"I Am an American, and I Killed Americans": Edmund Kemper in "The Killing of America", 1981

Name: "I Am an American, and I Killed Americans": Edmund Kemper in "The Killing of America", 1981
Uploaded: 2018-03-05
Duration: 6 min 17 s
Description: Filmed in his prison cell for a 1981 documentary, Edmund Kemper talked about his mother, his first killings at 15, the severed heads he kept, and the two hitchhikers he says he let go.

Filmed in his prison cell for a 1981 documentary, Edmund Kemper talked about his mother, his first killings at 15, the severed heads he kept, and the two hitchhikers he says he let go.

Subject: Edmund Kemper
Recorded: about 1981
Runtime: 6:17

Content warning: A serial killer describes killing and dismembering young women, decapitation, sexual acts with the dead, and the murders of his grandparents and his mother.

The Interview

"The Killing of America" was a feature documentary about violence in the United States, directed by Sheldon Renan and written and produced by Leonard Schrader. It was released first in Japan in 1981. For the film, Schrader and Renan interviewed Edmund Kemper on camera in his prison cell, about eight years after his crimes. This six-minute excerpt from the film intercuts Kemper speaking with the film's narration. "I'm an American," he says at the start, "and I went off the deep end."

Historical Context

In August 1964, at the age of 15, Kemper shot dead his paternal grandparents, Maude and Edmund Kemper Sr., at their ranch near North Fork, California. He was committed to Atascadero State Hospital and released in 1969, against the hospital's advice, into the care of his mother, Clarnell Strandberg. Between May 1972 and February 1973 he picked up and killed six young women hitchhiking near Santa Cruz: Mary Ann Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cindy Schall, Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu. In April 1973 he killed his mother and her friend Sally Hallett at his mother's home in Aptos, near Santa Cruz, then drove east and gave himself up by telephone from Pueblo, Colorado. He was found sane and guilty of eight murders in November 1973 and sentenced to life in prison.

Circumstances of the Interview

Kemper was held at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville. Renan later recalled sitting across from Kemper in his cell while Schrader talked with him, and that during a break Kemper said to Schrader, "I killed you", leaving Schrader fearing for his life. No interviewer's question is heard in this excerpt.

What the Interview Covers

Kemper says he had wanted to kill his mother since he was eight, and describes violence that began with objects and small animals. He describes the killing of his grandparents and says that, had it happened in a city, he would have been "a mass murderer at age 15". He talks about being paroled to his mother, a disastrous first date, and the glasses he wore when picking up hitchhikers. He describes sitting with a severed head and telling himself it was not insane, recalls the killing of two women he had picked up together, and says he later let two hitchhikers go, a week before he killed his mother. He ends: "I am an American, and I killed Americans."

What Makes the Recording Significant

This is one of Kemper's earliest filmed interviews, made years before the HBO documentary "Murder: No Apparent Motive" (1984) and his later television appearances. The film was little seen in the United States until its 2016 Blu-ray release, so this footage reached most viewers through later reuse online.

Archival Importance

The interview shows how Kemper presented himself early in his imprisonment: articulate, self-analysing and focused on his mother. Many of the themes he returned to in later interviews and parole hearings already appear here.

Important Caveats

Kemper's accounts of his motives, his mother and his surrender are his own. The film's narration contains statements that do not match the record: it says he dismembered co-eds "for two years" (the killings ran from May 1972 to April 1973) and that he cut off his mother's hands, which is not confirmed by our research; its references to cannibalism rest on Kemper's own statements. Kemper's recollection that the first woman he killed was 19 and her roommate 18 is his; published accounts give both women's age as 18. The excerpt is an edit of the film's Kemper segment, not a complete interview.

Edmund Kemper: I'm an American, and I went off the deep end.

Narrator: Ed Kemper has been serving a life sentence in this California prison since 1973, when, at the age of 24, he murdered his mother, then called police and confessed to having dismembered college co-eds for two years, as well as cannibalizing and raping their headless bodies.

Edmund Kemper: When someone abandons himself to being a victim, he's going to have to be one.

Narrator: With an IQ of 136, Kemper is now the prison's best reader of books for the blind.

Edmund Kemper: I'm saying I've wanted to kill my mother since I was eight years old, and I'm not proud of that. It started with surrogates, at that non-human level. Physical objects, my possessions, other people's, destruction of things that are cared about, and then destruction of things that are living on a lower level: small animals, insects, animals, and then finally people.

