"The Wreckage I Have Behind Me": Edmund Kemper's 1991 Prison Interview, Extended Footage

Name: "The Wreckage I Have Behind Me": Edmund Kemper's 1991 Prison Interview, Extended Footage
Uploaded: 2016-07-09T00:00:00Z
Duration: 1 h 20 min 30 s
Description: In 80 minutes of footage from a 1991 prison interview, Edmund Kemper talked about his childhood, his mother, his fantasies, his grandparents' murders, prison life, the experts who study killers and Herbert Mullin.

In 80 minutes of footage from a 1991 prison interview, Edmund Kemper talked about his childhood, his mother, his fantasies, his grandparents' murders, prison life, the experts who study killers and Herbert Mullin.

Subject: Edmund Kemper
Recorded: about 1991
Runtime: 1:20:30

Content warning: Kemper talks about his murders in general terms, his childhood fantasies of killing and of "possessing the severed heads of women", a staged guillotine act, his suicide attempt, beatings he says he received as a child, and Herbert Mullin's shootings ("they gurgled"). The case background includes murder, decapitation and necrophilia.

The Interview

This upload preserves about eighty minutes of a filmed 1991 prison interview with Edmund Kemper. In footage that appears to be largely unedited camera tape from a single session, Kemper sits facing the camera and answers an off-camera interviewer, attributed by the uploader to the French author Stéphane Bourgoin. After a short opening with music, the footage joins Kemper already in conversation about the experts who study serial killers; a few minutes in he asks whether the interview has started, notes that "the tape is rolling", and the formal questions begin. From there he talks almost without interruption about his sentence, a suicide attempt in jail, his childhood in California and Montana, his mother, his fantasies, the murder of his grandmother, life in prison, Herbert Mullin and his father. The upload ends in the middle of a thought.

Historical Context

Kemper killed his paternal grandparents, Edmund and Maude Kemper, at their ranch in North Fork, California, in August 1964, when he was 15, and was committed to Atascadero State Hospital. Released in 1969, he killed six young women in the Santa Cruz area between May 1972 and February 1973: Mary Ann Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cynthia Schall, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. In April 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett, then drove to Colorado and called the police to confess. On November 8, 1973, a jury found him sane and guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder; he was sentenced to concurrent terms of seven years to life. He has been held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville and has been denied parole repeatedly.

Circumstances of the Interview

The interview is attributed to Stéphane Bourgoin, a French author who filmed conversations with American serial killers, and was recorded in 1991, when Kemper was 42 and had been in prison, by his own count, for 18 years. The footage appears to be the camera's raw tape rather than a finished programme: it includes small talk before the interview starts, Kemper's remark that he is "driving your sound lady crazy" with his coughing, and the interviewer's offer to let him redo answers. In 2020 and 2021 Bourgoin admitted that he had invented parts of his own life story; those admissions concern his biography, and no source suggests the recording is anything other than genuine footage of Kemper, who appears on camera throughout.

What the Interview Covers

Kemper says he would be expected to argue against the death penalty, and that an early execution would have left the experts with "absolutely no input". He describes slashing his wrist with a sharpened pen in the Redwood City jail, which he places in the middle of his trial, and a hospital session after which, he says, a drug left him seeing his crimes as "pure horror". He traces his childhood: his parents' divorce, a mother he says drank and beat him, being sent to sleep in a windowless Montana basement at eight, games with his younger sister in which they played at gas chamber executions, and cutting the hands off her doll. He says he ran away to his father at 14 because he was "fantasizing murder all day long", and describes being left with his grandparents, the tension that built up there, and fantasies that included decapitation.

What Makes the Recording Significant

The footage gives Kemper's own extended account of his childhood and the development of his fantasies, in his own order and at length, rather than in the short clips in which he is usually seen. It shows how he presented himself in 1991: articulate, self-analytical, critical of the professionals who study offenders, and keen to describe himself as a model prisoner.

Archival Importance

Among the best-known filmed interviews with Kemper are the 1981 segment for *The Killing of America*, the 1984 documentary *Murder: No Apparent Motive*, and this 1991 session. This upload preserves over an hour of the 1991 session, including the Herbert Mullin passage that circulates separately as a short excerpt. Kemper remains in prison in California.

Important Caveats

Everything Kemper says about his childhood, his mother, his family and his feelings is his own account; his mother cannot answer it, and he says himself that "it's not fair to talk about a dead person that way". His claims about prison programmes, awards, the Jaycees, the hospital drug session, his father's wartime unit and Herbert Mullin are not independently confirmed. He places his wrist-slashing in the middle of his trial; Wikipedia says his two suicide attempts in custody came before the trial, which began on October 23, 1973. The interviewer's suggestion that Kemper was 14 when he went to his grandparents is the interviewer's; Kemper was 15 when he killed them. The interviewer's identity rests on the uploader's attribution. The upload is an unofficial copy of what appears to be raw footage, it ends mid-sentence, and another upload is said to contain footage not included here.

No English Speech: [Music and a few indistinct words, apparently in French, over the opening; not transcribed. English speech begins at 02:14.]

Edmund Kemper: Hi. I, I guess I didn't even ask him that, [unclear: "he just proffered the information" / "as properly information"], that he wouldn't hesitate a second to pull the lever on any serial killer, right? And I'm thinking, and gee, he just killed me, you know? If you stop and think about it, if I were to, uh, if I were to have been, uh, executed in a timely fashion, they would have had absolutely no input, and they'd be scratching their heads about what makes a serial murderer tick. Other than the experts all jumping up to give their opinions, which they've been doing for a lot of years, and unfortunately they don't hit too well. They don't have too good of a track record.

Edmund Kemper: I'm not sure whose name. We need to put one specific name down here. Who should be, uh, [unclear: "you feel me" / a name]?

Interviewer: [unclear: "Would include" / "That would include"] serial killer, obviously.

Edmund Kemper: Yeah, but obviously very few of them could, if there was only 35 serial killers.

Interviewer: No, now they're talking about close to 100.

Edmund Kemper: Uh, right now. I was saying that ten years ago.

Interviewer: That's, uh, that wasn't done, but you also have, you also have to include...

Edmund Kemper: No, no, I'm saying, and his cohorts. They were saying, as a unit, the BSU was saying. And, uh, having come from that genre, and, uh, having been locked up and through the dregs, and knowing some of those characters, and watching how easy it was for me to stumble into what I did. Uh, I didn't go into it pre-planned or anything, but, uh, I couldn't believe that that was a unique act, you know, that no one else could find that out. And that's just one avenue into it.

Edmund Kemper: Because, you know, while a lot of people can stereotype the type of, uh, criminal that a serial killer would be, society has to loosen up its belt a bit and admit that jailers, like at the, uh, Tucker Farm down in Arkansas, who get tired of recalcitrant troublemaker inmates, take them out back and kill them and bury them, are serial killers. Different motive. But, uh, so, you know, it's a wide range of activities that get included in something like that. They've had that a hundred years ago in the Old West, where someone would set up a boarding house and people who came by never left, you know, whole families, individual travelers. Would go on for years before they'd get discovered. But, uh, it's things I've read about.

Interviewer: Yeah. And you had H. H. Holmes also, in the 1890s, and stuff.

Edmund Kemper: Yeah. Poisoners, people like that.

Edmund Kemper: Um, are we starting our interview, or...?

Interviewer: No.

Edmund Kemper: [unclear: "Would say" / "They'd say"], "Oh, yes, I'm doing my time and I'm miserable," and they say, "Good." You know, that's not what it's about.

Edmund Kemper: Uh-oh, we're getting serious now. I can tell. The tape is rolling.

Interviewer: Could you tell us how long you've been in prison?

Edmund Kemper: Excuse me. Uh, this month is 18 years that I've actually been in prison.

Interviewer: What were you convicted of?

Edmund Kemper: Eight counts of first-degree murder.

Interviewer: And what was your sentence?

Edmund Kemper: Seven years to life, um, CC, that's called concurrent. It means all the sentences run at the same time.

Interviewer: That means they run consecutively?

Edmund Kemper: Oh, no. That's the opposite of consecutive. Consecutive would be one at a time, and of course you can't serve multiple life sentences. But, uh, there was some question before my case, uh, [unclear: "whether"] on the legality of that. So when my case went through, uh, the judge sentenced me to one term of seven to life, which at that time was the, uh, was the maximum non-death penalty, and, uh, all to run concurrent, at the same time.

Interviewer: In considering your crimes, uh, and crimes done by other serial killers, what do you think, uh, society should do in general with serial killers?

Edmund Kemper: Do with them?

Interviewer: Yes.

Edmund Kemper: Uh, it's a difficult question to answer from my point of view, because I'm obviously an involved subject. So it would, any answer I would give that would be other than the death penalty would sound very, uh, self-serving. I look at people who on the surface don't have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. They don't do anything or say anything or behave in any way that would make your average person want to save their life, want to keep them alive and feed them and house them and clothe them for decades. But when I first came to prison, I had much the same attitude. Um, it was a very defensive attitude, a very self-preservative attitude, because those, those immediately about me were very much set on destructive attitudes toward me. So I put up screens, so to speak, to screen out those feelings, um, excuse me, and those reactions to me.

