Who is Edmond Kemper?

 

Edmond Kemper is a mass murderer who was convicted and    sentenced on eight counts of murder on the first degree at the age of 24. (Beroldingen) Kemper was a young man, with normal sexual urges. However, he was so insecure of his masculinity that he could not bring himself to be intimate with a girl. There are some reports that would suggest this was caused by his incredibly small sex organ, which on his 6-foot 9 inch frame would have been laughable. there are some who account his insecurities to his overbearing mother who's continuous jearing made Kemper so insecure that he felt he could not even perform the sexual act, even to rape his victims. He had to kill them first.

Nevertheless, both excuses seemed to me to be just that, excuses. There are thousands of men out there with overbearing mothers and micro penises and they do not kill to satisfy their urges. In many of his interviews Kemper blames his mother for the person he became. as with anything there are two sides to every story. in this essay we will look at Kemper's side. Since Kemper killed his mother,  we can only rely on expert opinion about who Kemper's mother was and how she treated him.

In Kemper's view his mother was “a big, ugly, and awkward woman who was six feet tall and always trying to get him to go out with girls who were just like her” (Beroldingen, Pg 3) according to Kemper; she did this because she did not believe that her son was worthy of pretty, intelligent girls, as he was just like his father and would never amount to much.

At some point Kemper became obsessed with gas chambers after reading about the Holocaust  and he began to include his sisters in his dark fantasies, in which they would tie him up to a chair and he would act like he was dying from an invisible gas. His mother would belittle and chastise Kemper about his sick games and told his sisters to stay away from him.

circumstances change drastically when Kemper killed two of the family cats, decapitating them. When asked why he did that he said that the cats would show more affection to his sisters, just like his mother, and killing the cats was the only way he could make the cats his. By this time Kemper had grown to a large frame, and his mother was afraid that he would hurt his sisters, possibly even rape them. It was then that his mother moved Kemper to the basement where she could lock him in for the night. Kemper recalls being afraid and cold in the basement. There was only a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and one uncovered mattress for him to sleep in. Later he would recall feeling like his sisters were in heaven and he was in hell. (Beroldingen) according to Kemper his hatred only grew as his mother would constantly put him and other men down, later when asked why he killed he gave two reasons, the first was that he was in fact playing out a fantasy in which he was killing his mother over and over. The second was that his mother had told him that the pretty Co-ed girls were too good for him and that he would never be able to get one of them. His reasoning was that perhaps he would not be able to get them when they were alive, but dead they belonged to him body and soul. As a curious side note Kemper stated that all the girls who he had killed were still with him in spirit. Which is something that Jespersen stated in the ‘happy face podcast’. Regardless of what question was asked of Kemper he would always shift the blame to his mother. But she can no longer speak for herself. So, I turned to the opinion of certain psychologist who studied the case. The opinion seems to be split as to whether Kemper's mother was the cause, or the victim.

Investigators and psychologists have, by all accounts determined that Kemper's mother was an alcoholic. Whether or not she was a man hater as Kemper stated cannot be substantiated because we only have Kemper's word on the subject. We do know that she was married three times and all three times it ended in divorce. Kemper states that she was verbally, psychologically and physically abusive. Again, this cannot be substantiated, but evidence that he was kept in the basement was collaborated by the finding of a mattress and personal items in the basement and by Kemper’s father.

There are those who suspect Kemper’s mother of having borderline personality disorder which is “an emotional state that borders between psychosis and neurosis” (Lawson XI) should this have been the case Clarnell Kemper, Kemper’s mother, would be a likely candidate to point the finger towards since  borderline personality can manifest as an overbearing behavior and a need to constantly humiliate those who are closest to them, it has been a constant that children whose mother’s have this disorder can often externalize and misdirect their anger towards small animals. A symptom we saw with Kemper when he decapitated both family cats.

However, the only collaborated fact was that his mother would lock him in the basement. According to his father, this was done because his sisters where afraid of Kempers size and his mother was afraid that he would rape her daughters. In a documentary a psychologist  states that this indicates that Clernell Kemper was a victim. That Clernell perhaps felt the monster lurking inside of Kemper and wanted to protect her daughters. This view is substantiated by Clernell's colleagues at the college campus who during subsequent interviews clearly stated that Clernell was a stand-up citizen, worker and human being.

It must be reiterated that all knowledge of abuse and alcoholism was only collaborated by Kemper. The only abuse that was collaborated by an outside source was that of his mother locking Kemper in the basement. An event that was collaborated by his father. Which brings up the question, as his only son why didn't he protect his son from abuse? If in fact it was abused. And if Kemper was suffering at the hands of his mother, why didn't the father take him in when Kemper ran away at 15 years old?

