Edmund Kemper

Edmund Kemper in April 1973

Edmund Emil Kemper III. ( Ed Kemper for short ) aka Co-Ed-Killer (born December 18, 1948 in Burbank , California ) is an American serial killer .

overview

Kemper, who is 2.06 meters tall and weighs over 113 kilograms, grew up with two sisters in a broken family, was then brought to live with his grandparents, whom he shot at the age of 15. A stay in a reformatory followed. From 1972 Kemper killed again. His victims were mostly hitchhikers whom he strangled, attacked the corpses post mortem and then dismembered them. After several such acts, Kemp's series of murders culminated on Holy Saturday 1973 with the killing of his mother Clarnell and her friend Sally Hallett. After this act, Kemper turned himself in to the police. Kemper was sentenced to life imprisonment for eight murders and is now in Vacaville prison .

Here, Kemper became one of the most popular research subjects in forensic psychiatry and criminology , who was repeatedly used for analysis by so-called profilers such as Robert Ressler and John Douglas . In addition to availability, sufficient intelligence and willingness to talk, Kemper's research was able to assert above all that the pathogenesis was more fully documented than is usual due to the early killing of the grandparents .

Childhood (1948–1963)

Ed Kemper's mother Clarnell and his father Edmund (Ed) Jr. (or: the second) seem to have argued constantly until they split up. The mother's incipient excessive alcohol consumption and the resulting alcohol problems were blamed on the son, who also began to resemble the unpleasant husband visibly. As a ten-year-old boy, Kemper was then moved out of the living area and given a room in the basement next to the boiler room. As a reason, the mother cited that Kemper's appearance was no longer acceptable to the sisters. The sisters also felt sexually harassed by their brother.

Kemper himself stated that his violent fantasies increased in intensity and complexity when he moved to the basement. He is said to have fantasized about sexual experiments on his mother and two sisters with a fatal outcome. A strong need for justice then channeled itself into a preference for the police authorities. Watching her sleeping mother armed with a knife and hammer fed these fantasies.

Even while he was in elementary school, Ed Kemper was taller than his classmates, which is why he was often bullied or marginalized and also fantasized about killing them. At the same time, he was always afraid of being beaten up by the other children, despite his size. Although he was considered a daydreamer and reluctant to go to school because of the social exclusion by his classmates and the cold-heartedness of his mother, he described himself as an inconspicuous boy and, because of his good academic performance, highly intelligent.

As a 10-year-old, Kemper began to detonate and torture animals , initially only insects , but then killed the family cat , which he buried alive, in order to be able to dig it up again and decapitate it. Kemper put his head on display in his nursery. His mother, initially uncertain about the cat's disappearance, replaced it with a new one. But when Kemper cut up the second cat with his machete at the age of 13, hid the bones in his closet and his mother later found them, thus also investigating the disappearance of the first cat, she referred to her son as a psychopath .

As a 12-year-old, Kemper had his sister Susan tie himself to a chair in a so-called gas chamber game in order to mimic suffocation. He also began to behead his sisters' dolls.

After the divorce from Kemper's parents, the son was to live with the father. Especially in the phases of establishing a new partnership and separation - Kemper's mother married two more times and got divorced again - Kemper found himself with his father's parents, who lived on a farm on the edge of the Sierra Nevada . Kemper found his grandmother to be bullied, but loved shooting with his grandfather.

When the grandmother Maude punished her grandson after the excessive killing of smaller forest animals and birds with the withdrawal of the rifle and house arrest, Kemper approached the grandmother, bent over her correspondence, shot her in the head from behind and then stabbed her several times with a knife she an. As a motive, he later stated that he only wanted to know what it was like to shoot his grandmother: "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma." The returning grandfather was then also shot to see his dead wife to spare: Ed Kemper was later found lying in the courtyard. Then Kemper called his mother, who was on her honeymoon, and informed her of the crime.

