in the early 1970s the adil ik California seaside town of Santa Cruz would be plunged into that one day there would be a body part found somewhere or washing in from the ocean innocent young women were being raped murdered and dismembered picked up a sack with remains and then heaved it over and all the while the elusive killer was right under the noses of the cops that pursued him he had a great personality he was a likable guy what kind of man could commit such heinous crimes he would have oral sex with the decapitated head
was he a terrible product of his environment his mother would lock him in the basement room at night because she had this idea that he could possibly sexually assault his sisters or was the co-ed butcher born to kill he just erupted [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] santa cruz up through the 60s was a small speech town it was a surf town and it was a retirement town then the university popped onto the scene in 1965 it was the dawn of the hippies of the Age of Aquarius so there was a very free and easy feel
to life here a lot of the counterculture that essentially bled over from San Francisco area and came down here a lot of this so-called the hippie types ended up farming communes here in Santa Cruz County and that was attractive to a lot of young people and including young girls that people are coming from all over the country just to I live that free and liberating lifestyle [Music] but in 1972 the piece in Santa Cruz would be shattered all of a sudden there were bodies being washed in on the ocean [Applause] there were Risley discoveries and
the thought was from a lot of people in town what the hell is happening to our little paradise we were dealing with a lot of missing person reports it became clear that somebody was killing young co-ed hitchhikers eighteen-year-old Fresno college students Anita Lu Kesser vanishes the severed head found in the mountain it was just the skull we have no body Marianne pêche an 18 year old co-ed and talented skier disappears [Music] it became a very confusing time for homicide investigators 15 euro balidaan say like abducted it just seemed like a world gone crazy Cindy Scholl
18 years old and babysitting to earn her way through college goes missing I remember at the time very much running get it I mean get him off the streets catch him put him away the media christened the mystery killer the co-ed butcher whenever we see somebody under the age of 18 who was hitchhiking we would picked him up to take him to to a little halt and it became a big outcry of that that we were violating their right to hitchhike but in reality is that we were just trying to save their lives and it
went on 23 year-old Rosalind Thorpe vanishes from the Santa Cruz campus every time we have a missing person report we're just a fearful that this was going to be another homicide victim and 21 year old student Madison Luth disappears we had no clue as to who was doing us they didn't know what the hell was going on and indiscriminate murder cases are extremely hard to solve because there's no rhyme nor reason because the culture at the time was there were a lot of drugs going on here and a lot of the so-called hippie movement I
suppose individually we may have fought it may have had something to do with that in April 1973 as part of a routine firearms inquiry detective Michael aloof II would come face-to-face not with a drug-crazed hippie but with a short-haired conservative young man popular with local police the Sheriff's Office that I worked for at the time received a what we call a dealers record of sale one of our records clerks brought back to us a file card and said you know this this guy just tried to buy a gun and his record was expunged but I
could see through the blackout that he was involved in a murder in Madera County some years ago affectionately known as Big Ed the 25 year old six-foot nine-inch 280 pound Edmund Kemper was a regular fixture at cops bar the jury room he would come down to a local watering hole that us police officers would go to after work and hang out and talk with us he was had a great personality he was very friendly very outgoing and he was a likable guy that the discussion became well who's going to go take the gun away from
this guy because when you look at his dealers record of sale he's six feet eight and a half and 285 pounds so he's pretty big guy so being the junior detective I drew the straw there was some apprehension involved just due to the guy's size big man big gun and little old me well they were unfamiliar to a luffy the gun owner was definitely not considered a suspect and the co-ed killings Big Ed lived with his mother on a pleasant peaceful suburban street but the address was unclear we parked right there and we looked around
couldn't find much of anything [Music] there were several places that had basically the same address that we weren't sure which one was his we were I'm just guessing at this point right around this point right here when a car came around the curve and pulled up right there where that car is i stalled on I said let me go ask this guy if he knows where kemper is so as I approached the car that there was a gentleman in the car lying across the front seat with the door open and he was fiddling underneath the
dashboard and I was just about to this point when I said excuse me I'd like to speak with you for a second when he got out of the car he got out of the car and he got out of the car and he got out of the car and immediately I knew that this was mr. Kemper the man I was looking for because he towered over me and I'm 6 feet tall so from here we explained that you know what we needed to do we needed to take his weapon to make sure that he was
