The Life of the Co-Ed Killer

From an early age, Edmund Kemper was known to kill animals, decapitate his sisters' dollars and played disgusting games that he came up with. And when he ended up confessing to the murders of six female hitchhikers, as well as his own mother and her best friend, police were dumbfounded, they didn't believe him at first, they know Edmund as Big Ed, a 6 foot 9 inch man that appeared as a gentle giant, liked by the police.

But, in reality, Ed wasn't a gentle giant, he murdered and raped his victim's corpses, mutilating their corpses, and buried their heads in his own backyard. And his high IQ of 145 made him that more dangerous, he used his intelligence to his advantage, making him slip away from the crime scenes undetected.

Ed's Childhood

Edmund was born on December 18th, 1948, in Burbank, California. He had a rocky childhood, his mother Clarnell, was an alcoholic who was suspected to have been suffering from borderline personality disorder. She had erratic behavior, so bad in fact, that Ed's father, a World War II veteran, to compare his suicide missions during wartime and atomic bomb testing to be nothing compared to having to live with Clarnell. She would berate Ed's father for his "menial job" as an electrician. She would also refuse to coddle her son, she feared that doing so would "turn him gay." Being exposed to an environment such as this led Edmund to develop dark fantasies at an early age, and being fueled by these thoughts, he started to decapitate his sister's dolls.

Edmund said, "I remember there was actually a sexual thrill, you hear that little pop and pull their heads off and hold them up by the hair, whipping their heads off, their body sitter there, that'd get me off."

Ed also started to force his sisters to play games he made up, such as electric chair and gas chamber, this was his way of imagining where he might end up. He even had his sisters pretend to march him off to his death.

He started to stalk his second grade teacher with his father's bayonet, and after his sister started to tease him about kissing the teacher, he told her he would have to kill her first if he was to kiss her.

And at the age of ten, his behavior escalated to violence after his father had left the family in 1957, Ed killed both of the family's cats, he even buried one of them alive before he dug it back up to decapitate it.

Without his father around, his mother begun to focus her aggression on her son, she would make him sleep in the basement, afraid he may hurt his sisters. And she would berate and insult him, telling him that no woman would dare to fall in love with him

At age 14, Ed grew tired of the constant emotional and verbal abuse, so he decided to run away to live with his father. But at that point, he was remarried, so he sent him to live with his grandparents, which would prove to be no better than living at home with his mother. He said his grandfather was senile and that his grandmother was emasculating, he said that she thought she had more balls than any man, she would constantly emasculate him and his grandfather to prove her point.

Ed would argue with his grandmother on numbers of occasions, this caused him to grow angrier and angrier, feeling as if he could never please her, he felt as if he was in jail. And on August 27th, 1964, he got into his final explosive fight with his grandmother, this led the 15-year old boy to shoot Maude Kemper in the head with his grandfather's .22 caliber rifle. And as his grandfather walked up the driveway to their home, Ed shot him as well; both of his grandparents were dead now because of him. Edmund Kemper was a murderer at only 15-years old.

He later said that he only killed Maude to see what it felt like to "kill grandma" and he only killed his grandfather so he wouldn't find out that his wife had just been murdered by his grandson. After the pair were dead, Edmund called his mother to confess everything to her, he was then sent to the criminally insane unit of the Atascadero State Hospital, and it was here that doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, they also discovered he had a very impressive IQ.

Even with the murders on his hands, he only state in the hospital until his 21st birthday in 1969, it was then that he was released to his mother who was now working as an administrative assistant at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

It didn't take long for Ed to indulge in his murderous urges after being released, but, first he attempted to live a normal life. He attempted to get a job as a state trooper but was denied because he was deemed too large, Edmund stood at 6'9" and weighed 300 pounds. So, he instead took up an available position at the Department of Transportation.

As he drove around California, he started to notice a lot of women who were hitchhiking, so he started to pick some up and provide them with rides.

Edmund said, "At first I picked girls up just to talk to them, just ot try to get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship."

Edmund managed to pick up over a 100 girls without any incident.

But, it wasn't long before he was unable to suppress the urge to kill, and later when he was asked what crossed his mind when he saw a pretty girl, he said, "One side of me says, wow, what an attractive chick, I'd like to talk to her, date her... The other side of me says, I wonder how her head would look on a stick."