Edmund Kemper: It started coming to a head again, so I went back down. I ran away back down there, and then a month later I'm up living with my grandparents in the mountains, and ten months later I murdered them. It made it worse to be on top of a mountain. I was literally on top of a mountain when it happened, and I could sense, I sensed everybody in the world just stopping what they were doing, turning around, saw what I did and are coming to get me. And I knew I was paranoid at that moment. I knew anybody that came up there and gave me a funny look or a fishy eye or a quizzical look, [unclear: "out of blowing" / "out of blown"] their brains out, thinking they were coming to get me.

Edmund Kemper: And if it had been in a city, I would have been a mass murderer at age 15. I would have killed until they gunned me down. I wouldn't have been able to reason my way out of it. I was scared to death, and I was violent. I felt my back hit that wall. I was the rabbit that always ran, that always backed away, always burned his bridges. Suddenly there weren't any more, and my back hit that wall, and I came out screaming and kicking and shooting.

Narrator: He was released to the one person that authorities at the state mental hospital recommended he never see again.

Edmund Kemper: I got paroled to my mother. Atascadero decided that I didn't ever need to talk to her again at all. "Don't give her a Christmas present. Leave her alone. She got her pound of flesh out of you." I wasn't sniveling about my mother to them. I didn't like to hear what they had to say about her. She went through three husbands like a hot knife through butter.

Edmund Kemper: Four months after I was out, I was back into the fantasy bag. My first date was an absolute disaster. It wasn't her fault, you know, and I didn't blame her even then. I'm saying it was a terrible tragedy. But boy, was it, boy, she didn't ever talk to me again. It was awful. Wasn't sexual or grabbing at her or nothing. I was just such a dork, taking her to a John Wayne movie and Denny's. It's terrible. I'd never been on a date. At 16, that was cool, you know? I'd never been on a date, you know? I was locked up since I was 15. But I can't tell her that. "Oh, gee, don't mind me." You know, she kind of got hung up on my looks or whatever, you know. I mean, she's a gorgeous young lady, pure class, and she saw something there that I guess wasn't there. And boy, she found out quick.

Narrator: Taking elaborate precautions, he drove around universities and picked up hitchhiking co-eds while wearing these glasses.

Edmund Kemper: Yeah. These are the ones. Now, would you get in the car with this man, huh? [pause] Mm-hmm. [unclear: "The state" / "State"] has made me much more credible as a human being.

Narrator: While his mother worked at the university, Kemper buried the mutilated bodies in the mountains and took the severed heads home. Then he slept with their heads for days, and finally went looking for more.

Edmund Kemper: But I was losing a grasp on something that was too violent to keep inside forever. As I'm sitting there with a severed head in my hand, talking to it, or looking at it, and I'm about to go crazy, literally. I'm about to go completely flywheel loose and just fall apart. I say, "Wow, this is insane." And then I told myself, "No, it isn't. You're saying that, and that makes it not insane." I said, "I'm sane, and I'm looking at a [unclear: "separate" / "server"]." I said, "Well, wait a minute, wait a minute." [unclear: "I see old paintings" / "that's the only paints of paintings"] and drawings of Viking heroes talking to severed heads and [unclear: "taking them to parties" / "taking over the parties"], old enemies, in leather bags. Part of our heritage.

Edmund Kemper: This is me back then, in 1972 and '73, unable to live with the fact that I just stabbed to death and cut the throat of an innocent young woman. Innocent in the sense that she did not plan on that happening. She didn't do anything specifically for that to happen to her, yet she was a very active participant in her own death, and in my memory of that. She was 19 years old, and her roommate in the trunk, who died right after that, was 18.

Edmund Kemper: [unclear: "I didn't go hog-wild and totally limp" / "letting go hog-wild and totally live"]. What I'm saying is I found myself doing things in an attempt to make things fit together inside. I was doing sexual probings and things. I mean, in the sense of striking out and reaching out and grabbing and pulling to me, but appalled at the sense that it wasn't working. That isn't the way it's supposed to be. It isn't the way I want it, is what I'm saying. And yet, during that time, I become engaged to someone who's young and is beautiful, and very much the same advantages and very much the same upbringing and Disneyland values, and she's very much the reason I surrendered.

Edmund Kemper: I picked up two girls who were so much like the first two it was unbelievable. Almost identical circumstances, and I let them go. Everything went towards killing them, and I [unclear: "didn't" / "did"], but I'm saying, wow, it's uncanny. It was almost like it was meant to be that way, and I said, "Wow, I've got, this has got to stop," and I let them out. They never even knew what was going on. I let them out. I would have gotten away with those two being murdered. I said, "No, it's got to stop." And a week later I murdered my mother. I went back to Santa Cruz and killed her.

Narrator: He killed her with a hammer in her sleep, cut off her head and hands, but then put her vocal cords in the garbage disposal, and threw darts at her severed head.

Edmund Kemper: I am an American, and I killed Americans. I am a human being, and I killed human beings. And I did it in my society. ---