September 28, 2018 • 28 mins
Sometimes it's hardest for the people who are closest to see the obvious clues. Melissa Moore reckons with the reality of her childhood and growing up with a serial killer for a dad.
Melissa G. Moore: IG @melissag.moore; Tik Tok @melissa.g.moore
Lauren Bright Pacheco: www.LaurenBrightPacheco.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Let's start from the beginning. I was a young girl.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I was eleven years old, and my parents had just divorced,
and my dad was now living with his girlfriend in Portland, Orgon.
And this was my first summer vacation where I stayed
at a different home than my childhood home. And the
moment I walked in that house, I felt like I
wasn't alone, that there was energy there, that there were
(00:31):
spirits there, that I was being watched in every room.
In every room, he had purchased bunk beds for my
sister and I and my sister picked the bottom bunk
and I picked the top bunk.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And it was my first night in this new house.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I fall asleep a little bit, but then I'm awakened
by being touched.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
And then my hair is touched. It's not a heavy touch,
it's a light touch.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
So I leap and go down the little stairs of
the bunk bed and I rush over and I'm going
to go run into my dad's room, but I froze.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
I felt that.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Whatever was touching me was over there too. I wasn't
going to be safe in my dad's room, and I
didn't feel safe with my dad, and so I laid
in the hallway floor with a light on, curled up
in a ball, hoping that the night would just go
(01:44):
away fast. And in the morning my dad stepped over
me and he said, why did you fall asleep in
the hallway? And I said I was being touched, Dad,
something was touching me. And he said, Oh, don't pay
any attention to them. They bothered me all the time
(02:04):
at night. Don't pay them any mind.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Melissa, who is your dad and what is he known as?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
My father is Keith Hunter Jesperson. He's known as the
happy Face serial killer.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
My girl, my girl, don't lie.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
To me.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Tell me where did you sleep last night? In the pies?
In the pies where the sun don't have a shine?
I will shiver.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Oh nice.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
My name is Lauren bry Pacheco. I'm a television producer
and I've worked with Melissa Jessperson Moore for about four years.
We work on crime stories together and we travel a lot,
and during our downtime we've had the chance to really
get to know one another. And she shared a lot
with me about her past, especially her childhood.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
My childhood home was amazing. My parents had three children together.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I'm the oldest a year later, my brother was born,
and then two years after my brother, my sister, Carrie
was born, and my mom was a stay at home
mom and my father was a long haul truck driver.
I felt loved, I felt provided for, I felt adored.
I actually felt like I was a super are.
Speaker 6 (04:01):
Menissa, how big are you?
Speaker 7 (04:04):
This big yees real big.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Dance Manista, you dance, You're a good dancwer.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
We lived in the country, and when I would hear
the semi truck pull up, and you could hear the
wheels on the gravel, and you just knew, you knew,
you could easily recognize that sound. The window panes would
actually shake because of the size and the rumble of
his engine. So we would just both my brother, my
sister and I would actually race to get to my
(04:41):
dad to see who could get into his pockets first,
because in his pockets were tons of change and tokens
and things from his trips, and so it was like
a competition who could get who.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Could get Dad's change. And that was our first encounter
with him.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And you pick us up and he would throw us
in the air and play with us and be excited
to see us. He would be just as excited to
see us as we were excited to see him.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Everybody thinks they're you know, their dad is the center
of the universe, But your dad, How did you feel
being placed up on his shoulders.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I love the view that I could see so much more,
and I felt that I was absolutely safe and that
anything was possible, and that I could do whatever I
wanted to do, and that was safe in the arms
with my dad. He was six foot six and close
(05:40):
to three hundred pounds. His size was something. The first
thing you notice, how you feel so small in comparison.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Keith was this huge giant man even to adults, so
for a child, he must have seemed even that much
more enormous. And when Melissa talks about him, she has
this reverence, this almost mythological lens that she views him through.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I felt like my dad was a superhero because he
was so large, and he could actually eclipse the sun
with his with his head, like he just his body,
like the sun would just like beam behind him, and
he could just eclipse the sun.
