Sara “Sally” Taylor Hallett was Ed Kemper’s last victim. She was Kemper’s mother’s best friend and a colleague of Clarnell’s at UCSC. Born on October 19, 1913 in Washington, Hallett had two sons, Edward and Christopher Hallett. Kemper murdered Hallett in his mother’s apartment on Easter weekend in 1973. She was 59 years old.
After killing and decapitating his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, early on the Saturday morning before Easter, Ed Kemper spent much of the day drinking. That evening, he telephoned his mother’s close friend, Sara Taylor Hallett, saying he wanted to surprise his mother and take her and Ms. Hallett to dinner that night.
Kemper prepared for Ms. Hallett’s murder by distributing weapons around the apartment but in the end, none of them would be necessary. Soon after the phone call, Ms. Hallett arrived: “I came up behind her and crooked my arm around her neck, like this,” Kemper said, bending his powerful arm in front of himself at chin level. “I squeezed and just lifted her off the floor. She just hung there and, for a moment, I didn’t realize she was dead … I had broken her neck and her head was just wobbling around with the bones of her neck disconnected in the skin sack of her neck.”
Later that night, Kemper attempted to have intercourse with Ms. Hallett’s body.
He fled the next day in her car.
Kemper said he had to kill a friend of his mother’s “as an excuse.” In other words, Kemper said he had to provide a reasonable story for friends of his mother’s to explain her absence. If she were away on a trip with a friend, Kemper reasoned, nobody would be concerned about her absence.
At his 2017 parole hearing, Kemper gave an alternate explanation as to why he murdered Sally Hallett. He said it was revenge for ruining his mother’s holiday. The two women were supposed to go to Europe together for four weeks, but Hallett backed out at the last minute. Clarnell went on the trip by herself. At some point, during the hearing, Kemper referred to Hallett as his mother’s “lover”, but: “When [my mother] got back, she tried sharing those vacation moments with Sally, and Sally got very loud with her and rude, and told her ‘I don’t want to hear about that. I didn’t even go on that vacation, why are you bringing this up?’ So, she – that cut off that release. So, here I am at the house having heard this from my mother and she’s frustrated and I said ‘I’d like to know, I’d like you to share with me.’ So, she went and got all of her travel logs and the papers and stuff from the places that she went and she started systematically sharing this stuff with me, and then all of a sudden, she stops and she looks at me in this strange way, and she said, ‘I’m not gonna let you pity me.’ And she just walked away from the whole thing. And I said, ‘Hey, I wanted to hear this stuff…’
“I had told myself that if my mother ever dies over this stuff that I did, [Hallett]’s going with her. That’s one trip she’s not gonna miss. She’s not gonna back off on that one… I swore an oath to it. I was angry at the time… I haven’t sworn many oaths in my life and everyone that I have sworn I followed through with.”
Sources: “The Co-ed Killer” by Margaret Cheney, 1976 / “Gruesome Details on Tape at Trial”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, October 25th, 1973 / “Coed Sex Murders Detailed by Chang”, Register-Pajaronian, by Marj von Beroldingen, October 23rd, 1973 / Front Page Detective Magazine, by Marj von Beroldingen, March 1974 / Ed Kemper’s 2017 Parole hearing
“You know, wooing and dating, you’re one thing, but after you’re married you let it all hang out. She was just too powerful. She would drive them (the men in her life) away, attack them verbally, attack their manhood.”
Ed Kemper about his mother
Ed Kemper’s mother, Clarnell Strandberg née Stage, according to her son, apparently was a real man-hater. Whatever the truth may have been on that front, she was persevering and married three times. She told the social workers that she kept trying to find a suitable husband “because the boy needed a father”-a motivation that they cynically tended to discount.
1. Edmund Emil Kemper Jr
Her first husband was Kemper’s father, Edmund Kemper Jr. It was also his first marriage. Edmund Emil Kemper Jr was born to Edmund Emil Kemper Sr and Maude Matilda Hughey Kemper in Los Angeles, California, on April 27, 1919.
