EDMUND EMIL KEMPER III

Article BY Cristo M. Sanchez - Art by Chuck Hodi

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Ed Kemper will turn 69 years old this year. The last photo I was able to find of him is from 2011 (when he was 62 years old) and he looks old, isn't wearing his glasses, and though his hair is still dark his trademark mustache reveals a lot of gray. This feels strange to me as it probably does to most of us who have been interested in serial killers for a while and remember him as the tall, intelligent but dorky-looking, mustached young man with round, thick glasses. Ed Kemper was the first serial killer who truly fascinated me. His upbringing, the method to his madness, his willingness to turn himself in; it all seemed so different to the other serials killers I had heard about up until that point. The moustache, the dorky look, the thick glasses; that is how I remember him from when I first saw a photograph of him when I was 14 years old. This is also closer to what I imagine how his victims from 1972 and 1973 would remember him if they had lived to tell the tale. This is the story of Ed Kemper: The Co-Ed Killer.

 

CHILDHOOD

Edmund Emil Kemper III was born December 18, 1948 in Burbank, California to Edmund Emil Kemper II and Clarnell Elizabeth Kemper. Both his parents were very tall people - Clarnell being 6 feet tall and Edmund Kemper II being 6 feet 8 inches - and young Kemper weighed 13 lbs as a newborn. His size would further alienate him from his peers, and would be a sore point his mother made no qualms about tormenting him about.

Clarnell - a violent alcoholic - soon showed a strong dislike of her son, was extremely domineering and would both psychologically and physically torment young Edmund. It is postulated that Clarnell suffered from borderline personality disorder, but she was never diagnosed.

At age 7, young Kemper's first sociopathic tendencies, as well as his first psychopathic tendencies, began to reveal themselves, though no one knew at the time. He would sneak out of his house with his father's bayonette, go to his second grade teacher's house and watch her through the window; fantasize about killing her and having sex with her corpse.
In his older sister's (Susan) testimony from the stand, she explained that when she would tease Ed about wanting to kiss his teacher, Ed said:

"If I kiss her, I'd have to kill her first".

One of Kemper's favorite childhood games included one he called 'Gas Chamber', in which he would ask his younger sister (Allyn) to tie him up then pull an imaginary switch, which then would cause Ed to drop to the floor and convulse, pretending to be dying of gas inhalation. Ed knew from an early age where he was heading, later stating:

"I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that. The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate.”

When Ed was 8 years old, he was forced to sleep in the cellar because his mother feared that he would molest his younger sister, Allyn. So at night, when the rest of his family would go upstairs to bed, Ed would have to walk down a staircase with no guardrail into the dark, cold basement. About this Ed would later remember:

"...an eight year old child has a tough time differenciating the reasoning in that. 'Why am I going to the basment?' I am going to hell and they are going to heaven. Earth is the living room (the center of the house); I am going down to deal with demons and monsters and ghosts and all the things that scare me [and] they don't have to."

His mother would order him to close the cellar door once he was down there, so the cold air wouldn't leak out into the rest of the house.

The cellar storage-turned-'bedroom' was about 18 feet wide and 35 feet long; a concrete room with no windows. On the floor, he had a couple of old carpets so he wouldn't have to step directly onto the cold floor. The only light source, except from a stove, was a dangeling light bulb hanging down over an industrial iron laundry sink. His bed was on the opposite side of the room, in the dark.

If he complained about having to sleep down there, his mother would smack him across the head, telling him to stop being such a wimp.

In one conflicting statement (as there are many because Ed Kemper has a tendency to change details when retelling a story) it is stated that the entrance to the cellar was by a trap door on the floor under the dinner table. Every night the family would push the family table off the trap door, let Ed in and would then place the table back. Ed would not be allowed out until the following morning.

Regardless of the details concerning entrace into the cellar, Kemper would spend more than 6 months sleeping there.

To pass the time, Ed would often stare into the flames in the furnace for hours; his fantasy running rampant, like in most children, except he had no one to console him and tell him that his hallucinations weren't real.

"This is where I allowed my hatred for women to fester and grow," he later told FBI profilers. This is also where he saw the face of the devil for the first time, he added.

At age 9, his father Ed Kemper II, tired of Clarnell and her psychological abuse, left the household. It was also around this time that Edmund became a big fan of the actor John Wayne - possibly trying to find a substitute father figure in a home full of women who he felt hated him. (This fascination and admiration of John Wayne would continue well into his adult life and would later help him integrate into the police lifestyle and befriend many officers, particularly because of his John Wayne impressions.)

