“My mother was there. She was there to beat me, she was there to humiliate me, she was there to use me as an example of how inferior men are.”
Edmund kemper in his 1991 interview with Stéphane Bourgoin
Photo ©Joey Tranchina
Month: February 2020
Rosalind, a bright, well-liked girl from an affluent coastal resort town, was just completing her studies in linguistics and psychology at UCSC. She lived downtown in an apartment on Mott Street which she shared with her friends Nancy, Virginia, Kathy, and Linn.
Sometimes Rosalind bicycled up the hill to her university classes. On the evening of February 5 [1973]—only days after Cindy [Schall]’s remains had been identified and Mary [Guilfoyle]’s body discovered—Rosalind left the apartment after dinner to attend a lecture on campus.
Her roommate Nancy was under the impression that she planned to take a bus, since the day had been rainy. Rosalind was wearing her dark pea jacket when she left the house. She did not return that evening, and her housemates quickly informed the police.
The same evening in another house in Santa Cruz, Alice, 21, a small Oriental girl weighing only about one hundred pounds, left for the University campus to do some research at the library and afterward attend a late class. She was from Southern California and in her senior year at UCSC.
Alice regularly hitchhiked to and from the campus. She shared living quarters with Julie, also Oriental, a former student who was working as a financial assistant on the campus. The two girls had grown up together in Los Angeles and remained the closest of friends.
Alice, one of four sisters, was the daughter of an aerospace engineer. She did not return from her evening class. Definitely, in Julie’s opinion, Alice was not the sort of girl to leave town without telling anyone.
When Julie telephoned the police to report Alice’s disappearance, she reported that she, like the missing Rosalind, had been wearing a dark pea jacket and that she carried a tote bag containing an I.D. card, a hairbrush, a UC health card, and an El Camino Library card, among other items. She also carried a photograph of a friend in Taiwan, where she had visited the previous summer.
Word of the two girls’ vanishing swept quickly through the campus community. There was nothing to link them together since they had not known one another. On February 14, several squads of students began grimly combing the groves of redwoods, pines, and madrona that grow thickly over much of the campus, stumbling through underbrush along the canyons, searching for what they feared to find.
Adding confusion and spreading fear over a broader range, on the following day the body of a girl named Leslie, 21, was found in a remote part of the Stanford University campus in San Mateo county to the north. She had been strangled and left beneath an oak tree. Leslie’s death, as it turned out, was unrelated to the Santa Cruz student murders.
Source: The Co-Ed Killer, by Margaret Cheney
Two UCSC coeds described as “frequent hitchhikers” by Santa Cruz police are reported missing in two different cases.
The first is Alice Liu, 20, 431 Locust St. Her roommate, Julie Chang, reported the woman as missing since Monday. Miss Chang told police that the missing woman told her that she was about to hitchhike to campus Monday afternoon, and has not returned.
Miss Chang said that the coed has never stayed away from the residence all night before. Police have issued an all points bulletin for the coed. She is described as Chinese, wearing bell bottom blue jeans, a pullover sweater of an unknown color, a gray pea coat and brown desert boots. She is 5 feet 2 inches and weighs 111 pounds.
Police are also looking for Rosalind Thorpe, about 22, 220 Mott Ave. who was last seen Monday at 7 p.m. heading toward a lecture at UCSC. A friend of Miss Thorpe, Lynn Nakabayshi, told police that Miss Thorpe missed the bus to the campus and has been known to hitchhike if she misses the bus.
Miss Thorpe is 5 feet 6 inches and has a heavy build, according to police. She is white, has long light brown hair and was wearing black pants, a pea coat and pink and purple boots. She also wears glasses, police said.
Source: Two Coeds Missing, Santa Cruz Sentinel, February 8th, 1973
Sentence notice
November 8, 1973
Case number: 73-152-M-01
The defendant is adjudicated guilty on 8 counts of first degree murder and is to be imprisoned for term of natural life for each count
Filed in open court by Judge Harry F. Brauer
Source: documentary “Forgiven” (D. Smarto)
Santa Cruz Superior Court
State of California V. Edmund Emil Kemper III
Notice of arraignment on 8 counts of homicide
April 30, 1973, 10 am
Source: documentary “Forgiven” (D. Smarto)
“Three months after I was out, I was back into the fantasy bay. – My first date was an absolute disaster. It wasn’t her fault, you know. And I didn’t blame her even then. I’m saying – it was a terrible tragedy but boy was it – she never talked to me again, it was awful. Wasn’t sexual or [gr…] I was just such a dork, taking her to a John Wayne movie and at Denny’s. It was terrible. I’d never been on a date! At 16 that was cool, you know?! I’d never been on a date! You know? I was locked up since I was 15, but I can’t tell her that, ‘Oh gee, don’t mind me,’ you know. She got kinda hung up on my looks or whatever, I mean, she’s a gorgeous young lady, pure class, and she saw something there that wasn’t there, and boy, did she find out quick.”
Ed Kemper about his first date after his release from atascadero in 1969
Source: The Killing of America (documentary directed by Leonard Schrader)
Edmund Kemper grew up like almost any other red-blooded American boy, which is to say, in a home where the parents quarrelled a great deal, separated, reunited, eventually were divorced, and where the mother wound up both caring for the children and working at a full-time job. He grew up worshipping Hollywood actor John Wayne, whose image intertwined and blurred in his mind with memories of the beloved father who had abandoned him.
Raised by a terrible mother, who didn’t hesitate to lock him in the cellar when he was a child, Edmund Kemper became very shy and isolated himself more and more. He dreamed of revenge, he thought of morbid games in which death and mutilation played an essential part. Aware of his inadequacy, he admired his absent father and actor John Wayne.
“John Wayne was very much like my father,” said Edmund Kemper, both physically and in his behavior. My father was a big guy who spoke loudly. Like John Wayne, he had very small feet. When I first went to Los Angeles, I immediately went to put my feet in the footprints of John Wayne, who are immortalized in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I was proud to see that my feet were bigger than his.”
Sources: The Co-Ed Killer, Margaret Cheney / Serial killers : Enquête mondiale sur les tueurs en série, Stéphane Bourgoin / Thanks to Catrin Elen Williams for the John Wayne pictures on Facebook
Ed Kemper often went to see movies at the Del Mar theater in Santa Cruz. Kemper has mentioned that he enjoyed films very much, such as John Wayne movies, war films and police thrillers.
Built in 1936, and located on Pacific Avenue, the Del Mar Theatre is an art deco triplex featuring a grand auditorium, tasty local snacks, organic popcorn (with real butter!) and weekly Midnight Movies. The theatre shows a wide variety of independent and foreign language films, as well as the best big-budget Hollywood movies, with state-of-the-art presentations in a welcoming community atmosphere. Extensively renovated and restored in February 2002, it has been operated by Landmark Theatres since December 2015.