Someone recently asked me if Ed Kemper smokes. He did smoke when he was young, at the time of his arrest and trial, as seen in the enclosed pictures. I don’t know if he continued smoking during his incarceration at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, or if he still does now. With his health issues, I wouldn’t think so.
Edmund Kemper III, 24, enjoys a smoke as unidentified detective adjusts his handcuffs after Kemper appeared in Pueblo District court extradition hearing. Kemper is being held by police in connection with eight California murders. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Kemper’s smoking was mentioned by reporter Marj von B in her interview with him in November 1973 just after his conviction on eight counts of first-degree murder:
“When dinner was over, I said I must go and, when he got up and proceeded toward the door, I said, “Do you think you could knock on the window and get the jailer to spring me, Ed?”
He laughed and replied, “I’ll try.”
He stood in the doorway, his hair brushing the top of the door jamb, watching me leave, as if he were graciously bidding a guest goodbye from his home.
He said to a deputy, “Could I have some matches?” (I had been lighting his cigarettes all afternoon with my lighter.)
The sergeant on duty at the desk said to the deputy, “He can’t have any matches, but light his cigarette for him.” Kemper looked at me and grinned like a teenager. “Yesterday,” he said, “I had matches, but isn’t it funny when you’re convicted, you immediately become combustible.”
Edmund Kemper III from Aptos, California dwarfs escort officer en route to his cell a the Pueblo City jail after being questioned by officials about the unsolved murder of 6 co-ed’s. Police said Kemper admitted to killing his mother and a friend on a phone call to Santa Cruz police.
Source: Front Page Detective Magazine, March 1974, by Marj von Beroldingen
Convicted killer Edmund Kemper, left, testifies at his parole hearing on June 15, 1988. With him is his attorney, Richard Shore.
Vacaville
– A parole date was denied on June 15, 1988 for serial killer Edmund Kemper,
even though a prison psychiatric evaluation termed Kemper suitable for release.
Kemper,
40, is serving a life sentence at the California Medical Facility for murdering
eight women, including his mother, in 1972-73. The law at the time provided for
the possibility of parole on life sentences.
A
three-member panel from the Board of Prison Terms rejected the psychiatric
evaluation by Dr. Jack Fleming. Board member David Brown said Kemper poses an
unreasonable risk to society.
Brown
told Kemper his crimes “shock the public conscience.”
During
an almost three-hour hearing, Kemper told the panel he did not practice
cannibalism or perform sex acts on his victims when they were dead or dying. He
said he made those confessions to police when he was tired and confused.
He
did acknowledge that he beheaded seven of his victims, including his mother,
Clarnell Strandberg, because of a childhood fascination with decapitation. And,
he put his mother’s head on a mantle and threw darts at it.
Kemper
buried the head of one of his young victims in the backyard of the house he
shared with his mother in Seacliff. He pointed the face toward his bedroom,
according to testimony at his trial in 1973.
He
appeared surprised during the hearing by a letter written by a cousin, Patricia
Kemper, urging the panel deny Kemper a parole date. Kemper said he had not
known of such a letter.
In
the letter, the woman said that as a child, Kemper mutilated the family cat.
And, she said she watched him one day wait for hours with a rifle over a
squirrel’s hole to blow its head off when it peeked out. He went on to kill his
grandparents and then the seven women and his mother, she wrote.
She
said Kemper was and still is a deeply disturbed person who will kill again if
he’s ever released.
District
Attorney Art Danner said he was shocked, but not surprised by the latest
psychiatric evaluation of Kemper. Danner said Fleming’s report “flies in the
face of everything known about Kemper.”
Danner
told the parole board Kemper’s greatest danger is that he may some day con his
way back out on the street.
He
pointed out that Kemper had led psychiatrists and psychologists to believe he
was no threat after a five-year commitment for killing his grandparents.
Even
Kemper testified that he was shocked in the 1970s when two doctors would rule
him sane and no danger to society, even after he had begun killing again.
He
explained that he was sent to be interviewed by two doctors in Merced County in
1972 when he was seeking to have his conviction for killing his grandparents
sealed from public view.