The abuse from his mother increased in the absence of his father, and Clarnell would constantly compare Ed to his father, whom she hated, in demeaning ways.

(Clarnell would have a complicated relationship with men throughout her life, marrying thrice and getting divorced thrice.)

At age 10, Ed was already above average size (in fact, he had been a head taller than his peers since age 4), and his mother would often tell him that he was a 'real weirdo', continue to mock him for his size and tell him that no woman would ever love him.

Shortly after being exiled to the basement for yet another stint, he killed for the first time: burying the family cat alive. He would later dig the cat up, decapitate it and mount its head up on a stick. Later he stated that he did this because the cat had begun shifting its attention over to his younger sister and he wanted to make the cat his. Even though he was caught with the dead cat by his mother, he somehow managed to lie his way out of the situation - for the first time lying about a murder, and getting away with it - something he derived great pleasure from.

 

TEENAGE YEARS

At age 13 or 14 (there are conflicting statements about this), Ed ran away from his home in Helena, Montana where he was living with his mother and sisters. Somehow he made it to Van Nuys, Los Angeles, where his father was living. Edmund loved and idolized his father greatly and was under the impression that his father and him were very close despite his father having left. This, unfortunately, proved not to be the case when he arrived in Los Angeles and found out that his father had remarried and had a stepson. Young Kemper was permitted to stay there for a while, but was soon sent back home after his father's new wife told Edmund Kemper II that his son was causing her migraines.

Back home in Helena, Montana, with his mother once again, he murdered a second family cat in retalition to his father's rejection and being back home. This time he cut off the top of the family cat's skull, exposing the brain, and then kept the remains of the dismembered body in his closet until his mother found it.

(Many serial killers who would later go on to murder women would often kill cats when young as felines often symbolize feminity.)

After the second cat murder, Ed, now aged 15, was sent off to live with his paternal grandparents - Edmund Emil Kemper I and Maud Kemper - on their ranch up in the mountains of North Fork, California. It was young Kemper's own father, Edmund Kemper II, who sent his son to live with his parents, to which Clarnell told him, "you might wake up one day and find they've [his parents] been killed."

Soon after Kemper got to the farm, he was given a .22 caliber rifle. Though when his grandparents found out that Ed was still killing domesticated animals, the rifle was taken from him. But it being a ranch there were more than a few weapons around the house. Among these weapons was the .44 caliber gun that Maude Kemper kept in her dresser, and would at times find young Ed playing with it, something she did not approve of. This got to the point that Maude chose to take the weapon with her when she would leave the house. Young Kemper would later state that he felt like they didn't trust him, and that he hated living there.

On August 27, 1964, Ed - still 15 years of age - had an argument with his grandmother Maude and stormed out of the kitchen, where Maude was working on a children's book around the kitchen table. Ed returned with the .22 caliber rifle that his grandfather had given him and shot his grandmother in the back of the head, then fired twice more into her back. (There are conflicting statement about whether or not he inflicted stabs wounds on his grandmother posthumously, though most agree that he did.) He then dragged his grandmother's body into her bedroom.

When his grandfather came home from a trip to the grocery store, Ed shot him dead in his driveway. Ed Kemper would state that he shot and killed his grandfather because he wanted to save him from having to see his wife dead. This is a type of validation of good that he would later also express concerning his first Co-Ed murders.

Young Ed was unsure about what to do after he had murdered both his grandparents, and called his mother for advice. Clarnell told him to call the local police and turn himself in. Ed did as she'd told him and waited on the ranch for the police to arrive and take him into custody.

On why he shot his grandmother he said: "I just wanted to see what it felt like to shoot grandma." In an other interview he stated that he shot his grandmother because she reminded him so much of his mother, which is an example of his many conflicting testimonies. I conclude that his conflicting testimonies often changed according to his wish to plea for insanity.

Ed Kemper III was declared paranoid schizophrenic by a court after this incident (he was still 15 years old at the time) and was sent to Atascadero State Hospital in the criminally insane unit when he was 16.

 

ATASCADERO STATE HOSPITAL

At Atascadero, psychologists strongly disagreed with the diagnosis he had been given as a paranoid schizophrenic, stating that Kemper showed "no flight of ideas, no interference with thought, no expression of delusions or hallucinations, and no evidence of bizarre thinking".

