Sword and Scale - Episode 92

Episode Date: June 19, 2017

The love of a mother is something many of us take for granted, but when it's not present during the early formative years the results can be disastrous. This is what Edmund Kemper suggests happened to him. A serial killer who enjoyed murdering coeds in the early 70's, Kemper is not your average lunatic. He has the IQ of a genius and has spent years self-analyzing his actions. We hear from his own words and delve into the extreme nature of his crimes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Right, she hits me across the face with this belt, says, Shut up, the neighbors are going to think I'm beating you. Welcome to season 4, episode 92 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. Ah, it's a lovely day for a new episode of Sword and Scale on this Fathers Day. But the story we're telling you today isn't about Fathers, it's about a mother actually, and her son.

You know, we rarely like to tell stories about serial killers. I just don't find them quite as interesting as stories about regular people who just snap. But this one is different. It's so extreme and has so many bizarre turns that I couldn't stop reading about it. I think you'll like it. So let's just dive right in. Here we go. There is a Jewish proverb that states, God could not be everywhere, so therefore he made mothers.

The Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote, womanliness means only motherhood. All love begins and ends there. A particularly humorous Chinese proverb states, there is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it. But despite your physical attractiveness, the love of a mother is something every child desperately craves for from birth.

It's part of our instinct, a survival mechanism which cries out for a mother's comfort and safety and food when left alone and feeling vulnerable. That is why when a mother's love is not present the results can be disastrous. Take for example a man by the name of Ed. This is Jack. terrible pain from her life, her life, her upbringing, I failed marriage with my father. I'm a constant reminder of that failure." This is Jack. My name is Jack Rosewood, I'm true crime author, and I wrote the book Edmund Kemper, The

True Story of the Code Killer. Edmund Kemper was basically a genius. Yes, he had a hard time at school, but once he got called the first time, he was tested at the IQ IQ 136. The name IQ or intelligence quotient test was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term intelligence quotient, the test of which now there are many varieties, uses several standardized tests designed to assess human intelligence. The scoring range is from below 20 to over 140.

About 5% of the population scores above 125 and 5% score below 75. During childhood, Edmund Kemper scored 136 on the test, putting him in the range of the classification of very superior intelligence. When he was tested again as an adult, he scored 145 genius level. And ironically I have a high IQ. I didn't know that until I was locked up the first time for murder. I always thought I was a little missing up here, a little short, because I was always called stupid, I'll call it slow, don't you think?

When you do things, that was the problem. I wasn't thinking when I did things. I just did by road, I did by memory, I did by example. And I had absolutely no faith in myself at all. I had no interaction going on in my own mind. I was not a thinker. I was not an individual. I had a teacher in the ninth grade who changed all that.

He made me think. He would not tolerate my not thinking. He was an art teacher. And it was a devastating experience for me because there were gears in my head that were just rusty and they were barely moving or not at all. And that's when I found out that's what the state of my mind's functioning was. I didn't think. To the point of he points at a stapler on his desk and says, what does that say? And I looked at it, I said, silver line, he says, look again.

And he's raving at me. And I looked at it, and it said, swing line. All I had to do was look at it and read it. But I glanced at it and threw it back at him out of panic. So he made me think. And he gave me puzzles to work out in school in my class, where I had to resolve these to continue on with the class. I had to think, I had to resolve these to continue on with the class I had to think I had to use abstracts

and after that started that became fascinating to me so I got more and more involved in thinking and about my surroundings and things like that but by then I was locked up. He didn't have the most wonderful childhood. No, he grew up in a household where both of his parents were arguing and he was a very tall boy which made him insecure so he had a rough time for sure. From my point of view what I saw was there was a great hole in my life. There was a lot missing from my life and it didn't necessarily mean feelings. It meant I had rolled off this emptiness of my life. I had an upbringing that was some of called dysfunctional.

Okay, parents divorced when I was young. My mother started drinking heavily. She was working to raise three kids. We were not being cooperative about it. She drank more, she punished us harder, probably out of desperation. So, character sets were being developed at that point. Rather than me going to Boy Scouts and getting achievement badges, I was not going to Boy Scouts

and not getting achievement badges. I was finding devious ways to get around the rules of the home. Because the whole home life, I watched it deteriorate from what typical kids on a block were doing. His mother seems to have been an impossibly difficult character to get along with. Yeah, his mother seems to be the source of a lot of his problems. His mother was verbally abusive towards Kemper's father and later to Kemper. They had a lot of similarities and she seems like she hated Ed for similarities always father. One time I turned around shrieking and she hit me in the mouth and the little keeper on

the class flew off, they'll silver buckle, thank. And she smacked me, this thing breaks off on my mouth, right? She hits me across the face with his belt and says shut up, the neighbors are going to think I'm beating him. I don't look at her. What? I'm not supposed to cry out, which is a natural reaction to these great red welts that are going on. I mean, I sure was a little shit.

I got rude downstairs. She took me upstairs and beat the hell out of me. I would like to think it was a better part of my character that was resisting this kind of pressure to fit into some mold that she had the image of as being the good little kid. I'll be damned if I'm going to be that good little kid. I'm getting the hell beat out of me for not being that little kid. I got, I got, I don't know what you call it, resistant to it. But again, it's not in manly ways or in prideful ways.

It was sneaky, loveliest ways. I'd get around that. And one of the ways was she won't give me allowance. I'll take money out of her purse. I never robbed her. It took all of it. I'd take a dime here, a quarter there, 15 cents there, 50 cents here.

