“Someone Was Always Murdered Wherever We Lived”: 10 Times Families Of Killers Spoke Out About Their Life With A Criminal — Or Even Helped With The Investigation
Beyond the headlines about violent criminals exist parents, siblings, partners, children, and other relatives who are left with the broken pieces of their family member's actions. Many deal with lifelong shame and guilt, and feel responsibility for their relative's sins. Sometimes they are victims too.
Below are 10 times relatives have publicly spoken out about their life with violent offenders and the aftermath.
Content warning: These cases contain discussions of suicide and murder.
1.Jenn Carson, the daughter of James Carson and stepdaughter of Suzan Barnes, aka the San Francisco Witch Killers, penned an essay for HuffPost describing her struggle to find peace as the daughter of serial killers. After learning about her father and stepmother's crimes as a young child, Jenn Carson became fearful, distrusting, and faced shame from others. She wrote, "If my father could kill people, then, I reasoned, anyone could be a killer..."
"I began to barricade my bedroom door with furniture when I got home from school or before I went to bed at night. I also began to sleep with scissors and knives under my pillow. I was so traumatized that at one point I tried to drown myself in the bathtub and hoarded pills from our medicine cabinet with the intent of ending my life. Before I had even turned 10 years old, I was a suicidal kid with a homicidal father," she wrote.
"I began to wonder if I would snap and start killing people, too. I wondered if I had monster genes. [...] The worst was from relatives who saw me as a hindrance to erasing my father. My grandmother introduced me to her friends as her great-niece. Two family members told me to keep the murders a secret or 'no one would ever marry me.' One relative even told me, 'Look what you brought to our lives, you selfish little bitch.' I was nine."
Not wanting to hide who she was, Carson sought treatment and became an advocate for children with incarcerated parents, families of violent offenders, and victims of violent crime. In 2015, she fought alongside the victims when her father and stepmother were up for parole, speaking out to say that they should both remain behind bars.
"This hasn’t been an easy life, but through helping others, I have found peace. Looking back, I realize that I originally sought to help others to fill in an invisible balance sheet with good deeds in hopes of making up for the terror and trauma my father and Suzan caused. But I now know that I cannot atone for the sins of my father and I can’t bring back those beautiful innocent victims. I can only live my life the best way I know how while trying to inject as much kindness into the world as possible," Carson wrote for HuffPost.
2.Three years ago, Ted Bundy’s ex-girlfriend spoke to ABC under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall. “I still have a sense of disbelief, that this man that I loved could go out and do such horrific things,” she said. “In the very beginning I asked him, ‘Did you read this? Do you know what they’re saying? There’s so many things here that people are going to be looking at you,’ kind of making a joke out of it, but once I started to worry, like, ‘Could this be true?’ I didn’t feel safe bringing it up. I didn’t want him to know what I was thinking.”
Kendall went on to write about her suspicions and time with Bundy in her 1981 book, The Phantom Prince, which she updated and rereleased in 2020 to include a new introduction, afterword, photos, and an excerpt from her daughter, who shared her own story for the first time, also using a pseudonym, Molly.
"I still cared deeply for Ted when I wrote the original book," Kendall wrote in the new introduction. "It took years of work for me to accept who he was and what he had done. I still felt lingering shame that I had loved Ted Bundy. It was healing for me when women started telling their stories of sexual violence and assault as part of the Me Too movement. I could relate to keeping experiences secret for fear of being judged."
"As much as I can, I've forgiven myself. For me, I'm hoping this is the end of my participation with anything related to Ted," Kendall said in the Amazon series Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer.
3.Richard Bundy, Ted Bundy's little brother, spoke publicly about his life with Ted on Amazon's Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer. Of his childhood with Ted, Richard said, "We were more than just brothers. We were close friends. I really looked forward to spending time with him, which I did a lot of."
In reference to a photo of the two camping, he said, "He could do a million of these, but it doesn't outweigh one, just one of the victims, you know? It only takes one person that he killed to make it all just go to shit, you know?"
As for life today, Richard Bundy said, "Some things make me really depressed, in an almost debilitating way where I will sit in this chair for days. I'll sometimes stay in this camper for two, three days at a time. ... I don't recommend it to everyone, to live your life precariously, but if I know I have enough to keep shelter and food for my cat and I, that's the most important thing."
4.For most of her life, Kerri Rawson kept a low profile and avoided press while she processed her dad's double life as the serial killer BTK, or Dennis Rader. That is until 2019, when Rawson opened up for the first time with the release of her book, A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming.
"We went from being best friends, him walking me down the aisle, camping, hiking, moving me all over, and taking care of me, and teaching me everything you would want to know about the outdoors — we went from that, to my 26-year-old self losing my father, having everything I knew about my father being told it was a lie," she told NBC.
When asked how she didn't know of her father's double life, Rawson told Esquire, "My mom and I have both said, early on, if we had known, we would've gone screaming out the door, running to the police."
She added, "It's not like you're going to sit there and make dinner for the guy after finding out he's murdered 10 people. [We] didn't know we were living with a psychopath. They're really good at hiding... I mean, my mom lived with him for 34 years, and 90, 95 percent of the time, he was a good, loving father and husband."
After years of therapy, processing, and healing, Rawson felt comfortable speaking to the media. "I realized as soon as I started speaking up, it was like this release fell," she told NBC. "Crime victims started showing up. They started contacting me. They're like, 'Something you're doing, something you're saying, is helping us.'"