One psychiatrist also commented: "He was a very good worker and this is not typical of a sociopath. He really took pride in his work."

It is worth noting that Atascadero, at the time, had around 1600 patiens, dozens of whom were murderers, and over 800 who were rapists, with a psychiatry staff of only 10.

Kemper was re-diagnosed as having personality trait disturbance, passive agressive type. He would also test as having an IQ of 145 at the facility; something he would use to his advantage in the manipluation of the psychologists at the hospital.

Ed was very friendly and therefore easily became good friends with his psychologist, and with his high IQ, as well as the understaffed psychiatry staff, this may explain how he was able to manipulate the staff into believing that he was more or less harmless - just a lost, friendly kid - and that he didn't have terrible and dark fantasies brewing in his mind.

After a while there, his psychologist made Ed into a sort of assistant and he was given access to hundreds of cases and studies where he was able to read into the gristly details about murders and rape. Through these cases and studies, Ed would learn about pyschology tests, the methods used in these tests and, most importantly, he would learn what many felons had done in order to have be caught, thus allowing him to further plan how he would commit his future crimes in such a way that he wouldn't be caught once freed. One particular thing he learned, notably related to rape, was that you did not leave witnesses and did not leave any physical evidence.
Going through puberty, these years that are the main formative and important in the development of sexuality, Kemper, like several other serial killers, would soon relate sexual pleasure with violence and/or rape, something that was further facilitated and augmented by Ed being able to read case files about other inmates' crimes.

Ed would also help administering tests to other prisoners and through this he got a very clear idea of what psychiatrists considered insane and sane, meaning that he would be able to play the system against itself with this attained knowledge.

Shortly before his 21st birthday, he had convinced the psychiatrists that he was cured and ready to return to society.

 

RELEASE

On his 21st birthday, Ed was released on parole from Atascatero.

When he came out, having missed his adolscence and facing a 'new' world of hippy culture, his alienation must have been unavoidable in its clarity. This alienation and festering hate about 'the world of women who didn't want him' must have been further encouraged by returning to live with his mother, something all the psychiatrists who treated him strongly recommended against, as Clarnell was an obvious trigger. This was ignored for reasons unknown, and Ed and Clarnell (now remarried with the last name Strandberg) moved to Santa Cruz, California, where Clarnell became an administrative assistant at the University of California.

Clarnell soon divorced for the third and final time and would blame all of her failed marriages on Ed. They would have a strained and toxic relationship while Ed lived with her, and their frequent and loud arguements would be often heard by neighbors. Kemper would later describe this time by saying:

"My mother and I started right in on horrendous battles, just horrible battles, violent and vicious. I've never been in such a vicious verbal battle with anyone. It would go to fists with a man, but this was my mother and I couldn't stand the thought of my mother and I doing these things. She insisted on it, and just over stupid things. I remember one roof-raiser was over whether I should have my teeth cleaned."

Luckily this situation didn't last for too long as Ed managed to save up enough money working at the California highway department to move out of his mother's home and move into an apartment in Alameda with a friend. It was a small apartment, not much, but he was finally on his own. But despite living away from his mother he could not escape her constant pestering, her regular phoning and surprise visits.

Ed Kemper had a very strong desire for being a police officer and tried to get a job at the California highway patrol, but was turned down because of his size. Since he couldn't join the Highway patrol, Ed began hanging out at the The Jury Room, a bar frequented by police officers, in order to befriend them and to some extent pretend that he was one of them. At The Jury Room, he was able to sneak into the police circle because of his friendly personality and most likely their shared admiration of actor John Wayne. Some officers would later state that Kemper was what they would refer to as a cop groupie and thought nothing more of him. One police officer even gave him a police academy training badge and a little identification card so he could pretend, and possibly make him feel more as a part of the group.

Ed still wanted to ride motorcycles, and since he couldn't do that with the highway patrol, he went out and bought himself one. It didn't take long before he crashed his this first bike.
He then bought himself a second motorcycle. While out riding on his second motorcycle, he was hit by a car, injured his arm badly and received a $15,000 settlement. With this money, he bought himself a yellow 1969 Ford Galaxie. With this vehicle he would begin picking up hitchikers.

