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For most people, the thought of encountering a serial killer is beyond comprehension. For these people, the serial killers were people they knew well — and called Dad.
While some were shocked at the unthinkable news that their father could be capable of murder, others had their suspicions, and even turned them in themselves.
Read on to learn more about the stories of serial killers' children, and how their father’s crimes have impacted their own lives.
Lucy Studey, daughter of Donald Dean Studey
Speaking withNewsweek, Studey said her dad Donald Dean Studey, who died in 2013 at age 75, killed 50 to 70 women, most of whom were sex workers, over the course of three decades. She alleges that as a child, she and her siblings were forced to help him dispose of the bodies in a well near Thurman, Iowa.
“I know where the bodies are buried,” Lucy told the outlet. “He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant.”
Lucy alleges that Donald would stab, shoot or strike the heads of his victims inside a trailer on their property. After the alleged killings, she said they would transport the bodies to the area of the well, via wheelbarrow during the hotter months and toboggan in the winter. They would then cover them with dirt and lye, according to the outlet.
“Every time I went to the well or into the hills, I didn’t think I was coming down. I thought he would kill me because I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut,” she said.
Newsweekreported that if these investigations uncover what Lucy is claiming, her father could be categorized asone of the most prolific known serial killers in the history of the United States.
“No one would listen to me,” Lucy toldNewsweek.“The teacher said family matters should be handled as a family, and law enforcement has said they couldn’t trust the memory of a child. I was just a kid then, but I remember it all.”
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April Balascio, daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards
“Kids aren’t stupid,” Amy Balasciotold PEOPLE in 2018. “There were dead bodies. Someone was always murdered wherever we lived.”
Balascio is the daughter of convicted serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards, whom she turned into police on the basis of long-held suspicions she had about her father.
Balascio remembers her father having a peculiar fixation with crime, collecting newspaper clippings about local murders and often contacting police about their investigations. He would also make his family move every six months to a year, often in the middle of the night, without warning.
He was also physically and verbally abusive to Balascio’s mom, even hospitalizing her multiple times.
In 2009, Balascio decided to start investigating her father’s past and eventually learned the horrifying truth: hehad murdered at least five people.
She contacted police with the information she had uncovered about the 1980 murders of Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, who disappeared from a Watertown, Wisconsin, venue called the Concord House — where Edwards had worked as a handyman before the family skipped town.
The tip led to Edwards' arrest weeks later, but even at that point, Balascio hoped her suspicions would be proven wrong.
“During this whole process, you’re still holding out for hope that he’s not this monster that I think he is, that he’s just my dad and has a temper,” she told PEOPLE.
Balascio said when she first found out that the DNA was a match she “literally went into a panic attack, or an anxiety attack.”
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Melissa Moore, daughter of Keith Jesperson a.k.a.the “Happy Face Killer”
“We aresecondary crime victims. We carry that shame and we want to remove that,” Moore said during a 2015 interview on20/20discussing her father, Keith Jesperson, who became known as the “Happy Face Killer.” “I feel in a sense I am related to my father, but I didn’t cause the pain. But knowing that my father caused some pain causes me pain.”
Jesperson is servingthree life sentencesfor the strangulation deaths of eight women (he once claimed to have as many as 160 victims). According to ABC News, Jesperson’s killing spree began in 1990 and continued over the course of five years before he turned himself in.
The outlet explained that the “Happy Face Killer” moniker came from a six-page confessional that Jesperson sentThe Oregonianin which he detailed the locations of his murders and signed it with a happy face.
Moore told20/20in 2010 that she remembers her father torturing and killing kittens when she was a child.
“I think I caught a glimpse of the sociopath, the part of where felt in control over me and that he enjoyed it. I got the sense that there was another side to him,” Moore said.
According to ABC News, Moore estimates that she has talked with more than 100 children of murderers, including the daughter of the serial killer known as “BTK.”
“They have been living in shame the way I used to live in shame, thinking that you’re somehow responsible for that family member’s actions, that you owe the world an apology,” she said.
Insider reported that in recent years,Moore has started sharing her experience on TikTokwhich has included reading excerpts from letters she’s received from her father in jail.
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Kerri Rawson, daughter of Dennis Rader a.k.a. BTK
“Nobody wants to believe their father could be capable of such monstrous things,” Kerri Rawsontold PEOPLE in 2019.
In Feb. 2005, the unimaginable happened: The doting, protective father Rawson thought she knew was arrested for 10 unimaginably savage murders, andher DNA had led to his arrest. He had been identifiedas the serial killer known as “BTK,“for “bind, torture, kill,” a name he’d created for himself while terrorizing the family’s hometown of Wichita, Kan., between 1974 and 1991.
BTK would often stalk his victims — most of whom he strangled slowly after binding their arms and legs with rope — for months, then hid mementos from his kills in the floorboards beneath the family’s linen closet.
“I was just trying to stay alive and breathe,” Rawson recalled of the day she learned the truth about her father. “Trying to recover from the shock, telling myself over and over that I’d do anything not to be the daughter of a serial killer.”
Matthew Ridgway, son of Gary Ridgway a.k.a. the “Green River Killer”
Known as “the Green River Killer,” Gary Ridgway is believedto have killed more than 90 women and girls in Washingtonbetween 1982 and 1998. He was arrested in 2001 thanks to DNA evidence and is serving life in prison, having pleaded guilty to 48 homicides.
After he was arrested in 2001, investigators visited his only son, Matthew, in California and asked ( among other things ) “Did he attend your school functions?”
“I don’t think I ever remember him not being there,” he replied, according toTheSeattle Times.
Matthew told detectives that growing up, his father never did anything that would indicate the dark truth, the outlet reported.
According to his son, the outlet explained, Gary was quiet, frugal with money, had few friends and struggled with short-term memory.
TheTribunewrote that Matthew told authorities “that he doesn’t remember any strange women in the car, or being left in the truck for a long time.”
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Jenn Carson, daughter of James Carson, one half of the “San Francisco Witch Killers”
In an essay for HuffPost, Jenn Carson described how being the daughter of a killer led to a childhood filled with pain and a"lifelong struggle with nightmares.”
In the deeply personal essay, Jenn highlights how her father, James Carson, changed after meeting Suzan Barnes.
“Abandoning the name James Clifford Carson for the name Michael Bear Carson, he was no longer the attentive and caring stay-at-home father that I remembered,” she wrote. “My father had braided my hair and read me books. Michael Bear would barely look at me.”
After Jenn’s mother filed for divorce, Jenn said she enjoyed a happy life during the week but weekends at her stepmother’s house with her father were “like a horror film.”
She wrote,“At night, I’d lie awake in a sleeping bag on the floor as I looked at the dark shadows on the wall and thought of my last meal days before. In addition to not feeding me, Suzan was verbally and physically abusive.” Jenn and her mother moved away to keep her safe, but her father and Suzan went on to harm others.
Eventually, the two were caught and Jenn recalled finding out the news from her mother. “She met me at school one afternoon and on the walk home told me, ‘Daddy hurt people, and now he needs to go to jail so that he doesn’t hurt anyone else.’ I asked her if the people he hurt were dead and if the dead people had mommies,” she wrote. “We held hands and sobbed.”
Jenn is now a mental health advocate and professional and when it was time for her father and stepmother to be up for parole, she testified they should both remain behind bars,AZ Centralreported. (They were denied parole.)
source: people.com
