Edmund Kemper

• 1. A Call From Colorado

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  Edmund Kemper stood in a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado, in the spring of 1973 and confessed to murder. The police officer who answered did not believe him. Kemper was told to call back later. He had just driven more than 1,000 miles, kept awake by caffeine pills, with three guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in his car.

  How does a boy raised in the wreckage of a bitter marriage become a man who telephones the police to report his own crimes? Why did doctors and officials keep trusting someone who studied them as closely as they studied him? What happened in the months before that phone call, and what finally made him stop? And why, decades later, did FBI investigators still travel to sit across a table from him?

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• 2. A Giant Child

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  Edmund Emil Kemper III was born in Burbank, California, on the 18th of December 1948, weighing 13 pounds. By the age of four he stood a head taller than other children. He was the middle child of three and the only son of Clarnell Elizabeth Kemper, a Montana native, and Edmund Kemper Jr. His father was a World War II veteran who had tested nuclear weapons at the Pacific Proving Grounds and later worked as an electrician.

  Strange rituals marked his early years. With his younger sister's dolls, he staged ceremonies that ended with the heads and hands pulled off. When his elder sister Susan teased him about kissing his teacher, he answered, "If I kiss her, I'd have to kill her first." He later said that as a small boy he crept out at night with his father's bayonet to watch his second-grade teacher through her windows.

  His favorite games, he recalled, were "Gas Chamber" and "Electric Chair." He had his younger sister tie him up and pretend to flip a switch. Then he would collapse and thrash on the floor as if being executed. In later accounts he also said that his cousin and elder sister molested him and that both parents beat him. He also said his elder sister once tried to push him in front of a train and once pushed him into the deep end of a pool, where he nearly drowned.

  The marriage of his parents fell apart. They separated in 1957 and divorced in 1961, and Kemper, who was close to his father, was devastated. Clarnell sneered at her husband's "menial" work as an electrician. Edmund Jr. later said that wartime suicide missions and atomic bomb tests were nothing compared to living with her. He claimed she wore on him more than "three hundred and ninety-six days and nights of fighting on the front."

  After the divorce, Kemper moved with his mother to Helena, Montana. By his own account she was a domineering, neurotic alcoholic who belittled and humiliated him. She made him sleep in a locked basement because she feared he would hurt his sisters. Once he overheard her telling his father on the phone that he was "a real weirdo." He said she withheld affection for fear of turning him gay, and told him no woman would ever love him. He called her "big, ugly, and awkward" and a "sick, angry woman."

  At the age of 10, Kemper killed a family cat and later said he enjoyed fooling his family about what he had done. At 13 he killed a second cat that he believed preferred his sister to him, and he kept pieces of it in his closet.

  At 14 he ran away to his father in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, and found that his father had remarried and now had a stepson. Kemper concluded that his father cared more for the new family than for the old one. He was then sent to live with his paternal grandparents on a ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills, on Road 224, about two miles west of North Fork. Accounts differ on whether his father or his mother made the arrangement. He called his grandfather "senile" and said his grandmother "emasculated" him. Within a year, that ranch would become the scene of his first killings.

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• 3. The Model Patient

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  On the 27th of August 1964-15-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother, Maude Matilda Kemper, with a rifle after an argument. He hit her once in the head and twice in the back, then stabbed her several times. When his grandfather, Edmund Emil Kemper Sr., came home, Kemper shot him dead in the driveway. He then phoned his mother, who told him to call the police. He did, and he waited for them to arrive.

  He told officers he "just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma." He said he killed his grandfather because the old man would have been angry with him. Court psychiatrists decided that a crime so incomprehensible must come from madness, and they diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. Kemper was sent to Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility in San Luis Obispo County for mentally ill convicts.

  At Atascadero, psychiatrists and social workers from the California Youth Authority reached a different conclusion. Their reports found "no flight of ideas, no interference with thought, no expression of delusions or hallucinations, and no evidence of bizarre thinking." They described him as intelligent and introspective. His first IQ test scored 136, more than two standard deviations above average. A later test produced 145. He was re-diagnosed with a "personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive type."