Edmund Kemper: I'm driving your sound lady crazy here.

Interviewer: Also, when you feel you need to redo an answer, you can do it, you know, it's [no] problem.

Edmund Kemper: I don't have any problem with that now. I understand, yeah, the problems involved. I had to do a whole interview over once because the lady wouldn't check her audio tape recorder. I kept saying, "You better check it and make sure it works first." "Oh, I'm sure it works. It works." Two hours later, we're doing it all over again. She was ready to cry, I'm telling you.

Edmund Kemper: I guess I could have, but that was the [unclear: "where I thought" / "way I know"] the pen was mightier than the sword, right? The only interview I did back, back at the time of my case, this is just a little anecdote for you here, but, uh, I went through the whole investigation, the whole trial, no interviews with the media, right? And then this one woman who had treated me pretty fairly in the media, she was in this, uh, [unclear: "drove or driven toward"], uh, beating me with the newspapers, um, she tried to do a more in-depth piece around it. And so I did an interview with her before I went to prison. It was the day I was sentenced, and I was waiting for the bus, or the, the car to prison here. And, uh, actually, wait a minute, excuse me, that was the, that was where I gave her the interview. Okay.

Edmund Kemper: I talked to her just briefly. She came, she was hovering around. I was at the, the, the jury room, the courthouse, talking to my lawyer. He hadn't shown up yet. She was up there talking to the officer that was with me, and we all just had a [unclear: "look"]. I said, "My officer, or my lawyer, does not want me talking to the media at all." So quick, I see him coming way down the hall. I said, "Let's set up a little scenario and act like I'm giving this really incriminating interview that screws everything up," right? And she kind of laughed because it was breaking the, the tension in, in the room, you know. So we set up this little scenario, and she's busily acting like she's writing, and I'm talking about all of this harebrained stuff that relates to the case and feelings. And he just, he just starts turning bright red as he gets within hearing range. He's like a big clown, got this huge forehead, had hair standing out all over. And now he turns bright red, and he's [unclear: "madder than a wet hen" / "mattered in a wet hand"], and he stomps into the room and slams his briefcase on the desk. And, and, uh, we all start laughing, and he gets really mad. "What are you laughing about?" I said, "This is a setup just for you. I'm not doing any interviews."

Edmund Kemper: But later on I gave her an interview, because, uh, she'd treated me so fairly up to that point, and, uh, and also had, uh, she gave me a pen that day. It was a cast aluminum, uh, ballpoint pen. And I took it back to my high-security jail cell up in Redwood City. I was really slammed down tight. I'm in a two-man cell by myself. They have a camera on me 24 hours a day, a monitor, videotape monitor. Lights are on, it's, uh, two sets of these four-footers here, and it's as bright as day, all day long, all night long, you know, 24 hours a day. And I was there for five months. And, uh, I brought this pen back in. I smuggled it in with me. And I get strip-shook leaving the cell, I get strip-shook coming back in. And I brought this pen in and it got in with my legal papers.

Edmund Kemper: And a few months later, in the middle of the trial, I smashed the pen on the floor with my boot, sharpened it, got a sharp edge on the, on the metal, and slashed my wrist, and was bleeding all over the place. And, uh, it was very messy and very exciting, and everybody was dragging me off to the hospital, get sewed up and all of that. And I got maced, shot up with an industrial-strength bottle of Mace. They had about a quart of it, and they just gassed me with that whole thing, and, uh, dragged me off to the hospital. And I made a quippy comment. I don't think the police translated it properly for the media, because they missed it. They love, you know how they love to get into puns on, on broadcast television. They love these little verbal puns and plays with words. And the pen is mightier than the sword: I turned the pen into a sword and, and cut myself. Both times I attempted suicide, I did it with a pen, or parts of a pen. And I thought that was kind of, uh, interesting, but, uh, the media never picked up on that. They were too busy being serious.

Edmund Kemper: At any rate, um, [unclear: "at what point" / "at one point"], once in my life, I could see every aspect of my life, my crimes, um, who I was, how I really felt about things, without any defensive or protective accoutrements. [It] was all gone. And, uh, it was fascinating to me. I was, uh, semi-conscious. Uh, actually, I was conscious. I just, you know, couldn't get up and move around a lot. And, uh, at the end of the two hours, I didn't want to stop. I wanted to keep on with this. I hadn't gotten to the crimes themselves, the current set of crimes, but, uh, I was kind of oriented around other things related to my life. And I asked to continue on. The doctor didn't want to, so I insisted. So they were using an IV, and they shot me up with another two-hour batch of this stuff. And, and, uh, as soon as he was done with what he wanted to do, uh, he got up and left. He had an appointment. It had gone longer than he planned on it. He had to leave. My lawyer had to go.

Edmund Kemper: So I'm stuck with these two deputies and, and a, uh, a registered nurse, watching me until I come down off of this stuff. Well, when the doctor left, he decided to give me a shot of medicine to snap me out of this, is the way he put it. And I asked him what it was, and he said it was [unclear: "Methedrine" / "methadone"], hospital-grade [unclear: "Methedrine" / "methadone"], speed. And I've asked doctors since then, both medical doctors and psychiatrists, if that was an appropriate action, and they said, "Absolutely not. They should have let me sleep it off. Just let it course through my body and let it go away." By amplifying with the [unclear: "Methedrine" / "methadone"], it is suggested that the doctor knew full well it would put me through hell. It amplified everything I was feeling. It got me really [unclear: "drove"], and for two days after that they were trying to scrape me off the ceiling. They couldn't even talk to me. I was raving, I was ranting.

Edmund Kemper: I was, they had to put me in a strip cell. I wouldn't go back to my regular cell. I refused, because there was television available there. I had a canteen, I had some food items in my house. I wouldn't accept it. And I went to a strip cell two cells down, where all I had was a mattress over a hole in the floor. And, uh, I was just on and on, 24 hours a day. The, uh, convicts and the criminals in the back that were locked up with me, they were in the tank. I mean, we were talking very casually about different things, had fairly good relationships, and I put them all on what we call Front Street. I exposed all of them to all of the negative sides of our relationships, and called them all kinds of, uh, cowards and punks and this and that and the other because they were even talking to me. And that was when I made the statement that I should be hung upside down on the bars and beaten daily, right, for what I did. Because under the influence of those drugs, I was seeing what I did through other people's eyes, not through mine. I won't say through other specific persons' eyes, but as someone else would view it: pure horror. Someone that had nothing to do with violence in their life, um, would see it. I was completely unprotected, and it was an awful experience.

Edmund Kemper: And within, uh, hours of coming down off of that stuff, uh, two days later, um, you know, I wasn't making comments like that. The defenses were back in place. They were a bit ruffled. Uh, it had been an, um, an eye-opening experience, 'cause it gave me something I'll never forget, you know: some perspectives on my case that I'll never forget, some anxieties on my case I'll never forget. And all I can give you to gauge it by is that when I went into that hospital, the nurse came out, and she was the typical battleaxe professional nurse, been on the job 20 years, great woman, with the wheelchair, severe, stern face, and she's looking at me with razor blades. She could just dice me up in a second without thinking about it. She's really having fits, you know. I'm in the chair, she wheels me inside.

Edmund Kemper: Five hours later, when I come out of there, you know, she's wheeling me out, and as I'm getting into the car, I got this tortured look on my face. I've been crying, I've been tearing at myself. And she looks at me with this very compassionate look, and she says, "Good luck." 'Cause she got a good look at what was really inside. That she couldn't, she, she was already aware of the evil I was capable of, and the, and the horror that had happened in the case. And now she saw a lot of my real feelings, and her knowledge of chemicals and medicine and treatments and all of that, she knew I wasn't faking. And from her, I got a "good luck", you know, and she was serious. Never seen her since.

Edmund Kemper: But then, the, the, ironically, the deputies that were stuck with me that day, trying to wait out this, this fit I was having, this rage, um, because they hadn't anticipated that. But they just tried to figure, well, "We, we, he's so outraged right now, he's so [unclear: "drove"], uh, let's just keep him here until he calms down a bit, then we'll take him back to jail." But I didn't calm down. It just kept going on and on and on and on. And, uh, at one point I asked the deputies to handcuff me to the rails of the bed, because I was afraid I would rip my eyes out. I was really acting up. And, uh, he was, he had known me well enough for a few months, he didn't want to do that. He says, "Oh, come on, Ed." That's, [he'd] call me by my first name. He says, "That's not really necessary, is it?" And I said, "Man, you better put them on, or I'm going to tear that goddamn gun belt off of you and blast you. I might beat you to death with it."

Edmund Kemper: So he comes over with the cuffs. He's a little offended by that. So he comes over with the cuffs, he starts to put them on my wrist, and I just went through some kind of incredible convulsion. I just yanked him clear across the bed, you know, 'cause I was in and out and yanking like this. And he had the other hand cuffed already. He's putting a cuff on here, and I just, when I yanked him across the bed, zing, off he goes. He's hanging on to this handcuff. And at that point, he cuffed me up real quick, finished. I already had leg irons down at the foot of the bed. And I just was yanking those rails up and down with my wrists, and that's very painful with handcuffs on, you know, these stainless steel rails. I was just up and down and up and down, yanking them and trying to pull them in. And we went like that for a few hours, and finally they said, "We got to get him back to jail. He's not going to change in the near future."

