This is a scene-by-scene recap of Happy Face Season 1 Episode 1, “The Confession.” For a discussion of the episode, please visit our Happy Face Series Premiere Review.
Melissa puts on makeup while “Put On a Happy Face” plays over the scene. The mailman is loading his pack. He’s got a lot of letters for the family.
Melissa delivers her daughter Hazel a birthday donut in bed.
Ben is jogging, a smile on his face.
Brother Max can’t believe how many presents Hazel has. Hazel asks Mom to open one.
Ben gets the mail and drops it in front of Hazel, wishing her a happy birthday. He’s sweaty. Eww gross. Melissa looks at Hazel’s makeup and helps her correct it.
Hazel received a birthday card in a yellow envelope. It’s from someone who says they’re family and mentions Chilliwack as a happy place for the whole family. Inside is a drawing, which is also hardly appropriate for a teenage girl.
Melissa hides the card in the safe, where there are a lot more letters stacked up.
Melissa arrives at the studio for Dr. Gregg. Ivy is upset because things seem to have fallen through with a guest. Ivy asks Melissa to try calming down Cathy Weaver, today’s guest. Melissa seems to be a makeup artist with a good chairside manner who can easily convince reluctant guests to talk.
Cathy is reluctant to go on the show, and her husband says it makes them look desperate. Melissa says that an armchair expert from last month said five out of six Americans will be victims of violent crime in their lifetimes.
Cathy heard that every violent death is a rock dropped in water. If you stay silent, the ripples of trauma just keep going, pulling everyone they touch underneath. That seems to touch Melissa.
Hazel sends a photo of Chilliwack, saying it looks like a pretty cool place. It inspires Melissa to abruptly turn to Cathy. Someone murdered her daughter and they don’t just get to go on living. Someone needs to pay for what they did to her and Cathy has to make sure he does.
Ivy is like, what the hell, Melissa? Without the emotional component of the show, they are just like any other show. Cathy, though, is ready. Melissa’s outburst worked.
Melissa looks at the text again. What she needs is a frozen treat and birthday candles for Hazel’s cake. Right next to the candles, Melissa sees duct tape, which brings back, an ugly memory. At the checkout, Melissa gets a burner phone with her order.
Hazel’s birthday dinner is a success. They are a happy family. Ben is running a marathon in May, and she tells him to run while she cleans up. This gives her the opportunity to call the Oregon State Prison. She can’t even do it while inside the house, taking to the dark street to make the call.
However, she’s not alone. Renee from next door says hello. She just moved in. Melissa has a message for her father. Don’t ever call again, don’t write letters, she’s not interested, will not read them, and will file complaints until he stops. Then she smashes the phone on the ground.
Renee awkwardly tried to interrupt during the call. Why??
Dr. Gregg’s assistant Tabitha wants to talk with Melissa. Melissa is taken aback. Dr. Gregg is on the phone when she gets there, but he’s excited to see her. John from Legal is also in the office. In two years, Melissa may have never met Dr. Gregg. She was a freelancer who dabbled in weddings.
Melissa thinks she’s in trouble for her conduct with Cathy the day before, but Dr. Gregg asks Ivy about the Happy Face killer. Melissa is shocked this is happening. Happy Face called the show earlier today. He will only talk with either Dr. Gregg or Melissa.
Happy said he has been writing to her for years. Nobody has a clue who she is, but Happy is calling again momentarily. Either she tells Dr. Gregg, or he’ll get it from Happy Face. He’s her father.
Keith Jesperson is the Happy Face Killer. He wants to hear Melissa’s voice, but Dr. Gregg interrupts. Keith wants to get “the truth” out to the media, not just talk with his daughter.
When she says, “What do you want,” he calls her Missy, which annoys her. She said she already told him to eff off; wasn’t that enough? Keith asks, “Is that how I raised you to speak in front of your boss?”
Dr. Gregg says to let him worry about that. Keith confessed in 1995 that there were eight people, but he held one back. There were nine. Melissa calls bullshit. He claims he’s trying to make things right.
