Allyn Kemper, Ed Kemper’s younger sister, testified at his trial about an incident that happened in February 1973 between her brother and their mother:
“She came to me in March, no, February, because they had a real bad argument one night. They used to argue a lot. They also used to like to get into these intense conversations.
“My mother, just because of the kind of people she was around and the work she did, she liked to get in to people. She liked to get to know the real person. She liked real people and she could be real harsh. When she’d get uptight or mad, she could really cut to the bone. She did that a lot to my brother. She’d just strip him down and say, “You’re just like your father.”
“Just cutting. Just cutting right to the bone. She really did talk a lot when she should have shut her mouth. I mean there’s a point where you just don’t push people. She’d always go past that point.
“She had a lot of warmth and a lot of strength and a lot of heart, but I think she misguided it. Like, she could never openly—she admitted this. Also, she couldn’t express her love to somebody openly and say, “I really love you.” I can’t ever remember her saying that. She’d kind of go around, kind of beat around the bush.
“That’s when they would start fighting, when she was drinking and when he was drinking.
“She came over one time because my brother had hit her. She said he only hit her about three times but he’s pretty big. He says he hit her once, but he strung the glasses all out and she had bruises on her arms. This was about February. She said she kept herself in the house all weekend and didn’t answer the door because she didn’t want anybody to know. But she was telling me, and she was crying. She was afraid. She was scared. I told her right then, “Get him out of the house.”
“I said, “I’ll pack his stuff right now and put it on the porch.”
“I said, “Just get him out because next time might be too late.”
“I had a fear about him just because he had committed a murder before and if he got uptight and drank you never know. To me, he had emotional problems. I went home and talked to her for a couple of hours. Sue [Susan, their older sister] tried to calm her down a bit. I really tried to encourage her to get him out. She said, “Well, where would he go?”
“I said, “He’s twenty-three, twenty-four years old. He’ll find a place to go. That’s no problem. He’s a big boy now. Just get him out.”
“She said, “Well, I’ll talk to him tonight. We’ll have a talk about it.”
“I told her that I’d call her later to see how things were.
“I called her later and she said everything was fine. He said he was going to straighten up and they had a little session and everything was all right. Then he got on the phone.
“I didn’t want to say anything, but it made me really mad. But I also wanted to see if he’d say anything to me to see where his head was at.
“I told him, “I really love you.”
“I don’t know why, I just wanted him to know that I loved him and ask him how he was doing. He said, “Why don’t you quit playing games?”
“I said, “I’m not playing games.”
“Because I really did mean it at the time.
“He said, “I know that you know I hit mom.”
“He told her not to tell me. I said, “So?”
“He said, “That’s between me and her.”
“I said, “I really love you, but I don’t think you should stay there.”
“I knew they were having problems whenever they were together.
“He wouldn’t accept the fact that I was saying I loved him. It was really hard for him to ever accept anybody loving him or really really caring about him. So, we discussed that for a little bit.”
Sources: Murder Capital of the World by Emerson Murray, 2021/ Images are from the documentary The Co-Ed Killer – Mind of a Monster (2021)
It seems that Ed Kemper has been misbehaving again. In December 2024, he reportedly received a Rules Violation Report (RVR) at the California Medical Facility (CMF) for an incident involving battery on staff. According to the report, Kemper allegedly grabbed and slapped the buttocks of a male nurse during the administration of incontinent care.
The following is the incident description as documented in the report:
“I officer C. am entering this Rules Violation Report on behalf of LVN B. due to not having access to SOMS.
“On 12/23/2024 at 12noon, I went [to] I/P cell to do incontinent care together with LVN and CNA, while cleaning and changing, I/P Kemper (B52453) he suddenly grabbed and slapped my buttocks, I was startled and I Immediately told Kemper that grabbing/slapping a nursing staff butt is very inappropriate behavior, Kemper verbalized “It’s okay, you’re a male nursing staff” while laughing at the same time. I educated Kemper that it does not matter if it’s a male or female nursing staff, you are not supposed to inappropriately touch any nursing staff, LVN also educated Kemper, not to touch nursing staff inappropriately, and when LVN asked Kemper (B52453) why did you touch his butt? I/P verbalized “I thought it was you” while laughing at the same time. I exited the cell to report to custody about what happened.””
This latest incident occurred in Kemper’s cell, located in Facility A at the California Medical Facility (CMF).
It follows a 2022 Rules Violation Report (RVR) for a similar offense, in which Kemper reportedly grabbed the buttocks of a female nurse while she was changing his diapers.
What makes this behavior especially notable is that Kemper had maintained a reputation as a model inmate for nearly five decades. Prior to these two recent RVRs, his only other disciplinary infraction was in 2016, when he refused to provide a urine sample for a test.