Speaker 8 (06:32):
Phil Stanford, The Oregonian, Maywecond, nineteen ninety four. The letter,
unsigned and written on pale blue paper, has a happy
face at the top of the first page, two tiny
circles for eyes, an upturned sliver of a moon for mouth.
(06:53):
Have a nice day, all five of it, says next
to the cartoon face. However, the letter is six pages long,
So what does that mean? Five? What? Five murders? That's what.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Melissa agreed to go on the road with me and
our producer Noel and revisit the places from her past
that have incredible significance, both good and bad, to her today,
and one of those places was Spokane, Washington, where she
moved with her mother and siblings after her parents' divorce.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I haven't been Spokane for a long time, but whenever
I come back here, I think about the first time
I came here back in nineteen ninety. My dad was
home for the weekend and we had a great weekend.
We're really close and it was like a normal weekend,
and then it was time for my mom to drop
(08:15):
off my dad at the truck station. And on the
way to the truck station to his offices, there was
just this tension in the air and there was something
obviously going on between my parents, my mom and my dad.
(08:45):
When we arrived at my dad's work, he got the
car and acted like he was never going to see
us again. He hugged us super tight, said how much
he loves us, and was just gripping us like it
was his last time ever holding us. When I saw
(09:07):
him walk away and go to his job, my brother
and sister and I got back in the car, and
my mom was silent until we were about a block
away from the house. She said, when we go into
the house, I need you to pick one thing, your
favorite thing.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
We drove there because we were going to meet her mom, Rose,
who we met at work.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I'm excited to see her. Yeah, I'm glad that you're
going to meet her. She's a caseworker for a Salvation
Army where she helps families who are on the streets
transition to having a life off the streets. And so
these are children that have lived in cars. These are
children that have nothing very similar to what I had
and what she had. I wonder if she has a
(10:01):
picture of me in her office.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I think she might be coming out.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Well.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
They hadn't seen each other in a few years, but
you could definitely hear the warmth and the pride and
the love in Melissa's voice when she described her to us.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
You know what you'll find that about my mom is
she's a very nurturing, soft person that you could tell
anything too. So not dregonical home. Oh my skinny, Oh
my gosh, you're getting small, my office.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Is over here.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Meeting Melissa's mom in person, I was really taken aback
by the fact that they don't look alike. Melissa's always
told me that she looks just like her father, and
I never saw it until I met her mom. She
absolutely looks like her father.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
When I was flying down here, I was thinking about
what your experience must have been like, because when we
came here.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Is after you dud separated.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I remember just, you know, leaving and coming here m
without planning, right, That's what it felt like.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
It wasn't planned.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
You're correct, it wasn't what happened. Well, it was our
thirteenth wedding anniversary and I was expecting a bouquet of
flowers and he said, you know, I think we should
just get a divorce.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
He said, would you mind just leaving?
Speaker 5 (11:29):
And were you happy at any point with him? I
think at the very beginning we had a lot of
fun and we would we'd take a month off and
we'd traveled down I five, all the way down California
along the beaches, or you know, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah,
we did, we did. We'd take a month off, go
to Lake Powell. We'd go to Canada. Oh. He had
(11:51):
a golden wing motorcycle and we went all through Canada,
traveling through uh Lethbridge and Alberta.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
And it was a good provider, he really was.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
And you probably felt really financially.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
Still, I felt safe. And then I had you, and
then things changed.
Speaker 8 (12:16):
I would like to tell my story. The writer of
the letter begins. The exclamation point is all his, so
as the labored printing and the odd mixture of capital
and lowercase letters. Onor about January twentieth, nineteen ninety, I
picked up Sonya Bennett, and I took her home. I
(12:37):
raped her and beat her real bad. Then I ended
her life by pushing my fist into her throat.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
When my dad was so up into town, he didn't
get a hotel. He would stay at our home, my
mom's home, and even when she was with her new
boyfriend who became her husband, my dad would stay in
the house with him in the house as well. The
reward of him coming was he's filling the pantry. He's
helping her. She was a single mom. She was a
(13:13):
sole provider for months on end, and here he comes
into town. She's going to take any reprieve she can get.
