A “True Story” That Isn’t Very True
Happy Face is a crime drama series that claims to be “inspired by a true story” – namely, the case of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the notorious Happy Face Killer, and his daughter Melissa. In reality, however, the show takes more creative license than a serial killer at an alibi convention. It’s ostensibly based on Melissa Moore’s 2009 memoir Shattered Silence and her 2018 true-crime podcast, but don’t let the “based on a true story” tag fool you. The series throws actual facts out the window and concocts an almost entirely fictional mystery-thriller plot that barely resembles the real Jesperson case. The result is a shoddy, half-baked melodram.
Released on Paramount+ in March 2025 and canceled after a single season by that July, Happy Face clearly didn’t leave many viewers smiling. As someone who’s not even the target audience for saccharine true-crime soap operas, I watched this show thinking it was some kind of serial killer thriller instead what I saw was a soap opera with True Crime elements.
Fact vs. Fiction: A Serial Killer’s Case Gets a Makeover
The Happy Face series wastes no time before careening off the rails of reality. The premise of the show’s entire mystery – that Keith Jesperson (played by Dennis Quaid) confesses to a ninth murder, one for which an innocent man is on death row – is pure fiction. In real life, Jesperson was convicted of eight murders, all women killed between 1990 and 1995. He never hinted at a secret ninth victim, and certainly not one in Texas (the show’s chosen locale for its invented crime). In fact, Jesperson’s confirmed murders took place in the Pacific Northwest and California/Florida; Texas never entered the picture. So when the show opens with Jesperson suddenly calling up a TV talk show to dangle a new murder confession, true crime aficionados familiar with the case likely did a double-take. A ninth victim? Texas? What true story is this again?
To be clear: there was never a mysterious, unresolved “extra” murder in the Happy Face Killer case. The writers essentially fabricated a made-up murder mystery and slapped Jesperson’s name on it for brand recognition. It’s as if the showrunners thought the real story wasn’t exciting enough (eight actual murders apparently not being sufficient drama!), so they invented a bonus murder just to have a thrilling plot. The result might make for suspenseful television if it were fiction, but packaging it as a true-crime tale is disingenuous. In reality, Jesperson has not confessed to any additional murders beyond the known eight, despite his occasional grandiose claims of “many more” victims (he once boasted of up to 160, though none verified). The series takes that self-aggrandizing bluster at face value and runs with it into fantasy-land, leading viewers to wonder what’s real and what’s completely made-up – a recipe for an unsatisfying experience.
Nowhere is the truth stretched thinner than in the case of the wrongfully convicted murderer the show focuses on. In Happy Face, Jesperson’s fabricated ninth victim (a young woman named Heather, who moonlighted as a singer-songwriter) was officially pinned on Heather’s boyfriend, a man named Elijah who’s now on death row in Texas for the crime. Jesperson’s big play is that he’ll confess and exonerate Elijah – but only if his estranged daughter Melissa hears the confession in person, thus dragging her into the mess. This makes for a nifty dramatic hook, except it’s almost entirely fiction. In the real Happy Face case, there was a wrongful conviction connected to one of Jesperson’s murders – but the details are completely different. After Jesperson’s first murder (victim Taunja Bennett in 1990), two innocent people were mistakenly convicted: Laverne Pavlinac and her boyfriend John Sosnovske. Laverne bizarrely lied to police that she and John killed Bennett (seemingly to escape an abusive relationship), leading to both being convicted in 1991. Crucially, however, neither of them were on death row – John took a plea to avoid the death penalty, getting life in prison, and Laverne was sentenced to prison as well. They were freed in 1995 only after Jesperson was caught and gave proof that he was Bennett’s killer. So yes, a wrongful conviction happened in this case – but not the way Happy Face portrays. The show invents Elijah, a black man in Texas awaiting execution, injecting a heavy-handed racial injustice angle that simply wasn’t part of Jesperson’s story. The series throws in a hot-button issue like a racist wrongful conviction, but doesn’t actually do anything insightful with it. It’s just there as a dramatic prop – much like everything else in this supposed true story.