Why do you think Kemper has been acting out after so many years of compliance?
Sources: Photo from The Co-Ed Killer – Mind of a Monster (Film, 2021) / RVR from a private source
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)
2024 will be an important year in the Ed Kemper case as a parole suitability hearing is tentatively scheduled for July 9. We don’t know yet if Kemper will be attending.
In other news, according to an unverified source on Reddit who works at the California Medical Facility (CMF) and who has direct contact with Kemper, Kemper has been having health issues in the last year, severe enough for him to be taken out of prison on a code 3 emergency transport to an outside hospital. It happened in July 2023 and February 2024. When Kemper does go out to hospital, he’s always back after a few days and it’s always because of complications from his diabetes. Other than that, he is apparently doing fine. He doesn’t get around much but he spends many hours on his tablet to pass time. He is still part of the general population of the prison.
Kemper isn’t bed ridden and as frail as people think. He is in a medical unit at the CMF for his severe diabetes, and has never been in the hospice. Kemper regularly uses a wheelchair but he can still walk. It is just more difficult due to neuropathy and other issues. The stroke he suffered in late 2015 early 2016 didn’t leave him paralyzed or cognitively disabled.
According to the same source, Kemper spent over a year telling his life story and crimes to a journalist over phone calls and in person visits, for a new book and possible documentary (maybe the “This is Ed Kemper” project?). Kemper still likes to discuss his crimes but the staff at CMF doesn’t really engage him in those conversations. The source goes on to say that Kemper has no remorse or shame about what he did. After being imprisoned over 50 years, Kemper told the source’s coworker that there is nothing better than having intercourse with the neck of a decapitated girl because the trachea and vocal cords pull you in and that he recommends he try it one day. Kemper is very personable and can start and carry on a conversation with anybody, and everybody that interacts with him seems to feel totally safe around him and people often say that he’s harmless, which is obviously not true.
Kemper has been a model prisoner for most of his incarceration but did receive a disciplinary RVR a few years ago for grabbing a nurse’ butt. Kemper showed no remorse for this and his defense was “I couldn’t help myself and what are they going to do to me, I’m already in prison.” The incident happened as the nurse was changing Kemper’s diaper. His actions were perhaps sexually motivated in a context where most self-aware people would feel embarrassed. This might show that Kemper still has no self-control over his impulses. He’s never done this before so why now? Perhaps he is getting older and the gesture wasn’t meant to be harmful, but maybe the real Kemper just made a brief appearance as his health further declines and he no longer wants to control his urges and is no longer satisfied by the memories. Especially after spending the prior year reliving all of his crimes and the graphic details of what he did to his victims for a biography.
Source: photo from “’Mind of a Monster: Ed Kemper “The Co-Ed Killer”, a podcast from Investigation Discovery / Reddit
Edward George, former administrator at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, recalled his many interactions with Ed Kemper:
“Big Ed and I used to chat occasionally about his life on the street. I discovered that he actually lived in Alameda in an apartment two blocks from where I lived. Scary. He worked at a gas station where I used to buy gas. Very scary. One day I asked him, tongue in cheek, what did he consider his greatest contribution to society. He didn’t miss a beat. With a gleeful smile, he cracked ‘I taught women not to hitchhike.’”
Source: Ed Kemper – Conversations with a killer, by Dary Matera, Sterling Publishing, 2021/ Photo: Pete Amos, Murder Capital of the World, by Emerson Murray, 2021
Kemper spent five years at Atascadero after he murdered his grandparents in 1964 at the age of 15. He recalled with pride the job he’d held there as head of the psychological testing lab at the age of 19 and working directly under the hospital’s chief psychologist. He said:
“I felt I definitely could have done a lot of good there, helping people return to the streets … I could have fit in there quicker than anybody else…
“After all,” he explained, “I grew up there. That used to be like my home.
“Basically, I was born there, you know. I have a lot of fond memories of the place … And I don’t know anybody else who has,” he added with a rueful laugh.
It was there that he became a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. During his trial, he wore his membership pin in his lapel, apparently with pride.
Because of his intelligence and ability, he apparently was a valuable aide in psychological testing and research. “I helped to develop some new tests and some new scales on MMPI… You’ve probably heard of it … the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” he said with a chuckle. “I helped to develop a new scale on that, the ‘Overt Hostility Scale’… How’s that for a…” He groped for a word.
“Ironic?” I suggested.
“Ironic note,” he agreed. “There we go, it was an ironic note that I helped to develop that scale and then look what happened to me when I got back out on the streets.”