You know, this area right here is where when my
dad would come to visit, we'd drive past this road
right here. But this used to be all open fields
(13:34):
like this, and at the end here was as a
safeway where we would go and get groceries. So when
my dad would come into town, he would actually take
us three kids to this grocery store and just let
us pick anything we wanted. And one thing that he
constantly picked was just like he would get these huge
five gallon tubs of ice cream and then he would
(13:57):
get these he would get like a couple packages of bacon.
He would make not like one package of bacon at
a time, he would make like five packages of bacon
at a time. So when he came, he was a
source of all at A girl that I used to
(14:25):
hang out with, Tamera, and she lived right here in
this house.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
And what happened was she lost her.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Jacket and she accused me of stealing her jacket.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
And you know, in the j just person households.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
We don't steal like that is like something is the
coat of honor, you don't steal. And so I told
my dad that her parents think I'm a thief and
that I.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Stole her coat.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
So he walked over there and confronted her parents.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
And I was so nervous because he was so aggressive.
I was just terrified of what.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
He's going to do to that to her parents. And
he explained how I didn't steal that jacket, and he
pretty much I don't know remember exactly what he said,
but he really terrified her parents so much so that
she never came back to my house.
Speaker 8 (15:27):
But there's something about the letter that holds you that
makes you keep reading. Maybe it's the urgency of the
prose itself. Maybe, although you might not want to admit it,
it's the lurid details spelling off the pages like cold sewage.
Maybe the writer, whoever he is, is making it all up.
(15:48):
But if so, you have to wonder what kind of
person would even be able to write something like this.
This turned me on. I got high panic set in
where to put the body? First? He says he drove
to the Sandy River and threw Tanya Bennett's purse and
(16:10):
walkman into the water. Then he drove back home and
dragged the body out to his car. I want the
world to know that it was my crime, so I
tied a one half inch soft white rope around her neck.
I drove her to a switchback on the scenic Road
about one and one half miles east of Lateral Falls.
(16:34):
I dragged her downhill. Her pants were around her knees
because I had cut her buttons off.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Now happy faces.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
On one side of the coin, he's a loving family man,
and he's a good friend, and he's.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
He's a good provider.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
He's everything that you know as a child you want
for a dad. And then on the other side of
the coin, he is everything that scares you, everything that
could hurt you. He goes from protected or predator and
(17:23):
wrapping my mind around it is impossible. I started to
(17:49):
notice the shift in the household, probably about when I
was in kindergarten first grade.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Things started to change in the household.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
My mom seemed more withdrawn, and I imagine her being
isolated in a house with three young children must have
been difficult for her and my father being gone.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
But when he would come home.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
There seemed to be a distance between my mom and
my dad physically as well, that I didn't witness them
hugging or being affectionate with one another. I actually don't
even recall kissing. I can't even remember if they even
kissed each other when they greeted each other. Now, looking back,
(18:40):
I see the dynamic between my parents and recalling how
critical and degrading he was to my mother. He would
put her down for driving, He embarrassed her, He told
her all the time about what a horrible housekeeper she was.
He complained about her food, he complained about her weight.
Everything my mother did was wrong.
Speaker 5 (19:04):
I was never thad enough or I was too fat.
You know, if I ate dinner, old God forbid, if
I ate dinner.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
As a kid, when I was alone with my father,
he would bring up that he constantly felt sexually rejected,
and he would say that My mom would tell him
to go.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Put it in a key hole.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
So what was your father thinking talking about his sex
life with his child?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
My father sex life was always a part of the conversation.
I heard it with his friends. I heard it in
the flirtation and the sexual harassment of waitresses. I heard
it having to hear him tell me these details about
their sex life. I never asked my father, it was
just part of the conversation constantly. I knew that my
(20:03):
father was a very sexual man from a young age.
I recall finding hustlers and playboys all around, like all
around the house, and when I would go to the
truck stops, I would see his offices were lit like
discovered and nude calendars. So nude women and pornography was
(20:25):
always a part of my childhood.
Speaker 8 (20:29):
My good.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Lie to me.
Speaker 8 (20:41):
When Bennett's body was found actually about a mile west
of Lateral Falls and a mile and a half east
of the Vista house, there was a rope around her neck.
Speaker 6 (20:54):
Ely addition, as the police reports indicate, the buttonfly of
bennett jeans had been cut away.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
In the fin.
