August 27, 1964. Grandma Kemper is sitting at the kitchen table editing the manuscript of
her boy scouts book, “Boys’ Life.” Her 15-year old grandson, Edmund,
walks up behind her and puts two bullets in her head. He then stabs her three times.
He later explains to police why he did it, “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot grandma.”
That’s brutal, but in the great scheme of things, it was the least shocking of Edmund
Kemper’s crimes. To know the man,
you have to know the child. Ed Kemper was one disturbed kid, but it’s not surprising
when you hear some details about his life. That day when he shot his grandma, someone
he loved dearly, he then stabbed her three times. He said he had to make sure she was well and truly
dead because he didn’t want her “to suffer.” After that, he carried her body up to one of
the bedrooms, and he waited for his grandpa to get home from grocery shopping duties.
When he heard a car pull into the driveway, he greeted this man he also loved dearly.
With shopping bags in his arms, grandpa Kemper smiled widely and said, “Hey buddy.”
Ed later told police, “When he turned, I placed the rifle this far
(he used his forefinger to demonstrate the distance) from the back of his head and shot him.”
By the time Ed was 15, he was already messed up, although we think we didn’t really need to tell
you that. This kid, massive in height and build, with a very high IQ, was not like other kids.
He wouldn’t be like other adults, either, unless it’s not that usual to sleep with
the heads of women you’ve killed. Kemper blamed his mother for that,
for the most part at least. Clarnell Kemper wasn’t easy to please. She’d grown
up wanting only the best. She was intelligent and very ambitious in high school, expecting
to marry the ideal American prince charming. She got what she wanted, too. After finishing
school, she soon became President of the National Federation of Federal Employees. She stood at a
great height, both figuratively and literally, but even the best wasn’t good enough for her.
That’s when she met Ed’s father, also called Edmund.
He was a behemoth of a man, standing at six feet eight inches. He wasn’t a man to be messed with,
his status as a special forces commando in the army impressing the hard-to-please Clarnell.
Then Ed senior went to war, fighting in the Devil’s Brigade, an outfit known to take on
the riskiest missions, missions from which many soldiers did not come back.
In one such mission, fighting against a German elite squadron,
he was only one of 23 percent of his battalion to come back alive.
When he got back to the US to Clarnell, he was wounded both physically and mentally. He was a
changed man, no longer the dashing soldier that Clarnell admired. He was downbeat and depressed,
having discovered hell on Earth in the war. She became disappointed in him,
crestfallen that her hero was all too human. He later said that facing his nagging wife
was more difficult than facing the German elite soldiers. “The atomic bomb testings
were nothing compared to living with her," he said, adding that she did more damage to
him than “three hundred and ninety-six days and nights of fighting on the front did.”
You might wonder, why are we telling you all this? The answer is this story can’t be told without
knowing something about Clarnell. Leaving her out would be like talking about a malignant tumor
and not mentioning the causes of cancer. On December 18, 1948, their second child
was born. He was named Edmund Emil Kemper III. He was the malignant tumor,
the product of a cancerous relationship. He grew up with his mother after Kemper
senior could take no more and left the family home. Now young Ed became the sole
focus of Clarnell’s frustration and failures, belittling him at any opportunity she got.
Growing up, his mother used his sisters to bully and harass him. He was made to
feel shame about himself, something from which his mom derived much enjoyment.
For that, young Ed would sometimes cut off the head of his sister’s dolls. As you know,
he’d be preoccupied with heads later in his life. One time his sister teased him about
his crush on his teacher, to which Ed replied, “If I kissed her, I'd have to kill her first.”
Fearing her own son, Clarnell locked him in a basement in the dark, making him sleep there
with the scurrying rats. As he got taller, she moved his bedroom down there for good,
turning the key to the sounds of his sobbing. There he fantasized about violence,
once beheading the family cat on his return upstairs. He kept the skull in his closet.
Meanwhile, Clarnell tried and failed to meet a man that lived up to her very high expectations.
For all her woes, she blamed Ed, the product of the man that had left her.
Ed cried for days on end, pleading with his ma to let him go live with his pop.
His father eventually took possession of young Ed, although he quickly moved the teenager in with his
parents, Edmund senior and Maude, where they lived on a farm. They adored the child, showering him
with love and gifts. One of those gifts was a .22 rifle, which, unbeknownst to them at first,
Ed used to kill just about every animal in sight. When summer came, he was returned to his mother.
