Ed Kemper: CO-ED Killer

Warning, material in this episode is graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised. Get down there. I told you to stay away from their sisters. Oh, don't look at me like that. Ed is not my fault that you're a pervert. Just take a look at this place, this dark, dreary, dank location here. This is the bedroom of young Edmund Kemper. At the age of eight, my mother determined I shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with my younger sister anymore. And she moved me to the basement. She was afraid of him. She hated him. He looked too much like her ex-husband who she despised. And as he lived down here with Jessica to sleep on, he developed this hostility to where he wanted to destroy his mother, wanted to destroy his sisters. He stole his sister's dolls from upstairs. And he ripped the heads off. He ripped the arms off over and over again, visualizing that these were real people. Years and years later, this fantasy would take the next step, tearing the heads and limbs off of real living beings, college co-eds, and then discarding their bodies throughout the coast of California. This is the origin of a killer next door. My name is John Douglas. As an FBI agent, I studied hundreds of serial killers and talked to many of them face to face. When I joined the FBI's behavioral sciences unit in 1977, my job was to decode the minds of America's most notorious serial killers using a brand new approach called Criminal Profile. Officers from all over the country, they're branding cases. How can we understand the cases if we don't talk to the bad guys? In 1979, the FBI developed a questionnaire to tap into the minds of ruthless killers. 57 pages, 332 questions, 36 killers. This study was about understanding different patterns of criminal behavior. The purpose of the interview was to learn from the offenders. We realized that we got a gold mine here. Why plus how we pursue? No one had ever done that before. FoxNation presents The Killer Next Door. (music) Hey, Camper got the name Koa killer from the newspapers because his primary victims were Koas associated with the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the early 1970s, Santa Cruz was extremely tense. To be a woman during this time period would have been extremely scary. It's not far from here that just a week ago today, four more bodies were discovered in a connected series of murders that now numbers at least 10. Bodies were appearing everywhere. People were missing. Bodies were coming up on the ocean. Emerson Murray, author, the murder capital of the world. The area in and around the campus had become a killer's hunting ground. Ed Camper was identified only after he confessed. And he was the first serial killer I ever interviewed face to face for the FBI's behavioral sciences unit. His crimes were some of the most grizzly I had ever seen. And I wanted to know how and why he chose his victims and what made him tick. I'd need to know the fantasy and how it begins and why it begins. How could someone commit such a horrific crime against others and was there a triggering mechanism that did it? Was he born this way or was he made? Nate to be who he is today. He got his parents, his mom Claire Nell and his dad. Also named Ed were divorced when he was very young and his mom had custody. When Ed was eight years of age and his mother wanted nothing to do with him, she decided to stick him down into the cellar of House Nine of Basement, a cellar. His mother would treat him horrifically. He spent his elementary years locked in that dungeon of a cellar and had these dark fantasies stirring into the fire of the furnace. His youngest sister, he played games with her. He played like electrocution where he would act like he was in an electric chair and she would turn on the switch and he would ride and paint. He wanted to go see his dad. But the father really doesn't want too much to do with Ed at all. For his idea now is now to ship him to the paternal grandparents in Northern California. But things weren't too good there and he's had these flashbacks of his mother as well as his old man. That pretty much didn't want anything to do with him at that point in time. So he decides to go to kill. One day while his grandfather was at the grocery store, Kimper shot and murdered his grandmother. He couldn't bear the idea of his grandfather finding his dead wife. So Kimper shot him in the back of the head. The police come, they asked him, "Why'd you do?" And his remark was, "I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill grandma." After Kimper was convicted for the murder of his grandparents, he was brought to a taskadero, which is a mental hospital for the criminally insane. 15-year-old Ed was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenia. His committee for six years, during which time, he makes a positive impression on his staff at the facility. Upon his release, his records were sealed in juvenile court, meaning he could live, work, and be free. And no one in the general public would know he was a killer. What do they do? They do the worst thing in the world. They send him back to dear old mom to Claire Nell. Who doesn't want anything to do with him? You're psychotic. And you know what else you are? Huh? You're nothing. Nothing. Nobody. And you're never going to be anybody. Never a mount to anything. You're a freak. This was the root cause of Ed Kemper's deviant behavior. He didn't have a chance. You think those pretty girls that you stare at like a pervert are going to go out with you? Look at you. Oh, you are f---ing disgusting. Just like your father. Raised by an abusive alcoholic, domineering mother that badgered him day in and day out. This was the foundation. This was the background. This was the beginning and the creation of a serial killer. It was only a matter of time before he started cruising the Santa Cruz campus for victims. The kind of women his own mother told him he could never have. And in the 1970s and Santa Cruz, they were everywhere. And Santa Cruz in the early 70s was a