Speaker 8 (21:13):
In the letter continues, she was my first and I
thought I would not do it again, but I was wrong.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
It was clear that Keith had no filter for what
was appropriate to say or do in front of his kids,
and many of his other impulses were even darker, and
he acted upon them.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I remember there was a weekend that my dad was
back home and he from one of his long hauls
and there was a barrel, a rusty barrel that he
was burning shrubbery and old debris.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
From the yard. And he was cleaning the yard.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
And we had this barn, and behind the barn, I
saw my brother and he had a black cat. And
I remember how dark the cat's fur was, because it
was so shiny. It looked silvery like, almost like glass
from the sun hitting the cat's back, hitting the fur.
And so I saw my brother just petting this black cat,
(22:43):
and how slick and pretty the cat looked, and I
wanted to touch this cat too. I wanted to pet
and so I went up to my brother and I
sat next to him behind the barn, and I started
petting the cat with him. And quickly I noticed that
my dad had witnessed me petting the cat with my brother.
(23:06):
And at this point, the cat is still my brother's
lab and then my dad approaches us.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
He walks up to us, and he says, what do
you have there.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
I remember my dad's sitting down to the other side
of Jason and taking the cat in his lap, and
he started petting the cat, and both my brother and
I were tense, like if we could feel like something's
something's wrong because we knew my dad hated cats, absolutely
hated them. So for my dad to be sitting next
(23:46):
to my brother petting this cat was odd that he
would be lovingly petting a cat.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
And quickly he was. I remember his big hand.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Just like engulfing the whole cat, and then all of
a sudden, with one hand, he pinned the head down
and grabbed it with the other hand, and he's just
started squeezing the cat's neck. And then the cat started
to like screech and to scream and started clawing for
its life on my dad's forearms and.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Just was clawing.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
And I was thinking, and my brother and I were screaming,
and we're like stop a dad, Stop a dad, Like
why are you doing this, dad, Why are you doing this?
And just screaming at him to try to like stop it,
like it just it made me so nauseous, Like it
(24:40):
just made me.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
How old would you and Jason have been?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
We were young, My brother and I were young, we
were six seven years old. I don't recall telling my mom,
I don't recall telling anybody. And the reason and why
is it's just like when it came to my father,
there was just this thing that people said in the family,
they would say, Oh, that's just Keith, That's just how
(25:09):
Keith is, and it seemed to be acceptable.
Speaker 9 (25:23):
Keith Jessperson takes steps toward a court appearance he's tried
to avoid for years, as well as an order and
your plea of no contest to the aggravated murder cat
After prosecutors read off the charges and with the victim's
family looking on, Jesperson gave grizzly details of how in
nineteen ninety he killed twenty three year old Tanya Bennett
in his apartment.
Speaker 10 (25:43):
And forced my fist into her throat and later grabbed
the rope and tied around her neck securely, and she
was dead.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
You know. I slept in the hallway that one night.
The second night, I slept on the couch.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
And kept the TV on so i'd have light.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
And as I laid on the couch, I looked up
the ceiling and I saw markings on the ceiling of
some kind of splatter. And then as I was laying there,
the cabinet doors in the kitchen were opening and closing,
and I remember touching my eyes and rubbing my eyes,
thinking I must be seeing things.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
But I would hear it too. They would open and
they would close.
Speaker 9 (26:32):
Says, He left the body in the Columbia Gorge, then
cleaned up his house.
Speaker 10 (26:37):
Washed the carpet, I washed the blood off the walls
what I could, and eventually painted the walls of the
house I was in and try to forget about it.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
I would later discover that in that very room where
I was laying down was where he he murdered Tanya
Bennett in the most gruesome and brutal way possible, And
that now I look back and think, was that blood
that I saw?
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And I believe it was.
Speaker 8 (27:17):
My girl?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
My girl? Don't lie to me? Tell me where didiou sleep?
Last night?