He later went back to the farm a changed boy. He killed more animals with that rifle,
after which his grandad confiscated it. You know what happened next.
Ed was subsequently sent to a psychiatric institution. There,
doctors remarked on Ed’s friendly demeanor and high intelligence. He was called a sociopath,
but a boy with outstanding qualities who could use those qualities for good in the right environment.
All the time, Ed was well aware of how to manipulate the doctors that treated him.
After all, his IQ was near genius level. At age 21, he was released and sent back into the
heart of the furnace that founded him, aka, his mother’s house. Almost immediately, they had what
he later called “vicious battles”. His mother once screamed at him, “Because of you, my murderous
son, I haven’t had sex with a man for five years.” He got a job working for the California Highway
department and also got his own place. Still, his mother kept tabs on him,
calling him nightly to complain. Ed called her a “manipulating, controlling beast,”
echoing what his father had said. Something was about to blow.
May 7, 1972. Ed, now six feet nine inches tall and weighing 280 pounds,
was driving his car down the freeway when he spotted two young women hitchhiking.
They were Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchesssa. He picked them up, although somewhere on the
journey they realized he wasn’t going in the direction he said he would go in.
He then stopped the car at a quiet area and got into the back seat.
There, this huge man put handcuffs on Pesce, and then took Luchessa to the trunk.
He later remarked of sitting with Pesce in the back, “I was really quite struck by her
personality and her looks. And there was just almost a reverence there. There was absolutely
no contact with improper areas.” He said what “bothered him” though,
was the fact he might have accidentally “brushed up against her breast.”
Embarrassed, he said to her, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” This was a man that was about to kill her.
Just after the apology, he put a bag over her head and stabbed her to death, slitting her throat
at the end of the attack. He then went to the trunk and did pretty much the same to Luchessa.
But the act of killing wasn’t what really thrilled Ed. He wasn’t a sadist per se,
what he wanted was complete control over his victims’ bodies. The killing was just a
necessary act for what he wanted to do later. He took the bodies back to his apartment,
where he dissected them and beheaded them, later remarking how he heard a “little pop” when their
heads came off. Again, he told detectives, “There was absolutely no contact with
improper areas.”- though this was certainly a lie. Ed said he just sat there looking at their heads
when at one point one of them fell off a chair and made a loud noise on impact with the floor.
He later told detectives, “The neighbor hates my guts. I’m always making loud noises at night. He
gets a broom and whacks on the ceiling. ‘Buddy’, I say, ‘I’m sorry for that, I dropped my head,
sorry’. That helps bring me out of my depression.” He also said that he had fallen in love with
Pesce, or what remained of her. He went back to the grave where he buried part of her,
talking to her like a boyfriend. He told detectives that he was well aware of his
twisted psyche. He knew what he had done was demented, but it just felt right to him.
He then said words that have gone down in history: “When I meet a pretty girl, one side of me says
I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says I wonder
what her head would look like on a stick.” Just for you serial killer geeks out there,
these words were once wrongly attributed to Ed Gein in the movie “American Psycho.”
Ed told police that he didn’t have the confidence to actually meet a woman and start a relationship.
Instead, he made “dolls” out of them. They were manageable that way.
It was only a matter of time before he made another doll.
On September 14, 1972, he picked up another hitchhiker. She was named Aiko Koo. He killed her
and then went for a beer at a local pub. Halfway through his beer, he couldn’t resist going back
to look at the victim in the trunk of his car. He said he admired his catch “like a fisherman.”
He did with her what he’d done to his first two victims. He buried most of her body parts,
but he saved her head. When he went to see his psychiatrist for one of his regular appointments,
her head was in his car trunk. This is what the psychiatrist wrote in his report that day:
“If I were seeing this patient without having any history available or without getting the history
from him, I’d think that we are dealing with a very well-adjusted young man who has initiative,
intelligence, and who was free of any psychiatric illness…I would see
no psychiatric reason to consider him to be a danger to himself or to any member of society.”
A second psychiatrist that day added his own thoughts:
“I would consider it reasonable to have a permanent expunction of his juvenile records.”
The doctor added that he was glad that Ed had gotten rid of his motorcycle, something he said
was the only threat to himself or anyone else. Ed’s record was wiped on those recommendations.
He then went back to live with his mom after getting injured at work.
