Is Happy Face a True Story? Revisiting the Harrowing Murders of Serial Killer Keith Hunter Jesperson — and How He Got His Haunting Moniker

Dennis Quaid is chilling as a serial killer reuniting with his daughter (played by Annaleigh Ashford) in Happy Face.

The series, premiering on Paramount+ on March 20, is based on the real-life Happy Face Killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, and his relationship with his daughter Melissa G. Moore.

Moore was a teenager when Jesperson was arrested for murder, changing her life forever. It was later discovered that he had killed at least eight women over a span of five years and six states, per CNN.

The trucker got his moniker, the Happy Face Killer, after signing various confessions and letters to the media with a smiley face drawing. As Moore got older, she reckoned with all of these discoveries and chronicled her journey of reconciling who her father is with what he did in the 2009 book Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter.

Now, Moore works with family members of killers and murder suspects to bring attention to their pain and help them feel less alone.

“We are secondary crime victims. We carry that shame and we want to remove that,” Moore said on 20/20 in 2015. “I feel in a sense I am related to my father, but I didn’t cause the pain. But knowing that my father caused some pain causes me pain.”

Here is everything to know about the true story of Happy Face, including how many women Jesperson killed and how it impacted his family.

Is Happy Face based on a true story?

The real-life Happy Face Killer is Keith Hunter Jesperson.

Born April 6, 1955, in Chilliwack, Canada, Jesperson alleged that his father was abusive and addicted to alcohol, per A&E’s Monster In My Family. As a child, he showed violent tendencies and reportedly began torturing and killing animals.

Jesperson later moved with his family to Selah, Wash., and he allegedly turned his violence onto his peers: He reportedly nearly killed two of his bullies in separate incidents, beating one of them until he was unconscious and attempting to drown the other, per Radford University.

After high school, Jesperson became a long-haul trucker. When he was 20, he married a local girl named Rose Hucke and the couple went on to welcome two daughters, Melissa and Carrie, and a son named Jason.

“He was not a good husband,” Hucke told 20/20. “He was very distant with me. He was not [abusive]. If he was angry he would walk away.”

She and Jesperson divorced in 1990, per 20/20, and that same year, he committed his first known murder.

How did the Happy Face Killer get his name?

In January 1990, Jesperson met 23-year-old Taunja Bennett at a Portland, Ore., bar. He then brought her to his home, where he raped, beat and strangled her, then dumped her body near Columbia Gorge, per 20/20.

“Comments were made and different things and an altercation happened, and I struck her,” Jesperson said in a 2010 phone interview. “I actually had hit her in the face and for some reason I just kept hitting her in the face and because of that. I feared going to prison for slugging her in the face and causing her bodily injury and so I killed her.”

Jesperson almost got away with killing Bennett after two people falsely confessed to being involved with her murder.

In an effort to get out of an alleged abusive relationship, Laverne Pavlinac told police that she saw her then-boyfriend, John Sosnovske, rape and murder Bennett. Police arrested Sosnovske, who then pleaded no contest to avoid the death penalty, despite not having committed the crime. Though Pavlinac later recanted her false confession, both she and Sosnovske went to prison, per The National Registry of Exonerations.

Jesperson was soon after nicknamed the Happy Face Killer when he wrote an anonymous letter on a bathroom wall in a Montana bus terminal saying that he murdered Bennett, adding a smiley face as his signature, per The New York Daily News. The doodle became Jesperson’s trademark, and he included it in other letters he wrote about his slayings, including ones to The Oregonian.

The smiley faces also reflect Jesperson’s approach to his crimes in general. He said on 20/20 that murdering women “became a nonchalant type thing, because I got away with it. It is everything like shoplifting. You’re breaking the law but you’re getting away with it. There’s a thrill of getting away with it.”

After Jesperson’s arrest, Sosnovske’s conviction was set aside, and both he and Pavlinac were released from prison.

How was the Happy Face Killer caught?

Jesperson’s final known victim was his own girlfriend, Julie Winningham. Police discovered her body on March 11, 1995, on Highway 14 near Skamania County, Wash., per the Associated Press. Upon searching her property, investigators found a receipt with Jesperson’s signature on it, according to 20/20.

Investigators questioned Jesperson about her death, and he confessed the following day. The serial killer’s brother also turned a letter over to the police in which Jesperson confessed to a total of eight murders.

“I am sorry that I turned out this way. I have been a killer for five years and have killed eight people. Assaulted more,” Jesperson wrote in part. “Seems like my luck has run out. I will never be able to enjoy life on the outside again.”

He told investigators in 1995 that admitting to Bennett’s murder was most important to him because Pavlinac and Sosnovske had gone to prison for the crime.

Jesperson said he wanted “to come clean … get it all over [with], the record straight. I had been worried about this for a long time. I wanted to get those two people out of prison.”

How many victims did the Happy Face Killer have?

Jesperson had eight known victims who he killed across five years and several states.

The Happy Face Killer’s confirmed victims include Bennett and Winningham, as well as Suzanne L. Kjellenberg in Holt, Fla.; Laurie Ann Pentland in Salem, Ore.; Cynthia Lyn Rose in Turlock, Calif.; Patricia Skiple in Gilroy, Calif. and Angela May Subrize in Laramie County, Wyo.

He also killed at least one other woman, currently known only as “Claudia,” near Blythe, Calif.

How did the Happy Face Killer’s daughter find out about his crimes?

Moore only learned that her father was a serial killer after he turned himself in for murdering Winningham.

“I really wanted to show people versus tell people when they asked, ‘How did you not know that your father is a serial killer?’ ” Moore explained on 20/20 about herself and other loved ones of killers. “We all have a common answer, family members of violent offenders: They have two different [lives], a double life.”

Moore wrote in a 2014 essay for BBC News that as a child, her father dropped hints about his secret, including allegedly telling her when she was 13 that he knew how to “kill someone and get away with it” and announcing that he’d someday be in Oregon State Prison. She also claimed that he tortured and killed kittens in front of her.

After Jesperson’s arrest, Moore’s mother wouldn’t speak about him or his crimes, leading the teenager to read about her father’s trial at their local library.

What happened to the Happy Face Killer?

Jesperson received four life sentences with no chance for parole, according to the Associated Press. He is currently serving his time at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.

Moore told 20/20 in 2021 that she no longer communicates with her father.

“I don’t want my dad to get into the psyche of my children and hurt them in any way because he is manipulative,” she said. “He is a psychopath. He has the potential, still, to hurt, even if not with physical violence or murder, but with his words.”

According to Moore, her grandfather told her that Jesperson had admitted to thoughts of killing his own children, including her.

“Maybe people won’t understand this, but hearing that gave me freedom,” she wrote for BBC. “It allowed me to see that in truth there had been no double life — there had only ever been one Keith Jesperson and he had been able to manipulate everyone around him and present different facades to the world.”

Moore added that she had often wondered what would have happened if she found out about her father’s crimes sooner and turned him in to police.

“Finally I knew the answer to the question that had been bothering me … ‘Would he have killed me if I had told the police about his crimes?’ Yes, he would,” she said. “Understanding that allowed me to say goodbye to him.”

This article was written independently by PEOPLE’s editorial team and meets our editorial standards. Paramount+ is a paid advertising partner with PEOPLE.