Ink by artist David Jouvent for his upcoming graphic novel based on Ed Kemper’s life and crimes. Éditions Hachette. To be released Summer 2019.
This drawing is part of my collection of true crime collectibles.
Month: April 2019 (Page 1 of 3)
“I wanted to distract the heat from Santa Cruz… I knew the Bay Area well, because the job that I do entails intensive travel through those areas. Especially like with the disposal of Alice’s head and hands, I knew that this was an ideal place because the authorities would figure it was somebody that knew that particular area really well, and I knew that people at two o’clock in the morning would not be traveling the road at all. So they would think it would be at least somebody within five or ten miles of that area, and that’s what I wanted people to think. I arrived on the scene up in Eden Canyon Road about two A.M.”
Ed Kemper about disposing of alice liu’s remains
Ed Kemper drove to an area known as Devil’s Slide. He drove into Pacifica to see if cops were around-they were at a local diner-so he drove back to the cliff and threw the body parts off.
The horror was underscored two weeks later, when a hiker near Devil’s Slide found the skulls of two young women. Tests showed they were Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu’s heads.
Devil’s Slide is a name given to a steep, rocky coastal promontory located about midway between Montara and the Linda Mar District of Pacifica. The terrain is characterized by steep, eroded slopes with natural gradients ranging between 30 and 50%. http://www.devilsslidecoast.org/history/
Drawings by David Jouvent for his upcoming graphic novel about Ed Kemper / Some photos by Christopher Michel
After raping and killing 15-year-old Aiko Koo, Ed Kemper stopped at a country bar “for a few beers.”
Before going into the bar, he opened the trunk to make sure she was dead. He told investigators:
“I suppose as I was standing there looking, I was doing one of those triumphant things, too, admiring my work and admiring her beauty, and I might say admiring my catch like a fisherman.”
Source: Front Page Detective Magazine, March 1974, interview by Marj von Beroldingen
Several years after Edmund Kemper had been incarcerated (at Atascadero), a parcel arrived at the home of psychiatrist Dr. William Schanberger, who’d been friendly with teenage Edmund.
“I received in the mail this cup from Ed Kemper. Ed said that it took him about a year to make, and it’s very, very complex. It’s like a battered cup. And on the cup is written also: “I beg your pardon,” and on the bottom: “I never promised you a rose garden.” Meaning to be, I think, a very serious apology.”
Images from the documentary Born to Kill – The Coed Killer
Renowned filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris visited serial killer Edmund Kemper in prison some time in 1974. In 2008, The Believer Magazine published an interview with both directors who remembered their encounter with Edmund Kemper at the CMF in Vacaville. This is the segment of the interview about Kemper. Please note that there are several inaccuracies about the Kemper case in this interview.
Errol Morris (EM): When Werner and I first met each other, we took a trip to visit this serial killer [Edmund Emil Kemper III] in prison in Northern California.
Werner Herzog (WH): Vacaville, yeah.
EM: There were three of us. And Kemper’s lawyer. To circumvent a lot of red tape, the lawyer identified us as psychiatrists. Werner’s producer, Walter Saxer, came along with us. So there was Dr. Saxer, Dr. Morris, and Dr. Herzog allowed in because—
WH: We were scared shitless because Kemper was a very huge man, fairly young, I think still twenty-six by then. But something like six foot five or six foot four.
EM: I think bigger.
WH: Maybe bigger, yes.
EM: Very large.
WH: Capital punishment was suspended at the time he was condemned. And he chose seven or eight consecutive life terms, but he wanted to die in the gas chamber. And the only way to get to the gas chamber when it was reinstated at that time was to kill someone inside the prison. So the attorney was really scared. And he was in a way relieved that he had some solid men as his guards or his company. And reading all the transcripts of Kemper, I had the feeling that what was interesting was that the man, in my opinion—and I’m speaking of Edmund Emil Kemper—he made a lot of sense. In a way he makes a lot of sense, why he killed and how it all originated.
And at the end, after having killed seven or eight or so coeds, hitchhikers, he killed his mother and put the severed head on the mantel and threw darts at it. And then there happened to be some leftover turkey in the fridge from Thanksgiving. And he called the lady next door, the neighbor, and asked—am I correct? Yeah, asked her if she would like to pick up the turkey leftovers, and she walks in and then he killed her as well, and put her in a closet. And then he fled in his mother’s car and crisscrossed the West until he ran out of money and ran out of gas. And in Pueblo, Colorado, he kept calling the police. [To Morris] You know better what happened there. I think they thought he was kind of gaga and didn’t believe him.
EM: He desperately tried to turn himself in to the police by making repeated phone calls from this phone booth. Now he would have had a cell phone. So I guess it’s easier now for serial killers to turn themselves in. And the police kept hanging up on him. They just—
WH: And he was down to his last quarter to make his last call, and then two detectives actually picked him up at this phone booth. I remember their names because they sound very German: Schmidt and Grubb. And Schmidt and Grubb took him to the police station, and what was smart of them was, they just randomly turned on a tape recorder and Kemper spoke for six hours, pretty much nonstop.
And this transcript is really wonderful—
EM: Quite amazing, yes.
WH: Very, very amazing. And Kemper was, in a way, a very sensitive person. When you looked at his hands, like the hands of a violin player, in a way. I remember he looked like an elephant with a Mozart soul.
EM: Yeah. That’s the way Werner described him at the time. An elephant with the soul of Mozart. I’m not sure that most of the prison authorities would have described him in the same way, but at the time I found Werner’s description very interesting. I thought for a long time about it. It made it situational, as if God in his infinite perversity had somehow mismatched Kemper’s various attributes in order to produce some kind of nightmare, some kind of tragedy. I remember thinking, Yeah, if Othello had been in Hamlet’s place, and vice versa, there would be no tragedy.