And by 1972, he fell into a life of violence once again.

The Co-Ed Killer

On May 7th, 1972, Edmund stopped and picked up two Fresno State students, Mary Ann Pesce, and Anita Luchessa, both 18-years old, near Berkeley, California. It was then that he brought them to a wooded area nearby, he intended to rape them at first, but he panicked, he ended up stabbing and choking the two women to death. He then stuffed them into his trunk and started to drive back to his home in Alameda, about an hour drive.

He was stopped by an officer on his way home for a broken taillight, the officer chose not to search the car and let Edmund go. And once he arrived home, Edmund raped the bodies and then dismembered them; dividing parts into plastic bags, then he disposed of them in a ravine near Loma Prieta Mountain.

And from there, he continued his murder spree. He killed again on September 14th, 1972. He picked up 15-year old Aiko Koo, who had just missed her bus to dance practice. During the encounter, he locked himself out of the car, but was able to persuade the girl to let him back inside. It was then that he choked her until she was unconscious, raped her, and then murdered her. He stuffed her into his trunk, looking down at his latest kill with pride, admiring his victim as if she was a prize.

He then started to risk getting caught, just for the thrill of it. He would hang out at a bar called the Jury Room, this was a popular spot with police officers. He made friends with local cops, who pinned the nickname "Big Ed" on him. He enjoyed being friends with the people who were trying to catch him.

He ended up moving back in with his mother in 1973, but this didn't stop him from murdering three more college students. He even went as far as burying a severed head from one victim in his mother's garden, leaving it facing her bedroom. And according to him, he did this because his mother always wanted people to look up to her.

It was obvious his true target was his mother, he said; "My victims represented not what my mother was, but what she liked, what she coveted, what was important to her, and I was destroying it."

Living with his mother again brought him right back to his childhood once again, they would get into heated arguments, he described them as violent and vicious. And everything topped off on April 20th, 1973. It was that night that Edmund bludgeoned his mother to death with a hammer as she slept. He then decapitated her and raped her severed head before he then used it as a dartboard and screamed at it for an hour straight.

That wasn't enough for Ed, he then cut out her tongue and larynx and placed them in the garbage disposal. However, the mechanism wasn't able to break up the tissue properly, so it spit the remains back into the sink.

He then phoned his mother's best friend, Sally Hallett, over to the house, he had developed a cover story, he thought he could say that his mother and her friend went off on a vacation together, so he murdered Sally and stole her car.

He drove to Colorado, he was certain he would see the murders on the news soon, but after hearing nothing for a few days, he called police from a phone booth and confessed everything to them. And police didn't believe him at first, how could gentle, charismatic Big Ed be a killer? But, soon, Edmund started to describe things that only the Co-Ed killer would know.

"It wasn't serving any physical or real or emotional purpose, it was just a pure waste of time. Emotionally, I couldn't handle it much longer," Edmund said when asked why he turned himself in and stopped his killings, "Toward the end there, I started feeling the folly of the whole damn thing, and at the point of near exhaustion, near collapse, I just said to hell with it and called it all off."

Ed was arrested and convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder. He attempted suicide twice and even went as far as requesting the death penalty, but was given seven concurrent life sentences instead.

Edmund's Life Now

Edmund was imprisoned at the California Medical Facility, alongside Charles Manson and Herbert Mullin.

Edmund is 74, still imprisoned at the same facility to this day.

During his earlier years in prison, he participated in numerous interviews with reporters and law enforcement, and he was even in a meeting with the FBI to discuss his crimes and why he had committed them. And in Netflix's show, Mindhunter, it depicts his testimony about his state of mind during the murders and how it was integral to help law enforcement's understanding of serial killers and how they operate.

In more recent years, he has a reputation as a model prisoner. He is in charge of scheduling other inmates' appointments with psychiatrists, and he has even spent over 5,000 years narrating audiobooks.

But, those who have known him personally doubt he has changed, even a little. His half-brother even says Edmund is a complete sociopath.

"He could look you straight in the eye telling you how sorry he is for everything he did while at the same time plotting your demise and you'd never even have a clue..."