Edmund Jr 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. He married Clarnell Elizabeth Stage on November 26, 1942 in Great Falls, Montana. His wife constantly complained about his “menial” job as an electrician. Edmund Jr later stated that “suicide missions in wartime and the later atomic bomb testings were nothing compared to living with [Clarnell]” and that she affected him “as a grown man more than three hundred and ninety-six days and nights of fighting on the front did.” He said, “I became confused and was not certain of anything for quite a time.”
Edmund Jr and Clarnell had three children, Susan, Edmund III, and Allyn. Due to constant fighting, the couple separated in 1957 and Clarnell took the children back to Montana and continued to raise them there as a single parent. She found a job as a secretary at the First National Bank. Kemper, who had a close relationship with his father, was devastated by the separation. In 1962, when Kemper turned 14, he ran away from home to reunite with his father, who was living in Van Nuys, California at the time. Upon arriving at his father’s house. Kemper discovered that his father had remarried and now had a step-son. Edmund Jr allowed his son to stay until he planned for him to live in North Fork, California with his parents, Edmund Sr and Maude Kemper, whom Kemper would eventually murder in 1964.
Kemper was the second of three children of Edmund Jr, a six-foot-eight-inch electrician and his six-foot wife Clarnell. Both parents were heavily built and loud spoken. In good times, there were rowdiness and joking around the dinner table, and these were the moments that Kemper later cherished.
Susan, the oldest child, was six years of age when Kemper was born. The parents called him Guy. And when Guy was two and one-half years of age, and huge for a toddler-bright, curious, and into everything-his sister Allyn was born.
The wrangling and shouting between the two parents found a new focus in the way in which Kemper was being reared. When he was four, his father went away for two years, taking a job in an atomic bomb testing program in the Pacific. “The war never ceased,” Clarnell said bitterly. “Upon his [the father’s] return he tried college under the G.I. Bill, couldn’t get back into studying, argued like a staff sergeant with the instructors, dropped out, and worked rapidly into the electrical business.”
They argued over money and over the father’s lack of attention to the children. Clarnell Kemper claimed that her husband was “stern to the girls and overprotective to Ed,” saying, “He never spanked the children and they never had any respect for him. All he ever gave Kemper was his medals and war stories.”
When Kemper was nine years of age, his father again left home. By this time, it was charged that Clarnell had developed a drinking habit.
In 1958, when the father briefly returned to the family, he claimed he found that Clarnell was mistreating Kemper, having made him sleep in the basement for about eight months. “He was terrified of this place. There was only one way out. Someone had to move the kitchen table and lift the trapdoor. I put a stop to it and threatened her with the law.”
He also said that when Kemper was eight or nine years of age, the mother forced him to sell newspapers on the street, and that on one occasion the father went out looking for his son after the mother told the boy not to return until he had sold all his newspapers.
The way Kemper remembered those years, “Very early, my natural parents were always loud and arguing, which terrified me emotionally of anything very loud and very pushy. As I was growing up, I shied away from loud noises and arguments.”
“My mother was very strong and she wanted a man who was strong. My father was very big and very loud, but he was very weak and she wanted the opposite.”
Clarnell and Edmund Jr divorced on September 28, 1961 in Montana, on legal grounds of mental cruelty.
Two months later, Edmund Jr remarried, this time to Elfriede Weber, a German immigrant with a son two years older than Kemper. For the latter, this apparent usurpation of his father’s affections by an older and, no doubt in Kemper’s mind, worthier son must have come as the ultimate rejection.
Edmund Jr and Elfriede Weber remained married until his death in Los Angeles on January 19, 1985. He was buried at sea.