She comes in drunk at night. She's not going to know how much change she has. So to rebound on that, she started counting her money at all kinds of odd times to keep on top of me. And she was like a game we played for years. At the age of 13, she finally lets me go visit my father, okay, down in LA, where I was born. I'm in Montana where she was born.

I don't like Montana. It's cold in the winter, it's hot in the summer, it's miserable, and the people up there are nice people, but hey, they're not my people. That's what I'm saying now. I wasn't viewing or voicing those things then. I was feeling them, but I didn't know how to put them into words. So I finally get to come down and see my dad again, down in LA. All right. One month. I never touched her purse again. That scared her. That really bothered her because she had, she beat me halfway senseless with that belt, trying to impress and terror tactics. Okay, we're going to eat dinner and I'm going to beat your ass afterwards.

You know, so I can think about it for a half hour. Or after some little thing she's doing. And she tried psychological tactics. She tried, I'm going to put you in an orphanage. I'm going to disavow you and none of that shit worked so I go see my dad for 30 days and my step-brother and I we go out and mullons we say gee dad you know you're going out to dinner tonight can we go someplace and he says sure he gives us a few dollars we go down to some little diner down the street he treated us like

little men like he wanted to be treated by his, he came from a matriarchal household too. I guess if you know how that stuff runs in families, right? Matriarchal household, the sun goes out and finds a mother image and marries her. I didn't know all this stuff back then. It would have made a lot more sense, right? But I got this domineering grandmother on my father's side. I got this domineering grandmother on my mother's side who died before I was born, but now she's reincarnated in my mother and her sister, my aunt. They're two very domineering, very aggressive, very successful women. All right, so I'm in the middle of that trying to find my way.

And I go stay with my dad. And I can only say he reflected back on his childhood and said, gee, I wish I had been treated this way. So that's how he treated me and my stepper. And we responded to that. We'd go, if we needed spending money, we would go out and we'd do tasks around the neighborhood, clean yards, rake this, mow that, water the flowers, and make a few dollars and we'd have some fun.

And then sometimes he'd ask us to do something. We'd do it because he was always fair with us. And kind and he was generous with us. So 30 days of doing this opened up whole new feelings in me that I'd never had before. And I wish I'd had more experience with my father growing up. He was pretty much abused.

It seems like he, it's hard to feel sympathy for somebody who killed a bunch of people, but as a child he seems to have been a victim for a long time. Yes, he was a victim in the sense that he didn't feel that he was fitting in. Everyone told him he was stupid. Yes, that is, he refused. Everyone told him he was being stupid and he felt stupid and he didn't know his potential. And yeah, so I think that is more like being so abusive towards him. That's a huge impact on what he later did. In fact, didn't she keep him in a basement for a while?

She did. The reason she gave was that she was afraid that he would molest his little sister. I'm not sure what she based that on. I mean Edmund had some pretty weird things that he did when he was growing up that might be why she locked him in a basement because she was afraid that he would molest his little sister. And this was a very scary basement. And this definitely had a huge impact on camper suffering. It was very, very afraid about being in that dark basement. He said it was only one light and just very scary overall. We lived in a house where there was a basement. There was a walk-in basement, but it was in Montana. It was a full basement. It had granite walls, a hune of wood floorboards, and it looked like

some old dungeon out of a castle or something. I was eight years old, seven and a half, eight years old, and then I was very susceptible. My imagination was very living. And there was an old furnace in the basement that had been converted from burning coal to burning coal and wood to burning gas. And that was it. It had a central heating system with your typical radiators. And if you've ever lived in a home like that, you know, the being, the clang, the pop, the rattles,

the weird sounds in the night that can be spooky to a kid. Well, at a certain time of the evening, the family left the center room, the living room of the house. My mother and my sisters, or my sisters themselves, would go up to bed upstairs, where I used to go to bed upstairs. I had to go down to the basement. And an eight-year-old child had a tough time differentiating the reason in that. Why am I going to the basement? I'm going to hell, they're going to heaven. Earth is the living room. I'm going down to deal with demons and monsters and ghosts and all the things that scare me. They don't have to. There's a house with three women and one male, one boy, me. And I got a little defensive.

I'm saying, gee, this is kind of ganging out. My older sister had had a basement bedroom, okay, and it was a storage room that was about 18 feet wide and 35 feet long, okay, and it was a concrete room, no windows. And it had a light bulb over a big industrial iron sink, you know, like a laundry sink and had a pole string on the light. The bed was in the opposite corner of the room. I'd say a double bed, a single bed. And I had a dresser halfway, I had a couple of carpets thrown on the floor, old carpets, and there's a lot of storage stuff along the wall. And I was there about six months in that room, and I developed some very, very

particular and articulate rituals that I felt I had to go through to protect myself. Again, it's embarrassing. I was a youngster. And if you can imagine me going down a staircase of Ruff Humewood, there's no guardrail. So one step wrong and you're off into this black pit. I turn on the light. It's a little circular light switch and a single naked bulb goes on down to the bottom of these stairs.

Okay, so I turn that light on. I open the door. I closed the door because my mother complains of the cold coming in from the basement. I go down the stairs. I get to the bottom. I do a 180 degree turn, and I walk the full length of the house on this floor, with these pipes rolling and wheezing and banging over my head. It's pitch black ahead of me, and the only light is behind me hanging down from the ceiling. I'm now cut off from the house, cut off from them. I walk this full length into the darkness, from this gradients of light into complete darkness. Groping around in the dark, I do about a 45 degree angle when I get to the end. And I pull the string at lights up this end. And then I'm supposed

to walk all the way back to the other end, turn that light off and now walk towards the light from the dark. And I've got this horrible terror going on inside of me. And this is every night. This is every day because it's pitch black down her. No windows. She didn't intend all of this. And when I sniveled about it, when I complained and I cried about it, I got smacked and they hit. Now what's the matter with you?