Kemper soon began picking up any hitchiker he could in order to learn what they liked to talk about and how they acted, as well as what women looked for when it came to hitching a ride; what made them feel comfortable. Feeling more secure with his people skills (feeling that he could act like a regular guy), he shifted to only picking up women.

Through conversations with hitchikers he began to develop a system to how he could easily pick someone up without looking suspicious: He would be polite and smile, but act serious and often look at his watch as if he was in a hurry. He also developed a persona for these pick ups: the gentle giant persona. This persona was the soft spoken, smiling "dork"; the persona who could easily connect with other people - something Kemper never felt he really could, especially when it came to women. His psychotic behavoir was primarily psychological as he wouldn't grope or even touch the females that entered his car, but he would fanatasize about it and play out dark fantasies in his mind. Dark fantasies he soon was unable to avoid to act on.

Then came his practice period: When he would pick someone up (a female), he would inform his female hitchiker that he believed their door not to be properly locked. He would then lean across them, open their door and wedge a chapstick (which he hid in his palm) behind the doorhandle so it couldn't be opened from the inside - essentially trapping them. He would practice this with multiple female passengers, telling them once they noticed that they were trapped that something was wrong with the door before he let them out without further incident.

As his psychological fantasies became clearer, his urges became stronger and he felt more confident in his alternative persona, as well as in his practice, he began carrying a gun with him in the car.

Once the gun was a part of the routine, he would begin to bring plastic bags, knives, blankets and handcuffs in the trunk. This was all about moving closer to the final act. In Ed's own calculations, he estimates to have picked up around 150 hitchikers while having the gun, knives, plastic bags, blankets and handcuffs with him in the car.

In his twisted worldview females fell into two categories: they were either nice and sweet to him; or they would act haughty and too good for him. He would narrow all females into being either innocent and pure or sluts deserving of punishment. This worldview was further amplified after Ed once showed interest about wanting to get to know women at the university to his mother, which his mother responded by telling him that they were too good for him.
Kemper's fantasies had reached their pinnacle and he was now primed to kill.

 

THE MURDERS BEGIN

Kemper had been a displacement killer (killing strangers because he could not bring himself to kill the one he truly wanted to kill - in this case his mother) since his first murders - his grandparents in 1964 - and in 1972 that urge to kill would would be too strong to corral. All his victims were chosen randomly on the spot; he would not (like many serial killers) stalk a particular victim and hatch out a plan before going after them.

So, on May 7, 1972, Ed picked up two young Co-Eds - Mary Anne Pesce, 18 years old, and Anita Luchessa, also 18 years old - as they were hiking on a freeway ramp.

Ed quickly directed his anger towards Mary Pesce, who he later would describe as haughty, stuck up, not beautiful but not ugly, and distant.

This is where a self-justified pattern of being rejected emerges in Kemper: If a woman doesn't quickly reach out to him and engage with his nice-guy persona, he immediately places her in the haughty, stuck up category, further aggravating and pushing himself closer to the edge of his urges.

Mary was an experienced hitchiker and initially didn't want to get into Ed's car since the Ford Galaxie only had two doors, meaning that you had to push the front seat forwards in order for anyone to sit in the back; also meaning that one of them would be trapped. But Anita, who was new to hitchiking, managed to convince her friend and they got in with Kemper.

Mary and Anita needed a lift to Stanford University, but since Ed knew the entire area very well from his time working at the highway department he began driving them around, managing to change direction without the two women knowing. He was not driving them to Stanford University, but rather bringing them to a remote and secluded wooden location near Alameda.
Once there, he pulled out his .22 caliber gun out from underneath his leg in one fluent and rapid motion (something he referred to as his "move", which he had practiced endlessly) and started by handcuffing Mary, who was sitting in the backseat. With the gun out and Pesce handcuffed, Kemper told them that he was running the show, and for the first time he was in control of someone elses life.

He was very careful so he wouldn't come into contact with what he referred to as "improper areas" and later said that it bothered him personally that he thinks he had accidentally brushed the back of his hand against one of Pesce's breasts. This embarrassed him and would go on to say to Pesce, "Whoops, I'm sorry."

He then took Luchessa out of the car and placed her in the trunk. Kemper would later state that he locked Luchessa in the trunk because he didn't want her to see what he was about to do with her friend (similar to when he stated that he wanted to spare his grandfather the sight of his wife's corpse).

