Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  Kemper asked the young women a few questions and quickly ascertained that they didn’t know their way around the area. He drove around in a few confusing twists and turns, then, instead of taking the Bay Bridge west to San Francisco, he drove south, to Alameda. He stopped for gas there and went to the restroom, where he looked for Stanford on a map. It was to the south. He went back to the car and drove east.

  “I took them the other way, out on 680, which would come in on the rural highway,” he told police later. “I told them a story about how I was working for the Division of Highways. They were impressed with my radio transmitter, and they thought I was a secret agent or something. I kept telling them that I wasn’t a policeman . . . and they’d give each other little looks.”

  Clearly enjoying being taken for the cop he longed to be, Kemper drove to a secluded area near Livermore. Then he stopped the car and showed the young women his gun; he had borrowed it from one of his superiors at the Highway Division. He told the girls that he was taking them back to his home in Alameda, implying that he planned to rape them. He told Luchessa to get in the trunk and Pesce to hide in the backseat. Mary Ann Pesce immediately began to talk with him, calmly offering that he might just want to talk about his problems. Kemper, a veteran of five years of state-funded psychotherapy, was not going to be swayed so easily, but he did say later that he really liked her.

  “I was really quite struck by her personality and her looks,” he told police, “and there was just almost a reverence there.”

  Kemper handcuffed Pesce—a cop friend had given him a badge and a pair of handcuffs—and locked Luchessa in the trunk. He returned to the backseat and Pesce. He had what he called “this nifty idea about suffocating her.” He tried to suffocate her with a plastic bag; then he tried to choke her with a bathrobe tie. She struggled too much, so he got out a knife and stabbed her many times, finally slashing her throat. As he was killing her, he said, “there was absolutely no contact with improper areas.” He reported that her last word was to call out her friend’s name: “Anita.”

  Once he felt sure Pesce was dead, Kemper went to the trunk and confronted the terrified Luchessa. He stabbed her so many times he later professed amazement at how long she lived. Finally, she stopped fending him off. He drove the bodies back to his apartment in Alameda, took them inside, dismembered them, and took Polaroid pictures. Later, he buried the bodies in the mountains near Santa Cruz. He kept the heads for a while, until they began to rot, then he threw them over the edge of a cliffside roadway into a ravine. He spent hours going over every item in the young women’s bags and wallets. He was thrilled to find that his instinct about them was correct. Pesce’s ID showed that she was from Camarillo, a well-off bedroom community north of LA. She was even a member of the Bear Valley Ski Patrol. He drove up the Ventura Freeway to look at her home and was delighted when it turned out to be in an affluent, “country club” neighborhood. Sometimes, he told police, he went back to Mary Ann Pesce’s burial site, “to be near her . . . because I loved her and wanted her.”

  Despite that “love,” Kemper didn’t feel bad for killing the two young women. After all, they shouldn’t have been hitchhiking. At eighteen, the two of them “weren’t much more than children,” he acknowledged, “but I felt that they were old enough to know better than to do the things they were doing . . . out there hitchhiking, when they had no reason or need to. They were flaunting in my face the fact that they could do any damn thing they wanted, and that society is as screwed up as it is. So that wasn’t a prime reason for them being dead. It was just something that would get me a little uptight, the thought of that, them feeling so safe in a society where I didn’t feel safe.”

  • • • • •

  Hitchhiking was not invented by the counterculture. For many decades after the introduction of the automobile, hitching rides was perfectly mainstream. In the days when few people owned cars, giving a ride to someone who needed one was simply the decent thing to do. During the Depression, a lift was a means of helping out the less fortunate. And once the war broke out, picking up hitchhikers became nothing less than patriotic duty, since soldiers often thumbed their way to or from their bases. Emily Post even sanctioned the practice for young women who had jobs in the defense industry—though she suggested drivers and hitchers restrict their conversations to impersonal topics, like the weather.