Interviewer: In general, people see serial killers as one category, but there are actually seven different types of serial killers. Would you care...

Edmund Kemper: Several, or seven?

Interviewer: No, several. Several types. Would you care to explain to us what types of different serial killers?

Edmund Kemper: I, to be honest with you, I couldn't really tell you, uh, um, because the categorization process, as you know, is back east, uh, with the Behavioral Sciences Unit. Uh, when I was locked up originally, they called it mass murderer. Anybody who killed more than two or three people was a mass murderer, and whether it was all at one place or over an extended period of time. And then, uh, in the early 80s, they came up with this differentiation called serial killing, which was living two lives, basically. Um, if one orients to the negative side of that living, he would say, um, this person was living a cover life that was wrapped around doing those crimes. And which couldn't be very realistic. Someone doesn't live their life to murder people. Their life was not set for that from birth.

Edmund Kemper: Um, from my point of view, what I saw was there was a great hole in my life. There was a lot missing from my life, and it didn't necessarily mean feelings. It meant I had walled off this, this emptiness of my life. Okay? I had, uh, an upbringing that was, uh, some have called, um, dysfunctional. Okay? Parents divorced when I was young. My mother started drinking heavily. Uh, she was working to raise three kids. We were not being cooperative about it. Um, she drank more. She punished us harder, uh, probably out of desperation. Uh, so character sets were being developed at that point. Rather than me going to Boy Scouts and getting achievement badges, I was not going to Boy Scouts and not getting achievement badges. I was finding devious ways to get around the rules of the home. Because the whole home life, just, I watched it deteriorate from what typical kids on the block were doing to coming home from school that I didn't like anyway.

Edmund Kemper: Um, and ironically, I have a high IQ. I didn't know that till I was locked up the first time for murder. I always thought I was a little missing up here, a little short, uh, because I was always called stupid, called slow. "Don't you think when you do things?" That was the problem. I wasn't thinking when I did things. I just did by rote, I did by memory, I did by example. And I had absolutely no faith in myself at all. I had no interaction going on in my own mind. I was not a thinker. I was not an individual. I had a teacher in the ninth grade who changed all that. He made me think. He would not tolerate my not thinking. He was an art teacher. And it was a devastating experience for me, because there were gears in my head that were just rusty, and they were barely moving, or not at all. And that's when I found out that's what the state of my mind's functioning was. I didn't think.

Edmund Kemper: To the point of, he points at a stapler on his desk and says, "What does that say?" And I looked at it, I said, "Silver Line." He says, "Look again." And he's, he's raving at me. And I look, and it said "Swingline". All I had to do was look at it and read it, but I glanced at it and threw it back at him out of panic. So he made me think, and he gave me puzzles to work out in school, in my class, where I had to resolve these to continue on with the class. I had to think. I had to use abstracts. And after that started, that became fascinating to me. So I got more and more involved in thinking, and about my surroundings and things like that. But by then I was locked up.

Interviewer: But what was your relationship with your sister?

Edmund Kemper: Which one? I have two.

Interviewer: Yes, the one you, you was playing strange games of death with her, with one of your sister.

Edmund Kemper: My younger sister. Yeah. My older sister was five years older than me, so she was off with her friends, and in a distant relationship. My younger sister's two years younger, and I developed some morbid games. Um, my life had started going that way at about eight. Uh, we lived in a house where there was a basement. Uh, some people think there was a trapdoor on that basement. That's not so; that was a different house. It was a walk-in basement, but it was in Montana. It was a full basement, had granite walls, uh, hewn wood floorboards, and it looked like some old dungeon out of a castle or something. I was eight years old, seven and a half, eight years old, and then I was very susceptible. My imagination was very [unclear: "livid" / "vivid"].

Edmund Kemper: And there was an old furnace in the basement that had been converted from burning coal to burning, and coal and wood, to burning gas. And that was, it had a central heating system with, uh, uh, your typical radiators. And if you've ever lived in a home like that, you know: the banging, the clang, the pop, the, the rattles, the weird sounds in the night that can be spooky to a kid. Well, at a certain time of the evening, the family left the center room, the, the living room of the house. My mother and my sisters, or my sisters themselves, would go up to bed upstairs. Where I used to go to bed upstairs, I had to go down to the basement. And an eight-year-old child had a tough time differentiating the reason in that. Why am I going to the basement? I'm going to hell. They're going to heaven. Uh, Earth is the living room. I'm going down to deal with demons and monsters and ghosts and all the things that scare me. They don't have to. There's a house with three women and one male, one boy, me. And, uh, I got a little defensive. I'm saying, "Gee, this is kind of ganging up."

Edmund Kemper: My older sister had had a [unclear: "basement" / "baby basement"] bedroom, okay, and it was a storage room that was, uh, about 18 feet wide and 35 feet long. Okay? It was a concrete room, no windows. And it had a light bulb over a big industrial iron sink, you know, like a laundry sink, and had a pull string on the light. The bed was in the opposite corner of the room. [It] was a double bed, a single bed. And, um, I had a dresser halfway.

Edmund Kemper: I had a couple of carpets thrown on the floor, old carpets, and there's a lot of storage stuff along the wall. And, uh, I was there about six months in that room. And I developed some very, very, uh, particular and articulate, um, rituals that I felt I had to go through to protect myself. I was, again, it's embarrassing, I was a youngster. And if you can imagine me going down a staircase of rough-hewn wood, there's no guardrail, so one step wrong and you're off into this black pit. I turn on the light. It's a little circular light switch, and a single naked bulb goes on down at the bottom of these stairs. Okay? So I turn that light on. I open the door. I close the door, 'cause my mother complains of the cold coming in from the basement. I go down the stairs. I get to the bottom. I do a 180-degree turn, and I walk the full length of the house on this floor, with these pipes rattling and wheezing and banging over my head. It's pitch black ahead of me, and the only light is behind me, hanging down from the ceiling.

Edmund Kemper: I'm now cut off from the house, cut off from them. I walk this full length into the darkness, from this gradient of light into complete darkness, groping around in the dark. I, I do about a 45-degree angle when I get to the end, and I pull the string and [it] lights up this end. And then I'm supposed to walk all the way back to the other end, turn that light off, and now walk toward the light from the dark. And I've got this horrible terror going on inside of me. And this is every night. This is every day, 'cause it's pitch black down there. No windows. Um, she didn't intend all of this. And when I sniveled about it, when I complained and I cried about it, I got smacked in the head. You know, "What's the matter with you? Quit being such a wimp." And she, you know, she was trying to solve a problem. She had, uh, not enough room upstairs to where I didn't have to share a bedroom with a sister. I'm eight years old. I need to go to the basement.

Interviewer: And what were the, those morbid games that you played with your sister?

Edmund Kemper: Okay. Well, the one I remember, uh, someone talking about in a, in a book was one, it was playing gas chamber, or electric chair, or something. And we had this big old overstuffed chair up in my room. And we, we'd, uh, it was not just my sister and I, it was my sister and I and a friend, close friend. We got into all these games. We got into one game where we'd roll up in a rug, and a person would try to get out of it. It's just like a large throw rug. And it was, uh, I guess what fascinated us individually about it is it was a completely, uh, it broke up the monotony, I guess, of what we were doing. Didn't have a lot of toys to play with. Uh, we got bored with those pretty quickly, so we looked for things to do. You roll up in the rug, and, and you try to get out. The other two would leave the room, and we'd see who could get out fastest. You know, you try to work your way out sideways or scoot out the end of it or whatever.

Edmund Kemper: And, uh, went from that to being tied in this overstuffed chair with a cord or something, or, or pieces of sheet or sash or something. And, uh, went through this process. I guess that's back when, in 1960, when, uh, Caryl Chessman was executed down in California. We're up in Montana. And so I got, uh, there's a lot of media coverage on that, because he was an author. He'd written books. They're trying to save his life. He'd not killed anybody. Why are they executing him? And, um, so that's, I think, where the fascination with that came in, that gas chamber effect. But I think it overly fascinated some people in relation to this case, because it [unclear: "seems" / "made it seem"] so obvious a piece, you know: I'm preparing my mindset for doing deathly kind of things.

Interviewer: Another obvious piece would actually be, uh, I don't know if the story is true, that you beheaded, uh, one of your sister's doll and cut out the hands of the doll.

Edmund Kemper: It's interesting you bring that up. Um, I had a cap gun. It was, uh, by Mattel, right? Fanner 50. It was a very fancy cap gun. I got it in New York City. I went there for one summer with a cousin. And when I came back, my sister was kind of jealous, my little sister. For years I never really put any value on what happened, tried to, you know, figure out beyond the obvious what happened in this scenario. But she, I've since found it plausible to believe that when she was angry or jealous about something, she would fuel her attitude toward resolving something. She hated that cap gun, because it came between us as brother and sister. It was something I had that she didn't have. Uh, that trip represented something she really wanted. She didn't get, and I did.