He then returned to Pesce, who was still handcuffed in the back seat, and threw a plastic bag over her head as he had "this nifty idea about suffocating her". He wrapped a bathrobe belt around her neck, but upon pulling on the soft fabric the belt snapped. Pesce had also managed to bite through the bag in the process of him attempting to choke her.

With his first intentions foiled, Ed pulled a knife out - his gun was tucked in his pants at the time, but he had forgotten about it in his excitement - and stabbed her. Mary didn't immediately fall dead, which surprised Kemper as he expected it to be more like in the movies where the victims near immediately topple over dead. Kemper then stabbed her all over her back, and as Mary turned around to face him he 'had' to stab her in the stomach because he "could not stab her in the heart, as he could not see himself stabbing a young woman in the breast". Ed later confessed that he felt embarrassed by this; humiliated that he was affected by her presence to such a degree.

He then stabbed Mary in the belly, "something that must have hurt worse," Ed would say, as inflicting pain was not what Kemper desired or what got him off. He had stabbed her in order to shut her up; to get her to the state he wanted her in: dead.

Kemper characterized what he did as "making dolls out of people". Dolls who wouldn't reject him. Dolls he could do as he pleased with.

Finally, he slit Pesce's throat, or as he would say in his own words: "...she ended up getting her throat cut."

With Pesce bleeding out in the back seat, Kemper went to the trunk to kill Anita Luchessa. Upon opening the trunk, Anita asked Kemper about what had happened to her friend as she had heard sounds. Kemper told her that he broke Mary's nose because she wouldn't do what he wanted and that Anita needed to come to help her. As Anita got out, Ed reached into the trunk and brought out a knife called The Original Buffalo Skinner, which Kemper nicknamed "The General". (The knife was very expensive, "about 8 or 9 dollars," Ed would later comment, bringing to light the triviality he felt concerning the horrendous crime.) With this knife he stabbed Anita in the throat, eye, heart and forearm - still avoiding what he referred to as "improper areas". About this murder, he also stated that he was surprised of just how many stab wounds it took for her to lose consciousness.

After the murder of the two young women, he put them in the trunk. But once slamming the trunk shut, he panicked because he couldn't find his car keys. Believing he had lost the keys, or possibly locked the keys in the trunk, he began to run from the car in desperation. As he ran, the gun in his pants, the one he had forgotten about, slipped down the inside of his pants and caused him to trip. The fall apparently snapped him out of this sudden panic and when he returned to the car he was more level-headed; he checked all his pockets and found the missing keys.

As he drove back home towards Alameda, he was pulled over by a highway patrol officer because of a broken tail light, but being used to hanging out with cops Kemper did not appear suspicious and was allowed to proceed driving after receiving a small fine. Kemper would later say in an interview that if the officer had decided to do a routine check and look in the trunk where the two women were, he would gave shot the officer in the back of the head.

Arriving home (his room mate not present), he carried the corpses into the apartment. Kemper usually chose petite women, something both Mary and Anita were, and himself being a big and strong man he had little problem carrying them inside.

He took the bodies into his room where he dissected them, took polaroid pictures of the bodies and cut their heads off, before performing sexual acts with the remains.

About the dismemberment of their heads, Ed said:

"I remember there was actually a sexual thrill. You hear that little pop and you pull their heads off and hold their heads up in the air. Whipping their heads off and their bodies sitting there, that'd get me off."

After he was done with the bodies, he placed the remains in plastic bags and buried them in the Santa Cruz hills: torso and limbs in one location; hands in a second location, and disguised the burial grounds with techniques he had learned in the boyscouts.

Kemper kept the heads for a while longer and on one occasion, when he was sitting in his room staring at one of the heads that he had rested on a chair across for him, the head became unsettled somehow and rolled off the chair, hitting the floor with a loud thud. A human head weighs about 10 to 11 pounds, similar to the weight as a bowling ball, and Ed was worried that the downstairs neighbor (who hated Kemper because he would make noise at night) would surely come up to check what was going on upstairs. Luckily for the neighbor, he never did.
When he was done with indulging in sexual acts with the heads, he threw them into a ravine.
Mary Anne Pesce's skull was found in August of 1972 up on Loma Prieta Mountain. Anita Luchessa's skull has never been recovered.

Most serial killers build up with each murder, or in some cases double murders; each murder getting closer and closer to what they truly enjoy about killing, getting closer to their ideal, but it seems like Kemper's fantasies were so elaborate and detailed that he nearly immediately escalated to his uttermost urges.

