The Case of Edmund Emil Kemper
Childhood, Adolescence
Edmund Emil Kemper III was born on Dec. 18, 1948, in Burbank, California. He grew up with two younger sisters in a dysfunctional family in which his mother, Clarnell, and father, Ed junior, fought constantly and eventually separated. Among other belittling cruelties, once the sensitive Ed and his two sisters reached puberty and began to grow dramatically tall, Clarnell banished him to a makeshift basement bedroom, fearing he might try to molest his sisters. After Ed displayed a range of strange behavior, including dismemberment of two family cats and playing "gas chamber" with his sister, his mother packed him off to her estranged husband. When he ran away and went back to his mother, he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents on a remote California farm in 1965, when he was 15 years old. There, he was miserably bored (having an IQ well over 120) and lonely, cut off from his family and school. In 1963, the 14-year-old shot his grandmother, who had insisted that he help her with the housework insted of accompanying his grandfather into the fields, and repeatedly stabbed her, then shot his grandfather too. Then questioned by the police afterward, he just said that he was curious how it would feel to shoot his grandmother. Ed was diagnosed of "personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive type", and was committed to the Atascadero State Mental Hospital for the criminally insane. During this time, he took dozens of mental tests and did well on them, possibly because he was able to find out the answers that the mental-health personnel found appropriate. Later, he would let it be known that he had memorized 28 of the tests and the correct answers. He was let out in 1969 at 21, over the objection of state psychiatrists, and placed in the custody of his mother who was now working as a secretary at the University of California at Santa Cruz. By now, Ed was wix foot nine (well over 2 metres) and weighed arount 150 kgs.
Adult life
After coming out of prison for the murder of his grandparents, Ed Kemper went back to live with his mother, Clarnell, at her insistence. Yet, having fought to get him out of the institution, she then berated him steadily, saying that he was responsible for her dating problems. His mother showed more interest in and empathy for students she met casually in her job than she did for her own son. Ed worked as a laborer at a Green Giant canning plant. In terms of sexuality, Kemper was still a virgin, however, he liked to use pornography and detective magazines for erotic and violent stimulations. His murderous fantasies had not abated, they had on the contrary grown more detailed and intense. Kemper started to work for the state highway department in 1971, and then put in an application to become a state trooper. Several law enforcement agencies turned him down, evidently because of his size, but he began to hang out with the police in Santa Cruz. He borrowed handcuffs, a training-school badge and a gun. In February 1971, he had a motorcycle accident, for which he was awarded $ 15,000 in damages. The cast on his arm made it impossible to do the highway work, so now he had money and time on hie hands. His mother worked at the local University, where Kemper often picked her up after work. He had been stable while in custody, coping with his murderous fantasies, but that was not an indication that he would be capable of living on the outside without again resorting to murder.
Ed Kemper, the serial killer
After one particularly harrowing argument with his mother in Spring 1972 - a precrime stressor precipitating murderous actions -, Kemper drove away and went out searching for a good-looking victim, and soon found two hitchhiking college students. He had his handcuffs and badge, as well as a knife and the borrowed gun. Pointing the gun at the girls, he told them he was going to rape them, and pulled off the highway onto a side road. Evidently, the women believed that they were not going to be killed, and therefore decided not to fight back at first. Kemper was able to talk one girl into climbing into the trunk, then he got in the backseat of his car, handcuffed and tied up the second girl, then stabbed and strangled her. He did not use the gun, because bullets from it could be traced. After killing the first girl, he opened the trunk and stabbed the second to death. With the two bodies in the car, he drove to his apartment, and there he decapitated the bodies and cut off their hands.