Kemper was born in Burbank CA in 1948. His mother was Clernell Kemper, his father was Edmund Emil the second. When Kemper was 13 years old, in 1961 his parents’ divorce. During the documentary Kemper states that this was an exceedingly difficult time in his life. That his father was someone he looked up to and respected. It should be noted that the couple had separated in 1957 citing an unstable marriage. I could not find any evidence of Kemper’s father remaining in his life after that. For all accounts and purposes, it was his mother who raised Kemper alone after the separation.

At age 15, Kemper had reached the boiling point. Some resources state that it was Kemper’s mother who sent Kemper to live with his father. However, Kemper himself states that he was the one to run away to go live with his father. Regardless about how it came to be, Kemper staying at Edmund senior’s home with his new wife did not last very long “I think I made her nervous” Kemper says of his father's new wife in the documentary.

In a move his father would probably regret for the rest of his life, Kemper was sent to live with his paternal grandparents. In the beginning things seemed to be going well. Although his grandmother was just as overbearing as his own mother, Kemper seemed to thrive in the isolated farmland, helping his Grandfather with his chores an attending Sierra joined Union High School where he was seen as an average student and caused no memorable problems.

Nevertheless, things began to go downhill after Kemper visited his mother. According to Kemper his mother could not stop herself from calling him a “weirdo” during his first visit. And after his second visit his mood began to alter. His anger towards his mother was displaced. First towards small animals after his Grandfather gifted Kemper with a .22 caliber rifle to hunt rabbits. Displaced aggression is a defense mechanism in which a person redirects their negative emotions such as anger from one person to another. Eventually rabbits were not enough. And after visiting his mother, Kemper killed his grandmother as soon as he got back. When asked about it later, he said that he “wanted to find out what it felt like to kill his grandmother” realizing that his Grandfather would feel pain at the knowledge his wife had been murdered he decided to kill him too. He did so by shooting him three times in the back of the head as he was unloading groceries from his truck. Only then did Kemper feel uncomfortable about his actions. Not knowing what to do he called his mother who encouraged him to call the police, he did so and quickly confess to both murders.

However, two things prevented him from going to jail. The first was that he was only 15 years old at the time of the murders. The second was that after a psychiatrist diagnosed Kemper with a personality trait disturbance, and a passive aggressive type it was decided that he would be sent to a psychiatric hospital instead. personality disturbance is a term used when there are long term patterns of behavior and in your experience is that they differ significantly from what is expected. The pattern of experience and behavior begins by late adolescence or early adulthood and causes distress or problems in functioning. It was only later that Kemper was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by a court appointed psychiatrist. 

Due to this diagnose Kemper was committed to the Atascadero state hospital. The hospital performed several tests on Kemper, one of which was an IQ test. He first received a score of 138 and seeing that it was quite high they decided to retest him. His second score was 145 making Kemper close to genius and keeping him above 1% of the population.

Understanding that Kemper seemed to want to help, was smart and had a gentle way of treating other patients, they decided to place Kemper in a position of responsibility. He oversaw and performed personality test to other patients. The doctors trusted him and at 21, they  considered he was cured and allowed him to leave the hospital as long as he kept seeing psychologist for well visits and he did not go back to his mother's house.

Neither recommendation was taken. Kemper had no place to go except his mother's house and no social worker ever contacted him for any meaningful therapy to follow up. The constant berating from his mother increased Kemper’s desire for violence and he began to collect guns and knives at home. As a 21-year-old in 1969, Kemper attended Community College under the watchful eye of the youth authority. But Edmund had spent the better part of the 60s in a mental institution surrounded by adults. He did not fit into the hippie culture movement that had since developed and he was considered a square by most of his peers. Soon he was so uncomfortable he did not continue.

He applied to become a law enforcement official, a dream he had had since young, but, his six feet 9 inches 200 lbs. frame made him ineligible and was therefore rejected. He settled for a job working road construction with the division of highways where his massive body would be an assit. He was still extremely disappointed at having missed his opportunity of becoming law enforcement, so he bought a motorcycle. Unfortunately for future co-eds he soon crashed his motorcycle that had made him feel like a police officer and resorted to buying a 2 door sedan that resembled an unmarked police car. He also purchased a radio receiver transmitter in order to listen to police broadcasts.