After the first killings, nearly all his future murders would occur soon after fights with his mother Clarnell. After these fights, Ed's anger would escalate to unmanagable levels and he would storm out of the house in search of a victim. He stated that he would go on what he called "rages", saying that anybody who got in his car on one of these occasions was going to die. He said when someone put their hand on his car doorhandle they were essentially giving him their life.

Another thing he would start doing after these first killings is that he would engage in conversations about the murders he had committed with other hitchikers and police officers at the bar, with them unaware that it was he who had committed them - something that he must have found deeply satisfying, especially concerning the police officers, as he never had the opportunity to be one himself . Though he most likely found satisfaction in the police officer's ignorance, he later admitted that if any hitchiker brought up the killings they were safe as he felt too embarrassed to then kill them.

Ed Kemper committed no murders for four months after Pesce and Luchessa, driving young women to their destinations without incident, before September 14, 1972.
Aiko Koo was 15 years old - a ballet dancer hitching a ride to San Fransisco after she'd missed her bus - when Kemper picked her up. Not wanting to miss her class, Aiko had made a sign with SAN FRANSISCO scribbled on it and was standing in Berkeley when she was picked up by Kemper's yellow Ford Galaxie.

This time Ed didn't wait until they got to a secluded spot and almost immediately, while still on the road, pulled out his gun and told Aiko that he was planning to kill himself and that he wanted someone to watch him do it. If she screamed or signaled to anyone that something was wrong he would kill her as well, he told her.

What is all the more tragic about this particular incidence, is how at one point through the drive Kemper got out of the car and managed to lock himself out with the gun still inside the vehicle with Aiko. But being only 15 years old and terrified - and possibly believing his story about only wanting to kill himself - Aiko let him back in the car.

Kemper drove out to the mountains above Santa Cruz - coincidentally only minutes away from where one of the case investigator's lived - where he tried to suffocate Aiko by inserting his fingers up her nostrils after having taped her mouth shut, but she was able to fight him off. Eventually he strangled her with her own scarf.

Once she was dead, Kemper laid her on the ground and raped her; stating later that he achieved orgasm within seconds. He then placed her in the trunk of his car and started driving home.
On the way home, he stopped at a country bar for "a few beers". Exiting the bar, he openend the trunk of his car to look at Aiko's dead body. Of this, he said:

"I suppose as I was standing there looking, I was doing one of those triumphant things, too, admiring my work and admiring her beauty, and I might say admiring my catch like a fisherman."

Taking the corpse back to his apartment, he cut off her head and hands, then had sex with the corpse again.

The next morning, he buried the body in one location and the hands at an other as was becoming his Modus Operandi.

Kemper kept Aiko's head and would that day, with her head inside a camera bag, drive to his court mandated psychiatrist appointments and go as far as to bring the bag with Aiko's head into the appointments (something that shows his detachment from reality, as well as how confident he was that this 'persona' he had created was unpenetrable, even from the likes of psychiatrists.)

Kemper saw two psychiatrists that day. One of the reports read:

"If I were seeing this appointment without having any history available, or without getting the history from him, I would think that we're dealing a very well-adjusted young man, who has initiative, intelligence and is free of any psychiatric illnesses. It is my opinion that he has made an excellent response to his years of treatment and rehabilitation and I would see no psychiatric reason to consider him to be any danger to himself or to any member of society."

The second appointment used the words "normal" and "safe", and both recommended that his juvenile records be sealed as a way to further help him become a better citizen and adjust to society.

It was only 8 years after the murder of his grandparents, and with three additional murders under his belt as well as Aiko's decapitated head in a camera bag, Kemper gained his complete and total freedom.

After the killing of Aiko Koo, Kemper moved back in with his mother for unknown reasons. (I can only speculate that he was getting closer, psychologically, to his target and this is why he chose to move back in with her.)

Kemper didn't kill again, until he bought a .22 caliber pistol on January 8th of 1973. "I went bananas after I bought that .22," he later told an interviewer.

With the pistol in his car, he picked up Cynthia "Cindy" Schall, 19 years old, who would often hitch rides from Cabreo College. As with Aiko, Ed wouldn't be able to wait and brought out the pistol while driving. He then drove her to a small town called Freedom, where he stopped on a quiet road and shot her in the head. He then placed her body in the trunk of the car and brought her home to where he was living with his mother.