very small community in the University of California Santa Cruz campus. And it brought in a lot of young people. It's hiking in the early 1970s. It was a very common way to get around. These women got in the car with him. And I think he was a fantastic talker. He had practiced hundreds and hundreds of times before he committed his first murder. The campus first murder was on May 7, 1972. The campus picked up Mary Ann Pesh and Anita Luchessa. They were on their way to Stanford. It's something he talked about in detail when he was finally arrested. An interrogation I studied before meeting him. I was by eight softened girls in Sh墻. I performed side-to-earth. They had a sign up that said they wanted to do a Stanford. And at least two girls were rocking him. Mary Ann Pesh and Anita Luchessa, told him I wasn't going to Stanford. And which I wasn't. I don't think people realized that it just wasn't a few trips out, picking up several hitchhikers. He picked up over 150. And what he was doing was just learning from them. He was developing his modus operandi. I have a apprehended both of them. It's the one girl in the trunk. One bad seat tighter up. They have a stab bone. They have a plea that he can cut their heads off. What do you think is the plea? I was using a large penny knife. But I had called a bug channel. I had the original shot and spatter shot and started. He was able to remember the intricate details of the crime. That's why what you're saying here is this remarkable memory that Kemper is showing at this time. As he drove home with the bodies of Mary Ann and Anita in the trunk, I caught notice that one of Kemper's taillights was out. The officer pulled him over, not knowing there were two dead girls in the back. Back at his apartment, Kemper sexually abused him. and dismembered the bodies, then he threw the heads into a ravine. The bodies were discovered last week on Eden Canyon Road, east of Castro Valley. Both girls had been decapitated, and the hands from one body had been cut off. Four months after that, camper was ready to kill again. Ico Koo was picked up in Berkeley. That was his third victim. This was his youngest victim. It was a Korean American girl that I really feel bad about because we were unable to find her complete body. And I had to tell her mother that. Dick Verbrouge, Santa Cruz DA Inspector. When there's young people involved, I think it's a lot harder on investigators. Because you get to see them, you get to see their families, and you see the loss the families are suffering. It's just heartbreak. All this time during all these murders is continuing to affect his techniques. Like how he got Ico Koo into the car. What I would do is he would pretend that he was a businessman when he pulled up alongside of a curb trying to pick up a hitchhiker by looking at his watch. What he was trying to do is to indicate that he had plenty of things to do, but he was somehow be able to fit her into his busy schedule. Sometimes he put a fake cast on, which he told me made him look injured and less intimidating. Ed told me he had this maneuver where he would get a tube of chapstick and put it in his hand. And then as he reached over to let the co-ed into the car, at the same time he would drop that tube of chapstick in this press grip handle. This would prevent the door from opening from the inside. Once the victim was in the car, she could not get out. I made that a challenge almost like a chess game and then more clever they got about checking me out ahead of time. The more clever I got. There were times where he would kill someone, go to a bar, have a drink, or two, while the victim's bodies were in the car and he would come out and he would pop the lid of the car and look at them as his pride enjoyed. Three days after killing Ico Koo, Kempere even had a court mandate a psychiatrist visit, which was required as part of his conditions of release for murdering his grandparents as a kid. Lying in the trunk was Ico Koo's severed head. At that appointment, Kempere was declared to be no longer a threat to himself and others. If only that were true. Cynthia Shaw was a student at Cabrillo College. She was hitchhiking that night of January 8th, 1973 when Kempere picked her up. Kempere said, "I just really need to talk to someone, I need to talk to someone I'm feeling suicidal. I want to bring you home, but I'm afraid if the neighbors see you in my car, they're going to talk. He convinced her to get into the trunk of his car. She was adjusting herself in the trunk, any shudder in the head." When I spoke to Kempere, he told me after abducting and killing his victims, he would take those victims back to his mother's house and then place them in his closet sometimes for several days. These were the women that his mother said for years and years they're too good for you. You never can have women like this, but in Ed's mind, in his deviant thinking, it was like, "Guess what, Mom, I can in fact have these women." We'll be right back with more Killer Next Door. Less than a month would go by before Kempere felt he had to kill again. Ruzlin Thorup and Alice Lou with a fifth and sixth victims of Kempere. Santa Cruz, California February 5th, 1973. (Music) Ruzlin is a low-risk victim. Here she is on his college campus. It's very, very conservative, not a risk-taker, but she took the risk. She took the chance because she felt safe. But why does she feel safe? Unfortunately, at this time, the university was telling college co-eds if you want to hitchhike, look to see if there's a university sticker and when you see one, it's okay, get in there car. You'll be safe. Ed, his mother, worked for the university and both she and he had these stickers on the car. Ruzlin very definitely saw this sticker, so she thought she was going to be safe. Unfortunately, that was not the case. She fell right into the trap. With Ruzlin already in the car, he also knew he would make kidnaping up a second victim even easier. Alice Lou was a very cautious hitchhiker, but when she saw it, been Kemper approaching in his car with another