2. Norman Vincent Turnquist
On February 17, 1962, Clarnell married for the second time, with Norman Turnquist, in Helena, Montana. It was his third marriage. Born on March 18, 1917 in Horte, Missoula, Montana, Turnquist was in the US Marine Corps until he was wounded. He was discharged on August 8, 1945. After his military service, he worked for the city of Wallace in Montana. When he met Clarnell, he was working as a plumber. Kemper was 13 when they married.
Norman Turnquist, Kemper’s first stepfather, helped him for a time to overcome his death fantasies, taking him on fishing expeditions and teaching him to hunt. Yet even so, there was a day at Hauser Dam near their home when the boy picked up an iron bar and stood behind Turnquist for quite a long time. His plan, after bashing him over the head, was to steal his car and drive to Southern California for a reunion with his natural father. In these years, he thought continually of being allowed to live once more with his father, and made several attempts to do so. But he could not bring himself to lower the cudgel on his stepfather’s head. Usually, it was fear of reprisal by an older male that deterred him in such circumstances. All his life he would be a fearful giant who vastly preferred to strike weaker victims of the female gender.
When his father left and remarried, Kemper has fantasies of protecting his mother. But a year later, she had married Turnquist.
“I found out,” Kemper recalled, “that she didn’t need any protection at all. She used always to tell me how much I reminded her of my father, whom she dearly hated, of course.”
Clarnell and Turnquist divorced in Montana on June 20, 1963, just over a year after they married, on legal grounds of extreme cruelty.
Norman Turnquist died a few years later at the age of 48 of cardiac arrest, on August 18, 1965. At the time, his was working as a meat cutter for a meat packing company.
3. Harold Magnus Strandberg
Less than a year after her divorce from Turnquist, Clarnell wed Harold Magnus Strandberg on May 17, 1964. It was his first marriage, it was her third. They were both 43 years old. They were married in Wallace in Shoshone County in the State of Idaho. When he met Clarnell, Strandberg was working as a plumber.
Not much is known about Mr. Strandberg. He was born on December 8, 1921, in Helena Montana. He was drafted in the US Army some time in 1942 during the WWII conscription. He was working at the Helena Related Trade School at the time.
Clarnell and Strandberg married just a few months before Kemper murdered his paternal grandparents at their farm in August 1964 in North Fork, California. Kemper had been living with them since Christmas 1963. It is unclear if Kemper and Strandberg ever met or spoke. Kemper never mentioned Strandberg in any interview.
Clarnell and Strandberg divorced some time before 1969, the year he remarried, to Nona Laurence Buckland. Clarnell kept his surname as her own even after the divorce.
Strandberg died in an accident on August 8, 1986 in Montana. He was operating his small outboard motor boat on Holter Lake when a high wind capsized his boat. He did not have a life vest on. He suffered from hypothermia and drowned.
Source: The Co-ed Killer by Margaret Cheney, 1976 / Ancestry
In the Fall of 1963, Ed Kemper, now 14 years-old, was allowed to go to Los Angeles to the home which his father, Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. II, shared with his new wife, Elfriede Weber, and her son from a previous marriage, Gilbert Otto Brechtefeld, who was two years older than Kemper.
The second Mrs. Kemper quickly began to feel extremely ill-at-ease with her dour and hulking stepson, now more than six feet tall, hanging around the house and staring at her until she became upset. She began to get migraine headaches. Once the boy happened to catch a glimpse of her nude, in the bedroom. Later, Kemper recalled that he had felt sexually excited by this episode. And still later it would be reinterpreted, perhaps at his instigation, but at least by the journalists, as a sexual overture on the woman’s part: “…the woman had appeared naked before him, using her sexuality to take his father away from him.”
Kemper was in Los Angeles for only a few weeks when at his stepmother’s urging, his father sent him back to Montana to live with his mother and sisters. E. E. Kemper Jr. II told his son that he was financially unable to keep him.