Quit being such a wind. And she was trying to solve a problem. She had not enough room upstairs to where I didn't have to share a bedroom with a sister or eight years old. I need to go to the basement. It is unclear why his mother would confine her eight-year-old son to the basement rather than let him share room with his little sister. Was this hyper-vigilance? We saw something similar in the case of Michele Blair or Frieza mom from episode 67 who abused, beat, and eventually killed her two children

because she believed they were abusing another one of her children. But it appears that at least in this case, Carnell Elizabeth Kemper, Ed's mom, had reason to worry. After all, Edmund's behavior was very different than your typical pre-adolescent boy. He liked to play these weird games with his little sister, though.

I mean, there was one called Gas Chamber. What was that? The game Gas Chamber was something, they played two games that he could recall. One was Gas Chamber, which was that his little sister and a friend would throw in what they would call a pill or stuff like that that would basically gas him so he would suffocate and that was the game. They also played a game similar to the electric shared. He would sit in a chair and act like he was being electrocuted.

And we had this big old overstuffed chair up in my room and we'd, it was not just my sister and I, it was my sister and I and a friend close friend. We got into all these games. We got into one game where we'd roll up in a rug. And a person who would try to get out of it is just like a large throw run. And it was, I guess, what fascinated us individually about it is it was a completely broke up the monocle. I guess of what we're doing.

Didn't have a lot of toys to play with. We got bored with those pretty quickly. So we looked for things to do. You roll up in the rug and you try to get out and the other two would leave the room and we see who could get out fast. You know, you try to work your way outside ways or scoot off the end of it or whatever and went from that to being tied in this overstuffed chair. And one of the things he enjoys doing as a child is decapitating his sister's dolls. Yeah, from an interview with Kemper, this is from his personal view. He doesn't think that that had anything to do with what he would later do, but his psychology has talked about that a lot.

I had a cap gun. It was by Mattel, right? Fandre 50 was a very fancy cap gun. I got it in New York City. I went there for one summer with a cousin. And when I came back, my sister was kind of jealous, my little sister. For years, I never really put any value on what happened, tried to figure out beyond the obvious what happened

in this scenario. But I've since found it plausible to believe that when she was angry or jealous about something, she would fuel her attitude toward resolving something. She hated that cap gun because it came between us as brother and sister. It was something I had that she didn't have that trip represented something she really wanted to eye and she didn't get and I did. But very soon after getting back from that trip, she got in an argument with me. It was over something really petty. She got really outraged.

She picked up that cap pistol. I said, don't throw that. And she threw it right at me. Wam hard. It hit the floor and my toe. And it hurt bad. But it broke the gun. The inner mechanism, it wouldn't work after that. I picked it up. I found that out. It wouldn't conquer and pull the trigger anymore.

And that really outraged me. I said, so you want to play like that, huh? So I go running into her room. She's, what are you doing? What are you doing? She's shrieking and chasing me, right? So I run into her room and I grab a Barbie doll. It was the one fancy doll she had, the Barbie doll. Everybody has one, right? She had a pair of sewing scissors sitting there in a sewing machine,

a sewing kit. I grab the scissors out. The head didn't be capitated, pops off. So I popped that off. I said, well, that's going to go right back on. That's no damage. So I took the scissors and I cut the hands off the doll. I said, here, now you've got a toy that doesn't work too good. I got a toy that doesn't work too good. That was my attitude. It wasn't quite just me going and, you know, dismembering her doll. And then at one point he tells his little sister that he has a crush on his teacher, and that he wants to kiss her. And what happens then?

Yeah, he told his little sister that he had a crush on his teacher and she asked him whether I don't kiss her and he said that he would have to kill his teacher before he could do that. So that gives us a kind of a weird feeling when a child or a teenager. So it's not like that. Yeah, he was just a little boy when he says something like that. It's such a strange thing to say. Yeah. It seems like it's almost like he was preparing to be a serial killer his whole life. Yeah, we see these similarities between most serial killers. You can really see that the behavior is changing when they grow up. They're not like normal kids, and that applies to campers as well. And, you know, he had a lot of things in common

with other serial killers. I know you're a fan of incredible stories like the ones we tell here on Sword and Scale. There are some really gripping, immersive and terrifying stories told by master storytellers, just waiting to be heard by you. Audible is where you find them. Downloading the Audible app has never been easier. You can do so by sending a text with the word app to 500-500 with any mobile device. And start exploring a rich universe of amazing true-crime stories. I recommend the book about the serial killer we're telling you about right now.

Edmund Kemper, the true story of the co-ed killer by Jack Rosewood. It's one hell of a ride into a deranged and twisted mind. So text app to 500-, and join Audible today. When you join, you get one free audiobook every month and 30% off all regularly priced audiobooks, plus unlimited access to channels content. Text app to 500500 and start listening. You know, we always try to treat our audience with respect, like the adults they are.

After all, this isn't the Disney channel. It's a podcast about murder. So if you're listening to this, it's assumed you understand that you may hear some things that may bother you. That's why we never issue what is commonly referred to as a trigger warning. After all, we're not a bunch of mindless, manchurian candidates. We're human beings. And if you choose to listen to a murder podcast, you should expect to hear some disturbing things. Having said that, this will be the first ever

trigger warning issued on this show. The reason being is simple. If you listen to this, you should probably be expecting all sorts of horrible things to be happening to people. What you're probably not expecting, and in no way prepared for, is cruelty to animals. So if you want to skip it, just skip ahead to the 26 minute and 25 second mark. We'll carry on the story from there minus the animal abuse. To everyone else willing to continue. Here we go.