The inaccuracies pile up faster than bodies in Jesperson’s truck. Here’s a quick body count of the truth the show cheerfully kills off:
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The “Ninth Victim” That Never Was: As mentioned, there was no Heather, no extra murder in Texas, and certainly no scenario where Jesperson heroically tries to free an innocent man. Jesperson never spontaneously confessed to new murders 30 years later out of remorse – the man was a braggart claiming more victims, yes, but he never acted as some twisted Good Samaritan to help a fall guy. The show’s entire central plot is a big fictional what-if. It’s like making up a new Jack the Ripper victim and building a detective story around it – entertaining perhaps, but don’t sell it as truth.
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Wrongful Conviction, Wrong Details: In real life, two people were wrongfully convicted due to a false confession in one of Jesperson’s cases (and they were freed once he came clean). In the show, this morphs into one man of color railroaded by an evil white DA on flimsy evidence. The state of Oregon (where Jesperson’s first murder happened) is swapped for Texas, presumably to justify the death row angle and add a ticking clock for drama. The choice to make the innocent man black seems like the show’s attempt to inject a topical racial commentary – but as noted, this thread is ultimately superficial. It ends up feeling exploitative: diversity dressing on a plot device, rather than a thoughtful examination of injustice. The showrunners seem to think nothing of co-opting serious issues (capital punishment, racism in the legal system) for a quick thrill, then abandoning them without resolution or respect.
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Melissa’s Media Revelation – Dr. Phil Becomes Dr. Fiction: In Happy Face, Melissa (renamed Melissa Reed on TV) works as a makeup artist on a cheesy daytime talk show hosted by “Dr. Greg,” played by David Harewood. This character is a clear stand-in for real-life TV psychologists like Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz – and in fact, in real life Melissa Moore did reveal her story on The Dr. Phil Show and later on Dr. Oz. The series swaps Dr. Phil out for a fictional Dr. Greg, perhaps to avoid using the actual person on screen (or because the writers wanted the freedom to dramatize a very sensational live on-air confession scene). So instead of the genuine article, we get a flamboyant Dr. Phil knockoff who goads Melissa into confronting her serial-killer dad on live TV. It’s one of many instances where the show changes a detail from reality for no evident reason beyond convenience. Dr. Greg is also black (since this show apparently had a diversity quota to fill in the most random ways possible), but other than giving actor David Harewood some scenery to chew, it adds nothing to authenticity. If anything, it’s a distraction – viewers now wonder, “Wait, did this really happen? Who is Dr. Greg supposed to be?” (Answer: a composite of Dr. Phil and others, but mostly a figment of the writers’ imaginations.)
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Imaginary Friends & Enemies: Virtually every supporting character in Happy Face is fictional or wildly embellished. Melissa’s on-screen best friend and producer, Ivy Campbell? Completely made-up – the real Melissa didn’t have a TV producer buddy egging her on to investigate dad’s crimes. The show’s villainous District Attorney, Calloway (played by Michael O’Neill), who aggressively tries to keep innocent Elijah on death row and torments the Reed family? Totally fictitious. In reality, Jesperson’s crimes spanned multiple jurisdictions; there was no single obsessive DA antagonizing his family. Calloway is basically a mustache-twirling caricature of “the system” – and then, in an utterly unconvincing twist, he grows a conscience at the eleventh hour. One minute he’s a smug, unyielding skeptic dismissing evidence that exonerates Elijah; the next, he abruptly doesn’t oppose Elijah’s release in court, effectively letting him go free with no fight. Why the sudden softening? The show never explains, likely because realism wasn’t high on the priority list. Perhaps the writers realized they needed to wrap up the legal plot by Episode 6 and decided, “Okay, let’s just have the big bad DA give up. People won’t question it.” Newsflash: we’re questioning it – and laughing at the lazy writing. It’s less a plot hole than a plot black hole, sucking away any remaining credibility.
