The Easter weekend of 1973 marks the end of Ed Kemper’s crime spree with the murder of his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her good friend, Sally Hallett.
Neighbors said Kemper, who had been collecting workmen’s compensation since an injury in 1972 on a highway construction job, went to his mother’s Aptos apartment on that Saturday carrying an Easter lily.
The lily was still blooming on a table when sheriff’s deputies entered the apartment the next Tuesday and found the nude bodies of the two women stuffed into a closet. Mrs. Strandberg had been decapitated and her left hand chopped off.
Neighbors said Kemper quarrelled frequently with his mother about whether she loved him. “You’re embarrassing me in front of my friends,” they quoted him as saying after she upbraided him for “laying around and drinking beer.”
After the murders, a wave of panic seized him. The events of the last hours were jostling in his head. He thought of his mother. The fact of having cut off her head did not disturb him more than that; after all, she was not the first to whom it happened! And, besides, she was already dead. He who read the Bible so much during his imprisonment [at Atascadero], to the point of identifying himself very much with the character of Job, he saw in the destiny of his mother, the hand of God. It is even more than a symbol when he thought about it: “This hand is the left hand of the Lord, I have always considered my mother as a great being, someone very fierce and sinister. She has always had a great influence on my life, and when she died, I was very surprised to find that her death was like all my other victims, how vulnerable and human she was, which has left a mark on me and still shocks me today. The left hand of the Lord is the one he uses to punish, and I, that guilty and left-handed son, cut off my mother’s left hand. That’s enough to make me flip, right?”
*Contains previously published content.
Sources: L’Ogre de Santa Cruz de Stéphane Bourgoin / Why: The Serial Killer In America by Margaret Cheney (1992, update of The Co-Ed Killer, 1976)