  Kemper made himself useful to the staff. He was a model prisoner, and he was trained to give psychiatric tests to other inmates. One psychiatrist later remarked that he was a very good worker who took pride in his work, which was not typical of a sociopath. Kemper joined the Jaycees and claimed to have helped develop new scales for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, including an "Overt Hostility Scale."

  After his second arrest, he explained what that work had given him. Understanding how the tests functioned let him manipulate the psychiatrists who evaluated him. He said he learned a great deal from the sex offenders he tested. The same doctors would soon be asked whether he was safe to release.

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• 4. Big Ed in Santa Cruz

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  On the 18th of December 1969, his 21st birthday, Kemper was paroled from Atascadero. Hospital psychiatrists advised against it, yet he was released into his mother's care. Clarnell had remarried, taken the surname Strandberg, and divorced again. She lived in Aptos, California, a short drive from her job as an administrative assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  Kemper stood 6 ft 9 in tall, which earned him the nickname "Big Ed." He attended community college as his parole required and hoped to become a police officer. The police turned him down because of his size. He stayed close to Santa Cruz officers anyway, and described himself as a "friendly nuisance" at the Jury Room, a bar where local cops gathered.

  He drifted through menial jobs until 1971, when he joined the State of California Division of Highways. Life with his mother stayed bitter. Neighbors often heard their shouting matches. Kemper later described them as horrendous, vicious battles, and he remembered one roof-raiser over whether he should have his teeth cleaned. When he saved enough money, he moved to Alameda to live with a friend. His mother kept phoning and dropping in on him, and money trouble repeatedly sent him back to her apartment in Aptos.

  The doctors who monitored his parole grew more admiring. On the 29th of November 1972, his juvenile records were permanently expunged. The final report from his probation psychiatrists said that without his history, they would see "a very well-adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence and who was free of any psychiatric illnesses." They saw no psychiatric reason to consider him a danger to anyone.

  In 1971 a car hit Kemper as he rode a newly bought motorcycle, badly injuring his arm. He sued the driver and received a $15,000 settlement. Part of the money bought a 1969 Ford Galaxie. Driving it, he noticed how many young women stood hitchhiking along the roads. He began keeping plastic bags, knives, blankets and handcuffs in the car.

  For a while, he picked up hitchhikers and simply let them go. By his count, he did this with around 150 women. That was before he felt the homicidal sexual urges he called his "little zapples." Later he blamed his victims, saying they were "flaunting in his face the fact that they could do any damn thing they wanted." Another side of his life that year was an engagement, and it would end only when he was arrested.

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• 5. The Co-ed Killings

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  On the 7th of May 1972, Kemper picked up two 18-year-old Fresno State students in Berkeley, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. They hoped to visit friends at Stanford University. Kemper drove them to a wooded area near Alameda that he knew from his highway job, never telling them he had changed course. He killed both women. He later said he chose them because they seemed upper middle class, unlike the hippies he disliked.

  A police officer stopped Kemper that night because of a broken taillight and did not notice the bodies in his car. In August, Pesce's skull turned up on Loma Prieta Mountain. A large search found no trace of the rest of her, and none of Luchessa.

  On the evening of the 14th of September 1972, Kemper offered a ride to 15-year-old Aiko Koo, a Korean dance student. She had missed her bus and decided to hitchhike to class. He killed her too. Afterward he stopped at a bar for a few drinks, and he later said he looked at the trunk of his car, "admiring his catch like a fisherman." Koo's mother reported her missing and posted hundreds of flyers, but no one came forward with information.

  By the time the state approved that glowing parole report, three women were already dead.

  On the 7th of January 1973, Kemper was back living with his mother when he picked up 18-year-old Cynthia "Cindy" Schall near the Cabrillo College campus. He shot her with a .22 caliber pistol. He hid her body in the closet of his room overnight, and the next morning, after his mother left for work, he dismembered it. He buried Schall's head in his mother's garden, facing up toward her bedroom window. After his arrest he explained that his mother "always wanted people to look up to her." Over the next few weeks searchers found all her remains except the head and right hand. A pathologist determined she had been cut apart with a power saw.