At the apartment, he cleaned himself up as much as possible. There was still blood on the cast; later, he'd cover this up with white shoe polish until he could convince his doctors to make a new cast for him. The amount of blood and the difficulties Kemper experienced in killing the women with a knife shook him, and he vowed that the next killings would be less messy. That night, he took off all the clothing from the dead bodies and copulated with them. Next morning, he realized that he had made at least three mistakes that could have gotten him caught, and he decided to proceed even more carefully from then on. As he had fantasized doing in Atascadero, that day he dumped and buried the bodies in several different places, the heads in a different spot from the torsos, and the hands in a third location. Anyone who found the torsos would be unable to identify the bodies, because there would be no faces or dental work, and no fingerprints. The burial sites were in a different county from the one where he had picked up the hitchhikers. He disposed of the victims' clothing in remote canyons in the Santa Cruz mountains. The women were reported missing but were not found for several months. In August, the severed head of one girl was discovered. It yielded her identity but absolutely no clues as to how she had died.
By that time, Kemper's mother was lobbying hard to have Ed^s juvenile record of the murders of his grandparents sealed by the court. The district attorney objected, saying they should be kept open at least ten more years. A psychiatric examination of Kemper was scheduled for mid-September. Four days before that test, Kemper went out hunting again. He picked up an attractive woman hitchhiking with her twelve-year-old son. As he drove away, he noticed that the woman's friend who saw her off had taken down his license plate number, so he ferried the mother and son to their destination and then returned to the outskirts of Berkeley, nearly desperate to find a victim. This indicates a highly organized offender whose intellect is firmly in control of his compulsion to kill. He saw an Asian girl, a fifteen-year-old ballet student, and picked her up. Told she was being kidnapped, the girl became hysterical, but when he pulled out a new gun borrowed from another friend, she quieted, and he kept her docile by saying that he had problems and wanted to talk to her about them. Stopping the car just north of Santa Cruz, he smothered her until she was unconscious, raped her, then strangled her to death with her own scarf and had intercourse with the corpse. With the body in the trunk of the car, Kemper then decided to go visit his mother for a while; it was strangely pleasurable for him to chat with her while he had a dead girl in the car. Later in the evening, in his apartment, Kemper placed the body in his bed and again had intercourse. In the morning, he spent several hours meticulously dismembering the body, flushing the fluids down the drain and afterward pouring Drano in the drain to remove any evidence from the system. Then he took to the back roads with his burden. He buried the hands in one county, the torso in another, and kept the head in the trunk of his car. The head was still in the trunk when he went to visit on e of the psychiatrists appointed by the court. That, too, must have given Kemper a kick.
Both psychiatrists who examined him in September 1972 concluded that he had made excellent progress during this time at Atascadero. Since both psychiatrists recommended the sealing of the records so that Kemper could get on with his life, on November 29, 1972, they were officially sealed.
After killing the Asian dancer, Kemper was able to keep a lid on his murderous impulses for the several months before and just after his juvenile records were sealed. With the turn of the new year, however, the urge to kill resurfaced. He returned the guns that he had borrowed from his friends ans sought one of his own. Now that his records were sealed, he had a legal right to own a gun, which he purchased not much later. On that same afternoon, in daylight, he picked up another hitchhiker, a quite heavy young girl. He told her he wanted to talk, and she seemed sympathetic. Nonetheless, he killed her with a single bullet from his new gun, then drove to his mother's home. She wasn't there, so Kemper took the body from the car and stashed it in his bedroom closet. After his mother left for work the next morning, he dismembered it. Part of the reason for severing the head was to remove the spent bullet from it so there would be no ballistic evidence to connect him with the crime. He threw the body parts over a remote cliff into the sea. Some of them were found within a few days. The head he buried underneath his mother's window. By now, many people had become frightened by the killings of young girls in the area, and security forces were on alert.
Less than a month later, in February 1973, and after a particularly heated argument with his mother, Kemper went onto the UCSC campus, picked up two young women, and shot them both before reaching the perimeter of the campus. The students were not quite dead, and one was groaning audibly when Kemper pulled up to the gates where two armed young rookie guards were manning the post. The men looked right into the car but either did not see the dying women or did not understand what they were viewing in the dark interior of the car. Though the exterior of the car was a drab tan, the interior was black. The woman in the front seat, dressed in black, was partially tumbled over into the wheel well, and the one in the back was covered by a blanket that Kemper had purposefully kept in the car for just such an occasoin. The guards paid more attention to the campus sticker on the window he had obtained through his mother than to the moaning bundles in the car, and they let them pass. For Ed, this was a moment of triumph. These bodies, too, he handled boldly when his mother was nearby, seemingly excited by the possibility that she might discover him doing it. He decapitated them in the trunk of the car while it sat in her driveway and took the heads into the house so he could look at them in his bedroom. Masturbation would be a part of this ghastly ritual. He returned the heads to the car in the morning, and kept all the parts in the car for the next day and more, driving the car to the home of some friends, where he had dinner. Later in the evening, he dumped the parts in various places, again taking care to remove the bullets from the heads.
