Category: Victims (Page 1 of 8)

“She was so beautiful that night”

August 27, 2025 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

Original press photo of Aiko Koo from the San Francisco Examiner from September 19, 1972, which was used on the front page of the newspaper on April 26, 1973, following Ed Kemper’s arrest. Kemper had just confessed to his crimes and the police had recovered a human head in the backyard of the home where Kemper murdered his mother and her friend. It was believed (and later confirmed) to be Cynthia Schall’s head.

Aiko Koo had been missing since September 14, 1972. Police planned to question Kemper about her disappearance.

It came as no surprise to Mrs. Skaidrite Rubene-Koo when Berkeley police told her that her 15-year-old daughter may have been murdered by Edmund Emil Kemper III.

“I never believed she ran away, not even that night when she didn’t come home. I have always said she was kidnaped.”

“I had a premonition all last summer that something was going to happen to change our lives. She had started hitchhiking – you know we had no car.”

“I didn’t want her to go (to a San Francisco ballet dancing lesson) that night. I’m not psychic but I was afraid for her. She was so beautiful that night. But I told her she could go if she took the bus, if she didn’t hitch a ride. I knew she had been hitchhiking rides.”

Source: “Kemper Yard Yields Another Head,” Front page of the San Francisco Examiner, April 26, 1973

Young Dancer Missing

August 26, 2025 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

September 18, 1972. Aiko Koo, a delicately beautiful young Berkeley dancer, waited Thursday evening for the bus that was to take her [to her] ballet lessons in San Francisco. She never appeared at the class. And she has not returned home in the four tense days that have passed. Her mother and grandparents have put the case into the hands of Berkeley police and a private investigator, who is taking information at 421-9137.

Miss Koo is only 15. She looks older. A Korean dancer, she has performed widely in the Bay Area and is scheduled to leave late this month for concerts in the Midwest.

Friends discount a runaway theory, saying she is a placid girl with no family friction. She was last seen by friends as she waited at Shattuck and University Avenue Thursday evening for the “F” bus to San Francisco.

She was seen talking to another girl, also an Oriental, between 7:05 and 7:10 p.m.

The bus she was supposed to take left the corner at 7:14 p.m.

The driver on that run remembers that two Oriental girls boarded the bus together a block beyond where Miss Koo was seen waiting.

Friends said the girl often hitchhiked and may have accepted a ride to the city.

The family hopes to hear from the girl to whom their daughter spoke.

A friend aiding in the search described Miss Koo “an extremely attractive Oriental. People are likely to remember her. She is a 15-year-old high school student but looks 18 or 19.”

Miss Koo is 5-4, weighs about 105 pounds, has long black hair worn either straight down or tied in a knot. When she left for the lesson, she was wearing a distinctive black turban-type hat with a colorfully striped band, green sweatshirt, blue denim jacket, blue jeans and brown shoes.

The family is seeking any information from witnesses who saw her Thursday evening.

Source: “Young dancer missing,” Front page of the Berkeley Daily Gazette, September 18, 1972

Easter of 1973

April 20, 2025 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

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)

51 years ago today, on January 8, 1973

January 8, 2024 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

51 years ago today, on January 8, 1973:

Edmund Kemper murdered his sixth victim, Cynthia Ann “Cindy” Schall. She was is fourth co-ed victim. In the early evening of January 8, 1973, Cindy was walking down Mission Avenue in Santa Cruz, hitchhiking to go to class at Cabrillo College. Kemper picked her up and drove her to the hills near Watsonville, where he forced her into the trunk of his car and shot her in the head with his newly acquired gun. She died instantly.

Miss Schall was born on August 4, 1954 in San Mateo County in California. She was 18 when she died. She rests at the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, San Mateo County in California. She was the daughter of William Schall and Suzanne Ottinger Schall.

It is one of her friends, a young woman named Pamela, that reported Cindy missing to the police when she didn’t return home that night. She also alerted Cindy’s family in Marin County.

Source: “The Coed Killer” by Margaret Cheney / Photo from the book “Murder Capital of the World” by Emerson Murray, 2021, provided by Cindy Schall’s brother Forrest Schall

Kemper victims’ manner of death

October 24, 2023 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

After Ed Kemper was imprisoned for life in 1973, some crime magazines published articles revisiting Kemper’s case in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These articles portrayed Kemper as a serial killer who used a power saw or a buzz saw to murder his victims, which is far from the truth. But a bit of research revealed that there is a link to the use of saws in Cindy Schall’s murder case: after finding the different parts of her body in different locations in and around Santa Cruz, police and a pathologist determined she had been sawed into pieces with a power saw.

Ed Kemper mainly used firearms, knives and strangulation as his murder weapons.

He shot to death both his paternal grandparents, Maude Matilda (Hughey) Kemper and Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. on their ranch on August 27, 1964 with a rifle given to him by his grandfather. Kemper also stabbed his grandmother post-mortem.

Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa were both murdered by Kemper on May 7, 1972. Pesce was stabbed with a knife and strangled to death in the backseat of Kemper’s car. Luchessa was killed in the trunk of the car in a similar manner.

Aiko Koo was choked to death by Kemper on the evening of September 14, 1972 right next to his car on a secluded road. He also raped her while she was unconscious.

Cindy Schall was fatally shot in the head by Kemper with a .22 caliber pistol in the trunk of his car on January 7, 1973.

On February 5, 1973, Kemper first fatally shot Rosalind Thorpe in the head and then Alice Liu with his pistol in his car while driving on the UCSC campus. Kemper shot Liu several times, including twice in the head.

