TRANSCRIPT 🔗
00:00:04
Speaker 1: Carl Jung once said that knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. But what if that other person is your father. This story covers two lives, a father and his daughter, and two paths, a killer and a victim. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is happy Face.
00:00:33
Speaker 2: I got a phone call. You guys were in bed.
00:00:35
Speaker 3: I got a phone call, and this guy gets on the phone and he says, I know where you're at. You're in the kitchen and you're wearing this. I was petrified. Oh my god. So I closed the door to the kid's room and I turned off all the lights because I didn't want him to know where I was at. But whoever called me exactly where I was in the house, and he knew exactly what I was wearing, so I knew he could see me for wherever he was. So I turned the lights off and I called nine one one, and they said, well, if they haven't broken in anything, there's nothing we can do.
00:01:15
Speaker 2: I go, oh, you're still comforting, you know.
00:01:18
Speaker 3: But the fortunate thing for me is I was babysitting my sister's two dogs and I was sitting on the Countain, and I said, oh, my god, Lord, if you take me, if he kills me.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: Just don't let my kids find me in the morning. Please don't let them find me.
00:01:37
Speaker 3: And I sat with the dogs next to me. I can see the door handle turning and the dogs went ballistic. And whoever it was left.
00:01:54
Speaker 2: Do you think he got something to oh? He said he did. Keith states that he hired someone.
00:02:01
Speaker 4: How did you know that it was him that was trying to put a.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: Hit on you? Because that was the only who else knew where I lived.
00:02:11
Speaker 5: It's been a long long Thanks God, Mesta, you stay since Durren, the dream of you bell leto you be let go.
00:02:36
Speaker 1: Fagged Upso No, I'm on the road with Melissa Moore, the daughter of the happy faced serial killer Noel. Our producer is also in the car with us, and we've just left her mother, Rose's office. Rose told us this terrifying story about how Keith had threatened her even from prison, he had hired somebody to possibly even murder her, and Melissa's beginning to realize that none of her childhood homes were truly ever safe.
00:03:11
Speaker 5: Let's actually go there.
00:03:12
Speaker 6: I want to go to the first place I stopped when we came to Spokane. Are you okay with that? If I take you there, it worse. I'm on Hamilton Road, which is the road my mom took when we got to Spokane to head over to my grandma's house. And everything was new to me. I have never seen so many buildings so close to each other.
00:03:35
Speaker 5: There's so many cars.
00:03:36
Speaker 6: This was a site that I've never seen before, and it was thrilling to me as a young girl. It was absolutely exciting, despite knowing my mom had just said that her and my dad were separating, which I didn't believe.
00:03:50
Speaker 5: It didn't feel real.
00:03:51
Speaker 6: I felt that this was a temporary situation, that they would get back together, that this was just going to be like a summer vacation.
00:04:00
Speaker 1: When you moved to your grandparents' house, how did your day to day change.
00:04:06
Speaker 5: My grandma, you.
00:04:07
Speaker 6: Know, didn't expect to be hosting a family in her house, and so there's no way she could have prepared. Even if she could have prepared, So her basement was an unfinished basement, was all cement, cement floors, and there was a canning cellar with this old reclaimed wood, and there was no There was one bedroom that was finished in the basement with like particle board. But my area that I picked was the cellar room, and I had a room for a cot, and then there was no room for any furnishings. We didn't have any furniture, so I used shoe boxes to organize my underwear.
00:04:49
Speaker 5: And my socks my cardboard.
00:04:51
Speaker 6: Yeah, cardboard shoe boxes, And that was kind of like my makeshift dresser. I thought I was going to last just a week or two, but it quickly turned into the whole summer, and then summer quickly turned into I was going to fifth grade now. My mom was registering me at Evergreen Elementary here, and once she registered me for fifth grade here, it now felt like, oh, this isn't changing, and especially when my dad showed up.
00:05:28
Speaker 1: But when Keith came, it was a huge disappointment for Melissa. She suddenly realized he wasn't this superhero or this mythological figure she'd always romanticized him, as.
