The life and murders of Edmund Kemper
Warning : there are a couple cuss words from some quotes of the killer, gruesome scenes, and necrophilism.
Serial killer; crazy, unintelligent, creepy. These are the kinds of things that most people associate with those two, awful words. However, with Edmund Emil Kemper III, all these things are the complete opposite. Let’s start from the beginning…
December 18, 1948 is the day that this seemingly normal child entered the world in the state of California. Sadly, the world he entered was not a good one. At age 9 his parents would divorce, leaving him to move to Helena, Montana with his two sisters and his mother, who was an alcoholic and verbally abusive. Constantly telling him he had a ‘weirdo’ personality, picking on him for his size, and telling him that no woman would ever love him, he learned to hate himself and the world around him.
His unique mental fantasies started forming when he was a young boy, though at the time they seemed rather harmless. Just little things, such as his favorite game being pretending to be executed in a gas chamber or an electric chair. At one point in time he had a crush on a teacher. His sister asked him, “Well why don’t you kiss her?” He replied with, “If I kiss her, I’d have to kill her first.”
Things escalated though, and soon he was chopping the heads off of his sister’s dolls. At 10 years old, he reached a land mine in the grooming process of becoming a serial killer, and buried the family cat alive. Once it was dead, he dug it up, decapitated it, and placed it’s head on a spike. He said he took great pleasure in successfully lying about killing it. The family simply replaced it with another cat, which he killed when he was 13 by chopping the top of it’s head off with a machete.
By the time he hit puberty, the necrophilism began setting. Like every oncoming teenager, fantasies began setting in. But, they weren’t your normal teenage fantasies, as the thought of murdering everyone on his block and having sex with their remains is what appealed to him.
His mother, instead of fixing the problem, made it worse. She decided it would be best for him to stay in the basement, so that he wouldn’t rape his sisters. In an interview with him from the 90’s, he said that this made him feel as if they were in heaven, and he was forced to stay in hell.
At the age of 14, he ran away to his father, who was now remarried with a stepson. His father sent him off to his grandparent’s house in California. He compared his grandmother to his own mother, saying that she would constantly emasculate him and his grandfather, who he said was senile and Edmund also hated him.
At the age of 15, the first summer staying with his grandparents, Edmund and his grandmother got in an argument. Extremely angered by the argument, he went and grabbed the .22 rifle that his grandfather had bought him for hunting. After telling him not to shoot any birds, he shot her in the head. He would then shoot her twice more in the back, and then stab her with a kitchen knife. After pulling her into her bedroom, his grandfather got home from grocery shopping. For fear of his grandfather getting mad at him for shooting his wife, Edmund fatally shot him as well. He called his mother and asked her what he should do, and she told him to call the cops. When questioned by the police on why he did it, he replied by saying, “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot grandma.” He was sent to the State Hospital.
While at the State Hospital, Edmund was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. All of his violent fantasies were covered up by an outwardly calm, though his favorite thing to do was listen to serial rapists retell their stories. However, many people decided that there was no major evidence of him having any extreme mental disorders, that it was just a personality trait disturbance. So, he was let out on parole, and his juvenile record was expunged. Being let out was not only against the advice of his doctor, but also against the advice of himself. He was released into his mother’s care, once again, against the will of his doctor and himself.
By the time he was released, Edmund had become a young man reaching the height of 6’9”, and a weight of 280 lbs. He moved in with his mother in Aptos, CA. From there, she would drive to work to the University of California.
He attended community college for a short time, hoping to become a state trooper, but was rejected. However, he still hung out with law enforcement at a bar called ‘Jury Room’, where he took on the nickname ‘Big Ed’. Later on, when the murders would begin happening, this would be where he got info on what they’d found out on the killer. He called himself a ‘friendly nuisance’.
Not too long after his 21st birthday (which was the day he got let out on parole), he began dating a 16 year old who would later become his fiancé. Also around this time is when he started picking up hitchhikers., bringing along with him knives, blankets, and handcuffs, in case he decided to act out on his ‘little zapples’, as he called them. He said he picked up probably around 150 hitchhikers, peacefully letting them go. In an interview he did in the 90’s, he said that he had learned what tactics to use to make any hitchhiker get into the car, even ones who started out with suspicions.