He says if she had read his letters, she would know there were nine. The final victim is Jane. Jane Doe. Melissa is nodding with that uh huh look on her face. He’ll only tell the truth to Melissa – in person.
It’s a four-hour drive. Ivy wants to know if she can do it tomorrow. Ivy wants Melissa to face him down, not run away, but Melissa knows Ivy is trying to produce her. Ivy apologies. Has Melissa ever visited him? Twice. When she was 15 right after he first got arrested, and when she was pregnant with her daughter. Ben knows, but they told the kids her father was dead.
Melissa says this is so fucked, but Ivy says what’s even more fucked, is if Keith isn’t lying, they could get her family an answer. Melissa has a lot to think about.
She starts by reading his letters. They contain photos, and one envelope has “find God here” with an arrow pointing to the seal. The photos are regular family photos with a smiling Melissa in her dad’s lap. She sorts through a box of trinkets, and she remembers how he returned from a semi-trip and gave them to her with a story about each.
Melissa remembers feeding her dad ice cream on the couch while they watched America’s Most Wanted, and mom interrupted to say Melissa was too young for it.
Ben finds Melissa in the closet, crying. He thinks Keith is lying to her, and he can’t believe that her employer is manipulating her as much as her father. But Melissa saw and heard things that should have warned her. She never said anything.
Ben is worried. The last time she visited her father, she wasn’t OK, practically a ghost after her return. She wants them to leave them alone. Ben isn’t sure she wants him to leave her alone.
She says her dad wasn’t always a monster, he became one. Before that, he was just her dad. Ben will support her, but what will they tell the kids?
It’s a dreary, rainy day when they visit the prison. Keith can hardly stifle the joy on his face when he sees her, but she hesitates to look him in the eye. Ivy introduces herself. He enjoys her work. They’ve gotten permission to record this, but he needs to sign the release first. He doesn’t.
He jokes about it before asking about Chilliwack, when they went swimming, just the two of them. Melissa said then that the river was so sparkly it must have been a girl. He’s afraid that if he signs the form and talks about the dead girl, she’ll never come back. Either way, she won’t come back.
He signs the form with a happy face. In her frustration, Melissa says, “Oh, Dad, just give it to her.” He relishes that she called him dad. Will she do his makeup, too?
She wonders if he just wants to be on TV. He laughs. He’s not the one who used to parade around the house pretending to be Dolly Parton. He sings “Here We Come Again.”
He says she’s still his little girl, digging in his pockets for treasure. He asks why Melissa is acting like god’s gift when she’s the one who benefitted from every kill. She got presents and time with Daddy because he needed to be with her afterward since it got him out of the darkness.
He got her trinkets and things her mom couldn’t afford. Seeing her happy erased all he’d done because if they loved each other that much, then he couldn’t be all that bad. He gets teary, and Melissa’s face crumbles.
After he killed the ninth victim, he bought Melissa a trampoline. It was the last gift he gave her. She escapes to the bathroom. She’s accosted by a guard outside while exiting the restroom. He tells her to relax. He just wanted to see if she was a sick fuck like her dad.
Ivy is asking Keith about the victim’s name. Ask Missy. She knows.
Melissa is two glasses of wine in by the time Ivy joins her at the bar. Today was a lot, and it will take a lot more than two to forget. Ivy needs her to remember. What does she know about the time around when she got the trampoline?
She was 15 at the time. It was winter, and she was wearing her puffy coat. It was after Christmas since that’s when she got the coat. Melissa calls for another glass of wine, and the bartender says it’s cheaper to leave the bottle.
Ivy says terrible things are done by people, they don’t just happen. And that interests her. She’s got a lot of information on his killings, such as that he strangled his victims in and out of consciousness to torment them further. Melissa needs to go.
She recalls a time when he took her somewhere, telling her how to pull off the perfect murder. He shows her duct tape, but you need to take it with you since they can get a print off of it. Zip ties are much better.
