Posted by Kerri Rawson is the daughter of Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, who murdered at least ten people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. She found out on 25 February 2005, the day of his arrest. Melissa Moore is the daughter of Keith Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer, a truck driver who murdered at least eight women between 1990 and 1995. Both men are serving multiple life sentences.
Everyone has, apart from some unfortunate exceptions, beautiful childhood memories with their dad.
Your dad raised you, helped you in difficult times, gave you good advice and taught you what is right and what is wrong.
But what happens when a cop comes to your house and announces you that your father is a serial killer? This is what happened to Kerri and Melissa, daughters of respectively the BTK killer and the killer of the smiley face.
Kerri Rawson
On 25th February 2005 Kerri is at home baking a chocolate cake. The aroma is lingering in the kitchen, but soon Kerri would forever associate that scent to a terrible memory.
The doorbell rings, and when she opens the door a man in his fifties introduces himself as an FBI agent.
Kerri lets him in and he asks her if she has heard of the BTK killer. Of course she has, he terrorized the area years before.
The agent then tells her a story that would leave her speechless:
her father is suspected of being the BTK killer and they ask her for a DNA sample from the inside of her cheek to have real proof.
Kerri gets mad at first, shouts that it is not possible and says that her father is innocent, but later on she does not seem so certain.
She clearly remembers that when she was six years old, in 1985, a neighbour had disappeared.
Her name was Marine Hedge, she was 53, slightly built, and she greeted her every time she went to church.
The night she disappeared she remembers that his father was not home.
Outside there was a storm, she was frightened and her mother had allowed her to sleep in her big bed with her. For this reason she knows for sure that her dad was out that night.
A few days later they found her lifeless body in a ditch, about 11 kilometres from her home.
Other memories start to flow and doubts become stronger.
On the same day as the FBI agent’s visit to Kerri, the BTK killer is arrested.
It is Dennis Rader, Kerri’s father, stopped a few hours earlier while driving near his home in Park City. With a warrant, the police had already obtained a sample of Kerri’s DNA from a university clinic and compared it with the DNA found under the fingernails of one of the victims. The match showed that the killer was a close relative of hers.
Rader confesses to killing at least ten people between 1974 and 1991, pleads guilty and in 2005 is sentenced to ten consecutive life terms, with a minimum of 175 years. Once in prison, he wondered why nobody from his family went to visit him.
I was a good man; I just did the wrong things
Kerri has taken many years to get to this point, but she has finally decided to forgive him. The road to forgiveness, however, is long and difficult.
Melissa Moore
Melissa is the daughter of Keith Jesperson, the smiley face’s killer. She found out in 1995 when the mother called her and her two siblings to tell them that their father had been arrested for murder.
She could not believe it, her dad a murdered? But then, like Kerri, she begun to analyse all of her memories.
The last time she had seen his father she was 15 years old. Her parents were divorced, but that morning Keith had gone to get her children to have breakfast with them.
All three got into the van and, while her brother and sister asked to be dropped off in the centre because they had other commitments, Melissa went to have breakfast with her father.
When the brothers got out of the car, a roll of duct tape rolled out from under the seat.
Melissa thought that was strange, but then she thought that it was probably useful to her dad when traveling, during his long truck journeys to work.
They went to a bar and Melissa felt anxious. Her father told her that not everything is what it seems. Melissa asked explanations and, after a moment of silence, the father replied:
I have something to tell you and it’s very important. I cannot tell you darling, if I told you, you would you go to the police. I’m not who you think I am.
Melissa felt sick, she went to the bathroom to wash her face and when she returned to the table conversation did not continue.
A few months later her father is arrested, and Melissa starts noticing signals in her childhood memories.
Keith Jesperson is arrested on 30 March 1995 for the murder of Julie Winningham. A truck driver, he killed at least eight women between 1990 and 1995, mostly by strangulation, and signed the letters he sent to newspapers and police with a smiley face. He is serving three consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
Like the time when she had found some kittens and was playing with them. Her father had hung them to the wire used to hang out the laundry and tormented them, while she screamed and begged him to put them down.
Later she found the kittens in the garden, dead.
Or when one day, when he was 13, he had taken her on a journey along the Columbia River. As they travelled he had said:
I know how to kill someone and get away with it
and then he had told her details such as what kind of shoes to use or how to cut the victim’s buttons in order not to leave fingerprints. Melissa had attributed the strange conversation to her father’s passion for detective novels.
Later she discovered that exactly in that area her father had left the body of one of his victim.
Now Melissa cannot help but wonder:
if her father had confessed everything to her, that morning at the bar, would he have been capable of killing her?
In 2008 Melissa told her story in the book Shattered Silence, about growing up next to a serial killer.
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