The decisive moment in Edmund Kemper's case is not a murder. It is a release. In 1969, after five years at Atascadero State Hospital for shooting his grandparents dead at fifteen, he was discharged as no longer dangerous. He had spent much of that confinement working inside the hospital's psychology laboratory, first as a patient assistant, then with access to the tests being administered to other men. He learned what the instruments were looking for, and he gave it to them. Several of the doctors who had treated him opposed the release. He was let out anyway, into the custody of his mother, the person those same doctors had identified as the center of the problem. At twenty-one his juvenile record was sealed. From that point forward no routine background check anywhere in California would show that he had killed two people.
He was convicted on November 8, 1973 of eight counts of first degree murder and is serving eight concurrent life terms at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where he has now been held for more than fifty years. Ten deaths are attributed to him: his paternal grandparents in 1964, six young women taken off the roads and campus paths around Santa Cruz over ten months, and his mother and one of her closest friends.
He was born in Burbank on December 18, 1948, the middle child of Clarnell Stage and Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. The marriage was violent and the couple separated when he was nine, divorcing four years later. He tested somewhere in the high 130s to 140s for IQ, and by every account was bright, articulate and socially hopeless. The childhood record agrees on one thing above all: he frightened the adults around him. He killed the family cats. He conducted burial and execution rituals with his sisters' dolls. He told a teacher he had a crush on that in order to kiss her he would first have to kill her. In the family's house in Helena, Montana, his mother moved him into a locked basement room and said plainly that it was because of what she thought he might do to his sisters. He was conspicuously large before he was a teenager and finished at six foot nine.
At his own request he was sent to live with his father in Los Angeles. When that arrangement failed he was handed on again, to his father's parents on their ranch near Tollhouse in the Sierra foothills. At Sierra Joint Union High School he was quiet and unremarkable, made average grades and caused nobody any trouble. On the ranch it was tense. His grandmother, Maude Matilda Hughey Kemper, was a published children's author who found him disconcerting and had begun to keep track of where her husband's rifle was. His fantasies had started to include her.
On August 27, 1964 he was sitting at the kitchen table while she worked on proofs. She caught a stare she had seen before and told him to stop it. He picked up the rifle, whistled for the dog and said he was going out after gophers, then shot her through the screen door, once in the head and twice in the back, and stabbed her. When his grandfather, Edmund Emil Kemper Sr., came back from the shops he shot him in the driveway, and said afterward that he had done it so the old man would not have to walk in and find her. He telephoned his mother, who told him to call the police. He did, and waited. Asked why, he said he had wanted to see what it felt like to kill his grandmother. He was fifteen. He was diagnosed and committed, and the matter never became a murder charge.
He came out in 1969 and went back to living with his mother, by then Clarnell Strandberg and working as an administrative assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He applied to become a state trooper and was turned down for his size. He worked laboring jobs and eventually for the state highway department, and he drove. By his own account he picked up an enormous number of hitchhikers over a long period without harming any of them, which is either restraint or rehearsal and he was never able to say which.
On May 7, 1972 he picked up Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, both eighteen, Fresno State students hitchhiking to Stanford. He drove away from where they were going. He killed them both, took their bodies to his apartment, and dismembered them. Driving home he was stopped by a police officer for a broken taillight, and the officer did not look in the car. Anita Luchessa's remains have never been recovered.
Aiko Koo was fifteen, a dancer, and had missed her bus to a class when he stopped for her on September 14, 1972. After he killed her he drove to the Jury Room, a bar in Santa Cruz used by the detectives working the case, and had a drink with them before going home to the body in his trunk. They knew him there. They called him Big Ed.
Cindy Schall was a student at Cabrillo College. He shot her in the car on January 8, 1973, took her back to his mother's house in Aptos, dismembered her in the bathtub, and threw most of her into the sea off the cliffs, where she was recovered over the following weeks. He buried her head in the garden, beneath his mother's bedroom window, facing the house. He offered this later as a joke about his mother always wanting people to look up to her.