woman, Kemper said that he felt she assumed that it was a man and a wife, so she got in the back seat behind the passenger. We're not dealing with an amateur here. We're dealing with someone who's criminally sophisticated. There was a lot of planning involved, a lot of premeditation, rehearsing this. He shot, Ruzlin thought through the head, instantly killing her. He turned back and shot at Alice Lou. He shot three times. When the two last co-ed victims were being taken to and from the car, I parked it up by the house on the driveway and I got a very distinct feeling. There was at least two people looking at me from the window directly above me and the lid of the trunk was obscuring what they could see in the trunk, but at the time I was severing the hands of Alice Lou. He kept their belongings trophies we call them souvenirs. He kept the head. The head he looked at that really as a trophy. The last thing that he would discard would be the head of his victims. There is a rational reason why he is doing the things he's doing. It is to delay the identification of the victims. The capitation, the head will end up at one location. The arms and legs, torso, will end up in other locations. So what does that tell you? It tells you about the degree of sophistication, a criminal sophistication that this killer has. I'll say this one is a person to suffer while they're still alive. We don't see that with Kemper. Kemper did everything after he killed him. That's when he would act. He definitely had practical reasons for dismembering his victims, but keeping their heads as trophies or sleeping with their bodies in his bed at night, we're all part of Ed Kemper's signature. Signature is when in the crime that there is some psychological part of the offender that has to repeat it. Dr. Ann Burgess co-author Achiller by Design. It is something that the offender feels that is necessary to perpetrate the crime. I have to look at more than one case, two cases, three cases. Before I can say, "aha, this is the signature here. This is what's linked in these cases together." There was a lot of media coverage, of course, on everything, and there was a lot of pressure. There were actually multiple serial killers at work in this area within a 20-month span. Police didn't know their names early on, but would eventually identify them. Herbert Mullin killed 13 people, believing human sacrifice would prevent natural disasters. And John Lennley Frazier, a mass murdering eco-terrorist known as the killer prophet. Per capita, Santa Cruz was the murder capital of the United States. These cases over here at the University of California, totally different types of victims, totally different methods of killing here. We have decapitation, we have bodies with that have been I just remembered. These cases over here in Santa Cruz are not related to these other ones. It was scary. It was a very busy time. We never seem to have enough time to do the follow-up on the things we wanted to do. And every time we've started to work on one of our cases, there would be another homicide with Papa. Things were very tense. It wasn't the sleepy community. It had been just five, 10 years prior. The profile of the co-it killer is a white male. He is of the organized type, which means to us and work these cases. He plans his crimes, leaves little evidence at the scene. He's pretty. is a perpetrating his crimes in an area where there is this familiarity to him, so he's going to be a resident in this area. Honor about the time of these crimes, the person responsible here would be having conflict with someone very, very close to them. He's someone who's cruising the area. He's going to look just like you or I, which will make it difficult for a law enforcement. Kemper would be apprehended after he committed a final pair of murders, one of which he was building up the courage to carry out all along. It told me how he would tip toe into his mother's bedroom in the evening hours, holding a claw hammer in his hand. And he would raise that hammer over her head, fantasizing how he would crush her skull. But he said it took him six homicides before he got the nerve to make that fantasy a reality. If Kemper hadn't killed his mother, Kemper actually had plans in his head to murder his entire neighborhood. Fortunately or unfortunately, he murdered his mother and that sort of put it into everything. He now will decapitate his mother. He will have post mortems, sexual relations with the mother. Because he's such a nag, he said to me, that he rips out the larynx, the voice box. I'm going to get rid of this nag. And so he throws it down into the garbage disposal. And he laughs. He says, and it pops up. And he says, now even now, even now, this bitch, she's still nagging me. Even after she's dead, she's still nagging me. After killing his mother, Kemper went to a bar for a drink and then returned home where he invited over Sally Hallett, his mom's best friend. When she turned up, Kemper strangled her. He then took a bunch of caffeine pills and goes on the run. The coward killer gets his vehicle. And he drives to Pueblo, Colorado, thinking that this is going to be the biggest manhunt in history of the United States. Listening to the radio as he drives along, no one's even bringing this case up at all. So here he drives a thousand miles. And finally he decides, I'm going to turn myself into the police department by calling. He confessed to the murder on the phone to the dispatcher. The police department immediately told him to stay right before he was out. And we didn't have a police command, you got him? Comes out. He's so big that when he reaches up, his arms are on top of the telephone booth. Cuff some. He gave no fight. Kemper gave no fight. Then they just spatched the Santa Cruz detectors to come and take him from there and extradite him back to Santa Cruz. The man told Pueblo police that he had killed his mother and another woman in a duplex in the Santa Cruz community of Aptos Seaclill. Apparently Kemper also told Pueblo police that he had previously killed six college