THE MOST FREQUENTLY encountered unsubs on Criminal Minds are sexual predators. This might be because their particularly heinous crimes make dramatic television. When sex and death are mixed up, the result can be prolific serial killers whose fantasies lead them to kill and who refuse to stop. Some serial sexual predators focus on women, whereas others prey on men. What they have in common is the overriding urge behind their actions. They’re killing out of lust, and in most cases they’re powerless to stop themselves.
ONE KILLER who broke that final rule—who stopped himself cold, once he had dispatched the person at whom his anger was really directed—was Edmund Kemper, the Santa Cruz contemporary of Herbert Mullin’s. Kemper, the Coed Killer, is referred to by Aaron Hotchner as an example of a spree killer in the Criminal Minds episode “Charm and Harm” (120) and again, by David Rossi, as a killer with some characteristics similar to those of the unsub in “Penelope” (309).
Edmund Emil Kemper III was born on December 18, 1948, and it wouldn’t be long until he killed his first victims—his own grandparents. Since his parents’ antagonistic relationship had ended in divorce, Kemper’s psychological problems—no doubt intensified by living with a mother, Clarnell Kemper, who constantly belittled and demeaned him—grew worse. He had two sisters, one older and one younger, and he used to play a death-ritual game with the younger in which he would pretend to be strapped into a chair in a gas chamber. She would release the poisonous gas, and he would struggle and writhe until he “died.” When his sister teased him about a crush on a female teacher, he said, “If I kiss her I would have to kill her first.” He was already, at a young age, beginning to have fantasies that interwove murder and sex.
When Kemper was an adult, he was six feet nine and weighed almost three hundred pounds. But when he was a child, his mother, fearing that her already oversized son would sexually assault his sisters, made him move his belongings into the basement and sleep there, locked in. Her various marital adventures didn’t help; Kemper’s successive stepfathers didn’t know how to deal with the troubled boy. Kemper ran away and tried living with his natural father briefly, but he wasn’t wanted there, either. When he was fifteen, he was sent to live on his paternal grandparents’ remote California ranch.
Things went bad one day in August 1964 while his grandfather, the first Edmund Emil Kemper, was out. The boy was at home with his grandmother when an uncontrollable urge came over him. He shot her in the back of the head, then stabbed her several times. When his grandfather drove up to the house, Kemper decided to spare him the sight of his murdered wife and shot him to death before he ever made it into the house. Alone, Kemper called his mother, then the police. After he was arrested, he explained, “I just wanted to see what it would feel like to shoot Grandma,” and he expressed sorrow that he had missed the opportunity to undress her.
In “Penelope,” Agents Hotchner, Reid, Prentiss, and Jareau gather to help Garcia (center) after she is targeted by a serial killer.
These murders resulted in Kemper being sent to Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility for the mentally ill. Testing showed him to be a paranoid schizophrenic and to have a near-genius IQ. Kemper hid his inner turmoil and became an assistant to one of the hospital’s psychologists, even administering psychological tests on the doctor’s behalf. What he learned about the testing was to stand him in good stead when it was time for his own examination. After less than five years in the hospital, he was deemed an acceptable risk and released into his mother’s care.
By this time Clarnell had found a job on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. She let Kemper move back in with her. He applied for a job with the California Highway Patrol, but he was too tall. Instead, he found employment with the state highway department and started hanging out at restaurants and bars frequented by cops. He was smart, had a good sense of humor, and could carry on a conversation, so he was accepted by the police officers he met.
The urges Kemper had felt earlier were returning, perhaps heightened by the fact that he was living with his abusive mother again. Finally he saved up enough money to rent a place in Alameda with a friend. During this time, he was building up to the acts that would make him infamous. He went out driving, picking up dozens of female hitchhikers—of which no shortage existed in early 1970s California—and learning how to put them at ease.
The time came to make his fantasies real. On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up two college girls, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were hitchhiking to Stanford University. Kemper tooled around with them for a while, then pulled onto a deserted country road. There he handcuffed Pesce to the seat, locked Luchessa in the trunk, and stabbed them both to death. He hauled them up to Alameda, and in the privacy of his apartment he decapitated Luchessa. He removed Pesce’s clothes and dissected her, cut off her head, and sexually assaulted some of the body parts he had strewn about the room. He dumped the bodies in the mountains, remembering the spot so he could visit later. After keeping both heads for a time, he tossed them into a ravine. He photographed the whole affair with a Polaroid camera.
His fantasy fulfilled for the time being, Kemper kept picking up hitchhikers without harming them—until September 14. On that day he spotted fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo hitchhiking, so he stopped, enticed her into his car, and took her to a rural road. He strangled the girl into unconsciousness and raped her. When she started coming to before he was finished, he strangled her to death and continued. With Koo’s body in his trunk, he paid his mother a visit, then took his “prize” home for dissection. The next day, he had an appointment with a psychiatrist; according to some accounts, while he was inside convincing the doctor that all was well with him, Koo’s head sat in his trunk.