After
meeting with the first psychiatrist, Kemper said, he went out and got drunk. “He
thought I was Mr. Wonderful or something,” Kemper said. He knew after the first
interview that he would be judged sane.
He
said he went to the second interview, later in the day, “blasted off my tail on
beer,” but the doctor didn’t notice.
The
two psychiatrists wrote that Kemper posed no danger to himself or others.
Kemper
hadn’t told them he had already begun killing again, just two days before and
had driven to his interviews with a woman’s head in the trunk of the car.
He
told the parole board he picked up more than 1,000 hitchhikers during his
year-long murder spree. He did not say why he selected the victims he did,
other than say the selection was random.
He
said he only murdered the women hitchhikers because the women in his life,
especially his mother, had caused his only grief.
Kemper
talked at length about his mother and drunken fights he said they had after his
release from custody after killing his grandparents.
Kemper
said he returned from the California Youth Authority at age 20 with great hope
for the future. He said his mother fought him every step of the way. “She was 6
feet tall and 220 pounds at the time of her death,” Kemper said, adding, “she
was not intimidated by anybody.”
Kemper
said he can’t simply explain why he murdered his mother to spare her from
finding out that he was responsible for all the co-ed killings in Santa Cruz.
“There
was love and there was hate,” Kemper said of his relationship with his mother.
“I
didn’t want to put her through what I created,” he said. And even though he
said she helped create what he was, “she was a victim and not a perpetrator.”
Kemper
fled Santa Cruz County after killing his mother. He said he drove for four days,
listening to the radio for news that police had a break in the case.
He
said he had three guns and a knife in the car. “When I heard on the news there
was a break in the case it would mean in a few hours I’d be dead,” Kemper
explained.
He
said he planned to stop the car as soon as he heard the bulletin. “I was going
to get my weapons and go to high ground and attack authorities when they came
for me,” Kemper said.
He
said he believed at the time that he would have to be killed or he would keep
on killing.
As
it turns out, a showdown never happened. The bodies of his mother and her
friend had not been found, and a panicked Kemper finally telephoned Santa Cruz
police from Pueblo, Colorado, and confessed. Police there arrested him at a
telephone booth.
Kemper’s
last appearance before the parole board was in 1982. At the time, he had lost weight
and looked noticeably different that at the time of his trial.
Now,
he appeared to look more like the 6-foot-9, 280-pound giant of a man Santa Cruz
residents remember.
In
1985, Kemper waived his right for a hearing, saying he was unsuitable for
release. He did not say that this time, but did concede he does not expect to be
released from prison anytime soon.
His next parole consideration will be in 1991.
Source: “Kemper parole denied – Psychiatrist says killer suitable for release”, by Mark Bergstrom, Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 16, 1988
In April 1973, following Kemper’s arrest, early on in his taped confession to police, Sergeant Aluffi asked Kemper to hold up because the tape had gotten “all messed up” in the recorder. Kemper then commented, “Oh, Jeez, wouldn’t this make a good horror story on tape?”
Source: The Co-Ed Killer, Margaret Cheney, 1976 / Drawing by David Jouvent from his upcoming graphic novel about Ed Kemper
Edmund Emil Kemper III, a young giant who has confessed killing eight women, arrived home in Santa Cruz yesterday and immediately started taking investigators on a tour of grave sites.
Mass slayer Kemper led deputies with pinpoint accuracy to four remote sites where parts of bodies were recovered soon after he returned yesterday in custody from arrest at Pueblo, Colorado. Without the slightest hesitation, the hulking 280-pound, 6-foot-9 Kemper led officers along, off Summit Road, to a shallow grave, to the Lorna Prieta Mountain area, on Rodeo Gulch Road near Mountain View Road, and just above Boulder Creek. All four sites are within a 10-mile radius of Santa Cruz.
Officers said Kemper knew exactly where he was going yesterday. They didn’t have to look even an inch to one side of where Kemper directed them to dig. Kemper reportedly told deputies he knows the names of only five of the six victims. Since six have been found, there was speculation that one of those recovered might be Aiko Koo.
Driven from Pueblo, Colorado, where he was arrested Tuesday while
confessing in a telephone booth to California authorities, he found 20 law
enforcement officers waiting at the county line.