Speaker 7 (27:34):
Happy Face is a production of How Stuff Works. Executive
producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Butcheco Mangesha Ticketer, 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 Chacoygne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford,
(27:58):
the publishers of the Oregonian newspaper in k t U
News In Portland, Oregon
Speaker 4 (28:04):
Go away where the cold Wan blows
Let's start from the beginning. I was a young girl.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I was eleven years old, and my parents had just divorced,
and my dad was now living with his girlfriend in Portland, Orgon.
And this was my first summer vacation where I stayed
at a different home than my childhood home. And the
moment I walked in that house, I felt like I
wasn't alone, that there was energy there, that there were
(00:31):
spirits there, that I was being watched in every room.
In every room, he had purchased bunk beds for my
sister and I and my sister picked the bottom bunk
and I picked the top bunk.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And it was my first night in this new house.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I fall asleep a little bit, but then I'm awakened
by being touched.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
And then my hair is touched. It's not a heavy touch,
it's a light touch.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
So I leap and go down the little stairs of
the bunk bed and I rush over and I'm going
to go run into my dad's room, but I froze.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
I felt that.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Whatever was touching me was over there too. I wasn't
going to be safe in my dad's room, and I
didn't feel safe with my dad, and so I laid
in the hallway floor with a light on, curled up
in a ball, hoping that the night would just go
(01:44):
away fast. And in the morning my dad stepped over
me and he said, why did you fall asleep in
the hallway? And I said I was being touched, Dad,
something was touching me. And he said, Oh, don't pay
any attention to them. They bothered me all the time
(02:04):
at night. Don't pay them any mind.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Melissa, who is your dad and what is he known as?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
My father is Keith Hunter Jesperson. He's known as the
happy Face serial killer.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
My girl, my girl, don't lie.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
To me.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Tell me where did you sleep last night? In the pies?
In the pies where the sun don't have a shine?
I will shiver.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Oh nice.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
My name is Lauren bry Pacheco. I'm a television producer
and I've worked with Melissa Jessperson Moore for about four years.
We work on crime stories together and we travel a lot,
and during our downtime we've had the chance to really
get to know one another. And she shared a lot
with me about her past, especially her childhood.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
My childhood home was amazing. My parents had three children together.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I'm the oldest a year later, my brother was born,
and then two years after my brother, my sister, Carrie
was born, and my mom was a stay at home
mom and my father was a long haul truck driver.
I felt loved, I felt provided for, I felt adored.
I actually felt like I was a super are.
Speaker 6 (04:01):
Menissa, how big are you?
Speaker 7 (04:04):
This big yees real big.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Dance Manista, you dance, You're a good dancwer.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
We lived in the country, and when I would hear
the semi truck pull up, and you could hear the
wheels on the gravel, and you just knew, you knew,
you could easily recognize that sound. The window panes would
actually shake because of the size and the rumble of
his engine. So we would just both my brother, my
sister and I would actually race to get to my
(04:41):
dad to see who could get into his pockets first,
because in his pockets were tons of change and tokens
and things from his trips, and so it was like
a competition who could get who.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Could get Dad's change. And that was our first encounter
with him.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And you pick us up and he would throw us
in the air and play with us and be excited
to see us. He would be just as excited to
see us as we were excited to see him.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Everybody thinks they're you know, their dad is the center
of the universe, But your dad, How did you feel
being placed up on his shoulders.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I love the view that I could see so much more,
and I felt that I was absolutely safe and that
anything was possible, and that I could do whatever I
wanted to do, and that was safe in the arms
with my dad. He was six foot six and close
(05:40):
to three hundred pounds. His size was something. The first
thing you notice, how you feel so small in comparison.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Keith was this huge giant man even to adults, so
for a child, he must have seemed even that much
more enormous. And when Melissa talks about him, she has
this reverence, this almost mythological lens that she views him through.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I felt like my dad was a superhero because he
was so large, and he could actually eclipse the sun
with his with his head, like he just his body,
like the sun would just like beam behind him, and
he could just eclipse the sun.
Speaker 8 (06:32):
Phil Stanford, The Oregonian, Maywecond, nineteen ninety four. The letter,
unsigned and written on pale blue paper, has a happy
face at the top of the first page, two tiny
circles for eyes, an upturned sliver of a moon for mouth.