  On the 5th of February 1973, after a heated argument with his mother, Kemper went looking for another victim. Students had been warned to accept rides only from cars with university stickers. His mother worked at UC Santa Cruz, so Kemper had one. On campus he picked up 23-year-old Rosalind Thorpe, who chatted with him believing he was a fellow student. Soon after, he stopped for 20-year-old Alice "Allison" Liu. He shot both women. Some of their remains were found at Eden Canyon a week later, and more near Route 1 in March.

  Asked why he beheaded his victims, Kemper said the head fantasies were "a bit like a trophy," because "the head is where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That's the person."

  Kemper often went hunting after fights with his mother. He and his psychiatrists have both said the young women were stand-ins for the person he most wanted to destroy.

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• 6. The Night in Aptos

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  On the 20th of April 1973, Clarnell Strandberg came home from a party and woke her son. She sat in bed reading, noticed him standing in the doorway, and said, "I suppose you're going to want to sit up all night and talk now." Kemper answered, "No, good night." He waited until she slept. Then he returned with a claw hammer and a penknife and killed her.

  He went on to mutilate her body. In a 1984 interview he said he had "humiliated her corpse." He put her head on a shelf, screamed at it for an hour, and threw darts at it. He also cut out her larynx and dropped it into the garbage disposal, which could not grind the tough vocal cords and spat the tissue back into the sink. "That seemed appropriate," Kemper said, "as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years."

  He hid his mother's body in a closet and went to a nearby bar for a drink. When he came back, he phoned her best friend, 59-year-old Sara Taylor "Sally" Hallett, and invited her over for dinner and a movie. She was strangled as soon as she arrived. Kemper put her body in another closet, tidied away signs of a struggle, and left a note for the police. It mocked them, claiming the killing had been quick and clean, short only on time, because he had things to do.

  Then he ran. Convinced that a manhunt was underway, he drove through the night toward Colorado. Along the road, the radio said nothing about the two deaths. That silence was what pushed him to the phone booth. After the first officer brushed him off, he called again hours later and asked for a policeman he personally knew. To that officer he confessed to killing his mother and Hallett, and then he waited to be arrested. In custody he also admitted to murdering the six students.

  Asked later why he gave himself up, he said "the original purpose was gone." It wasn't serving any physical or emotional purpose, he explained, and near the end he felt "the folly of the whole damn thing." At a point of near exhaustion, he said, he "called it all off."

  Back in California, investigators now had names to attach to remains scattered across ravines, canyons and roadsides.

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• 7. Sane and Guilty

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  On the 7th of May 1973, Kemper was indicted on eight counts of first-degree murder. His lawyer was Jim Jackson, the chief public defender of Santa Cruz County. Kemper's confession was so explicit and detailed that Jackson had one realistic option, a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. While in custody, Kemper tried to kill himself twice. His trial began on the 23rd of October 1973.

  Three court-appointed psychiatrists examined him and found him legally sane. One of them, Dr. Joel Fort, studied the juvenile records and the earlier diagnosis of psychosis, and interviewed Kemper, including under truth serum. Fort told the court that Kemper had committed cannibalism, slicing strips of flesh from victims' legs and cooking them in a casserole. Kemper later took that confession back. Fort still concluded that Kemper fully understood what he did in each case, and that he relished the infamy of being labeled a murderer.

  California used the M'Naghten standard for insanity. It required clear proof that, because of a diseased mind, the accused did not know the nature of the act or did not know it was wrong. Kemper appeared to know his acts were wrong, and he had shown signs of malice aforethought.

  On the 1st of November, Kemper took the stand. He testified that he killed the women because he wanted them "for myself, like possessions." He tried to persuade the jury he was insane by arguing that only an aberrant mind could commit such acts. He said two beings lived in his body, and that when the killer personality took over it was "kind of like blacking out."

