Kemper made the following statements to the police on the occasion of his picking two young hitchhikers, using a gun and knife to control them, and murdering them both.

 

“At this time, I had full intentions of killing both of them. I would have loved to have raped them. But not having any experience at all in this area, with very limited exposure to the opposite sex and I guess the learning point—fifteen to twenty-one—I was locked up with all men [for having murdered his grandparents], and there wasn’t any opportunity to be with women or girls, and this is one of the big problems I had, and one of the biggest things that caused me to be so uptight. So even trying to communicate [with girls] before this happened, just casually, I felt like a big bumble butt, and I think it’s just like an overaged teenager trying to fit in. They were both eighteen at the time, I think, and I was twenty-three, which isn’t that much of a gap, but it was just like a million years.

“Anyway, I decided that Anita was more gullible and would be easier to control, so I told her that she was gonna go into the trunk. And she stepped right out of the car, and I had a pair of handcuffs I had purchased. I took the cuffs out and I reached for one of Mary Ann’s arms and she grabbed it back. I picked the gun up like I was gonna hit her with it and told her not to do that again. I said, you know, I’m running the show here, or some such cliché. So she allowed me to put my handcuffs on her arm, and I put the other one around the seat belt, behind the lock so it wouldn’t come up, and left her back there.

“I took the other girl to the trunk. Just before she got in, she reiterated something Mary Ann said—‘Please don’t do this,’ or something like that. I said, ‘What, are you gonna start in too?’”

Back in the car, Kemper found that Mary Ann was trying to get free:

“I almost stuck the gun up her nose to impress her that that was a real gun and that she kept getting me more uptight than I was. And then her lips started quivering, rather than her friend’s, and I started losing control, and I told her that if she kept this up, that they were all gonna be in a whole lot of trouble. At this point, she cooperated. I handcuffed her behind her back and turned her over, and I tried to put a plastic bag over her head. I had this nifty idea about suffocating her. I was going to be really smart, and the windows were rolled up, and just normal conversation wouldn’t carry—it was a fairly populated area. It was up on the hill. You couldn’t hear voices or anything way off in the distance. So I didn’t want anything carrying that would be conspicuous.… She was complaining that she couldn’t breathe. I said I’d tear a hole in the bag, not intending to really, and I had a terry-cloth bathrobe with a long rope tie. I put a loop in it and started pulling it down over what I thought was her neck. I pulled it tight. That’s about where I blew it.”

What he meant was that he broke the rope, which had caught in her mouth, and she bit a hole in the plastic bag. Kemper, infuriated, pulled a blade.

“I poised the blade over her back, trying to decide where her heart was, and struck and hit her in the middle of the back, and it stuck a little bit; and she said something like ‘ow’ or ‘oh’… and I did it again and did the same damn thing, and I was getting mad now and I told her to shut up after the second time, and she said, ‘I can’t,’ and was moaning. She was struggling but she couldn’t move too much.… Then I started thrusting hard and I was hitting, but apparently I wasn’t hitting or the blade wasn’t long enough, which it wasn’t conceivable to me because she wasn’t that large a girl, rather small in fact, about [5'2''] and maybe 105 pounds. I struck in several places in both sides of the back and noticed as I went further down the back that she was a little louder and more painful in her cries, but none got really loud. That always bothered me. I couldn’t figure out why. It was almost like she didn’t want to blow up and start screaming or something. She was maintaining control. But when I started doing this, then it got to be too much for her; she twisted around, and I hit her once in the side with the knife.

“She turned completely over to see what the hell I was doing, I guess, or to get her back away from me, and I stabbed her once in the stomach in the lower intestine. It didn’t have any effect. There wasn’t any blood or anything. There was absolutely no contact with improper areas. In fact, I think once I accidentally—this bothers me, too, personally—I brushed, I think with the back of my hand when I was handcuffing her, against one of her breasts, and it embarrassed me. I even said, whoops, I’m sorry, or something like that. She was pretty cognizant of what was going on, and it was getting pretty messy there in the backseat. She turned back over on her stomach, and I continued stabbing. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her. I’m trying to think. I usually checked something like that—you might say, almost comparing notes—and in this case I didn’t. I did with Anita, ’cause that really amazed me. With Mary Ann, I was really quite struck by her personality and her looks, and there was just almost a reverence there. I didn’t even touch her, really too much, after that. That is, other than to get rid of physical evidence, such as clothing, and later the body.

“Anyway, she was across the back of the seat with her head down towards the door, towards the space between the front seat and back seat, and I don’t think the bag was on. She had shaken it off. She was crying out a little louder, and I kept trying to shut her up, covering her mouth up, and she kept pulling away, and one time, she didn’t, and like it was a cry, and I could have sworn it came out of her back. There were several holes in the lung area and bubbles and things coming out, and the sounds shook me up, and I backed off; at that point, she turned her head to the back of the seat and she called her friend’s name, her first name. It was slow and it was not loud. That was the last thing that she said. She wasn’t passing out at that point. I don’t think at that point that the full impact of what had happened had really hit her. I think she was pretty well in shock or something.

“I felt I was getting nowhere, not that I wasn’t getting any kicks out of stabbing her, but hoped that one would do it. When it got quite messy like that, I reached around and grabbed her by the chin and pulled her head back and slashed her throat. I made a very definite effort at it, and it was extremely deep on both sides. She lost consciousness immediately, and there were no more vocal sounds anyway.”

At that point, Kemper got up in a daze and headed to the back of the car:

“I knew I had to do it to the other girl right then, because she had heard all the struggle and she must have known something very serious was going on.”