As a sex-starved young man in what should have been a peak of his virility, Ed Kemper was sexually and socially so uncertain of himself that he began to prey on hitchhiking coeds, not as a rapist, but as a murderer and necrophiliac.

“At first I picked up girls just to talk to them, just to try to get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship,” he had told investigators. Then he began to have sex fantasies about the girls he picked up hitchhiking, but feared being caught and convicted as a rapist So, he said: “I decided to mix the two and have a situation of rape and murder and no witnesses and no prosecution.”

Kemper’s first two victims were 18-year-old Fresno State college coeds, Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa whom he stabbed to death May 7, 1972, after he picked them up in Berkeley.

Source: Front Page Detective Magazine, March 1974, interview by Marj von Beroldingen