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When Melissa G. Moore came home one afternoon in the spring of 1995, her mother Rose Hucke took her and her two younger siblings aside. The Shadle Park High School senior immediately knew something was very wrong: her parents never held family meetings. In the unfinished basement of Moore’s grandmother’s Spokane, Wash., home where the family lived at the time, Rose shared that the children’s father, Keith Hunter Jesperson, was in prison for murder.
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The news rocked Moore to the core. “I had a cot and a cellar area that I designated as my bedroom. I just remember going in there, throwing myself on the cot, crying and trying to picture what happened,” she tells TIME, wondering to herself, “Is this really true?”
It would eventually be revealed that between 1990 and 1995, Jesperson strangled and killed at least eight women during his travels across the U.S. Signing anonymous confessional notes to newspapers and on restroom walls with a smiley face, he became known as the “Happy Face Killer.” After his arrest in 1995 and subsequent confession, he is now serving several life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Ore.
Moore’s surreal-but-true experiences of growing up with Jesperson as a father are now the basis of the eight-episode Paramount+ crime thriller series Happy Face. Written by a team that includes creator Jennifer Cacicio and The Good Wife team Michelle King and Robert King, the show explores a what-if scenario, revolving around a grown-up version of Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), a talk show make-up artist whose world is upended when her convicted father (Dennis Quaid) calls her employer demanding to speak with his estranged daughter. In exchange, he promises to divulge new information about an alleged ninth murder victim.
While the show’s present-day plot is fictional, Moore, an executive producer on Happy Face, says the project accurately captures aspects of her past, including her “toxic entanglement” with her father, who Moore hasn’t seen since she last visited him in prison in 2004. She says the “ping pong”-like, back-and-forth style of their confrontations, during which Jesperson emotionally exploited his daughter to boost his ego, is authentically depicted onscreen.
“There was always a reason why my dad would say something to me, and I always felt that my father wanted to get my guard down and open my heart, so then he would manipulate that,” recalls Moore. She adds, “I think they [Ashford and Quaid] really embodied what it would be like to be in that type of relationship.”
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A life transformed by tragedy and trauma
Moore spent her early years in Toppenish, Wash., a rural town with fewer than 9,000 people, and says she recalls mostly feel-good memories with her family when looking back on her modest childhood. While Jesperson, a burly long-haul truck driver, was often on the road, he sent Moore postcards. When he returned, pockets flush with change and trinkets, his arrival was met with an air of excitement; Moore and her siblings raced to see who could get to him first.
“I would dig into his pocket and get all the coins to buy whatever I wanted at the supermarket, which was normally candy,” she recalls.
Exciting as these family reunions were, red flags emerged early on that Jesperson was troubled. When Moore was 5, she discovered stray kittens in the cellar of her family’s farmhouse. Jesperson seized them from Moore’s hands, hung them on a clothesline and tortured them, leaving their bodies in a heap in the back garden.
After Jesperson and Hucke divorced in 1989, the signs became even more alarming. “It almost kind of snowballed,” Moore explains. During a drive along the Columbia River, which partly straddles Oregon and Washington, Jesperson told Moore, who recalls being around 11 or 12 at the time, he knew how to get away with murder employing a method that didn’t leave fingerprints or distinctive footprints behind.
Moore was convinced at the time her father’s odd chatter was simply the stuff of detective fiction, but Jesperson may have been referring to the murder of Taunja Bennett, whom he beat, sexually assaulted, and killed after meeting her at a bar in Portland, Ore. in January 1990.
Bennett was Jesperson’s first known victim. Over the next five years, he murdered seven more women, including Cynthia Lyn Rose, Patricia Skiple, Suzanne Kjellenberg, Laurie Ann Pentland, Angela May Subrize, and one unidentified woman Jesperson referred to as “Claudia.” He turned himself in to authorities in 1995 after he murdered his girlfriend Julie Ann Winningham.
During a family visit to see Jesperson in jail after his arrest, he gave Moore a tip. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘My best advice is to change your last name,’” she recalls. “That’s when I knew hands-down that he was guilty, because he was advising me to basically go into hiding.”
Disappearing and leading a quiet life wasn’t in the cards for Moore, who chose instead to embrace her past and share her experiences through projects including the 2009 autobiography Shattered Silence, the podcast Happy Face Presents: Two Face, and Paramount+’s Happy Face.
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Tapping into Moore’s story for a new chapter
When Cacicio stumbled upon Moore’s podcast on iTunes in 2018 during her commute to the writers’ room of Showtime’s crime thriller series Your Honor, she was quickly drawn in. Moore’s story was compelling and unique, but Cacicio also felt connected because of what she and Moore shared in common: humble upbringings and fathers who served prison time. (Cacicio’s father was incarcerated for almost 12 years for drug-related charges.)