He decided that he would begin to pick up hitchhikers “at first I just wanted to make friends to fit in” kemper said in an interview in the documentary. “But then I began to have sexual fantasies about them” the co-eds were all so pretty, the exact type of girl his mother said he would never have a chance with “I thought about raping them, but with my big size I would be easily recognizable.” His only solution was to kill them so he could have his way with them.

In 1972 he began his practice runs. He began to pick up female hitchhikers and practice how to make them feel more comfortable. “I figured out this trick, where I would look at my watch, as if I didn't really have time to pick them up. That made them feel more comfortable and they would get in quick. I also realized that glasses made me look less threatening.” Kemper also started hanging out at a local cop bar in anticipation of the murders. He wanted to be there so that when things began, he would have a front side seat to all the cop talk about the investigation. Later he would state that after the killing started, he would sit in that same bar and think “here I am, and you're so stupid you can't find me.”

His trial runs began to become more daring and escalated slowly. Kemper first began to change the routes, take the girls to their destination via a more ‘scenic, quiet’ route. In his mind, this would have been where he would kill them, but those girls were lucky. He would simply keep on driving until he would reach their destination. Then he began to keep weapons under his seat, just to see if they would notice if he reached down and grabbed it. Finally, he began to carry chords and other kidnapping and murder paraphernalia that he would need to do the deed.

Finally, he was ready. In his interview he once again blames his mother, stating that they had had yet another fight and that this is why he decided that May 7^th, 1972 would be the day. He got into his car and drove around the school until he saw Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchese from Fresno State college. Anita had hitchhiked through Europe, so she had more experience. Kemper states that she was reluctant to get into the car, so he played his trick of looking at his watch impatiently, seeing this Mary Anne hopped in and Anita reluctantly followed. Mary Anne what's sitting in the front seat chatting happily, but Anita sat in the back seat locking eyes with Kemper who later confessed to really liking Anita “it was like falling in love.”

Anita

This of course did not stop him from carrying out his impeccable plan. He told Mary Anne her door was still open, and as he was six feet tall, he easily reached the passenger side handle and closed the door again. As he did so he placed a small item between the handle of the door and the door. Later the police would identify the item as a common tube of Chapstick, but it was sufficiently effective in preventing someone from opening the passenger door from the inside. Soon the girls found themselves in an isolated wooded area where Kemper brandished his knife at them. He placed Anita in the trunk and walked Mary Anne further into the forest. He stabbed Mary Anne several times, but, she was still alive so he cut her throat. He was surprised at home messy and slow the whole process was “in the movies” Kemper said “people get stabbed and they fall back dead instantly. It's not like that in real life, they leak to death” Kemper states he was quite shaken by the experience but felt he had to kill Anita. “She knew what I looked like” so he killed her too.

He brought the two bodies to his mother's house where he dissected them and used them sexually before discarding their heads in a ravine and scattered the body parts in different places. Anita’s torso he buried and throughout the years he would visit her grave “I loved her in my own way.” He says in the documentary. In August of 1972 police discovered the first of several gruesome finds. Mary Anne’s head was discovered but no amount of looking could unearth the rest of her body. In fact, her body was never found. After he was incarcerated Kemper graphically described how he used the decapitated heads and dismembered bodies to satisfy his sexual urges until the bodies began to rot. He even said that he ate part of their bodies “I wanted them to become part of me, to be inside of me forever” Kemper stated. Kemper told interviewers that the act of dismembering them was arousing and he had to stop several times to masturbate.

The need to commit the act again was strong and only four months later Kemper was out on the hunt. Aikoo Koo Was 15 years old. She was petite and delicate; she was a dancer and had just been nominated to dance in a recital. Unfortunately, she missed the bus and fearing she would be late she hitchhiked. It was Kemper who picked her up. When she realized that he was going the wrong way she tried to escape, but her slender frame was no match for the huge 6-foot 9 inches monster who had kidnapped her. He placed tape over her mouth and tried suffocating her by cutting the air to her nose. When that failed, he raped her and strangled her with her own scarf. Once finished he placed her body in the trunk of his car and went to a bar for a drink. During the interview he talks about opening the trunk and regarding his prize as if he was a hunter and her body was his prize. He then took her home and they dissected her body keeping her scarf as a trophy.

On September 16, 1972, two days after killing, raping and mutilating Aikoo Koo, Kemper had a court appointed appointment with a lawyer who would decide whether Kemper had paid for his crimes (that of killing his grandparents) and if his juvenile record should be sealed. The attorney decided that Kemper was completely normal and sealed his record. Later on, Kemper would say that if perhaps he had been monitored like he was supposed to, he would not have done what he did. Again, placing blame for his decisions on someone else’s shoulders and not taking responsibility for his own actions. Meanwhile, Aikoo’s head laid rotting in Kempers trunk while he smiled in convinced the lawyer that he was totally sane.

