Soon, however, he lost interest in his sisters’ dolls, and he – like many serial killers – began torturing the family cats. He buried one alive, then later dug it up, decapitated it and placed the head on the end of a stick like a demented trophy of war.
This act, according to one expert, was a practice session for future kills.
“Animal torture isn’t a stage. It’s a rehearsal,” said writer Harold Schechter.
The second family cat also died at Kemper’s hands, although this time he stabbed it with a machete, allowing the cat’s blood to drench him as the feline died.
“There are many, many serial sexual murders that have a history of killing cats, torturing cats, tormenting cats,” said forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger in “Edmund Kemper: The Co-Ed Butcher Serial Killer,” a documentary about the killer and his life. “Why cats? Because cats are a female symbol.”
Kemper’s rage against women – revealed first through the dolls with long, blond hair, and later through the cats – was a result of his abysmal relationship with his mother.
Divorce changes everything
As a child, Kemper and his dad were close, but his parents divorced when he was nine years old, and Kemper ended up living with his mother in Helena, Montana. There, she regularly locked her son in the basement over fears that her son would rape his younger sister, perhaps due to his large size.
The rest of the family slept upstairs, but Kemper was locked downstairs, a situation he compared to heaven and hell.
“My mother and my sisters would go upstairs to bed, where I used to go to bed, and I had to go down to the basement,” Kemper said. “An eight-year-old child had a tough time differentiating the reasons. I’m saying I wanted to kill my mother since I was eight years old. I’m not proud of that.”
There, in the basement that first sparked fantasies of murdering the woman who locked him down there, he had a cot, a sleeping bag and a single bare bulb with a string hanging from the ceiling. He later told psychologists in interviews that in the dark, while willing himself to fall asleep, he could hear rats scurrying along the edges of the cold basement walls.
“He talked about it as a very difficult time in his life, very scary,” said Dr. Joel Fort, a San Francisco-based specialist in social and health problems including crime and violence who not only testified at Kemper’s later trial, but also as part of the Patty Hearst trial.
His mother also taunted her son by comparing him to his father, and said he would be equally unsuccessful with women.
Kemper’s rage and resentment only grew, and soon he coerced his sisters into playing his favorite game, one called “gas chamber,” which involved the girls blindfolding their brother and placing him in a chair that he pretended was a gas chamber, where he would writhe around and act out an agonizing death.
It only gave his mother more fodder for ridicule, and she called Kemper “a real weirdo,” cementing his battered self-esteem with each cruel word.
“You’re just like you’re father,” she screamed at Kemper, who soon realized that his mother hated him, her only son, because “I was a constant reminder of that failure. She took her violent hatred of my father out on me.”
“My mother was sad, angry, hungry and very sad,” he added. “I hated her.”
Another painful rejection
The never-ending verbal abuse finally led him to leave in 1964, and at the age of 15, the boy with an IQ of 145 dropped out of classes at Sierra Joint Union High School and ran away to live with his father. Once there, however, he learned that his father had remarried and had a new family, leaving no room in his life for the burden of his eldest son.
“When he went there, he was rejected by his father,” Fort said.
It was likely a huge betrayal for the younger Kemper, since he and his father had been close when the boy was young.
“He didn't want me around, because I upset his second wife,” Kemper added. “My presence gave her migraine headaches.”
The elder Kemper instead placed his son in the care of his parents, Edmund and Maude Kemper, who lived on a 17-acre ranch in the mountains of North Fork, California. While the bucolic setting would have been ideal for most boys of his age, Kemper disliked the ranch, as well as his grandmother.
“He found his grandmother to be authoritarian and a disciplinarian, just like his mother,” said Fort.
“I couldn't please her,” Kemper said. “It was like being in jail. I became a walking time bomb and I finally blew.”
Kemper’s first murders
For his first Christmas at the ranch, Kemper’s grandfather gave him a .22-caliber rifle to shoot rabbits and other small game around the farm.
Instead, on August 27, 1964, Kemper used it to kill Maude Kemper, shooting her three times in the back of the head while she sat at the kitchen table, typing an adventure story for boys. To make sure he’d finished the job, he also stabbed her a few times in the back with a kitchen knife.
“I didn't think she was dead and I didn't want her to suffer,” he would later say.
Kemper then waited, and when his grandfather pulled up to the house, the old man waved and smiled at his grandson before getting out of the car and reaching inside to gather the packages he’d purchased in town.
As he bent toward the car, Kemper shot him in the back of the head “because I didn't want him to see what I had done,” then hid his grandfather’s body in a closet in order to better keep the gruesome murder a secret.
“He said he didn’t want his grandfather to suffer knowing that his wife was dead,” one psychiatrist later said. “It’s the most bizarre statement. You don’t go out and shoot someone so they don’t find out that their wife is dead.”