Tell me about the family cat. So they had two family cats. The first cat he actually killed by, I think it was ten and he buried it alive. He would later dig it up and play with it. He also killed the second family cat at 13, so that would be three years later. It's believed that he killed other animals during his period as well. That first cat, the one he buried alive, when he dug it up, he didn't just play with it. He decapitated it and mounted its head on a spike. Then he seemed to derive pleasure by successfully lying to his family about it. At age 13, he killed another cat when he thought it was favoring his younger sister, more

than him. He kept pieces of it in his closet until his mother found them. According to the FBI, a history of cruelty to animals is one trait that appears over and over in serial killers. This is a trait which should be taken very seriously if spotted in small children. It exhibits a lack of empathy with creatures, innocent creatures, that have no way to protect themselves. And it's the sure sign of a psychopath in the making.

Animals are usually the first step before moving on to humans, which is exactly what Edmund And from there he progresses quite quickly to human beings, doesn't he? Yeah, at 15th he starts to fantasize more and more about these dark fantasies, about killing, killing people, killing his mother in particular thing or at least that might be a reason why he starts to escalate like this and he kills his grandparents. Yes, at 15 he seeks out his father and he gets reacted and he is sent to his grandfather's his grandfather and grandmother. It's not really a fan of being there, and his grandmother is kind of nagging on him, reminding him a little bit of his mother being quite abusive, quite aggressive, and one day he shoots her.

When Edmond was sent to his grandparents 17-acre ranch in North Folk, California, initially he seemed to be doing well, spending his time shooting rabbits and birds, which seemed to act as an outlet for his aggression. But after he returned to his mother's for a brief, two-week break, which was supposed to last all summer, he regressed. This time, back at the farm, he was more sullen and dark, and he had a lot of time on his hands to brood. It seems Kimper projected his hatred for his mother on his grandmother. He found her to be a nag, and his grandfather to brood. It seems Kempper projected his hatred for his mother on his grandmother. He found her to be a nag and his grandfather a bore. Soon the violent fantasies returned. He started imagining dark images and fantasies, like shooting dozens of bullets through the

outhouse as his grandmother moths sat inside. He would often aim the gun at her when she wasn't looking, lining her up in the sights. As the tension at the farm mounted, his grandmother grew more and more nervous. She knew something was very off with Edmund, and went as far as carrying her husband's 45 caliber pistol on at least one outing, for fear that Edmund might get his hands on it instead. She had warned him not to touch it, and Edmund took this lack of trust as an insult. On August 27th 1964, Maud was going over proofs from a children's book she was writing. That's when she looked up and noticed Edmund.

He was sitting there, staring at her in a strange and frightening way. She told him to stop. After a moment, Edmund picked up his gun and whistled for his dog, saying he was headed out to shoot some gofers. Mod warned him not to shoot the birds as she had many times before, and she went back to working on her children's book. Edmund went outside, but then turned around and watched her through the screen door. Her back was to him. Edmund raised the rifle and aimed it at her head. He would later say that it was like a fog head taken over, a

possession. He described it as two beings inhabiting his body. And when his killer personality took over, it was kind of like blacking out. He fired once, and Mod slumped at the table. Then he fired twice more, hitting her in the back. Inside the house again, he wrapped her head in a towel and dragged the body into the bedroom. Within a few minutes, Kempersenier returned home from buying groceries. As he began to unload the truck, Edmund took game and shot him in the back of the head. He laid him on the bed next to his wife. He later said that he just wanted to feel how it was to shoot grandma or to kill grandma.

But the big twist is that his grandfather was a grocery shopping and he comes home and Kemper decides to shoot him for the reason that he doesn't want, he doesn't want grandpa to find out that his wife is dead. So that's kind of a bizarre reason to kill someone, to protect your feelings or whatever it was going on. But he killed grandpa because he didn't want him to find out that his grandma was dead. There are periods when kids go through very violent development and to, I mean potentially

violent, they break things, they steal things, they lie, they go through very violent development and to potentially violent, they break things, they steal things, they lie, they go through these changes. Yet I've had these people, one or two doctors in particular, who I won't go into, who very casually just slapped all these assignations on her and said, well, of course, if you run into a kid that's doing this kind of thing, you've got to develop in serial killer, you better put him in treatment real quick and save his life, right? To a point I agree with them, that someone who's acting out and has a dysfunctional childhood, or has just gone through a dysfunctional childhood and hasn't gotten violent yet, or is heading

toward that direction, passive aggressive. Violence was the last thing I exhibited and then it was murderous violence. Okay? Violence was the last thing I exhibited and then it was murderous violence Okay, so sure there's a lot of value in getting youngsters like that help To where they can find themselves and they can find value in themselves and they can find value in interacting with others And they didn't need to go in a different direction than what then what I did But to just sit there and casually lay these than what I did. But to just sit there and casually lay these, it's, I guess that bothers my ego, I don't know,

that these people have not worked with me year after year. The psychiatrists and psychologists I deal with are in a prison setting. They're there eight hours a day, they have to deal with me every day. If I am their patient and I screw up, they can kiss their job and go buy. I mean, they're gonna be a lot of hell on them for not seeing this in advance and saying,

oh, we should lock him up. He might be violent, right? And any psych out there, any professional out there is going to tell you, I think, that if they are going into my mind and to my past, into my feelings, that there's a potential there for acting out or getting uncontrolled or being violent, because they're stripping away the veneer of my civilization, the stripping way the veneer of the protections of myself, and there's a lot of things that can come jumping out of there, and then to walk out of that therapy session into this kind of a setting, prison, where it's very violent,