00:05:40
Speaker 6: He had a trailer of all our belongings, and it was like halfway through, like he didn't even having care. When he showed up, it was a disaster. It was just like tossed in there, like it was trash, our belongings. I actually didn't even recognize it as my own bedroom furniture because it was so broken down and so ruined by the transport.
00:05:59
Speaker 1: Rose remembers this well, and it's even worse from her perspective, while Melissa focuses on her bed and her possessions. Rose's sadness comes from losing something irreplaceable.
00:06:13
Speaker 3: When we had left, he had given everything away from our house, like I wanted to keep, like you guys's baby pictures and her She had a cute little gown at Little Rose Buzzle that your grandma had bought for you, and in a quilt that was made for you.
00:06:30
Speaker 2: And he chucked that all up, gave it away.
00:06:43
Speaker 7: Phil Stanford The Oregonian, May twenty sixth, nineteen ninety four. One day about November ninety two, he says he picked up a girl named Claudia in California on the way out of la My mind went with the thought of a sex slave, and when I stopped at a rest area, I took her. I taped her up and raped her again and again. I kept her for four days alive. Then I killed her and dumped her body about seven miles north of blyth On ninety five.
00:07:25
Speaker 6: I was still happy to see him because I thought
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that every time my dad came, I could persuade him to get back together with my mom, and like everything would go back to normal and I could have my life back. I thought, if I could just manipulate and convince my father, I would try every tactic possible. And maybe you know other kids when they go through a divorce, go through the same thing. That's what I did with my dad. I wanted him back. I wanted him to fix the situation, you know.
00:07:54
Speaker 5: But she registered that.
00:07:55
Speaker 8: Like he wasn't treating your things with respect, that there was sort of a coldness there.
00:08:02
Speaker 5: You registered that.
00:08:03
Speaker 6: I registered that, but I thought it was because of his anger situation.
00:08:07
Speaker 5: I didn't take it personal. I thought it was.
00:08:09
Speaker 2: Would you blame your mom?
00:08:11
Speaker 6: Yeah? Yeah, I blamed my mom. That's what I regret is I blamed her.
00:08:17
Speaker 5: She shouldn't deserve that at all.
00:08:31
Speaker 2: How did you meet him again? How did you guys start dating?
00:08:34
Speaker 5: Oh?
00:08:34
Speaker 9: I know the sorry You were working at a burger place and you were doing the takeout window and then my dad drove through the takeout and then you didn't put the meat in his hack.
00:08:48
Speaker 4: On the grill on the left, and then he circled back because he didn't have meat in his hamburgers.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: Two buns, right, yeah, he goes up. I did order a hamberger, there.
00:09:03
Speaker 5: Was no meat in it.
00:09:04
Speaker 2: I go, oh, okay.
00:09:05
Speaker 5: He still sitting on the grill.
00:09:09
Speaker 2: So he asked me out and I said no.
00:09:16
Speaker 3: Every time he come in he'd ask me, and Macfin goes, I'll just go out with him once.
00:09:22
Speaker 2: Why didn't you want to do him?
00:09:24
Speaker 3: I was not really attractive to him, you know, the whole thing. I don't even know I even married him.
00:09:29
Speaker 5: To be honest with.
00:09:30
Speaker 1: You, seemingly inappropriate laughter seems to be a trait of the Jesperson women. It's almost gallows humored.
00:09:41
Speaker 2: Years later, I was like, what did you even see in this guy that you married him?
00:09:47
Speaker 3: I guess I just I road it for the underdog, so long I married it.
00:09:51
Speaker 5: I don't know.
00:10:02
Speaker 2: He wasn't exactly a faithful husband, oh, absolutely not from day one. From day one, actually literally day one. Yeah, tell me about your wedding day.
00:10:14
Speaker 3: Got ready for the wedding, we got married, and they were doing pictures of me and I guess he was outside kissing the bridesmaids my best friend, Pam, Pam, how can.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: You find out about that? She told me? Maybe years later? She goes, I felt so bad. I wanted to tell you, but Dad didn't tell you.