At the sight of all those police and their cars, a deputy said Kemper
“just came unglued.”
“This is no circus to me, man,” Kemper said. “Get me the hell out of
here.”
Kemper was transferred to a station wagon with four officers and proceeded to sites where bodies or parts of bodies could be found. Several of the victims had been carefully cut in parts or decapitated.
The first remains to be uncovered were believed those of Mary Anne
Pesce, 18, Fresno, California, student, who disappeared last May. Her skull was
discovered in a wooded area last August and Kemper indicated a point several
miles away along the same mountain ridge where the torso lay in a shallow
grave.
Anita Luchessa, 18, also of Fresno, was hitchhiking with Miss Pesce and
the pair disappeared together. Kemper led the investigators to a ravine where
he said he dumped her body. A pelvic bone was found, and a spokesman said
animals might have carried off the rest of the body.
Kemper then showed the law enforcement officers a wooded area where he
said he left parts of the body of Aiko Koo, 15, Berkeley, California. She
disappeared September 15 on her way to a ballet lesson.
A handless arm was found, as well as a green plastic bag that had been
ripped open. Kemper said he also left parts of Miss Koo’s body in another
wooded area where investigators found pelvic bones and a rib cage.
Three months after Miss Pesce and Miss Luchessa disappeared, Kemper was
found “normal” in an examination by two psychiatrists that led to a court order
sealing his juvenile records.
Kemper spent five years in the Atascadero State Mental Hospital
following his murders in 1964 of his grandparents at the age of 15. He was
declared sane by the hospital, turned over to the California Youth Authority
and eventually released.
From information given in the Tuesday phone call, Santa Cruz police found the nude and decapitated body of his mother, Mrs. Clarnell Strandberg, 52, in her apartment, and the body of a visitor, Sara Taylor Hallett, 59. Apparently, they were killed April 21.
Sources: The Press Democrat Sun, April 29, 1973/ San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, April 29, 1973
This is probably one of the most famous pictures of Ed Kemper. This mugshot was taken on April 28, 1973, when he arrived in Santa Cruz, California, escorted by police after his arrest three days earlier in Pueblo, Colorado, where he had given himself up to local police, after the murders of his mother and her best friend.
The latest addition to my collection of true crime collectibles is this press photo of Ed Kemper after his arrest in Pueblo, Colorado, in April 1973. The text below the picture reads as follows:
Pueblo, Colo., Apr. 25 — Questioned in slayings — Edmund Emil Kemper III, 24, of Aptos, Calif., is taken to court in Pueblo, Colo., Wednesday after turning himself in to police. Kemper called police in California telling them of the murder of his mother and her friend. (See AP Wire Story) (AP Wirephoto)
Following Ed Kemper’s arrest on April 24, 1973 in Pueblo, Colorado, the media interviewed 20-year-old student Carla Gervasoni, Kemper’s upstairs neighbour on Ord Drive in Aptos, who stated: “Oh, he was kind of an odd man. He didn’t say much. He seemed like kind of a momma’s boy. I always was kind of afraid of him, actually. He scared me a lot. And I heard him and his mother argue quite a bit. All the time.”
Gervasoni added: “He was too quiet sometimes. He was always taking things, you know, back and forth. Guns. He had guns, that I saw. I guess that’s why I thought he was strange. He scared me.”
Source: Bay Area TV Archive– Edmund Kemper Murders Collection
Shortly after his arrest, upon his return to Santa Cruz, serial killer Ed Kemper lead police to the sites where he buried his victims. Kemper targeted young female hitchhikers, luring them off the road and into his vehicle. He would drive to a secluded spot to murder them, and then take their corpses home to dismember, desecrate, and decapitate them. Detectives said Kemper was extremely cooperative throughout the search.
At first glance, the car looked generally clean inside and out. Investigation of Kemper’s car revealed blood stains in the back seat of the car and a dried puddle of blood underneath the back seat. A bullet was found embedded in the right-rear inside panel of the car. Kemper had murdered both Mary Anne Pesce and Alice Liu on the back seat.
Source: Register-Pajaronian, April 27, 1973, by Marj Von B