Melissa Moore was just 15 when she discovered her father was the notorious serial monster known as the Happy Face Killer.
Now, the 44-year-old is vowing to help Asa Ellerup, the wife of suspected Gilgo Beach killer Rex Heuermann.
Moore’s father, Keith Hunter Jesperson, was convicted of murdering eight women during his years traversing the highways and byways of America as a long-haul trucker in the 1990s.
His sick calling card was a smiley face.
Already, Ellerup has filed for divorce in the days following her husband’s July 13 arrest. Heuermann has been charged in the brutal slayings of three sex workers whose remains were found on a Long Island beach.
Moore has started a GoFundMe to raise money for the distraught Ellerup and her two adult children. So far, $14,000 has been raised with a goal of $25,000.
“I am speaking out to raise awareness and to support her,” Moore told the Daily Mail. “This would go towards helping Asa and her children restore the house (after police searched the grounds with an excavator).”
One commonality in the two cases, Moore said, was the shock effect of their loved one’s arrest. Jesperson — a Canadian citizen originally from British Columbia — kept the monster side of his personality hidden from his family.
“I didn’t know he was living a double life at the time,” Moore said. “He was picking up some of his victims when he was travelling across the country.”
Ellerup has described her feelings as a deep, “sheer depression.”
“It meant the pain become so severe you no longer feel. So, any annoyance she may otherwise normally feel towards people taking pictures pales in comparison,” Moore said.
“I wanted to come forward as an adult when I got older to show the double life that serial killers live and how the family is the façade that helps them stay underground for so long.”
Rex Heuermann is charged with murdering Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, who disappeared in 2009 and 2010.
He is also the main suspect in the slaying of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who disappeared in 2007.
His lawyer Michael Brown said outside court on Tuesday: “He told me didn’t do this.”
But the suspected serial killer is also being eyed in the murders of six other people whose bodies were discovered near Gilgo Beach in 2011. In addition, Heuermann is also being eyed in a quartet of unsolved Atlantic City murders and other cold cases around the northeastern U.S.
Moore said she has been there as her own childhood was obliterated by her father’s arrest.
“My mom was a stay-at-home mom and my dad was a long-haul truck driver. My dad would come home on the weekends. He’d play games with us. He was very hands-on,” she said.
But in retrospect, there were clues there was something different about her father. For instance, the time when she was six and he strangled and tortured a cat — and the enjoyment he got from it.
“He [also] had constant infidelities. The phone would ring and there would be another woman on the line. My mom stayed. I know people are going to ask why she did stay. It was because she had a high school education with three young children to raise and he was the breadwinner. There was financial dependence that made her stuck.”
In 1990, the marriage ended when Jesperson filed for divorce. That was the year he began killing.
He was finally arrested in March 1995.
“He preyed upon sex workers and transient women. He objectified women and believed they were trash and disposable,” Moore said. “So, I grew up hearing my father talk about women in these derogatory terms.”
Jesperson could not abide a woman who was “strong-willed” or who would “stand up for themselves”, she said.
“My father wanted somebody who would just appease him. He expected praise and adoration as a true narcissist would,” she said, adding her father haunted her mom until she died of cancer two years ago.
“She told me when she was in her bed with hospice showing up that she was my dad’s last victim. It just took a lot longer to kill her.”