00:10:34
Speaker 4: Oh when when you were married and we were living in Yakima, did you ever since say he was unfaithful?
00:10:44
Speaker 2: I knew it. I knew it. I was getting phone calls every day. Hi, is Keith here?
00:10:49
Speaker 3: I said, no, who is this? She goes, oh, I can't remember what her name was, And she goes, oh, would you tell Keith that I called?
00:10:58
Speaker 2: She goes, oh, who are you his wife? Oh? And then she'd hung up. So they were phoning the house. They were phoning the house. Did you ever confront Dad on these women calling?
00:11:11
Speaker 5: I did.
00:11:12
Speaker 3: He would say things like, if you only knew, like we'd be driving down the road, because if you only knew, And I go, if I only knew?
00:11:21
Speaker 2: What? Because if only you knew.
00:11:30
Speaker 7: After the second murder, the happy Face killer says he realized he liked what he was doing. This triggered something in me. He says, it was getting easy, real easy. A week or two later, I stopped in Turlock, California, at a rest area a hooker became my next victim. This time I just strangled her right there without sucks. She was in my truck only five minutes. I dropped her body off behind the Blueberry Hill Cafe a ten miles south on ninety nine. I placed her body in the dirt and stepped on her throat to make sure she was dead.
00:12:28
Speaker 6: I just couldn't understand why we kind of get together, Like I couldn't understand because our car came from my dad. When we needed anything, my mom would ask my dad, and my dad would buy us a new car, or my dad would provide the things that we needed.
00:12:42
Speaker 5: So it felt like we just weren't competent on our.
00:12:46
Speaker 6: Own without him, Like somehow he was competent and knew how to make things happen, and he got money so fast and so effortlessly.
00:12:57
Speaker 5: It looked like, you know, but our dad.
00:13:00
Speaker 1: Was that now looking back, you know, as a mom now looking at he'd.
00:13:08
Speaker 6: Have to pay anything, like all his resources, his full time job, didn't go to supporting a family and went to himself and his lifestyle.
00:13:21
Speaker 1: Did you at one point try to go on the road with him.
00:13:25
Speaker 3: There's some story he told, Yeah, so so you guys, stay with your grandparents.
00:13:31
Speaker 2: We go to Arizona.
00:13:34
Speaker 3: So we're in near Aza, semi truck in a semi truck. It was a blazing hot day, so we were gonna stop at a restaurant and neat.
00:13:41
Speaker 2: So he parks the vehicle. We walk and there was.
00:13:48
Speaker 3: I call him Pimps, but they had a huge black lemmo and they were washing it. He physically picked me up and put me in the arms of that man.
00:13:59
Speaker 2: He said, you can have her and walked away. And that was the end of our marriage. That was it. That's when I left.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: I don't I don't even know why. I got back in the truck with him and went back home.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: Mentally for you, at that moment, that was it. I was totally done. So basically told.
00:14:18
Speaker 3: Pemps that you can have my wife pick me up, physically pick me up and
put me in the arms of a guy like what like?
00:14:28
Speaker 2: I couldn't think. I was in so much shock, I couldn't figure out.
00:14:33
Speaker 3: We never talked, by the way the whole way back, never said a word to each.
00:14:38
Speaker 5: Other, smelled too this world was fall Your nas been clean, our s dream.
00:14:58
Speaker 6: Of fire.
00:15:01
Speaker 5: Un released, spent.
00:15:08
Speaker 3: Oh you.
00:15:12
Speaker 2: Brid how did he feel about being a dad?
00:15:19
Speaker 3: Well, he said he really was happy, and I mean he held you and stuff, but he was never home.
00:15:27
Speaker 2: So what he said when he did was two different things. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:15:31
Speaker 5: It's always been the case.
00:15:33
Speaker 3: I think I spent the first year it was like, I don't know how to explain it.