Paranoia set in almost immediately, and he imagined people coming to the remote home with the rugged California mountains as a backdrop, and he worried that he would have to kill them too in order to keep from being found out.
“I sensed everybody in the world coming to get me. I knew anybody that came up there that gave me a funny look or a fishy eye or a quizzical look I would have blown their brains out. If I had been in a city I would have been a mass murderer at 15,” he said. “I would have killed until they gunned me down. I was scared to death and I felt violent. I was the rabbit that always ran, that always burned my bridges, and there was nowhere else to run. My back hit that wall and I came out screaming and kicking and shooting. I was raging inside.”
Finally unable to live with his despicable act and the emotions that followed, he called his mother, sobbing, and confessed his horrible crime.
Chapter 2: Turning himself in
Kemper’s mother advised him to call the police, which he did, and waited patiently on his grandparent’s front porch for authorities to arrive.
After his arrest he underwent a barrage of psychiatric testing. Despite having a near-genius IQ, it was determined that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
Later, when he was asked why he’d done it, he nonchalantly responded that he “just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma.”
Kemper ended up being placed in Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he became number B52453.
He was housed among approximately 1,600 murderers and sex offenders, and there were only 10 psychiatrists on staff to treat them all.
Still, Kemper captured attention during his six years at the facility, and the psychiatric staff at Atascadero found him to be both smart and personable. He soon gained privileges that others didn’t have.
“Ed is a bright fellow, that was obvious when you were talking with him,” said Dr. William Shanburger, one of the staff psychiatrists although not Kemper’s personal mental health professional. “He was kind of a model patient.”
But doctors make mistakes, too
During his stay at the facility, Kemper was given access to materials that allowed him to master the test questions he would later be asked in order to prove that he had, in fact, been rehabilitated duri
ng his stay at Atascadero.
“He intentionally led all the psychiatrists to believe that he was normal,” said Mike Johnson, a former reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. “He said he had them eating out of his hands. One of the errands he would run was to carry test materials from one room to another.”
During his trips between offices, he would memorize material, beginning a pattern of manipulation first learned within the walls of the facility.
“It was a very dangerous place for him to be, and he certainly learned a lot of bad things,” said Schlesinger. “He had so much access to the records and test papers, and he learned all the criteria for all the diagnoses. They treated him and I think they thought they cured him.”
Kemper was released on his 21st birthday, and although his psychiatrists recommended he not have contact or live with his mother, he was nonetheless returned to her care, a move that would set off a tragic chain of events.
Almost immediately, the verbal abuse began anew.
“For seven years I haven’t had sex with a man because of you, my murderous son,” Kemper recalled his mother saying. For his part, he almost immediately reverted back to the angry, frightened, damaged boy he had been when sleeping in the basement.
“For the first time in my life, I had finally scraped up a measure of self-respect for myself, and I didn’t need her,” Kemper said.
But it would be months before he could save enough money to move out of his mother’s apartment, and by then, it would be too late.
Chapter 3: An era of peace, love and murder
Kemper’s mother had since left Montana and resettled in California, this time in Santa Cruz, where she had a job as an administrative assistant at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
It was the early 1970s, and the oceanfront community was home to beach-loving residents, tourists and hippies.
“A lot of the counterculture that bled over from the San Francisco region ended up forming communes in the Santa Cruz County area, and that was attractive to a lot of people, including young girls,” said Michael Aluffi, a police officer who would soon become a key part of the Kemper investigation. “People were coming from across the country to live that free and liberating lifestyle.”
Kemper was hoping to meet people and start a new life, but his murderous personality was simmering just beneath the surface, along with the damaged self-esteem that was quickly returning, courtesy of his mother.
“He felt particularly inadequate around women, so I think he was lonely,” Shanberger said. “I can’t imagine how difficult it would be. It doesn’t excuse anything, but in my mind it describes the situation.”
Kemper attempted to date, but after one disastrous first date, shied away from trying to have any further intimate encounters with girls.
“My first date was an absolute disaster, it was a terrible tragedy,” he said of his evening out with a girl he’s taken first out to eat at Denny’s, then to a John Wayne movie. “It wasn’t her fault, and I don’t blame her, but I was such a dork.”
It wasn’t that anything sexual happened, but Kemper was awkward and inexperienced, and his date soon realized that Kemper was nothing like the free-spirited young people who were flocking to Santa Cruz.
“All of these kids were like aliens to me,” said Kemper, who had spent the beginning of the hippie era and the entry into Vietnam locked up for killing his grandparents. And during that time, things had changed significantly.
