Unhinged Minds
California
Ed Kemper
Basic Facts
Full name: Edmund ‘Ed’ Emil Kemper III. Nicknames include Co-ed Killer, Co-ed Butcher and Ogre of Aptos.
Lived: 18th December 1948 – Present day.
Date apprehended: April 24th, 1973.
Victims: 10
Criminal Penalty: Eight life sentences
Ed Kemper was known for his large size of 6ft 9 inches and said to have been a clever child with a higher than average IQ. His dark childhood and abuse from his mother were said to be the purpose for his murders, which spanned between 1964 and 1973, Kemper later admitted.
When Kemper was a child, he already had dark thoughts. His sister used to tease him about finding his school teacher attractive and told him to kiss her. He replied, “If I kiss her, I’d have to kill her first”. He also cut the heads off of his childhood pet cats, putting their heads on sticks as a trophy. Kemper’s abusive mother also used to frequently lock her son in a dark basement alone at night, allegedly because she was afraid, he would rape his own sister. Aged 14, he ran away from home to his father’s house whose new partner was also scared of Kemper. Therefore, he was sent to live with his grandparents. Kemper claimed his grandmother was very abusive too. On August 27th, 1964 Kemper fatally shot his grandmother in the head before firing twice more into her back. When asked why he did this, he replied “I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma”. When his grandfather returned to the home, Kemper shot him in the driveway so he wouldn’t have to see that Kemper had killed his wife. He immediately called his mother as he didn’t know what to do next who made him phone the police. He was taken to Atascadero State Hospital as he was said to be a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’. Psychiatrists there strongly disagreed with this diagnosing for various reasons, believing there were no signs of hallucinations, delusions or no bizarre thinking. They recorded his IQ there at a higher than average, 145.
After just under 5 years of confinement and treatment, Kemper was released on his 21st birthday, December 18th, 1969. He was released to his mother even though many of the psychiatrists were against this. He began work with the State of California Highway Department and once he had saved enough money, he moved out of his mother’s home to live with a friend. The same year, when driving around the area in the car he had bought, he noticed there were a lot of young women hitchhiking at the side of the road. It was then he started to begin storing plastic bags, knives, blankets and handcuffs in his car. From then, he began picking up girls and just peacefully letting them go. Kemper said he picked up around 150 women before he began to feel homicidal, sexual urges.
On May 7th, 1972 was when Kemper started killing again. He picked up two 18-year-old’s hitchhiking together and told them he would drive them to where they needed to go. After driving for an hour, he managed to reach a secluded wooded area without alerting passengers that he had changed directions from where they wanted to go. Here, he intended to rape them but had learned from rapists he spent time with in confinement when he killed his grandparents, that you should not leave witnesses. So instead, he strangled them both and then stabbed them, one after the other. He then put the two bodies in the boot of his car but was stopped by the police on the way home. He had a broken taillight. However, he was let off with a warning and arrived at his apartment. His roommate was out so he took the bodies into the apartment where he took photos of them. He also had sexual intercourse with the corpses before dismembering them. With the heads, he engaged in irrumatio [irrumatio – the act of a man thrusting his penis into someone else’s mouth]. He put the body parts into plastic bags and then disposed of them near Loma Prieta Mountain, one of the highest peaks in Northern California.
4 months later, Kemper struck again. On September 14th, 1972 Kemper picked up a 15-year-old student who had missed her bus. He again, drove her to a remote area and pulled a gun on the girl. Despite his high IQ, he managed to accidentally lock himself out of his car, but he gained her trust and she let him back in. He then choked the girl, raped her and then killed her. Kemper put the body in the boot of his car and went to a nearby bar and had a few drinks. He then returned to his car, drove back to his apartment and had intercourse with the corpse before dismembering the body and disposing of the remains in a similar manner as before.