By February 1973 Santa Cruz students had been warned not to accept rides except from cars carrying a university sticker. Kemper got a university sticker, because his mother worked at the university. On February 5, after a row with her, he drove onto the UCSC campus and picked up Rosalind Thorpe, twenty-three, as she came out of a lecture. She took him for another student and talked to him amiably while he drove. He then picked up Alice Liu. He killed them both, took them to the house, and took them apart there.
Two facts belong side by side. He was living with a woman who worked at the university whose students were disappearing. And the officers hunting him drank with him and liked him.
Santa Cruz County was carrying three separate murder series at the same moment. Herbert Mullin was killing in the same county in the same months. John Linley Frazier had murdered the Ohta family there in 1970. Investigators could not always be certain which deaths belonged to which man, and that confusion was working steadily in Kemper's favor. He and Mullin were later held in adjoining cells, and Kemper complained that Mullin had been dumping bodies in his places.
In the early hours of April 21, 1973 he killed his mother with a pick hammer while she slept, decapitated her, and forced her larynx into the waste disposal, which pushed it back out at him. He said this seemed appropriate, given the number of years she had screamed at him. He then telephoned her friend Sally Hallett, fifty-nine, invited her to the house, and killed her when she arrived.
Then he drove east. He got as far as Pueblo, Colorado, a day and a half away, sat in a phone booth, and called the Santa Cruz police to confess. He had to ring three times before anyone would take him seriously. What investigators have always found remarkable is what he had to gain by staying quiet: there was no direct physical evidence tying him to the six women, and three overlapping series were muddying every attribution in the county. He told them all of it anyway, and then spent days taking them to places where the rest could be found.
He was tried in October 1973 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Court-appointed psychiatrists testified, his recorded confession was played, and on November 8 the jury found him legally sane and guilty on all eight adult counts: Pesce, Luchessa, Koo, Schall, Thorpe, Liu, Strandberg and Hallett. Asked what he thought a fitting punishment would be, he said death by torture. California's death penalty had been struck down the previous year, so it was life.
In prison he became, by the standards of the institution, a model inmate. He coordinated the audiobook program at Vacaville and spent years reading books onto tape for blind listeners, thousands of hours of them. He talked at length in the 1970s to Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI, and those conversations became foundational material for the Behavioral Science Unit's work on sexual homicide. He is unusually fluent about what he did and why, which is precisely why he is quoted so heavily and precisely why the quoting needs care. A clear, calm, self-aware account delivered by the man who did it is still only his account. A great deal of what the public believes it knows about Edmund Kemper is simply Edmund Kemper talking.
The parole record has become a document in its own right. He has come up for suitability review repeatedly since 1979 and been refused every time, sometimes after waiving the hearing himself on the grounds that he was not fit to be released. On July 9, 2024 he was denied again, and Rosell's office said afterward that fifty years on he still showed no remorse; accounts differ on whether that was the twelfth or the fourteenth time he has qualified. He did not attend. His court-appointed attorney, Nicholas Ageo, told the board he had met his client exactly once and that Kemper had refused to speak to him since; Ageo's application to postpone was refused and the hearing went ahead without either of them able to say much.
The April 2024 psychiatric evaluation rated him a high risk to reoffend and recorded diagnoses of antisocial, narcissistic and schizotypal personality disorders. In it he described a childhood of being struck in the face by his father and whipped with a belt by his mother, and alleged sexual abuse by an older sister and a cousin. He again acknowledged the necrophilia. He is seventy-seven, diabetic, has lost a toe, has had a stroke, wears a pacemaker for coronary artery disease and uses a wheelchair. The board cited an incident from 2022 in which he grabbed a staff member while being lifted into it.
Two people at that hearing said things worth preserving. Patricia Kemper, his cousin and the niece of the mother he killed, attended in order to speak for the victims, which is a particular kind of burden to carry for fifty years. And Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell, appearing by video, argued that Kemper had gone essentially untreated the entire time, and read the empty chair for exactly what it was: he is blowing this off because he does not care, Rosell said, he does not respect it.
His next hearing is scheduled for July 2031, when he will be eighty-two. He has said for decades that he should never be let out, and on the available evidence he is the only participant in the process who has never wavered on the point.