00:15:37
Speaker 2: The first year she was born, I was like, there was some dark force that was trying to kill us. I don't know how to explain it to you. I went the first year with Melissa, had went through two fires. Didn't I save the family by waking up? Yeah? Like I was.
00:15:54
Speaker 3: I was sleeping and she was playing in her crib.
00:15:59
Speaker 2: I go, what the heck?
00:16:00
Speaker 3: And I looked over, Oh, she's playing in a crib. I heard her audible voice tell me Rose, it's three o'clock in the morning. Why can't you see your child playing in the crib? I shot straight up. The whole bathroom was on fire. I grabbed her, ran out, I nudged Keith, ran out the door with her, and.
00:16:21
Speaker 9: The whole mobile home belt burned down And it didn't burn down.
00:16:24
Speaker 2: But it caught the whole roof on fire, wasn't it the vent?
00:16:28
Speaker 3: Keith taped the vent. It got so hot that the fan the melt. It melt, plastic melted, and I had a little toilet cover, a shag covered, and it caught it on fire. And the whole bathroom was in golf before the smoke detectors went off. I was already out the door before the smoke dectors went off.
00:16:59
Speaker 1: When did you remember having the first feeling like, oh my god, I made a mistake in terms of marrying him.
00:17:07
Speaker 3: I think when I went through the second fire. It was like three months after that. Your dad had a contract with tobacco to do irrigation pipes for a huge orchard up in Winneanchi.
00:17:25
Speaker 2: So we borrowed.
00:17:27
Speaker 3: Your grandparents' brand new travel trailer and we parked it under the hill and there was just dry grass all the way up the hill, and then there was a beach and then a lake, and I remember looking up and the hill was on fire and it was all dry grass between me and that trailer.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: It was tall, dry grass. Do you know that he was an arsonist? He set fires? He didn't think of that. He did it through childhood.
00:18:01
Speaker 4: Do you think he set the trailer off?
00:18:04
Speaker 2: But that's after that that's kind of coincidence to fire.
00:18:10
Speaker 4: Exactly do you think guys having
second thoughts of being a dad who was trying to kill kill us?
00:18:15
Speaker 3: I have no idea, but I think about it, like I told you, a dark force was trying to get rid of us.
00:18:28
Speaker 2: So Dad was gone. You didn't see him. And there this fire happens on the hill and it's coming straight down for us. And then what do you do?
00:18:38
Speaker 3: You have me in the lake, and I grabbed the hose from behind the camper and saturated the grass as much as I.
00:18:47
Speaker 2: Could with the water from the hose. I mean, it was gonna be our life.
00:18:52
Speaker 3: So and I had a visual point that if the fire broke past that line, I was gonna just leave the hose there and as.
00:19:00
Speaker 2: I run the lake and I was gonna go deeper with you in it. And then did it ever reach that point? They did not. I saw the fire truck come down, WoT it out. When did Keith come back, Oh, maybe fifteen minutes after that? How did he know? I have no idea.
00:19:25
Speaker 1: It was an incredible moment just watching them come together. It was as if they were putting together the pieces of a puzzle that they'd been trying to solve for years.
00:19:50
Speaker 2: Then you said that was the moment when you regretted marrying him. Why because it was.
00:19:57
Speaker 3: This is the second fire, like within three and I felt like this dark, oppressive force was after me, and I felt that that force was your dad.
00:20:15
Speaker 2: Then shortly after that, like a month.
00:20:19
Speaker 3: After, we go camping to you and I and we're at a church camp and so he decides to sleep in the car, but you and I sleep in the cabin.
00:20:32
Speaker 2: And then I heard a.
00:20:34
Speaker 3: Bear and it's going around and around our cabin, and I was like, oh my god. I mean I wanted to grab you put it in my bed, but I didn't dare stir you. And then the bear stood up on the door and was pushing on the door and there was only a leather latch between that bear and us, and so I laid there and I said, oh God, please don't let Melissa make one sound. Please don't make your one sound. And then I heard another bear going around and around.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: That's not an accident.
