Edmund Kemper: The Coed Butcher
BY Katherine Ramsland
Time Bomb
On August 27, 1964, 15-year-old Edmund Emil Kemper III was with his paternal grandparents on their 17-acre ranch in North Fork, California He'd gone there during the previous Christmas holidays, remaining for the rest of that school year before returning to his mother, and was now back. He wasn't happy about that. Already six-foot-four and socially awkward, he was an intimidating figure, and people tended to shunt him from one place to another. He'd grown frustrated and angry, and later described himself as a "walking time bomb." If only someone had known then how to defuse his rage. Instead, the people around him seemed to ensure that it would grow worse.
Kemper disliked how his mother treated him, and his grandmother was just as bad. They were always pushing him around and telling him what to do. According to his own statements, he harbored fantasies of killing and mutilating them. And not just them: As a child, writes psychiatrist Donald Lunde in Murder and Madness, Kemper wished that everyone else in the world would die, and he envisioned killing many of them himself. He had also indulged in tormenting cats. He'd buried one alive, then dug it up, cut off its head and stuck the head on a stick.
That August afternoon, he argued in the kitchen with his sixty-six-year-old grandmother, Maude. Lunde, who interviewed him at length years later, says that he had displaced his anger at his mother onto Maude, so it did not take much to make him react. Enraged, Kemper grabbed a rifle, and when she warned him not to shoot the birds, he turned and shot her instead. He hit her in the head, writes Margaret Cheney in Why? The Serial Killer in America, killing her, and then shot her twice in the back. (Lunde says that he also stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and David K. Frazier writes in Murder Cases of the Twentieth Century that it was three times in the back.) So his first killing, if this account is correct, was impulsive, more a thoughtless act than a planned predatory incident. But then he had to do something to hide it from his grandfather. He was a big kid for his age, the product of a six-foot mother and a father who was six-foot-eight. So he did not have much difficulty dragging his grandmother's corpse into the bedroom.
But then his grandfather, also named Edmund, drove up. The man was 72, and it was he who had given the boy the .22 caliber rifle the previous Christmas. Young Edmund heard his car outside. He went to the window and made the decision to finish the job he'd begun. As the elderly man got out of the car, Kemper raised the rifle and shot him as well. Cheney says that he then hid the body in the garage. "In his way," writes Lunde, "he had avenged the rejection of both his father and his mother."
Not knowing what else to do, he called his mother in Montana and told her what he had done. Clarnell urged him to call the police, and no doubt she was thinking of the dire warning that Cheney says she had given Edmund's biological father, whose parents were now dead. She had told him not to be surprised if the boy killed them one day.
Edmund Kemper's grand-mother as young woman and Edmund Kemper's grand-father as young man
Kemper called the police and they came to the ranch to take him into custody. He was waiting calmly on the porch for them. They placed him with the California Youth Authority, and in an interview, the police later reported, he said he had shot Grandma to see what it felt like. That comment would become the quote most often associated with him, used to show how cold-blooded he was at such a young age. Yet another reading of it indicates that he was merely stating the end result of his frustration with the woman. He explained that he'd killed his grandfather to spare him having to find Maude dead, murdered by her grandson.
At the time, it seemed incomprehensible to the California system that a child could do such a thing. He was sent for psychiatric testing and diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia. He was also found to have a near-genius IQ. Instead of staying at a facility operated by the Youth Authority, he ended up at the secure Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and because he was so intelligent and astute he was allowed access to some of the assessment devices - even to administer them at times, according to John Douglas in Mindhunter. Frazier says that while in the hospital, Kemper actually memorized the responses to 28 different assessment instruments, providing himself with the proper tools to convince those doctors who evaluated him that he would be safe to release upon his 21st birthday. With his mother's help, he achieved this.
The most comprehensive sources on Kemper's case come from people who wrote during the 1970s, immediately after his trial, including psychiatrist Donald Lunde and authors Ward Damio and Margaret Cheney (who had access to transcripts of what she called his "compulsive confessing"). Kemper also did an interview in 1978, which ended up on Court TV's Mugshots program. Others included former FBI profilers Robert R. Ressler and John Douglas, who interviewed him at length and discussed their encounters with him in their respective books.
While self-report is generally suspect, what Kemper has to say about himself and his background is revealing. Accounts of him generally emphasize his huge size - six-foot-nine and nearly three hundred pounds - but the manner in which he thinks and speaks is more interesting. Kemper's string of crimes was the third for San Jose , California , since 1970, so it's instructive to look at the first two briefly to understand the climate of fear that hovered over the area upon his arrest.
Just after he came out of Atascadero , the town that would become his new home made national headlines.
The beach town of Santa Cruz lies south of San Francisco on the Pacific Coast . Surrounded by mountains, ocean, and towering redwood trees, it's a tourist Mecca and an upscale place to own a home or rent an apartment. During the early 1970s, when the murders began, townspeople were already torn over the "hippies" moving in, thanks in part to the University of California opening a new campus there. Young people flooded in, and not all of them were what residents called "desirable."