Source: Excerpt from an interview by reporter Marj von Beroldingen for Front Page Detective Magazine, March 1974 / Photo: Murder Capital of the World by Emerson Murray, 2021
As Ed Kemper celebrates his 73rd birthday today (he was born on December 18, 1948), we revisit his 1973 trial for the murder of six coeds, his mother and her best friend, during his cross examination by District Attorney Peter Chang, where Kemper reflected on his psychiatric diagnosis:
Peter Chang: How would you diagnose yourself, Mr. Kemper?
Ed Kemper: I believe very dearly and honestly there are two people inside of me and at times one of them takes over.
Peter Chang: You disagree with the court-appointed psychiatrist who diagnosed you as a sex maniac?
Ed Kemper: I don’t believe I am.
Peter Chang: Why do you tend to blame others for what you have done?
Ed Kemper: I feel there are others involved. I don’t believe I was born to be this way.
Peter Chang: Do you think society thinks what you’ve done is grossly evil?
Ed Kemper: Right now, yes.
Peter Chang: Horrendous?
Ed Kemper: Yes, but there are times those things don’t even enter my mind.
Source photo and text: Murder Capital of the World by Emerson Murray, 2021 / Photo by Pete Amos
Ed Kemper’s paternal grandparents: Edmund Kemper Sr. and Maude Hughey Kemper
Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. and his wife Maude Matilda Kemper were both murdered by their grandson, serial killer Edmund Kemper III, on August 27, 1964, at their ranch in North Fork, California. They were his first victims.
Maude Matilda (nee Hughey) Kemper was born on November 19, 1897 in Topeka, Shawnee County, in Kansas. She was the sixth of seven children to her parents Henry McClellan Hughey and Violet Elizabeth (nee Dodge) Hughey. Her family moved to Los Angeles in 1910.
That’s where she met Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. a few years later, and married him on June 7, 1914. She was 16 and he was 21. They had three sons: Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. (1919-1985); Robert (1921-2018); and a third son whose name might be Raymond.
Edmund Sr. was a farmer before enlisting in the Army in 1917, and serving during the First World War. He was the third of six sons to his parents Frederick Augustus Reinhardt Kemper and Bertha Anna Haas. After the war, he worked as an electrician for the California State Division of Highways.
Maude and Edmund Sr. lived on an isolated farm in North Fork, Madera County, California, in 1963, when their oldest son, Edmund Jr., visited them with his second wife and his son Edmund III during the Christmas holidays. After the celebrations, Edmund Jr. left his son with his parents. Edmund Jr. explained his decision in 1964:
“His personality had changed so much that I was worried about him being here with my present wife, who tried very hard to be a real friend to him. I saw him one day in a brooding mood and his eyes looked like a sleepwalker. In several talks I had with him toward the last he seemed fascinated by death and war. Tried to watch Weird Tales on TV which I suppressed.”
Of his father, Kemper said, “he didn’t want me around, because I upset his second wife. Before I went to Atascadero, my presence gave her migraine headaches; when I came out she was going to have a heart attack if I came around.”
It was because of that, Kemper said, that he was “shipped off” to his paternal grandparents to live in “complete isolation” on a California mountain top with “my senile grandfather” and “my grandmother who thought she had more balls than any man and was constantly emasculating me and my grandfather to prove it. I couldn’t please her… It was like being in jail… I became a walking time bomb and I finally blew…”
Edmund Sr. and Maude’s ranch in North Fork at the time of the murders
Kemper hated living on his grandparents’ farm, but he had great admiration for his grandfather. Some people who knew Kemper believed his grandfather was the only person he ever really loved: “Well, I’d heard stories about when he [his grandfather] was younger. He was a pretty fierce guy. He was an original cowboy. He carried a .45 on his hip. He was a tough guy wrangler, and my father had told me that he back-handed him clear across the kitchen one night when he got, I guess, smart with him.”
As for his grandmother, she was a strong woman, who reminded Kemper of his own mother. She wouldn’t let him bring any friends home or get into any social activities in school. He couldn’t watch cartoons and she screened any TV shows he watched. Kemper said: “She had placed herself in the position of being, in essence, my warden. And she said if you ever want to go live with your father again, you had better do what I say.”
His grandfather bought in a .22 and taught him how to shoot it. Kemper spent hours in the bushes shooting at birds, gophers and other small animals to annoy his grandmother who didn’t want him killing animals. He disposed of the remains carefully. Edmund Sr. eventually took away the rifle at the behest of Maude, who didn’t see the point in killing things just for the sake of killing them. This punishment infuriated Kemper, as the weapon served as an outlet for his growing aggression.
From David Jouvent and Thomas Mosdi’s Ed Kemper – Dans la peau d’un serial killer, 2020
Confined at home, Kemper’s anger started to simmer, and he began to transfer his hatred for his domineering mother to his domineering grandmother.
