Edmund Kemper III
by Marlee MacLeod

When you’re 6’9’’, it’s hard to keep a low profile, and to this rather obvious fact, we may owe much of our insight into the mind of the serial killer. It must have occurred to Edmund Kemper, as he drove frantically eastward from the scene of his last two murders that the jig was most definitely up. His six previous murders had been so carefully planned and carried out. He had picked up young female hitchhikers, women with whom he’d had no previous contact, and after he’d killed them, he took great care to conceal their identities and eliminate evidence.But now, he had committed a murder, the circumstances of which would point straight to him—he had killed his mother in her own home. It would only be a matter of time until her body and that of her friend, whom he’d also dispatched, were discovered.

Police would soon begin searching for Edmund, and, with his unmistakable appearance, he must have known there was really nowhere for him to hide. So, exhausted and anxious, Edmund placed a call from a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado to the police in Santa Cruz, California. And he spilled his guts, so to speak.

Still, the scope and detail of his confession can’t be completely attributed to his appearance. If he’d wanted, he probably could’ve confessed only to his last two murders, keeping mum about the six hitchhikers. There was no direct evidence as of yet connecting him with any of those killings. He’d been careful, and because two other serial killers were operating in the Santa Cruz area at roughly the same time, police were confused as to who was killing whom. But Edmund had had a lot on his mind for a long time and was ready to be rid of all of it. Also, the size of his ego rivaled the size of his body, and once he was the center of police attention, he must have enjoyed the spotlight. He told them details that only he knew, that he expected they’d never be able to uncover on their own. He felt important and intelligent. He was relieved to be speaking openly of what he’d kept hidden for so long. And the police, recognizing all this, listened closely. Edmund talked and talked and talked, and when interrogators thought he couldn’t possibly give them anything else, he talked some more. Because he did talk, we know a lot about what motivates such a killer, what peculiar thoughts and fantasies occupy such a mind.

Edmund Emil Kemper III’s childhood parallels that of many serial killers—his parents, Clarnell and E.E. Kemper, Jr., had a stormy marriage and separated when Edmund was nine. They divorced four years later, and he pined for his absent father through a succession of stepfathers. In their new home of Helena, Montana his domineering mother and sisters belittled him, and as he grew older they banished him to the basement because they considered his sharing a room with his sister unseemly. His ever-increasing size was disconcerting, even when he was a pre-teen, and Clarnell constantly reminded him of this.

Not that his parents didn’t try—indeed, both Edmund’s parents were much more engaged in his upbringing and wellbeing than many parents were. But Edmund was difficult. He was unduly afraid of being physically hurt by other boys and unable to sustain friendships with his peers. He was unable to put the pain of his parents’ divorce behind him. He tortured and killed animals, and he entertained fantasies, which combined sex and violence from an early age. His mother found him dour and unmanageable, and he was sent to Los Angeles, at his own request, to live with his father and stepmother. Their reaction to him was the same as his mother’s—his strangeness was threatening, and they were quickly at their wits’ end for something to do with him. With frightened exasperation, Kemper Jr. sent Edmund away. Maude and Edmund Kemper, Sr. (Edmund’s paternal grandparents) had a seventeen-acre farm in North Fork, California, and Edmund was brought there during the Christmas holidays of 1963.

He was not pleased to be left at the farm with his grandparents when the holidays ended, but he began school anyway and seemed to make at least some progress. His teachers at Sierra Joint Union High School in nearby Tollhouse, California found him quiet, rather meek in fact. He caused no trouble, made average grades, and drew no undue attention to himself, apart from his size. At home with his grandparents, the situation was tense, but bearable. They found him disconcerting, as had his mother and father, but he kept busy and out from underfoot with his dog and a .22 rifle given to him by Kemper, Sr. He shot rabbits and gophers, and he shot birds (though he had been warned not to), but evidently contained his aggression to this one outlet. At the end of the school year he returned to his mother and sisters in Helena, ostensibly to spend the summer, but within two weeks he was back at the farm.

