Anyone who meets Edmund Kemper today sees a large, slightly stooped man in his seventies with a book on his lap. You would never believe he is responsible for a string of the most brutal murders ever to shake California—or that at the age of fifteen he launched his bloody career with a double murder inside his own family. Yet behind the barricades of California State Prison, he has become the chronicler of his own crimes, the narrator of hundreds of audiobooks for the blind, and a man whose testimony helped shape modern serial-killer profiling.
The childhood of a giant with a dark imagination
- 1948, Burbank – the second of three children of veteran Edmund M. Kemper and secretary Clarnell Strandberg.
- By fourteen he had grown to nearly two meters, but his mother called him “too big of a freak for any woman to love.”
- At ten he buried a cat alive, later dug it up, decapitated it, and put its head on a stake. Carnivorous fantasies alternated with childish “games” of the electric chair—his siblings taped him to a chair and he would theatrically “die” to see their reactions.
His parents’ divorce only made things worse. The boy first tried to run away to his father, but the man had already started a new life. His mother therefore sent him to his grandparents’ farm in North Fork. There, on August 27, 1964, something happened that psychologists would later describe as his “first major power test.” After an argument, he shot his grandmother, Maude Kemper, with a hunting rifle given to him by his grandfather. When his grandfather, Edmund Kemper Sr., came back a few minutes later with groceries, his grandson dropped him in the yard with the same weapon. He called his mother, then called the sheriff himself.
A juvenile patient who taught psychiatrists
Kemper ended up at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility for juvenile offenders. IQ tests repeatedly put him above 140, but signs of paranoid schizophrenia were not confirmed. Thanks to his intellect and diligence, staff promoted him to an “assistant”: he handed out tests to other patients, recorded their answers, and gained insight into the methods used to assess sanity. Years later, he admitted that it was here he learned to “speak the language of psychiatrists” and to create the impression of complete rehabilitation.
Back to civilian life—and hunting hitchhikers
On his 21st birthday (1969), he was released. At specialists’ request, the record of the double murder was expunged, and “Big Ed” returned to Santa Cruz. He couldn’t become a police officer because of his 206 cm height, but he befriended patrolmen and became almost a mascot at the Jury Room bar.
In the meantime he worked on highway construction and wanted to break free of his mother—yet Clarnell regularly sought him out, humiliated him, and reminded him that to women he would always be a “monster.” It was around this time that he noticed a new trend: students and tourists hitchhiking along the coastal highway. At first he only gave them rides and counted them; he claimed he “trained” on more than 150 girls this way before letting his old urges feed.
Eight murders in eleven months
| Date | Victim | Method | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 1972 | Mary Ann Pesce (18) & Anita Luchessa (18) | strangulation + stab wounds | Brought the bodies to his apartment; Polaroids; necrophilia |
| Sept. 1972 | Aiko Koo (15) | suffocation | Before heading home, he “had a drink” with the body in the trunk |
| Jan. 1973 | Cindy Schall (19) | shooting | Buried body parts in his mother’s garden; turned the head toward her bedroom |
| Feb. 1973 | Rosalind Thorpe (23) & Allison Liu (20) | shot with a semi-automatic | Drove severed heads in the passenger seat to get through the campus gate |
| Apr. 1973 | Clarnell Strandberg (52) & Sally Hallett (59) | hammer + cutting wounds / strangulation | Decapitated his mother and placed a lamp on her neck; lured her friend over for “dinner” |
On the final night, when the silence in the house finally exploded into shouting, he drove 1,600 km to Pueblo, Colorado. The police still suspected nothing—but he broke down mentally and, from a station payphone, called to have himself arrested.
A trial with no way out
He was charged on May 7, 1973. An amytal “truth serum” interview was used to check whether he was hiding additional murders; cannibalistic fantasies surfaced, but no new victims. The jury rejected an insanity defense; Kemper faced the gas chamber at San Quentin. He himself asked for a “torturous execution,” but California was in the process of abolishing the death penalty, so he received life imprisonment—with the possibility of review after seven years.
A Behavioral Science Unit “collaborator”
In the second half of the 1970s, the FBI began building a profiling team. Agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler visited Kemper dozens of times; they dissected his relationship with his mother, his necrophilic tendencies, and his manipulation during hitchhiking pickups. These interviews fed into the landmark handbook Crime Classification Manual, still used in criminal-psychology courses today. Kemper sensitively guided them in terminology—for example, he proposed distinguishing between “control” and “postmortem” stab wounds.
Thanks in part to interviews with Kemper, the FBI got its bearings more quickly in the case of another California serial killer, Herbert Mullin, who was killing during the same period for a range of psychotic motives. Douglas later admitted that without Kemper’s willingness and analytical precision, interpreting Mullin’s crimes would have taken significantly longer.
Life behind walls—from audiobooks to denied parole boards
- He recorded more than four hundred titles for the Books for the Blind program; his baritone still circulates in American libraries today.
- Between 1980 and 2024, he has appeared before the parole board sixteen times; most recently on July 9, 2024, with the verdict: “denied — next hearing in 7 years.”
- For health reasons (two heart attacks, chronic arteriosclerosis) he does not work in the prison pottery shop, but he still keeps the prison library’s statistics.
The paradox of fame—and a moral warning
Kemper’s case underscores two opposing facts: exceptional intelligence can support rehabilitation just as easily as it can refine manipulation; and it also shows that a family environment—especially a toxic relationship with a mother—may be a trigger, but never an excuse. That is one reason California tightened risk-assessment procedures for the parole of juvenile violent offenders.
VIDEO: Interview from Vacaville Prison (1979), VPN required
A twenty-minute cut from the first official interview in which Kemper describes the mechanics and motivation behind his murders.
Sources
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, FOIA Log – entry “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 July 8–12, 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.