(06:53):
Have a nice day, all five of it, says next
to the cartoon face. However, the letter is six pages long,
So what does that mean? Five? What? Five murders? That's what.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Melissa agreed to go on the road with me and
our producer Noel and revisit the places from her past
that have incredible significance, both good and bad, to her today,
and one of those places was Spokane, Washington, where she
moved with her mother and siblings after her parents' divorce.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I haven't been Spokane for a long time, but whenever
I come back here, I think about the first time
I came here back in nineteen ninety. My dad was
home for the weekend and we had a great weekend.
We're really close and it was like a normal weekend,
and then it was time for my mom to drop
(08:15):
off my dad at the truck station. And on the
way to the truck station to his offices, there was
just this tension in the air and there was something
obviously going on between my parents, my mom and my dad.
(08:45):
When we arrived at my dad's work, he got the
car and acted like he was never going to see
us again. He hugged us super tight, said how much
he loves us, and was just gripping us like it
was his last time ever holding us. When I saw
(09:07):
him walk away and go to his job, my brother
and sister and I got back in the car, and
my mom was silent until we were about a block
away from the house. She said, when we go into
the house, I need you to pick one thing, your
favorite thing.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
We drove there because we were going to meet her mom, Rose,
who we met at work.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I'm excited to see her. Yeah, I'm glad that you're
going to meet her. She's a caseworker for a Salvation
Army where she helps families who are on the streets
transition to having a life off the streets. And so
these are children that have lived in cars. These are
children that have nothing very similar to what I had
and what she had. I wonder if she has a
(10:01):
picture of me in her office.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I think she might be coming out.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Well.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
They hadn't seen each other in a few years, but
you could definitely hear the warmth and the pride and
the love in Melissa's voice when she described her to us.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
You know what you'll find that about my mom is
she's a very nurturing, soft person that you could tell
anything too. So not dregonical home. Oh my skinny, Oh
my gosh, you're getting small, my office.
Speaker 8 (10:33):
Is over here.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Meeting Melissa's mom in person, I was really taken aback
by the fact that they don't look alike. Melissa's always
told me that she looks just like her father, and
I never saw it until I met her mom. She
absolutely looks like her father.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
When I was flying down here, I was thinking about
what your experience must have been like, because when we
came here.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Is after you dud separated.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I remember just, you know, leaving and coming here m
without planning, right, That's what it felt like.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
It wasn't planned.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
You're correct, it wasn't what happened. Well, it was our
thirteenth wedding anniversary and I was expecting a bouquet of
flowers and he said, you know, I think we should
just get a divorce.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
He said, would you mind just leaving?
Speaker 5 (11:29):
And were you happy at any point with him? I
think at the very beginning we had a lot of
fun and we would we'd take a month off and
we'd traveled down I five, all the way down California
along the beaches, or you know, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah,
we did, we did. We'd take a month off, go
to Lake Powell. We'd go to Canada. Oh. He had
(11:51):
a golden wing motorcycle and we went all through Canada,
traveling through uh Lethbridge and Alberta.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
And it was a good provider, he really was.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
And you probably felt really financially.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
Still, I felt safe. And then I had you, and
then things changed.
Speaker 8 (12:16):
I would like to tell my story. The writer of
the letter begins. The exclamation point is all his, so
as the labored printing and the odd mixture of capital
and lowercase letters. Onor about January twentieth, nineteen ninety, I
picked up Sonya Bennett, and I took her home. I
(12:37):
raped her and beat her real bad. Then I ended
her life by pushing my fist into her throat.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
When my dad was so up into town, he didn't
get a hotel. He would stay at our home, my
mom's home, and even when she was with her new
boyfriend who became her husband, my dad would stay in
the house with him in the house as well. The
reward of him coming was he's filling the pantry. He's
helping her. She was a single mom. She was a
(13:13):
sole provider for months on end, and here he comes
into town. She's going to take any reprieve she can get.
You know, this area right here is where when my
dad would come to visit, we'd drive past this road
right here. But this used to be all open fields
(13:34):
like this, and at the end here was as a
safeway where we would go and get groceries. So when
my dad would come into town, he would actually take
us three kids to this grocery store and just let
us pick anything we wanted. And one thing that he
constantly picked was just like he would get these huge
five gallon tubs of ice cream and then he would
(13:57):
get these he would get like a couple packages of bacon.
