"I Saw a Kindred Spirit": Edmund Kemper on Herbert Mullin, 1991

Name: "I Saw a Kindred Spirit": Edmund Kemper on Herbert Mullin, 1991
Uploaded: 2022-09-22
Duration: 15 min 48 s
Description: In a 1991 prison interview, Edmund Kemper talked about his father and John Wayne, then described how he says he handled fellow Santa Cruz killer Herbert Mullin in jail with peanuts and cups of water.

In a 1991 prison interview, Edmund Kemper talked about his father and John Wayne, then described how he says he handled fellow Santa Cruz killer Herbert Mullin in jail with peanuts and cups of water.

Subject: Edmund Kemper
Recorded: about 1991
Runtime: 15:48

Content warning: Kemper describes shootings committed by Herbert Mullin, including victims who "gurgled" and kept moving after being shot.

The Interview

In this excerpt from a filmed prison interview, Edmund Kemper answers a few short questions from an off-camera interviewer and then talks, almost without interruption, for about fifteen minutes. He gives his sentence and the time he has served, compares his father to John Wayne, and tells stories about outgrowing his father's shoes and army jacket by the age of 14. Most of the clip is about Herbert Mullin, another Santa Cruz serial killer, whom Kemper says he first met in the jail at Redwood City and later shared a prison lockup unit with.

Historical Context

Kemper killed his paternal grandparents in 1964, at 15, and was committed to Atascadero State Hospital. Released in 1969, he killed six young women who were hitchhiking in the Santa Cruz area between May 1972 and February 1973, then his mother and her friend Sally Hallett in April 1973, and gave himself up. Over the same months Herbert Mullin killed 13 people in and around Santa Cruz, between October 1972 and February 1973; he said the killings were needed to prevent an earthquake. Mullin was arrested on February 13, 1973, and Kemper about ten weeks later. Both were convicted in 1973 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mullin died in prison in August 2022.

Circumstances of the Interview

The interview is attributed to Stéphane Bourgoin, a French author who filmed conversations with American serial killers. In 2020 and 2021 Bourgoin admitted that he had invented parts of his own life story, including a murdered wife and FBI training, and that he had met far fewer killers than he had claimed. Those admissions concern his biography; no source found suggests that this recording is anything other than genuine footage of Kemper, who appears on camera and gives facts about himself. The interviewer's identity is taken from the uploader and is not confirmed in the clip.

What the Interview Covers

Kemper says he was serving concurrent terms of seven years to life on eight counts of first-degree murder. He describes John Wayne as looking and acting like his father, and recounts standing in Wayne's boot print at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. When the interviewer mentions Mullin, Kemper says he got Mullin a job on a prison kitchen crew, and describes their first meeting in jail, when he "bumped" Mullin out of a cell with a shower. He says he won Mullin over with bags of Planters peanuts, punished his speeches and singing by throwing cups of water at him, and recruited another inmate to help him aim: what he calls "basic behavior modification". He goes on to say that Mullin confided in him, that he saw in Mullin "a kindred spirit", and that he told Mullin not to give him "that bullshit about earthquakes".

What Makes the Recording Significant

The recording is a first-hand account by one Santa Cruz serial killer of another, whose crimes overlapped with his own in the same months of 1972 and 1973. It also shows how Kemper presented himself in 1991: as a man who understood other killers, and who could read and manage them using what he had learned in hospital and youth institutions.

Archival Importance

Kemper remains in prison in California and has been repeatedly denied parole. Long filmed interviews with him are few. This one gives his own extended version of his relationship with Mullin.

Important Caveats

Everything Kemper says here is his own account. His descriptions of Mullin's thoughts, his target practice and his killings are Kemper's claims about what Mullin told him, not established facts; the claim that Kemper got Mullin a kitchen job, the jail at Redwood City and the "behavior modification" episode are not independently confirmed. His figures for his own and his father's height and shoe sizes are his. Grauman's Chinese Theatre was renamed Mann's Chinese Theatre in 1973, so the timing of the visit he describes is unclear. The interviewer's identity rests on the uploader's attribution, and the clip is an excerpt.

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

Edmund Kemper: Excuse me. 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, CC, that's called concurrent. It means all the sentences run at the same time.

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. ---