By Megan Leitch-Dymond
The family of serial killers are rarely, if ever, brought up in discussions of serial killer’s victims, yet Melissa Moore, the daughter of The Happy Face killer (Keith Jesperson), said those who have murderous parents should be considered secondary victims. Serial killers are expertly capable of exploiting and hurting others in many ways and then leaving their loved ones behind to pick up the pieces of their life. We are told that serial killers have no remorse, how they can take a life without a second thought. But it is hard to realise someone you care about may only saw you as a camouflage to evade detection. Dennis Rader referred to his family as ‘pawns in his game’ in 2005. There is no simple answer to the question of whether a serial killer is capable of loving their children, but this article will explore the complex relationships and how they survived the aftermath.
Katherine Ramsland, forensic psychology professor, said it is difficult to know whether serial killers can truly love their children. Their relationships can be complicated, and no single experience is ever the same. She said some serial killers can show ‘loving and protective behaviour toward their own families while killing the children in other families’.
Dennis Rader, ‘BTK’, was able to hide his alternative lifestyle very well and used his domestic life to evade suspicion. In 1974, Rader massacred the Otero family; which included husband and wife Joseph and Julie Otero, along with two of their children, eleven-year-old Josephine and nine-year-old Joseph Jr. At the same time he was killing a family, he and his wife were preparing to start their own. His daughter Kerri later described her father as being protective and taught her to always be wary of strangers. She has continuously defended her childhood and said the man who committed those crimes is not the father she knew and loved.
The most prevalent approach serial killers adopt with their children is deception, achieved by obfuscating any evidence of their deadly activities from those they care about most.
Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, is an example of this. Ridgeway’s son, Matthew, has said he would never have thought his father could be anything more than a loving and supporting parent. Matthew said Ridgeway never yelled at home, and he only had fond memories of his father, such as taking him camping and teaching him how to ride a bike. He was seemingly a regular dad. Even when he was named in a list of suspects, Matthew never gave it a second thought.
Albert Fish, America’s most gruesome child murderer, was a single father who raised six children without harming a single one of them. Despite molesting, murdering, and cannibalising other children, he never once harmed his own. There were never any reports of instances of abuse within his home, although he did make them unknown participants in his sexual fetishes when he would encourage them to hit him with a nail-studded paddle. His children thought he simply had a whimsical nature.
Serial killers can frequently compartmentalize their identities, believing themselves to be a good parent. When the grim reality is finally exposed, the parent regards the relationship as they did in the past. They still believe they can maintain a relationship with their children and frequently believe they are the same person they have always been. Despite now seeing signs of her father’s sinister nature upon reflection, Melissa Moore said her father was a bubbly, charismatic man, but there was always something ‘off’ about him. She said her father has never apologised for his crimes and still believes he was a ‘good father who made eight errors in judgement’.
Some serial killers may even disregard the parent-child bond altogether and kill their children to fuel their own deranged desires.
Joseph Kallinger drowned his fourteen-year-old son, Joseph Jr., with the aid of his young son Michael. Later when asked why he did it, Joseph responded and said his son was a ‘sacrifice to see if I could murder a life I owned’.
Belle Gunness, who lived during the 1800’s, was suspected of killing her step-children in addition to a number of children who had been trusted in her care. She was never caught nor convicted unfortunately, as her crimes were only discovered when her farmhouse burned down in 1908. When investigating the scene, officials discovered the remains of thirteen individuals, Gunness included.
Fred and Rosemary West also counted their own children among their victims. Charmaine West was only eight years old when Rosemary killed her and Fred buried her underneath the kitchen floor. In 1986, their firstborn child Heather had confided in a close friend the abuse she was suffering at home. Her voice was not heard, and in 1987 she was strangled, dismembered and buried in the back garden. Later when recounting her murder, Fred described how he “cut her legs off…and then…cut her head off”.
Some children have amassed so much fear about their parentage that they think they could be capable of continuing the cycle of abuse.
Stephen West, another child of Fred and Rosemary, was thrown into the spotlight once again in 2004 when he was charged with participating in unlawful sex with and impregnating a fourteen-year-old girl. Despite the relationship being consensual, the girl was underage and he was sentenced to nine months in prison. During the sentencing, Judge Mott told him he had “went through an experience…that no one would wish on anybody…you had a terrible childhood…you were not in any way responsible for what happened in your childhood, I understand all of that. I also understand that it must have had a marked effect on you and your development”. His defence attorney, Stephen Mooney, argued there was a ‘chronological difference’ between his client’s real age and his emotional age. West was in his thirties at the time of the incident, but he had still not matured when it came to developing relationships.