  “What’d you say we’re supposed to be doing?” Claudette Colbert asks Clark Gable in Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night. “Hitchhiking,” he replies, and after launching into a pedantic lecture on thumbing technique, he promptly fails to thumb down a ride. The famous scene that follows, in which Colbert flashes a leg to bring a car to a screeching halt, is typical of Hollywood’s pre-seventies embrace of hitching. Hitchhiking is a narrative device, throwing together characters like Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in the 1941 Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels, or even a “meet cute,” as when Jean Arthur gets a ride from John Wayne in Lady Takes a Chance (1943). Character actors as varied as Elvis Presley, Debbie Reynolds, and Cher can all be found hitching in postwar films, and as late as 1973, Breezy director Clint Eastwood set up a May/December romance by having flower child Breezy (Kay Lenz) hitch a ride with the middle-aged William Holden. Before she meets him, however, Breezy finds herself in the car with a lecherous creep. She jumps out of his car at a stop sign. “Freaks!” she exclaims as the car roars off. “Another typical day in the life of Miss Dumb-Dumb.”

  Antihitchhiking campaigns began around the time the interstate highway system did. In the late fifties, the Automobile Association of America launched a campaign called “Thumbs Down on Thumbers.” It aimed at dissuading drivers from picking up hitchers by suggesting they might be dangerous felons or con artists. The FBI—impelled in part by J. Edgar Hoover’s hatred for student activists who were hitching to civil rights and antiwar demonstrations—joined the campaign, issuing scary statistics and creating a poster titled “Death in Disguise” that featured an ominous hitchhiker. “Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal,” the poster asked, “a pleasant companion or a sex maniac—a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer?” The Saturday Evening Post had the answer in 1957: “The Hitchhiker You Pick Up May Be a Dangerous Criminal!” The magazine reported that “Drivers have had their heads bashed in with stones, have been dismembered and have been disemboweled by strangers they picked up on the highways.” The problem was hitchers, though, not highways: the same issue included a feature impatiently assessing progress on the interstate highway program called “Where Are Those Superhighways?”

  In spite of early scare campaigns, hitchhiking continued to grow in popularity. In the sixties, articles published in magazines as varied as Life, Harper’s, the National Review, Newsweek, and Scholastic all viewed thumbing in a positive light. A 1966 Sports Illustrated feature was typical: it recounted fun stories about hitching, described as “a valid ticket to adventure for uncountable thousands every year.” Author Janet Graham—a practiced hitcher—even included a perky list of “Tips to Girl Hikers.” They included “Take a companion—or a hat-pin”; “Be neat but not gaudy—no low-cut blouses”; “If he’s tipsy or wolfish, say you are heading elsewhere”; and “Learn in five languages: ‘I’m going to throw up.’ ”

  An early FBI antihitchhiking campaign. The FBI disseminated scary facts about hitchers in part because J. Edgar Hoover hated that student activists were hitchhiking to civil rights marches. Courtesy FBI.

  Part of why the practice persisted was that early campaigns against hitching presented the hitchhiker as the threat. Early hitch-horror films like Felix Feist’s The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) cast the hitchhiker as villain, a story line that continued even in later films like Roger Corman’s The Hitcher, made in 1986 and remade in 2007. In these films, the hitchhiker never has a backstory; he simply looms into sight by the side of the road and opens his campaign of torment. As a result, these films don’t feel true to
social reality: the motiveless hitcher is simply a force of evil, a near-supernatural harbinger of death like Javier Bardem’s affectless Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Played with sadistic relish by Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, the killer-hitchhiker even has a totemic name: “John Ryder.”

  The Hitcher was partly inspired by Jim Morrison’s song “Riders on the Storm,” from the 1971 Doors album L.A. Woman. Morrison’s lyrics—whispered and sung at the same time for added effect—describe a hitchhiking murderer and warn the driver not to give him a ride, but here, too, the image feels like a metaphor. Morrison was not writing a public service message about picking up hitchers: to be a rider on the storm is simply to be a person on the turbulent journey through life, with the hitchhiker standing in for any bogeymen who can ruin the trip. (The metaphor is played out even further in Morrison’s obscure 1969 art film HWY: An American Pastoral, where he himself plays the murderous hitcher.) The hitcher-killer felt no more real than the zombies, werewolves, or aliens who stalked the nation’s dreams. And in fact, the real danger of hitchhiking was almost never to the driver; it was to the hitcher.