It was January 7th, 1973 when Kemper’s next known murder took place. By this time, he had moved back in with his mother. He was out driving again and picked up an 18-year-old hitchhiker. He drove her to a wooden area where he fatally shot her with a pistol. He placed her body in the boot of his car and drove to his mother’s house where he kept the body in his wardrobe until his mother left for work the next morning. He then had sex with the corpse before dismembering the body in his mother’s bathtub and then throwing the remains off a cliff. He however, kept the head. For several days he regularly engaged in irrumatio with the head. In the meantime, the rest of the girl’s body had been discovered, police describing piecing her body together “like a macabre jigsaw”. They determined that she had been cut to pieces with a power saw. Kemper buried her head in his mother’s garden, her face facing upward towards his mother’s bedroom. When asked why he put the head there, Kemper replied that his mother “always wanted people to look up to her”.
February 5th, 1973 almost a month later was Kemper’s next two murders. He picked up two friends hitchhiking, a 20-year-old and a 23-year-old. When they entered his car, he shot them both with a pistol and then wrapped their bodies in blankets and drove back to his mother’s house. He beheaded the bodies in the car and then carried the headless corpses into the house to have sexual intercourse with them. He again, dismembered the bodies, removed the bullets as he did with his last victim – so it couldn’t be traced back to his gun – and discarded their remains. Some of the remains were found by passers-by in two different locations over the next month. Kemper sought public recognition and acclaim for his murders. So, between the murders he committed he used to socialise and drink in ‘The Jury Room’, a bar where local police officers would often drink and socialise. Unbeknownst to them, they were socialising with the man who they were pursuing. Kemper always wanted to be a police officer but was turned away due to his size, so he enjoyed making friends with the officers, asking questions about their cases and the law. They called him “Big Eddie” due to his huge size.
It was April 20th, 1973 that Kemper finally realised he was ready to indulge in his ultimate fantasy and kill his mother. He murdered her that day with a claw hammer and slit her throat with a knife. He performed irrumatio with his mother’s head before using it as a dart board, continuously throwing darts at her face. He then cut out her tongue and voice box and put it in the garbage disposal. However, the disposal could not break down the tough vocal chords so ejected them. Kemper later admitted he found this amusing and said it was appropriate as "she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years”. He then hid her corpse in the wardrobe and went out for a drink. Once he had returned, he decided to call his mother’s best friend over to the house. When she arrived, Kemper strangled her to death, then decapitated her. He spent the night with her corpse and then left the scene, driving non-stop to Colorado. He listened on the radio for news of the murders but heard nothing so, he decided to telephone his friends at his local police force. His friends there initially thought their friend Big Eddie was just pulling a prank on them. Several calls later he finally convinced them he was being serious, revealing details about his crimes that only the killer would know so they came and picked him up and arrested him. When asked why he handed himself in, he said, “the original purpose was gone” now he had killed his mother.
On May 7th, 1973 Kemper was indicted on 8 counts of first-degree murder. When in custody, he tried to commit suicide twice, but he managed to survive both times. Once Kemper had confessed to the crimes giving explicit and very detailed accounts, his councils only option was for him to plead not guilty by reasoning of insanity to all eight charges. On October 23rd, 1973 his trial went ahead, and he admitted that he had also engaged in cannibalism, saying he had sliced flesh from the legs of his victims, then cooked and consumed them in a casserole, though he admitted he knew this was wrong. On November 8th, 1973 after the jury had convened for five hours, they declared Kemper sane and guilty on all eight counts of first-degree murder. Kemper asked for the death penalty but as this was not available at the time, he received 7 years to life for each of the eight counts and is still currently serving them at California Medical Facility.
Kemper is still in prison now, though is often described as a model prisoner. He has spent over 5,000 hours narrating books for the blind in prison though was retired from this position in 2015 after he had a stroke, rendering him medically disabled. He has been denied parole 8 times so far, the last being in 2017. Kemper’s next eligibility for parole is in 2024.
In an interview by a reporter during a prison interview, Ed Kemper was asked how he felt when he saw a pretty girl after he had killed his mother. He replied, “One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side says, ‘I wonder how her head would look like on a stick?’”.