Edmund Emil Kemper III was convicted in November 1973 of eight counts of first degree murder and is serving life at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. Ten people are attributed to him: his paternal grandparents when he was fifteen, six young women picked up on the roads around Santa Cruz over ten months, and his mother and one of her friends.
He was born in Burbank, California on December 18, 1948, to Clarnell Stage and Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. His parents' marriage was volatile and they separated when he was nine, divorcing four years later. He was tested at an IQ in the high 130s to 140s. The record of his childhood is unusually consistent on one point: he frightened the adults around him. He tortured and killed the family cats, staged rituals with his sisters' dolls, and told a teacher he had a crush on that to kiss her he would have to kill her first. In the family's new home in Helena, Montana his mother moved him to a locked basement room, on the stated grounds that she feared what he might do to his sisters. His size made it worse. He was conspicuously large before he was a teenager, and eventually stood six foot nine.
At his own request he was sent to live with his father in Los Angeles, and when that failed he was left with his father's parents on their ranch near Tollhouse, in the Sierra foothills. His teachers at Sierra Joint Union High School found him quiet and meek. He made average grades and caused no trouble. At the ranch it was tense but manageable. His grandmother Maude, a children's author, found him disconcerting and increasingly kept her husband's rifle in mind; his violent fantasies had begun to feature her.
On August 27, 1964 he sat with Maude at the kitchen table while she worked on proofs of a children's book. She noticed a stare she had seen before and told him to stop it. He took the rifle, whistled for the dog, said he was going out to shoot gophers, and shot her through the screen door. When his grandfather came back from the shops he shot him too, and said afterwards that he had done it so the old man would not have to find her. He telephoned his mother, who told him to call the police. Asked why, he said he had wanted to see what it felt like to kill his grandmother. He was fifteen.
He was committed to Atascadero State Hospital. He did well there in a way that mattered later: he worked in the psychology laboratory, became an assistant to one of the psychologists, and was given access to the tests administered to other patients. He learned what the instruments were looking for. On the strength of that performance he convinced the staff he was no longer dangerous.
In 1969 he was released into the custody of his mother, in Santa Cruz. Several of the doctors who had treated him opposed it, and the person he was released to was the one they had identified as the difficulty. At twenty-one his juvenile record was sealed, which removed the grandparents from any subsequent check. The California press later called him the Co-ed Killer, after the students he picked up.
He drove the roads around Santa Cruz picking up hitchhikers: by his own account a very large number over a long period, without incident. On May 7, 1972 he picked up two Fresno State students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, and killed them both. Aiko Koo, fifteen, followed on September 14. Cindy Schall was killed in January 1973, and Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu together on February 5. He shot or stabbed them, took the bodies to his mother's house or to motels, decapitated them, had sex with the remains and disposed of them in the hills. He kept heads.
Two details of that period are worth stating together. He was living with his mother, who worked at the university whose students were disappearing. And he drank in a bar used by the detectives working the case, who knew him as Big Ed.
Santa Cruz was carrying more than one series at the time. Herbert Mullin was killing in the same county in the same months, and John Linley Frazier had killed the Ohta family there in 1970. Police could not be certain which deaths belonged to which man. Kemper and Mullin were briefly held in adjoining cells, and Kemper complained that Mullin had been using his dumping grounds.
In the early hours of April 21, 1973 he killed his mother with a pick hammer while she slept, decapitated her, and put her larynx into the waste disposal, which returned it. He said afterwards that this seemed appropriate, given how many years she had screamed at him. He then telephoned her friend Sara Hallett, invited her over, and killed her.
He drove east for a day and a half, stopped in Pueblo, Colorado, and called Santa Cruz police from a phone booth to confess. He had to ring three times before anyone took him seriously. What he did then is the part investigators have always found notable: there was no direct evidence connecting him to the six hitchhikers, the confusion between three concurrent series was working in his favour, and he confessed to all of it anyway.
He was tried in October 1973, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and was found sane and guilty on eight counts. Asked what punishment he thought fitting, he said death by torture. California's death penalty had been struck down the previous year, so he was sentenced to life. He has waived or been denied parole repeatedly and has said he should never be released.
He talked at length to the FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas in the 1970s, and those interviews became foundational material for the Behavioral Science Unit's work on sexual homicide. He is unusually articulate about what he did, which is the reason he is quoted so often and the reason the quoting needs care: an account given by the man himself, however fluent, is not corroboration. At Vacaville he has spent years narrating audiobooks for the blind.