CBS All Access: Happy Face series will tell a sad story
By Carla Davis
CBS All Access has announced news that should appeal to true crime documentary fans: they are adapting the Happy Face Podcast for their network.
Happy Face is a 12-part podcast hosted by Melissa Moore, whose father Keith Hunter Jesperson was the notorious Happy Face Killer. Jesperson was convicted of raping and killing eight women in the 1990s but he claimed to have killed 185. Most of his victims were sex workers and/or transients but the murderer was finally apprehended after he killed his longtime girlfriend, Julie Ann Winningham.
Jesperson’s daughter Melissa was fifteen-years-old when her mother told her that her father was in jail for murder. She spent years hiding the fact from everyone she knew, except for her husband. Finally, Melissa decided to face the truth after her five-year-old daughter asked her where her grandfather was.
Moore appeared on The Dr. Phil Show, to speak about the difficulties she had experienced over the years. She shared stories with the audience about the darkness she saw in her father beginning when she was six years old.
In 2009, Moore wrote a book titled Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter. Then in 2018, she began hosting the podcast Happy Face where she talked about the conflicted feelings she had about her father and her fears that she or her children might have inherited the evil part of him.
Happy Face is also partly narrated by Phil Stanford, the journalist who first began referring to the then-unknown serial murderer as The Happy Face Killer (based on the smiley-face doodles that were included in an anonymous letter Jesperson wrote to The Oregonian). Other guests on the podcast have included a psychopathic neuroscientist, detectives who helped apprehend Jesperson and the son of one of his victims.
True crime podcasts are currently very popular and Happy Face has joined the ranks of My Favorite Murder and True Crime Garage.
However, the podcast seems to have more in common with Dirty John in which actual participants in the true story were interviewed. It’s also worth noting that Dirty John received a television adaptation.
It appears that the All Access series will be scripted, since writer Jennifer Cacicio (Your Honor, Shooter) is working on the adaptation. Robert and Michelle King, who created The Good Fight and Evil are executive producing.
CBS All Access just announced this week that they will be re-branding themselves as Paramount Plus in early 2021.
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Are you a fan of true crime podcasts? Have you listened to Happy Face? Let us know what you think in the comments section.