One of the hardest things about accepting the truth of her father, Melissa says, is reconciling the fact that he was a murderer with her memories of him as a dad. "I have memories of him playing with me, picking me up, spinning me around," she says. "Then to see that he was a stone-cold killer, I can't fuse the two together."

Still, Melissa admits she saw glimpses of evil in her father when she was very young. "I was just a child when he took my kittens from me. He took the little tails and pinned them on the clothesline, and I watched them scratching at each other, trying to get down, and I couldn't stop it," she says. "As I got older, I started to put two and two together."