In his bedroom, he carefully removed the bullet from Cindy's skull. (He would remove the bullet every time he shot any of his victims, understanding that the bullets would eventually be linked back to him.) He then placed Schall in his closet and waited until his mother went to work the following morning before bringing the corpse out again.

That following morning, he had sex with the body before dissecting it in the bathroom with an axe. He drained Schall of blood, carved the body into pieces and bagged all the pieces before throwing them off a cliff into the pacific ocean.

As he was prone to do, Kemper kept the head for several days, engaging in sexual acts with it, before burying it in the yard right outside his bedroom window with the head facing towards the house. Later he said that he would talk to the head at night and have a sort of boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with the image of the head as he would sit on his bed. Kemper would also go on to say that he buried the head facing the house to mock his mother.
Less than two days later, dismembered arms and legs were found on a cliff overlooking the pacific ocean. The police also found parts of the torso and managed to indentify Schall through lung x-rays. A surfer found her left hand, which offered fingerprints.

Over the course of the following weeks, all but her head and right hand were found and "pieced together like a macabre jigsaw puzzle". Police and a pathologist determined that she had been hacked to death then cut into pieces with a power saw, which, if we trust Kemper, was not the case.

With many women having gone missing and at least three serial killer sprees since 1970, Santa Cruz was nicknamed 'The Murder Capital of the World' by the press and there were constant warnings about not hitchiking or talking to strangers. But Ed Kemper had a secret weapon.

The University of California had decided to institute a bus system so off-campus students could safely get to campus without having to hitchike. The vehicles that had permission to give rides to students had been provided with University-issued stickers, but since Kemper's mother worked at the campus she actually gave him a sticker so he could easily get into campus and pick her up from work. On his next victims he would use that sticker to his advantage.
On February 5, 1973, after having a very intense fight with his mother, Ed drove to campus. There he picked up 23 year old Rosalind Thorpe as he was coming out of a lecture, and soon after picked up 21 year old Alice Liu while Rosalind was still in the vehicle. These two poor women would be Ed Kemper's last Co-Ed victims.

This time he didn't even wait until he was out of the university ground and shot them both in the head while still on campus.

On one account, Kemper said that he drove through a security gate with the bodies of the women in his trunk. The guard looked at him suspiciously until he saw the university issued sticker, then just waved him through.

On an other account, Kemper said he told the guard that the two girls were just drunk and that he was taking them home. Regardless of which is true, Kemper did drive out of campus with two more victims despite of the University's effort.

About these murders, Kemper said:

"It was getting easier to do, and I was getting better at it."

He brought the bodies home, but since his mother was there he had to wait to take them inside. Though he had to wait, his urge wouldn't allow him to wait to dismember the bodies and he did so with his hunting knife, "The General", by hacking off both their heads while they were still in the trunk of his car and in full view of neighbors. If anyone would have been walking by they would have seen the 6 foot 9 inches tall Kemper in the process of dismembering two young women. Like most serial killers, he was developing a huge ego and he believed he could pretty much get away with anything at this point.

He carried the headless bodies and heads inside once his mother went to bed and had sex with the bodies. He was again careful to remove the bullets from their heads.

The following morning, he placed both bodies back in the trunk and dumped the bodies and the heads in two separate locations. Remains were found on Eden Canyon a week later, and more remains were found near Highway 1 in March.

Pretty soon after the murder of Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu, a police officer, checking through random gun-licenses to make sure that everything was up to par, found Ed Kemper's name among the licenses. Recognizing him as the guy who hung out with them at The Jury Room bar, he gave the license more attention and noticed that something had been blackened out with a marker. Upon closer inspection, he managed to make out that Kemper had been in Atascadero for the murder of his grandparents. The police officer saw that Kemper was in possession of a weapon (a .45 he had purchased in this period) and quickly came to the conclusion that they had to reclaim it.

After (literally) drawing straws, a rookie was sent to get Kemper's gun back. The rookie officer was much smaller than the 250 pound Kemper and was understandably hesitant when he found him in his vehicle on the street outside his house. In the car with Ed was a young blonde girl that various statements support that if the officer had not arrived at that time, Kemper would have surely killed her. Instead - most probably concerned about the visit of the police officer - Kemper let her go.

