Latest news with #Jesperson
Express Tribune
22-03-2025
- Express Tribune
Happy Face: Moment Keith Jesperson almost confided in daughter Melissa Moore revealed in new account
Melissa G. Moore, the daughter of notorious serial killer Keith Jesperson, has opened up about a chilling encounter with her father during a breakfast in 1995, just before his arrest. Moore was 15 at the time and recalls her father nearly confessing his double life as a serial killer. In an account to Fox News Digital,she recollected, during their meal Jesperson told Moore he had something to reveal, saying, "But you'll tell the authorities." Moore initially thought he was referring to rumors about being fired for theft, but the conversation quickly turned uneasy. Jesperson became evasive, and Moore, feeling sick, went to the bathroom to compose herself. This moment marked one of the final interactions before Jesperson's arrest, which occurred shortly after Moore's 16th birthday. Jesperson, also known as the "Happy Face Killer" for drawing smiley faces in letters to the media, was arrested in 1995 and confessed to killing eight women across several states. Moore, who was unaware of his crimes, learned of his arrest when her mother informed her and her siblings that their father was charged with murder. The news spread quickly, and Moore faced shame and isolation from her peers, which deeply affected her sense of identity. Moore's story is now the subject of Happy Face, a true-crime drama on Paramount+ starring Dennis Quaid as her father. Moore, who previously authored the memoir Shattered Silence, shared her experiences to shed light on the complex relationships between family members of perpetrators. The show highlights the trauma families face and the lack of support for them. Jesperson, now 69, remains imprisoned, serving multiple life sentences without parole. Moore continues to grapple with the impact of her father's actions but has found strength through her work supporting other families affected by similar tragedies.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Happy Face review – Dennis Quaid is a grinning caricature in this shoddy, half-baked crime drama
Perhaps, like politicians' careers, all intellectual property must eventually end in failure. You begin in one medium – a viral video on social media, perhaps, which brings your story to the attention of the masses and the makers of a podcast; then on to a streamed drama or documentary, maybe knocking out a book on the subject as you go. But eventually it hits a wall. The new translation doesn't work, it's running on empty, it doesn't capture interest, the moment has passed. People get bored, they move on, and that's the end of your IP's journey. The new true-crime drama Happy Face, created by Jennifer Cacicio and executive-produced by the mighty Robert and Michelle King (The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Evil, Elsbeth), began life as a book – Shattered Silence, the 2009 autobiography of Melissa Moore, in which she recounted her experience as the daughter of the serial murderer Keith Hunter Jesperson. He was known as the Happy Face Killer, because of the smiley doodles he drew on numerous attention-seeking letters to the media and authorities during his years of murdering at least eight women. He is serving a life sentence in Oregon state penitentiary. Moore appeared in an episode of the true-crime series Evil Lives Here, followed shortly after by a 12-part podcast about her father's crimes and her childhood. Now, we have an eight-part 'inspired by' dramatisation, which keeps the basic facts the same, but adds in fictional elements so the viewer never knows quite what is true and what isn't, and therefore how shocked or invested to be at any point. It makes for an unsatisfactory experience even before you take into account the lacklustre script, flat performances and wild tonal variations, let alone address the queasy question of how much the genre generally, and this specifically, is exploiting the grief of victims' families. Annaleigh Ashford gives a charisma-free performance as Moore, who is written as a blandly saintly survivor, racked with guilt about not doing more to stop her father and now seeking – via an apparently invented subplot – to atone for her perceived sins. James Wolk does the best he can with the little available to him in the role of Ben, Melissa's almost equally saintly husband. There is a teenage daughter who goes off the rails when she discovers who her grandad is (shoplifting, joining the wrong crowd and secretly contacting him in prison). And then there's Dennis Quaid as Jesperson, whose innate edgy vibe could have been harnessed to great effect, but who instead slips into grinning caricature. He isn't helped by the eternally one-note script. Moore is working as a makeup artist on the therapy talkshow Dr Greg (played by an uncharacteristically over-the-top David Harewood) when Jesperson gets in touch to say that he will confess to killing a ninth woman, Heather (Leah Jacksties) – but only to his daughter and only in person. For a moment, it looks as if Happy Face is about to right itself and become an interrogation of our era's increasingly unhealthy obsession with true crime and our willingness to overlook exploitation of the vulnerable in pursuit of the next vicarious thrill. Dr Greg and his producer, Ivy (Tamera Tomakili), press Moore into contacting her father and appearing on the show to 'out' herself as the killer's child. But this hope, despite everything the Kings did to capture the vagaries of the US legal system with The Good Wife and The Good Fight, is not realised. The disappointment recurs when Ivy and Melissa discover that Heather's boyfriend, a young Black man, Elijah (played by Damon Gupton), is weeks away from the death penalty in Texas for her murder, despite an absence of evidence. This is ripe for an examination of systemic racism and corruption, but this is not fulfilled. Although it becomes a little more consistent in the second half, Happy Face remains a weirdly soapy, at times saccharine, evocation of triumph over trauma and the mawkish celebration of the courage of victims and the survivors of terrible violence that patronises rather than honours them. The whole thing feels tired, shoddy and half-baked. But maybe Jesperson will enjoy the further attention it will bring him. Something to help break the monotony in prison. Smiley face. Happy Face is on Paramount+