Edmund Kemper: Uh, but very soon after getting back from that trip, she got in an argument with me. It was over something really petty. She got really outraged. She picked up that cap pistol. I said, "Don't throw that." And she threw it right at me. Wham. Hard. It hit the floor and my toe, and it hurt bad. Uh, but it broke the gun, the inner mechanism. It wouldn't work after that. I picked it up, I found that out. It wouldn't cock and pull the trigger anymore. And that really outraged me. So I said, "So you want to play like that, huh?" So I go running into her room. She says, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" She's shrieking and chasing me, right? So I run into her room and I grab up her Barbie doll. It was the one fancy doll she had, the Barbie doll. Everybody has one, right? Uh, she had a pair of sewing scissors sitting there, and a sewing machine, a sewing kit. I grabbed the scissors out. The head didn't decapitate; it pops off. So I popped that off. I said, "Well, that's going to go right back on. That's no damage." So I took the scissors and I cut the hands off the doll. I said, "Here. Now you got a toy that doesn't work too good. I got a toy that doesn't work too good." That was my attitude.

Edmund Kemper: It wasn't quite just me going and, you know, uh, dismembering her doll. Again, that, I think that's a little bit too quick an assignation. It's not me to judge these professionals, but when they look at me here, on Monday morning after the football game, and they say, "Gee, here's all these little parts of the puzzle. Oh, this indicates what he was going to do." And if that's the case, I want to know about the teenage kid, or the pre-teen kids, and the puberty, the pre- and post-puberty kids, that are going through these raging moods and attitudes, that go out and kill neighborhood cats. They hang them up from a telephone pole or hang them up from a tree, shoot them full of arrows, set fire to them. I was reading about that in Dear Abby. Where are those children today? Are they serial killers? Or are they police chiefs and mayors and, and aldermen and assemblymen?

Edmund Kemper: [unclear: "But saying" / "But actually"], there are periods when kids go through very violent development into, I mean, potentially violent. They break things, they steal things, they lie, they go through these changes. Yet I've had these people, uh, one or two doctors in particular, who I won't go into, who very casually just slapped all these assignations on and say, "Well, of course, if you run into a kid that's doing this kind of thing, you got a developing serial killer. You better put him in treatment real quick and save his life," right? To a point, I agree with them, that someone who's acting out and has a dysfunctional childhood, or has just gone through a dysfunctional childhood and hasn't gotten violent yet, or is heading toward that direction, passive-aggressive. Violence was the last thing I exhibited, and then it was murderous violence. Okay? So, sure, there, there's a lot of value in getting youngsters like that help, to where they can find themselves, and they can find value in themselves, and they can find value in interacting with others, and they [unclear: "didn't even go" / "did, they go"] in a different direction than what, than what I did.

Edmund Kemper: But to just sit there and casually lay these, it, it's, uh, I guess that bothers my ego, I don't know. That these people have not worked with me year after year. Uh, the, the psychiatrists and psychologists I deal with are in a prison setting. They're there eight hours a day. They have to deal with me every day. If I am their patient and I screw up, they, they can kiss their job goodbye. I mean, there's going to be a lot of hell on them for not seeing this in advance and saying, "Oh, we should lock him up, he might be violent," right? And any, any psych out there, any professional out there, is going to tell you, I think, that, um, if they are going into my mind, into my past, into my feelings, that there's a potential there for acting out, or getting uncontrolled, or being violent, because they're stripping away the veneer of my civilization. They're stripping away the veneer of the, the protections of myself, and there's a lot of things that can come jumping out of there.

Edmund Kemper: And then to walk out of that therapy session into this kind of a setting, prison, where it's very violent, it's very, uh, aggressive. It's a, it's a distilled kind of, uh, medium that, uh, you might encounter on a street corner somewhere: the street-corner thug, or the street-corner punk, or the alleyway where someone is going to take terrible advantage of you, or put you in a terrible situation that you may have to be violent to get out of. That's this mainline. I mean, that, that's where all these guys go. And I'm going to walk out of a therapy session where this man has been peeling my mind, so to speak, and getting into my psyche and my soul, and finding out what makes me tick, or trying to help put me back together, or help try to put me together for the first time. And then I'm going to walk out of that into this medium that's not very, uh, conducive to good health. I'm aware of that going into the situation, so I'm twice as leery as the doctor is.

Edmund Kemper: But unfortunately, he's got all of these mindsets and these theories and these books he's read and that he's trained under. And I guess what has happened in my life kind of jumps out of the book a few chapters ahead, and the way I've experienced it, the psychs don't want to go that far. They don't want to come out there and work the pages back into the book so that I fit in there too, or my kind of criminal fits into there too. They kind of just stand on the edge of the book, and they put on their feathers, and they put on their paint, and they get their rattles, and they hop around, and they go into the witch doctor routine. And that I resent. And unfortunately, so do they, when they have to put on their rattles and put their crosses up and say, "Ah, he's evil. Get him away from us. He'll take advantage of us, and he'll, he'll rape, pillage and burn," right? So guess what: that's where I'm on the cutting edge of humanity, I find out now. And it doesn't matter that I find this out, because I've already been cast out by society.

Edmund Kemper: So any, any things I find out or discover, or even beautiful little things I discover about the ability of the human spirit to heal itself, to, to an extent, enough where he can make friendships, he can form bonds, he can cry when someone dies of AIDS, or he can feel bad when a friend gets injured or killed by someone else, see what I'm saying, or grows old and dies, unable to go back out to the street because they won't let him out early and he's dying, that kind of thing. And the feeling that that develops, it can develop hard, wicked feelings. It can develop some very tender and some very sad feelings. And then you're trying to deal with the widow of that man through the mail, the very restrictive mail procedures we have here. See, we're not supposed to co-correspond across these [unclear: "lattices" / "latches"] of relationship. It's tough to deal with. But you know what? That's my world now. That's what allows me to be sane, let's call it, quote unquote, sane. That's what allows me to function as a human being: is, is not doing time with these incredible constraints that I've caused to be on me, right? It's living my life, right, with the limitations that I've caused to happen.

Edmund Kemper: Living my life is different than doing time, because then there's the ability to work into that picture, um, positive things, giving things back. Like working in the Blind Project, the Volunteers of Vacaville, where we [read] books on the tape for the blind all over the United States, and sometimes in foreign countries. I participated in that program for the last 14 years. I started out [with] very, very little involvement: reading books, uh, working on beep baseballs for blind sports, um, doing some clerk work, working on their newsletter, and, uh, different jobs in there. [I've] become the reader supervisor, teaching guys how to read the books on the tape, and all the way up to the point where I became the inmate coordinator, which is the lead man there. It's the guy that's in charge of making sure everything works right all the time. Uh, and when I first went into that activity, they were saying there were things I could never do.

Edmund Kemper: To ask you a question about your interview: did you see a trophy case when you came in?

Interviewer: Uh, yes.

Edmund Kemper: Out in the foyer, there's a trophy case. Take a look at it. There's several trophies in there, and a couple of them have my name on them. Okay? And, and, um, the reason I'm asking you that: there's a big 40-inch trophy in there. It's a triple-tier trophy, very impressive looking. That's the Volunteer of the Year award. Okay? And, and it has a little speech on the front of it, on a brass plaque, that says, uh, this award is given to the person who most epitomizes what they stand for, you know, the help, the service of the handicapped, um, visually impaired. And this is a very, uh, time-honored award. Okay? They've been in existence now for 31 years. I've been in that group for, uh, 14 of those years. And one of the first couple of years I was there, I used to, like, the trophy case used to be in the Blind Project, okay, and I used to walk up and I'd look at that trophy, and I'd never had a trophy in my life. I'd never had a ribbon. I'd never had a plaque. None of that stuff. I'd never tried for it.

Interviewer: Well, you had the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

Edmund Kemper: Okay, yeah. Uh, uh, I forgot, they don't call that that, though. They had to get rid of that name, because the Chamber of Commerce took offense to that. Uh, Jaycees. Yeah. United States Jaycees. Uh, and at one point [I] was the youngest Jaycee in America, because I was 19 when I was put in as an associate member who couldn't vote, and by the time I was 20, I was on the board of directors. Um, yeah. Okay. No trophies, no plaques, anything like that. Um, I got some certificates, um, but that was, again, that was in the institution. That's where I'm learning to achieve. I developed a better, uh, image of self and those around me, and, uh, I really started cooking. I started doing things real positive. I felt good about it. And that continued on to the streets. I went to the Jaycees on the streets.