He would make not like one package of bacon at
a time, he would make like five packages of bacon
at a time. So when he came, he was a
source of all at A girl that I used to
(14:25):
hang out with, Tamera, and she lived right here in
this house.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
And what happened was she lost her.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Jacket and she accused me of stealing her jacket.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
And you know, in the j just person households.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
We don't steal like that is like something is the
coat of honor, you don't steal. And so I told
my dad that her parents think I'm a thief and
that I.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Stole her coat.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
So he walked over there and confronted her parents.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
And I was so nervous because he was so aggressive.
I was just terrified of what.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
He's going to do to that to her parents. And
he explained how I didn't steal that jacket, and he
pretty much I don't know remember exactly what he said,
but he really terrified her parents so much so that
she never came back to my house.
Speaker 8 (15:27):
But there's something about the letter that holds you that
makes you keep reading. Maybe it's the urgency of the
prose itself. Maybe, although you might not want to admit it,
it's the lurid details spelling off the pages like cold sewage.
Maybe the writer, whoever he is, is making it all up.
(15:48):
But if so, you have to wonder what kind of
person would even be able to write something like this.
This turned me on. I got high panic set in
where to put the body? First? He says he drove
to the Sandy River and threw Tanya Bennett's purse and
(16:10):
walkman into the water. Then he drove back home and
dragged the body out to his car. I want the
world to know that it was my crime, so I
tied a one half inch soft white rope around her neck.
I drove her to a switchback on the scenic Road
about one and one half miles east of Lateral Falls.
(16:34):
I dragged her downhill. Her pants were around her knees
because I had cut her buttons off.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Now happy faces.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
On one side of the coin, he's a loving family man,
and he's a good friend, and he's.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
He's a good provider.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
He's everything that you know as a child you want
for a dad. And then on the other side of
the coin, he is everything that scares you, everything that
could hurt you. He goes from protected or predator and
(17:23):
wrapping my mind around it is impossible. I started to
(17:49):
notice the shift in the household, probably about when I
was in kindergarten first grade.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Things started to change in the household.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
My mom seemed more withdrawn, and I imagine her being
isolated in a house with three young children must have
been difficult for her and my father being gone.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
But when he would come home.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
There seemed to be a distance between my mom and
my dad physically as well, that I didn't witness them
hugging or being affectionate with one another. I actually don't
even recall kissing. I can't even remember if they even
kissed each other when they greeted each other. Now, looking back,
(18:40):
I see the dynamic between my parents and recalling how
critical and degrading he was to my mother. He would
put her down for driving, He embarrassed her, He told
her all the time about what a horrible housekeeper she was.
He complained about her food, he complained about her weight.
Everything my mother did was wrong.
Speaker 5 (19:04):
I was never thad enough or I was too fat.
You know, if I ate dinner, old God forbid, if
I ate dinner.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
As a kid, when I was alone with my father,
he would bring up that he constantly felt sexually rejected,
and he would say that My mom would tell him
to go.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Put it in a key hole.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
So what was your father thinking talking about his sex
life with his child?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
My father sex life was always a part of the conversation.
I heard it with his friends. I heard it in
the flirtation and the sexual harassment of waitresses. I heard
it having to hear him tell me these details about
their sex life. I never asked my father, it was
just part of the conversation constantly. I knew that my
(20:03):
father was a very sexual man from a young age.
I recall finding hustlers and playboys all around, like all
around the house, and when I would go to the
truck stops, I would see his offices were lit like
discovered and nude calendars. So nude women and pornography was
(20:25):
always a part of my childhood.
Speaker 8 (20:29):
My good.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Lie to me.
Speaker 8 (20:41):
When Bennett's body was found actually about a mile west
of Lateral Falls and a mile and a half east
of the Vista house, there was a rope around her neck.
Speaker 6 (20:54):
Ely addition, as the police reports indicate, the buttonfly of
bennett jeans had been cut away.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
In the fin.
