Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  2

  FORKLIFT

  His mother called him Guy. His friends in the police force called him Big Ed. His buddies at the Highway Division called him Forklift. In the end, he was more of a bulldozer, a massive machine carving its way through a once-bucolic California town. As the seventies dawned, an excess of madness bubbled up in the sleepy coastal community of Santa Cruz. An auto mechanic turned homicidally anti-auto. A would-be highway engineer who heard voices telling him to kill. And Forklift, a nice guy, one of the boys, given another nickname by the town’s residents: the Chopper.

  His journey began in 1963, the year America went mad. The United States was increasingly embroiled in a baffling war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement was turning violent in town after Southern town, and in November, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy as his motorcade crept through Dallas. Then Oswald himself was assassinated on live television by Jack Ruby. Later that week, as the murder played over and over on the nation’s small screens—the crowd of nondescript cops, the diminutive Oswald crumpling, his face distended into Edvard Munch’s The Scream—fourteen-year-old Edmund Emil Kemper III of Helena, Montana, stole his mother’s car, drove himself to a depot, and took a bus to his father’s home in Van Nuys, California. He too had reached a boiling point.

  Ed Kemper was a disturbed young man. According to his sisters, he chopped the heads off their dolls, killed the family cats, and liked to play a game where he pretended to die in the gas chamber. He had a habit of staring that made the neighborhood kids nervous. It didn’t help that he was huge for his age, a giant of a boy with a brooding look. His parents had divorced in 1961. Kemper’s story was that his father, Ed Junior, was a John Wayne–like war hero who had gone on secret suicide missions in the Special Forces, and his mother, Clarnell, was a domineering man-hater. Frustrated with her husband’s inability to complete college and get a decent, middle-class job after the war, she hounded him until he left. Once he was gone, she took out her frustration on her strange, sullen son.

  Unfortunately for young Ed, his father’s new wife didn’t like his hulking, strange presence either. So after the boy had spent a few weeks with them, Ed Kemper Jr. took his son Ed III on a holiday visit to the home of the first Ed Kemper in tiny North Fork, California. At the end of the holiday, the father went back to Van Nuys—leaving young Ed behind. The teenage boy was distraught. He didn’t want to live with his grandparents out in the middle of nowhere. The abandonment was made worse by the fact that it was Ed’s father, the boy’s idol, who had done it. Nobody wanted him, it seemed. Young Ed brooded for less than a year. At age 15, Ed Kemper III stood watching his grandmother as she sat at the kitchen table correcting proofs of a story she had written for Boys’ Life. Then he lifted his .22 hunting rifle to his eye and shot her in the back of the head. He went outside, waited by the side of the garage for his grandfather to come home, and killed him too. “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma,” he told police when they asked him why he had done it. “ ‘Mad-at-World’ Youth Kills His Grandparents,” reported the local newspaper, right under the breaking news “Cute Little Girl’s Kissing Santa Claus.”

  Ed Kemper, mad at world, looked a lot like a fifties juvenile delinquent, an angry young man like Charlie Starkweather venting his frustration on anyone who crossed his path. Committed to Atascadero, a state hospital for the criminally insane, he would emerge to remake himself entirely. The hostile, thwarted rebel would morph into the latest model of madman to haunt the American highway: the methodical killer on the road, depicted in magazines, movies, and a Doors song, threatened in police warnings, rumored on college campuses where idealistic young people were trying to build a better world, one that included the freedom of untrammeled mobility.

  In the sixties, young people had taken to the road in great numbers, thumbing their way along the nation’s new interstate highways. By the late seventies, all that would change. The killer on the road, a small danger amplified to a mythic threat, would change the nation’s relationship to its car culture. His increasing hold on the national psyche paralleled the nation’s transition from loving its new roads to hating them. From beautiful, safe dreamways, the freeways came to be seen as destructive atrocities imposed on the landscape by a money-grubbing highway machine. And as the highways came to be seen as concrete monsters, hitchhiking increasingly came to be seen as foolishly inviting ruin from monsters in human form.