In the early hours on April 20, 1973, Kemper snuck into his mother Clarnell Strandberg’s bedroom to bludgeon her with a claw hammer and slit her throat with a penknife.

On the evening of April 20, 1973, Kemper murdered his mother’s best friend, Sally Hallett, by strangling her to death with his arm in his mother’s apartment.

Source: article “I’ll Show You Where I Buried The Pieces of Their Bodies”, Inside Detective, by Hugh Stephens, August 1973

“Blood was an actual pain in the ass.”

May 10, 2023 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

The blood got in my way. It wasn’t something I desired to see. Blood was an actual pain in the ass.
Ed kemper about his victims’ bleeding

The picture shows Kemper in April 1973 revisiting the places where he buried his victims to help police uncover remains.

Source: I, Monster – Serial Killers in their own chilling words, collected by Tom Philbin, Prometheus Books, 2011

“He would notice a girl and really stare, not just look or glance.”

February 26, 2023 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

Ed Kemper and his older sister Susan Swanson discussed the Santa Cruz murders and Herbert Mullin in April 1973 before Kemper’s arrest: “Guy [Kemper’s nickname] and I discussed them one day when mom and I went to the university to borrow a movie projector so I could show a movie I had brought from home [in Montana]. There was something said about Mullin firing his attorney because he had long hair, and I asked Guy if he thought Mullin had done the co-ed slayings too. He said he didn’t because none of them were similar in any way to how his victims had been shot–then the subject was dropped. The first weekend I was there, Guy went to Turlock and picked up [Kemper’s fiancée] and brought her to mom’s. We went to San Francisco that weekend Mom, I, [Kemper’s fiancée], and Guy, and along the road he mentioned that down there, pointing to the right, was where they had found two girls propped up against something I don’t remember the exact area. We drove along the coast highway, but this was a hilly section inland, just a bit. I believe it was just south of San Jose. Another time, I commented on the girls hitchhiking and mentioned they weren’t too bright, considering what happened and the particular ones I mentioned were really dressed shabby. He said it was strange because some of the co-eds killed were very attractive girls, not hippie looking at all. I think this was mentioned at the same time the conversation about Mullin was discussed on the way to the university. The subject changed. He didn’t say or do anything strange or comment any more than anyone might comment because of what had been happening.”

“One day when we were driving from Aptos along the beach toward Santa Cruz, just sightseeing, [Kemper] pointed off toward the beach and mentioned that a girl’s head was washed up along there -no more was said, and he brought it up.”

“Several times while we were riding around while I was there he would notice a girl and really stare, not just look or glance, and I teased him that he’d better get out of that habit when he gets married or [Kemper’s fiancée] would sure get jealous. He said she’s used to it or something along that line and most of these girls were dark skinned, possibly Mexican heritage, with black hair and medium build, tending toward heavy. He also commented that he sure likes those big butts- again I just passed it off and went on to other talk.”

Source: Book “Murder Capital of the World” by Emerson Murray, 2021 / Photo: Yearbook, University of Southern California, 1964

Ed Kemper’s greatest contribution to society

March 10, 2022 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

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

Diagnosis in 1964: Schizophrenic paranoid

December 28, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

This is a transcript of a Staff Summary written by Mercedes Tileston, a Senior Social Worker at Atascadero State Hospital, in October 1964, a few months after Kemper was arrested for killing Edmund Sr. and Maude Kemper, his paternal grandparents. The Staff diagnosed him as schizophrenic paranoid:

This youth (Kemper) has committed a double murder, that of his paternal grandparents. For several years prior to the killing there were numerous indications that this youth was extremely disturbed, had self-destructive impulses and acted out homicidal impulses against two cats over a period of a year. He is overwhelmed with feelings of worthlessness, guilt, parental rejection and has great fears that he will suffer a psychotic episode. [Kemper] has thought long and hard about suicide and has attempted it repeatedly over a number of years. Upon admission at NKCC, he was in a particularly unstable state and gave the impression of being on the verge of committing suicide. As a result, a suicide watch was posted. At present he has stabilized to some small extent. He is on tranquilizers.

In spite of the tranquilizers, though, [Kemper] continues to be extremely agitated, anxious, distraught and preoccupied. He has a tremendous need to talk about himself, has done this with the psychologist and his social worker and to some extent with the psychiatrist. He should be encouraged to channel all this talk about himself to his therapist. [Kemper] is fearful that peers might learn of his commitment offense. In this respect, he is in very good touch with reality, he is sensitive and very much aware of the unacceptable nature of the killings. Studying the record and all of [Kemper]’s verbalizations reveals that there were suggestions that he would act out violently. It is a tragedy that attention was not paid to these suggestions and that he was not placed in treatment and helped to avert this terrible tragedy of killing both the paternal grandparents. Staff is in accord that this youth could best be treated in a mental hospital at this time and perhaps with some preparation and at a later date be prepared for placement in a treatment program in a Youth Authority institution.

Medical Report: Physically fit for full activity.

Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, paranoid

Placement recommendation: Department of Mental Hygiene

Source photo: Murder Capital of the World by Emerson Murray, 2021

Maude Kemper, the artist

August 28, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

This oil painting is titled “Portrait of a Spanish Lady” and it was made by Maude Hughey Kemper, Edmund Kemper’s paternal grandmother, circa 1930. It measures 22 X 16 inches and is signed by the artist. It is believed to be a self-portrait. She was a figurative painter and she signed her paintings “Hughey Kemper”.

Sources: http://papillongallery.com/ / https://miep-knipperdolling.tumblr.com/post/183336050107/this-is-an-oil-painting-made-by-edmund-kempers#notes