There was a bullet hole in the car, however, and too much blood in the trunk for him to wash away completely, and other such telltale evidence. In early April, he bought another gun, a .44 pistol. When a sheriff received the record of the sale of the weapon, he remembered something about Kemper's early conviction, and decided to make a check on it. Finding the record sealed, he nevertheless drove to Kemper's apartment and asked him for the pistol; he would hold it until a court decided whether it was legal for Kemper to own a weapon. Kemper opened the trunk of his car and, without an argument, gave the pistol to the sheriff. The sheriff was satisfied with that and did not search the car thoroughly - and did not find the .22 murder weapon that was concealed under a seat. After the sheriff left, however, Kemper started playing what-if games in his mind. What if the authorities came back and searched his car, his apartment, his mother's home? He later told the police that it was then that he decided he must kill his mother and surrender.
The final act
Two weeks after that incident, on April 20, 1973, Kemper went to his mother's home. She arrived later, after a faculty meeting, and they had a brief conversation in which his mother was, as usual, sarcastic to him. Once she had fallen asleep, at five in the morning, Kemper took a claw hammer from the kitchen and, as he had done so often in his imagination, went into her bedroom while she slept. This time, he actually brought the hammer down with considerable force on her right temple, then slashed her throat with his pocketknife. Blood was still gushing from her as he decided to sever the head as he had done with his other victims. Another slice removed her larynx, and he threw this part into the disposal unit in the kitchen sink. When the disposal was unable to digest the larynx and spewed it back out, Kemper thought this was poetic justice. He wrapped the body in the bloody sheets and stashed it in the closet. Later in the morning, he went to the bar that was the police hangout, and to the gun shop, and talked calmly to some friends, even trying to borrow a gun from one of them, who refused. That afternoon, however, he reasoned that since this was a holiday weekend, family members or one of his mother's close friends who also worked at the university might well appear at the house and discover the body. Directly after he did kill her, he called her friend Sally Hallett over for a surprise dinner, whereupon he clubbed and strangled and decapitated her, placed her headless body in his bed, then went to sleep in his mother's bed before setting out on a multistate car journey that ultimately ended when he contacted olice from a Colorado phone booth and told them to come and get him. He'd gotten it out of his system and so was ready to give up. Once in custody, he was determined to give the police the evidence they needed to convict him. He was convinced that they would never have found it on their own, and that if he had simply confessed and not led them point by point to physical evidence, a smart lawyer might later be able to discount the confession an enable Kemper to escape conviction. And so, in addition to confessing, he told police just where to find the bodies in his mother's home, and, even before the public was made aware of these killings, led police to the dump and burial sites of several of the other victims, and so on. Kemper later said that in the course of the murders, there was always some detail that didn't happen as planned, or that he felt could have been more perfect. That imperfection pushed him to kill the next time. The actual act of murder, he concluded, was never as good as the fantasy, and never would be.
Trial and punishment
Awaiting trial, Kemper attempted twice to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, and was soon transferred to a solitary cell. The trial itself was rather short - the evidence was there, and it showed clear premeditation. All psychiatrists asked testified that Kemper was sane at the times he committed his crimes. Kemper was put into prison, where he calmed down and became a well-behaved inmate, accepted into the prison population, gradually given increasing amounts of privileges within the institution. Robert K. Ressler (Whoever fights monsters, 261): "It's more useful to keep a man such as Ed Kemper alive, so we can study him."
[Parts of this article were taken or adapted from Robert K. Ressler/Tom Shachtman, Whoever Fights Monsters,1992, 247 ff.]
Top of Page
|