authorized to have that legally we came to the trunk and he had his keys in his pocket and he went to put the key in there and so my partner and I instinctively whether it be instinct or training separated and I came around to this side of the car on the trunk and my partner was on the other side and we had our hands on the guns the only thing that was in the trunk was a bundle like in a blanket of some sort of towel he started to reach in for it and I said
no wait a minute let me get I reached in the trunk got the bundle and inside of that was the the weapon we're looking for and I noticed there was nothing in the trunk no liner in the trunk or anything I thought that was a little strange but we took the handgun and we left the luffy handed the gun in at the station and thought no more about it [Music] two weeks later five o'clock in the morning officer jim connor is on the night shift when he overhears a colleague taking a call from the gun
owner knowing yet i got on the phone and we we started talking like i could tell that something wasn't right [Music] he was at Pueblo Colorado he was in a phone booth and he hadn't had any sleep for several days and he said he had done something really bad [Music] [Applause] he said that he had killed his mother and a friend of hers [Music] he said that they were at his house and he asked me if I knew Mickey Luffy and I said yes and he says well my house is hard to find Mickey knows
how to find it very easily because he had been out there and had confiscated a gun officers contacted detective a Luffy at his home I'm standing there getting all this information and giving all this information and I have this tremendous feeling of all of the blood just rushing out of my body it was just oh my god this is unreal one of the deputies broke the back window which is on the other side of the sliding glass door and then we started looking to see if we could locate the bodies [Music] closet we pulled back
a sheet and we saw up some hair and some blood [Applause] then Big Ed Kemper made a startling confession he made comments to Jim Connor on the telephone that he had killed all of the coeds - taken into custody 24-year old Edmund Kemper would then reveal an extraordinary and sickening [Music] in the early 1970s the Californian beach resort of Santa Cruz had been stunned by the mysterious disappearance of a series of young college girls and a catalogue of gruesome discoveries then in April 1973 24 year-old six-foot nine-inch Edmund Kemper unexpectedly confessed that he was the
infamous co-ed butcher and that he now had a tally of 10 murder victims to his name taken into custody he would now reveal his extraordinary story [Applause] the co-ed killer had such a fascinating life born in 1948 Edmund Kemper was the middle child of three his mother and his father were very strict disciplinarian there there was no leeway one way or the other growing up in Burbank California Kemper looked up to his father but had difficulties with his mother claw Nell she was a punitive person that he resented greatly she was harsh aggressive putting him
down I think when he was younger call it verbally abuse if I don't know but very very aggressive verbally in 1957 after years of unhappy marriage the nine year old Edmonds parents divorced [Music] Darnell Edmund and his two sisters moved away Kemper was already behaving oddly he showed the light of pathology as a child he would cut off the heads of his sister's dolls in other ways deform the dolls [Music] at 10:00 he had made a comment that if he ever had to kiss his teacher he would have to kill her and when you think
about a 9 and 10 year old at that point having that kind of a thought process you begin to wonder you know what is it about him the young Kemper was developing a violent fantasy life he moved from dismembering dolls to harming animals he admitted once burying a cat alive later digging its body up to play with [Applause] there's many many serial sexual murderers that have a background of killing cats torturing cats tormenting cats why cats because cats are a female symbol khempo was showing warning signs that the FBI have since identified as common amongst
a number of serial killers basically if you're dealing with a young male that is engaged in fantasies that are nabrit and destructive and violent before adolescent you're looking at individual it has a broken home a cold and distant mother a absent father through a divorce or just abandonment they get into animal torturing there are patterns that are identifiable kemper grew taller stronger and stranger his mother put him in the basement room and would lock him in at night because she had this idea that he could possibly sexually assault his sisters he described it as having
a cot and a sleeping bag and a light hanging down from the ceiling with just a bare bulb and a string talked about it as being a very difficult time in his life very scary he could hear rats running around at night that kind of thing as a teenager Kemper left his mother heading to Los Angeles to seek out the dad he idolized he had hoped to go and live with his father and he described to me that when when he went there he was rejected by his father Edmund Kemper was sent to live with
his paternal grandparents on their remote farm here the troubled teenagers violent fantasies would be realized for the first time he found his grandmother to be an authoritarian in the disciplinarian like his mother his grandfather was out shopping or whatever and he took a twenty-two and and shot and killed his grandmother [Music] when he realized his grandfather would be coming home and finding his wife dead they were they were elderly he decided he couldn't allow his grandfather to go through that trauma so when his grandfather came in he shot and killed him he said he didn't