Kemper laughed as he recalled an incident with his grandmother when she left him home alone one day but took his grandfather’s .45 automatic with her in her purse, because she was afraid he might “play” around with it in her absence. His grandparents were going to Fresno on a monthly shopping trip. He recalled: “I saw her big black pocketbook bulging as she went out the door and I said to myself, ‘Why that old bitch, she’s taking the gun with her, because she doesn’t trust me, even though I promised I wouldn’t touch it.’” He said he looked in his grandfather’s bureau drawer and “sure enough the gun was gone from its usual place… I toyed with the idea of calling the chief of police in Fresno and telling him ‘there’s a little old lady walking around town with a forty-five in her purse and she’s planning a holdup’ and then give him my grandmother’s description. How do you suppose she would have talked herself out of that?”
Maude began to fear the grandson she had inherited. Possibly because she was the object of Kemper’s deadly glares, she sensed he was plotting against her.
Kemper’s mother, Clarnell Strandberg, reacted in 1964: “Pressure [on Kemper] must have been building. [Maude] wrote how happy he was with his gun and dog and ‘great authors and school’ and it wasn’t until the tragedy that I was told by the father that he was beginning to worry and frightened them with his moods. I wish I had known.”
On August 27, 1964, Kemper’s grandfather was running errands at the grocery store and the post office. His grandmother was working on a short story for Boy’s Life Magazine, “Fire in the Cannon,” in the kitchen. Kemper was sitting at the kitchen table with her. They started to argue after he stared at her with the horrifying expression she had observed before. Enraged, Kemper stormed off and retrieved the confiscated rifle that his grandfather had given him for hunting. He decided to go rabbit hunting and went outside to fetch is dog, Anka, on the porch. His grandmother uttered her last words: “Oh, you’d better not be shooting the birds again.” He stopped to look in through the screen window. He had fantasized about killing her before. She was facing away from him. He raised his rifle aimed at the back of her head, and fired through the screen. Maude slumped forward on the table where she’d been typing. He shot her twice in the head and once in the back. He then wrapped her head in a towel and dragged her body to the bedroom, went to get a knife and stabbed her three times so hard, the knife bent double: “I didn’t think she was dead and I didn’t want her to suffer any longer.”
From David Jouvent and Thomas Mosdi’s Ed Kemper – Dans la peau d’un serial killer, 2020
His grandfather soon returned home and Kemper went outside to greet him. Edmund Sr. nodded, smiled and waved to his grandson as he began unloading food and supplies from the truck. Kemper returned the greeting and sneaked up closer to his grandfather: “When he turned, I placed the rifle about thirty inches from the back of his head and shot him. Kemper later explained that he didn’t want his grandfather to see what he had done to his wife of fifty years and that he would be angry with Kemper for what he’d done.
Kemper dragged is grandfather’s body to the garage and washed the blood from his hands with a garden hose. He also tried to clean the blood near the truck.
Edmund Sr.’s truck on the day of the murders
Back inside the house, Kemper had a passing thought about undressing his dead grandmother and exploring her body sexually to satisfy his carnal curiosity, but he shook it from his mind as being too perverted.
He was unsure of what to do next, so he phoned his mother, who told him to sit tight while she called the Madera County Sheriff. Kemper also called the police to make sure they would come. When the police arrived, Kemper was sitting calmly on the front porch. The reason he gave for his actions: “I just wanted to see what it felt like to shoot Grandma.”
Sources: Ancestry / Front Page Detective Magazine, March 1974, by Marj von B / Murder Capitol of the world, 2021, by Emerson Murray / Ed Kemper’s 2017 parole hearing / Ed Kemper – Conversations with a killer, 2021, by Dary Matera / Ed Kemper – Dans la peau d’un serial killer, 2020, by David Jouvent and Thomas Mosdi
Ed Kemper in a side room at the courthouse during his trial in 1973
[During his time at Atascadero from 1964 to 1969, Kemper,] the ever popular study subject with an always friendly, totally unthreatening countenance, had consciously or subconsciously convinced his array of doctors that he was “healed” and, clearly, no longer a threat to society. Much of that belief was based on the collective egos of his doctors, nurses, and other dedicated staff members, who desperately wanted to believe in their life’s work, to believe that people, especially juveniles like Ed Kemper, could in fact be cured, rehabilitated, and go on to live happy, productive, violence-free lives. They needed that gold star on their resumes, the reassurance that all their work and study had not been wasted. [Kemper] had astutely psycho-analyzed his own doctors, sensing their overwhelming need to heal, feel self-empowered, and pigeonhole him in the box of their prior schooling. They played right into his hands.
Showing his true feelings toward his shrinks, [Kemper] once colorfully described them as charlatans who “…put on their feathers, put on their paint, they get their rattles, they hop around and go into the witch doctor routine. That I resent.”