00:21:08
Speaker 4: He must have planted fish.
00:21:09
Speaker 5: He did. He did.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: He cleaned fish in front of the cabin.
00:21:14
Speaker 3: You can see paws all over the place. And he was sleeping in the car, and this bear was pushing on this door and was pushing on this door, and I just thought, oh my god, if that latch on hooks, we're dinner.
00:21:34
Speaker 2: I know that dad knows not to clean fish. It's one on one. It's one on one.
00:21:40
Speaker 4: You don't prepare your food in your camp base, right, or clean fish.
00:21:45
Speaker 2: You're supposed to even put your trash up a tree. Yeah, he knew, he knew that.
00:21:49
Speaker 3: I mean, he packed horses with his dad. They've they've been camping since they were little. They know the bush better than anything.
00:21:57
Speaker 4: It's apparent to me three incidents, he's conveniently in a different location.
00:22:03
Speaker 2: This is definitely him trying to make it look like an accident.
00:22:08
Speaker 3: I think after that point that I really believe you and I were protected, really spiritually protected you. And I felt that from the very beginning with all the kids.
00:22:25
Speaker 7: The happy face killer, if that's how he wants us to think of him, says he left his next victim in Salem Moregan. My next victim was a hooker I had used weeks earlier. I summoned her on the CB. She had a raincoat on. We went through the normal procedure. I felt so much power. I then told her she was going to die and slowly strangled her and dropped her off behind g I, Joe's and Salem. I put her against the fence under the BlackBerry vines and covered her with leaves.
00:23:02
Speaker 5: Do you believe her.
00:23:03
Speaker 8: When she says, your dad never abused her?
00:23:06
Speaker 6: I do, and I believe in the physical sense because he didn't physically abuse her. Was he abusive man, Yes, in a different way.
00:23:15
Speaker 5: He was abusive.
00:23:16
Speaker 6: Emotionally he was abusive, like controlling the money and controlling her.
00:23:24
Speaker 8: How did it make you feel hearing kind of putting the pieces together about those stories your mom told you about the fires because you obviously knew about it.
00:23:31
Speaker 6: You knew about the fires.
00:23:32
Speaker 5: He knew about one fire.
00:23:33
Speaker 6: I did not know about the bears or about the other fire. I didn't put the pieces together like this is like I've had these fragments, these little stories of just paint a picture of one particular thing. Now I feel like the pieces are coming together.
00:23:49
Speaker 5: And painting a bigger picture.
00:23:57
Speaker 6: I had assumed when he had thoughts of killing us kids that it was towards the latter years. Never would I have ever thought that it happened as I was a toddler.
00:24:08
Speaker 5: You know, I didn't go that far back.
00:24:13
Speaker 1: When you look at Keith's history as a serial killer, you have to understand that his murders that we know of took place in a five year period. He started killing in nineteen ninety when Melissa was ten, and he stopped in ninety five when she was fifteen, And that history she shared with her father before he became a serial killer is something that's very difficult for her to process.
00:24:37
Speaker 6: You know, I guess I had put somewhat my dad in a box too, like he was the monster for five years. Now I'm seeing he was the monster for many years, decades, Like this is not all life.
00:24:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, the five years is not an isolated event. It was an escalation.
00:25:04
Speaker 2: Were you ever afraid of him? Was I afraid of your dad? No?
00:25:11
Speaker 3: Was I afraid of the person that picked me up and put me in the arms like another guy?
00:25:16
Speaker 2: Absolutely? I was afraid of that.
00:25:20
Speaker 1: Do you think he was born that way?
00:25:24
Speaker 2: I think he was groomed to be who he is. From less.
00:25:34
Speaker 10: So you last out, It's been long long, Thanks the best of.
00:25:55
Speaker 5: You stayed since The dream Lafer.
00:26:03
Speaker 8: Happy Face is a production of how stuff works Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Pacheco, mangesh A Tikedur and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by Claire Campbell, Paige Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle, Audio editing by Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Chaicoigne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper and KATU News in Portland, Oregon.