want the grandfather to suffer knowing that his wife was dead it's the most bizarre statement I mean you don't go out and just shoot somebody to keep them from finding out that their wife is dead [Applause] [Music] Kemper was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic and sent to the secure Atascadero State Hospital that was a very harmful place for him to be institutionalized he certainly learned a lot of bad things dr. William Shamburger was one of the facilities staff in those days we had 1,600 patients in the hospital there were probably several dozens people who had committed
murder 800 mentally disordered sex offenders we had psychology staff of only 10 people or so although not campus therapist Shan Berger would have regular contact with the inmate it is a brace fellow and and that was obvious when you were talking with him it was kind of a moral patience the likeable Kemper soon became a trusted assistant to the psychology staff that dealt with the hundreds of sex offenders he had so much access to the records and there would be detailed descriptions of the methods used in carrying out the crimes techniques of deception remember he
was 15 when he went into the mental hospital and he really had never had any sexual experience at all generally what you'll find is that the child will pursue these silent fantasies and in adolescence the sexual element will come on board and they will have sexual fantasies that develop along the lines of using people as an applet rather than a partner they want to do something to somebody not with somebody he had a fantasy life he described himself as masturbating numerous times during a day when he was in the mental hospital as part of his
duties Kempe had access to the hospital's psychological test papers Kemper was very smart he knew what psychiatrists and psychologists wanted to hear he knew all the criteria for different diagnoses they treated him and I think they thought they cured him after five years in the secure hospital Edmund Kemper now 20 years old and 6 feet 9 inches tall was released [Music] he was discharged by the way to the youth authority with the recommendation not for him to live with his mother unfortunately the Youth Authority didn't follow that advice and he wound up living with his
mother his social life I'd say was very inadequate as he described it I felt particularly inadequate around women so I think he was lonely here is a young man he's 21 22 when he probably never had a date in his life probably have the usual interest and needs to connect with women what can you tell someone about yourself that I murdered my grandparents and I was in a mental hospital for the last five years of my life I can't imagine how difficult it would have had to be that doesn't excuse anything but him in my
mind describes the situation so he started picking up coeds and some of them he wound up murdering I'm doing even worse thing sometimes in custody Edmund Kemper would reveal to investigators the full horror of his extraordinary crimes in minut and graphic detail [Music] it's about as serious and complex series of sexual pathologies as I'd come across [Music] he said a lot of things that they're kind of disturbing in 1973 after the disappearance and murder of half-a-dozen young college girls detectives held Edmund Kemper in custody and the six-foot 9 inch killer was eager to talk leading
detectives to the scenes of his crimes he would explain his murders in chilling detail to anybody who'd listen he talked and talked and talked and just gave every bit of information you could ever dream of and he goes into great detail about the things that he did to these girls most of the serial killers I've worked with fall into two distinct types one group of serial killers will never like to talk about their offending behavior at all whereas the second group of serial killers are desperate to talk about their killing they're desperate to be the
heart of the story he and he said a lot of things that were kind of disturbing investigators learned how Kemper had taken months to develop his strategy for abduction he spent a lot of time traveling all over central California and even down into Los Angeles and what he would do is he would find hitchhikers and he would essentially do a practice run as he would drive off with with the young women he would look to look over at the think about fondling the breasts in heaven and and have great sexual curiosity about them over numerous
trips kemper honed his harmless persona and perfected his plans only then did he feel confident enough to act out his fantasies [Music] [Applause] on the 7th of May 1972 Edmund Kemper picked up to 18 year old friends Mary Ann pêche and Anita Luc essa near the University campus in Berkeley [Music] they would get in the car and he would drive off and immediately he would say oh I don't think your dork car door is closed and he's huge he's a big man he could reach all the way across the car open it close it and
then he would drop a chapstick behind that mechanism so if they became afraid or they wanted to get out it wouldn't allow the mechanism to work Kemper drove them to a remote spot he told detectives that holding the girls at gunpoint he had forced an eater to climb into the trunk he then returned to the car and stabbed Marianne until she was dead just think about a needle to Ke$ha in the trunk listening to her best friend being stabbed and hearing her screaming I mean you know this is pretty pretty heavy stuff actually Kemper then