“They were totally different from the kids I knew. Plus, I’d been locked up since I was 15, but I couldn’t tell her that,” Kemper said. “When I got out on the street it was like being on a strange planet. People my age were not talking the same language. I had been living with people older than I was for so long that I was an old fogey.”
Too, Kemper was never really able to get his mother’s critical voice out of his head.
An attempt at normalcy
Nonetheless, he got his GED at the local community college, and although he’d hoped to become a police officer, he was too tall. His juvenile records had been sealed, so his previous murder charge would not have been a deterrent to becoming a policeman. It seemed that his size was the sole reason for the denial. So, instead of joining the police force, he landed a job with the California Division of Highways working as a road construction flagman.
“He was as strong as a horse and I think he liked the culture of the job, the physical work,” Johnson said.
He saved his money and eventually earned enough to buy himself a motorcycle, but he crashed the bike, suffering a head injury in the process. The settlement he won after the accident allowed him to purchase a car – a yellow 1969 Ford Galaxy – and thus begin his reign of terror on an unsuspecting community.
Chapter 4: A life fueled by anger and hatred
“A lot of serial killers, they feel inferior,” said forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Smith. “And that inferiority feeds anger.”
From that point, serial killers often take out their anger and aggression on the outside world as a way to restore feelings of having some control.
For Kemper, his rage fed what would become overwhelming fantasies of violence that he would direct at women, each of whom reminded him of his mother, simply because of their sex.
“For serial killers, part of the experience is fantasizing about what they’re going to do,” Smith said. “It’s thinking about it, it’s planning it.”
Soon enough, fantasies would not be enough.
Kemper’s stalking ground was the highway during a time when most college girls chose hitchhiking as their mode of transportation, and Kemper was glad to give them a ride.
“I traveled a lot because I’d been locked up for five and a half years, so I was driving around. The driving around was a way to demonstrate that freedom,” Kemper said in an interview. “It was a way to get the cobwebs out of me.”
His mother gave him a university staff parking sticker, but also made sure to advise her son that he was never going to attract the pretty co-eds at the school.
“My mother works at the university but my mother wouldn’t introduce me to any of the young ladies at the university because I’m like my father and I don’t deserve to know any of these young ladies,” he said.
The relentless ridicule eventually led him to decide he would get the very girls he coveted, one way or another, in part as a way to get back at the mother who thought her son wasn’t good enough to find love.
His new two-door car would be his weapon.
Practice rounds
Kemper initially was hoping to establish relationships and make friends by picking up people he saw hitchhiking along the highway.
“At first I picked up girls just to talk to them, just to try to get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship,” he told investigators after his murder spree finally came to an end. “But even sitting down and talking, I knew nothing about that area. Ironically, that’s why I started picking people up. Then I went off the deep end.”
He found himself sexually attracted to the girls he picked up hitchhiking – as many as 150, most of whom likely later were horrified to learn how close they’d come to losing their lives to a madman – but was unable to effectively romance them, and feared that if he raped them, he was so recognizable that he would easily be caught.
“I decided to mix the two and have a situation of rape and murder and no witnesses and no prosecution,” he said. “If I killed them, you know, they couldn't reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being... and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll. I am sorry to sound so cold about this, but what I needed was to have a particular experience with a person, to possess them in the way I wanted to. I had to evict them from their bodies.”
Preparing for madness
He packed his car with the items he’d need for his crimes – plastic bags, knives, blankets and handcuffs – and drove around in search of the perfect victim
.
“I saw a lot of people out there and I picked up anybody who wanted a ride,” he said.
He chose co-eds for the same reason he as a child tortured cats. They represented his rage at the woman who’d raised him.
Although at first he continued to pick up and release his passengers, eventually his frustrations bubbled over, and he became unable to control his urges – which he called little zapples – and his second murder spree began.
It happened around the same time as his first sexual experience, at the age of 23, which likely went badly due to another unfortunate physical trait.
“Kemper was driven by manic sex urges but saddled with a crippling sense of inferiority. He had a small penis, which on him looked minuscule, and was quite inept as a lover,” wrote John Godwin in the book “Murder U.S.A.: The Ways We Kill Each Other.”
Most likely, the women he later encountered on the highway would be the ones who would pay for that particular inadequacy.
“I’m picking up young women, and I’m going a little farther each time,” he told Court TV in an interview. “It’s a daring kind of thing. First, there wasn’t a gun. I’m driving along. We go to a vulnerable place, where there aren’t people watching, where I could act out and I say, ‘No, I can’t.’ And then a gun is in the car, hidden. And this craving, this awful raging eating feeling inside, this fantastic passion … it was overwhelming me. It was like drugs. It was like alcohol. A little isn’t enough. At first it is, but as you adjust you need more and more and more.”
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 26