Edmund Kemper: But as my relationship, I was paroled to my mother. Okay? What the, these experts don't notice in the, in the, in the picture, I haven't seen it in writing anywhere, it could be somewhere, uh, that when I was 14 years old, I ran away from my mother. They mentioned that. But if you look at it in the overall picture, why did I run away? "I wanted to be with my father." That's a very topical, uh, approach to it. I wanted to get away from my mother because I was dreaming, thinking, fantasizing murder all day long. I couldn't get it out of my head. She and I, I couldn't battle with her, because I was very intimidated by her. She's six feet tall. She weighs two and a quarter, 225 pounds. She's not a fat woman. She's just this great big woman who I was terrified of. She had, uh, verbal capabilities you wouldn't believe. I used to watch her field-strip grown men in emotional little contests. And when they'd get to the point where they wanted to smack her, then she'd start attacking them on beating women: "Oh, slap the woman around," you know. And then she'd toy with them on that. And I'd watch these guys dance around the room having fits, knocking out windows, punch a hole in the door, and stomp off. And she could control people like that.

Edmund Kemper: I'm sitting there watching that, in awe from the one point of view and in terror from the other. I grew up with this stuff. She did that to my dad when they were always battling before the divorce. I'm not trying to put on her what happened to the girls, or to her, but I'm saying there was a lot of psychological involvement there.

Interviewer: Did you feel, early on...

Edmund Kemper: I got it in the legs one time. I turned around shrieking, and she hit me in the mouth, and the little keeper on the clasp flew off, little silver buckle thing. And she smacked me, this thing breaks off on my mouth, right? She hits me across the face with this belt, says, "Shut up. The neighbors are going to think I'm beating you." I'm looking at her: what? You know, I'm not supposed to cry out, which is a natural reaction to these great red welts that are going on me. I'm sure I was a little shit. I got [unclear: "rowdy" / "rude" / "roted"] downstairs. She took me upstairs and beat the hell out of me. Um, I would like to think it was a better part of my character that was resisting this kind of pressure to fit into some mold that she had the image of as being the good little kid. "I'll be damned if I'm going to be that good little kid." I'm getting the hell beat out of me for not being that little kid. I got, I got, uh, I don't know what you call it, resistant to it.

Edmund Kemper: But again, it's not in manly ways or in prideful ways. It was sneaky, devious ways I'd get around that. And one of the ways was: she won't give me an allowance, I'll take money out of her purse. I never robbed her, took all of it. I'd take a dime here, a quarter there, 15 cents there, 50 cents here. She comes in drunk at night, I, she's not going to know how much change she has. So to re-, to rebound on that, she started counting her money at all kinds of odd times to keep on top of me. And it was like a game we played for years. At the age of 13, she finally lets me go visit my father. Okay? Down in LA, where I was born. I'm in Montana, where she was born. I don't like Montana. It's cold in the winter, it's hot in the summer, it's miserable, and the people up there are nice people, but, hey, they're not my people. That's what I'm saying now. I wasn't viewing or voicing those things then. I was feeling them, but I didn't know how to put them into words.

Edmund Kemper: So I finally get to come down and see my dad again, down in LA. All right. [One] month. I never touched her purse again. That scared her. That really bothered her, because she had [unclear: "never" / not in Whisper], she'd beat me halfway senseless with that belt, trying to impress, and, and terror tactics. "Okay, we're going to eat dinner, and I'm going to beat your ass afterwards," you know, so I can think about it for a half hour. Or after, after some little thing she's doing. And she tried psychological tactics. She tried, "I'm going to put you in an orphanage. I'm going to disavow you." And none of that shit worked.

Edmund Kemper: So I go see my dad for 30 days, and my stepbrother and I, we go out and mow lawns. We say, "Gee, Dad, you know, you're going out to dinner tonight. Can we go someplace and eat?" And he'd say, "Sure," give us a few dollars. We'd go down to some little diner down the street. He treated us like little men, like he wanted to be treated by his... He came from a matriarchal household too. I guess, if you know how that stuff runs in families, right? Matriarchal household, the son goes out and finds a mother image and marries her. I didn't know all this stuff back then. It would have made a lot more sense, right? But I got this domineering grandmother on my father's side. I got this, uh, domineering grandmother on my mother's side, who died before I was born, but now she's reincarnated in my mother and her sister, my aunt. They're two very domineering, very aggressive, very successful women. Okay? So these two women are in terrible conflict with each other, competition, you know, and, uh, they didn't get along at all. All right?

Edmund Kemper: So I'm in the middle of that, trying to find my, my way, and I go stay with my dad. And he, I can only say he reflected back on his childhood and said, "Gee, I wish I'd been treated this way." So that's how he treated me and my stepbrother, and we responded to that. We'd go, if we needed spending money, we would go out and we'd do tasks around the neighborhood: clean yards, rake this, mow that, water the flowers, and make a few dollars, and we'd have some fun. Okay? And then, um, sometimes he'd ask us to do something. We'd do it, because he was always fair with us, and kind, and he was generous with us. So 30, 30 days of doing this opened up whole new feelings in me that I'd never had before. And I wish I'd had more experience with my father growing up, so I could orient more to being tall around not-tall peers.

Edmund Kemper: Um, there was a, I, I call it an artificial paranoia that developed, where I walk into a room, everybody stops and looks at me, because I'm the tallest guy they've seen, or the tallest guy in the room. They stop and they look. And ironically, the average or short guy is sitting over there looking at me with a great resentment, because he wants that attention. I've got it. He thinks it's really neat, 'cause he's looking at it from a, uh, a vicarious position. He doesn't realize that there's thorny sides to that attention. I don't want that attention. I want to just blend into the room. I just want to kind of sidle in. So I see two kinds of, uh, tall men, or tall male or tall female personalities: those who are very passive because of all of this thrust on them, or who are very aggressive, and they use that, and they apply it towards ends. You know, like the little guy who goes out and becomes the bank president, and he's the champion this and did that, never saw the fourth grade. Yeah, because he's real aggressive, 'cause he's denied all those little attentions. He has to grab them, and he has to go out there and put himself in the limelight. I get it naturally. So there's resentment, and little guys tormented me all the time I'm growing up.

Interviewer: Did you feel like an outsider, an outcast, early on?

Edmund Kemper: I always felt like an outsider, and it's, again, because I didn't ever fit in. I moved around a lot, for one thing. Uh, I went to different schools when I was in Los Angeles, from age, you know, five till seven, when I'm going to, uh, kindergarten, first grade, second grade. Uh, I got in trouble in public school, and I look fondly back on those times, because that's when I was acting out and I was normal, you know what I'm saying? I'm not saying I went around and kidnapped people in classrooms or broke windows out. We didn't get into stuff like that. But I was tardy, and I was messing around, and I was recalcitrant. I was getting bad marks for it, and my parents were getting called by the PTA. But you know what? That's a hell of a lot better than a few years later, when I'm real spooky, and I'm real quiet, and nobody ever hears from me. And I'm in school, and I go home, and very few people knew me, because I'm in that basement. And now I'm pulling into myself, and now things are getting very morbid in their orientation.

Edmund Kemper: I start becoming fascinated with things evolving around death and destruction and evil and all of that. I'm not saying I became a Satan worshipper, because I didn't. I was afraid of evil things, afraid of those powers, uh, that we all don't understand. And as a little kid, you know, I had a very, very strange orientation to those. I mean, it wasn't rational.

Interviewer: What was your, your fantasies at that time, morbid fantasies?

Edmund Kemper: At what, about age eight or nine, or...?

Interviewer: Or later on, when you said you were thinking all the time about death.

Edmund Kemper: What I was fantasizing about: I was building up big loads of frustration inside, big loads of, uh, of hatred, because I had no outlet for it. I should have developed outlets, but I didn't know how at that time. So the outlets that developed themselves, or I developed without knowing it, um, were fantasies about, um, me being the last... I got that out of a school book, this thing of being the last person alive on the world. And the, the thing that was posed to me in this textbook was, it was, uh, uh, social studies, and it was meant to play upon the loneliness youngsters can feel. And it's a very uncomfortable feeling, and you can't have love, and you can't have adventure, and you can't have excitement without being able to share it with other people, because that's where a lot of the dimension comes from. Okay? So they pose this thing at me: what if you were the last person in the world, and you had all these cars and airplanes and boats and ships and, and things to do, but nobody to share it with, right? Um, wouldn't that be awful? And I thought, "Hey, that's a thought. I never thought of that before."

Edmund Kemper: So it became a seed, like a little core to fantasies for me. Some mysterious thing has happened and everybody else has gone, and I got all these things I can do. No inhibitions, no restrictions. I can do what I want. I don't get yelled at anymore. Okay? That soon became very hollow. So I built upon that and added to it. Well, people were still around, but they were inanimate. They couldn't affect me. They couldn't hurt me. And then it went further and further and further, till finally, uh, by the time I'm reaching, uh, puberty, I'm approaching puberty, and I'm starting to, to sense myself. And I've already been accosted by a girlfriend. Not sexually, physically, but emotionally. She's trying to, you know, she was a little ahead of me. Uh, we're the same age, but she was, uh, pretty aggressive, and she's a beautiful young girl. Uh, but I wasn't ready for that kind of relationship, and I was scared by it. She kind of cowed me into backing away from the relationship altogether, because she wanted to get physical. She wanted to kiss and to neck and to smooch, and imitate what she saw in older kids. And that kind of terrified me, because I didn't understand the feelings inside.

Interviewer: At one point your sister teased you also about a woman schoolteacher, and you said, "If I wanted to kiss her, I'd have to kill her first."