opened the trunk and killed Anita he took the dead girls to an apartment he was renting there he dismembered them before dumping their remains in the mountains all the while the police hunted the mysterious co-ed butcher the seemingly harmless Edmund Kemper was sitting next to them in their favorite bar I remember he had be in there on many occasions especially during the time of the homicides that were going on he would come in and and have a few beers with the guys he was a likable guy while he was with them and was able to
think about Here I am an ongoing murderer and they don't know anything about it and they fully accept me and I'm one of the boys he was a police group he actually is the best way of describing in many serial sexual murderers have a fascination with police that's part of their psychology and they do that for a number of different reasons to hang out with them it was one but they also sometimes you can follow the investigation and see if they're talking about it at all this is very stimulating for them it was just talk
about you know a girl found here a girl found there and body parts washed up on shore this kind of thing it was the conversation among the guys when we were at the jury room [Applause] on the 14th of September 1972 kemper spotted fifteen-year-old ballet student Aiko Koo hitchhiking she missed her bus and was worried about being late for a dance class she had made a sign because she missed the bus she needed to get to San Francisco she was very young small easy to overpower got in the car he drove across the bay to
San Francisco but unfortunately for her just kept going this little girl was terrified Auguste Lee Kemper bound gagged and then suffocated his captive but it was only when Kemper took his victims bodies home that he could fully act out his twisted fantasies [Music] with most of them he would actually have intercourse with the dead woman he would have sex with her entire body then sometimes also with the decapitated body and then sometimes he would have oral sex with the decapitated head it's not unusual for a serial murderer to have sexual actions with a decapitated body
it's it's because it's not a person to them see them is it's an object I have the power to do anything I want with this woman she's mine and I can I can do anything that I'm curious about do anything I've only dreamed about doing and nobody can do anything about it power is a big part of it but extreme sexual pathology is another in order to evade detection Kemper would separate his victims body parts and dump them in different locations one spot just minutes from detective Terry Medina's home what I did find out that
he was up here [Music] that was that maybe reflect on my wife you know we had two small kids it's up here and she would be home alone a lot so that gave me kind of a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach [Music] it was a predator [Music] well this is would be approximately the place that kemper parked the car very remote it was even more remote 30 years ago than it is today there was nothing up here then it was just in the mountains picked up a sack and then carried it right
to the edge and remember there was no fence here heaved it over and that was the remains of beikoku of all of these murders that's the one I think affects me the most as I think about it I mean they're all brutal but that one you seem to stick with me there's there's some those of us that do murder cases there's always some that seemed to to get inside you [Music] [Music] kemper would go on to claim the lives of three more co-ed hitchhikers 23 year old Rosalind Thorpe 21 year old Alison Lou and 18
year old Cindy shawl babysitter to police officer Jim Connors kids she was young you know she needed money like anyone else she was very pleasant and knowing that she was a student at the University we felt very safe that we could you know trust her with our children he had shot her with a 22 Kemper took Cindy's body to his bedroom in his mother's apartment he had dismembered her but in his mind there was some relationship there he had an attachment and he kept her head Kempe told detectives he'd hidden sinned his head in his
mother's backyard beneath his bedroom window they buried it it was about two feet down in the backyard facing his bedroom window so that there was some connection in his mind it was unbelievable because Edie seemed like excuse the phrase a gentle giant you know with a very nice personality and likable kind of guy that he could be responsible for something like that in addition to the murder of his grandparents Edmund Kemper had taken the lives of six young women next he would commit a murder he dreamed of all his life by March of 1973 six
feet nine inch Edmund Kemper had kidnapped and murdered six female coeds without attracting suspicion but in April detective Michael aloof his routine visit to confiscate a firearm had unwittingly sent the suspicious Kemper into panic this whole process of me taking the handgun away from him he was under the impression that I was playing cat-and-mouse with him he thought we were playing a game that we really knew he was the murder khempo worried his mother clan l would now learn of his actions he did not want her to suffer the embarrassment of what he did Edmund
Kemper resolved to finally commit a crime he had fantasized about since he was a child he got up at 4 o'clock in the morning took a hammer went into his mother's bedroom just jam that hammer through her head several times that was a very messy murder [Music] Kempis mother would suffer the same fate as the young coeds and more he cut off her head and then he inserted his penis into her mouth put it on the mantel above the fireplace and just yelled and screamed at it and at times he threw darts at her face
