EDMUND KEMPER: THE CO-ED KILLER

Article BY Chris Bartholomew - Art by NICHOLAS RAIMO

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The Macdonald triad (also known as the triad of sociopathy) is a set of three behavioral characteristics which are associated with sociopathic behavior. The triad was first identified by J.M. Macdonald in "The Threat to Kill", a 1963 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

In a study involving hospitalized patients [Macdonald] focused on patients who had threatened to kill rather than on patients who had killed, although some subjects later committed homicide. His sample consisted of forty-eight psychotic and fifty-two non-psychotic patients. He found that sadistic patients often had three characteristics in common in their childhood histories. These factors... consisted of chronic bedwetting, fire setting, and torturing small animals.

Further studies have suggested that these behaviors are often the product of parental neglect, cruelty or trauma, and that such events in a person's childhood can result in "homicidal prone-ness".

A later paper by Hellman and Blackman concluded that the triad was predictive of future criminal behavior.

Edmund Kemper was born to Clarnell Strandberg and Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr. in Burbank, California and was raised in Santa Cruz.

Kemper displayed sociopathic and passive-aggressive behavior from a young age: he tortured and killed animals, acted out bizarre sexual rituals pretending he was dying in the gas chamber with his sisters' dolls, was a pyromaniac, and once when his sister asked him to kiss a teacher he had a crush on, he replied "if I kiss her I would have to kill her first". Kemper also claimed that he displayed all signs of the Macdonald triad as a young child.

His mother constantly berated and humiliated her son and often made him sleep in a locked basement because she feared that he would rape or molest his younger sister. (While some accounts say she didn't think they needed to be sharing a room). She eventually grew tired of her son's eccentric personality and sent him to live with his paternal grandparents in 1961. They lived on a 17-acre ranch high in the mountains of North Fork, California. Kemper had disliked living in North Fork, and according to him, his grandfather was a violent man and a heavy drinker.

On August 27, 1964, at fifteen years of age, Kemper shot his grandmother while she sat at the kitchen table writing the finishing pages of her latest children's poetry book. When his grandfather came home from grocery shopping, Kemper shot him as well. Then he called his mother, who urged him to call the police. When questioned, he said that he "just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma," and that he killed his grandfather because he knew he would be angry at him for what he had done to his grandmother. (Some accounts say that he killed his grandfather so that he wouldn't have to see his dead wife's body.)

Kemper was sentenced to youth authority and committed to Atascadero State Hospital, where he befriended his psychologist and became his assistant. He was intelligent enough with a very high I.Q. to gain the trust of the doctor to the extent of being allowed access to prisoners' tests.

With the knowledge he gained from his apprenticeship he was eventually able to impress his doctor at the hospital enough to let him go. He was released in early 1970 into his mother's care against the wishes of several doctors at the hospital. Kemper later demonstrated further to the psychologists that he was well, and to have his juvenile records expunged.

Kemper worked a series of odd jobs before securing work with the State of California's Department of Public Works/Division of Highways.

Edmund's mother was an administrative assistant at the University of California. She got Ed a university parking sticker so he could park on campus. Ed had always dreamed of being a cop, but it was impossible for him because of his height. He bought a car that looked like an unmarked police vehicle, and he equipped it with a radio transmitter, microphone, and a large whip antenna. Then he started picking up female hitchhikers. He took them to their destinations, but the whole time he was dreaming up violent sexual fantasies. Eventually he removed the antenna, and rigged the passenger side door so that it couldn't be opened from the inside.

Between May 1972 and February 1973, Kemper embarked on a spree of murders, picking up female students hitchhiking, taking them to isolated rural areas and killing them. He would stab, shoot or smother the victims and afterwards take the bodies back to his apartment where he would have sex with their bodies and then dissect them. He would often dump the bodies in ravines or bury them in fields, although on one occasion he buried the severed head of a 15-year-old girl in his mother's garden as a joke, later remarking that his mother "always wanted people to look up to her." He killed six college girls (including two students from UC Santa Cruz, where his mother worked, and one from Cabrillo College). He would often go hunting for victims after arguing with his mother.