The Independent
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Dennis Quaid is brilliantly creepy in true crime serial killer thriller Happy Face
On balance, the podcast revolution has been a negative for television. Whether it's Homecoming on Prime Video (starring a confused Julia Roberts) or Dirty John on Netflix, hit podcasts have invariably made for watered-down TV. Something about the format's chatty, informal style translates uneasily to the screen. For that reason, true crime fans could be forgiven for having muted expectations for Paramount+'s Happy Face, a serial killer saga adapted from the 2018 podcast of the same name. But it pulls off the shift from non-fiction to drama surprisingly well – helped, perhaps, by the fact that it isn't trying to do anything especially spectacular. The series tells a sensational story but with a minimum of fuss. Given the challenge posed by bringing podcasts to TV, simply to be stonkingly average (rather than weird and boring) is a victory in itself. The big draw is Dennis Quaid. He is quietly chilling as Keith Hunter Jesperson – a real-life American-Canadian serial murderer dubbed the 'Happy Face killer' in the 1990s because of the smiley faces with which he would sign his Jack the Ripper-style letters to the media. Quaid says he was initially 'hesitant' about the part, explaining he didn't want to 'glorify' Jesperson. Yet he uncorks oodles of A-lister charm as a monster who projects dad-next-door vibes on the surface but whose wholesome smile is offset by the dead gravity pits of his eyes. In the mid-1990s, Jesperson led an outwardly normal life as a hard-working trucker and doting dad to teenage daughter Melissa. Every so often, he would return home with a present for his little girl. What she didn't know was that the gifts were his way of calming his roiling soul after he had taken another victim. He was using his innocent daughter as a coping mechanism as he raped and strangled numerous women across America. Back in the present, Melissa (Annaleigh Ashford) has ended all contact with her now-imprisoned father. She has a career as a makeup artist on an Oprah-style daytime talk show hosted by the gregarious Dr Greg (a wonderfully fake and manipulative David Harewood). But her father continues to plague her with letters and calls from prison. When she rebuffs his latest attempt at contact on her daughter's 15th birthday, he phones her employer and promises to reveal the identity of another, hitherto unidentified victim. There is a catch. He will share the details only if Melissa is involved in the process. The real Jesperson is still alive. As are his victim's families, who will presumably have mixed feelings about having their trauma turned into prime-time entertainment while the man who murdered their loved ones serves out his life sentence in Oregon (which does not have the death penalty). But Happy Face is, on the whole, respectful towards their suffering. The gruesome murders are largely glossed over. This is not one of those serial killer dramas that reveals an unhealthy fascination with the minutiae of the killings. As was the case with the original podcast and Melissa Moore's 2009 memoir, Shattered Silence, the true subject matter is Melissa's relationship with her father. Ashford excels as an everyday mother and daughter, getting on with her quiet life in the suburbs while living always in the shadow of a dark secret. For his part, Quaid brings an overpowering Hollywood charisma as the father from hell. He is horribly watchable as an avuncular everyman whose cheesy dad banter papers over a bottomless well of evil. It is a story crammed with surprises (provided you haven't already binged the podcast). For instance, Melissa is shocked to discover that an innocent African-American Elijah (Damon Gupton) has been wrongly blamed for the Texas murder to which Jesperson has just confessed and languishes on death row. The exploitative nature of daytime TV is also unpacked when Melissa is encouraged to go on Dr Greg (Harewood plays a variation on the evil talk show host he portrayed in video game Alan Wake 2) to talk about the wrongful conviction in Texas. She has walked into a trap and is encouraged, despite her visible distress, to discuss her relationship with her father instead. Her personal tragedy has become meat for the masses. That isn't to say Happy Face doesn't have its soapy moments. A subplot in which Melissa's daughter becomes a minor celebrity among local true crime fans because of her bloody family history is presumably intended as a critique of the podcast industry and its obsession with dead women (the grislier the killings, the better). But the execution is hokey – as the resident mean girls pick on Hazel (Khiyla Aynne), it feels as if we're sitting through a grim riff on High School Musical rather than a sensitive exploration of trauma and survival. But that's just a quibble. By the standards of TV adaptations of hit podcasts, Happy Face can be considered a success. It stands on its own two feet as a drama and tells a grisly story without exploiting the victims or making the viewer feel cheapened or complicit merely by the act of watching. Disaster averted.
