Cannibals (12 page)

He had certainly been psychotic since the time he entered San Quentin prison, but no one had really bothered to do anything about it, and just ignored his bizarre pleadings for blood.

Ed Kemper had death fantasies since early in his childhood and he fulfilled these in his adult years

Even as a child Ed Kemper had fantasies about death. What his mother’s friend didn’t realize was quite what they would be eating when Ed invited her round for a surprise dinner . . .

Delving in Ed Kemper’s past exposes many clues as to why he would become a killer. His parents Clarnell and Ed Kemper Jr. had an extremely stormy marriage and they eventually split up when Ed was only nine. Ed missed his father terribly and his mother subjected him to severe discipline. Although Ed was to have a succession of stepfathers he never succeeded in forming a close relationship with any of them. Ed was constantly belittled by his mother and his two sisters, and when he reached puberty his mother started to lock him in the basement for fear of him scaring his sisters. Ed spent many hours on his own in the dark, damp cellar, and thought about murdering his mother for making his life such a misery.

With very little human contact Ed became withdrawn and he started to entertain fantasies which combined sex and violence. In his early teens he killed two of the family cats, and his mother discovered the remains of one in a dustbin, minus the head, while other dismembered pieces were found in Ed’s cupboard. He combined his animal mutilations with his sexual fantasies and his behaviour really started to worry his mother.

Clarnell was starting to find her adolescent son unmanageable, and at his own request Ed was sent to live with his father and stepmother in Los Angeles. However they found his behaviour just as disturbing as his mother had and they were at their wits end as to what to do with the boy. Ed’s father decided that he should go and live under the strict discipline of his grandparents, Ed and Maude Kemper. The Kempers had a 17-acre farm in California and Ed arrived to stay with them during the Christmas holidays of 1963. His grandmother wasn’t happy about having to look after a problem child, and little did she know that it would be for such a short time.

For a while Ed seemed to settle down and made reasonable progress at his new school, Sierra Joint Union High School. His teachers found him co-operative, and said he never drew any attention to himself apart from his unusual size. The situation at home was a little tense and his grandparents found the young lad rather disconcerting. His grandfather gave him a .22 rifle and to keep out of their way Ed would go off with his dog and shoot rabbits, gophers and birds.

When his school year finished he went back to stay with his mother and stepfather, allegedly for the rest of the summer, but this stay was to only last for two weeks. He returned to his grandparents’ farm where Maude noticed that he had regressed and seemed more sullen and ominous than when he was at school. Ed found his grandfather boring and his grandmother’s nagging was starting to get on his nerves. Once again he started to fantasize, with more and more violent visions of how he would like to kill her. All summer long the tension got worse and worse and Ed got more and more broody.

On August 27, 1964, Maude Kemper sat at her kitchen table reading through some proofs of a children’s book she was in the process of writing. She looked across at her grandson and noticed that he had a strange expression on his face, an expression which unnerved her. She warned him to stop looking at her like that, and with that he picked up his gun, whistled his dog and said that he was going out hunting. Maude warned him not to shoot any birds while he was out, and this was enough to tip him over the edge. As Ed reached the back door of the farmhouse, he turned round, levelled the rifle at her head and fired. He fired twice more hitting Maude in the back, and then came back into the house. He wrapped Maude’s head in a towel and dragged her body into the bedroom. Then he grabbed a knife and started to slice the woman’s body into pieces, also stabbing it repeatedly to try and relieve his anger.

After a few minutes Ed heard the sound of his grandfather’s truck in the driveway. As his grandfather began to unload the truck, Ed raised his rifle, took aim and shot Ed Snr. in the head.

As soon as he had fired the rifle Ed felt perturbed, not so much for the evil he had just carried out, but because he knew he would get caught. His grandparents were not the sort of people who would go off on a holiday on a whim and they would soon be missed. Worried and upset the 15-year-old killer phoned his mother back in Montana, who advised him to ring the sheriff and tell him what he had done. This is exactly what he did.

Ed Kemper was taken in for questioning and when he was asked why he had killed them he responded by telling them that he had often fantasized about killing his grandmother, but he had killed his grandfather out of mercy so that he wouldn’t have to see his dead wife. The courts appointed a psychiatrist to study Ed and he was diagnosed as being paranoid and psychotic, and the Youth Authority committed him to Atascadero State Hospital. So, still only 15, Ed entered the institution on December 6, 1964, and stayed there for a total of five years. While at Atascadero Ed was under the watchful eye of Dr. Frank Vanasek and he became a trusted inmate amongst the rest of the staff.

Ed quickly learned to say exactly what the doctors wanted to hear, not what he was actually thinking, and consequently he managed to fool them into believing he was a reformed boy. He also loved to listen to other serial sex offenders who would spend many nights fantasizing about their crimes and saying that the only reason they were caught was because their victim’s identified them. Kemper made a firm resolution that any future victims of his would not be allowed to live.

After five years the doctors at Atascadero no longer believed Ed was a threat to society, although they did agree that his violence may come to the surface again if provoked. By the time Ed left the hospital he had grown to a full

6 ft 9 in and weighed 300 lbs. He was now an angry young man of 21, and just his appearance was enough to frighten anyone.

Although the doctors had felt that his domineering mother may have been responsible for Ed’s simmering rage and it was best that they be kept apart, he returned to live with his mother. Clarnell was now working at the University of California. Ed’s time in the hospital had made him rather envious of anyone who was in authority and he had a desire to join the police force. Unfortunately for him his height made him ineligible, but this did not stop him hanging around with the local police in a bar called the Jury Room. He was well liked and became known as ‘Big Eddie’ the gentle giant. He managed to get a job as a flagman on the highways, and this meant that, now he was earning a living, he could move out of his mother’s apartment.