On Good Friday 1973, Kemper battered his sleeping mother to death with a pick (claw) hammer. He used her decapitated head for oral sex before using it as a dartboard. He also cut out her vocal cords and put them in the garbage disposal, but the machine could not break the tough tissue down and regurgitated it back into the sink. "That seemed appropriate," he said after his arrest, "as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years." His murderous urges not yet satiated, he then invited his mother's best friend over and killed her too, by strangulation. He then drove eastward, but when no word of his crimes hit the radio airwaves he became discouraged, stopped the car, called the police and confessed to being the "Co-ed Killer." He told them what he had done and waited for them to pick him up.

At his trial he pleaded insanity, but he was found guilty of eight counts of murder. He asked for the death penalty, but with capital punishment suspended at that time, he instead received life imprisonment.

At the time of Kemper's murder spree in Santa Cruz, another serial killer named Herbert Mullin was also active, earning the small California town the title of "Murder Capital of the World." Also adding to the college town's infamy was the fact that Kemper's and Mullin's crimes were preceded three years earlier by multiple murders committed by John Linley Frazier, who murdered Santa Cruz eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family. Kemper and Mullin were briefly held in adjoining cells, with the former angrily accusing the latter of stealing his body-dumping sites.

Edmund Kemper remains among the general prison population and is incarcerated at Vacaville State Prison, in Vacaville, California.

 

Victims of Edmund Kemper

August 27, 1964Maude Kemper (Grandmother) shot in the head with a rifle and stabbed

August 27, 1964Edmund Emil Kemper (Grandfather) Shot with a rifle

On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up two 18-year-old roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. He was giving them a ride to Stanford University. He took his gun out and pulled off the road.

He locked Anita in the trunk so he could kill Mary Anne first. Somehow he panicked and locked himself out of the car, but Mary Anne let him back in. He then handcuffed her and attempted to suffocate her with a plastic bag, but she bit through it. He pulled out his knife, stabbed her repeatedly, and then cut her head off. After Mary Anne was dead, he took Anita out of the trunk and stabbed her to death. Next, he took the two bodies' home where he undressed and dissected Mary Anne's corpse and beheaded Anita. He disposed of the torsos, but kept the heads for souvenirs. Bundling the remains into plastic bags, he buried the truncated bodies in the Santa Cruz Mountains, tossing the heads into a roadside ravine.

Four months later, on September 14, Kemper offered a ride to 15-year-old Aiko Koo. Suffocating her with his large hands, Kemper raped her corpse on the spot and then carried it home for dissection. Koo's severed head was resting in the trunk of Kemper's car next morning, when he met with state psychiatrists and they pronounced him "safe," recommending that his juvenile record be sealed for Kemper's future protection. Following the interview, he buried Koo's remains near a religious camp located in the mountains.

Another four months passed before the "Co-ed Killer" struck again, on January 9, 1973. Picking up student Cindy Schall, Kemper forced her into the trunk of his car at gunpoint, and then shot her to death. Driving back to his mother's house, he carried the corpse to his room, and there had sex with it in his bed. Afterward, Kemper dissected Schall's head and buried it in the back yard of his mother's home.

By this time, various remains of Kemper's victims had been found and officers were on the case. Apparently, none of them had the least suspicion that their friend, Ed Kemper, was the man they sought, and some felt comfortable enough in Kemper's company to brief him on the progress of their homicide investigation. Smiling, often springing for the next round at a bar where policemen frequented, Kemper was all ears.

On February 5, 1973, Kemper picked up Rosalind Thorpe, 23 and another hitchhiker, Alice Liu. Both young women were shot to death in the car, and then stacked in the trunk like so much excess luggage. Driving home, Kemper ate dinner and waited for his mother to retire before stepping outside and decapitating both corpses as they lay in the trunk. Unsatisfied, he carried Lin's body inside and sexually assaulted it on the floor. Returning to the car, he chopped her hands off as a casual afterthought.

With spring's arrival, Kemper's frenzy escalated, coming back full circle to his home and family. He toyed with the idea of killing everybody on his block, as "a demonstration to the authorities," but finally dismissed the notion. Instead, on Easter weekend, Kemper turned upon his mother, hammering her skull in as she slept. Decapitating her, he raped the headless corpse, and then jammed her severed larynx down the garbage disposal. Her head was propped on the mantle for use as a dartboard.