it's very aggressive, it's a distilled kind of medium that you might encounter on a street corner somewhere, the street corner thug and the street corner pump, or the alleyway where someone is going to take terrible advantage of you or put you in a terrible situation that you may have to be violent to get out of. That's this main line. I mean, that's where all these guys go. And I'm going to walk out of a therapy session where this man has been peeling my mind, so to speak, and getting into my psyche and my soul and finding out what makes me tick

or trying to help put me back together or help try to put me together for the first time. And then I'm going to put me together for the first time. And then I'm going to walk out of that into this medium. That's not very conducive to good health. I'm aware of that going into the situation. So I'm twice as Larry as the doctor is, but unfortunately he's got all of these mindsets and these theories and these books he's read and that he's trained under. I guess what has happened in my life kind of jumps out of the book, a few chapters ahead.

And the way I've experienced it, the psychs don't want to go that far. They don't want to come out there and work the pages back into the book so that I fit in there too. Or my kind of criminal fits into there too. They kind of just stand on the edge of the book, and they put on their feathers, and they put on their paint, and they get their rattles and they hop around and they go into the witch doctor routine. And that I resent and unfortunately so do they. When they have to put on their rattles and put their

crosses up and say, ah he's evil, get him away from us. He'll take advantage of us and he'll he'll rape pillage and burn. Right? So guess what? That's where I'm on the cutting edge of humanity. And then he gets caught obviously. He's not very clever about that, but he goes to some sort of juvenile psychiatric facility. But he gets out pretty quickly. Yeah, I believe it serves four or five years. The reason he gets out so early is that Cambridge is very smart. This is around the time that he actually gets to know that he is smart. He's been told he's been stupid all his life, but they

put him through a bunch of tests and he learned that he has a high IQ. The people in there listen to him. He gained the trust of his psychologist and he gets to be his assistant. That means that he gets access to a lot of documents in there. So he basically is studying his own behavior and other people's behavior and he quickly learns what to say to the doctors and psychiatrists to gain their trust and eventually they feel like they have treated him and he's cured and that's why he gets released so soon. That's amazing. And the thing is though, he gets released back into the care of his abusive mother, which

is just a tragedy waiting to happen. Yes, that was one of the things that the doctors and psychiatrists did not recommend. They did not recommend that he would be put out to live with his mother again, but somehow that's what he ended up doing. And you know, eventually he's able to escape his mother's clutches and he's able to move out on his own. What happens then? So a camper gets your the doing some

work construction at the roads together a roomy camper is out of the house but he's not alone his mother drops by for surprise visits popping in suddenly she also calls him incessantly and puts him down tells him he's not worthy of the attention of women

yes it's not a lot of do with his insecurities. You see, Kemper's mother, Clarnell, worked at a college. The University of California, Santa Cruz, to be exact. She was an administrative assistant. It was the early 1970s and there was a bevy of free-spirited, attractive women, all Kemper's age. But Clarnell didn't want her son to have anything to do with these women. Instead, she would tell Edmund that he was just like his father, and that he didn't deserve to know any of these girls. His father, also named Edmund Kemper, had left in 1957 after a long dysfunctional relationship. The job he'd taken testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific,

it's believed he took that job to get away from his bitter, angry, domineering wife. What these experts don't notice in the picture, I haven't seen it in writing anywhere. It could be somewhere. When I was 14 years old, I ran away from my mother. They mentioned that. But if you look at it in the overall picture, why did I run away? I wanted to be with my father That's a very topical approach to it. I wanted to get away from my mother because I was dreaming thinking fantasizing murder all day long I couldn't get it out of my head

She and I I couldn't battle with her because I was re-intimidated by her. She's six feet tall She weighs two and a quarter two hundred twenty five pounds. She's six feet tall, she weighs two and a quarter, 225 pounds, she's not a fat woman. She's just this great big woman who I was terrified of. She had verbal capabilities you wouldn't believe. I want you to watch her field strip wrong men in emotional little contests. And when they get into a point where they wanted to smack her, then she started attacking them on beating women.

Oh, slap the woman around, you know. And then she toyed with them on that. And I'd watch these guys dance around the room having fits, knocking out windows, punch a hole in the door, and stop off. And she could control people like that. I'm sitting there watching that in awe from the one point of view and in terror from the other. I grew up with this stuff.

She did that to my dad when they were always battling before the divorce. Tell me about Kemperer's physical appearance. He was a very large man. He was very large. He was six-nine and the way between 250 and 300 pounds. That's a huge man, very huge and he was very insecure about that. He just went to 15 yeah, his father was also very big, though. It seems like his appearance was a negative aspect in his ability to even do what he wanted to do for a job. He wanted to be a cop, right?

Yeah, he wanted to be a police officer, but his size made it impossible. He didn't fit the criteria and he couldn't apply for that. The arrogance of the psychologists who treated Kemper and believed they had cured him of his incurable lust for murder meant that eight more people would lose their lives. Kemper was smarter than them. He not only managed to convince the doctors that he was reformed, but to have his juvenile records sealed forever as well. That was now eight years later,

and the 15-year-old boy who had killed both his grandparents was now a man. In the first killing in May of 72, when that gun was pulled out, I launched it out, right, I headed under my leg out of sight, parallel to my leg in the seat. It was something that had been fought out in fantasy, acted out, felt out hundreds of times before it ever happened.