  • • • • •

  The nation’s romance with its highways ended before the honeymoon was over. After the initial exuberance, the reality of having created a self-perpetuating highway juggernaut set in quickly. In 1960, Congress began investigating the program for waste and fraud. Critics pointed out that the highway trust fund—which socked away federal gas tax revenues solely for building roads—had spawned an unstoppable highway lobby, what one historian called “a virtual Möbius strip of money.” This wide-ranging consortium of road builders, equipment manufacturers, state highway officials, automakers, and oil companies—they came to be called the “road gang”—seemed dedicated to paving the entire nation. Highwaymen had built a soulless machine, eerily reminiscent of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against on his way out of office. In the sixties, activists began talking about “busting” the highway trust fund: letting some of the money banked by the federal gas tax be used for mass transit projects, rather than being reserved for roads alone. Even the staid Reader’s Digest took a stand, publishing an article called “Let’s Put the Brakes on the Highway Lobby!” in 1969.

  Part of the impulse came from the growing environmental movement. Highways were beginning to feel like an assault on the nation’s landscapes: they were leveling mountains, infringing on rivers, mowing down forests, and increasing air pollution by encouraging driving. The situation was especially dire in California, the state the rest of the nation looked to when it wanted to see the future. Thousand-year-old redwoods had been felled, valuable farmland had been asphalted, and a granite cliff-face in Yosemite had been blasted through. When, in 1963, California highway engineers released a plan to drop twenty-two nuclear bombs to vaporize the Bristol Mountains and clear a path for I-40, that only proved to critics what the interstate program really was: war on nature. Three years later, author Richard Lillard wrote that “As 1970 draws near, and the Age of Superhighways is at hand, many Californians see as a new menace the white serpentine tentacles of concrete that wind around communities and smother the environment. Eden has become the world’s biggest concrete asphalt desert.” Another denunciation of California’s auto-centric development, William Bronson’s How to Kill a Golden State, described the interstate network as “a monument to materialism, concrete proof that speed and dollars are the highest values in our culture.”

  The moral implications were important. It wasn’t just that highways were ugly: they were damaging to the human soul. Around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, a tidal wave of anti-interstate books hit bookstores. Their titles say it all: Superhighway—Superhoax, The Road to Ruin, The Pavers and the Paved, Highways to Nowhere, Dead End, Autokind vs. Mankind. The authors weren’t just concerned about the destruction of communities and ruination of the landscape. They were worried about the highway system’s effect on the humans who used it. “We human beings are sensitive organisms,” wrote John Robinson in Highways and Our Environment (1971), “and consciously or not, we react to our surroundings.” When those surroundings were a highway seen from behind the wheel, the effect was to deaden the driver to human connection.

  The notion that cars had the power to unleash primitive, antisocial urges had been around since the dawn of the auto era, and it bloomed again in the seventies. As Ronald Buel put it in Dead End: “We are a violent people. . . . The auto falls solidly within this tradition. It keeps people from treating other people as human beings. One thinks of passing the car in front of you, or beating the other car to a parking place, instead of passing the person in front of you or f
ighting the person for a parking place. The auto prevents casual contact with others unlike oneself. And because we don’t understand the humanity of others, there are fewer limits to our aggressive tendencies.”

  There was one exception to this understanding of the highway. One group of people was attempting to use the highway system to foster human connection, rather than separation: hitchhikers. Standing by the side of the road in bell bottoms and fringed vests, guitars slung over their shoulders, long hair blowing in the wind, America’s countercultural youth had found a glorious new way to roam the nation: depending on the kindness of strangers. Strangers who included people like Ed.

  • • • • •

  In 1969, Ed Kemper was released from Atascadero. During his four years of incarceration, the United States had changed dramatically. Americans’ support for the war in Vietnam, nearly universal when Kemper was sent away, had evaporated. After the president’s murder, there had been more assassinations: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy. Radical groups were advocating violent upheaval: the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society. And many of the nation’s urban ghettos had erupted in violence: Watts in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, Washington, DC, in 1968. If the world had taken a turn toward violence in 1963, it was roaring down that road at full speed six years later.