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The “Lesbian Sister” and Other Random Alterations: If you watch Happy Face, you’ll notice it peppered in backstory and character traits that scream “contrived.” For instance, one minor character (the sister of Elijah) is suddenly revealed to be a lesbian – seemingly out of nowhere and with zero bearing on the storyline. Either way, none of Jesperson’s real-life family drama involved a lesbian sister coming out or being tormented by a homophobic society. This subplot (if you can even call it that) appears to exist purely so the show can pat itself on the back for including an LGBTQ character. It’s diversity by checkbox –a cynically calculated choice. The same could be said for making the fictional and falsely accused Elijah a black man: it could have been a thoughtful choice to examine racial bias, but here it’s just a lazy shorthand for “he’s innocent and oppressed, feel bad for him.” In a show that already butchers factual accuracy, these random changes stick out like a sore thumb and add nothing but head-scratching distraction.
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Heather the Musical Ghost: Let’s not forget Heather, the nonexistent victim around whom the whole mystery revolves. The writers not only invented a victim, they gave her a soap-operatic backstory: she was an aspiring musician who wrote a song that sounds like a confession, her grieving mother and best friend appear for dramatic interviews, and her boyfriend is wrongly convicted for her murder. It’s a true-crime fever dream. None of Jesperson’s real victims were named Heather, and none were singer-songwriters leaving convenient lyrical clues. The show even throws in a ludicrous detail that Jesperson allegedly gave his daughter Melissa a trampoline as a gift after killing Heather (yes, a bloody murder commemorated with a bouncy trampoline – you can’t make this up… except the writers did). Needless to say, there was no trampoline in the real case, and certainly no scenario where Melissa’s childhood backyard toy becomes a clue to a homicide. This is the level of contrivance we’re dealing with. Here’s what the thought process in the writer’s room was : Insert random sentimental object, pick a state, add a hobby for the victim, stir in a secret love affair… Voila! True-ish crime thriller served hot. 🙄
In summary, Happy Face uses the basic skeleton of the Jesperson case – a serial killer dad, a daughter who feels guilty and changed her name, eight known murders – and then grafts a whole bunch of fictional meat onto those bones. As actress Annaleigh Ashford (who portrays Melissa) herself admitted in an interview, “Everything is fictionalized except for Melissa and her real story.” That might be a slight exaggeration (even parts of Melissa’s “real story” are fictionalized), but it’s telling that the lead actress felt the need to warn us. The show keeps some fundamental facts (e.g. Jesperson did sign his anonymous letters with a 🙂 happy face symbol, earning his nickname) and Melissa was a teenager when her father was arrested (she was 16 in real life, 15 in the show). However, beyond a few such details, the line between fact and fiction is so blurred that viewers can’t tell what really happened and what’s pure fantasy.
Meet the Happy Family: Character Assassination (Literally and Figuratively)
One of the strangest choices in Happy Face is how it portrays the Jesperson family members and other characters, warping real personalities into TV tropes. Let’s start with Melissa herself. In real life, Melissa Moore eventually chose to confront her past by speaking publicly – she went on Dr. Phil, wrote a book, hosted a podcast – but she certainly did notbecome a quasi-detective running around solving one of her dad’s “unsolved” murders. Nor did she frequently visit her father in prison for heart-to-heart chats. In fact, she only visited him twice ever: once in 1995 after his arrest (as a frightened teen), and once in 2005 with her then-husband and kids, to let her children meet their grandfather exactly one time. After that, she cut off contact, aside from him sending the occasional creepy letter. The series dramatically ups the contact between them – having Melissa meet Keith repeatedly, take his phone calls, even team up in a way (albeit reluctantly) to get his confession. It also has her breaking down and weeping on live television about her fears of “being like her father.” While Melissa Moore has indeed spoken of the emotional turmoil of being a serial killer’s daughter, the scenarios in the show are exaggerated or wholly staged. For instance, Melissa never confronted her dad about an imaginary ninth victim, and he never fed her clues to solve a case (again, because that case never existed). Melissa Moore has expressed guilt and trauma, but she was not running around playing detective with a TV producer sidekick. By turning Melissa into a crusading protagonist in a thriller plot, the show actually diminishes the real poignancy of her story – which was more about coping with trauma and shame, not cracking cold cases for TV glory.