The Guardian
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Happy Face: this drama about a serial killer's daughter is so mind-boggling it's hard to tell if it's real or fantasy
You know the feeling: you're watching a shocking docudrama about a toxic waste scandal, or the baseless prosecution of 555 sub-postmasters, or the fraudulent founder of a blood-testing biotech company, and you start thinking – did this all really happen? So you do some digging online. Usually, it turns out there has been a mild massaging of the truth in the name of narrative efficiency: a couple of characters conflated, a timeline slightly rejigged. Only very occasionally (once?) will a case of dramatic licence result in a hysterical media storm, a global debate about the ethics of dramatisation and Netflix being hit with a $170m lawsuit. And yet it is almost unheard of to settle down to watch a series based on real events – or, in the case of Paramount+'s Happy Face (from Thursday 20 March), 'inspired by a true life story' – and be confronted with an utterly mind-boggling fusion of fact and fiction. First, the facts. This is a drama about a woman called Melissa Moore, daughter of the Happy Face killer. She is real (played here by Broadway stalwart Annaleigh Ashford) which means that, unfortunately, he is too. Keith Hunter Jesperson murdered at least eight women in the US in the 1990s, drawing smiley faces on the anonymous confessional letters he sent out to garner publicity for his crimes. Moore was frightened of her father growing up, especially when she witnessed him torture a set of kittens with inconceivable depravity, later finding their dead bodies. Moore revealed the truth on popular TV talk show Dr Phil – a decision that eventually led to a career in the world of true crime-based entertainment. In some ways, this is Moore bringing the jaw-dropping story of her own life to the screen: Happy Face is based on her 2009 memoir as well as a 2018 podcast series about her experiences (she is also an executive producer on this show). But, in many other ways, it absolutely isn't. When we meet the empathetic and unassuming Moore, she is working as a makeup artist on the fictional Dr Greg Show. One day, the eponymous talkshow host (David Harewood) receives a phone call from Jesperson (Dennis Quaid), who demands to speak to Moore, forcing her to out herself as his daughter. He wants to reveal his responsibility for another murder, but only to Moore – in person. She believes he's lying to get her attention (likely), but Greg's workaholic producer Ivy tells her she owes it to the victim to visit him and extract as much information as possible. This – as far as I can tell – didn't happen, and this strange mixture of reality and total fantasy makes it difficult to invest in Happy Face's half-truths. Even weirder is that despite never shying away from the hellish details of Jesperson's crimes, the show's vibe is jarringly soapy and light-hearted, with Moore's idyllic home life rendered in sunny soft-focus and even her relationship with her serial killer father saturated in sickly sentimentality at points. Even weirder, however, is this show's attitude to the true-crime industrial complex. Once Moore's identity is revealed, the Dr Greg production team proceed to brutally exploit her like the professionals they are. Ivy guilt trips Moore into talking to her dad – who clearly poses a danger to Moore's family – in the name of content, then bullies her into doing a TV interview herself, during which Greg hurls all sorts of egregious accusations at her (later, a vulture-like agent circles in the hope of landing a book deal). Initially, I thought this might be a meta satire of an industry that milks private pain for entertainment, but by the end it is clear Happy Face is no such thing. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion So what is it then? Well, the fictional thriller component – which gets wilder and more murder mystery-like as Moore and Ivy delve into Jesperson's claims – is certainly gripping. It's chilling too: Quaid is deeply creepy as the compulsively gurning Jesperson (that's The Parent Trap ruined for ever). But does this pick-and-mix twist on the real-life crime drama have anything meaningful to say about the genre's malignancy – or even its healing properties? Truth be told, I really don't think so.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Yahoo
'He's a Monster:' Read PEOPLE's Exclusive 2009 Interview with Happy Face Killer Keith Jesperson's Daughter Melissa Moore
In 2008, Melissa Moore wrote a book called Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter, which shared the perspective of growing up as the daughter of the infamous Happy Face Killer and living with the aftermath of his murders and arrest. Now a podcaster and filmmaker, Moore has produced several docuseries about other high-profile murders, and her latest, one about her own family's story, will premiere on Paramount+ March 20. PEOPLE interviewed Moore in 2009, shortly after she released the book. Read the profile in full below. Sitting on the swing in her family's Spokane, Wash., backyard one afternoon last year, Aspen Moore asked her mother a simple question: "Mommy, where's your daddy? Everybody has a daddy. Where's yours?" It was the moment Melissa Moore had been dreading. Though she gave Aspen, then 6, a quick answer— "He lives in Salem, Oregon" — the whole truth was a