When asked questions concerning a gun, not a specific one gun but a gun, Kemper got paranoid, wondering what gun they were looking for since he not only had the .45, but many other - among them illegal guns, as well as the .22 he had been using to kill the women with. When the rookie officer told him it was the .45 he was looking for, Kemper brought his guard down and co-operated without incident.

Even though the gun incident had gone smoothly, Kemper was now beginning to believe that the cops were playing a cat and mouse game with him. Never considering the truth - that it was purely a coincidence that his license had been checked and that the police were no closer to figuring out who was killing Co-Ed women - Kemper let his paranoia escalate.

The unpenetrable persona suddenly didn't seem as sturdy anymore and Ed Kemper would spend the better part of a week thinking about that it was time to get down to the source of all the murders: that it was time to kill his own mother.

He would go through with it that Sunday, Easter weekend, April 20, 1973. He had worked himself up for hours that night before he walked into her room with a clawhammer and bashed her head in as she slept. Then he rolled her over and slit her throat, and for once he was shocked about how easy it was to kill her.

He then cut off her head and had sex with her corpse. He then removed her tongue and larynx and attempted to dispose of them in the garbage disposal, which would spit it out again and again because the vocal cords were too thick and tough.

"It seemed appropriate as much as she bitched and screamed and yelled at me so much over the years. Even when she was dead she was bitching at me, I couldn't get her to shut up," he would say about this.

He then engaged in sexual acts with the head, before he spent the next few hours yelling and screaming at the decapitated head of his mother. Finding the catharsis less than satisfactory, he placed the head up on a mantel and began throwing darts at the face.

Feeling sick and angry, and still filled with bloodlust, Ed went out for a drive in search of another victim. Spotting an acquaintance of his who owed his 10 dollars, he pulled over next to him. The two went out for a few drinks. Kemper was still struggling with the urge to kill and it is only because this acquaintance paid him back the 10 dollars he owed him that Ed decided not to kill him.

Having murdered his mother, he realized that the only person who would miss her would be her friend Sara Taylor 'Sally' Hallet, 59 years old, and he needed to do something about that. He called Sally up and invited her over for a surprise dinner with his mother.

Soon after Sally arrived, Ed hit her in the head with a brick. He then began strangling her with his hands, before using the same scarf he used to kill Aiki Koo to strangle her as well. Ed would later state that he strangled her with such force that he broke her neck.

"I had broken her neck and her head was just wobbling around with the bones of her neck just disconnected..."

He placed Sally's body in his bed and spent the night in his mother's room.
The next morning, he left in Hallet's car after leaving a note for the police on his mother's bloody matress:

Appx. 5:15 A.M. Saturday. No need for her to suffer any more at the hands of this horrible "murderous Butcher". It was quick—asleep—the way I wanted it. Not sloppy and incomplete, gents. Just a "lack of time". I got things to do!!!

 

CONFESSION

Kemper then drove three days straight headed for Colorado, popping 'trucker pills' (amphetamines) to keep himself awake. Most of this drive he would say was made up of hallucinations, but he did nevertheless realize that he no longer wanted to be resposible for any further murders and decided that it was time to put a stop to it.

Paranoid and hallucinating, Kemper was at this time expecting a manhunt; he was sure that the police had been watching him and had also searched the house as soon as he'd left three days prior. But after three days on the road without hearing anything about any bodies being found in his house, he stopped in Pueblo, Colorado and called up the Santa Cruz police department to confess to the killings. This was not as easy as he had anticipated as the police did not believe him to begin with, but knowing who was on the case because of his close relationship with detectives and officers, he asked for a specific detective - Detective Sturgess - and provided him with enough specific details about the various murders in order to finally convince him.

Kemper later said that he drove all the way to Pueblo, instead going directly to the Santa Cruz police department, because he was afraid that they would shoot first and ask questions later, and that he was "terrified of violence".

One can only imagine how many more Kemper would have been able to murder and get away with had he not turned himself in.

Kemper pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but three different court psychiatrist declared him to be sane.

When the court asked him what he thought was a fitting punishment, he told them that he had been thinking about that day since childhood, and told the judge that he ought to be tortured to death. The death penalty was suspended nationwide at the time and Kemper was sentenced to life in prison.

Since his sentencing, Kemper's diagnosis has been used as the standard of what legal insanity is defined to be.

Kemper has not given an interview since 1991 and says himself that he is happy where he is. He has also said that were he on the streets now, he would kill again.