“The crimes were different, but the emotions were really the same, having this family secret, having the shame around incarceration and kind of having this dad that you idolized, but had this hidden life,” Cacicio explains.
Although Moore received several offers to have her story adapted for TV, Cacicio’s vision for advancing her life story—and Cacicio sharing experiences of her own father—resonated above the others. Happy Face is largely faithful to Moore’s childhood, but it takes a fictional approach to her adult life, changing elements including Moore’s profession and the show’s imagined reconnection between father and daughter. (Moore actually works as an executive producer and speaker.) Cacicio developed the investigation into the possibility of a ninth murder victim as an “outside mystery” to drive the show forward and “underpin [Moore’s] emotional story.”
“When I pitched to Melissa to try to convince her that I was the right writer, I always said I would do a fictionalized version of this,” she says, adding, “I think that was part of the reason why she picked me, because she had said, ‘I did the podcast. I wrote my memoir. I’ve been on all the talk shows. I’ve told my story my own way many times, and I would love for this to take on a life of its own.’”
Immersing herself in Moore’s past, Cacicio listened to her podcast a “million times” and pored over Shattered Silence. She and Moore had many conversations, and Moore shared letters Jesperson wrote over the years, which helped shape how he is portrayed onscreen. While Cacicio had complete creative freedom, Moore wanted Happy Face to capture her father’s cunning side. (“I wanted to show the emotional manipulation that he was superior at,” Moore adds.)
To strike the naturalistic tone Cacicio aspired to with Happy Face, she and the show’s music supervisor DeVoe Yates landed on “Happy (Reprise)” by Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins for the show’s theme song. The show’s creator is a longtime fan of Lewis’ music, but the 48-second song’s lyrical use of the word “Happy” juxtaposed with its slower, almost haunting melody and sparse instrumentation, also felt ideal to open each episode with, teasing at the show’s shadowy, unsettling narrative. A team of designers at Picturemill, meanwhile, developed the opening credits around the song, weaving together a sequence of close-up shots of blood seeping through parchment.
Creating the pilot episode’s balance of light and dark themes was essential, so Cacicio enlisted Emmy-nominated director Michael Showalter, whose previous credits include films like 2017’s The Big Sick and the 2021 biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye. “He has a way of making scenes just feel natural and helping the actors feel really comfortable,” says Cacicio, adding, “I think we were always going for things feeling a little happier in the family, and then allow things to be a little more shadowy in the darker moments.”
“It’s important to always have a little bit of humor,” she continues. “People like journalists, police officers, and people that actually are touched by crime and working in crime, they have dark senses of humor, so I was really trying to bring some of that through, as well.”
She ultimately believes Happy Face separates itself from other TV crime dramas with its examination of true crime and trauma through a lens that’s sometimes passed over in favor of a prurient focus on gore and violence.
“It’s said in the pilot that every act of violence is a rock dropped into water, and it ripples out,” she says. “I think in so many families, there’s some kind of family secret, violent act, or crime, and it affects everybody. It’s really about generational trauma, I think, at the heart of it, and it’s something I haven’t quite seen in true crime before—that’s really what I was going for.”
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Where is Moore today?
After her father’s conviction, Moore made it her life’s work to shine a light on other true crime stories and reach out to individuals with experiences similar to hers. She became an executive producer on TV projects including The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, Jodi Arias: The Friends Speak, and Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up.
Moore has also spoken to more than 100 children with parents who committed murder—her way of lending support to those likely struggling with feelings of fear, shame, and alienation over their parents’ crimes. Several of those conversations were captured in the Lifetime Movie Network docuseries Monster in My Family, which ran for two seasons from 2015 to 2017.
“When I came forward with my story, I started getting emails—’I’m just like you’—and it really validated my experience,” Moore says. “I started to see that we all had a similar experience in the emotion range. We all had denial. The five stages of grief were really real for us.”
Moore’s next project is a personal one. If her offer on a home in Palermo, Sicily is accepted, she and husband Steve Kenoyer plan on leaving the U.S. eventually for the Italian city. The house is somewhat “dilapidated”—the roof needs replacing, for one—but Moore looks forward to transforming the fixer-upper, which will be a summer home until the couple receives their visas and can permanently relocate. It’s a big move, but one that feels right.
“My daughter’s going to be getting married—she has her own life—and my son’s going to college, so he has his own life,” Moore says. “So I guess it’s my time.”
