Edmund Kemper: The Co-ed Killer

There are two different types of homicide: criminal-enterprise and personal-cause. The latter is motivated by feelings of aggression and severe emotional disturbances. The fifth sub-division of personal-cause homicide is known as authority killing. This type of homicide involves the killing of an authority figure. Henry Lee Lucas and Edmund Kemper both fall under this category, as they both murdered their abusive mothers. Both were anger-retaliatory killers. These types of killers were often domineered by a controlling and abusive woman, usually a mother, who left them with feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. Most anger-retaliatory killers substitute their victims for the true source of their anger and target women that resemble the abusive female I their lives. A majority of these killers do not kill the actual source of their anger. There are exceptions to this rule, and Edmund Kemper was one of them.

Born in 1948, Edmund Emil Kemper III was the product of a dysfunctional family. His parents were divorced and both of them remarried. Kemper did not get along well with either of his stepparents. His mother was abusive and set ridiculously high standards for her children. When Edmund did not live up to these standards, he was locked in a basement and verbally berated. He became very diffident and resentful. He harbored violent sexual fantasies, even as a child. He often cut the hands and heads off of his sister's dolls. This habit later became his MO with his human victims.

By the time Kemper was 10-years-old, it was very obvious that there was something seriously wrong with him. After burying the family cat alive, he subsequently dug up the corpse and decapitated it. He proudly displayed the cat's severed head in his room. When the family got a second cat, Edmund chopped it into pieces with a machete and hid the remains in his closet. Upon the discovery of the feline remains, Kemper's mother sent him to live with his father. Kemper was not happy there and was then sent to live with his paternal grandparents in California. At the tender age of fourteen, Kemper committed his first two murders. In August of 1963, Kemper shot his grandmother and stabbed her body with a kitchen knife. He also shot and killed his grandfather. When questioned at a later time, Kemper claimed that he wanted to know what it would feel like to "shoot Grandma." Kemper was sent to Atascadero, a maximum-security hospital.

At the age of twenty-one, Kemper was released into his mother's custody in 1969, despite the objection of his doctors. By this time, Kemper was a massive being, standing at six-foot- nine and weighing approximately three hundred pounds. It would be two years before Edmund Kemper would resume his killing spree, savagely taking eight more innocent lives.

Kemper often visited bars that were frequented by off-duty police officers. He befriended the policemen and detectives. Unbeknownst to the officers, they were in the company of the man who would soon become known as the "Co-ed Killer." It is not uncommon for a serial killer to take an active interest in police work. Many of them feel rejected and crave the power and control that comes with being an officer of the law. Many serial murderers have attempted to join the police department, but were rejected for one reason or another. (Kenneth Bianci, one of the Hillside Stranglers, was severely affected by his rejection from the police department; he instead took a job as a security guard). Edmund Kemper was rejected because of his size. In some cases, offenders befriend lawmen to receive "inside" information.

On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up two young college students by the names of Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchesi. He drove them to a secluded impasse, where he bound Mary Ann with handcuffs and locked Anita in the trunk of his car. He then asphyxiated Mary Ann with a plastic bag and stabbed her. He stabbed Anita to death and drove both cadavers to his home. He brought them to his room and took photographs as he dismembered them. After sexually assaulting the bodies, he buried the remains in a valley near the mountains. Several months later, Mary Ann's head was found. She was positively identified from her dental records.

On September 14, 1972, Kemper suffocated and raped a 15-year-old girl named Aiko Koo. He dismembered and disposed of her body, but kept her head in his trunk. Ironically, her head was still in his trunk the next day when state psychiatrists declared him "safe" and ordered that his juvenile murder record be sealed for his protection. Immediately after the meeting with the doctors, Kemper buried the remains of Aiko's body. Had the psychiatrists known what was lying in the trunk of Kemper's car just outside the building, they may have re-thought their decision.

On January 9,1973, Kemper shot and killed a young woman named Cindy Schall. He had sex with her corpse and dissected her body in his bathtub. He disposed of her remains by tossing them into a nearby sea. Most disturbingly, he buried Cindy's head in his mother's backyard.

The manhunt for the "Co-ed Killer" had begun after the remains of several victims had been found. Not one of the detectives had the slightest inkling that their friend, Ed Kemper, was the man committing the atrocities. Sometimes the officers would even brief Kemper on the details of their investigation.

On February 5, 1973, Edmund shot and killed 23-year old Rosalind Thorpe and a young woman named Alice Lin. He drove the bodies home and waited for his mother to go to sleep, at which point he decapitated the cadavers of the two young women. He sexually violated Lin's body and then hacked off her hands.

On Good Friday, Edmund Kemper killed the source of his violent anger: his mother, Clarnell Strandberg. He bludgeoned her with a hammer in her sleep. He then cut off her head and raped the cadaver. He then cut out her larynx, which he pushed down the garbage disposal. He later commented, "It seemed appropriate. She'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years." He placed her severed head on the mantle and used it as a dartboard.

Kemper then called a friend of his mother and invited her to dinner. When Sara "Sally" Hallett arrived, she was hit over the head, strangled and beheaded. He left her body in a bed, took a nap in his mother's room and then went to a local bar.

On Easter Sunday, Kemper went for an aimless drive. When he reached Pueblo, Colorado, he pulled over the car and made a phone call to the police. He confessed that he was the killer, but because they knew Edmund, they did not believe him. After several more calls, officers were sent to arrest Kemper.

Kemper was declared sane and convicted of eight counts of murder. He attempted suicide twice while awaiting his trial. When asked what he felt was a fitting punishment, Kemper replied, "Death by torture." At the time, the death penalty did not exist in the state of California and Kemper received life imprisonment.

What causes a person to become a serial killer? What motives were behind Kemper's atrocious deeds? He answers that plainly and simply for us, "I was making life-and-death decisions ... playing God in their lives." Most serial killers have a lust for power. They have strong feelings of humiliation and inadequacy and feel the need to compensate by asserting their power and control over beings that are more vulnerable than themselves. There is much controversy as to whether killers are born or created. It is possible, in some cases, for a person to be genetically predisposed to certain behavior. In Kemper's case, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but it is safe to say that his upbringing definitely exacerbated his condition. Whatever the cause of his psychosis, he is considered one of the most dangerous and depraved serial murderers of our time.