsible for what their grandfather did." As More says, serial killers have families too.

Melissa and her siblings used a great deal of energy to forget what they knew about their dad.

"My father could kill a woman and then take us to McDonald’s," she asked. "I couldn’t wrap my head around it."

The knowledge was too painful to discuss, so the children of the Happy Face Killer simply stopped talking about him. What eventually helped Melissa heal was meeting and marrying her husband, the having her children.