A few months later, around Thanksgiving, Kemper ran away from home in Montana and returned to Los Angeles to see his father. Another incident had Kemper following his pregnant stepmother around the house, shutting all the drapes and blinds claiming it was too bright. Afraid, she opened them up again and told Kemper he needed to leave. Her son Gilbert happened to arrive home at that moment. He saw how scared his mother was and how creepy Kemper was acting. He grabbed a hammer and chased Kemper away. This incident was apparently the reason why Kemper was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in late 1963. His father brought him to North Fork in California for Christmas and left him there once the holidays were over.
Gilbert Otto Brechtefeld
Kemper’s father and Elfriede Weber had a son together. He is known as David Weber but it’s not his real name. He keeps his real name private for security reasons. He was born in 1963 or 1964. As for Elfriede’s first son Gilbert, he died in 1975 at the age of 28. We were unable to find the cause of death. Elfriede passed away in 2009 at the age of 89.
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
Rosalind, a bright,
well-liked girl from an affluent coastal resort town, was just completing her
studies in linguistics and psychology at UCSC. She lived downtown in an
apartment on Mott Street which she shared with her friends Nancy, Virginia,
Kathy, and Linn.
Sometimes Rosalind bicycled up the hill to her university classes. On the evening of February 5 [1973]—only days after Cindy [Schall]’s remains had been identified and Mary [Guilfoyle]’s body discovered—Rosalind left the apartment after dinner to attend a lecture on campus.
Her roommate Nancy
was under the impression that she planned to take a bus, since the day had been
rainy. Rosalind was wearing her dark pea jacket when she left the house. She
did not return that evening, and her housemates quickly informed the police.
The same evening in
another house in Santa Cruz, Alice, 21, a small Oriental girl weighing only
about one hundred pounds, left for the University campus to do some research at
the library and afterward attend a late class. She was from Southern California
and in her senior year at UCSC.
Alice regularly
hitchhiked to and from the campus. She shared living quarters with Julie, also
Oriental, a former student who was working as a financial assistant on the
campus. The two girls had grown up together in Los Angeles and remained the
closest of friends.
Alice, one of four
sisters, was the daughter of an aerospace engineer. She did not return from her
evening class. Definitely, in Julie’s opinion, Alice was not the sort of girl
to leave town without telling anyone.
When Julie telephoned
the police to report Alice’s disappearance, she reported that she, like the
missing Rosalind, had been wearing a dark pea jacket and that she carried a
tote bag containing an I.D. card, a hairbrush, a UC health card, and an El
Camino Library card, among other items. She also carried a photograph of a
friend in Taiwan, where she had visited the previous summer.
Word of the two
girls’ vanishing swept quickly through the campus community. There was nothing
to link them together since they had not known one another. On February 14,
several squads of students began grimly combing the groves of redwoods, pines,
and madrona that grow thickly over much of the campus, stumbling through
underbrush along the canyons, searching for what they feared to find.
Adding confusion and spreading fear over a broader range, on the following day the body of a girl named Leslie, 21, was found in a remote part of the Stanford University campus in San Mateo county to the north. She had been strangled and left beneath an oak tree. Leslie’s death, as it turned out, was unrelated to the Santa Cruz student murders.
Edmund Kemper grew up like almost any other red-blooded American boy, which is to say, in a home where the parents quarrelled a great deal, separated, reunited, eventually were divorced, and where the mother wound up both caring for the children and working at a full-time job. He grew up worshipping Hollywood actor John Wayne, whose image intertwined and blurred in his mind with memories of the beloved father who had abandoned him.
On January 25, 1950, John Wayne “The Duke” put his footprints & fist print in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The prints are still there.
Raised by a terrible mother, who didn’t hesitate to lock him in the cellar when he was a child, Edmund Kemper became very shy and isolated himself more and more. He dreamed of revenge, he thought of morbid games in which death and mutilation played an essential part. Aware of his inadequacy, he admired his absent father and actor John Wayne.