Still not sated, Kemper telephoned a friend of his mother's, Sally Hallett, and invited her over for a "surprise" dinner in his mother's honor. Upon her arrival, Kemper clubbed her over the head, strangled her to death, and then decapitated her. The headless body was deposited in his bed, while he wandered off to sleep in his mother's room.

On Easter Sunday, Kemper started driving East, with no destination in mind. He got as far as Colorado before pulling over to a roadside telephone booth and calling police in Santa Cruz. Several attempts were necessary before his friends would accept his confession, and local officers were dispatched to make the arrest while Kemper waited patiently in his car.

In his detailed confession, Kemper admitted slicing flesh from the legs of at least two victims, cooking it in a macaroni casserole and devouring it as a means of "possessing" his prey. He also acknowledged removing teeth, along with bits of hair and skin from his victims, retaining them as grisly keepsakes, trophies of the hunt. Described as sane by state psychiatrists, Kemper was convicted on eight counts of murder. Asked what punishment he considered fitting for his crimes, the defendant replied, "Death by torture." Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.

Since his incarceration, Kemper has been very busy. In 1988, he and John Wayne Gacy took part in interviews via satellite. Kemper is also part of an FBI program aimed to build the FBI's profiling system. He was led in a series of interviews by agent Robert Ressler. Edmund Kemper is now the model prisoner at his facility.

 

In Edmund Kemper's own words:

"When I was in school, I was called a chronic daydreamer and I saw a counselor twice during junior high and high school, and that was very routine. They didn't ask me a lot of questions about myself and that was probably the most violent fantasy time I was off into."

"I lived as an ordinary person most of my life, even though I was living a parallel and increasingly violent other life."

"My frustration. My inability to communicate socially, sexually. I wasn't impotent. I was scared to death of failing in male-female relationships."

"At first I picked up girls just to talk to them, just to try to get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship. I decided to mix the two and have a situation of rape and murder and no witnesses and no prosecution."

"I'm picking up young women, and I'm going a little bit farther each time. It's a daring kind of thing. First there wasn't a gun. I'm driving along. We go to a vulnerable place, where there aren't people watching, where I could act out and I say, 'No, I can't.' And then a gun is in the car, hidden. And this craving, this awful raging eating feeling inside, this fantastic passion. It was overwhelming me. It was like drugs. It was like alcohol. A little isn't enough."

"It was stupid for anyone to hitchhike, but to these people who thought it was fun and exciting and maybe even a little bit daring... it is if they're dead."

"I just wanted the exaltation over the party. In other words, winning over death. They were dead and I was alive. That was the victory in my case."

"I went to live with Dad, and he sends me up to Grandma. Now she's going to undo all the terrible things that my mother did to me. I'm going to be a showpiece. She's going to show the world that my mother was a lousy parent. I'm going to be a pawn in this little game."

"...cared more for his second family than he did us." - About his father, who rejected him after his parents divorced.

"He didn't want me around, because I upset his second wife. Before I went to Atascadero, my presence gave her migraine headaches. When I came out she was going to have a heart attack if I came around." - About his father and stepmother.

"...my grandmother who thought she had more balls than any man and was constantly emasculating me and my grandfather to prove it. I couldn't please her. It was like being in jail. I became a walking time bomb and I finally blew. It was like that the second time, with my mother." - About his grandmother, victim Maude Kemper.

"I saw her big black pocketbook bulging as she went out the door and I said to myself, 'Why that old bitch, she's taking the gun with her, because she doesn't trust me, even though I promised I wouldn't touch it.' I toyed with the idea of calling the chief of police in Fresno and telling him 'there's a little old lady walking around town with a forty-five in her purse and she's planning a holdup' and then give him my grandmother's description. How do you suppose she would have talked herself out of that?" - Recalling a time when his grandmother (victim Maude Kemper) took his grandfather's gun with her when she went shopping.

"...took her violent hatred of my father out on me." - About his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.

"...an alcoholic and constantly bitched and screamed at me." - About his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.

