Documenting the Co-Ed Killer case

Month: June 2020

Ed Kemper’s father’s army discharge

This is the registration card confirming that Ed Kemper’s father, Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. (II), was discharged from the army after World War II in 1945.

Edmund Kemper II enlisted in the Army on June 21, 1939. He served in World War II during his enlistment. After the war he tested atomic bombs in the Pacific Proving Grounds before returning to California, where he found work as an electrician. 

Sources: Ancestry / Find a Grave

Upcoming book about the Santa Cruz murders in the early 1970s

A new book by author Emerson Murray is currently in the works. The book will be about the murders committed in the early 1970s by John Linley Frazier, Herbert Mullin and Ed Kemper. Here is the description that can be found on the book’s website:

The Santa Cruz community looks back at the Frazier, Mullin, and Kemper murder sprees of the early 1970’s

Over 25 people murdered in just over two and a half years. What was happening in the small coastal town of Santa Cruz between October 1970 and February 1973?

John Linley Frazier’s home invasion murders of the Ohta Family and Dorothy Cadwallader in 1970 and the serial murder sprees of Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper left an impact on Santa Cruz that can still be felt today.

Local law enforcement, victim’s families and friends, classmates and acquaintances of the killers, local historians, voices from the past and present, and the killers themselves all come together to tell the horrific stories and explain why Santa Cruz was dubbed THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD in the early 1970’s.

The book will feature new material in the Kemper case, including interviews with Detective Terry Medina and Public Defender James L. Jackson. It will also feature interviews with relatives of some of the victims, and with coworkers at the UCSC of Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett. It will also include new information about Kemper’s young fiancee.

“A man would be a fool to marry a woman smarter than himself”

To one of his drinking companions, Ed Kemper confided that he’d become engaged and he commented that a ‘man would be a fool to marry a woman smarter than himself.’ Kemper did not marry the girl. In fact, she was seldom seen in the area and little was known of her except that she came from a Central Valley town, was small, blonde, young and immature. Later, he told an investigator that he worshipped her in an ‘almost religious’ way and that they had never engaged in a sexual relationship.

In fact, he claimed that he had had normal sexual intercourse only once and this with a woman who rejected him when he approached her a second time. But he also said on other occasions that he had never had normal relations with a woman; and again, that he had frequently attempted intercourse with a woman but had never reached a climax.

Source: The Coed-Killer by Margaret Cheney, p. 38-39 / Image: textless frame from David Jouvent’s upcoming graphic novel about Kemper