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.
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…