The first murder that Edmund commits as an adult, he has been cruising along the California area with his car outside school. He decides to pick up to hitchhikers, Marianne Pasey and Anita Lorscheza. They are both 18 years old, students at the Fresno State, they got into the car, he drives them to a kind of remote area, I believe it's in the mountain area and he stops the car and you know these two 18 years old girls are afraid like Why is he doing that? He handcuffs one of them into the car put that one in the trunk

Then he starts to believe the suffocate Marianne and Is that being here while Anita is still in the trunk, you know, alive. She's hearing a friend dying. It must have been horrible. I just gone through a horrible experience with her roommate stabbing her. And I was in shock because of that. I couldn't believe that it was that way.

And I'm walking back there, be wilderness. I got a killer. I can't let her go. She's kind of telling me. Everybody's going to get me. She's gonna tell me. Everybody's gonna get me. She sees the blood on my hands. What are you doing? She pulled back and she gasped.

And I think, oh, I don't want her to know what happened. I said, your friend got smart with me. She'd been getting really smart with me a lot. But I never hit her. I killed her, but I didn't hit her. I said, your friend got smart with me, and I hit her. I think I broke her nose. She better come help her. She's about to die. Why is she have to know that? I couldn't deal with telling her that. And when I attacked her, she didn't at first realize what was happening. It didn't go through. She had a very

heavy cover all of a sudden. It knocked her right up into the lid of the car. But it didn't pierce the clothing. So it wasn't that swollen-eye, anyway. I bought a pawn shop, huge knife, and I kept on to just mindlessly attacking. She falls back into the trunk. I just killed a young woman. I slammed down the lid of the trunk. She's dead, she's dying. And I panicked. I thought, I just locked the car keys in there, because I can't find them in my pocket.

Oh my God, I locked them in the trunk. I'm kicking on the trunk lid and yanking on it. Oh no, I don't believe this. I started to run and I tripped over the gun that I'd had in my pants that I had totally forgotten was there. I stopped, I said, stop and think. I collected my wits. Check all your pockets.

I picked the gun up, I stuck it back in my pants. Now remembering I had one. I checked all my pockets and there's the keys in the back pocket. I never put them in my back pocket. I thought I was pretty slick and went and stripped all over myself that first two murders. The first 24 hours, there were three clear times I should have been busted and I wasn't. Because three different individuals or three different groups of people got scared and minded their own business. And looked the other way.

Kemper was pretty slick. When the murder started, a warning was issued to students advising them not to hitchhike in cars that didn't have a university sticker on them. Edmund's car had a sticker. After all, his mother worked at the campus. My mother worked at the campus and I had an A stick around my car and obvious access day or night to the campus. I was picking up some very lovely young women. You know what we were talking about is we're driving around almost as often as not. This guy is going around doing this stuff.

And the second they started talking to it, they didn't realize it but they were getting a free ride. I couldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole, I swear. You know, but they'd be telling me what all about this guy and their comparing notes and speculate on what he looks like, how he cares himself, why he's doing this stuff, telling me about it. He takes the body's back to his apartment, his roomies and tom. He takes a pornographic photograph of bodies. He has sex with corpses. Then he dismembering them, putting them down into photographs, that he would later get rid of, around the California mountains.

It's getting easier to do. I was getting better at it. I was getting less detectable. I started flaunting that invisibility, severing a human head, two of them at night, in front of my mother's residence, with her at home, my neighbors at home upstairs, their picture window open, the curtains open, 11 o'clock at night, the lights are on, all they have to do is walk by and look out and I've had it. He mentions that stabbing someone to death isn't what you would imagine that they don't fall to the floor right away, and then he learns the expression of cut ear to ear.

Yeah, he can't be a very analytic person. He expected them to drop dead because that's how he sees them doing in the movies and so on. But yeah, that's where he learned that as he put it, that they just don't fall over. They leak to death. You know, they die when they're blood they just don't fall over, they leak to death. They die when they're blood, they don't have any more blood. And he severed their heads as well as part of this dismemberment. Yes, this is a commentator with camper.

He likes to survey the heads. Usually he keeps the head for a bit. He has sex with a dismembered head. Yeah. Why did you keep the heads when you cut them off and why did you keep something out of my childhood uh... i could put it on an incident i mean my father chopping the heads off of our two pet

chickens and my mother insisting that i eat them for dinner uh... you know we could say it was something that simple i don't think it was and my dad heads out back with a hatchet i got on my bike and i wrote it i tried to stop it i remember that i got on a bike road around the block that's crying i haven't talked about that for a lot of years

i'm sure that may have implemented something that may have gotten something rolling but the long fantasy lines but it took a lot of years of development along the slides to really get off. But how are you able to, in a one minute, have someone's head in your hand, and very shortly they're adding through a fantasy? However, that would relate to that severed head. And then five minutes later, I put that away and there'd be a knock on the door and I'd put it away and answer the door and the

land lady would be there. And we discussed it. Discuss where? Reality. Her reality. Not mine. Some people go crazy at the point. I felt it. It was when hell of a tweak. I mean, to just flip out and not know where I was To be walking up the stairs with a camera bag It belonged to a young woman that had her severed head in it Walking up to my apartment passed a happy young couple coming down the stairs I'm not it and smiled at me as they went by. Good evening. And they're going out on a date where I'd love to be going.

And I'm aware of both of these realities and the distance between those two. So dramatic, so amazing, so violent that I can feel the wheel squeaking inside. That was really pulling on it. And I imagine at that point some people break but i didn't literally go insane i didn't get lost when he commits this first murder is he living alone where is he living it's in a in a apartment with a roomy but is the room is not home at this point

and he's able to do all this he's able to take two bodies and dismember them and hide them away without anyone finding out. Yes, he boosts up the car, you can get pretty close to the park with a car, and he gets them in there, he leaves with them in basically a plastic bag. What does he eventually do with these body parts? He froze some of them in mountain areas, he froze some of them at the coast in the sea. He basically spreads them out. And then just four months later, he decides to kill again.