Edmund Kemper has now been admitted to the Atascadero State High Security Correctional Facility for mentally ill offenders, where he was diagnosed with a passive-aggressive personality. Over the years he learned 28 psychological tests and correct answers by heart. At the instigation of his mother, he was released early in 1969 and had to spend another year in a juvenile prison. In 1970 he was released against the opposition of the public prosecutor. The mother, who had since found a job as a secretary at the newly formed University of California at Santa Cruz , urged her son to move in with her. But despite this wish and although Clarnell Kemper was extremely popular with superiors and students and was considered a warm-hearted, always helpful and susceptible person to the problems of others, the arguments with the son seem to have continued unabated after his release.

Kemper moved into his own apartment and, according to his own account, was now getting more and more pornographic and criminal literature. Various jobs and an application to the Highway Patrol were unsuccessful - the latter because of his height. In 1971, Kemper was employed by the State Highway Department. The visit to relevant restaurants enabled the spurned by the Highway Patrol to make some acquaintances with police officers. Kemper also equipped his car like a civilian emergency vehicle, installed a radio, among other things, bought handcuffs and owned a training badge that he had received from his new friends. With the right arrangement of these accessories, Kemper then (like Ted Bundy ) aimed to give the appearance of official authority. In February 1971, Kemper suffered a motorcycle accident and after an out-of-court settlement that brought him 15,000 US dollars, he had no more financial worries for the time being.

The series of murders

Even in psychiatry, Kemper had worked out plans for killing people and hiding their corpses almost professionally. So he had already considered cutting up corpses to make identification more difficult and disposing of the individual body parts in different states. After an argument with his mother, who named the son's stay in psychiatry as the reason for her poor chances in choosing a new partner, Kemper left her house in early 1972 and killed “the first beautiful woman” he met. The victim could never be identified as the body was never discovered.

On May 7, 1972, Kemper murdered the two hitchhikers, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were students ( co-eds ) at Fresno State College and wanted to be taken to Palo Alto . According to his own statements, Kemper selected her because he thought he could attribute her to the hippie movement and was therefore hoping for a late report of missing persons. He threatened both of them with a gun, then handcuffed one while locking the other in the trunk. After strangling and mutilating one girl, he stabbed the other girl and brought both bodies to his (absent) mother's house. Here he dissected both of them, removed their organs and took photos. Then he separated his head and hands from the body according to the procedure he worked out in the psychiatry, cleaned the corpses several times, misused the torsos and finally packed the individual parts in plastic bags, which he brought back to his car. The bodies were buried in the mountains of Santa Cruz, and Kemper threw their heads into a ravine.

Kemp's mother campaigned for her son's criminal record to be erased, but the prosecution refused to agree to the deletion. Finally, it was agreed to seal the files on the grandparents' murder, but only after passing the psychological test. Four days before the scheduled test, Kemper looked for another victim. He dropped a hitchhiker who got into his car with her twelve-year-old son after he saw in the rearview mirror that the woman's companion had noted his license number. Kempers' approach to taking his victims with him has always been characterized by not showing his interest and not asking too hastily for his victims. Weighing things up, looking at the clock, calculating the detour, seemingly pushing oneself through to be taken along, created a situation that barely made it possible for the victims to change their minds.

In this way, on September 14, 1972, Kemper kidnapped high school student Aiko Koo, choked her to unconsciousness at the height of Santa Cruz , raped and killed her. He desecrated the body and then drove to his mother's house. Their presence seems to have been part of the arrangement with him. In his room in his mother's house, he abused the body again, dismembered and cleaned it up, loaded it back into his car and buried it in two different districts. He kept his head and brought it to the upcoming psychological test, which rehabilitated Kemper as completely healthy. One of the two investigators recorded that he had seen an “intelligent, enterprising young person who was not damaged by any neurosis”. After the criminal record was deleted, Kemper, who had previously used weapons on loan, immediately acquired his own. The first (partial) body finds were meanwhile linked to the serial killers John Frazier and Herbert Mullin, who were active at the same time .

On January 9, 1973, Kemper found another victim. He killed the schoolgirl Cindy Schall from Santa Cruz with a shot from the newly acquired weapon and drove the body according to the tried and tested pattern into the mother's house. After the dismemberment, he threw parts of the corpse into the sea and buried his head under his mother's bedroom window so that he looked up at his mother's window. Kemper later stated that his mother always wanted people to look up to her. The police soon suspected that there must be another "co-ed killer" in addition to the two other (then also arrested) serial killers. Warnings to hitchhikers seem to have been more conducive to Kemper, however, as he - provided with a university entrance (documented by a car sticker) through his mother - may have acted as "one of us" in the increasingly fearful climate.