She is disconcerted but jokes that he’s been reading too many crime books. Melissa is now in tears, searching the web for details about her father.
She realizes that he lured his first victim to a house where he killed his first victim. He was living there with a woman named Allison. He was going to get bunk beds, but she had to sleep on the couch for now. She recalls seeing blood on the ceiling fan. He finds her, wondering what she’s doing. He says it’s spaghetti sauce.
Melissa tells Ivy they need to talk with her mom, who lives in Spokane. When they arrive, her deaf husband indicates her mom isn’t here. Melissa wants to go through the basement to see her mom’s receipts. When they moved here, she slept in cots in the basement.
Ivy looks through scattered photos. One is a picture of Amy with a fellow, Brendan, whose face was scratched out. Mom finds them in the basement. Shane told her Melissa was going to visit Keith.
Mom isn’t very helpful and quite exasperated with the questioning. She works at a safehouse helping women, but Melissa said she never helped her own kids. Melissa claims that not telling her own kids is different.
When Ivy steps out, Melissa asks why she’s acting so weird. Years ago, after Keith went away, the phone rang. He knew just what she was wearing, right down to her slippers. She was terrified, sitting on the couch in the dark, clutching a knife.
She knows that Keith had something to do with it. Keith said he sent a “friend” by who would visit again. June knows that she’s only alive because Keith wants her to be. She wants Melissa to hear her. Keith has power outside of those prison walls, and in the right circumstances, she’d hurt anyone, even his little Missy.
While making her call, Ivy finds the trampoline outside. They pull it out to look for clues. It was made in Dunton, Texas, a clue to the last murder. Melissa takes that news back to Keith. Ivy finds the victim, telling Keith she understands why he kept this one out of his confession. He’d fry in Texas. But if he wants to keep control of his story, now’s the time to do it.
He says he delivered a load of franks to Texas. He had to wait around for two days and met a cute little girl coming off her shift. He wasn’t looking for trouble, but she was hitchhiking, all legs and thumb. It was fate. She recognized him from the bar and said her truck died. Victims always relaxed when they saw photos of his daughters in the truck.
He wonders what happened to his little girl who wanted to be a star who is now just doing the makeup of stars herself. The little bartender sang beautifully, and they had sex. He didn’t rape her.
He never raped any women or paid for sex. Did they like it rough, and did he strangle them? Yes, but he never raped them. She said she’d be a big star someday, and he can say he knew her when.
It rubbed him the wrong way, so he strangled her, using his method of pressing his fist into their larynx until he smelled urine. Then he was done. But the bartender was different.
He was choking her, but this smell started coming off of her, similar to how scents come off of a skunk. It was grapefruit. The smell of it filled up the whole truck. It threw him, but it was the smell of her death. He had just started moving her, and she woke up. He hit her over the head with his 11-inch dog wrench, and she died.
He picked her up, carried her down to the bridge, and dumped her. Then, he bought a trampoline and drove straight to Melissa. He thinks she’s just like him, even if she doesn’t see it.
Acting tough, secretive by nature, but deep down, filled with insecurity. Afraid she can’t love or be loved. He’s not impressed with Ben, the branch manager, or her kids, Max and Hazel. Don’t you fuckin’ talk about my kids, Melissa spits at him.
He’s sorry she has to have a dad like him. She deserves better.
Later, she remembers the guitar pick he gave her from his pocket. She asks Ben to go into her safe. He didn’t even have the code until now. The bar was the Whisky River. It’s their lead on the ninth victim.
Ben worries about her, but he says out loud that if she goes down this road, it will come out that her dad is the Happy Face killer. She knows that, right? Hazel overhears.
Ivy finds the final victim. Heather Richmond was raped and murdered on February 18 in 1995, but her boyfriend, Elijah Carter, was convicted of her murder and remains on death row, maintaining her innocence. He’s sentenced to die in two months. They’ve got to go to Texas.
Hazel searches for the Happy Face Killer. Her expression when she sees him for the first time is unreadable.
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