Upon his return, Maude Kemper commented that he had regressed. He seemed more sullen, more ominous, and now that he wasn’t in school, he was ever present at the farm. For his part, Edmund found his grandmother a nag and his grandfather a bore. His violent fantasies returned, this time starring Maude. He imagined her in the outhouse as he shot it full of holes. He lined her up unawares in the sites of his rifle and thought about what it would be like to kill her. As the tension at the farm mounted, his grandmother grew more nervous. She took Kemper, Sr.’s .45 caliber pistol with her on at least one outing, for fear it would fall into Edmund’s hands. She had warned him not to touch it, but obviously did not trust him to do as he was told. Edmund took this lack of trust as an insult, and brooded on it. All summer long, the tension grew.

On August 27, 1964, Edmund sat with Maude at the kitchen table, going over proofs from a children’s book she was writing. Looking up, she noticed Edmund had an odd stare, and frightening look she had seen many times before. It unnerved her, and she told him to stop it. After a moment, Edmund picked up his gun and whistled for his dog, saying he was headed out to shoot some gophers. Maude warned him not to shoot the birds, and returned her attention to her work. Edmund turned around upon exiting the house and watched her through the screen door. Her back was to him as he raised his rifle and took aim at her head. He fired once, and Maude slumped at the table. Then he fired twice more, hitting her in the back. Inside the house again, he wrapped her head in a towel and dragged the body into the bedroom. Within a few minutes, Kemper Sr. returned home from buying groceries. As he began to unload the truck Edmund took aim and shot him in the back of the head.

Edmund was dismayed, not only because of what he’d done, but because he knew he’d be caught. His grandparents weren’t the sorts to take off on a sudden extended vacation, so even if he hid their bodies, their friends and family would miss them immediately. Confused and fretful, he called his mother in Montana, who advised him to call the sheriff. He was taken in for questioning, and soon he confessed to both murders, saying he’d often thought of killing his grandmother, and that he’d killed his grandfather as an act of mercy, to protect him from seeing his dead wife and possibly having a heart attack. Edmund was incarcerated in Juvenile Hall while the California Youth Authority decided what to do with him. A court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed Edmund as paranoid and psychotic, and the Youth Authority committed him to Atascadero State Hospital. He entered the facility on December 6, 1964. He was not yet sixteen years old.

Atascadero State Hospital, though a secure facility, was by no means a prison. There were no guard towers, and the purpose of one’s stay was treatment, not penance. Edmund took an extensive battery of tests and began to gain insight, if not into the nature of his own crime, into what others thought of that crime. He didn’t accept actual responsibility for his crime, saying it had been beyond his control, but he worked hard at learning the language of treatment and appearing recovered. He worked in the psychology laboratory and helped administer tests. He took pride in doing a good job, which his doctors interpreted as a very good sign. Sociopaths (and Edmund had been diagnosed at Atascadero as that) were usually reluctant and uncooperative workers, but Edmund seemed eager to do his best.

Meanwhile, he got to know others at Atascadero, including serial rapists who shared stories of their crimes with him. The tales of their exploits made an impression, and his rapidly developing teenage sexual awareness became inextricably linked with domination and violence. In Atascadero, this kind of thinking seemed not perverse, but quite normal. His violent sexual fantasies became intricate and intense. And he took note of what the incarcerated rapists around him had done wrong. They had been caught because they hadn’t been smart—they left witnesses and evidence. They attacked women they knew, or they did their attacking in too public a place. Quietly, he filed this information in a corner of his mind. Although he hadn’t yet formed any concrete plan, he knew each fact, each story would be useful to him later. He didn’t share his fantasies with his doctors, though. For them, he behaved and worked hard. He claimed religious conversion and took to looking up any biblical reference he heard. He was clean-cut and conservative, intelligent and sheltered, and when he was released in 1969, the changes that had occurred in the outside world must have come as quite a shock. His renewed contact with the outside world began at a community college near Atascadero. While he attended school, he was still under the supervision of the Youth Authority.