Continuing with the theme of genetics, considering that some – but not all – serial killers endured childhood trauma themselves, we have to question whether such evil is the result of nature rather than nurture.
Andrei Chikatilo was charged with murdering fifty-six people, although there are believed to be many more, in the span of twelve years. From 1978 to 1990, the Rostov Ripper terrorised the people of Russia. Together with his wife, Feodosia Odnacheva, they had two children. Lyudmila was born in 1965 and Yuri was born in 1969. He was finally executed on Valentine’s Day, 1994 but his legacy did not end with his death. His son Yuri embraced his criminal genes and followed the same path as his father. Although Yuri did not engage in any of the sickening acts his father did, he still chose a criminal life. He has been charged with crimes of fraud, extortion, racketeering, kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder and has spent more than twelve years in prison. It was the attempted murder in 2009 which brought the Chikatilo name back into the media. Yuri himself has expressed his pride at reclaiming his father’s name and many years later still believes in his father’s innocence. Many people who know Yuri have said he would flaunt his birth certificate and brag about his genetics.
However, not all children of serial killers turn out like their parents. Melissa Moore is the child of Keith Jesperson who was convicted in 1995 for the murder of eight women throughout the 90’s. Melissa was only fifteen years old when her life was turned upside down, recalled a childhood memory of her father strangling a kitten. She also remembers a conversation which occurred when they were driving, when her father told her he ‘knew how to kill someone and get away with it’. She was horrified to later discover that the road this conversation took place on was the disposal site of his first victim – twenty-three-year-old Taunja Bennett. Now a grown woman with her own family, Melissa advocates for others who went through similar experiences. She reaches out to relatives of murderers and helps them to share their stories. She works as a crime correspondent and is the host and executive producer of the show ‘Monster in my Family’. She underwent a brain scan to finally discover whether she had inherited any of her father’s psychopathic genes and was relieved to discover she was ‘normal’.
Kerri Rawson also lives on to help others. Being the daughter of ‘BTK’ changed her life forever and she felt conflicted for a very long time on her feelings toward her father. She details her struggles in her 2019 book: ‘A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming’, to make sense of the contrasting versions of her father. She claimed the book was crucial in healing her wounds as it allowed her to talk about it in a way nothing else could. She hopes to help those who suffer from betrayal, violence, and anger and how to forgive the unforgivable.
And finally, some children are removed from their parent’s life early on so they do not have to suffer the effects of being related to a monster.
In the wake of John Wayne Gacy’s arrest, his wife Marlynn fled with his two children – Christine and Michael – and filed for divorce and full custody. Gacy never saw his children again and no one knows what happened to the children and whether they were ever told of their true identity remains a mystery. Many of Gacy’s family members also changed their surnames to avoid being recognised as a relative of one of the most notorious serial killers in American history.
Robert Hansen, the serial killer who hunted women in Alaska from 1971 to 1983, was sentenced to 461 years in prison for the murder of 17 women. At the time, he was married with two children. His wife Darla illustrated him as a father who did not care much about their family, as she claimed he used his income only supplement his own needs, and she raised their children and ran their house using her own income. When his biggest crimes were exposed, she finally divorced him and moved her family out of Anchorage. They have remained out of the spotlight since, but according to author Leland E. Hale in 2018, Darla is now a teacher in Russia and her children currently live in the American Midwest. The children have turned down every opportunity to tell their story.
Ted Bundy was able to add the role of ‘father’ to his resume before he was executed in 1989. While on death row, Bundy and his wife, Carole Anne Boone were able to have relations and eventually Boone gave birth to Rosa/Rose Bundy in October 1981. She would regularly visit him in prison and take her daughter along with her. He would proclaim his innocence for years until he was afforded the opportunity to confess in exchange for extension of his stay on death row. When this happened, Carol promptly divorced him in 1986 and cut contact forever. She died in 2018, and Rose Bundy’s whereabouts remain a mystery to this day. Her mother most likely changed her name to escape the burden of being the daughter of the most famous serial killer in history.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Two figures in it are the attributed rather than the convicted number. Andrei Chikatilo was convicted on fifty two counts, not the fifty six given here, though this archive's range runs to fifty six. Robert Hansen pleaded guilty to four murders and received a 461 year sentence plus life; he confessed to seventeen and twelve bodies were recovered, so the seventeen quoted here is his confession, not his conviction. The rest checks out: Keith Jesperson was convicted in 1995 and this archive records eight established deaths, Dennis Rader ten, Albert Fish three to ten or more, John Wayne Gacy thirty three. One line under Jesperson's name deserves more than it gets. His confession freed Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske, who had already been convicted of the killing of Taunja Bennett, the death his daughter describes learning about on that roadside.