Shattered Silence

Oprah profiles ‘Shattered Silence’

By Nancy Van Valkenburg (Standard-Examiner staff)

Melissa G. Moore spent most of her life in shame, crippled by a horrible secret she kept from friends, employers and associates:

Moore’s father is Keith Hunter Jesperson, also known as the Happy Face Killer, who admitted to torturing and strangling eight women in Oregon and around the Northwest. He earned his nickname for signing confessional letters he wrote to the media with happy faces. He’s now serving three consecutive life sentences in a Oregon prison.

A couple of years ago, Moore decided to share her story with television therapist Dr. Phil McGraw. About a year later, Moore told her story to Mountain Green author M. Bridget Cook, who worked with Moore to write the newly released “Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter” (Cedar Fort Inc., $16.99).

And on Thursday, Moore tells her story again, this time when Dr. Phil presents her to Oprah Winfrey and the talk show host’s viewing audience of about 47 million. Moore’s appearance also will promote the book she co-authored with Cook. The episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” airs at 4 p.m. Thursday on KUTV Channel 2.

“I knew when I read ‘Skinhead Confessions’ that Bridget was the one who could help me tell my story,” said Moore, from her home in Spokane, Wash.

“I was trying to find an author in the true crime genre, but it wasn’t a good fit,” Moore explained. “I wanted something more spiritual, more emotional. I wanted to tell a transformational story about my journey.”

In Cook’s 2008 book, “Skinhead Confessions: From Hate to Hope” (Cedar Fort), she and co-author T.J. Leyden told his transformational story of going from one of the most powerful men in the White Power Movement to becoming an anti-hate, anti-gang activist, as well as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Moore had converted to the LDS church after marrying her husband, Sam.

Cook remembers opening an e-mail from Moore.

“If anybody had told me a few years ago I would be writing about skinheads and the daughter of a serial killer, I would have said, ‘Yeah, right!,’ ” said Cook, who writes part time, works as a publicist and manages the trucking business she co-owns. “But I learned in working on the book with T.J. that it was possible to portray both sides of what the human soul is capable of. And the minute I read Melissa’s e-mail, I knew how poignant her story could be.”

A daughter’s story

Moore grew up the oldest of three children in a dysfunctional home. Her mother was emotionally unavailable. Moore’s father, Jesperson, was the misfit of his family, targeted by his parents for emotional abuse. But Jesperson, seemingly a gentle giant at 6-feet 6-inches and nearly 300 pounds, was a supportive and attentive father to his own three children.

Even as a grade-school child, Moore knew her father was different from the other dads, who didn’t enjoy torturing and killing animals, including a daughter’s cherished kittens.

“Shattered Silence” begins with Moore’s earliest memories, of racing to her unresponsive mother, begging for help in saving the tiny kittens Jesperson had hung on the clothes- line. Moore wrote of running back outside, to find an empty clothesline, with the kittens — “my babies” — bashed, bloody and broken, dead on the ground underneath.

Moore’s mother divorced Jesperson when the child was in fifth grade, and moved her children from Oregon to Washington state. Moore visited her father every summer.

“He would tell his children about his exploits with women,” Cook said. “He would go through phases, and try to model himself after a movie star. He would read detective magazines, and tell Melissa he knew how to commit the perfect murder and get away with it. She thought it was just another of his phases.”

One scenario Jesperson described involved picking up a woman and strangling her with a rope, then tying her from the bottom of a big rig like he drove as a trucker. Jesperson told his daughter someone could then drive, dragging the body until all distinguishing features were worn away.

That description fit one of his crimes. Jesperson eventually led officers to the place he disposed of the battered corpse, which was identified by a Tweety bird ankle tattoo as belonging to drifter Angela Subrize, 21.

Hitting bottom

Moore was 16 and a high school freshman when her father was caught and brought to trial. With her disgraced father all over the media, Moore found herself pregnant, and without hope of emotional or financial support. She ended the pregnancy, a decision she still regrets, Cook said.

Moore finished high school, and began trying to make better decisions for her life, choosing more friends who had a better outlook on life and avoiding out-of-control environments, such as bars and wild dance parties.

“I knew that I had gone through some really dark places, but I started to see I could to go a really beautiful place in my life,” she said.

“Melissa is not a victim,” Cook said. “I want to be clear about that. She has moved beyond victim to victory. The book is not about wanting people to see the horrendous things she has been through, it’s about how she began to make new choices for her life. She told herself, ‘This is the way my father did it. This is the way my mother did it. I don’t have to do it that way. I don’t have to live in guilt and shame.’”

Moore, now a happy wife and the mother of two, spends much of her time to helping at-risk children and women, and hopes to become an inspirational speaker.

“Shattered Lives” is available at Barnes & Noble and Borders Books. After hearing the book would be shown on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Wal-Mart signed on, and should have the book in stock by Thursday.

Moore and Cook both hope their book will help people with all kinds of troubling backgrounds to heal and move forward in their lives.

“There’s a voice in all of us telling us, ‘You can move past this to a better life,’” Cook said. “All we have to do is be willing to listen.”

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