Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Coed Killer: Edmund Kemper

Edmund Emil Kemper III (born December 18, 1948) is an American serial killer and necrophile who murdered ten people, including his paternal grandparents and mother. He is noted for his large size, at 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m), and for his high IQ, at 145. Kemper was nicknamed the "Co-ed Killer" as most of his victims were students at co-educational institutions.

Born in California, Kemper had a disturbed childhood. He moved to Montana with his abusive mother at a young age before returning to California, where he murdered his paternal grandparents when he was 15. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by court psychiatrists and sentenced to the Atascadero State Hospital as a criminally insane juvenile.

Released at the age of 21 after convincing psychiatrists he was rehabilitated, Kemper was regarded as non-threatening by his victims. He targeted young female hitchhiker during his killing spree, luring them into his vehicle and driving them to secluded areas where he would murder them before taking their corpses back to his home to be decapitated, dismembered, and violated. Kemper then murdered his mother and one of her friends before turning himself in to the authorities.

Found sane and guilty at his trial in 1973, Kemper requested the death penalty for his crimes. Capital punishment was suspended in California at the time, and he instead received eight concurrent life sentences. Since then, he has been incarcerated in the California Medical Facility. Kemper has waived his right to a parole hearing several times and has said he is happy in prison.

Early life

Edmund Emil Kemper III was born in Burbank, California, on December 18, 1948. He was the middle child and only son born to Clarnell Elizabeth Kemper (née Stage, 1921–1973) and Edmund Emil Kemper II (1919–1985). Edmund II was a World War II veteran who, after the war, tested nuclear weapons in the Pacific Proving Grounds before returning to California, where he worked as an electrician. Clarnell often complained about Edmund II's "menial" electrician job, and he later said "suicide missions in wartime and the atomic bomb testings were nothing compared to living with her" and that Clarnell affected him "more than three hundred and ninety-six days and nights of fighting on the front did."

Weighing 13 pounds (5.9 kg) as a newborn, Kemper was already a head taller than his peers by the age of four. He was highly intelligent, but exhibited behavior such as cruelty to animals: at the age of 10, he buried a pet cat alive; once it died, he dug it up, decapitated it and mounted its head on a spike. Kemper later stated that he derived pleasure from successfully lying to his family about killing the cat. At the age of 13, he killed another family cat when he perceived it to be favoring his younger sister, Allyn Lee Kemper (born 1951), over him, and kept pieces of it in his closet until his mother found them.

Kemper had a dark fantasy life: he performed rituals with his younger sister's dolls that culminated in him removing their heads and hands, and, on one occasion, when his elder sister, Susan Hughey Kemper (1943–2014), teased him and asked why he did not try to kiss his teacher, he replied: "If I kiss her, I'd have to kill her first." He also recalled that as a young boy he would sneak out of his house and, armed with his father's bayonet, go to his second-grade teacher's house to watch her through the windows. He stated in later interviews that some of his favorite games to play as a child were "Gas Chamber" and "Electric Chair", in which he asked his younger sister to tie him up and flip an imaginary switch, and then he would tumble over and writhe on the floor, pretending to be dying of gas inhalation or electric shock. He also had near-death experiences as a child, once when his elder sister tried to push him in front of a train, and another when she successfully pushed him into the deep end of a swimming pool, where he almost drowned.

Kemper had a close relationship with his father and was devastated when his parents separated in 1957, causing him to be raised by Clarnell in Helena, Montana. He had a severely dysfunctional relationship with his mother, a neurotic, domineering alcoholic who would frequently belittle, humiliate and abuse him. Clarnell often made her son sleep in a locked basement because she feared that he would harm his sisters, regularly mocked him for his large size—he stood 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) by the age of 15—and derided him as "a real weirdo." She also refused to cuddle him for fear that she would "turn him gay," and told the young Kemper that he reminded her of his father and that no woman would ever love him. Kemper later described her as a "sick angry woman," and it has been postulated that she suffered from borderline personality disorder.