The show even gives Melissa a moral “redemption” arc that rings false. In the drama, she’s depicted as “atoning” for not stopping her dad sooner by saving Elijah from death row – a very on-the-nose quest for redemption. Lucy Mangan of The Guardian identified this as an “apparently invented subplot” meant to let Melissa right some cosmic wrong. In reality, Melissa Moore couldn’t possibly have known about or prevented her father’s crimes as a child. The guilt she felt was largely internal and personal. By inserting a fictional life-or-death stake (an innocent man to save) as her way to assuage guilt, the series cheapens the more complex, real psychological journey. It turns Melissa into a kind of saintly avenger, rather than a real person struggling with complicated feelings. The flat writing and Ashford’s one-note performance don’t help; Melissa is strangely bland for a lead, maybe because the show is too busy juggling mystery tropes to let her be a nuanced human.
Then there’s Keith Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer himself. Casting Dennis Quaid as a serial killer dad had a lot of people intrigued – Quaid can do charming-crazy pretty well. And indeed, in the few scenes where the script actually focuses on Keith being Keith (recounting a murder, manipulating his daughter), Quaid’s natural edge shines through. But the show bizarrely reduces Jesperson to a secondary character and often a source of cheap manipulation rather than genuine menace. He calls his daughter demanding attention, cracks dark jokes, and smirks through prison glass, but rarely do we feel the true horror of who he is. Oddly, the show doesn’t even mention most of Keith’s real victims by name – a point of criticism for some, since focusing on the killer’s antics while ignoring the real victims is a hallmark of exploitative true-crime adaptations. Aside from a few passing references, the actual women he killed (like Taunja Bennett or Julie Winningham) are footnotes, while a fake victim steals the spotlight. Thus, Quaid ends up essentially play-acting a fictional scenario where Jesperson is helping solve a case – a far cry from the real Jesperson who mostly reveled in taunting authorities with smiley-face letters and only confessed when it served him. The real Jesperson certainly never had a heroic change of heart to do good; the series almost toys with giving him a redemption-ish angle (since his info frees Elijah), before reminding us, oh right, he’s still a monster. The whole thing is tonally bizarre. If anything, the real Jesperson might be pleased with this TV portrayal – not because Quaid nailed his personality, but because the show inadvertently makes the killer far less evil and cunning than he was, and grants him a role in resolving a murder.
Ben, the husband, the man with the spine of a garden hose. Played by James Wolk like he’s auditioning to be the face of antidepressants for men too scared to fart in public. In Happy Face, Ben is painted as the ultimate modern man: sensitive, supportive, emotionally constipated. Until, of course, he blows a gasket in the most asinine way possible—by trying to have his father-in-law assassinated in prison. Yeah, you read that right. A damn contract killing. It’s not in the memoir, not in the podcast, not in any reality that wasn’t cooked up in the writers’ room by people who think plot twists are better than truth.
In real life, Melissa Moore did have a husband during that second visit to her killer father. But there’s zero evidence the guy ever tried to off Jesperson through prison-yard gossip. No hitman. No goons. Nothing. The show invents this nonsense like it’s seasoning a bland stew, hoping a little murder-for-hire will give their soggy marriage arc some flavor. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
And Christ, the way they neuter this guy. Guards leer at his wife, suggest what they’d like to do to her—Ben just stares at the floor like it owes him money. Some angry, broken-down son of one of Jesperson’s victims shows up threatening violence, and Ben might as well be made of pudding. No fists, no shouting, no primal rage—just this whimpering, wide-eyed stare. He’s not a man; he’s a wet tissue in a collared shirt.
It’s character assassination by way of emasculation. The show doesn’t even pretend to like him. He’s less a character and more a cautionary tale. A walking, talking PSA for what happens when you suck the fire out of a man and replace it with therapy jargon and guilt trips.
