How Melissa Moore told her kids their grandfather is a convicted serial killer

Melissa Moore grew up feeling “loved” by her father. At 15, she found out he was a murderer.

“Whether it was true or not, the facade that was presented to me was that I was loved and I was provided for. I was cared for as a child,” Moore tells TODAY.com.

Moore’s dad is Keith Hunter Jesperson, the serial killer nicknamed the . Jesperson, 70, is currently serving multiple life sentences in an Oregon prison after being convicted of killing at least eight women in the 1990s. 

Jesperson confessed to the murders in a letter to his brother while awaiting trial in 1995, writing, “I am sorry that I turned out this way. I have been a killer for five years and have killed eight people. Assaulted more,” . 

Jesperson and ex-wife Rose Pernick, who divorced during Moore’s childhood, also share daughter Carrie and son Jason.

From the age of 15, when her father's crimes emerged, through college, Moore says she “just survived.” 

“I was just really trying to live day to day, make it through,” she says. She says she got married and had kids in an attempt to create “the perfect family.”

When her daughter was assigned a family tree project in school, Moore was faced once again with the reality of her father's actions.

“She was really perplexed because she couldn’t fill in the father of the maternal side of the chart,” Moore says of her daughter. “So that’s when she asked me after school, ‘Everybody has a daddy. Where’s your daddy?’ That’s when I said that he’s in Salem. She didn’t ask any other questions.

“It got me realizing that I can’t outrun my past in relation to my children. I have to tell them at some point. And how am I going to tell them? I didn’t want them to go through what I went through. I wanted to protect them and give them a good life,” Moore continues.

Moore says this was her “awakening.” Until then, she associated telling the truth with shame, remembering how other parents wouldn't let their children speak to her as a teenager.

After her realization with her daughter, Moore spoke publicly for the first time about her past on “Dr. Phil” in 2008. 

Since then, Moore wrote a memoir, “Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter,” in 2009 and served as an executive producer for “Happy Face,” a new Paramount+ series detailing her relationship with her father. 

“The main thing that I’ve learned in all of this is that it truly is a benefit to speak out,” Moore says. “I’ve had the most healing because I spoke my truth versus hiding. And the emotional energy it took to hide was draining my life. So to speak and to be truthful was life saving for me.”

Learning your grandfather is a killer

Moore broke the news to her children in a series of discussions.  

“There wasn’t just one conversation. There were many micro conversations throughout the years,” she says.

When her kids were younger, Moore says she could be vague and sporadically answer questions. That changed as her children, who are now 23 and 20, grew up.

“I would say it got really difficult to have more detailed conversations the older they got, because then they wanted to understand more about his crimes,” Moore says. “And that is not a comfortable conversation to say, ‘Hey, this is how he killed them.’”

Moore says the most difficult conversation was with her son about a year ago, when she had to explain the particularly gruesome way her dad committed his crimes.

“It was so upsetting to him to hear this news. No parent should have to tell their children these type of things,” she says.

Once Moore went public with her story, life wasn’t the same for her young daughter and son. She says her daughter experienced bullying for being related to the “Happy Face Killer.”

Despite the bullying and backlash, Moore says her kids “fully support me being public,” and know “the way they are treated is indicative of the character of the people that bullied them, not of me.

I think the hardest part about this whole experience is there’s nothing I could have done to protect them from their relation to him.

Melissa Moore

“I think the hardest part about this whole experience is there’s nothing I could have done to protect them from their relation to him,” Moore says. “There’s nothing I could have done to stop them being impacted.”

Moore’s perspective of her father changed after becoming a parent, she explains. As a mother, Moore says she’s reflected differently on her own parents’ choices.

“It also made me realize (my dad) had to have compartmentalized his double life to lead his double life the way he did, because there’s no way he could have committed those crimes against women while thinking about us children,” Moore says.

“Becoming a parent kind of helped me understand more of his pathology,” she adds.

After speaking to psychologists through the years, Moore says she’s come to believe that serial killers are both born and created — or, as she puts it, “they’re predisposed and their environment propels it.” 

Understanding the science was important to Moore as a parent because she says her children feared their family would have a chemical predisposition to violence.

To put her family’s mind at ease, Moore says she had a PET scan of her brain to check for patterns associated with Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is commonly linked to psychopathy or sociopathy.

The results gave her children a sense of relief. Moore says her understanding is that while “psychopathy is genetic,” becoming a killer requires “a line there that has to be crossed.”

“While psychopathy may be a predisposition, distributed throughout the family and some other generations, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a serial killer,” she adds.

Melissa Moore’s relationship to her father

Moore says she and her dad grew up with “a really close relationship.”

“As a little girl, I adored him, and he was my hero,” she says, adding that the “bond that I had with my dad wasn’t always bad or scary.”

But there were strange things she can’t deny. Moore says her father abused animals when she was a child. For example, she recalled in a  that he harmed cats.

Still, Moore expresses her gratitude that she knows “what it feels like to be loved in a family.” 

“I have fragments of a normal childhood that at least I can say that I can relate to other people, knowing what it feels like to have some normalcy,” she says. 

As she’s previously recounted in her 2009 memoir and BBC essay, the last time she spoke to her father before he was incarcerated was at breakfast at a Denny’s diner. 

Jesperson told Moore, “I’m not what you think I am, Melissa.” 

Moore visited her dad for the first time when he was in the county jail, charged with killing Julie Winningham, his girlfriend at the time. When she went to the jail with her aunt, Moore remembers her dad calling her by her nickname and saying, “Missy, my best advice is you change your last name.”

“That’s when I knew that the charges were true, that he was guilty,” Moore says.

Before their meeting, Moore says she “would have never envisioned that he was capable” of killing.

“It was just inconceivable, really, that he could do that,” she says, adding, “What would cause conflict for me internally is that he was such a generous person, which is really hard to wrap your head around, but he was so generous with his friends and the people around him.”

When she visited her father for the second time, Moore was married and purchasing a home. Jesperson wanted to make home-buying the focus of their conversation — which shocked her.

“He wanted to know about the interest rates. He had advice about purchasing a home,” Moore recalls. “He was leading the conversation to something that was very fatherly.”

Walking into the prison, Moore says she had expected to see her dad, the serial killer. Walking out of the prison, she says she saw her father as a dad.

“It invoked all these old feelings of having a father, the comfort of having a father — knowing that, the one thing he provided for me was, ironically, a sense of safety,” Moore says.

She continues, “Leaving the prison, it just made me crave and miss having that type of connection that a lot of daughters have with their dad.” 

When asked asked how Moore wants her dad to be remembered, in light of the show and her journey of understanding, she replies: “Oh, I’ve never been asked that before. I don’t know.”

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