Documenting the Co-Ed Killer case

Category: Dark tourism

The Jury Room’s Marv Easterby

During our trip to Santa Cruz last August, we returned to the Jury Room, the bar where Ed Kemper would hang out regularly in 1972 and 1973, as it was also frequented by the police officers involved in the solving of his murders. At the time, they had no suspicion about Kemper. 

On the day of our visit, legendary owner and bartender Marv Easterby was at work. He told us that he wasn’t the owner of the Jury Room at the time of Kemper’s crimes and never met the serial killer. The Jury Room was owned at the time by a fellow named Joe Mandela, who owned several bars in Santa Cruz. Mandela was the owner from 1968 to 1976. He then sold the Jury Room to Marv Easterby. 

Marvin “Marv” Easterby is a bartender’s bartender. Known for his collared shirts, stylish cuffs, curled mustache and soft-spoken but take-no-shit attitude, Easterby, or Marv to his friends and regulars, “is the quintessential, strong, handsome, silver-tongued, no bullshit bartender,” says Molly McVeigh. She’s tended downtown Santa Cruz’s Rush Inn since 2009 and has known Easterby for 16 years.

Born in Andover, South Dakota, Easterby was the youngest of seven. His first job behind the bar was in 1963, when he was 19, in a small town called Pierpont which, in 2010, boasted a whopping population of 135. 

 “You could drink beer at 18 and then hard liquor at 21,” he remembers. “When I interviewed, I told them I was going to be 22; I just didn’t tell them how long it would take me.”

After he was subsequently fired for being underage, he followed a sister to Washington state, where he found a job as a fry cook and eventually managed a bar and restaurant.

He arrived in Santa Cruz in April 1976 and soon bought The Jury Room for $75,000. Over the next several decades, he would fine-tune his skills, rubbing elbows with locals and authorities. 

“When I bought [The Jury Room], it was a total cop bar,” he remembers. “If I had 40 customers at once, I bet you 25 of them would’ve been off-duty law enforcement.”

Marv Easterby is seen behind the bar with tender and his dog

It seems he was always a favorite around town, earning the nickname “Judge Roy Beans,” given to him by a Jury Room regular, who also printed up business cards with the nickname and a caricature of Easterby on them. It’s the same caricature the bar still uses today on pins and other merchandise. During the holidays, local police acted as designated drivers for Easterby and gave him rides to and from their precinct parties, for which he helped supply the booze. 

Easterby owned and operated The Jury Room for 23 years, until 1999, when a health scare made him relinquish some responsibilities. Still, he continued tending at the local institution, after Karen Madura purchased it.

In 2013 GTreaders voted Easterby the Best Bartender in Santa Cruz, a title he still cherishes proudly with a picture on his phone.

Jury Room tender Tim Hall says: “Marv’s said to me many times, ‘Anyone can sling drinks, but not everyone can be a bartender,’” he says. “He’s Santa Cruz’s Kris Kristofferson or Sam Elliott. A class act with the old school mentality. It’s a lost art.”

Warm thanks to Marv for taking the time to chat with us!

Source: https://www.goodtimes.sc/iconic-jury-room-bartender-marv-easterby-serves-farewell-drink/ / Photo and video: EKS

Ed Kemper’s house in Santa Cruz

In the summer of 2018, I went to Santa Cruz, California, and visited places that were important in Ed Kemper’s story. Of course, I went to see the house where he lived with his mother and where he murdered her and her friend, Sally Hallett. 

The house is located in Aptos at 609A Ord Road (ground floor), but it appears under 609 Harriet Avenue on Google Streetview. The two streets meet, and the other house is behind Kemper’s. It’s a bit unclear and I remember that Kemper had mentioned in his 1984 interview for No Apparent Motive that the police had confused the two addresses when they came to take away his .44 magnum gun in 1973. 

It’s located in a really lovely and quiet residential neighbourhood. When you come from the highway, you pass through a wooded area before getting to the residential area. Kemper’s house stands out as it is one of the only ones on the street that has two floors. There are a lot of trees and flowers in the neighbourhood. 

I was hoping to see the inside of the house. As I was gathering my courage to go ring the doorbell, a SUV arrived and parked in the driveway. A woman and her young daughter came out and headed for the 609A door. I approached the woman and told her why I was there. She was aware of Kemper’s story. I asked if it was possible to see inside the house. She said no, but that it was ok to take pictures outside. She said that a lot of people come to see the house. 

The backyard where Kemper buried Cindy Schall’s head is now made of concrete.

The house has been regularly for sale since the murders. It is currently off the market, as it sold in May 2019 for more than 1,5 million dollars USD.

Photo sources: Edmund Kemper Stories / realtor.com

Kemper’s friendship with police

Drawing from David Jouvent for his upcoming graphic novel about Ed Kemper

“My relations with the police were much exaggerated at the time of my crimes. I knew two or three agents. The bar I went to wasn’t in front of the police station, it was more than sixteen hundred feet away, in front of the courthouse. The Jury Room, Joe Mandela’s Jury Room. ‘Come in and give us your verdict’, that’s the slogan under the sign. The establishment is rather quiet and a number of police officers frequent it. At the time I was committing my crimes, I used the friendship bonds that I’d woven with these policemen to learn more about the progress of the investigation.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, I had read it when I was younger. “(Kemper smiles.) With this criminal who feels the pressure building up inside: Are they following me? And he ends up cracking and confessing. This is a novel. I want to avoid all of that. I had no problem getting information out of these officers. Why? Because of the very structure of the police hierarchy, whose elite is represented by the criminal brigade. They see themselves as the cream of the crop and they like to brag about their exploits in front of other cops. So, there is a certain jealousy and friction between the different services.

As for me, I was doing a little dragging around these simple cops. I didn’t care about being their friend. I had already been in prison. I didn’t like the police. But they were talking to each other about what they’d heard about the case. I was on the periphery. They snubbed me, as they were snubbed by the ‘supercops’ of the Criminal. But I wasn’t bothered by their presence, I didn’t act weirdly in front of them and that’s something they must have felt.

Usually, any citizen who speaks to a police officer in uniform is clumsy, as if he’s guilty of something, even if he’s clean. And I think cops are sensitive to that kind of thing; as soon as they put on a uniform, they know right away that they’re no longer like the others. Relationships are skewed. It’s something that must hurt them somehow. But if I don’t act that way, if I don’t treat them like an insect under the microscope, then I’ve slipped a foot in the crack of the door. Little by little, you learn to pay for beers and get to know each other: ‘How’s it going, Big Ed’, ‘Great, and you, Andy, etc. And a year later, I phone them to tell them, ‘I’m the Co-Ed Killer. I want to surrender. ‘

Source: L’Ogre de Santa Cruz (Stéphane Bourgoin, 1998, Éditions Méréal)

The Jury Room bar in Santa Cruz

In 2018, we went to Santa Cruz on vacation and visited some of the places that were important in Ed Kemper’s story. First stop was the Jury Room, a bar where he hung out and drank beer with policemen, while having conversations about the co-ed murders, which were being investigated at the time. The police did not suspect him and found him friendly. 

On one of the walls, there’s a sign acknowledging that Kemper was at one time a regular patron. We don’t know to what ‘colorful history’ they are referring to, as nobody suspected him of the crimes and few people knew that he had killed his grandparents years before…

We went a couple of times and enjoyed a few drinks. On one of our visits, a dog kindly lent us his seat…!