“John Wayne was very much like my father,” said Edmund Kemper, both physically and in his behavior. My father was a big guy who spoke loudly. Like John Wayne, he had very small feet. When I first went to Los Angeles, I immediately went to put my feet in the footprints of John Wayne, who are immortalized in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I was proud to see that my feet were bigger than his.”
Sources: The Co-Ed Killer, Margaret Cheney / Serial killers : Enquête mondiale sur les tueurs en série, Stéphane Bourgoin / Thanks to Catrin Elen Williams for the John Wayne pictures on Facebook
Cynthia [Ann Schall] was a large eighteen-year-old with straight blonde hair. In her family she was Cindy, and she had a younger sister named Candy. The children grew up in San Francisco, but their mother remarried and moved to Marin County with her new husband. Candy went with them to attend high school. Cindy, at seventeen, however, struck off for Santa Cruz to enroll in Cabrillo College, debating about whether she wanted to become a school teacher or a policewoman. In her freshman year the college had required her to live with a family because of her youth. Later she moved down near the beach with a girlfriend. And again, just recently, she had gotten a babysitting job with the Arthur Windy family downtown and was living in. She shared her job in shifts with a friend named Pamela. And it was her custom to thumb a ride out to the college. In the early evening of January 8 [1973], she was walking down Mission Avenue, the main thoroughfare that becomes a freeway that leads into another freeway that goes past Cabrillo College. When she did not reach her class and did not return home that night, Pamela telephoned the police. Later she also alerted Cindy’s family in Marin County. News of Cindy’s fate was not long in arriving. Less than twenty-four hours later, a California Highway Patrolman stopped beside a three-hundred-foot cliff on the coast south of Carmel, doing a routine check for motorists who sometimes overshot the curve and for incautious photographers who occasionally took one backward step too many. He spotted what appeared to be neither of these, but a human arm sticking out of a plastic bag beside the road. Further search not only confirmed the finding but disclosed, strewn down the side of the cliff, strips of skin, portions of two legs, an arm, and a severed hand. A week later, a neatly severed human rib cage washed ashore back up the coast near Santa Cruz, a case of the crime returning to the scene of the murderer. Since many other girls were missing from their California homes, certain identification by the pathologists was not completed until January 24.
The sliced portions of a human body which have drifted into shore during the last week have been positively identified’ by the coroner’s office. The victim has been named as Cynthia Ann Schall, 19, 220 Cleveland Ave. She had been reported missing Jan. 9, one day after she reportedly hitchhiked to a class at Cabrillo College.
According to the coroner’s office, the victim was identified by two different methods. The first was a comparison of fingerprints of the severed hand which washed onto the beach Friday with fingerprints in Miss Schall’s room. The second method was a comparison of chest x-rays of the torso discovered in the surf last week with x-rays which had been taken of the woman in October.
It was also confirmed that the severed arms and legs found in Monterey County belong to Miss Schall. Positive identification of the limbs was made Thursday when two pathologists and a radiologist concluded that the arms and legs belonged to Miss Schall. Police Lt. Chuck Scherer said that x-rays of the severed parts of the body matched up: the x-ray showed a healed fracture in one forearm, an injury which Miss Schall suffered a few years ago.
The
investigation of the crime is being handled by the Santa Cruz police
department, which was originally notified of the missing girl.
Source: “The Coed Killer” by Margaret Cheney / Santa Cruz Sentinel, January 24th & 26th, 1973
This review of the Margaret Cheney book The Co-Ed Killer was published in The Hartford Courant on April 18, 1976 when it was first released. Looks like the critic didn’t like it…!
On
Thanksgiving Day (the fourth Thursday in November) 1963, as Ed was not yet
fifteen, he borrowed his mother’s car, without her permission, drove it to
Butte, Montana. From there, he got on a bus and returned to Los Angeles and
Dad. The father should understand, he felt, that it was his duty to support his
natural son rather than his stepson. To Edmund’s joy, his father agreed to let him
live with him. There followed a brief happy period which, in itself, was such a
novelty that it scarcely surprised him when it came to a sudden ending.