Speaker 8 (21:13):
In the letter continues, she was my first and I
thought I would not do it again, but I was wrong.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
It was clear that Keith had no filter for what
was appropriate to say or do in front of his kids,
and many of his other impulses were even darker, and
he acted upon them.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I remember there was a weekend that my dad was
back home and he from one of his long hauls
and there was a barrel, a rusty barrel that he
was burning shrubbery and old debris.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
From the yard. And he was cleaning the yard.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
And we had this barn, and behind the barn, I
saw my brother and he had a black cat. And
I remember how dark the cat's fur was, because it
was so shiny. It looked silvery like, almost like glass
from the sun hitting the cat's back, hitting the fur.
And so I saw my brother just petting this black cat,
(22:43):
and how slick and pretty the cat looked, and I
wanted to touch this cat too. I wanted to pet
and so I went up to my brother and I
sat next to him behind the barn, and I started
petting the cat with him. And quickly I noticed that
my dad had witnessed me petting the cat with my brother.
(23:06):
And at this point, the cat is still my brother's
lab and then my dad approaches us.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
He walks up to us, and he says, what do
you have there.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
I remember my dad's sitting down to the other side
of Jason and taking the cat in his lap, and
he started petting the cat, and both my brother and
I were tense, like if we could feel like something's
something's wrong because we knew my dad hated cats, absolutely
hated them. So for my dad to be sitting next
(23:46):
to my brother petting this cat was odd that he
would be lovingly petting a cat.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
And quickly he was. I remember his big hand.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Just like engulfing the whole cat, and then all of
a sudden, with one hand, he pinned the head down
and grabbed it with the other hand, and he's just
started squeezing the cat's neck. And then the cat started
to like screech and to scream and started clawing for
its life on my dad's forearms and.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Just was clawing.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
And I was thinking, and my brother and I were screaming,
and we're like stop a dad, Stop a dad, Like
why are you doing this, dad, Why are you doing this?
And just screaming at him to try to like stop it,
like it just it made me so nauseous, Like it
(24:40):
just made me.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
How old would you and Jason have been?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
We were young, My brother and I were young, we
were six seven years old. I don't recall telling my mom,
I don't recall telling anybody. And the reason and why
is it's just like when it came to my father,
there was just this thing that people said in the family,
they would say, Oh, that's just Keith, That's just how
(25:09):
Keith is, and it seemed to be acceptable.
Speaker 9 (25:23):
Keith Jessperson takes steps toward a court appearance he's tried
to avoid for years, as well as an order and
your plea of no contest to the aggravated murder cat
After prosecutors read off the charges and with the victim's
family looking on, Jesperson gave grizzly details of how in
nineteen ninety he killed twenty three year old Tanya Bennett
in his apartment.
Speaker 10 (25:43):
And forced my fist into her throat and later grabbed
the rope and tied around her neck securely, and she
was dead.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
You know. I slept in the hallway that one night.
The second night, I slept on the couch.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
And kept the TV on so i'd have light.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
And as I laid on the couch, I looked up
the ceiling and I saw markings on the ceiling of
some kind of splatter. And then as I was laying there,
the cabinet doors in the kitchen were opening and closing,
and I remember touching my eyes and rubbing my eyes,
thinking I must be seeing things.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
But I would hear it too. They would open and
they would close.
Speaker 9 (26:32):
Says, He left the body in the Columbia Gorge, then
cleaned up his house.
Speaker 10 (26:37):
Washed the carpet, I washed the blood off the walls
what I could, and eventually painted the walls of the
house I was in and try to forget about it.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
I would later discover that in that very room where
I was laying down was where he he murdered Tanya
Bennett in the most gruesome and brutal way possible, And
that now I look back and think, was that blood
that I saw?
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And I believe it was.
Speaker 8 (27:17):
My girl?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
My girl? Don't lie to me? Tell me where didiou sleep?
Last night?
Speaker 7 (27:34):
Happy Face is a production of How Stuff Works. Executive
producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Butcheco Mangesha Ticketer, 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 Chacoygne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford,
(27:58):
the publishers of the Oregonian newspaper in k t U
News In Portland, Oregon
Speaker 4 (28:04):
Go away where the cold Wan blows
Happy Face News
Hosts And Creators
Melissa Moore
Lauren Bright Pacheco
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