  Against the recommendations of his doctors, Kemper was paroled into his mother’s custody. Clarnell had divorced a third time and taken a job as an administrative assistant at the new University of California campus in Santa Cruz. Ed moved into her home in Aptos, a Santa Cruz suburb.

  Kemper, a boy with serious aggressive tendencies, had spent his formative teen years incarcerated with violent offenders and psychopaths. It hadn’t done his mental health much good. Sexually, he was still a child, strongly attracted to women, yet terrified of them. He was socially inept. He had little formal education and slim hope of getting a good job. But he wanted, as his mother might put it, to make something of himself. He had been a model prisoner, working his way up to administering psychological tests to other inmates. While in custody, he had even earned a Junior Chamber of Commerce pin that he wore proudly on his lapel.

  His dream was to be a member of the California Highway Patrol. He applied to both the Berkeley police department and the state troopers. His mother tried to help him by campaigning to get his juvenile record expunged. His record would ultimately be sealed, but it didn’t matter: even without his murderous history, his massive size—he had topped out at six feet nine inches tall and 280 pounds—disqualified him. The only work Kemper could find was manual labor on farms in the Watsonville area outside Santa Cruz. He claimed this disappointed his mother: like his father, he was failing to get ahead. He and his mother fought bitterly about it, sometimes screaming at each other loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Finally, Kemper managed to land a job as a flagman with the California Division of Highways. With a steady and fairly respectable job, he got his own apartment in Alameda, a Bay Area city just south of Oakland.

  He bought a car. His choice of model was significant: a Ford Galaxie. The model’s new “Thunderjet” engine made it a popular choice for police departments, and Kemper fixed it up like a police car, installing a radio transmitter and a microphone on the dash. He bought a motorcycle too. If he couldn’t be a cop, he could look like one. He even hung out with cops at a Santa Cruz bar called the Jury Room. “Big Ed,” as his police friends called him, was clean-cut and respectful, a far cry from a lot of young people in town.

  Santa Cruz, an idyllic coastal resort boasting beach, redwood forests, and dramatic mountains, was undergoing some growing pains of its own. It had long been a sleepy retirement and weekend community, but, in the late sixties, everything was changing. The new campus, opened in 1965, attracted a new breed of college student—longhairs who went to class barefoot and organized teach-ins to protest the Vietnam War. The town’s mellow lifestyle appealed to other unconventional types too. Hippies and surfers flocked to the area. Witches and Satanists established themselves in the hills outside of town. Communes were founded. An alternative bookstore called the Hip Pocket opened downtown, while a cheap café called the Catalyst served up coffee, beer, and music to the hippie crowd. Santa Cruz had become a magnet for what was coming to be known as the counterculture.

  In choosing to hang out with cops, Ed Kemper had chosen sides in a town sharply divided between “straights” and “freaks.” To the older, long-term residents, Santa Cruz’s new hippies were an “undesirable transient element.” In the summer of 1970, the city attempted to reduce their numbers by limiting their transience: prompted by several conservative council members, town legislators considered enacting an antihitchhiking ordinance. Noisy young longhairs stormed a city council meeting, chanting “Sieg heil!” and “Power to the people!” The hippies saw the proposed ban as an outright attack on their way of life. Hitching was not only central to their low-budget, freewheeling lifestyle, it was the perfect expression of countercultural ideals. It was a way of expressing trust in one’s fellow man. It was living in the moment instead of obeying a rigid schedule. And it was ecological and antimaterialist, because hitchers didn’t need to buy cars. In short, it was “a beautiful, groovy way to travel,” as one nineteen-year-old girl told Newsweek in 1969. Frequent news articles on the burgeoning phenomenon all cited the hippie commitment to using highways for impromptu human connection. As one hitcher put it to the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1971: “Mostly you just feel how much people need each other and how much they take care of each other.”

