Aktualizované 16.09.2026
Anyone who meets Edmund Kemper today sees a large, slightly stooped man in his seventies with a book on his lap. You would not believe that he is responsible for one of the most brutal murder sprees ever to shake California, or that he began his bloody career at age fifteen by killing two members of his own family. Yet behind the walls of California State Prison, he has become a chronicler of his own crimes, the narrator of hundreds of audiobooks for blind people, and a man whose testimony helped shape modern serial-killer profiling.
Childhood of a giant with dark fantasies
- 1948, Burbank – the second of three children of veteran Edmund M. Kemper and secretary Clarnell Strandberg.
- By the age of fourteen, he had grown to nearly two metres, but his mother called him “a big weirdo whom no woman would ever love.”
- At the age of ten, he buried a cat alive, later dug it up, decapitated it and impaled its head on a stake. His carnivorous fantasies alternated with childhood “games” involving the electric chair: his siblings taped him to a chair, and he theatrically “died” to watch their reactions.
His parents’ divorce only made matters worse. The boy first tried to run away to his father, but his father had already started a new life. His mother therefore sent him to live with his grandparents on a farm in North Fork. There, on 27 August 1964, something occurred that psychologists would later call his “first major test of power.” After an argument, he shot his grandmother, Maude Kemper, with a hunting rifle his grandfather had given him. When his grandfather, Edmund Kemper Sr., returned with groceries a few minutes later, his grandson shot him in the yard with the same weapon. He called his mother, then called the sheriff himself.
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The child patient who taught psychiatrists
Kemper ended up at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility for juvenile offenders. IQ tests repeatedly placed him above 140, but signs of paranoid schizophrenia were not confirmed. Because of his intelligence and thoroughness, staff promoted him to an “assistant”: he distributed tests to other patients, recorded their answers and gained insight into the methods used to assess criminal responsibility. Years later, he admitted that this was where he learned to “speak the language of psychiatrists” and create the impression of complete rehabilitation.
Return to civilian life and hunting hitchhikers
He was released on his 21st birthday in 1969. At specialists’ request, the record of the double murder was expunged, and “Big Ed” returned to Santa Cruz. He could not become a police officer because of his height of 206 cm, but he befriended patrol officers and became almost a mascot at the Jury Room bar.
Meanwhile, he built highways and wanted to become independent of his mother, but Clarnell regularly sought him out, humiliated him and reminded him that he would remain a “monster” to women. It was then that he noticed a new trend: female students and tourists hitchhiking along the coastal highway. At first, he merely gave them rides and counted them; he claimed that he “practised” on more than 150 girls this way before allowing his old desires to be satisfied.
Eight murders in eleven months
| Date | Victim | Method | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 1972 | Mary Ann Pesce (18) & Anita Luchessa (18) | strangulation + stab wounds | Took the bodies to his apartment, Polaroids, necrophilia |
| Sept. 1972 | Aiko Koo (15) | suffocation | Had “a drink” with the body in the trunk before returning home |
| Jan. 1973 | Cindy Schall (19) | shooting | Buried body parts in his mother’s garden, with the head facing her bedroom |
| Feb. 1973 | Rosalind Thorpe (23) & Allison Liu (20) | shot with a semi-automatic firearm | Drove with the severed heads on the passenger seat to get through the campus gate |
| Apr. 1973 | Clarnell Strandberg (52) & Sally Hallett (59) | hammer + cutting wounds / strangulation | He cut off his mother’s head and placed a lamp on her neck; he lured her friend over for “dinner” |
On the final night, when the silence in the house erupted into screaming, he travelled 1,600 km to Pueblo, Colorado. The police still suspected nothing, but he suffered a psychological breakdown and called from a station payphone to ask for his own arrest.
A trial with no escape
He was charged on 7 May 1973. A sodium amytal truth serum test checked whether he was concealing further murders; it revealed cannibalistic fantasies but no additional victims. The jury rejected an insanity defence, and Kemper faced the gas chamber at San Quentin. He himself requested a “torturous execution,” but California was abolishing the death penalty at the time, so he received life imprisonment, with the possibility of review after seven years.
A “collaborator” of the Behavioral Science Unit
In the second half of the 1970s, the FBI began building a profiling team. Agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler visited Kemper several dozen times; they dissected his relationship with his mother, his necrophiliac tendencies and his manipulation of hitchhikers. These interviews gave rise to the cult manual Crime Classification Manual, which is still used in criminal psychology courses today. Kemper carefully guided them through the terminology—for example, he proposed distinguishing between “control” and “post-mortem” stab wounds.
It was specifically thanks to interviews with Kemper that the FBI found its bearings more quickly in the case of another California serial killer, Herbert Mullin, who was killing during the same period for different psychotic reasons. Douglas later admitted that without Kemper’s willingness to cooperate and analytical precision, interpreting Mullin’s crimes would have taken considerably longer.
Life behind bars—from audiobooks to denied parole hearings
- He recorded more than four hundred titles for the Books for the Blind programme; his baritone voice still circulates in American libraries.
- Between 1980 and 2024, he appeared before the parole board sixteen times; most recently on 9 July 2024, when the decision was “deny—next review in 7 years”.
- For health reasons—two heart attacks and chronic arteriosclerosis—he no longer works in the ceramics workshop, but he still keeps statistics for the prison library.
The paradox of fame and a moral warning
Kemper’s case underscores two conflicting realities: exceptional intelligence can support rehabilitation just as readily as it can refine manipulation; and it also shows that a family environment—especially a toxic relationship with one’s mother—can be a trigger, but never an excuse. This is also why California tightened its risk-assessment procedures for the parole of juvenile violent offenders.
VIDEO: Interview from Vacaville prison (1979), VPN required
A twenty-minute compilation from the first official interview, in which Kemper describes the mechanics and motivations behind his murders.
Sources
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, FOIA Log – record “Kemper, Edmund” (2021). https://vault.fbi.gov/foia-log-2021-part-01/FOIA%20Log%202021%20Part%2001%20(Final).pdf
- California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Board of Parole Hearings – week of 8–12 July 2024 (case B52453). https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/bph/2024/07/17/week-of-july-8-july-12-2024/
- Douglas, J. E.; Ressler, R. K.; Burgess, A. W.; Hartman, C. R. Crime Classification Manual (U.S. Department of Justice, 1992). https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/146643NCJRS.pdf
- Geberth, V. J. “The Serial Murderer: An Integrated Approach to Offender Profiling.” Journal of Forensic Sciences45 (2000): 16–21. https://academic.oup.com/jfs/article/45/1/16/5433304
Robert
I’m interested in technology and history, especially true crime stories. For three years I ran a fact-based portal about modern history, and for a year I co-built a blogging platform where I published dozens of analytical articles. I founded offpitch so that quality content wouldn’t be hidden behind a paywall.