The first murders happened on May 7, 1972, when Edmund picked up two, 18 year old girls who were headed for Stanford University, about an hour away. The victims were Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. He began by trying to strangle Mary Ann, but when he didn’t succeed, he stabbed her several times. He then went back and stabbed Anita to death too. Once finished, he put the bodies into his trunk, and returned to an apartment he had rented out to get away from his mother’s continuing verbal abuse. Once there, he took photos of the naked corpses, had sex with them, and dismembered them. He then got rid of the bodies, but kept the heads and had sex with them as well. Later on, Mary Ann’s head would be found, but nothing else was ever found of her, and nothing would be found of Anita.
On September 14, 1972, he picked up 15 year old Aiko Koo, who decided to hitchhike to her dance class after missing the bus ride. When he stopped to kill her, he locked himself out of the car. Aiko, who had come to trust him, let him back in the car. He then choked her until she was unconscious, raped her, and then finished killing her. He then did the same as he had done with the last two victims, and then disposed of her. Not much of her was ever found.
January 7, 1973, Edmund picked up 18 year old Cynthia Ann Schall, drove her out to a secluded area, and fatally shot her in the head with a .22 pistol. He then took her back to his mother’s house (as he was once again living there), and hid her in his closet. When his mother left in the morning, he repeated the same steps as always, only this time he had a bullet to remove so he couldn’t be traced. He kept the head for several days after disposing of the rest of the dismembered body over a cliff, having sex with it regularly. He finally buried it in his mother’s garden, looking up toward her bedroom, saying that his mother always wanted people to look up to her. Not much of her was ever found either.
On February 5, 1973, he and his mother got into an argument. Edmund later said, “I was pissed. I would’ve killed anybody.” Anybody turned out to be 23 year old Rosalind Thorpe, and 21 year old Alice Liu. He acted it out the same, except this time he beheaded them in his car and carried the corpse into his mother’s house to do the usual ritual. He removed the bullets and discarded the dismembered bodies. At one point in time he was asked why he decapitated them and had sex with the heads. He replied with, "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 ... well, that’s not quite true, there’s a lot left in the girl’s body without the head.”
April 20, 1973 is when the final stage was set. All of the girls he had killed were all practice runs leading up to this moment; the murder of his mother. He said in an interview that he had been planning to kill her for a whole week before it happened; that he was tired of people dying, he had to do it. When she came home from drinking, it woke him up, and he went into her room. She was reading, as she did often, and when she saw him, she said, “I suppose you want to sit up and talk all night now.” He replied, “No, goodnight.” At 5:00 am, he went back into her room, where he caved the side of her head in with a hammer, cut off her head, and had sex with her body. He also cut out her larynx and tried to shove it into the garbage disposal. When it couldn’t chew through the tough cords, it spit it back out into Edmund’s face. He would say in an interview later, “That seemed appropriate, as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.” He then invited his mother’s best friend over for dinner, where he strangled her to death, decapitated her, and had sex with the remains.
After that night, he made his way to Colorado. After realizing that he would be the main suspect in the murder, and that he had finally accomplished his ultimate goal, he turned himself in. When asked by the judge what punishment he deemed fit for his crimes, Edmund replied with, “Death by torture.” Instead, he was sentenced to 7 years to life for each count, and is living them out concurrently.
To this day he resides in the California Treatment Facility, were he reads books for the blind, and crafts ceramic cups. He’s known as being very well behaved, but is still extremely manipulative and intimidating. He’s had 2 parole hearings, but he turned down each of them, saying that he was not fit to go back out into the world, and that he’s completely content in prison.
With our luck, he’ll keep that mind set. He’s knows that what he did was wrong, and he has sympathy for his victim’s loved ones, but he also knows that he can’t control the urge to kill. If he were released, it would start all over again, and the giant of insanity would once again be in business.
So, the reason I titled this article ‘A Sane Psychopath’, is because if you watch his interviews on YouTube, he seems like he’s just another person in the world. He’s extremely intelligent, very normal acting, and actually quite empathetic. At the end of one of his interviews, he says, "There's somebody out there that is watching this and hasn't done that – hasn't killed people, and wants to, and rages inside and struggles with that feeling, or is so sure they have it under control. They need to talk to somebody about it. Trust somebody enough to sit down and talk about something that isn't a crime. Thinking that way isn't a crime. Doing it isn't just a crime, it's a horrible thing, it doesn't know when to quit and it can't be stopped easily once it starts.”
Maybe if he hadn’t endured such a rough childhood, and somebody had taken the time to stop his unnatural behaviors, it may have stopped what happened. Tell me what you think. Simply send me an email from the 'Hi…' box, and tell me your opinion. It’s a chance to get all psychologically geeky. But first, here’s a video to look at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8x5PeZZFNs