Early Life of Edmund Kemper

The crimes of Edmund Kemper have been well-publicized for years — the hit Netflix series Mindhunter even focuses on Kemper — but the story of what led him to take the plunge into serial killing is just as chilling. Maybe more so.

Before I share this tale, if you’re at all squeamish you may want to skim this post. It’s intriguing from a psychological viewpoint, but I realize not everyone shares my enthusiasm fascination for with serial killers. Ready? Cool. Let’s do this.

Bouncing Baby Boy

Born in Burbank, California on December 18, 1948 (unbeknownst to us, Bob and I married on Ed Kemper’s birthday!) Edmund Emil Kemper III was the middle child of Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr.—known as E.E.—and Clarnell Kemper. His mother was a severe alcoholic who favored his two sisters, Susan and Anyll, and never missed an opportunity to belittle him. Some speculate Clarnell may have suffered from borderline personality disorder.

His dad was a World War II veteran who hated his wife. So much so, he preferred war over home.

Suicide missions in wartime and the later atomic bomb testings were nothing compared to living [with her].

— Edmund Kemper, Jr.

Schoolboy Crush

Like many young boys, Ed had a crush on his second-grade teacher. But rather than shower her with handpicked daisies or leave an apple on her desk, Ed stalked her, peeping through her windows, his tiny fingers gripped tight around the handle of his father’s bayonet.

His sister taunted him over this crush. “Why don’t you go and kiss her?”

“If I kiss her,” said eight-year-old Ed, “I would have to kill her first.”

Moving Day

One year later, Ed’s parents divorced. Carnell moved her family to Helena, Montana. Though Ed claimed he was close to his dad, after the divorce, all communication stopped between them.

Left alone with his overbearing mother and two sisters, Ed began to act out. He had a genius IQ even then, but had trouble making friends. It didn’t take long for his behavioral problems to turn violent and bizarre.

Cat Lovers: Skip the Next Paragraph

He abused animals and became violent toward his sisters. When he was ten, he buried the family cat alive. Waited two weeks. Dug up the cat, decapitated it, and stuck its head on a stick—like he would soon do to young girls. Three years later, another family cat went missing. His mother found the cat’s dismembered body parts in Ed’s closet. When asked why he did it, Ed said the cat liked his sister more than him.

Boyish Games

With a dark and active fantasy life, he would act out bizarre sex acts with his sister’s dolls. Carnell didn’t help matters by calling him “a sick pervert.”

For fun, Ed invented a game called Gas Chamber. He fantasized about death and would ask one sister to strap him into the “chamber” and tell the other sister to “pull the lever” to switch on the gas. Ed would choke, writhe on the floor, and “die” a dramatic death.

Dancing with the Devil

Soon, Carnell feared young Ed would sexually assault one or both of his sisters. Her solution was to lock him in the basement for days and weeks at a time—alone—a bare lightbulb hanging from a wire in the center of the dark and creepy space. Since the door locked from the outside, the only way out was through a trap door beneath the dining room table.

Trapped, Ed would lay on the cold cement floor staring into the flame of the furnace. And it was then, he later told an FBI profiler, he saw the face of the Devil for the first time.

When Ed wasn’t torturing animals, he would steal his sister’s dolls and perform funeral rites on them, often decapitating and dismembering the dolls beforehand. Later, he would act out this fantasy in real life with the murder, decapitation, and dismemberment of six young girls.

Post-arrest, he 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 sitting there, that’d get me off.

Dear Ol’ Dad

By age 14, Ed discovered his father had remarried and adopted his wife’s teenage son. So, he ran away from his Montana home and wound up at his father’s front door in Los Angeles. Dad allowed Ed to stay with his new family, but soon, his stepmother said he gave her migraines. In truth, Ed creeped her out by following her around the house, shutting the drapes and blinds, claiming, “It’s too bright.”

Get. Out.

The stepmother finally had had enough and sent him to live with his grandparents—Edmund Sr. and Maude—in Norfolk, California. Interestingly, Maude was an extra in Gone with the Wind and a writer for Redbook McCall’s.

Ed despised living with his grandparents, calling his grandfather “senile” and his grandmother, well, this is how he described her…

She thought she had more balls than any man and was constantly emasculating me and my grandfather to prove it. I couldn’t please her. It was like being in jail. I became a walking time bomb, and I finally blew.

A year later, at 15 years old, Ed Kemper committed his first murder.

First Murder

After an argument with Maude, Ed grabbed a .22 hunting rifle and shot her three times in the back of the head. Whether he also stabbed her is up for debate. Then Ed waited for his grandfather to arrive home. He murdered him at his car so, in his mind, he could spare the old man the pain of seeing his wife’s dead body.

But He’s Smart

Following the murder of his grandparents, authorities sent Ed to Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility where doctors subjected him to various tests. One of which illuminated his genius IQ. They also diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Nonetheless, in the six years he spent at the institution, he became one of the doctors’ favorite patients. They even allowed him to assist in conducting tests on other inmates.

By 1969, the doctors wrongly declared Ed was “not typical of a sociopath” and released him into his mother’s care.

Big mistake.

Murder Spree

In May 1972, Ed murdered and dismembered two college students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, after offering them a ride. He brought them home and photographed their corpses naked and performed sex acts on the decapitated heads.

Four months later, he murdered 15-year-old Aiko Koo in September 1972 after she accepted a ride from him.

In January 1973, he murdered 18-year-old student Cindy Schall. Four weeks later, he killed Rosalind Thorpe (23) and Alison Liu (20) and had sex with their corpses before mutilating their bodies.

Most of the decapitated heads he buried in the garden with their faces tilted toward his mother’s bedroom window because “she looked down on everyone.”

Mommy Kemper

In April 1973, he finally turned his wrath on Mom—the true source of his hatred—murdering, decapitating, and using her head as a dartboard before performing sex acts on it. He also killed her friend and had sex with her headless corpse. After murdering Mommy, he tore out her vocal chords and shoved them down the garbage disposal. When the disposal spat the gristly innards back out, he thought,

That seems appropriate as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.

After the murders, he turned himself into police.

Ed Kemper Today

The 71-year-old Kemper stands 6 ft. 9 inches, weighs 250 lbs, and has lived at California Medical Facility in Vacaville ever since. And works as an audiobook narrator! It’s a crazy world.