In January 1973, he picked up Cindy Schall. He snuck her body back to
his mom’s house and dissected it the next morning after draining it of blood in the
bathtub. As was now usual, he kept the head, using it for his certain stimulative acts.
When he finally buried the head, he put it in the garden facing up to his mother’s bedroom.
He later said he did that because his mom always wanted people to look up to her.
Now that a few young women had gone missing in the same area, police told students not
to get in cars with strangers. They still did, though, and on occasions with Ed. One reason
was the fact he sounded so articulate, and with his spectacles, looked quite academic.
But also because, due to her work, his mother’s car had a university car park sticker on it.
In February, Ed killed two more women. They were Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu. He did the
same with them, playing with his dolls when his mother was sleeping in the room next door. Later,
he explained to police why he was so fascinated with the heads of his victims:
“The head trip fantasies were a bit like a trophy. You know, the head is where everything is at,
the brain, eyes, mouth. That’s the person. I remember being told as a kid,
you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off.”
Still, part of him knew he had to stop. Ed Kemper knew he was crazy. He understood the
duplicity inside of him. Maybe, he thought, one particular trophy might end my madness.
April 20, 1973. It was then that Ed finally decided to fight the demon
he’d been fighting all his life: his mom. That night she’d arrived home, drunk as
usual. Ed walked into her room as she was reading a book. He just stared at her, and she said in a
belligerent manner, “I suppose you're going to want to sit up all night and talk now.”
He walked back out of the room. At 5.15 am she was sound asleep in her bed.
Ed walked in and hit her over the head with a hammer. He grabbed her moaning body and slit
her throat. He stood there, just looking at her, thinking how weak she was. He asked himself how
this thing in front of him had managed to have such power over him his entire life.
He cut off her head and put her larynx into the garbage disposal, taking much enjoyment from
this part. He said he did this because of all the complaining she’d done throughout his life.
But when he turned on the machine, the organ wouldn’t quite go down. He later told detectives,
“Even when she was dead, she still wouldn’t stop *expletive* at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up.”
What remained of her head, he placed on a shelf and screamed at it for an hour or so,
intermittently using it as a dartboard. Ed then got on the phone and talked to his
mother’s closest friend, Sally Hallett. He told her he’d arranged a surprise party for his mom and
could she come round to the house. He killed her, too, sleeping with her head in his mother’s bed.
It was at that moment that he realized something. There had been
no need to kill anyone except for his mother. He later recalled his decision to stop killing,
“The original purpose was gone. It wasn't serving any physical or real or emotional
purpose. It was just a pure waste of time. Emotionally, I couldn't handle it much longer.”
He drove to a call box many miles from home and phoned the police. He told cops he’d killed
his mother and her friend, but they didn’t believe him and told him to call back later.
He then called back again, this time asking to talk to a cop that he knew. One of the
reasons Ed had gotten away with his crimes is he used to drink with the police at a local bar.
They’d tell him about their hunt for the killer. No one ever expected Ed, the amiable and clever
fella, to be a killer. He later said in interviews that when his victims got in the car with him,
they’d discuss the terrible maniac doing such terrible things. He’d think, man,
how come they’d never suspect someone like me. It was this high IQ and obvious capacity to fool
others that made Ed Kemper the focus of the FBI’s new serial killer unit,
which formed the basis of the Netflix series, “Mindhunter.” He might have been a monster to the
public, but for cops and criminologists, and the media, he was an endless source of information.
One time when being interviewed back in the day by the FBI’s famed mind-hunter, Robert Ressler,
Ressler got anxious and pushed the button for the guard to come. Ed looked at him and said,
“I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”
By the time the guard arrived, Ed said he was just kidding. Ressler later recounted,
“My mind raced. I envisioned him reaching for me with his large arms, pinning me to a wall in
a stranglehold, and then jerking my head around until my neck was broken. It wouldn’t take long.”
Ed asked for the death penalty and to be executed prior to torture,
but he didn’t get his wish. He was imprisoned and later, on a few occasions, denied parole.
He once said, “Society is not ready in any shape or form for me. I can't fault them for that.”
The last time he was denied parole was in 2017, and he won’t get his next hearing until 2024.
He’ll be 76 years old. He’s always been considered a model prisoner,
but it’s likely even as he approaches the twilight of his life, he’ll remain behind bars.
Now you need to watch “How Serial Killer Profilers ACTUALLY Catch Serial Killers.”