Another four-month stretch passed, during which time Kemper bought a .22 caliber pistol. On January 8, 1973, his victim was Cindy Schall, a hitchhiking college student. He killed her with one shot to the head, then took her to his mother’s house, put her in a closet, and went to bed. In the morning, after his mother left for work, he took the corpse out of the closet, had sex with it, and dissected it, then washed the blood away in the bathtub, placed the pieces in plastic bags, and threw them off a cliff into the ocean. He buried Schall’s head in the yard so that it would be gazing up at his mother’s bedroom window, because, he explained, Clarnell always liked to think people “looked up to her.”
Less than a month went by before Kemper struck again. This time, he went onto the university campus and picked up two separate hitchhikers, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. Shooting them both on campus, he drove through the guard station at the campus gates with the bodies sitting upright in the car, then moved them into the trunk when he was safely past. At his mother’s house, he decapitated both girls, then carried the heads into his room to sexually assault them.
On March 4, body parts began turning up. Santa Cruz police had recently arrested Herbert Mullin and yet a third Santa Cruz murderer, John Linley Frazier, but when the University of California at Santa Cruz girls disappeared, the authorities knew that a killer still operated in their vicinity. Kemper had kept up his relationship with cops, getting regular reports on how the investigations were proceeding.
He was growing concerned, however. There was a bullet hole in his car and a lot of blood inside it. He bought a new handgun, a .44, and a sheriff ’s officer who saw the paperwork and remembered Kemper’s earlier conviction decided to visit him at his apartment. Kemper handed over the .44 but kept his .22. He didn’t know if the officer had looked inside his car, however, or what other dots he might have connected. It was time to bring his murderous streak to an end—but not before he killed his most significant victim.
On Good Friday, April 20, 1973, Kemper went to his mother’s house. When she got home from work, they talked, and their discussion became an argument. He let her go to bed, and at around 5:15 a.m. he carried a claw hammer into her room, as he had fantasized about doing many times. He hit her in the head with the hammer, then slash
ed her throat. Once she was dead he decapitated her, handcuffed her wrists, and put her in the closet. He argued with her head, threw darts at it, and removed the larynx, which he tried to shove down the garbage disposal. The disposal spat it back out. “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me,” he later said. “I couldn’t get her to shut up!” Back in her room, he had sex with her corpse.
He knew that suspicion would fall on him; he had, after all, murdered his own grandparents. But he thought that if there were two victims, his guilt wouldn’t be as obvious. Later in the day, he called his mother’s friend Sandy Hallett and invited her to dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed, strangled, and decapitated her and left her body in his bed. He slept in his mother’s bed, with her corpse lying beside him.
Still unsettled, Kemper drove to Reno, Nevada, rented a different car, and kept going. In Colorado he was pulled over, but he was chagrined to learn it was for speeding, not as part of a nationwide manhunt. Finally he called the Santa Cruz police, directing them to look in his mother’s house. At first, knowing “Big Ed,” they thought he was joking. It took a second call before they believed him.
Back home, he confessed to all of his murders. His public defender tried an insanity defense, which Kemper abetted by claiming that he had sliced off flesh from some of his victims, cooked it with macaroni, and eaten it—a claim he later recanted, saying it had been intended only to bolster the insanity plea. It was hard to convince a jury that someone as smart and personable as Ed Kemper was insane, and he was found guilty on eight counts of first-degree murder. The judge asked what he thought was appropriate punishment, and Kemper suggested that he be tortured to death. Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and he remains locked up today.
Ed Kemper’s motivations for his crimes were many. He couldn’t conceive of a healthy sexual relationship with a woman. He wanted to possess the pretty girls he saw all around him, who his mother said were so much better than he was that he didn’t stand a chance. Early in life, he had twisted up his brain’s sex-and-death wiring. But he also wanted revenge against his mother, and some believe that if he had simply killed her first, he might have spared others a great deal of suffering.
JAMES MITCHELL “Mike” DeBardeleben has been mentioned only once on Criminal Minds, in the episode “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), as one of the subjects of a book by profiler David Rossi, Deviance: The Secret Desires of Sadistic Serial Killers. DeBardeleben is definitely an appropriate subject for that book.
Initially, his case was investigated by the Secret Service, because in addition to being a sexual sadist and a serial killer, he was a counterfeiter known as the Mall Passer. He traveled the country using fake bills to make small purchases at malls and get substantial change in real currency. In two years, he had hit thirty-eight states and passed about thirty thousand dollars in funny money. The Treasury Department wanted him badly. It finally got ahead of him, figuring out where he might go next and alerting merchants in the malls he might hit.
In Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 25, 1983, an alert store clerk reported DeBardeleben. The authorities moved in, and the Mall Passer found himself busted.
The suspect clammed up. His ID said one thing, and his car registration said something else altogether. It took the FBI’s fingerprint analysis to hang his real name on him: Mike DeBardeleben. Once the Secret Service had that information, they realized they’d arrested him once before, for passing fake hundred-dollar bills in 1976, a rap that earned him two years of federal time.
