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 24, his first murders took place nearly a 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 teenage 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 Kemper was young. But even as a child, the future killer 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 the family cat, burying it 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 an explosive argument with his grandparents, 15-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother in the head using his grandfather’s rifle. When his grandfather returned later on, Kemper killed 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.
Public DomainKemper 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 moved back in with her 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 suppress his urges, he eventually gave in to them in 1972.
That year, the “Co-Ed Killer,” as he came to be known, murdered Fresno State University 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, and dismembering bodies. He’d 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 the police to confess.
Kemper was sentenced to life in prison, and he remains behind bars at California Medical Facility today.
