10/31/2022 0 Comments Serial Stories Lady SwingsHe's his own individual, and so are you.'" Even if other schoolkids didn't see it that way. "My mother told us, 'He will always be your dad,'" says Taalibah, "'but that does not mean that everything he does you take responsibility for. "So for the protection of us and the protection for the children at school, it was beneficial." But she was never sheltered from the harsh reality: "My mom always wanted us to watch the news every day, so we were going to find out regardless.When it came to the verdict, I just went completely numb."īesides dealing with public ostracism and private shame, these daughters had to separate themselves from their fathers' horrific acts: His crimes were not theirs. Sniper's child is in attendance," she recalls. "From the outside looking in as a parent-they want to protect their child. "Some friends that I thought were friends were not when the information was released," Taalibah recalls. SERIAL STORIES LADY SWINGS TRIALSniper," Taalibah says, "the thing that I really remember is just crying."ĭuring John's trial in the fall of 2003, Mildred, who now works with domestic-abuse survivors through her After The Trauma organization, homeschooled the kids, but not because she was ashamed-or wanted them to be. "When his picture popped up and they were naming him the D.C. Sniper," Taalibah says, "the thing that I really remember is just crying." (They had found in national records that Mildred had a restraining order against John.) "When his picture popped up and they were naming him the D.C. The following year, Taalibah and her siblings were whisked out of school and into protective custody once the police suspected their father as the perpetrator. (The couple had separated in 1999.) Shortly after being reunited with her children, Mildred relocated the family to the D.C. He had taken them from their mother, Mildred Muhammad, in Tacoma, Washington, as a custody hearing was pending. Taalibah, who was 9 at the time, hadn't seen her father since August 2001, when she, her brother, and her sister were retrieved from Bellingham, Washington, where they had been living with John. From a sniper's nest jerry-rigged in the back of a blue Chevy Caprice, John and his 17-year-old accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, began their spree. Over three weeks in October 2002, 10 people were shot at random and killed (three others were injured) in parking lots and on sidewalks around Washington, D.C. "I honestly could say that I had a great childhood with him." "Whenever it was time for us to come home or play, he was always there he was always there to tuck us in at night," Taalibah, 22, says. Some daughters of murderers have fonder memories of their fathers, like Taalibah Muhammad, whose father, John Allen Muhammad, was the D.C. "That seething energy underneath the surface-I could watch him explode, could see the mood swings." SERIAL STORIES LADY SWINGS SERIALIn 2002's I: The Creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen, Jesperson dispassionately walks the reader through the 1990 murder of his first victim, a developmentally disabled young woman named Taunja Bennett he met in a bar near Portland, Oregon, and killed in his house, a crime he would recall for sexual gratification for years afterward. Known as the Happy Face Killer (for the smiley face sign-off on notes he wrote to police and the media), he strangled and sexually assaulted his victims. Though he's claimed to have killed 160 victims, eight murders-of women from Oregon to California to Florida-have been attributed to Jesperson, and he is currently serving two consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Jesperson, a long-distance trucker, had been divorced from Moore's mother for five years by then. I burst into tears because I was hoping he would say it wasn't." "And that, to me, was his confession that it was all true. On the other side of a Plexiglas wall, "he picked up the phone and the first thing he said to me was, 'Missy, my best advice is that you change your last name,'" says Moore, now 36. It was the summer of 1995, and Keith Hunter Jesperson was on trial for the March 1995 murder of his girlfriend, Julie Ann Winningham. Melissa Moore had just turned 16 the first time she visited her father in prison.
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