Guest Author - Vance Rowe

Edmund Kemper began his serial killing career at the tender age of fifteen. The victims were his grand-parents. However, like many other serial killers, he started off by torturing and killing animals. Cats were his choice. It is said that one time he even cut a cat’s head off and put it on a stick. At age fifteen, Edmund Kemper was 6’4” tall and was very awkward. He felt he was being psychologically abused by his mother and grandmother as they always told him what to do and pushed him around too much. He hated being treated like that. In statements made by Kemper himself, he said that he was a walking time bomb and no one was trying to help him. They were only further agitating his growing rage. That rage finally showed itself on August afternoon in 1964.

Edmund Kemper picked up a present he had received from his grandfather on the previous Christmas. It was a .22 caliber rifle. He was presumably going outside with it to shoot at birds. His grandmother began yelling at him and telling him to put the gun away because he wasn’t going outside to do anything. Edmund turned and shot his grandmother. He struck her in the head and then shot hr twice more in the back. There are also published reports that there were at least three knife wounds on her back as well. The large statured youth had no problem dragging the sixty-six year old corpse up to her bedroom. He laid her on her bed and heard his grandfather come home. He looked out the window. When his grandfather got out of the vehicle, Edmund shot him with the rifle. Kemper dragged the seventy-two year old corpse into the garage.

In 1972, the now 6’9” tall Edmund Kemper began killing coed girls. He had picked up two female hitchhikers. Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa were hitchhiking to Stanford and Kemper told them that he was on his way there as well. Kemper soon pulled off of the highway and stopped down a dirt road. He told the girls that he was going to take them back to his apartment and rape them. However, he had remembered some advice he was given about not leaving any witnesses, so he decided to kill them instead. He handcuffed one of the girls in the backseat and dragged the other girl out of the car and put her in the trunk. He tried to stab her repeatedly in the back to kill her but he kept hitting the backbone. Finally he decided to slit her throat. He then killed the girl in the backseat and put her in the trunk as well. As he resumed driving down the highway, he was pulled over by a policeman for a broken taillight. He eventually let Kemper go and Edmund Kemper, in an interview, said that if the policeman wanted to do a routine check of the car, he would have killed the officer on the spot.

The final woman he would kill was his mother. He felt it was her that drove him to this as she would never introduce him to any females on the college campus where she worked. She constantly emasculated and berated him and he would take his anger out on hapless women. He waited for his mother to go to sleep one night and he killed her with a claw hammer. He cut off her head and like he did with his other victims, humiliated her head and corpse. He put the severed head on the fireplace mantle, yelled at her and even tossed darts at it. He invited a woman named Sally Hallet over to his mother’s house and killed her as well. He thought that having two corpses in the house, suspicion may not be cast on him for murdering his mother, Clarnell.

In 1973, Edmund Kemper was arrested and indicted on eight counts of murder. Three different psychiatrists, who were testifying for the state, all said that Kemper was completely sane and was not psychotic as previous reports had indicated. In November of 1973, after a three week trial, he was found sane and guilty of all eight counts of murder and received life in prison and wound up at Folsom. There, Kemper was a model prisoner and even read books to the blind. When he was up for parole, he told the bard that he didn’t feel ready for the outside world. He was more comfortable in prison where he was much happier.