Edmund was a square. All around him hippies sported long hair and flouted authority while he, with his short hair and neat mustache, wished fervently to be a law enforcement officer. His hopes were dashed. In addition to minimum height requirements both the local and state police had maximum height limits. Edmund was too tall to be a cop. To assuage his disappointment, he bought a motorcycle. With it, he could at least feel like a cop. Meanwhile, he did very well in his studies, and after three months, he was paroled for another eighteen months. His doctors at Atascadero had recommended strongly that he not be returned to his mother, who had relocated to Santa Cruz, California. Against their advice, the Youth Authority sent him straight to her.

Clarnell Strandberg (as she was now known, having been married and divorced again) held a responsible position as an administrative assistant on the University of California at Santa Cruz campus. She was competent and well liked, and the absence of her son had given her several years of relative peace (ex-husband aside). But verbal battles loud enough to be heard by the neighbors began upon Edmund’s arrival at her duplex in suburban Aptos. She still harangued and blamed him, and Edmund would later claim that she hounded him relentlessly about matters as trivial as whether he should get his teeth cleaned. Often he sought refuge at the Jury Room, a local bar frequented by off-duty police and deputies. He was still fascinated by law enforcement and whiled away many an hour discussing the merits and shortcomings of various sorts of guns and ammunition with the officers. He was respectful of them, and they referred to him as "Big Ed."

Edmund took various positions as a laborer, and finally secured one with the Division of Highways, which enabled him to move out of his mother’s home and into an apartment in Alameda, which he shared with a friend. Still, he said later, his mother continued to berate and belittle him. And he quickly wrecked his motorcycle twice. The Division of Highways gave him time off to recuperate from his broken left arm after the second accident. With an out-of-court settlement, he bought a car that looked very much like an unmarked police vehicle.

He equipped it with a radio transmitter and microphone and a large whip antenna, and he began to pick up hitchhikers. Small, pretty female hitchhikers. He watched how they reacted to him. He learned how to make them trust him. He delivered them safely to their destinations, and privately, he indulged in his violent fantasies, imagining what he would do to his captive hitchhikers when he finally got all the details taken care of, all the possibilities seen to. He began to outfit his car for his future plans. The antenna came off, and the passenger door was rigged to keep it from being opened from the inside. Plastic bags, knives, guns, and a blanket went into the trunk. Edmund picked up girl after girl, treating each as a sort of experiment, waiting for his moment. It took a while, more than a year of picking up girls and letting them go, but on May 7, 1972, Edmund’s moment finally came.

Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchese were students at Fresno State College, and they were hitchhiking to Stanford University after a couple of days in Berkeley. They never reached their destination, and the families of both filed missing persons reports, though it was hard to get the police to pursue such a case with gusto, what with so many runaways and transients around the Bay Area. Girls disappeared all the time, only to turn up sooner or later with this or that friend or boyfriend. Even if the police had sprung into immediate action it wouldn’t have done any good. Edmund had dispatched Mary Ann and Anita soon after picking them up. After driving them around for a bit, he took his gun out from under the seat and pulled off into a deserted area. He put Anita in the trunk of his car and turned his attention toward Mary Ann. He handcuffed her, laid her across the backseat face down, put a plastic bag over her head, then attempted to strangle her with a length of terrycloth. But she bit a hole in the bag and the cloth snapped. Frustrated, Edmund pulled out his knife and stabbed her repeatedly. Eventually, he slashed her throat. He removed Anita from the trunk and, with a larger knife, he began to stab her. She fought and screamed, but he eventually wore her down.

He drove around with the bodies in the car for a while, deciding what to do. Eventually he brought Mary Ann’s body into his apartment, where he undressed and dissected her. He also beheaded Anita’s body. Mary Ann’s body was buried in the plastic bag he’d used to try to suffocate her, and later Edmund would lead police to this site. He kept both their heads for a while, eventually disposing of them in a ravine. Mary Ann’s was found and identified in August. Neither Anita’s head nor her body was ever found.

