Ed Kemper

 

The notorious Co-ed Killer, Edmund Emil Kemper, got his nickname by killing and dismembering six young women whom he picked up as hitchhikers in the area of Santa Cruz, California. However, he also committed a number of other murders, including killing his grandparents and his mother. He was only a teenager when he shot both his grandparents dead, having been sent to live with them on their farm. As an adult, he committed a series of murders, mostly of young female hitchhikers and committed gross acts of necrophilia and cannibalism on their corpses. During this time he covered his clues, but as time went on and his madness took hold, he lost all sense of caution. Finally, he murdered his mother and a friend of hers in a fit of furious rage, before finally giving himself up to the authorities. His behaviour was never explained, and at his trial he was seen as a sociopath rather than a psychopath. As a result he was judged to be sane, even though he had spent a good deal of time in mental hospitals as a teenager. The reason he gave for killing the women and the members of his own family, was, he said, ‘to see what it felt like’. Words that struck a chill into all who followed his horrific exploits, and persuaded the judge at his trial to give him a life sentence for murder.

 

Killing the family cat

 

Edmund Kemper III was born on December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California, into a troubled family. His father, who went by the nickname E.E., had been decorated in World War II; his mother, Clarnell, a domineering, critical woman, was not happy with her husband, and after a tempestuous relationship the couple parted. His mother took Ed, who was then aged nine, and his sister to live in Helena, Montana. It was here that Ed began to show the first signs of serious mental disturbance. One of the strangest aspects of his behaviour was that he tortured animals in the most horrible way. In an incident that defies belief, he buried the family cat alive in the back garden and when it was dead, cut off its head and put it on a stick. He kept the head on the stick in his bedroom, along with other unpleasant animal parts. How his mother managed not to notice what was going on is still a mystery. He also mutilated his sister’s dolls, pulling their heads, arms and legs off and acting out peculiar sexual rituals on them. At this time, he also fell in love with a teacher at his school and confided his feelings to his sister. His sister asked him, as a joke, whether he would like to kiss the teacher, and Ed replied that if he did, he would have to kill her beforehand. Later on, these words were to become prophetic.

Kemper’s mother Clarnell seems to have exacerbated the situation, humiliating her son on every occasion that she could and continually berating him in front of others. Eventually, she forced him to sleep in the basement under lock and key, because she was afraid that he would attack his sisters and subject them to sexual acts. She herself was also afraid of him. By this time he had grown into an extremely tall young man, inheriting his height from both parents. His size marked him out from his contemporaries and he was teased at school, but seemed unable to fend for himself and became extremely afraid of being bullied. Thus, although he was a large, violent young man, he was also timid and very awkward with people in general.

Edmund’s relationship with his mother soon deteriorated to the point where she declared that she had washed her hands of him. She referred to him as ‘a real weirdo’ and when his behaviour became completely out of control, sent him to live with his estranged father. His father proved equally inadequate to deal with the situation, and in turn sent him to live with his elderly paternal grandparents on their farm at North Fork, Carolina.

 

Country life – with a rifle

 

By now, Kemper was fifteen. To begin with, country life seemed to suit the teenager and he spent his days shooting animals and birds with a rifle. However, tragedy struck when, on August 27, 1964, Kemper turned the gun on his grandparents, shooting his grandmother dead as she put the finishing touches to a children’s book she was working on. When his grandfather came home from grocery shopping, Kemper shot him dead as well. Asked later why he had done it, all he could find to reply was, ‘I just wondered what it would feel like to shoot grandma and grandpa.’

Kemper was pronounced to be mentally ill and sent to a secure hospital at Atascadero, where he remained for the next five years. He was then judged to be much improved with regard to his mental health and was paroled into his mother’s care in Santa Cruz, a college town in San Francisco Bay. Once released, he applied to join the police, but was turned down on the grounds that he was too tall (by now he was 6 ft 9 in). After that, he did numerous odd jobs, never settling for long at any one task. He began to drink regularly at a police bar called the Jury Room, where he befriended numerous detectives and bought himself a car similar to those used by the police as undercover vehicles.

He started using the car to pick up young female hitch-hikers, customising the car by making it impossible to open the passenger side door from the inside. In retrospect, it seems clear that he was waiting to claim his next victim – it was just a matter of time until he found the right moment.

 

Murder, rape and necrophilia

 

On May 7, 1972, the next tragedy struck when he picked up two eighteen-year-old students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were hitching to Stanford University. He drove them down a dirt road, stabbed them both to death and then took them back to his apartment. There he sexually assaulted the bodies and took photographs of them, before cutting their heads off, putting the bodies in plastic bags, burying them on a nearby mountainside and throwing the heads into a ravine. Four months later, he killed again. This victim was fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo, whom he strangled, raped and then dissected. The next day, with her head in the boot of his car, he met with court psychiatrists, who declared him to be sane.

Another four months went by, and then Kemper murdered another student, Cindy Schell. By this time he’d bought a gun, which he used to shoot Schell dead after forcing her into the boot of his car. Now following a pattern, he raped, beheaded and dissected her corpse before disposing of it, burying the head in his mother’s garden.

Less then a month passed before he struck again, shooting hitchhikers Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Lin before putting both bodies in the boot and leaving them there while he went to have dinner with his mother. When they had finished eating he decapitated them, taking Lin’s headless corpse home to rape.

 

The final victim: his mother

 

Clearly, Kemper’s madness was now out of control, and over the Easter weekend of 1973 he finally turned on his mother. He lay in wait for her at her home and when she appeared he beat her to death with a hammer. He then decapitated and raped her, before attempting to throw her larynx into the waste disposal unit. In a confused attempt to cover his tracks, he then invited one of his mother’s friends over, Sally Hallett, and when she arrived he murdered her as well. Having committed the two murders, he took to his heels and fled, driving west to Colorado. When he got there, he telephoned his buddies on the Santa Cruz police force and told them what he’d done. At first they thought he was joking and did not believe him, but after visiting his mother’s apartment, they saw only too well that he was telling the truth and immediately ordered his arrest. He gave himself up without a fight and seemed relieved that his killing spree had now come to an end.

When Kemper was brought to trial, the jury concluded that he was sane and he was found guilty on eight counts of murder. He received a life sentence but apparently asked to be tortured to death. Since that time, he has continued to serve his sentence, appearing to enjoy his notoriety. On one occasion he was interviewed live and asked, ‘What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?’ His chilling reply was, ‘One side of me says I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other half of me says “I wonder how her head would look on a stick.” ’