he talked about all the time she had screamed at him and yelled at him or belittled him he cut out her vocal cords and tried to destroy them in the garbage disposal unit at the sink because it was her chastising him using those vocal cords that that so bothered him fearing his mother's death would soon be discovered by her best friend Kemper invited her to the house murdered her and then fled it was only after driving for three days without rest that he called the police and gave himself out [Music] detective Medina was sent to
the mother's apartment to process the crime scene when we arrived there was nothing disturbed it looked like somebody had just left on vacation we flipped over the mattress and of course it was soaked with blood and there was a note there he left a note that said sorry gents for the mess but really had no time that's the first time in my career and I've been in this business 43 years that you know the suspect left the cops a note the bodies of Kemper's mother and her best friend had been carefully hidden in two closets
in October 1973 Edmund Kemper would be tried for multiple murder both prosecution and defense searched for the answer to the question on everyone's lips why would this large friendly cooperative guy why would he kill all these people defense investigator Harold Cartwright spent over a hundred hours interviewing Kemper I never at all felt threatened at anytime by you know 260 pounds or something you know six foot eight or whatever and he's an enormous man but he was just uh sort of like a gentle giant but it seems Kempis demeanor with the opposite sex may have been
very different Cameron Jackson the graduate psychology student at the time was asked to perform a standard personality test on him I was the only person in the room with him and I read the questions to him and and he was he was very cooperative and then suddenly just out of the blue he simply he both sort of started to get up and he just he just erupted like a volcano of Eddie's ah like that and his hands and everything and I just went like that backwards and it immediately came with one or two of policemen
who calmed everything down it was just so fast and such an overwhelming rush of anger and emotion and fury I don't really remember the exact question now that I was asking that I'm sure it had something to do with women and I was a woman asking him questions in the courtroom Kemper's taped confessions were played aloud I recall it sitting in the trial listening to the taped confession of Kemper and looking around and seeing the face on the parents of the murdered girls just the shock and agony and what they had gone through in the
coverage of these terrible crimes I think the most neglected aspect are the victims there's a brief mention of their names usually these were all young college girls they were working towards a career they might have been chosen to have a family all of that is lost when a murderer comes along and takes him away what a tragedy in those families where a young woman was murdered and taken away the tragedy of that is as much alive today as it was back in 1972 on the 8th of November Edmund Kemper was found guilty of eight counts
of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment so what drove Kemper to take the lives of ten innocent victims was it his broken family life and the alleged emotional abuse from his mother or was he simply born to kill he only once said something like that was the way I could control them and that's the only thing he ever said the entire time I dealt with him that had anything to do with why he did what he do and temper is the classic sociopath he feels no guilt it's all about him no compassion whatsoever
it's very difficult to say how he looked at what he was doing what a person who walked into the butcher have remorse about cutting up a chicken I don't know a doubt it and I think that's what he looked at an object that he could dismember you know you look at him and you say okay something happened his wiring was crossed he had a chemical imbalance he had he had something and then you look at him and you say no this is strictly environmental you know the way he grew up all the life experiences that
he they had led him to the point that he becomes this serial mass murderer maybe he was killing his mother all along who knows I think when we're all studying serial murderers we want to find something to blame it's got to be this crazy mother that he had who locked him in the cellar but she must have felt something you know people who are around serial killers for a period of time will pick up some type of a feeling they can't describe it but they know something there are genetic and biological factors there are sociological
factors and there are complex psychological factors all of which interact and if we're going to ever reduce and prevent these things we have to attack it on all these levels I don't think anybody is bored to kill I think everybody is born with a series of pluses and minuses in their makeup both physically and and mentally and emotionally I think that things happen to people most people are able to cope with it deal with it some people are not several years after Kemper had been incarcerated the parcel arrived at the home of psychiatrist dr. William
Shamburger who had been friendly with the teenage Edmund I received in the mail this cup from Ed kefir it said that it took him about a year to make and it's a very very complex it's like a battered cup and on the cup is written also I beg your pardon and on the bottom I never promised you a rose garden meaning to be I think a very serious apology I think there is a side of him that would have given anything to be a normal person I could see that in him I could see it
while he was testifying there's a part of Ed Kemper that is as horrified and as disgusted with what he did as the rest of us are I'm sure that there's no part of him that is happy with what did what he wound up doing [Music]