horror hte young wife and mother of two had spent 15 years trying to forget. Her father, Keith Jesperson, 54, confessed to raping and murdering eight women between 1990 and 1995. Dubbed "the Happy Face Killer" for the bragging letters he wrote to the press and signed with a smiley face, he is now serving multiple life sentences at an Oregon prison. "Every night I would reassure my daughter, 'There's no such thing as monsters,' " says Moore, 30. "How am I supposed to tell her that some monsters are real?" The incident with Aspen was a turning point. Tired of living in shame and secrecy, Moore has written a book, Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter. "I was always afraid that if people knew who my father was, they would look for my flaws," she says. "I don't want my children to grow up ashamed — they're not responsible for what their grandfather did. People forget that serial killers have families too.' Growing up in Yakima, Wash., Moore and her two younger siblings, Jason, now 29, and Carrie, 26, had good times with their dad, a longhaul trucker. The 6'6" Jesperson 'was charismatic,' Moore remembers, and more attentive than their mother, Rose. 'He'd take us bowling, fishing. He'd always say he had the best kids because we were well-behaved. I loved him—he was my dad.' Yet there were distinctly troubling signs, such as Jesperson's habit of torturing pets. 'In my earliest memories, he was killing animals,' Moore recalls. He swerved to hit cats on the road and once hung Melissa's four kittens on a clothesline, laughing as they squirmed. When she returned from trying unsuccessfully to persuade her mother to stop him—'I think she thought if she avoided a problem it would go away'—the kittens lay dead in a heap. 'Those were signs,' she says. 'But we weren't looking for clues.' When Melissa was 10, Jesperson left his wife for another woman and floated in and out of his children's lives. Though their mom called him 'Disneyland Dad' because 'he always had some fun activity planned,' Moore says, he was becoming moodier. He even began talking about how to commit the perfect murder: 'I just thought it was something he read about in his detective magazines.' Then, in April 1995, Melissa's sister saw their dad's mug shot on TV. Rose gathered her children together and told them simply, 'Your dad is in jail.' When Jason asked, 'For what?' Rose answered, 'For murder,'' ending the discussion. Stunned and sickened, Melissa, then 15, sought details at the local library. She learned that her father had raped and killed his first victim, a young woman he picked up at a bar in Portland, five months after he and Rose split. Six others followed — all strangers, all raped and strangled. The eighth was a girlfriend, Julie Winningham, and his ties to her — combined with his letter to a local paper and a confession he sent his brother — led police to the truth. Melissa was left reeling. 'My father could kill a woman and then take us to McDonald's?' she says. 'I couldn't wrap my head around it. And I worried it was genetic.' She and her siblings didn't discuss their anguish. 'It was too painful. We acted like Dad's just on a trip.' Nor did she feel she could talk to her mom, who now says she 'had no idea' her husband had the capacity for murder, though she admits, "I should have told the kids more about what was going on after he was arrested. I shut down. But there's not a place to go ask, 'How do you deal if your husband is a serial killer?' " Moore struggled through her remaining high school years, dating only rarely. "I remember guys whispering, 'You know who her dad is!' They avoided me." Her father wrote her letters, saying he missed her and her siblings, and on the one occasion when she and her brother visited him in jail, he apologized that he could no longer care for them and encouraged them to change their name. "He started crying, and I started crying," Melissa recalls. Enrolled in Spokane Community College, she met Sam Moore at a church dance in 2000. When she told him her story, "I had some reservations," admits Sam. "I was keeping an eye out to see, 'Is she a little off?' I never, ever saw it." Marrying Sam, now an account executive at UPS, helped her heal, as did becoming a mother to Aspen, now 8, and Jake, 5. Writing her book helped two, and her siblings are supportive, she says. As for her mother who hasn't read the book, Melissa sees their relationship as a work in progress: "My mom admits she has a lot of regrets." Recently, Moore's paternal grandfather informed her of something she'd never known. After her father was in prison, her grandfather said, " 'He told me he was getting uncomfortable [at one point' because he was having thoughts of killing you kids.' My grandfather thought my dad didn't really mean it. But yeah, he did." (Keith Jesperson did not respond to a request for comment.) After years of having mixed feelings about her father — along with revulsion, "I felt compassion and I felt sad" — she says that now she sees him as "a monster," plain and simple. And when Aspen want to know more about her heritage, as she surely will some day, Moore will pass on to her daughter her own hard-won certainty. "I'm not a monster," she says, "even if my dad is." This article was written independently by PEOPLE's editorial team and meets our editorial standards. Paramount+ is a paid advertising partner with PEOPLE. Read the original article on People