Then there’s Ivy. The tagalong. The friend. The producer. The unnecessary narrative seat filler. Played by Tamera Tomakili with the kind of wide-eyed earnestness that would make a stray dog suspicious. Ivy doesn’t exist. Never did. She’s as fictional as the idea that this show gives a damn about the truth. Her sole purpose? To give Melissa someone to talk to when she’s not crying in her car or facing off with her serial killer daddy. Ivy’s also the moral megaphone—”Go public, tell your story, we need the content, baby!” She’s the conscience of the show if the conscience smoked vape pens and studied marketing.
She’s also the show’s limp-wristed attempt at self-awareness. Ivy wants to exploit Melissa’s family trauma for killer content (ha, get it?) while at the same time raising questions about whether that’s ethical. It’s like watching a pimp lecture himself in the mirror about feminism. Sure, the show winks at the camera and says, “We know this is a bit exploitative, but that’s the point!” No, sweetheart. That’s a cop-out wrapped in a virtue signal.
There’s irony here. Big, greasy, pork-fat irony. This show screams about the dangers of true-crime sensationalism while snorting lines of it off the writers’ room table. They make up murders. They make up characters. They turn a dead girl into a guitar-strumming folk muse so their plot has a heartbeat. Ivy’s just the lipstick on that particular pig—there to smooth over the bullshit with some soft-eyed commentary and conveniently placed moral panic.
They want to serve you a cake made of lies, feed it to you with a trembling hand, and whisper in your ear that it’s gluten-free honesty. But all you taste is plastic and panic. No flavor. No grit. Just the hollow aftertaste of a show that tried to critique the monster by becoming it.
Plot Devices on Overdrive: Thriller or Iller?
If you were marketed this show as a gripping thriller about a serial killer, you might expect a tense cat-and-mouse game or a psychological deep-dive. Instead, Happy Face delivers something closer to a Lifetime movie mixed with a CW teen drama, sprinkled with just enough true-crime buzzwords to claim legitimacy. The advertising called it a “thriller,” but I found it thrilling in the way a train wreck is – you can’t look away even as you cringe. The main reason is the sheer overuse of plot devices and twists that have nothing to do with the real case. It’s as if the writers sat in a room and brainstormed every dramatic trope they could think of to spice up Melissa’s story: Wrongly convicted man! Ruthless DA! Secret evidence! A mysterious song! Teen rebellion! Marriage on the rocks! Murderabilia sold online! Hitman scheme! Last-minute confession recordings! Hospital scares! – and then shoved them all into eight episodes. By the end, the show has drifted so far from the moorings of Jesperson’s crimes that it may as well be entirely fictional. Which raises the question: Why even base it on the Happy Face Killer at all?
Interestingly, the real Jesperson’s artwork (yes, he apparently sells doodles from prison) would probably get a boost from the show’s publicity– a rather queasy side effect. The showrunners want the cachet of a true story, but they don’t actually want to tell that true story straight. Perhaps they worried Melissa Moore’s actual memoir – which is largely about her personal healing – wouldn’t provide the salacious twists needed to keep bingers hooked. So they bolted on a fictional thriller. In doing so, they’ve arguably done exactly what they pretend to criticize: exploited a tragedy for entertainment, and even given the killer more notoriety (and possibly profit, if his prison art sales go up). Dark humor twist: Jesperson might be the only person who truly enjoys Happy Face – he gets to play the star of a sensational drama and could even make a few bucks off increased infamy. Meanwhile the audience is left feeling a bit icky, as if we’ve been duped into watching fake true crime that neither satisfies as drama nor respects the real people involved.