No one suspected polite, clean-cut Edmund Kemper of anything untoward, so he continued to prowl. On the evening of September 14, 1972, he picked up Aiko Koo, a fifteen-year-old dancer of Korean descent, who was on her way to a dance class. She had tired of waiting for the bus and decided to hitchhike. Aiko caught onto his plan quickly and panicked. He convinced her that he was planning to use the gun to kill himself, and that if she didn’t try to signal police or passersby she would not be harmed. He drove into the mountains and turned off the main road, parking out of sight. He taped her mouth and tried to suffocate her by putting his thumb and index finger in her nostrils. She fought, but lost consciousness, only to awaken again moments later. Edmund began to suffocate her again, this time continuing until she stopped breathing completely. He removed her from the car, laid her on the ground, and raped her. With her own scarf, he strangled her, and when he was absolutely sure she was dead, he put her body in the trunk and drove away from the scene. He stopped soon at a local bar and had a couple of beers, and, after that, he went to his mother’s house. From time to time, he would open the trunk and gaze at his conquest. Late that night he brought Aiko’s body into his apartment and placed it on his bed. He dissected her just as he had Mary Ann and Anita, and he disposed of her head and hands in a different location than the rest of her body. Very little of her ever turned up, and her disappearance was not thought to be related to Mary Ann and Anita.

Four months passed. Other victims of other killers were found in the Bay Area and public concern was aroused, but Edmund was under no suspicion for any of the killings. On January 8, 1973 he bought a .22 caliber automatic pistol, even though he was forbidden to own a firearm because of his prior crime. He had no trouble with the purchase in spite of his record, but he feared that eventually the police might catch on to the fact that he was in illegal possession of a handgun. He stepped up his cruising and killing activities beginning that very day.

He picked up Cindy and drove her into the hills near Watsonville, where he forced her into the trunk and shot her with his new gun. The bullet lodged in her skull. Edmund had recently moved back in with his mother, so he brought the body to the duplex in Aptos and into his room there, and when Clarnell left for work the next morning he had sex with Cindy’s corpse. He dissected her in the bathtub, taking great care afterward to wash away all traces of what he’d done. He removed the bullet from her skull and buried the head in his mother’s back yard. Later he threw the body parts, which he put in plastic bags, off a cliff. This time, however, the body was discovered within twenty-four hours. Edmund took notice, but still wasn’t really worried. He’d been extraordinarily careful. Within a month he was ready to kill again.

On the night of February 5, 1973, Edmund and Clarnell had a monumental row, and Edmund stormed out of the apartment, keyed up and ready to strike. He picked up Rosalind first and engaged her in conversation. In a short while, he stopped for another hitchhiker, Alice. She had no trepidation about getting in the car, what with Rosalind already there and the UC Santa Cruz parking sticker (which Clarnell had procured) prominently displayed. They rode for a while, and this time Edmund didn’t even stop the car to do his killing. He drew Rosalind’s attention to a lovely view off to the passenger side, and as she looked, he slowed down, drew his .22, and shot her in the head. Quickly, he pointed the gun at Alice in the back seat and fired several times. Unlike Rosalind, she didn’t die immediately. He shot her again point blank once he got out of town, and that finished her off. Pulling into a cul-de-sac, he quickly transferred the bodies to the trunk.

He stopped for gas, then went to his mother’s duplex, which he quickly left again, claiming to need cigarettes. Once outside the apartment, he pulled the car to the street, opened the trunk, and beheaded the bodies. The next morning, he brought Alice’s body inside and had sex with it in his room. He also brought in Rosalind’s head so he could remove the bullet that had lodged in it, as he had done before with Cindy’s. He drove away from Santa Cruz to dispose of most of the body parts, then on to Pacifica to get rid of the heads and hands.

Clarnell Strandberg never seemed to show any suspicion that Edmund was up to such depravity, and she probably didn’t suspect that she’d become his victim. But on Easter weekend, roughly a month after the killings of Rosalind and Alice, he decided the time had come to be rid of her. He waited all night in his room while Clarnell slept peacefully, carefully considering what he was about to do. At 5:15 a.m., he got a hammer from the kitchen and went to her bedroom. He struck her once, very hard, and then slashed her throat. Within a minute, he had killed and beheaded her, removing her larynx in the process. He tried to put it down the garbage disposal, but the machine spat it back out, which Edmund found darkly appropriate and not at all surprising. He hid her body in a closet and cleaned up a bit, then left the house.