At the time, Damio writes, 95 percent of murders that occurred in America were primarily situational—inspired by tense domestic incidents or the result of some kind of altercation among acquaintances. But the murders during the 1970s in Santa Cruz defied this pattern, and while one killer was quickly captured after his crime, for several months no arrests were made or suspects identified for the other cases. By 1973, people were purchasing guns to protect themselves, because clearly these offenders were boldly entering the homes of ordinary citizens.
Near the end of 1970, John Linley Frazier murdered five people—the Ohta family and Dr. Ohta's secretary—to stop what he viewed as the spread of progress that was ruining the natural environment. An extremist in the hippie lifestyle, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but nevertheless was found sane and convicted. His trial became a circus, in part because he wanted to appear to be pretending to be insane so the jury would believe he was malingering. But there was also an air of suspicion against "hippies," because over the span of two nights during the previous year Charles Manson and his gang had massacred seven people down in Los Angeles . Like Manson, Frazier had invaded a home and brutally killed the occupants (including two children) for some bizarre drug-inspired vision.
Then in late 1972 and early '73, across a terrifying period of four months, another series of murders occurred around Santa Cruz . Among the victims were four campers, a priest, a man digging in his garden, a young girl, and a mother and her two children. The police finally stopped the killer, Herbert Mullin, 25. Although he had been institutionalized and evaluated as a danger to others, he'd nevertheless become an outpatient, which allowed him to roam freely. He'd stopped taking his antipsychotic medication and "heard" a voice that urged him to kill. It was his mission, Mullin believed, to save the people of California from a super-earthquake that would send it into the ocean. Thus, he decided that he had to "sing the die song," which he believed would persuade thirteen people to either kill themselves or allow themselves to become human sacrifices (which he said they conveyed to him telepathically). Using a knife, gun, or baseball bat to slay those he selected, he killed until police picked him up. Also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he was nevertheless considered legally sane and was convicted on ten counts of murder.
But even before that, in May 1972, female hitchhikers began to disappear. To subdue public panic, the authorities tried linking these disappearances to Mullin so they could assure the community that the spate of murders was at an end, but it soon turned out to be another person altogether—someone who surprised them.
Eventually the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the local newspaper, would put together a magazine that reviewed important events in the area across the decades and featured these three killers. "It felt like the actions of a world gone crazy," recalled reporter Tom Honig. The 1970s was an age of violence, and along with Frazier and Mullin, they would add Edmund Kemper, now a young man. Altogether the three killed 28 people, and represented the three basic types of multiple murderers: Frazier killed all his victims at once, Mullin in a spree (accounting for his projected goal of thirteen), and Kemper as a serial killer.
Kemper's crimes began before Mullin and stopped after him. What precipitated it, according to his account in several interviews, was his mother's constant needling and humiliation. When released by the parole board from Atascadero in 1969, the psychiatrists had advised that Kemper not be returned to Clarnell, because it could trigger more violence. But it appeared that no one was keeping watch. Having no means of support and no assistance from the Youth Authority, Kemper did move in with Clarnell and, according to him, she took up berating him again.
Having left her third husband, she had taken a job at the new university in Santa Cruz as an administrative assistant and moved into a duplex on Ord Drive in Aptos. They had frequent arguments that the neighbors overheard. Whether or not Clarnell was a primary influence in his subsequent actions, there is no doubt that they had an unrelentingly toxic relationship. As part of his parole requirements, Kemper went to a community college and did well, but he hoped to get into the police academy one day. When he learned that he was too tall, his consolation was to hang out in the jury room where the police gathered and listen to their stories. They knew him as "Big Ed" and generally thought of him as a polite young man. His voice was soft, his manner polite, and his speech intelligent and articulate. He idolized John Wayne and everyone knew it. Little did they know that they would eventually be telling one of their most bizarre tales about him.
He got several different jobs and finally ended up with the California Highway Department. When he had saved enough money to move out of his mother's home, he went north to Alameda , near San Francisco , and shared an apartment with a friend. But he often had no money and sometimes ended up back with Clarnell. He purchased a motorcycle, but got into two separate accidents, one of which Damio says paid out in a settlement that gave him $15,000. With this he bought a yellow Ford Galaxy and began to cruise the area. He noticed young females out hitchhiking - the popular mode of travel for college students in those days along the West Coast. And when he looked them over, as he described in later interviews, he thought about things he could do to them. Quietly, he prepared his car for what he had in mind, placing plastic bags, knives, a blanket, and handcuffs that he had acquired into the trunk. He had only to await an opportunity. For a period of time, he picked up girls and let them go. By his estimation, he picked up around 150 hitchhikers, any of whom might have been chosen for his plan. Finally, he felt the urgent inner drive of what he called his "little zapples," and he acted.
3d Serial Killers Edmund Kemper: The Coed Butcher
