Edmund Emil Kemper
The Co-Ed Killer
Edmund Kemper was born December 18 1948 in Burbank California.
Living with 2 younger sisters, his mother and father, he endured the constant
fighting between his parents who eventually separated. Upon the separation, Ed
began displaying strange behavior.
He mutilated two of the family cats, and was caught playing games with his
sister portraying death rituals.
Ed was shipped off by his mother to live with his father after these incidents.
Soon after, he ran away, returning to his mother, only to be shipped off again.
This time he was sent to live with his grandparents (father's side) in the
foothills of California's Sierra's on a farm.
The farm life, away from his family did not do well for Edmund. He became bored,
agitated, lonely and homesick. In August of 1963, mad that his grandmother made
him stay at the house with her, rather than going out into the fields with his
grandfather, Edmund shot her with a .22 caliber rifle, then stabbed her,
repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Knowing his grandfather would not see his act
as something acceptable, Ed waited for him to return and shot him as well,
leaving the body in the yard.
Edmund Kemper's reasoning for killing his grandmother
"I just wanted to see what it would be like to shoot
grandma"
Not surprisingly, the motiveless double homicide, gained Kemper the diagnosis of "personality trait disturbance, passive aggressive type" and a commitment to the Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane where he remained until 1969. He was released against objections of psychiatrists and placed into his mother's custody. His mother had, by now left her third husband and was working at a new job with the University of California at Santa Cruz. By this time, Kemper was 21 years of age, 6'9" and weighed in around 300 lbs.
Victims: Aiko Koo, Alice Liu, Anita Luchessa,
Cindy Schall, Mary Ann Pesce, Rosalind Thorpe
For the next two years he held down odd jobs, and enjoyed driving the freeways
and highways, and made a habit of picking up young female hitch hikers. Santa
Cruz seemed to be just the place at that time for beautiful California coeds.
Kemper, after missing out on his teens while in the mental hospital, took an
interest in these young women and their willingness to easily accept rides.
Working for the Highway's Department allowed him access to the time he spent
driving the highways. He took this job after being turned down by the Highway
Patrol (a lot of serial murderers have at some time applied to some sort of law
enforcement agency, or follow these agencies, almost trying to look as though
they are police officers).
On May 7, 1972 Kemper picked up two girls from Fresno State College. Mary Ann
Pesce, and Anita Luchessa were roommates at college and were hitchhiking. He
took them to a secluded area where he stabbed them both to death and then took
the bodies home to his mother's, where he dissected them, playing with various
organs and took Polaroids. Once finished, he packed up their remains in plastic
bags, and buried the bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains, tossing the heads into
a deep ravine beside the road.
On September 14, he picked up a 15 year old high school girl named Aiko Koo,
suffocated her and then raped her corpse. He took her home, just like the others
and dissected her. The next morning, he was visited by a state psychiatrist to
monitor his mental health, and had pulled of the interview so well, that at it's
end, he was ruled "no longer a threat to himself or others". It was recommended
that his juvenile record be sealed. The entire time, Koo's head lay in the trunk
of his car, just outside. Once his interview was finished, he then drove back to
the mountains and buried Koo's body near Boulder Creek.
Next, he waited until January 9, 1973 when he picked up a student from Santa
Cruz names Cindy Schall. He forced her into his trunk and shot her at gunpoint,
before bringing her back to his mother's again, having sex with her corpse,
dissecting her and then bagging the remains and tossing them off a cliff into
the ocean at Carmel. He had thought of burying her head in his mother's garden,
facing up to her bedroom. He said that his mother preferred people looking up to
her, so he thought that may have been suitable.
Santa Cruz, by this point, was gripped with fear of this "Coed Killer". The
young women of the campus were warned not to accept rides from people outside
the safety of the campus. This did nothing to stop Kemper, who drove his
mother's car with her university I.D. sticker on the windshield.
Less than a month after Cindy, Kemper picked two more women up. Rosalind Thorpe
and Alice Liu were both shot and piled into his trunk as always and received the
same treatment when he got them home as all of the others he had brought there.
Their mutilated bodies were dumped into Eden Canyon, near San Francisco and
found about a week later.
By now Kemper was nearly controlled by his need to kill. That Easter, he
realized what he had been wanting all along. That weekend, as his mother lay
asleep in her bed, he attacked her, repeatedly beating her with a claw hammer
until she was dead. He followed this by decapitating her and raping the headless
corpse. He finished by removing her larynx and trying to feed it through the
garbage disposal.
Edmund Kemper's reasoning for putting his mothers
larynx in the garbage disposal
"it seemed appropriate, as much as she had bitched and
screamed at me over the years"
When he turned the switch on however, the disposal jammed and threw her larynx back at him. "Even when she's dead she was still bitching at me, I couldn't get her to shut up." -Kemper about why the disposal jammed.
He then called a friend of his mother's, Sally Hallett, inviting her to a surprise dinner for his mother. Once she arrived, he clubbed and strangled her, cutting off her head and leaving the body in his own bed while he slept in his mother's.
On Easter Sunday he left in his car, driving eastward. He kept
an ear on the radio, expecting to hear as he became a national celebrity, when
the bodies had been found. He instead heard nothing. He reached Pueblo Colorado,
exhausted from lack of sleep and angry that his grand gesture had not garnished
him any news play, and had made seemingly no "national" impact, he pulled over.
At a phone booth beside the road, he called the Santa Cruz Police Department and
after her repeatedly tried to convince them that he was telling the truth, he
confessed to the murders, and to being the Coed Killer. He then waited for them
to send a cruiser car to pick him up.
He was convicted on 8 counts of first degree murder and when asked what he
considered to be appropriate punishment, he replied....."Death by torture" .
Q. "What do you think when you see a pretty girl
walking down the street?"
A. "One side of me says,
'I'd like to talk to her, date her.
The other side of me says, 'I wonder how her head would look on a stick?"
Some Kemper-Related Quotes
By Kemper Himself
"...i had thought of annihilating the entire
block that i lived on..."
"...you know the head's 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. with a girl there's a lot left in the girl's body without a head..."
"...i just wanted to see what it would be like to shoot grandma..."
"...i wanted them to be part of me, and now they are..."
"...one side of me says, 'i'd like to talk to her, date her.' the other side of
me says, 'i wonder how her head would look on a stick?'"
"...i am the hunter, and they are the hunted"
By A Psychiatrist Re: His Adult Release
"...if i were seeing this patient without any history available or without
getting the history from him, i would think that we're dealing with a very well
adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence, and who was free of any
psychiatric illness. if effect, we are dealing with two different people when we
talk of the fifteen year old boy who committed the murder and the twenty-three
year old man we see before us now. it is my opinion that he had made a very
excellent response to the years of treatment and rehabilitation and i would see
no psychiatric reason to consider him to be of any danger to himself or to any
member of society..."
By John Douglas
Re: An awkward moment when he and Robert Ressler were accidentally left alone
with Kemper in a room unguarded
"...if he wanted to - and at one point he suggested that he might - he could
have twisted our heads off and set them down on the table for the guard to
find...as Ed Kemper put it, he was in for life, so what more could they do to
him if he killed one of us - take away his desert?..." (In the end Kemper did
nothing, was affable and chatty as always)
SERIAL KILLERS LIVE HERE
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