Edmund Kemper: Yeah. That had been, um, that had been a, uh, um... You can imagine how that goes, uh: deep, dark secrets that one sibling shares with another. It's troubling inside of me. So, uh, that was from that, that period, that more advanced period, where people were still there, they just weren't animate. They could not react or respond to what I was feeling, or what I was sharing, because what I was sharing was very embarrassing, very humiliating. It's hard to talk about now, really, because it's, uh, obviously it affects, uh, how a person feels about himself. But it's not too hard to get around that, because then I look at the wreckage I have behind me: the dead people caused by my self-indulgence in fantasy life, and, and my self-indulgence in not doing something about it, like getting help, or taking action against myself.

Edmund Kemper: Even, a lot of people committed suicide at an early age, and they don't understand why, you know. And a lot of times, uh, again, by troubled parents and school counselors, they'll water it down into, "Well, he couldn't adjust, and he was having a difficult time, so he took his life." I would not want to say too casually that they're probably pretty lucky he did. Not in every case, not even in most cases. But in some of those cases, you might have had some very inwardly violent young people, that they had on the one hand the prospect of, they're about to act out, and on the other, in a very violent way, or a very unsocial and socially abhorrent way, and on the other hand, they keep holding it in, you know, and they say, "Can't do that." So they, you know, sometimes they kill themselves.

Edmund Kemper: I played with death. Um, one of my favorite tricks back then was to go out and lay in front of the, in the cars, in the traffic. I'm walking down the sidewalk with a friend, you know, it's a [unclear: "rousabout" / "roused-about"] friend, and we're clowning around about something, and I'll say, "Hey, check this out." And I'll go lay in the street like a stiff. I go, I'll lay in the street like I got run over. And a car comes driving by, and of course I'm expecting this guy isn't drunk, I'm expecting this guy isn't slightly demented and say, "Hey, there's a kid laying in front of me. It's his fault," boom, boom, you know, just shift gears, going over me. They always stop, and they get, jump out of the car and get all upset when I get up and walk off or run away. And, uh, but it was a little game we played. He didn't go lay in front of the car, so I was doing that. You know, I laugh now because it's embarrassing, but, uh, it indicated, I think, uh, how little I thought of myself. I think it indicated that a part of me would rather I got run over right then than, uh, I pursue what I was continuing to pursue in my life. Because, you know, looking at myself and how I was developing inside, nothing good could come of that.

Interviewer: And you had also a great admiration for John Wayne at the time.

Edmund Kemper: He looked a lot like my dad, and he acted a lot like my dad. My dad was kind of a big, loud guy. Actually, John Wayne was six foot four, had very little tiny feet. My dad was six foot seven. He had little tiny feet. And you notice how comedians, when they imitate how John Wayne walked, there's this rambling thing with the hips waving, and they always do this trip. You ever wonder why? He didn't just pick that way to walk. I found, quite by accident, that very big men with very little feet, who have abnormally small feet, have a tough time balancing, and it's a little balancing act they're going through.

Edmund Kemper: I went to Grauman's Chinese Theater after it was renamed, and I went and checked all those different footprints out. And here I'd grown up as a kid, not a very tall kid, looking at other people being like this, much shorter than me. In my mind's eye, it was all balanced. And when I saw pictures of other kids and me, or other people and me, and there's this great difference, it was always shocking to me, too, because I never saw it that way. But here, I watch all these movies and TV programs, and I see these people as being bigger than me because I'm a youth. And then I go to this physical exhibit where it shows their foot size, and I step on John Wayne's boot print with his cowboy boot, and my shoe completely covers it over. It's gone.

Edmund Kemper: When I was 14 years old, I had bigger feet than he did. You know? When I was 14 years old, I had bigger feet than my father. I was six foot three and a half. He's six seven. He works on a construction site as an electrician. I'm going to junior high school. We go to [unclear: "Kenny's" / "Kinney's"], we get the same kind of Oxford shoes, black Oxfords. I wear a 14 and a half. Excuse me. I wear a 12 and a half. He wears a 12. All right?

Edmund Kemper: In the mix-up of getting up and going to work and going to school in the morning, he comes running around the house looking for his shoes. He grabs mine. I can't find mine, so I go running around the house and I grab his. And all day long, I'm walking around with these pinched feet. I got blisters developing. He's flopping around at work, half a size too big in his shoe. And he says, "God damn it, got my kid's shoes again." And they're all saying, "Gee, Big Ed, you know, your kid, you got his shoes on and you're flopping around in them." And he thought that was great. Well, that was a big laugh, right? Hey, I was kind of proud of that too, because [unclear: "he's" / "his"] following in father's footsteps.

Edmund Kemper: When I was 14 years old, I put his old army jacket on, his Class A uniform. I put his jacket on, and if I had pulled my shoulders forward, I would have ripped it right up the back, because I had broader shoulders than he had. My head's larger than his is. I have a very large head. I wear an eight and three-quarter helmet for a motorcycle. Eight and three-quarters is very big. It's hard to find a helmet like that.

Interviewer: Actually, what's strange is that another serial killer from Santa Cruz, Herb Mullin, grew up hating John Wayne, actually.

Edmund Kemper: I wouldn't blame him. I was in a jail cell right next to him for months, and I was in prison up in the hole here, in the lockup unit, for going on three years with him, about two, two and a half years. And at one point, I got him a job in the kitchen. I was already on the kitchen crew, and a sergeant pulled me aside and asked me to talk to the guys about him coming on the crew, because he'd alienated a lot of the guys and they were afraid there'd be violence. So I talked to them and there was no problem, so they brought him out to the crew. He worked a few months, he goes to the main line. I'm still sitting in the hole saying, "Geez, what happened here?"

Edmund Kemper: You know, I knew Herbie, and I don't call him Herbert Mullin, and of course I don't call myself Edmund Emil Kemper III either. I never heard that in my life until I was locked up for murder, right? But little Herbie was, when I met him in Redwood City Jail, okay, our first meeting was I bumped him out of the priority cell, where they could look from the office and see through the steel door, the glass in the door, and see him physically, or they could watch the monitor and watch him. He got bumped next door. There was a shower in the priority cell. Never had to leave the cell. For him to shower from the other cell, he had to go out into the main area.

Edmund Kemper: They had to lock everybody in one of the, I guess you call them, tanks. They moved 15 guys, 30 guys, out of the tank into the activity area. They'd walk him around into their tank. He'd shower. He'd come back out, and all the way over there and all the way back, they're catcalling him. They're calling him names. They're yelling, because he caused them great interruption in their day, right? He resented that. He got bumped out of the priority cell into a non-shower cell. I got the shower cell, right?

Edmund Kemper: So he wasn't too friendly at first, and I'd say, "Excuse me, Mr. Mullin," I says, "do you have a bar of soap? There's no soap over here." He took it all with him. He had no need for it, but he took it with him. And he'd say yes, and I'd say, "Well, can I use a bar of it?" He said no. I'd say, "Oh, I got one of these little shits here." And what it is, he's a little wimpy guy that hates big guys, because he always feels intimidated by them, right? And that's how we started out.

Edmund Kemper: So I started thinking about that, and I went back to my old relationships in therapy, and group therapy, in Atascadero, and Youth Authority, and stuff, and I'm saying, "Okay, well, we can deal with this." So I started, I said, "Well, I have to be kind to him." So I found out something he liked. He loved Planters peanuts, little bags of peanuts, shelled peanuts. And so I bought 20, 30 bags of them. I didn't care for them myself. And I offered him some one day, and they were both on camera 24 hours a day.

Edmund Kemper: So I said, "Herbie, would you like some peanuts?" And he'd say, "Yeah." I say, "Oh, I got to him right down to the inner core there." Yeah, this little childhood thing comes out. I says, "Oh, here." And he was fascinated by this thought of, "Gee, he's just giving me some peanuts, and I didn't do anything for him. I don't know him, you know, I'm not being nice to him. Why would he give me some peanuts?" So he comes over to the bars. We can't even see each other. And I reach out with these peanuts around the side, and I see this little hand come out, and I thought of it almost as a little monkey paw. That's what it seemed like, so innocent. And this little, little hand comes out, starts to reach for the peanuts, and then he hesitated and he pulls back.

Edmund Kemper: And I thought, "Oh, geez, he's defensive. He's thinking I'm going to grab his hand and rip his arm off or something." I'm this great big guy, right? So without saying anything, I just reached around and I laid them on the bars and then pulled my hand away, and he took them, and he enjoyed them and all of that. And I'd say later, I'd say, "Gee, Herbie, did you eat all those peanuts?" And he'd say, "Oh, no, I still got some left." I said, "Well, I got plenty more," I says, "go ahead and enjoy them." So what I did is I started giving him bags of peanuts.