The car he’d been driving in Knoxville contained drugs, pornography, phony IDs, fake money, and the goods he’d bought with the latter. What they didn’t have was his printing equipment, what the Secret Service calls a counterfeiter’s “plant.” They needed to search his home in Alexandria, Virginia.
All they found, however, were dirty dishes and more small purchases made with bogus bills—no printing press, no plates. Three agents stayed behind when the others left, determined to find something. Greg Mertz picked up DeBardeleben’s phone book and flipped through the yellow pages.
There he found that a card had been slipped between two pages in the “Moving and Storage” section. He showed his colleagues, and they canvassed the nearby storage facilities. At one, the manager recognized DeBardeleben’s picture and opened up his unit.
Inside, they found much counterfeit money, a single printing plate, bubble lights for posing as law enforcement, drugs and drug paraphernalia, and much more. They also found things that hinted at another pastime they hadn’t known about: a bloody chain, women’s phone numbers and addresses, panties, a dildo, handcuffs, and lubricant. They also found hundreds of sexually explicit photographs—stills that showed what kind of man they’d captured. Audiotapes made it all real in an even more horrible way.
What DeBardeleben had recorded were torture sessions. His voice could be heard, along with the voices of women in intense agony, begging their captor to stop what he was doing or kill them and be done with it. The victims who survived his attacks reported a man who was obsessed with causing pain, who forced them to perform the most degrading acts imaginable, and who photographed it all and threatened to make the photos public if they told anyone.
With this information, the Secret Service began to track DeBardeleben’s movements during the last few years. None of what they found was pleasant.
DeBardeleben was a pure sexual sadist, the kind that is categorized as an anger-excitation rapist. He had murdered at least two women and possibly many more; however, by the time he was sentenced to 375 years in prison on rape, kidnapping, robbery, sodomy, and forgery charges, the prosecutors from other vicinities decided not to bother pursuing convictions on the murders. Not only had DeBardeleben recorded his crimes on audiotape and in photographs, he had also filled notebook after notebook with his own writings, a diary of perversity that stunned all who read it.
Anger-excitation rapists are the most dangerous kind of rapist, because the suffering of their victims is what stimulates them sexually. That is, it’s not the act of inflicting pain that they respond to; it’s the suffering of their victims from that pain. Edmund Kemper was not a sexual sadist, because his dismemberment of his victims was postmortem. A sexual sadist like DeBardeleben wouldn’t bother with that—once the victim is beyond pain, there’s no point to it. Former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood, who has done in-depth studies of sexual sadism, calls sexual sadists “the great white shark of sexual crimes.”
DeBardeleben was born on March 20, 1940, in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father was rigid and controlling, and his mother was an alcoholic who punished him frequently and whom DeBardeleben started beating up when he reached his teens. His younger brother eventually committed suicide. His first arrest, on a weapons charge, was at age sixteen. He joined the army but was court-martialed and booted out. He was married five times, and he treated his wives as horribly as he treated his victims, bending them to his will, punishing them, and making them participate in his criminal activities.
DeBardeleben made tapes on which he played both roles, running through a script dictated by his own internal fantasies and acting out the role of the victim, begging for mercy and screaming in pain. He also sometimes dressed in women’s clothing when acting out these fantasies.
But it’s his writings that are most illuminating. “The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism,” DeBardeleben wrote. “The central impulse is to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god, to do with her as one pleases, to humiliate her, to enslave her are means to this end. And the most radical aim is to make her suffer. Since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her. To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the complete domination of another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.”
Fortunately, the Secret Service agents arrested DeBardele
ben when they did, because if he had been able to continue his activities, these would only have gotten worse. Sexual sadists begin developing their fantasies at a young age and typically begin acting them out in early adulthood, but throughout the years they become more violent and bizarre. DeBardeleben had been at it for a while before his 1983 arrest, but he was only in his early forties, and he would not have stopped.
On one occasion he made a tape recording of some of his goals: to create false identities, to buy a house and land on which he could build a structure suited especially for his rapes and murders, and finally, “also of prime importance—top priority—would be an incinerator capable of incinerating at extremely high temperature—total incineration.” Had he achieved these goals, there’s no telling how many women would have disappeared, never to be seen again.
During their hunt for the unsub in “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), members of the BAU mention potential similarities between the victims and the victims of several other sexual predators in addition to DeBardeleben: Jeffrey Dahmer, Robert Berdella, David Berkowitz, Jack the Ripper, Altemio Sanchez, the Hillside Stranglers (cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi), the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run (also known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer), and Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer).
The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run has never been identified. During the 1930s, he murdered between twelve and forty people in Cleveland, Ohio, dismembering, decapitating, and occasionally cutting his victims in half, as the infamous Black Dahlia Killer did in Los Angeles in 1947. Famed detective Eliot Ness failed to catch the Mad Butcher. One of the strongest suspects was Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, who voluntarily committed himself and remained hospitalized until his death in 1965. After Sweeney took himself off the streets, the bloody murders stopped.
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