Kemper’s murders reached their natural culmination when he bludgeoned his mother to death with a claw hammer while she slept in her bed. Kemper then decapitated her and raped her severed head before placing it on a shelf and using it as a dartboard.
At a young age, Edmund Kemper decapitated his sisters’ dolls and even stalked his second-grade teacher with a bayonet.
The Murders Of The Co-Ed Killer
His first victims were Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, two Fresno State students he encountered while driving around Berkley, California. Kemper brought the women to a wooded area nearby where he originally intended to rape them, but panicked and ended up stabbing and choking the two women to death.
He then stuffed their bodies in his trunk and drove over to his house in Alameda where he was living at the time. On the way, a police officer stopped him for a broken taillight but did not search the car.
Once home, Kemper raped the bodies before dismembering them, placing the pieces of the bodies in plastic bags, and disposing of them in a ravine near Loma Prieta Mountain.
Kemper continued this formula of murder on his next victim, 15-year-old Korean dance student Aiko Koo. During this encounter, Kemper accidentally locked himself out of his car but was able to persuade Koo to let him back in.
Edmund Kemper enjoys a smoke with a detective. The Co-Ed Killer’s amicable attitude fooled almost everyone and had even his investigators enjoying his company.
By early 1973, Kemper had run out of funds and moved back in with his mother at her home on the UC Santa Cruz campus. There he continued his killings, murdering three more college students he picked up around the campus.
He even buried one of the dismembered heads of his victims in his mother’s garden and left it facing upward toward her bedroom. According to him, he did this because his mother “always wanted people to look up to her.”
Then, on April 20, 1973, Kemper’s murders reached their natural culmination when he bludgeoned his mother to death with a claw hammer while she slept in her bed. Kemper then decapitated her and raped her severed head before placing it on a shelf and using it as a dartboard.
He cut out her tongue and larynx and placed them in the garbage disposal. The mechanism couldn’t break up the tissue, however, and spit the mother’s remains back into the sink. “That seemed appropriate,” Kemper later reported, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”
Kemper joyfully shows cops where he buried the bodies of his victims.
Kemper then invited his mother’s best friend over to the house before murdering her and stealing her car. He drove to Colorado, but after not hearing any news of the murders, ended up calling the police from a phone booth to confess to murdering his mother.
The police did not take the call seriously prompting Kemper to admit to all of the murders he had committed to get their attention. When asked why he turned himself in, Kemper said that “the original purpose was gone…I just said to hell with it and called it all off.”
He was arrested and convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder. Kemper attempted suicide twice and even requested the death penalty, but failed on all counts and was given seven consecutive life sentences instead.
Mindhunter And Life Behind Bars
Edmund Kemper is escorted into Judge Donald May’s court by police.
Kemper was featured in season one of Netflix’s true-crime series, Mindhunter.
Edmund Kemper was imprisoned at the California Medical Facility alongside Herbert Mullin and Charles Manson, where he still resides to this day. While in prison, Kemper willingly participated in a number of interviews from reporters and law enforcement.
See the real Edmund Kemper beside the actor who meticulously portrayed him on the TV series.
Edmund Kemper became a model prisoner at the California Medical Facility, where he is in charge of scheduling other inmates’ appointments with psychiatrists and has spent over 5,000 hours narrating books on tape for the blind.