Edmund Kemper: And he had this horrible habit. There's guys back in the tank, and he and I are in these cells facing them through three bars, three sets of bars, and I can't see him and he can't see me. I don't know where on this set of bars he is. The set of bars is maybe nine feet wide and, you know, eight or nine feet high. And when he would get to acting up, he'd sit there for hours writing and writing at this little desk, and the other guys were ignoring him. So that night they're watching Saturday Night Special, you know, with all this rock music playing and stuff, and they're enjoying it. He'd get up and make this real loud speech about how bad television is for you, and why you shouldn't watch it, all the things it'll do to you. And they're having fits. They're trying to throw things at him. They can't get at him. They're raging. They're mad because he's destroying the one thing they really enjoy. And he's just having a ball doing this. He'll sit for hours, all day, writing this two-hour speech, exactly as long as it takes to watch that show.

Edmund Kemper: So he'd also sit over there and sing these horrible songs. He couldn't sing a lick at all. And he's singing these horrible songs. And one time I was in the car coming back to Redwood City, and the cop got so upset at the singing he's doing in the back of the station wagon, he turns around with his can of Mace. He says, "I've had it. Get out of the way, Kemper." And I'm saying, "Hey, wait a minute, you're going to get me with that stuff." They're just trying to Mace the guy in the back of the car because he won't shut up, and he's trying to get him to shut up, and the guy just ignored him. He had this way of really getting on people's nerves. So he pulled these little stunts, these horrible songs and the speeches and things. And I'd say, "Herbie, why do you do stuff like that?" He says, "I have a right to do what I want to do, too." Yeah, okay, right.

Edmund Kemper: So I started this, what they call just real basic behavior modification therapy. Okay, I'd had a little bit of psychology study. I'd worked in the psych testing area in Atascadero. I knew some of these things. So I set up a very basic and very essential, just bare minimum, behavior mod experiment, behavior modification, right? You reward them when they're good. You punish them when they're bad. And if you're absolutely accurate when you do these things, quick punishment when they do bad and quick reward when they do good, supposedly this is supposed to attack you at a subliminal level, a subconscious level, and you don't have a lot of control over your reactions, that it would improve your behavior, essentially. And then they have these great elaborate experiments, like in Youth Authority when I went through, where they tried these things.

Edmund Kemper: So what I did is, when he was bad, I'd get a cup full of water, a Styrofoam cup, and I'd reach around, I'd throw it on him. And it's embarrassing, and it also gets his papers wet. And, you know, so we got in this cat-and-mouse game: when he was good, I was giving peanuts, and I'd try to gas him when he was bad. It's called gassing: throw this water on him. And he'd duck all over the house. I couldn't figure out where he was at, so I kept missing him.

Edmund Kemper: So what I did is I waited one day till I knew he was asleep, or I suspected he was, and I called one of the guys over to the bars from the place in the back, the tank. And I went like this, and I went, and I says, and he reads it, and he says, and I says, and I called him over to the bars, and I said, "Hey," I said, "I want to work something out where I can get Herbie with these cups of water and he can't figure out how I'm doing it." And I says, "I just thought of a way." And he says, "What's that?" And I said, "I want you to set up a grid on the bars where you're at. Put a little piece of string or a little piece of plastic or a little something he won't notice. Count over how many bars there are on his cell, on his cell front, and from the wall go over that far on your set and set up boundaries.

Edmund Kemper: "And then when I give you a signal, that will be a hand signal, very casually walk over. Don't look at me, just casually walk over and drape yourself on the bars where he's at, so I'll know. And if he's back away from the bars, go back that far and position yourself." It's a grid, it's a targeting grid. So he would do this, and Herbie would hear me turn the water on, or maybe I'd have some already set up, and I would reach through the bars and I'd blast him. I got him every time. And he couldn't figure out how all of a sudden I got so accurate, you know. And it was without fail, I'd get him with that water, wham. And, you know, it's embarrassing, and everybody's laughing back there, "Good shot, Ed," and all that stuff.

Edmund Kemper: And then I'd ask him if he'd do something, or, "Hey, can we do this?" or whatever, you know, and he'd participate in something with me, I'd give him peanuts. When he's bad, he gets blasted with water. This went on for two or three weeks, and he actually got away from the bad behavior. When he said, "Hey, I want to sing," and I says, "Well, hey, guys in the back, do you mind if he sings?" "Oh, we don't want to hear that shit now." I say, "Hey, you want to hear it now, or do you want to hear it tonight when you're watching the show?" "Yeah, okay." "So go ahead, Herbie, sing." [unclear: "And what did he sing?" / "what did you say"] And he'd sing for 30, 40 seconds, and then he'd get bored and say, "Gee, I don't want to do this anymore," you know, because the fun was gone out of it.

Edmund Kemper: But the point is, it got a handle on his behavior. And the cops are watching this, the deputies are on camera watching me. I mean, they're on the monitors watching every move I'm making, right? And they're fascinated. They're watching this thing going back and forth with me and Herbie. They're not involving themselves, they're just watching it. And after a while, one of them came in and said, "Herbie is completely cooperative now. He's not messing around." Because I've been, as we're talking these little frictions out between he and I, I'm showing him some insights into why people don't like him. I'm showing some insights into what his behavior is causing in them. And he had realized by that point that it was just, he's reacting to how people are reacting to him, and it's just a self-perpetuating thing, and it was the only way he could get out his negative feelings. And I said, "Well, why don't you pose on the positive, focus on the positive instead, and the negative will go away."

Edmund Kemper: I don't think anybody ever did that with him before, because he responded real well to it. And later, when we were up here in the hole together, and we weren't even supposed to be together, they didn't want us together, but we were up in the hole together, I was the only guy he could talk to. A lot of pain inside. He had a lot of anguish inside. He had a lot of hate inside, and it was addressed to people he didn't even know, because he didn't dare do anything to the people he knew, because he was aware of all of the structure around that, and that that would be the end of his life.

Edmund Kemper: And so I started, the way I found out about these things is I would pose little comments or questions aimed at him as we're sitting up there on the tier, on the concrete floor, sitting there against the wall, talking to one another. And I would say, "How did you feel, you know, what did you, when you bought that little Saturday night special .22?" I says, "Did you ever go out shooting with that, you know, just target shooting?" He says, "Well, not much." And I say, "Well, try this on: you loaded it up, you went out, you set up bottles, you set up cans, you set them around in little areas right around close, and practiced shooting them real fast." And he looks at me all shocked. He says, "How do you know that?" I said, "Because that's what I used to do. Those were people. Those weren't cans and bottles. And you never told anybody."

Edmund Kemper: So he got all fascinated about how I was able to read his mind and stuff. I wasn't. I saw a kindred spirit there, somebody who was doing something very similar to what I was doing as a child. He went to mental institutions, and he went through these processes where these doctors told him what was wrong with him, and these doctors treated things that they decided were wrong with him, and he just sat back very passively and went through these treatments, and they had almost no effect on him, because he didn't dare say what was really going on in his head, because they would cast him off somewhere. He'd be totally separated from the human race. And there were certain things he and certain things I enjoyed in being in the human race and being part of the human race we weren't willing to let go of. So that was that little desperate hanging on.

Edmund Kemper: So here comes these professionals saying, "Oh, this is wrong with you, little lad, and this is wrong with you, and we're going to fix this up." "Okay, okay, I'm well." And yeah, he goes out and buys a gun and starts killing people. And I talk about what happened when he killed those people. "Oh, they fell dead." And I said, "No, they did this, they did that, they gurgled, and some of them kept moving like you hadn't even shot them, and you shot them again." And he says, "How did you know this? You weren't there." And I says, "I know. I never told anybody that. I know. I was there on my own trip. I know what happened.

Edmund Kemper: "Herbie, don't give me that bullshit about earthquakes, and don't give me that crap about God was telling you." I says, "You couldn't even be talking to me now if God was talking to you, because of the pressure I'm putting on you right now, these little shocking insights into what you did. God would start talking to you right now if you were really that kind of ill." Because I grew up with people like that.

Interviewer: Where?

Edmund Kemper: In a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. Adults. I was 15 years old when I went there.

Interviewer: To go back before that time, when you ran away from your mother and went to your grandmother...

Edmund Kemper: No, went to my father.

Interviewer: Yes, but afterwards. When you went to your grandmother, you were 14, I think.

Edmund Kemper: Mm-hm.

Interviewer: Uh, why did you feel you had to kill her?

Edmund Kemper: That was an outburst. Wasn't [unclear: "I had felt" / "ahead, felt"] I had to, uh... I went up there hoping... I didn't go there, for one thing. I got left there. We went there for Christmas from my father's in LA. We went up to the mountains to stay for Christmas, and I got left behind. I was having friction with my stepbrother and my stepmother. There was problems there. Uh, we were vying for his interests, vying for his love. They were desperate because they're the new family. I'm desperate because I've never had the man in my life. I wanted my father's love, I wanted his approval, I wanted his recognitions. And we all got very greedy and desperate at that time, so we fought each other a lot, and it was a lot of friction, and he couldn't handle that, so he got rid of me. Uh, I was old family, I was already failure, so, you know, I got parked up in the mountains. There's a lot of dressing on it, and window dressing and things, but I was up there with them for ten months.