  • • • • •

  Once he started again, Ed Kemper couldn’t stop killing. Four months after murdering Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, in September of 1972, he was once again cruising Berkeley. Near a bus stop, fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo, an aspiring dancer, was holding up a sign with the letters “SF.” She was on her way to a dance class in San Francisco and had grown tired of waiting for the bus. Kemper passed her, then did a U-turn to pick her up. She climbed right in without asking him any questions.

  “There was absolutely no problem,” he said later. “Apparently she was not an accomplished hitchhiker.”

  Koo, the daughter of an absent Korean father and a Latvian mother, lived in Berkeley with her mother and her grandparents. Her mother worked at the university to afford dance classes and private school tuition for Aiko. The young girl was talented, ambitious, and hardworking. She talked openly to Kemper about the fact that her father was not around. Ever on the lookout for class clues, he deduced from her speech and appearance that she came from “a home of meager means.” One clear sign, he said, was that “there was no family car. The only transportation that she had was a bus to and from where she would go.”

  Koo knew which freeway ramp she wanted Kemper to take, so in order to get to a more remote area, he pretended to miss it, then drove on and off the freeway a few times. Finally, as they neared the Coast Highway that led to Santa Cruz, he pulled out a .357 Magnum—another gun borrowed from a friend at the Highway Division—and informed Koo she was being abducted. She begged him not to kill her. He told her he only wanted to talk, but that in order to get her to his mother’s house without the neighbors getting suspicious, he would have to tie her up and tape her mouth. She consented. Kemper then attempted to smother her, and failing that, strangled her with the muffler she was wearing. At some point, he said, he raped her. When she was dead, he put her in his trunk and drove to a beer joint. After drinking a couple beers, he went out to his car, opened up the trunk, and looked at her body, doing, as he put it later, “one of those triumphant things . . . admiring my work and admiring her beauty, and I might say, admiring my catch like a fisherman.” Then he drove to Aptos and, with the dead teenager in his trunk, sat and pleasantly chatted with his mother. Later, he took the body home and dismembered it.

  Two days later, with Aiko Koo’s head in his trunk, he drove to Fresno for a psychiatric examination. Based on the interview, the psychiatrists determined that Kemper was no longer a threat to society and that his juvenile murder record should be sealed.

  • • • • •

  By late 1972, the Santa Cruz County sheriff’s department was beginning to notice a disturbing increase in the number of reported violent crimes. Rape was on the rise, and murders, though rarer, were trickling in. In July 1971, Linda Zuniga had disappeared while hitchhiking to her parents’ home in Watsonville, a lower-middle-class community of mostly Hispanic residents. Her wallet had been found off Highway 1. Zuniga was a student at Cabrillo College, a junior college known for helping students transfer into the UC system. She was an adult, and police don’t go looking for adult missing persons unless foul play is indicated. After one brief news item, the story died.

  In August of 1972, hikers found a head on Loma Prieta mountain outside Santa Cruz. It was identified as the head of Mary Ann Pesce, murdered by Kemper three months earlier. In September, a fifty-five-year-old loner who lived in Santa Cruz, Lawrence White, was found bludgeoned to death along Highway 9. The next month, another Cabrillo College student, twenty-four-year-old Mary Guilfoyle, disappeared while hitchhiking to an employment agency in Santa Cruz. Her husband reported her missing, but again, since she was an adult, there was little police could do. Then in November, in nearby Los Gatos, a Catholic priest was stabbed to death in his confessional. The murder of a priest in his own church made headlines, but no one really thought the crime was related to the other murders. Newspapers, however, began reporting that Santa Cruz County was “a high-crime area.” A November 1972 story in the Sentinel reported that the county’s crime rate was the nation’s seventh-highest—worse, the paper noted, than Detroit’s.

  With the exception of Mary Ann Pesce, Ed Kemper had killed none of these victims. But he was ready to kill again. On January 8, 1973, his record newly expunged, Kemper legally bought a .22 automatic pistol and cruised the UC Santa Cruz campus. His mother had gotten him an “A” parking sticker, reserved for students and employees of the college, so it was easy to get riders. No one thought twice about getting into a car bearing a university decal and driven by a polite, clean-cut young man. That night, he picked up three different hitchhiking women and took them all where they were going. “There were too many people standing around that possibly knew them when they got in, “he explained.