On January 8, 1973 Edmund bought a 22-caliber handgun. Although his records had been previously sealed the seller of the gun could see that there had been some kind of infraction in his past and so although legally, he had to sell the gun to him, he still called the police to let them know that this particular person might not be someone who should have a gun.

Cindy Schall was his next victim. He picked her up and drove her to Watsonville, ironically Cindy would be killed only meters away from the police detective’s house who knew Kemper as his drinking buddy and who was involved in the investigation of the previous murders. In A twist of fate Cindy was also his babysitter. After shooting her, he took Cindy back home and decapitated her in his backyard. During the interview Kemper said that at this point he wasn't even hiding, “all my neighbor had to do was turned his head and he would have seen me with cindy's body” but he was never found out.

The head of one of serial killer Edmund Kemper's victims is dug up by Santa Cruz County Sheriff's deputies on April 26, 1973.

On February 5^th, 1973 Kemper picked up Rosalind and Alice. He had had another fight with his mother and as he stormed out of his apartment he thought to himself  “the next pretty girl I see will die’ Edmond did not even stop the car to kill them, while driving he turned towards Alice in the back seat and shot her several times, he then turned to Rosalind and shot her point blank. Again he took their bodies back to his apartment had sex with their body parts, beheaded them, removed the bullets from Rosalind's head and then disposed the body parts in Santa Cruz..

It was after these murders that police officers arrived at Edmond’s house to speak to him about his ownership of a gun. During the documentary, the police officer states that he was not comfortable with his assignment since he could see that Edmund was a very big guy according to his record. But when he reached his house, he met up with Edmond in front of his house and Edmund was respectful and gentle. He did not deny that he had been incarcerated in the past and so he gave the gun to the police officers without much fuss. However, Kemper believed that they were playing a cat and mouse game. He was convinced that they knew he was the murderer and that they would soon come for him. A week before killing his own mother, he came to the realization that killing her was the only solution to save her from grief. According to Kemper he did not want her to know that he had been the co-ed killer all along.

On April 20^th, 1973 Edmond came to his mother's room thinking that if she only said something nice to him, he would not kill her. Instead she looked at him and said “oh God, I suppose now you want to stay up and talk all night” this sealed her fateand in the early morning hours he beat his mother to death with a claw hammer while she was sleeping, he slashed her throat, ripped out her larynx and tried to destroy it by placing it in the garbage disposal. He then decapitated his mother and placed her head on the mantle. He screamed and raged at the head, threw darts at it and performed sexual acts with it. In the afternoon sanity came back, and he realized that if he had any hopes of escaping, he also needed to kill his mother's best friend Sara Hallett, to make it seem like his mother and her friend had gone on vacation together. He called her up and invited her to dinner. When she arrived, he strangled her to death with Aiko Koo’s scarf and had sex with her corpse.

After cleaning up the apartment, Kemper got in his car and drove around for three days without sleep.  In a craze state he called the Santa Cruz Police Department from Pueblo, Colorado. He told them that he wanted to confess to the Co ed killings, but the dispatcher thinking he was a prankster hanged up on him. He called back and asked to speak to the police detective who had been his drinking buddy and who's kids Cindy had babysat. When the detective heard the familiar voice of the man he called ‘a gentle giant’ confessing to the gruesome killings he could not believe it but he dispatched officers to Kempers apartment where they found the bodies of his mother and her friend stashed in a closet.

Serial killer Edmund Kemper shows police officers around one of his crime scenes.

The rest as they say is history. Kemper was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentence on all eight counts after confessing to the murders and taking police to the various disposal sites. His lawyer tried to defend him using the insanity plea but Doctor Joe Fort claimed that Edmond was not a paranoid schizophrenic. Kemper is now at a maximum-security prison where he will hopefully remain for life. However his lust for attention has never gone away. Interviews with FBI agent Robert Ressler has led to the FBI contributing to the work of deciphering serial killers, which later will help with psychological profiles that can lead to arrests.

 

Wu, P “To what extent is Edmund Kemper determined to commit his crimes of serial murder” an IB Extended essay in philosophy,May 2013.

Beroldingan, M.V. “I was the hunter, they were the victims” Front page magazine. March 1974

Crump, S. Dunavant S. Smith A.J, Layne S. “Serial killer time line research by Radford university students” department of psychology, Radford university.