Edmund Kemper: The Co-Ed Killer Whose Spree Began With His Own Grandparents
Bettmann/Getty Images“Big Ed” sharing a smoke with a detective.
Although Ed Kemper wasn’t captured until he was 25, his first murders took place a full decade earlier — with his own grandparents as the victims. And at six-foot-nine and with an IQ of 145, it’s little wonder why he is considered one of America’s most terrifying serial killers.
Growing up in Burbank, California, Kemper also had a troubled upbringing. His alcoholic mother, Clarnell, regularly berated him and made him sleep in the basement. His father had abandoned the family entirely when he was young. But Kemper, even as a child, was already displaying troubling signs.
Notably, he began decapitating his sisters’ dolls and forcing them to play macabre “games” like “electric chair” and “gas chamber.”
Then, at the age of 10, Kemper killed both of the family cats, burying one alive before decapitating it. At 14, he tried to run away to live with his father, but was instead sent to live on his grandparents’ ranch. Things didn’t get any better.
On Aug. 27, 1964, though, they took a significant turn for the worse.
After another explosive argument with his grandparents, a now 15-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother in the head using his grandfather’s rifle. When his grandfather returned later on, Kemper kiled him too. He later explained that he killed his grandmother because he “just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma.”
Kemper was then sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. On his 21st birthday in 1969, however, he was released.
Wikimedia CommonsKemper later said his victims “represented not what my mother was, but what she liked, what she coveted, what was important to her, and I was destroying it.”
By then, his mother was working as an administrative assistant at the University of California Santa Cruz. Kemper returned to living with his mother and attempted to live a normal life. Taking a job with the Department of Transportation, he spent much of his time driving — and noticed that there were a lot of young women hitchhiking. Though he tried to supress his urges, he eventually gave into them in 1972.
That year, the “Co-Ed Killer,” as he came to be known, murdered Fresno State students Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, followed by six more victims including 15-year-old Aiko Koo.
Throughout his killing spree, Kemper brazenly hung out at police bars where officers referred to him as “Big Ed.” Unbeknownst to them, he spent his free time killing, raping corpses, dismembering bodies, and had even buried one victim’s severed head in his mother’s garden.
His murder spree lasted until April 20, 1973, when he brought it to an end with one chilling final act. That day, he bludgeoned his mother to death with a hammer, decapitated her, sexually assaulted her head, and then used it as a dartboard before screaming at it for an hour. He then murdered her best friend before driving to Colorado and calling police to confess.
Convicted of eight murders, Kemper received seven life sentences. Now 76, he remains imprisoned in California, where he’s reportedly become a model prisoner who — weirdly — narrates audiobooks.
Despite his apparent reformation, though, those who knew him warn that his charm masks an unchanged sociopathic nature.