During
the Christmas holidays, Kemper Sr. took his son to visit his parents, who owned
an isolated farm at North Fork, a small town in the foothills of the magnificent
Sierra Mountain range. But the pastoral beauties of the place were lost on the
teenage boy. For him, the farm came to seem like a prison or an old folks’ home
and he felt bitterly betrayed when his father announced to him for the second
time in less than three months that he was not going to return to Los Angeles
at the end of the Christmas holidays.
Clarnell
had spoken to her ex-husband on the phone to tell him about the Siamese cat
episode (Kemper had killed the family cat and hid it in his closet). She warned
him:
– This Guy (Ed Kemper’s family nickname) is a really funny bird. And you’re taking a risk by leaving him with your parents. You may be surprised to wake up one morning to learn that they have been killed.
Eight months later, in August 1964, Ed Kemper would shoot both his grandparents to death.
When we examine Ed Kemper’s existence, it is interesting to note how crucial the holiday periods were: Thanksgiving & Christmas 1963, and Easter 1973. For someone like him, who felt rejected by his loved ones and by society, these moments of celebration could be extremely difficult and stressful times.
Sources: L’Ogre de Santa Cruz (Stéphane Bourgoin, 1998) / The Coed Killer (Margaret Cheney, 1976) / 1973 Ed Kemper mugshot
Margaret Cheney has written books about the environment, a scientist,
the University of California – and mass murderer Edmund Kemper.
“I was more or less interested in seeing whether I could do it,” said
Cheney, who wrote the book about the Santa Cruz County killer in 1976 and has just
published an updated version titled, “Why: The Serial Killer in America.”
The original book was called “The Coed Killer”, because six of Kemper’s
victims were young women he picked up on college campuses in 1972 and 1973.
Most of his victims were students at UC-Santa Cruz.
Cheney said she decided to publish the new version after she was
contacted by criminologist Harry Miller, who was trying to find a copy of the
original book, then out of print.
Cheney, of Hollister, conducted new interviews with psychologists and
criminologist for the new book about Kemper’s gruesome murders.
The book questions the early diagnosis of Kemper, who killed his
grandparents when he was 15, in 1964. He was sent to a mental hospital and
later to the California Youth Authority.
Despite the recommendations of doctors that Kemper not be paroled to his
mother, the Youth Authority did just that. Kemper’s final victims were his
mother and her friend in April 1973 at the mother’s Seacliff apartment. He
turned himself in several days later and admitted everything.
“If Kemper had been diagnosed as a classic sadist, perhaps we wouldn’t
have had these murders,” because Kemper would have been kept locked up longer,
Cheney said.
The book refers to a 1991 FBI study that traces certain confused
behavior in childhood to violence in later life.
Cheney writes about an incident when Kemper was a small boy and told one
of his sisters he wanted to kiss his teacher. When the sister asked him why he
didn’t do it, Kemper replied, “I’d have to kill her first.”
That response should have been a tipoff that Kemper could turn violent
later on, Cheney said. When telling authorities about the murders, Kemper said
he felt he could “own” the women by killing them.
Another indicator of future violent behavior, Cheney said, was when the
young Kemper killed a cat. Cheney recently joined the Latham Foundation, an
Alameda-based group that believes childhood abuse of animals can lead to
violence in later life.
“We’re trying to get social workers and veterinarians” to be aware of
the ramifications of such cruelty, Cheney said.
Cheney was a consultant for a CBS-TV special, “Inside The Criminal Mind,”
a portion of which is about Kemper. No broadcast date has been set.
“Why: The Serial Killer in America,” is published by R&E Publishers, of Saratoga.
Source: “Author focuses on mass murderer”, Register-Pajaronian, December 22, 1992, by Lane Wallace, staff writer; Photo by Kurt Ellison