Yes. This time he picks up a Korean dance student named Aikoku. I believe she was waiting on a bus or she had missed a bus when camper pulled up and she got into his car And again he drove to our remote area and he pulls up the gun This is actually a pretty interesting part because he leaves I could cool inside the car I believe he has his gun in the trunk of his car And while he moves there, he locks the door. So he actually locked himself out of the car, but Icoku is so afraid of him, and she believes that he will let go of, so she lets him into the car, and that's when he shot the killer.

I believe he might have, yeah, he shocked her and raped her than then a killer. They represented not what my mother was, but what she liked, what she coveted, what was important to her, and I was destroying it. Why did you actually kill the girls? My frustration, my inability to communicate socially, sexually. I wasn't impotent, but emotionally I was impotent. I was scared to death of failing in male-female relationships. I knew absolutely nothing about that whole area, even if just sitting down and talking with the young lady. I need to be able to really communicate, and ironically enough, that's why I began picking people up.

And I'm picking up young women. And I'm going a little bit farther each time. It's a daring kind of a thing. First, there wasn't a gun. I'm driving along. We go to a vulnerable place where there aren't people watching, where I could act out. And I say, no, I can't. And then a gun is in the car,

hidden, and is craving this awful, raging eating feeling inside. I could feel it consuming my insides. This fantastic passion was overwhelming me. It was like drugs. It was like a lot of people were really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, bring this gun out. I already realized that if that gun comes out, something has to happen. Then again, just four months later, he does it again. Yeah, this time it's, again, it's an 18-year-old student in the show. He drove to a wooded area, an instutor. He placed a body in the trunk of a car, just like that at times. But this time, he actually moved back to his mother, but he's able to get it in, I believe he hides the body in the closet over the night. He's mother, no matter what.

It's amazing that he can hide these bodies where he's living and nobody finds out about it. Yeah, he gets sloppy and sloppier, but so far it's still working out. This time he doesn't wait very long before killing again. It's just a month later. Yeah, EQ's Rosalind Thorpe and Alessandro Liu. I believe it's the same thing. It picks them up, negative into his car.

By this time, it's known that there is a serial killer under the list picking up co-eds. I believe one of these girls who hesitant to get into the car, but eventually both got into the car. And yeah, he accused them just like the other victims. He beheads them in his own car. How is that even possible? I'm not sure how we did that actually. I mean, can you imagine the mess?

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, wow. He's smart enough to remove the bullets even from the corpses before dismembering and distributing the body parts. Yes, the reason he removed the bullets is, like I said, the campers were very smart. He's very analytic.

And he doesn't want the police to be able to truck the bullet to his gun at the later point. Despite not being one of the most well-known killers, the story of Edmund Kemper is so bizarre that it feels like it's taken right out of the pages of a Hollywood horror film. It's no wonder that the killer by the name of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs was

inspired by the story of Edmund Kemper. One of the weirdest parts of this story is the fact that the cops realize they have a serial killer on the loose, murdering co-eds and desperately try to find him. All the while, he's right under their noses. Kemper hangs out in a local bar called the Jury Room, a popular hangout spot for off-duty police. Edmund knows a lot of the Santa Cruz officers and even milks them for information over drinks. They knew him. I believe that one of the police officers actually knew one of the victims. She was a babysitter for him. So yeah, they had a very twisted verb, sorry.

It was springtime. It was April. For two months I hadn't killed. I said it's not going to happen anymore girls. It's got to stay between me and my mother and it's got to, I can't get away from her. We're still fighting. She's still be little. She's still like a puppet on a string and I entertain her She knows all my buttons and I dance like a puppet with that pain and it even got physical To where I had physically Grad her and thrown her onto her bed trying to emphasize a point that she's threatening to kill her So here I pick up these two young ladies and Berkeley, a Ashby Avenue, one has flowers in her hand, the teeth little dolls,

they're in granny dresses and they're hitchhiking, a couple of real experts. I want to see how together I am if I can resist this temptation and they get in my car. They want to go one way, I know they need to go the other. If they go the way they're insisting on were headed right back Not to wear the first two co-eds were murdered and I'm saying to myself, oh my god All I got to do is relax and they'll take me to their death. I've got the gun in the car the same one I've been doing it Way I Insisted this gently as I could I took them where they needed to go to their college

The most gently as I could, I took them where they needed to go to their college. Kempers killing spree ends with him solving the problem that has been there his whole life. His mother. I said she's got to die and I've got to die. Or girls like that are going to die. And that's when I decided I'm going to murder my mother. I knew a week before she died, I was going to kill her. And she went out to a party, She got sourced. She came home

Went to sleep. I was woken up by that. I got came out. I walked up to her bed She's laying there reading a paperback as many thousands of nights before And she said, oh, I suppose you're to want to sit up all night and talk now. Shit. I looked at her, I said, no, it's a good night. And I knew I was going to kill her.

You know? And I'm so cool, I'm so hard. And that's the first time in ten, I've looked at it that way. I mean, that intensely, that honestly, it hurts. Because I'm not a lizard, I'm not from a nurraka, I came out from verpa china. See, I came out of my mother, and in a rage, I went right back in.