"...big, ugly, awkward woman who was six feet tall and she was always trying to get me to go out with girls who were just like her... friends of hers from the campus. I may not be so much to look at myself, but I have always gone after pretty girls." - About his mother, who worked at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

"She's holding up these girls who she said were too good for me to get to know. She would say, 'You're just like your father. You don't deserve to get to know them.'" - Recalling what his mother had told him about getting dates.

"I can't get away from her. She knows all my buttons and I dance like a puppet." - About his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.

"There were times when she was bitching and yelling at me that I felt like retaliating and walking over to the telephone in her presence and calling the police, to say, 'Hello, I'm the co-ed killer,' just to lay it on her." - About his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.
"She loved me in her way and despite all the violent screaming and yelling arguments we had, I loved her, too. But, she had to manage your life, and interfere in your personal affairs." - About his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.

"I went bananas after I got that .22." - Recalling when he bought a .22-caliber pistol.

"When someone put their hand on my car-door handle, they were giving me their life." - About picking up hitchhikers.

"It was getting easier to do. I was getting better at it." - About talking his way through situations of almost getting caught.

"I remember it was very exciting. There was actually a sexual thrill. It was kind of an exalted triumphant type thing, like taking the head of a deer or an elk or something would be to a hunter. I was the hunter and they were the victims." - About decapitating his victims.

"Death never entered as a factor. Alive, they were distant, not sharing with me. I was trying to establish a relationship and there was no relationship there. When they were being killed, there wasn't anything going on in my mind except that they were going to be mine. That was the only way they could be mine." - About his teenage victims.

"They were like spirit wives... I still had their spirits. I still have them." - About his teenage victims.

"It was the first time I went looking for someone to kill. And it's two people, not one. And they're dead. Very naive, too. Painfully naive in that they thought they were streetwise." - About victims Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa.

"I had full intentions of killing them. I would loved to have raped them, but not having any experience at all..." - About victims Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa.

"I was really quite struck by her personality and her looks and there was just almost a reverence there." - About victim Mary Anne Pesce.

"Sometimes, afterward, I visited there... to be near her... because I loved her and wanted her." - About victim Mary Anne Pesce.

"I pulled the gun out to show her I had it... she was freaking out. Then I put the gun away and that had more effect on her than pulling it out." - About victim Aiko Koo.

"She could have reached over and grabbed the gun, but I think she never gave it a thought." - About accidentally locking himself out of his car, with victim Aiko Koo inside.

"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." - About victim Aiko Koo.

"...with her face turned toward my bedroom window and, sometimes at night, I talked to her, saying love things, the way you do to a girlfriend or wife." - Explaining how he buried victim Cindy Schall's head in his mother's backyard.

"My mother and I had had a real tiff. I was pissed. I told her I was going to a movie and I jumped up and went straight to the campus because it was still early. I said, the first girl that's halfway decent that I pick up, I'm gonna blow her brains out." - Explaining why he killed victims Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu.

"Miss Liu was sitting in back right behind Miss Thorpe. I went on down a ways and slowed down. I remarked on the beautiful view. I hesitated for several seconds. I had been moving my pistol from down below my leg in my lap. I picked it up and pulled the trigger. As I fired, she fell against the window. Miss Liu panicked. I had to fire through her hands. She was moving around and I missed twice." - About killing victims Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu.

"It was so hard. I cut off her head, and I humiliated her, of course. She was dead, because of the way she raised her son." - About killing his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.
"...put it on a shelf and screamed at it for an hour... threw darts at it... smashed her face in." - Recalling what he did after he decapitated his mother, victim Clarnell Strandberg.

Appx. 5:15 A.M. Saturday. No need for her to suffer anymore at the hands of this horrible 'murderous butcher.' It was quick, sleep, the way I wanted it. - A note he left with his mother's body.

"I came up behind her and crooked my arm around her neck, like this... I squeezed and just lifted her off the floor. She just hung there and, for a moment, I didn't realize she was dead. I had broken her neck and her head was just wobbling around with the bones of her neck disconnected in the skin sack of her neck." - Recalling how he killed his mother's friend, victim Sara Hallett.

"...so I wouldn't kill again." - Explaining why he surrendered to police.

"The day those fathers testified in court was very hard for me. I felt terrible. I wanted to talk to them about their daughters, comfort them... but what could I say?" - About victims Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa's fathers.