It’s so mixed up in my mind—Werner in these early years, graduate school, and what I myself was thinking. I was a very disaffected graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s where I first met Werner. It was just shortly after he finished Aguirre and his films were being shown in the United States for the first time. It was an amazing experience to see Werner’s work. There was really nothing quite like it in America at that time, and probably not since that time.
And I became really fascinated by Werner’s films. I’m thinking about it even now, now that we’re talking about it, our attempts to understand what people are thinking. What is going on in another person’s mind? How do they see the world? Kemper was a perfect example. I would drive every day from Berkeley to Santa Cruz and I would attend the Kemper trial. I became a regular fixture. And I would say the trial transformed my thinking about many, many, many things.
In those days, murder trials were chopped into two pieces. There would be a guilt and innocence phase and a penalty phase.
And there was this wacko psychiatrist, Dr. Joel Fort, who took the stand and said that Kemper was not even neurotic. Kemper had killed a dozen people. He had killed his grandparents. He had been put away in a juvenile facility, released under California law when he reached eighteen, and then went on to kill eight more people. And Kemper had described how these murders occurred. He would pick up women hitchhiking. He would be killing a woman with a knife and talking to her, saying, “I hope this isn’t really unpleasant. I hope you’re not uncomfortable. I hope this is not too frightening.”
So, the psychiatrist—I’ll make this as short as possible—the psychiatrist took the stand and said, “You know, this man is not even neurotic. Not only is he not psychotic, he’s not even neurotic, because he can’t empathize with the victim. He has a sociopathy or a psychopathy. He can be completely dispassionate while he is killing another person.” And I started to wonder—I still wonder about this stuff—I started to wonder how in god’s name does the psychiatrist know what Ed is thinking? Maybe Ed has this fantasy of being in control. Maybe in this writing after the fact he imagined himself as being dispassionate. Perhaps he was completely out of control, deeply psychotic. This kind of discrepancy between the accounts that we provide about ourselves and the world.
And I think it’s very much—in a different way—but it’s very much in your films as well, and something that deeply inspired me.
The Believer Magazine March 1st, 2008 | Issue Fifty-Two
Source: https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-werner-herzog/
Credit to researcher Tata Gogua for finding this, and to Erin Banks for sharing it on the Facebook page The Edmund Kemper Discussion Group.
A wave of panic seizes him. The events of the last hours are jostling in his head. He thinks of his mother. The fact of having cut off her head does not disturb him more than that; after all, she is 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 sees in the destiny of his mother, the hand of God. It is even more than a symbol when he thinks 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? ”
Source: L’Ogre de Santa Cruz de Stéphane Bourgoin / Images: The Killing of America
Neighbors said the young man [Ed Kemper], who had been collecting workmen’s compensation since an injury last year on a highway construction job, went to his mother’s Aptos apartment last Saturday carrying an Easter lily.
The lily was still blooming on a table when sheriff’s deputies entered the apartment Tuesday and found the nude bodies of the two women [Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett] stuffed into a closet. Mrs. Strandberg had been decapitated and one hand chopped off.
Neighbors said Kemper quarrelled frequently with his mother [Strandberg] 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.”
From: Why: The Serial Killer In America by Margaret Cheney (1992, update of The Co-Ed Killer, 1976)
Portraits of Ed Kemper by Nicolas Castelaux
Nicolas Castelaux, whose real name is Nicolas Claux, is a French painter, writer and collector of murderabilia.
A devotee of Satanism, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison in 1997 for murder and released in 2002.
After having written and published several books in the collection “Camion Noir”, including several biographies, such as Richard Ramirez (2009), Ted Bundy (2014), and the band Mayhem (2010), and the marking “Je tue donc je suis” (2009) resulting from his correspondence with killers (something that had never been done in France before him), among which are the infamous culinary texts by Issei Sagawa (the Japanese cannibal student), Castelaux is now the manager of the collection, related to publisher Camion Blanc.
As a painter, Castelaux notably does portraits of famous serial killers. He also illustrated with his works the famous American “Serial Killer Calendar”.
“By the time I was eight, I had accumulated a lot of frustration, a lot of hate, for which I didn’t find an outlet. I didn’t know how to develop outlets. A school book awakened in me fantasies about being the last man alive on Earth. I still remember the text that was intended for a sociology homework on the loneliness of teenagers. That we could not know the excitement of the adventure, emotions or feelings, without sharing them with others. This text was a bit like a seed that gave birth to fantasies in my mind. I find myself alone with all these things, these cars, these planes and no one to bother me or tell me what not to do, but these fantasies end up running empty and seem hollow… Little by little, I integrated inanimate people: they could not affect or hurt me. As I started puberty, these fantasies had continued to grow when I was approached by a girlfriend, not physically or sexually, but emotionally. We are the same age but she is ahead of me, she is aggressive, she is very beautiful. But I was not ready for this type of relationship. She really wanted a physical relationship, kisses, flirting. It terrified me because I didn’t know how to react or control the emotions that germinated in me.” – Ed Kemper about some of his childhood fantasies
These magazines are two instructive documents about Ed Kemper. The INSIDE DETECTIVE piece “I’ll Show You Where I Buried The Pieces of Their Bodies” from August 1973 details Kemper’s crimes and arrest. The FRONT PAGE DETECTIVE interview from March 1974 is one of the best pieces written about the Kemper case. Journalist Marj von Beroldingen met with Kemper a few hours after he was convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder. He had kept a promise and granted her an exclusive interview. It was not their first person-to-person talk.
You can access the documents here.