"Every family I know that's like mine, we all get it. It never goes away. It's like we get lumped in, even though we're innocent and we're crime victims. We get lumped in with [their] actions, and it's like there's this stain that follows us the rest of our lives," Rawson added. "Once I realized I could help people, then I was like, 'OK, I got to keep healing' ... So I went back into therapy again and again so that I could continue to find my old self again."
Now Rawson is helping investigators solve cold cases that may involve her father. According to the New York Times, her contributions just this year have helped investigators identify her father as the prime suspect in two cold cases.
“I have always just wanted to help,” she told the New York Times. “I wanted access to this stuff when I could handle it, because I knew I could maybe learn more. There were these missing puzzle pieces."
5.Melissa Moore, the daughter of Keith Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer, has spoken extensively about building a life for herself after her father's crimes. On A&E's Monster in My Family, she said, "Being the daughter of a serial killer puts everything into question. Am I worthy? Do I have a right to exist when he took so much away from other people? If I'm happy, is that a slap in the face to the victims' families? I don't want it to be."
"I'm ashamed that he's my dad. I'm ashamed that he has no remorse. I'm ashamed for how he treated your sister and what he did to your sister," she said to the sister of Taunja Bennett, one of her father's victims.
Since publicly sharing her story as a the daughter of a serial killer, Moore has written a book called Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter and begun creating resources for families of killers and crime survivors. "It wasn't until I saw a local case that got me to be active in telling my story in a vocal way. ... I wanted to reach out to them to let them know that they're not alone. That's what got me on the quest to write my memoir," she shared on TikTok.
She continued, "That memoir was aimed to help other daughters of killers. I wanted to tell the story that we were thrown into this without wanting to be. We were innocent bystanders in this horrible, horrible crime, and there's nothing that we could have done to prevent it. Up until that point, there wasn't any books or resources for families of killers that I was aware of. I kept seeking that out, and so I decided that I would start creating resources and start connecting with families of killers and start helping them tell their story."
Moore has gone on to speak to more than 100 children of murderers, including conducting the interviews for A&E's Monster in My Family.
6.Mildred D. Muhammad, the ex-wife of DC sniper John Allen Muhammad, speaks publicly about her experiences as the ex-spouse of a brutal criminal, as well as a survivor of abuse. On A&E's Monsters in My Family, she talked about how people viewed her after her ex-husband's attacks and murders. She said, "At that time [after the attacks], they told me that if I stayed with him, then he just would've killed me."
She added, "If I would've stayed on the West Coast, [they felt,] then the people on the East Coast would still be alive. And how dare I bring this drama into a quiet community, and how dare I call me and my children victims when neither of us were killed. I was blamed because they couldn't get to John."
A certified domestic violence advocate and global speaker, Mildred Muhammad has since made it her mission to speak on the connection between intimate partner violence and mass shootings, and advocates for domestic violence awareness and prevention.
7.Tonya Beasley, the daughter of Richard Beasley, aka the Craigslist Killer, spoke to Nick Kern, the son of one of her father's victims, on A&E's Monster in My Family: "For the longest time, I just felt guilty because one of the last times I actually spoke with my father, he asked me to make him a Craigslist account. Maybe had I not even had the connection that we did have, or the desire to help do even small things like that, then maybe it wouldn't have happened. And among that personal guilt is also the fear. I don't want anyone to blame me."
She said, "After meeting Nick, I'm finally feeling less guilty. But I'm still Richard Beasley's daughter, and as much as I hate him, part of me still just really wants a dad. And if we can't create new memories, I'm still constantly hung up on the old ones. And it's really hard to get past."
8.In 2009, April Balascio, daughter of serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards, told police about the suspicions she had about her father after she discovered the 1980 killings of Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew. The teenagers disappeared from where her father worked doing odd jobs before the family skipped town. "Kids aren't stupid. There were dead bodies. Someone was always murdered wherever we lived," she told People magazine. "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."
Belascio's tip led to Edwards’s arrest and eventual conviction. When Belascio found out that her father matched the DNA from the crime scene, she said, "I literally went into a panic attack, or an anxiety attack. Had to pull off to the side of the road. And that’s when it really hit me that all the suspicions I had about my father were true. And that he was this monster.” April detailed her story on The Clearing podcast.
9.Shelly Ramirez — the niece of Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker — and her mother, Sandy Tapia, Richard's ex-sister-in-law, met with one of Richard's victims, Bill Carns, also for A&E's Monster in My Family. Shelly Ramirez said, "When we found out that Richie was the Night Stalker, it was an end of innocence. Being related to somebody like that, it's just awful. ... My uncle Richie's actions, they hurt all of us. My mom just unfortunately got involved with the wrong man with the wrong family."
"He took away the innocence of the world from us," Tapia said. "That last name is what carries the legacy of someone who hurt people, such as Bill and others. It's really disturbing and feels so awful inside," Ramirez added. "I have been judged. He's my uncle, and people tell me that I look like him."
10.Karen Kuzma, the sister of John Wayne Gacy, met with Patti Szyc-Rich, the sister of John Szyc, one of Gacy's victims, to express remorse for her brother's actions. "When we got the news, we were totally in disbelief. The lawyers wouldn't let us say anything to these families. We were never able to apologize," Kuzma said to A&E.
"I have never had the opportunity to talk to any of the families. And I always wanted to say ... that I am so sorry what John did to your whole family. ... I thought with each step of his incarceration and his execution, I always felt that that was going to be closure for everybody. But I found it doesn't close it," Kuzma said to Szyc-Rich. "Even though the murders were over 35 years ago, the pain of it all will always be there. I think I'll take it to my grave. It's not going to go away."
You can hear more perspectives from relatives of serial killers and their victims on A&E's Monster in My Family.