Be Good to Your Kids: Serial Killers Have Traumatic Childhoods INTRO Keith Jesperson was born on May 6th, 1955 to Les and Gladys Jesperson in Chilliwack. From a young age, Keith entertained himself by torturing and killing animals. His parents weren’t too disturbed by his behavior. His father, Les Jesperson, even bragged about witnessing his five year old son suffocating a cat. Les Jesperson was an abusive alcoholic and frequently lowered his children’s self-esteems and self worth with his words and his fists. Les also was this way with women. As a result of his troubled upbringing, Keith was bullied in school and was kind of an outsider. Eventually, he became friends with a boy named Martin who would often blame Keith for his mistakes. On top of being physically and mentally …show more content…
By the time he was 15, he had attempted to kill someone two times. Twenty years later, he committed his first successful murder. Keith raped and killed Taunja Bennett by physical force and strangulation. He murdered seven more women over the course of five years and in several states. He is currently serving many life sentences in the Oregon Department of Corrections (Krueger et al.). Although Keith had an extremely painful childhood that lead to a criminal adulthood, his children didn’t suffer the fate he did. Melissa Moore, one of his children, grew up, got married, and had children of her own. She made it her own personal mission to contact the families of her father’s victims and speak with them. Although it was hard for her to do so, she thought it was important to apologize for her father’s actions since he definitely would not and didn’t have the capability to be sincere. She even wrote a book called Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter (“My Evil Dad […]”). Although having a serial killer for a father greatly impacted their