Let’s talk about some of those plot devices, though – preferably with a sardonic smile (Happy Face style). A few are so absurd they merit special mention:
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The Trampoline of Clues: Yes, episode 1 involves an actual trampoline as an important clue. Keith hints to Melissa that after one of his murders, he “gifted” her a trampoline. Melissa and Ivy then go digging (literally) in her mom’s backyard, unearthing the old trampoline to find out where it was purchased – which leads them to Texas, which leads them to the Heather case. I’m sorry, but what?! Imagine telling someone, “I’m watching this serial killer show where the key to cracking the case is a deadly trampoline.” It sounds like a parody. If this is what the writers had to resort to in order to kickstart the plot, maybe they should have rethought the plot entirely. (For the record, no real trampoline was harmed – or used – in the making of Jesperson’s conviction.)
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CSI: Schoolyard Edition: Melissa’s 15-year-old daughter Hazel (another character invented for the series – Melissa’s real kids were much younger during the events in question, and their names and ages are changed here) ends up having her own mini crime-spree. Upon learning her grandpa is a famous serial killer, Hazel’s reaction is not trauma or disgust, but excitement – she realizes it makes her instantly cool with the “mean girls” at school who love true-crime. (Ah yes, nothing makes the popular crowd like you more than finding out your granddad strangled women in the ‘90s…) Hazel proceeds to sell one of Keith’s prison drawings online for clout, shoplift makeup, and eventually she and her teen friends go Scooby-Doo exploring an abandoned motel where grandpa supposedly hid evidence. This whole subplot is so over-the-top it feels ripped from a different show .
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The Pen-Pal Girlfriend & The Vengeful Victim’s Son: As if the central cast wasn’t crowded enough, the series throws in Gillian, a random woman who has become Keith Jesperson’s prison pen-pal girlfriend. She’s giddy and in love with Keith, agreeing to TV interviews to sing his praises – basically a stand-in for those real-life groupies who crush on serial killers. And then we have Ashton, the angry son of one of Jesperson’s (fictionalized) victims, who shows up to harass Melissa because he thinks children of killers have no right to speak publicly. These characters are walking clichés (Groupie and Vigilante), and neither existed in Melissa Moore’s book or podcast in this form. Yes, some victim family members in real life have been upset by killers’ families getting media attention, and yes, infamous murderers often attract weird fan mail romances. But the way Happy Face crams it all in is like a True Crime Bingo card. It’s hard to take any of it seriously. Ashton, for example, literally breaks into Melissa’s house to leave a threat, yet later they have a heart-to-heart and bond over shared trauma. It’s so contrived I half-expected them to become besties and start a podcast together by the end.
Happy Face, Sad Audience
Happy Face strutted in like a carnival barker with a painted grin, promising a dive into the black heart of a serial killer’s family — some real psycho-surgery on the trauma left behind. What we got instead was a clown car full of made-up nonsense, driving donuts over the truth while waving a banner that read “Based on true events” in six-point font. A thriller? Please. This wasn’t suspense — it was a Hallmark melodrama that lost its meds and thinks it’s Zodiac.
The real problem isn’t plot holes — though there are more of those than bodies in Keith Jesperson’s confession list — it’s the rotting foundation: Happy Face is fiction in drag. It takes real blood and re-casts it with primetime sob stories, fake victims, fake heroes, and a story arc that looks like it was brainstormed on Ambien and white wine.
This thing parades around like it’s got something profound to say about family, identity, and justice — but under the makeup, it’s all fluff and fraud. They invented a murder. They invented a hitman plot. They turned Dr. Phil into a knockoff black daytime host named Dr. Greg. They made the falsely accused killer a Black man (why?), the sister a lesbian (why?), and the DA into a growling white boogeyman who suddenly finds a soul because… reasons? This isn’t representation — it’s checkbox roulette.
And don’t get me started on that guitar-playing ghost girl, Heather. They dragged her out like a crime scene prop, strumming songs she never wrote about feelings she never felt. It’s grotesque. It’s not so much storytelling as it is storytelling cosplay.
The writers committed the one crime Jesperson never did: murdering the truth. And like any bad killer, they got away with it. At least for a season. Then came the cancellation. No tears were shed. No candlelight vigils. Just one long, exhausted sigh from critics and audiences alike.