  But there was no one standing around when he picked up Cynthia Schall, a Cabrillo College student who had a babysitting job in downtown Santa Cruz. She was hitching on Mission Avenue, the road that led to Highway 1 out toward Aptos and her school. When Kemper pulled out his gun, she got scared, and he played his usual game of cat-and-mouse, telling her he simply wanted to talk, but he needed her to get in the trunk. Once he got her in the trunk, he shot her in the head and was surprised at how quickly she died. He took her back to Aptos, and this time he took the body into his mother’s home. The next day, with his mother at work, he dismembered Schall’s corpse with his Division of Highways axe. He got rid of her torso at the dump and threw the arms and legs over a cliff down the coast, but he buried the head in his mother’s backyard. Kemper made a big joke of this later, claiming he had buried Schall’s head face-up because his mother “always liked people to look up to her.” In fact keeping the head close was largely pragmatic. Schall was the first woman he had shot; he needed to keep the head around until it decomposed so he could retrieve the bullet.

  Schall’s arms and legs washed up on a beach a couple days later; her torso was discovered in a lagoon near Santa Cruz. But the discovery was soon overshadowed by another mass murder: a mother and her two sons, residents of a cabin outside Santa Cruz, were found stabbed and shot on January 25. The next morning, two more people, friends of the dead mother, were found shot to death in their home not far away. The murders were said to have something to do with drugs, which made the “straight” community feel better.

  On February 5, Ed Kemper got into a big fight with his mother. He told her he was going to a movie. “I said, the first girl that’s halfway decent that I pick up, I’m gonna blow her brains out,” he told police later.

  He drove to the University of California campus. It was raining. The first girl he saw was Rosalind Thorpe, and she was halfway decent. Even in the rain, she hesitated before getting in, but then she saw his university decal and hopped in the front seat. As they drove on, chatting amicably, Kemper saw Alice Liu by the side of the road, a beautiful girl in nice clothes. Kemper f
igured it was having Rosalind in the car that got him Alice.

  “From some of her I.D., college friends, stable background, and all that, I imagine she was a cautious hitchhiker,” he said, “and we appeared to be a couple, and with that A tag on there . . . So she didn’t hesitate at all about getting in.”

  This time, Kemper was still in a funk from his fight with his mother, so he made short work of the killing. He got past the campus guard and to the point where the road tops a hill and Santa Cruz can be seen below. Pointing out the beauty of the view, he reached down for his gun and with no warning, shot Rosalind Thorpe in the side of the head. She slumped against the passenger side window. Quickly, being careful not to hit the brakes, which might cause someone behind him to take notice, Kemper reached around toward the backseat and shot Alice Liu several times. She slid down in the seat, unconscious, but she was making a little sighing sound that bothered Kemper. Still, he couldn’t stop and do anything about it in town, so he cruised on through Santa Cruz, one dead girl and one dying girl in his car.

  Once he was safely out of town, Kemper stopped and shot Alice Liu again, point-blank in the side of the head. He moved both girls into the trunk and drove to his mother’s house, stopping for gas on the way. Once there, he chatted with his mother for a while, as usual, then said he needed to go out for cigarettes. He went out to his car, opened the trunk, and beheaded both bodies. The next day, he took Alice’s body into his mother’s house and had sex with it. Then he put the body, wrapped in a blanket, back in the trunk in broad daylight and drove to Alameda to dispose of both young women. Late that night, he rolled the bodies off the edge of the Eden Canyon Road near I-580 and then drove to Pacifica, on the ocean, to throw their heads and hands over a cliff called Devil’s Slide.

  With the disappearance of Thorpe and Liu, public hysteria swept the town. These weren’t part-time junior college students; these were nice, middle-class coeds on a flagship University of California campus. Both, however, were known to hitchhike. People began speculating about links between the murders. The killer was called “the Butcher” or “the Chopper.” Panic increased the following week when some target shooters in the woods near the campus came across a skeletonized female body. Dental records showed that it was Mary Guilfoyle, the Cabrillo College hitchhiker who had disappeared on her way to the employment agency.