He moved in with a friend in an apartment in Alameda and bought himself a car. Ed started to fantasize once more about picking up women hitch-hikers and what he would do to them. He cruised around the highways and with the aid of a sticker from his mother’s job at the University, soon gained the trust of the hitch-hikers as they felt it was safe to accept a lift from a fellow student. After he had picked up around 150 hitch-hikers, Ed felt he was ready for the next step in his gruesome plan.

It was Sunday, May 7, 1972, and Ed Kemper was preparing for murder. He stashed away under his car seat a hunting knife, some rope, a plastic bag, a pair of handcuffs and a Browning 9 mm automatic pistol, then he set out to find his victims. Just after 4.00 p.m. he came across two teenage girls thumbing a lift. They were May Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, and they happily accepted Ed’s offer of a lift. They told him that they were on their way to see a friend at Stanford University but were unsure of the way. Ed used this information to his advantage, and unaware that they were being driven in the wrong direction, the girls were taken down a side road. Suddenly Mary sensed something was wrong and she asked Ed what he wanted. Ed immediately stopped the car, pointed the pistol at the two frightened girls and replied, ‘You know what I want!’

Mary tried to keep her wits about her and endeavoured to keep her attacker talking, but Ed was too astute and realized what she was up to. He forced the petrified Anita into the boot of his car and then returned to give Mary his full attention. He handcuffed her hands behind her and then tried to suffocate her with the plastic bag. But Mary was not prepared to give in without a fight and she bit holes through the plastic so that she could still breathe. Kemper got more and more angry and soon overpowered her by stabbing her twice in the back and once more in the chest. Then Ed grabbed Mary by the chin and slashed her throat.

Realizing that Anita would have heard the struggle from her position in the car’s boot, Ed knew he had to kill her too. So he got out of the car, opened the boot and began stabbing Anita all the while trying to subdue her screams of terror.

Ed decided to take the two bodies back to his apartment as he knew his flatmate wouldn’t be at home. Once back in his room he stripped both the girls naked and started to take Polaroid photos of the various stages of dissection before finally decapitating his prey. He wrote down all their details from their student ID cards and then destroyed all the possessions they had with them. Then he buried the body parts in the bush around Santa Cruz, but kept the two heads as trophies on his shelf. He later returned to the buried parts and threw them into a ravine, in the hope that they would be even harder to identify when they were eventually found.

However, Ed need not have worried because the two girls had not been reported as missing. Their colleagues at the University just assumed that they had gone off travelling as students so often did.

For a few months it seemed that the photographs he had taken were enough to satisfy Ed’s sexual fantasies. He had also suffered a broken arm in a motorcycle accident shortly after his last killings, but by September of that year Ed’s homicidal urges were starting to surface again.

It was 14 September, 1972, late in the afternoon, and Aiko Koo, a 15-year-old dancer from Korea, was thumbing a lift on University Avenue Berkeley. When the friendly-looking man offered her a lift she was delighted, that was until she realized they were heading off in the wrong direction. She started screaming, and in an effort to shut her up Ed produced his gun and shoved it into the girl’s ribs. He pretended that he was feeling suicidal and needed someone to talk to, and for a while this ruse seemed to work. Once they reached a secluded spot Ed suffocated the small girl until she was unconscious, and then proceeded to rape and finally strangle her. Ed placed the body of Aiko into the boot of his car and then drove to a nearby bar where he sat and enjoyed a beer, all the time savouring the delights of his slaughter.

Later that evening he took the body, bundled up in a blanket, back to his room. Once again he dissected the corpse, and then scattered the remains around the Santa Cruz woods. This time he kept the head of little Aiko in the boot of his car.

Ed Kemper had a follow-up evaluation on September 15 by the board of juvenile psychiatrists. By now he was expert at fooling his doctors and he was declared mentally stable. Little did they know that all the while they were interviewing their patient, Aiko Koo’s head lay in the boot of his car! Ed, with his slate now wiped clean, felt he was invincible. It also meant that now he had no-one looking over his shoulder he could go out and buy a gun of his own. The only real problem he could see was that his broken arm prevented him from working and earning the money he needed to live on his own, so back he went to live with Mum.

There is no doubt that Clarnell tried to get along with her ‘freak’ of a son, but the quarrelling went from bad to worse. With each confrontation, Ed’s mother became more and more nervous and maybe she was just too scared to do anything about it.

Ed went out and bought himself a .22 Reuger automatic gun and he desperately wanted to try it out. It was now January 1973, and because the weather had been so bad it meant that there were very few young women out on the highways thumbing a lift. He was getting more and more frustrated but his luck was to change on January 8.

Ed’s next victim was an 18-year-old girl called Cindy Schall who was on her way to an evening class at her nearby college. He drove her into the hills above Watsonville, where he bound and gagged her and placed her in the boot of his car. Then he lovingly handled his new toy and felt excitement rise in his groins as the bullet hit Cindy’s head. Still buzzing from the thrill of his actions, Ed drove back to his mother’s house and took the body of the young girl inside. Clarnell was out so he was free to carry out his fantasies.

He laid Cindy’s body out on the bed and had sex with her and then the following morning, with some difficulty, due to the fact that his arm was still in a cast, he carried the body into his bathroom. He cut it into pieces and then placed the body parts into plastic bags and tossed the grisly remains into the ravine. This time he kept her shirt and ring as trophies, and put her head in the back of his wardrobe.