  On the 8th of November 1973, a jury of six men and six women deliberated for five hours. They found him sane and guilty on all counts. Kemper asked for the death penalty and specified "death by torture." But the Supreme Court of California had placed a moratorium on capital punishment. He instead received seven years to life on each count, to run concurrently, and was sent to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

  Soon after he arrived in 1973, doctors re-evaluated him there. This time the diagnosis was antisocial, narcissistic and schizotypal personality disorders. That label, not the one from Atascadero, followed him into a cell block shared with infamous neighbors.

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• 8. Behind Bars

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  At the California Medical Facility, Kemper shared a cell block with Herbert Mullin and Charles Manson. Mullin had killed in the same area at the same time as Kemper, and Kemper despised him. He called Mullin a cold-blooded killer who murdered "for no good reason." Kemper stood a foot taller than the 5 ft 9 in Mullin and dominated him. When Mullin sang during television time, Kemper threw water on him, then gave him peanuts when he behaved. "That's called behavior modification treatment," Kemper said.

  Inside, Kemper stayed with the general population and was regarded as a model prisoner. He scheduled other inmates' appointments with psychiatrists and became an accomplished maker of ceramic cups. He also narrated audiobooks for a charity program that prepared recordings for the visually impaired. A 1987 Los Angeles Times article said he coordinated the program and had spent over 5,000 hours narrating, with several hundred finished recordings. A stroke in 2015 left him medically disabled, and he was retired from these roles. In 2016 he received his first rules violation report, for failing to provide a urine sample.

  Kemper also became one of the most interviewed killers of his era. He appeared in the 1981 documentary The Killing of America and the 1984 documentary Murder: No Apparent Motive. In 1991 he spoke with the French writer Stéphane Bourgoin. FBI profiler John E. Douglas called him "among the brightest" prisoners he had interviewed, with "rare insight for a violent criminal." Douglas said he personally liked Kemper, whom he described as friendly, open, sensitive and funny.

  His talks with FBI agent Robert Ressler changed bureau procedure. According to Ann Burgess, Kemper ended one interview by telling Ressler the guard was on shift change and would not return for 30 minutes. In that time, he said, he could snap Ressler's head and leave it on the table. After the guard came back, Kemper said he was joking. From then on, FBI agents had to conduct such interviews in pairs.

  Kemper says he took part in the interviews to help prevent others from killing. At the end of Murder: No Apparent Motive, he spoke to any viewer who wanted to kill but hadn't, urging them to talk to somebody. Thinking that way isn't a crime, he said, while acting on it is horrible and hard to stop once begun.

  His story echoed through fiction. Kemper was one of several killers who inspired Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. Like Kemper, Buffalo Bill shoots his grandparents as a teenager. Dean Koontz cited Kemper as an influence on Edgler Vess, the villain of his 1995 novel Intensity. In the 2000 film American Psycho, Patrick Bateman misattributes a Kemper quote to Ed Gein. Cameron Britton played Kemper in the Netflix series Mindhunter in 2017. Other works include the 2008 film Kemper: The CoEd Killer, Marc Dugain's 2012 novel Avenue des géants, and the 2025 film Ed Kemper, starring Brandon Kirk. Bands including Macabre, System of a Down and SKYND have written songs about him.

  Kemper became eligible for parole in 1979 and was denied that year, then in 1980-1981 and 1982. He waived his right to a hearing in 1985. At his 1988 hearing he said, "Society is not ready in any shape or form for me. I can't fault them for that." He was denied again in 1991 and 1994, waived hearings in 1997 and 2002, and was denied in 2007. Prosecutor Ariadne Symons told that hearing, "We don't care how much of a model prisoner he is because of the enormity of his crimes." He waived a hearing in 2012, was denied in 2017, and declined to attend in 2024, when he was denied again.

  After the 2024 hearing, reports said Kemper used a wheelchair and suffered from diabetes and coronary heart disease. A psychiatric evaluation in April 2024 rated him a "high risk" to reoffend. His next chance at parole comes in 2031.

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