Edmund Kemper: Uh, at first it was okay, because it was the calm of being away from Montana. There wasn't the, the [unclear: "hassle" / "helliest" / "Hest"] stuff. [I] was going to a good school. Uh, as the months went on, um, the veneer went away. My grandmother had made agreements with me from the gate that she wouldn't get into little humiliating mind games with me like my mother and stepfather had done, right? And I agreed I wouldn't do certain things. And then this mind-game stuff started up. She decided she's going to raise me like she raised her three sons, and she's going to get rid of all this negative crap that my mother put on me. She's recognizing it as something my mother put on me. And I don't know that it wasn't. Some of it was. But a lot of it was my inability to deal with, uh, complex, critical psychological situations. I could not deal with them, so I resisted it. I ran away. That was my answer: to run.

Edmund Kemper: I ran from the people in Montana. I ran from my mother in Montana. Uh, I [unclear: "felt" / "let" / "thought"] my father parked me up there to get away from the strife in LA. Now I'm stuck. All the bridges, bridges are burned, because my grandparents are there 24 hours a day. I can't run from them. She never let me get out of her sight for more than an hour without yelling my name out to see where I was. She was convinced I wanted to go down the mountain into town, little North Fork, to, uh, hang around with kids, [unclear: "rowdies" / "boozies"] and stuff, and be a juvenile delinquent. So she would never let me go down there on my own. She'd never let me leave the property. And I just, it started simmering, I guess. Started building the, the, the passions and attention. I started developing the fantasies toward her, from my mother, killing her. And the decapitation fantasies were even there. They were in, they were in place by then already.

Interviewer: And, uh, [unclear: "were those fantasies" / "without those fantasies"], what were they?

Edmund Kemper: [unclear: "No" / "Yes"]. Um, possessing the severed heads of women. Men didn't turn me on. That wasn't very... I couldn't appreciate the appearances of a guy. I see movies as a youth, and I'm, you know, I'm seeing, this was a, not common, but it was a frequent feature in some movies, where they use a shock effect. They'll have someone get their head cut off, or there's a head sitting there when they come around the corner, or open the drawer, or something. And it went from that, got caught up in my morbid fascination.

Edmund Kemper: I made a comment, and someone wrote about it, that, uh, that when I was young, I was about eight or nine years old, I went to a, this little, come on, it was like at a record store or something, and they had this crowd of kids there, and there was a magic show. And this guy, you've probably seen it, the fake guillotine, hand-pressed, and they put the potato there, and someone puts their neck in the, uh, in the brace, and they slam this thing down, and the potato down below chops in two, but the person's head doesn't fall off, right? And everybody gets very fascinated by that: "Oh my God." And then when he puts the blade in place and he pushes it down, it goes through that neck hole, but it never chops anybody's head off. Okay?

Edmund Kemper: So he wanted [a] volunteer out of the... I'm [unclear: "now" / "not"] standing in this crowd watching this show, and he wanted [a] volunteer out of the audience, and some quite beautiful little 16-year-old girl gets up there, and it's big laughs, and all [unclear: "giddy" / "the guillotine"] and stuff, and I start getting caught up in this. I said, "Wow." Right at that moment, I departed reality, because logically I should have been able to ascertain that that could not happen. You're not going to get away with chopping somebody's head off in the middle of, uh, the middle of Helena, Montana, the capital city. Um, but the concept of it was so raw, and it was titillating. I says, "Wow, gee, I got to watch this." And he had her girlfriend come over and put her hands there to catch her head so it wouldn't fall in the basket, you know. And he was making jokes about this.

Edmund Kemper: I got caught up in this, this, um, this interplay between normal concerns: you don't want to get a bump on her head. Well, hey, if you're chopping her head off, it doesn't matter, right? And this is catching in my mind somehow, and I'm saying, "Wow." And naturally everybody let out a shriek, and they're all excited, and "Oh, wow." And as he chops, and the potato falls, and her head doesn't go any place, and he unlocks the brace, and she gets out laughing, and he gives her some little prize for coming up and, uh, participating in the experiment. That's the first time I'd ever seen a show like that. You know, you see things like that on TV, it's one thing, but to be there and watch things like that, you get more caught up in it.

Edmund Kemper: Um, and I went from there. That became another piece. That's the, that's the only way I can really, the only event in my life that I can align that fascination with was, was the fact that she was a very alluring young lady. I'm coming close to approaching puberty. I think I hit it a little early, because between the ages of about 10 and 13, I was going through some incredible emotional shifts. Um, and they say that going into puberty, for young men and, and girls, I guess, is a very, very upheaving time in our lives. And, uh, without a lot of positive input from parental or adult figures, um, it can go in some really wild directions. Um, in my case, it was embedded in this negative orientation thing. I would go back to my basement bedroom, and I would, uh, fantasize to protect myself.

Edmund Kemper: I'd, I'd go off into fantasy worlds that, um, got, it got vengeance on my enemies. It got even with the bullies who picked on the kids and me in school. It got even with someone who slighted me. Uh, even adults. I mean, they talk, uh, in various relationships, how we have our darker side, and there's things that you have thought, as an example, that you'd never want to share with anybody, because they're so cruel, or they're so unspeakably out of sync with what's going on, that you would be too ashamed to share it with someone. Like, "Boy, I'd like to knock his head off," or "I'd like to kill this guy," or "She's such a bitch," you know. Um, we all do that. Um, I didn't know that. So I'm adding to the problem, the impetus of this negative orientation: "I must be [a] really evil little kid, because I'm thinking all these horrible things." I was, I was thinking of them in increasing amounts and increasing frequency. So it's a kind of conditioning, a negative conditioning, that, uh, I wasn't aware of, other than [the] effect.

Edmund Kemper: I noticed that if I worked on a certain scenario, a certain kind of patterning in my fantasies, right, after a while it became numb, it became insignificant, it became not enough. So I had to add embellishments to it, a new level. And it just, very subtle, but over many, many years, it just kept, kept going more and more. I've known young people that I've been able to talk to honestly, and, they've, knowing them well enough and friendly enough over enough years, share with me, because it was, [it] was of real importance to me to know where I dove off the deep end. And they would admit that sometimes they, and they went off into happier orientations, they had a period where they went off into some real morbid or negative fascinations, but they grew out of it, quote unquote, grew out of it. It, it stopped providing a service that they needed. It stopped filling a hole or a gap. Or, let's say, an adult came along and started sharing something with them, or showed them a new avenue of acting out that completely obliterated that need, or vacated it, and they let it go.

Edmund Kemper: I didn't. The adult wasn't there. Uh, my mother was there, and she was there to beat me. She was there to humiliate me. She was there to use me as an example of how inferior men are. And that was a great little lady there. She, uh, kind of preceded this female movement we have now, of getting rights, of getting equal rights, of getting equal standing, of getting equal presence in various, uh, theaters.

Interviewer: But actually, you had experimented the...

Edmund Kemper: Oh, I was finding out the hard way what women's rights and women's antagonism, women are [unclear: "drove" / "driven"] about things like that, they get upset about the [unclear: "belittlement" / "little mince"] they get, and, and their, the, the lack of, uh, equality that they should, that they have, that they experience. Unfortunately, my mother developed, and I'm, I'm not, it's not fair to talk about a dead person that way. They can't defend themselves. They can't give you another perspective on what really happened. I can only surmise. From, to try to be fair, looking back on it, I'm seeing that she was making an effort to balance her pain with what she was experiencing. And if you look at her dad, he's a wimp. He never did anything. Mom did everything, you know, so she orientated toward her. So she comes out doing that stuff. I find out in sociological studies and psychological studies, that's normal. Not necessarily healthy, but that happens.

Edmund Kemper: And my dad, being the wimp out of his family, goes and finds my mom, who's the dynamo out of her family, and they get married, and it'll either work or it won't. And in his case, it didn't work, because she kept hammering on him. She wanted him to change this, she wanted him to change that, and he couldn't handle that. After 13 years, he'd had enough. What I resented was: I had a mother, I had a father. Father worked, he brought in a big paycheck. We had a nice house, we had friends, we went to school, right? We had birthdays, we had Christmas, we had vacations, huh? He had Saturday night with the poker buddies out in the guest house by the garage. We were living pretty good. And, uh, she absolutely hated that: this, this stereotypical response of this deadhead, this muttonhead she's married to, of wanting to go out and play cards in a smoke-filled room, drinking beer with these old war buddies.

Edmund Kemper: See, I had another problem. My father was in the First Special Service Force in, uh, World War II. They did a book and a movie called *The Devil's Brigade*. He was a combat sergeant in that group, and he volunteered for that as a single man. They would not take married men. That's how my parents met. She was working as a secretary in Helena, Montana, the capital city. He's a few miles out of town, at an old, retired, closed-down cavalry fort for the US Army that was reopened as a secret base for these guys to train out of, at, uh, Fort William Henry Harrison, just outside of town. They got to know each other. They quite, quite, it wasn't secretly, but it was very quietly got married, because if they [unclear: "didn't know" / "knew"] he got married, he'd have been kicked out of the group. This is what was described as a suicide brigade: 5,000 men trained in [unclear: "all this devastation" / "just in all his devastation"] ways, right? He goes off to war, and he does some horrible things. He can't talk about those things...