The daughter of the “Happy Face Killer” who terrorized the US three decades ago has launched a fundraiser to help the now-estranged wife of suspected Gilgo Beach murderer Rex Heuermann “start a new life.”
Melissa Moore said she related to Heuermann’s wife, Asa Ellerup, because of her own trauma she suffered after her dad, Keith Hunter Jesperson, was convicted of raping and murdering eight women in the early 1990s.
“Today, I have an opportunity to use my voice to help Asa, who isn’t in a place to speak about the terror and horror she and her family are experiencing at this moment,” Moore wrote on a GoFundMe page.
As of Wednesday morning, the fund had raised more than $13,000 of its $25,000 goal.
“The funds will go directly to the law firm representing Asa’s divorce in her name,” Moore continued.
“The funds are to assist Asa and their family to divorce her alleged serial killer husband and any extra for starting her new life, therapy, basic needs for the children, and to restore the home to whole (as evidence collection damage or destroyed many critical household items).”
The fundraiser page also features a photograph of Ellerup, 59, sitting outside the Massapequa Park home that she and Heuermann, also 59, lived in along with her son, 33, and the couple’s 26-year-old daughter.
Ellerup and the children finally returned to the house on First Avenue late last week, after authorities spent almost two weeks dismantling the property for possible evidence following Heuermann’s arrest on July 13.
Moore, now 44, was just 15 years old when her dad — a long-distance truck driver — was arrested for a string of rapes and murders spanning multiple states between 1990 and 1995, the BBC reported.
Jesperson was dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” because of the sinister smiling faces he drew on his taunting letters to police and the media.
He is currently serving life without parole at the Oregon State Penitentiary after confessing to killing eight women between 1990 and 1995 in California, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Nebraska, and Wyoming.
“My mother and my family were and are victims [of Jesperson]. We did not know about his double life,” Moore wrote on the GoFundMe page.
“I am speaking out to raise awareness and to support her,” she told the Daily Mail of her efforts to raise money for Ellerup, who filed for divorce from Heuermann shortly after he was charged with strangling three women and leaving their bodies in the marshes along Ocean Parkway.
“This would go towards helping the kids and her restore the house and make it back whole.”
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Moore also said she has a unique empathy for Ellerup, who told The Post earlier this week that the children “cry themselves to sleep” since Heuermann’s bombshell arrest.
“It meant the pain [has] become so severe you no longer feel. So any annoyance she may otherwise normally feel towards people taking pictures pales in comparison,” she explained.
“I wanted to come forward as an adult when I got older to show the double life that serial killers live and how the family is the façade that helps them stay underground for so long.”
Heuermann, meanwhile, looked disheveled but stoic in Suffolk County court on Tuesday afternoon.
During the brief hearing, the prosecution handed the architect’s lawyers eight terabytes of evidence – and promised that there was more to come.
The South Shore native is formally charged with the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello, and is the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
Similarly to Jesperson, Heuermann allegedly targeted young, vulnerable sex workers.
“He preyed upon sex workers and transient women. He objected women and believed they were trash and disposable,’” Moore told the Daily Mail of her father’s crimes, which spanned multiple states between 1990 and 1995.
“So I grew up hearing my father talk about women in these derogatory terms,” she added.
Moore said that her mother, who died two years ago, was initially enthralled by Jesperson, who was a “textbook narcissist.”
“[He] opened up the world to her… a world of travel and fun,” she said of her parents’ marriage, which ended in divorce in 1990.
“She was grateful for those happy moments and that is when she told me when she was in her bed with hospice showing up that she was my dad’s last victim. It just took a lot longer to kill her.
“And then I decided I’m not going to back down ever again with fear and I’m giving to live my life for my mom,” she concluded.