That afternoon he pondered what to do, and decided that if someone else were found dead with his mother, then suspicion might point away from him. Returning to the duplex, he called Sara Hallett, a friend of Clarnell’s, to invite her dinner. He wasn’t able to reach her immediately, and he fretted about his plan until Sara called for Clarnell at around 5:00 p.m. He made the invitation, saying the dinner was a surprise for his mother. When Sara arrived he strangled her, first manually, and finally, with the scarf he had obtained from Aiko. He then removed Sara’s clothes and put her on his bed, and sometime that night attempted to have sex with her corpse.

On Easter Sunday morning, he left town, driving east in Sara’s car. Fearing discovery, he rented another car and dropped off Sara’s car at a gas station, telling the attendant it needed repair. He drove for eighteen hours, stopping only for gas and sodas and No-Doz. He was stopped in Colorado for speeding, but his seemingly staid, quiet appearance belied his crimes. He paid his fine and moved on. Finally, exhausted, he stopped in Pueblo, Colorado. He placed a call to the Santa Cruz Police Department, where he already knew several of the officers, and he began his marathon confession.

The initial contact required several calls. First, he had to convince the Santa Cruz Police he wasn’t a crank caller. Then he had to help them find him. He was disoriented and wasn’t quite sure how to lead police to the Pueblo phone booth from which he was placing his calls. When he was taken into custody, a party of investigators from Santa Cruz headed for Pueblo, where they would question Edmund about the crimes for which he claimed responsibility. As their tape recorder rolled, Edmund talked, giving incredibly explicit and detailed confessions to all eight murders

Upon his return to Santa Cruz, Edmund led investigators to the various disposal sites he had used and continued his seemingly endless confession. When he was finally finished, he’d been so thorough that he left his court-appointed public defender, James Jackson, no avenue for defense except that of insanity.

A series of witnesses was brought in to try to establish that Edmund was not responsible for his crimes, but the prosecutor undermined the testimony of each one. Prosecution witness, Dr. Joel Fort, did the most damage to Edmund’s insanity defense. He had spent quite a bit of time reviewing Edmund’s case, going all the way back to his diagnoses after the killing of his grandparents and during his time at Atascadero. He had also interviewed Edmund, eliciting previously unknown information about his sexual practices with the bodies, and even cannibalism.

Edmund was not a paranoid schizophrenic, Fort said. He was obsessed with sex and violence, and he craved attention, going so far as to slash his own wrists with a ball point pen during the trial in an ostensible suicide attempt, but he was not insane. Furthermore, Fort said, if he were ever released he would kill again, and he would kill the same sort of victim. During the three weeks of the trial, no witness, not even Edmund’s sister or his doctors from Atascadero, was able to convince the jury that Edmund was insane. They deliberated for only five hours, and they found Edmund guilty of first-degree murder on all eight counts. After a short observation stint at Vacaville Medical Facility, he was sent to the maximum-security prison at Folsom for the rest of his life.

Edmund Kemper remains behind bars. Since he was put away in 1973, countless other serial killers, many just as brutal and depraved as he, have captured our attention. Edmund, as if to maintain his place in our consciousness, remains eager to speak of his crimes. He has done extensive interviews with Robert Ressler of the FBI, which were aimed at building the FBI’s nascent serial killer profiling program. In 1988, he participated, along with the notorious John Wayne Gacy, in a satellite broadcast during which each killer discussed his crimes. As always, he was loquacious and explicit, and he seemed to have garnered quite a bit of psychological insight into the nature of his crimes. In prison, he is well behaved and cooperative, and seems to take great pride in his status as the "genius" serial killer who aided in his own capture and conviction. He knows, as we know, that his release would lead to tragedy, and he is aware of and resigned to the fact that he isn’t going anywhere. That’s okay with him, and it’s certainly okay with us.