"I really wasn't surprised when it came out that way. There was just no way they could find me insane. Society just isn't ready for that yet. Ten or twenty years from now they would have, but they're not going to take a chance." - About the jury finding him guilty and sane.

"I felt I definitely could have done a lot of good there, helping people return to the streets. I could have fit in there quicker than anybody else. After all, I grew up there. That used to be like my home. Basically, I was born there, you know. I have a lot of fond memories of the place, and I don't know anybody else who has." - About Atascadero State Hospital in Atascadero, California, where he spent 5 years after murdering his grandparents, victims Maude Kemper and Edmund Kemper.

"I helped to develop some new tests and some new scales on MMPI. You've probably heard of it... the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. I helped to develop a new scale on that, the 'Overt Hostility Scale'. How's that for a... Ironic note. There we go, it was an ironic note that I helped to develop that scale and then look what happened to me when I got back out on the streets." - About being an aide in psychological testing and research at Atascadero State Hospital in Atascadero, California.

"I didn't have the supervision I should have had once I got out. I was supposed to see my parole officer every other week and a social worker the other week. I never did. I think if I had, I would have made it. Two weeks after I was on the streets, I got scared because I hadn't seen anyone. Finally, I called the district parole office and asked if I was doing something wrong... was I supposed to go to my parole officer, or would he come to see me, I asked." - Recalling after he was released from Atascadero State Hospital in Atascadero, California.

"When I got out on the street it was like being on a strange planet. People my age were not talking the same language. I had been living with people older than I was for so long that I was an old fogey." - Recalling after he was released from Atascadero State Hospital in Atascadero, California.

"I started feeling like I didn't deserve all that nice treatment after what I had done... and I guess that's why I started cutting myself up." - About jail personnel being kind to him and him wanting to commit suicide.

"He's more like a father to me than anyone I have ever known. He's like the father I wish I had had." - About Santa Cruz county sheriff's deputy Bruce Colomy.

"You're a no-class killer." - What he told serial killer Herbert Mullin, who he shared an adjoining prison cell with.

"...shut him up when he was disturbing everybody by singing off-key in his high-pitched, squeaky voice." - Recalling when he threw water at serial killer Herbert Mullin, in prison.

"When he was a good boy, I gave him peanuts. He liked peanuts. It was behavioral modification treatment. The jailers were very pleased with me. You know, though, it really sticks in my craw that Mullin only got two 'firsts' and I got eight. He was just a cold-blooded killer, running over a three-week period killing everybody he saw for no good reason. I guess that's kind of hilarious, my sitting here so self-righteously talking, like that, after what I've done." - About serial killer Herbert Mullin.

"I guess you heard me say that I wanted to kill Herbie Mullin, my fellow mass murderer. Well, there was a time when I thought it would be a good solution for everyone. It would be good for society and save everyone a bundle of money. Instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to lock the two of us up for life to protect us from people and people from us. I figured that if I killed him and then they sent me to the gas chamber, it would be a good solution to the problem. I know I'd never get a chance to though and I don't have any intention of killing him or anyone else." - About serial killer Herbert Mullin.

"I've always loved science and math, and I'd also like to study French and German. After that, I hope, I can find a way to help other people. Maybe they can study me and find out what makes people like me do the things they do." - What he planned to do while in prison.

"You haven't asked the questions I expected a reporter to ask. Oh, what is it like to have sex with a dead body? What does it feel like to sit on your living room couch and look over and see two decapitated girls' heads on the arm of the couch? The first time, it makes you sick to your stomach. What do you think, now, when you see a pretty girl walking down the street? One side of me says, 'Wow, what an attractive chick. I'd like to talk to her, date her.' The other side of me says, 'I wonder how her head would look on a stick?'" - What he said in an interview with a magazine reporter.

"Could I have some matches? Yesterday, I had matches, but isn't it funny when you're convicted, you immediately become combustible." - What he said after being denied matches to light his cigarettes, in prison.

"If I went apeshit in here, you'd be in a lot of trouble, wouldn't you? I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard." - What he allegedly told criminologist Robert R. Ressler, during a prison interview.