The secret lives of serial killers
Sunday May 26, 2013
Reporter: Mike Willesee
Producer: Alex Garipoli
Co-Producer: Sandra Cleary
Imagine waking up one day and discovering the man you married, the father of your children, was not a doting dad but a brutal serial killer. The TV crime shows usually profile these men as lonely drifters and misfits, but the reality can be far different, as Mike Willesee discovers.
Willesee interviews the so-called ‘Happy Face Killer’, Keith Jesperson, so named because of the smiley faces he drew on the letters he wrote to the media and prosecutors. Jesperson is behind bars for the murder of eight people - though he’s boasted the actual figure is far higher. To neighbours and even his wife and daughter he was an average Joe, a truckie with a family at home. But on the road he was a sadistic killer who crossed the country looking for victims. Sunday Night talks to his daughter, who for a time was scared she may have inherited her father’s murderous DNA.
Willesee also meets Jesperson’s victim who got away – saved because at the moment he was about to kill her, he felt compassion for her baby.
What makes a serial killer tick, and how can they function in the normal world? Mike Willesee goes in search of the answers in this spine-chilling investigation.
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