It's said Ed Kemper's mother once locked him in a cold, dark basement as punishment. Ten years ago, Kemper smashed his mother's skull with a claw hammer, stabbed her with a pocket knife and cut off her head.
The 278-pound hulk with a 136 IQ then strangled his mother's best friend, hid the bodies in his mother's Aptos home and drove a rented car to Pueblo. Colorado, where he called the police and confessed to the Easter weekend killings.
When officers reached the phone booth, the 6 foot 9 inch “Ogre of Aptos." convicted of killing his grandparents a decade earlier was detailing the murders of six other women students whose remains were mutilated and scattered.
It was a bizarre end to the most grisly of three mass murder sprees that gave Santa Cruz County the nickname “Mass Murder Capital of California".
In November 1971, John Linley Frazier was convicted of slaying five people in a hilltop mansion. In 1973, Herbert Mullin was imprisoned for killing 10 people In a three-week rampage.
"It was a nightmare,” recalls Peter Chang, the district attorney who prosecuted Mullin, Frazier, and Kemper. “It actually was the beginning of what became for me a very serious alcohol problem.”
Chang, who began private practice two years after Kemper's eight-day trial, notes that “none of the people I defend are like Edmund Kemper."
Kemper, serving a life term the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, didn't Mispond to an interview request. But statements to police and his criminal record show a sick man who was twice judged legally sane before the killings ended in 1973.
When you look at his background, he was a very mistreated child." said Chang “He was kept in dark, cold treatment by his mother. He was the subject of a lot of physical abuse There were very large hints of sexual abuse.”
“When he misbehaved at a train station, they held him out In front of a speeding train and jerked him back at the very last minute."
Kemper said he contemplated killing his mother with a hammer by the age of 9, and that he played "gas chamber" with his sister. In the game, he would be tied up, as his sister hissed, he would fall over, twitching.
On Aug 27, 1964, Kemper fatally shot his 68-year-old grandmother Maude Kemper, as she was retyping a story for Boy's Life. Then he shot his grandfather, his 72-year-old namesake, to death. Kemper spent five years m a state mental hospital, but was released when doctors decided he no longer was a threat to society. They were wrong.
On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up his first two hitchhikers, Mary ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Their decapitated bodies were found in Santa Cruz County.
On Sept 14, Kemper gave 15-year-old Alko Koo a ride. Then he taped her mouth shut and pinched her nostrils until the young ballerina was dead. Her remains were dumped in Santa Cruz County. Four days after Ms. Koo died, Kemper asked a Fresno judge to seal the record of his grandparents' murders. Three psychiatrists testified at the hearing that Kemper was sane. One joked that Kemper's driving posed a greater threat than his mental state. The record was sealed.
On Jan 8. 1973, Cynthia Ann Schall was shot to death In Watsonville. The 18-year-old's body washed up later on the beach. Her head was buried in Kemper's backyard.
On Feb 5, Rosalind Thorpe, 23, took a ride from Kemper, who then picked up Alice Liu, 21. Their decapitated bodies were found in Alameda County, their heads were thrown into the ocean from Devil's Slide, a landmark hillside on Highway 1 south of San Francisco.
The final killings came two days before Easter, on April 21, 1973, when Kemper asked his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, 52, and her closest friend, Sara Taylor Hallett, 59, if he could take them for an outing.
Their naked bodies were found in Mrs. Strandberg's Aptos apartment. Kemper put his mother's bloody head on a closet floor. Beside it was a note: "not sloppy gents - just a lack of time - got things to do."
When police caught up to him in Colorado, they found a rifle, a shotgun and 100 rounds ammunition in the rented car. They found a bullet hole, strands of hair and splotches of blood in the car he used to pick up his hitchhiking victims.
Kemper's statements following his arrest stunned even the most hardened detectives.
"I certainly wanted for my mother a nice quiet death like I guess everybody wants," he said.
Asked why he decapitated his victims, he replied "It was kind of a triumphant type thing, like taking the head of a deer or an elk or something would be to a hunter. I was the hunter, and they were my victims."
And why did he cut his mother's head off? "What's good enough for my victims Is enough for my mother," he said. Kemper explained he killed young hitchhikers "because It was so easy." He said murder was like a narcotic that made turn want "more and more and more."
Kemper tried to kill himself by slitting his wrist with the clip from a ballpoint pen on May 10,1973. On Nov 5. 1973, he ripped the stitches out of his wrist in a second suicide attempt. On Nov 9, he was sentenced to life in prison.