After another argument with his mother on the university campus, Kemper found two more victims with Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. Kemper, who is to be counted among the methodically proceeding perpetrators, did not break his pattern, but made the implementation more difficult by shooting at both students and driving the still living victims off campus. He told the guard at the entrance to the campus that he was bringing two drunk acquaintances home and was able to pass unmolested. The dismembered bodies were later buried in the usual way. Eating individual smaller cuts of meat was a new addition.

When he acquired another weapon in April 1973, the sheriff's attention was drawn to Kemper, as he remembered the criminal record on the occasion of the sales receipt sent as usual by the dealer. He decided to confiscate the weapon. At that time, Kemper's car already had a bullet hole and several blood stains, especially in the trunk area. Nevertheless, he managed to take the pistol out of the trunk in front of the sheriff's eyes and hand it over to him without suspicion. Kemper had already run into a police check with two bodies in the trunk without the police suspecting anything. The officer who later testified had remembered Kemper as "friendly". Kemper replied that he would have been ready to kill him any second.

Recent murders and arrests

The fear that Kemper had to go through when the sheriff asked for his weapon, prompted him, according to his own statement, to now plan the murder of his mother as a matter of priority. On Good Friday 1973, Kemper went to see his mother, had a chat with her, waited until she had gone to bed, and at five o'clock in the morning snuck into her bedroom with a penknife and a hammer in order to realize the fantasy she had as a child : He killed the mother with a hammer and opened her neck with a knife. When he had cut her throat, he severed the head and removed the larynx. However, his attempt to lead this through the sink into the sewage system failed. He later stated about this procedure:

"That seemed appropriate as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years."

"This seemed appropriate to me after she had pestered, yelled at and yelled at me for so many years."

According to Kempers, the mother was “humiliated”. At the trial, however, he left open whether this meant “rape”. After the murder, he met up with friends in the pub, where his Highway Patrol acquaintances also drank. The next day he asked his mother's best friend, Sally Hallett, to help him prepare for a surprise visit from several of his mother's other friends.

Kemper broke Sally Hallett's neck as soon as she crossed the threshold. He saw her as the woman with whom his mother had repeatedly and amicably talked about her son in a humiliating way. On Easter Sunday, he set off on an aimless journey with his pistol and the victims' credit cards. The armament indicated that he had not made up his mind to surrender before setting off. However, at three in the morning, Kemper's call came to the Santa Cruz Police Division. Kemper said he was calling from a phone booth in Pueblo , identified himself as the perpetrator of several murders and asked for his arrest. The police officers, including many acquaintances from the aforementioned inn, initially believed it was a joke, so that Kemper had to give unpublished details about the deeds in order to be taken seriously. He waited for the police in the phone booth and was arrested.

The murder was cleared up quickly - above all with the help of Kempers, who apparently liked the role of the crime "expert". Before the trial began, he failed two suicide attempts. When asked about an appropriate punishment for his offenses, he said “death by torture” during the trial. Kemper was convicted of eight murders and is serving a life sentence at Vacaville's California State Medical Facility.

In prison he developed over time into a model prisoner who was granted many privileges. He gave FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas, among other things, several insightful interviews in which he made an open-minded impression. According to their statements, he reported very soberly about his actions and had no need for legitimation. The examinations gave him an IQ of 145. His further training in prison had made him a lay psychiatrist for whom diagnostic terminology had become everyday language.

See also

• List of serial killers

literature

• John Douglas / Mark Olshaker: The Murderer's Soul. 25 years in the FBI's special unit for serial criminals . Orbis, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-572-01316-X .
• Peter Murakami / Julia Murakami: Lexicon of serial killers . Ullstein, Munich, 9th edition 2003, ISBN 3-548-35935-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edmund Kemper Biography. A&E Television Networks on Biography.com, April 27, 2017, accessed April 22, 2018 .