  The straight world may not have thrilled to the grooviness of it all, but many in it were uncomfortable limiting personal freedom, and the Santa Cruz ban didn’t pass. Then, in October 1970, the town experienced another tense moment between the straight world and the freaks. A prominent local eye surgeon, Dr. Carl Ohta, was found dead in his swimming pool, along with his wife, his two sons, his secretary, and the family cat. All of them, down to the cat, had been bound with the doctor’s trademark silk scarves and shot, execution style. The doctor’s house was aflame and its driveways blocked with his own expensive cars. Under the windshield wiper of the Rolls Royce, police found a note declaring that World War III had begun. “I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death for freedom against anything or anyone who does not support natural life on this planet,” it read. “Materialism must die or mankind will.”

  The conclusion was clear: hippie eco-freaks had murdered the doctor and his family. The town erupted in hostility toward its longhairs. Gun sales skyrocketed and bomb threats poured into hippie headquarters, the Catalyst. Frightened hippie informants told police about John Linley Frazier, an unstable young man who lived in a shack not far from the Ohta residence and often talked about murdering “materialists.” A former auto mechanic, he had quit his job and stopped driving when a religious experience—probably drug-fueled—had convinced him that cars were destroying the environment. Police staked out the shack and arrested Frazier within a week. He was tried in early 1971 and sentenced to death for the murders. (The sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 when California called a halt to capital punishment.) At his trial, friends testified that he had frequently talked of a “revolution” in which people would have to either change their ways or be killed.

  “It came down to the people who were in favor of nature against the people who were putting down blacktop and buying things,” one of his friends recalled.

  Hippies helped put Frazier in jail, but many were somewhat sympathetic to his cause. The antimaterialist counterculture was antiblacktop. Some in the straight world pointed out that this was in direct conflict with their enthusiasm for hitchhiking. But the hitchhiking kids didn’t see a contradiction. Sharing rides reduced the number of cars on the road, thus limiting the need for new pavement. And it changed the nature of the highway, from a place you moved through encased in a private cocoon to a place where strangers met each other and bonds betwe
en people were created. Chance encounters on the nation’s roadways could lead to just about anything.

  • • • • •

  Ed Kemper was interested in chance encounters. He spent his free time in 1970 and 1971 cruising the Bay Area’s highways. From Alameda, where his apartment was, north to Oakland and Berkeley. Or south, down the Nimitz Freeway, to San Jose, then southwest to Santa Cruz. He could get on the new interstate, I-80, zooming east out of Oakland, and he could link up to the still-in-progress I-5, connecting LA and San Diego to Sacramento and points north. In 1971, he had an accident on his motorcycle: another driver ran a red light and knocked him down. He received a $15,000 settlement and had a cast on his arm for the next two years. He had to spend a lot of time at his mother’s place, recuperating. This led to more fights. When things got unpleasant, Kemper would get in his car and just go. And wherever he went, he picked up hitchhikers.

  On May 7, 1972, Ed Kemper piloted his Galaxie onto I-80 in Berkeley. The Ashby Avenue on-ramp was a popular spot for hitchers wanting to go into San Francisco. Sure enough, he saw two young women there with a sign indicating their destination: Stanford. Kemper slowed to a halt and invited them in.

  Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, roommates at Fresno State College, had been visiting friends in Berkeley. They planned to see a pal at Stanford before heading back to school. They could have gotten a ride from someone they knew, but they wanted to hitch; it would be an adventure. They were both pretty and well dressed; they seemed like nice, middle-class girls. This was important to Kemper: he only picked up hitchers, he explained later, “if they were young, reasonably good-looking, not necessarily well-to-do, but say, of a better class of people than the scroungy, messy, dirty, smelly, hippy types I wasn’t at all interested in. I suppose they would have been more convenient, but that wasn’t my purpose.”