For seven years she said, I haven't had sex with a man because of you, my murderous son is one of our arguments. I cut off her head and I humiliated her court. It's there. Edmund bludgeoned his mother with a claw hammer, then slithered her order, a court. It's there. You know? Edmund bludgeoned his mother with a claw hammer, then slithered throughout with a knife. After that, he decapitated her, and used her head for oral sex. He then put her head on a shelf and screamed at it for hours. He used it as a dartboard, and ultimately smashed her face in. He also cut out her tongue

in larynx and put them in the garbage disposal, because that's the part of her he hated most, her nagging voice. But the garbage disposal couldn't break down the tough local chords and ejected the tissue back into the sink. He would later say that seemed appropriate. He then had sex with his mother's corpse, hit it in a closet, and went out for a drink. But he wasn't quite done yet. He grows up. And what's her closing words? I suppose you want to sit up all night and talk. God, I wish I had. Your grandmother and her daughter and long, your mother, were two women very important in your life.

And you killed them both. Could you say what they were like that led them to the same fate? Same thing that kept them from ever being friends are both aggressive. Matrix oracle women. They've been the daughters of strong, Matrix oracle women.

I still love to my mother. And it's hard for somebody to comprehend that you murder your mother through love. It isn't a rational process. It's a very painful process. It isn't rational. And I've got to still live with that. The last victim is Sally Haleth, which is his mother's best friend.

He, after he has killed his mother, he calls Sally over, inviting her for dinner or whatever. She comes by and he kills her too. And the reason he does this is he thought that she would miss or start to wonder why his mother isn't picking up the phone or wishes. So that's why that's his reason for doing that. After strangling her, he decapitates her and spends the night with her lifeless corpse. He then stuffs it in a closet and leaves a note to the police reading

approximately 515 AM Saturday. No need for her to suffer anymore at the hands of this horrible murderous butcher. It was quick, a sleep, the way I wanted it. Not sloppy and incomplete gents, just a lack of time. I got things to do. Edmund then gets into Sally's car and drives east, making it all the way to Pueblo, Colorado, before finally calling police and confessing to his crime. Why did you wind up giving yourself up?

It had to stop. It had to stop. Once my mother was dead, there's almost a confardi process at that point. I got physically ill right then, when she died, when I murdered her. And once she was dead, there was no way I could back out. I had backed it down from giving up 1,000 times. I just used to get drunk and go sit out in front of the Sheriff's Department in a parking

lot across the street on one of those little concrete parking berms. I just sit there and say, I still can't. The clanging doors, like it's still here. No, because it'll never open again. And so I rationalized that to give up would be insane, to give up would be crazy. I'd be giving away my freedom and I don't need to. But I looked back on that and wish I had earlier when I was saying those things to myself. The people who were later dead wouldn't be the regret that came later. Would have not had to myself. The people who were later dead wouldn't be the regret that came later. Would have not had to be. Those people, not things, those people would still be with their

families, with their loved ones. They would have their own families. If I had had the courage to make that decision, instead of painting myself into the corner. So you've done a lot of research into this man and I'd like to ask you for your opinion. Do you think that he became what he became because of his mother or do you think that was just an excuse? If she had not been in the picture, would he have been this person committing these murders anyway? I don't think anyone is born to kill. I think that people are shaped among their surroundings.

With that said, there are many people like Kemper that doesn't end up being a serial killer. I do think that's with another surrounding, with a functioning home loving parents, I do think that it could have ended another way, but it's just the speculations who knows. Do you think his mother is, would you consider her a victim? Everyone in the Edmund Kemper story is a victim of some sort, including his mother here. Including Edmund Kemper himself. Yeah, most serial killers are a victim of a very rough child of them. It's not an excuse or anything, but he didn't have the best opportunity in life to

do something else. I believe with a better child of the things my time worked out better for him. Unfortunately, my mother developed and I'm not it's not fair to talk about a dead person that way. They can't defend themselves. They can't give you another perspective on what really happened. I can only surmise to try to be fair. Looking back on it, I'm seeing that she was making an effort to balance her pain with what she was experiencing. If you look at her dead, he's a wimp. He never did anything.

Mom did everything. And also she orientated toward her. So she comes out doing that stuff. I find out sociological studies and psychological studies. That's normal. Not necessarily healthy, but that happens. And my dad being the wimp out of his family goes and finds my mom was the dynamo out of her family and they get married and it'll either work or it won't. And in his case it didn't work because she kept hammering on him. She wanted him to change this. She wanted him to change that and he couldn't handle that. After 13 years he'd had enough. What I resented was I had a mother, I had a father. Father worked, he brought in a big paycheck. We had a nice house, we had friends, we went

to school, right? We had birthdays, we had Christmas, we had vacations, he had Saturday night with the poker buddies out in the guest house by the garage, we were living pretty good. And she absolutely hated that. Three court-appointed psychiatrists found Kemper to be legally sane. In these interviews, it was learned that Kemper sliced flesh from the legs of his victims, then cooked and consumed these strips of flesh in a casserole. On November 8, 1973, Kemper was found guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder. But a Supreme Court moratorium at the time prevented a sentence of capital punishment.

He instead received seven years to life for each count, to be served concurrently. Kemper was eligible for parole in 2007 and again in 2012. On both occasions, he told the parole board he was not fit to return to society and was denied parole. In February 2016, attorney Scott Curry relayed to the press that Kemper believes no one's ever going to let him out and that he's happy going about his life in prison. Kemper's next parole hearing is this year, but according to Edmund Kemper, he said he's not interested in attending. Jack Rosewood's book, Edmund Kemper, the story of the co-ed killer is available on Audible. And listeners can get his audiobook for free with a 30-day trial membership by going to

audible.com slash monsters. That's audible.com slash monsters. If you like the show, join us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And until next time, stay safe. Thank you.