girls in the Santa Cruz area. We knew that we needed to know as much about each homicide as possible. And we also wanted to verify the things that he did tell us as to where the body parts were and things of that nature. But it was hard to listen to him. He did never stop talking. He was just so madder of faculty about everything. And I never once heard of say, oh, I'm sorry I killed that girl. After his confession, Ed Kemper was charged with eight counts of murder. He was set to stand trial in October 1973. I was Ed Kemper's lawyer. Santa Cruz didn't have a government public defender. We had a contract with the county. Jim Jackson, Kemper's defense attorney. When somebody was going to be defended, my name came to the fore. There's not a centilla of evidence that he didn't do it. Kemper just simply confessed. He confessed from Pueblo, Colorado, to Santa Cruz, to TV, to radio, to anybody that got near him, who could repeat what he said, got the story. Kemper is accused of killing Mary Ann Pesky and Anita Lutasa, Miss Kuh, Cynthia Ann Shaw, Rosalind Thorpe, and Alice Lude. His mother, Mrs. Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend, Sarah Taylor Howell. He's being held without bail. You talk to somebody who's perfectly reasonable and is talking to you about current events and offering opinions about what's going on in the world today. And you can't say, look, he's crazy. He was found guilty of eight counts of murder with no mitigation or anything, just that. At the time, they didn't have the death penalty, so he didn't get the gas chamber. After his conviction on November 8, 1973, Kemper was sent to California's Vacaville Medical Facility inmate evaluation. And that's where I finally met up with him, face to face. We pulled up to Vacaville, and you had typically the Bob wire around the building. You go in, claim, a door, and then do another section, and the door is open wide. They put us in a room. We had this little handy tape recorder. This was the only time I ever used a tape recorder. It was a distraction, and I thought it would make inmates nervous about talking and telling the truth. This mountain of a man starts coming through the store. And as he comes in, he even has the duck down. And I say, is to the correctional officers, please take off the cups of him. Just to show, we're not afraid of you. We want to make you comfortable. He sits back, and he says, what are those? But these had my cras. And I look at them. So yeah. So I give them my credentials. And he's like, man, I always wanted to be in law enforcement. I always wanted to be a cop. He had always wanted to be a police officer or a deputy. But unfortunately, because he had murdered his grandparents, he was not able to do that. They love law enforcement, probably more than anything law enforcement, even though we're after him trying to catch him. There's some respect there. But it's power. You have control over others in that capacity. Camper liked to talk. That was one of the best things about Camper. He could talk, talk, talk. He had quite a background in terms of being a domestic killer, then moving to stranger co-ed killings, and then back to domestic. So he had a rather complex type of killing pattern. And they needed to find out what that all meant. There were no fantasy episodes during the crimes. So I was-- How does this guy end up like this? I found out one reason was that when he was a kid, he killed his sister's cats, and that's important. A lot of serial killers, I interviewed in my career, would tell me they abused animals. But Camper was the first one to tell me that. We're not talking about burning ants with a magnifying glass or anything like that, of pulling the wings off of flies, which are about small animals where the person is deriving pleasure, pleasure from killing these small animals. It led to the creation of a predictive tool called the homicidal triangle, which includes animal cruelty, bedwetting, and pyromaniac, or the love of fire sitting. We believe that today that this is a very, very good predictor, a potential violence in the future. I was being called stupid pretty frequently. And Camper also has shared when he grew older, he wasn't comfortable in a typical boy-girl relationship. He didn't think any girl would have that. That Camper cannot deal and speak, interact with a living female, because he feels rejection. He's been rejected throughout his life by his mother. It's mixed emotion. They love the mother and then hate the mother at the same time. Of all the things Ed told me in his interview, secrets that would form the foundation of our pioneering serial killer study. It was the hatred he felt for his mother, who never believed in him, that he felt motivated him to start killing. And I agreed. It was the same thing with nearly 50% of the serial killers I interviewed. They all had difficult relationships with their moms. Ed was no different. It was very hard on everybody. These young, beautiful girls were being murdered. They were disappearing, and we didn't really know about his murders until he confessed to us. Edmund Kemper could not stop talking about his crimes. And this was a great, great benefit to the idea of profiling and what that meant. Kemper really gave him an understanding of what he was thinking, when he was thinking it, what led up to the crimes, what happened during the crimes, to really start the idea of profiling these types of criminals. John would always say, what did we learn from each offender? And kind of put that all together. Each offender had something unique. There are other people that were very verbal, and but not like him. -Kemper, really gave such an important information to us for the study and to understand other killers. -Ed Kemper was not born to be a serial killer. He was manufactured as one. And when I talked to him, he said he had one purpose in mind, one primary purpose, and now it's to get back at "Dear Old Mom." [music playing] -Go to FoxTrueCrim.com for more series like this or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. [music playing]