Edmund Kemper Stories

Documenting the Co-Ed Killer case

Month: January 2020 (Page 1 of 2)

2002 – Ed Kemper parole hearing

January 27, 2020 / / 0 Comments

June 28, 2002 – Santa Cruz’s deadliest serial killer will be in prison for at least another five years.

Edmund Emil Kemper, 54, has been in prison since 1973, when he was convicted of savagely killing, decapitating and dismembering six UC Santa Cruz students, his mother and his mother’s friend in 1972 and 1973.

Kemper was set to face the state parole board Wednesday. But earlier this week, he waived his right to the hearing, and agreed not to seek parole again until at least 2007, according to Denise Schmidt, spokeswoman for the state Board of Prison Terms.

Kemper’s agreement came as a surprise to county prosecutor Ariadne Symons. She said Kemper had indicated he would attend the parole hearing at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, and Symons was prepared to go – and to argue that he must remain behind bars.

She wrote in a letter to the parole board that she does not think Kemper is at all reformed, and that he remains a threat to society.

“Apparently Kemper does not like to be referred to as a ‘monster,’” Symons wrote. “However, the term is apt, even though it is woefully inadequate. Mere words cannot convey the horror of what he did.”

Kemper will be 59 when he becomes eligible for parole again.

Symons says that no matter when Kemper comes up for parole, he should not be released.

In her letter to the parole board, Symons wrote:

“In an interview at the time of his arrest, Kemper stated ‘I certainly wouldn’t trust me in society again.’ Let us give weight to those words.”

Source: “Kemper waives parole hearing”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, by Jason Schultz, June 28, 2002 / Artwork: unknown artist (please let us know if you know who it is, we will add credit)

“And that night I killed her. Not so much to celebrate, but I had been eagerly awaiting that gun.”

January 21, 2020 / / 0 Comments

***Warning: graphic content***

“Cynthia Schall was the next one.” Kemper went on, “That happened the night I bought a .22 Ruger automatic pistol with a six inch barrel. And that night I killed her. Not so much to celebrate, but I had been eagerly awaiting that gun.” He said he bought the gun at Valley Sport shop in Watsonville.” He picked up Miss Schall on Mission Street, “in that vicinity. I had been up cruising around the campus and I’d picked up three different girls, two of them together, that were possibilities, but I canceled those out because there were too many people standing around that possibly knew them when they got in. But all the other conditions were perfect. It had been drizzling, it had been raining real hard and people were getting any ride they could get and windows were fogging up… But I had given up on those other two and I was kind of uptight about it and driving down the street I spotted her standing out there with her thumb out.”

The young woman with her thumb out was Cynthia Schall. After driving her to the Watsonville area, he forced her to get in the trunk. Later near Corralitos, he shot her. He took her to his mother’s house in Aptos and dumped her in the closet. He dismembered her in the bathtub the next morning, after having sexual intercourse with her.

After having murdered and disposed of Cynthia Schall’s body, Ed took a trip to visit a friend in Oakland. He stopped off at a laundromat near his old apartment in Alameda, where he placed Cynthia’s blue socks, checkered wool shirt, brocaded blouse, and nylon jacket in a dryer and placed it on the highest setting, putting in four dimes worth. He turned the machine on, expecting that the continued high heat would burn the clothing beyond recognition. The next day, he went by the laundromat, checked the dryer and found it empty. He has succeeded again.

Sources: “Gruesome Details on Tape at Trial”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, October 25th, 1973 / “Sacrifice Unto Me”, by Don West / Photo: Getty Images Bettmann

Buried head in garden

January 21, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Police officers carefully rake through the back garden of Clarnell Kemper’s Aptos home, while forensic experts photograph the scene. It was here that Ed Kemper dismembered Cindy Schall, and it wasn’t long before her severed head was found buried by the garden fence.

***Warning: graphic content***

Cindy Schall was killed by a single shot in the head from Ed Kemper’s .22-calibre pistol. He kept her body in a cupboard overnight, waiting for his mother to go to work. As soon as she left, he brought out the corpse and decapitated it. His years of hanging out at the Jury Room left him with a wary respect of forensic ballistics – so he cut the bullet fragments out of the skull, which he then kept for a while as a trophy.

He then dismembered the body and took a drive along the coast to dispose of it. But when a couple of weeks later Kemper learned that the police had already recovered Cindy’s remains, he panicked and buried her head in his back garden.

Representatives from the Santa Cruz sheriff’s office, city police and the district attorney’s office looked on as detectives dug a 16-inch deep hole and found the decaying head. Because authorities pinpointed the head’s location, it is speculated they were acting on information from Pueblo, Colorado, where Kemper was arrested and has reportedly been giving detailed information on not only the slaying of his mother Clarnell Strandberg, 52, and her friend Sara Taylor Hallett, 59, but also the slaying of six young women.

The head found today had been buried about four feet from the rear of Kemper’s house. For the last several months, Kemper and his mother lived in the duplex apartment.

While the skull was being removed from the hole, the upstairs neighbors glanced down at the yard through a window.

People living next door to the duplex were visibly shaken as they occasionally looked over to where the detectives located the head.

“To think we’ve been living here so peacefully with that laying on the ground,” said one woman, pointing to Kemper’s backyard. A young woman next to her, wearing a Cabrillo College T-Shirt, nodded silently.

Kemper said he buried Cynthia Schall’s head in the backyard of his mother’s apartment house facing the window of the bedroom where he was staying and “talked to it (the head) many times, saying affectionate things… like you would say to a girlfriend or a wife.”

Kemper has also said that he buried Schall’s head in his mother’s yard, facing up toward his mother’s bedroom window, because his mother always wanted people to “look up to her.”

Sources: “Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters”, by Peter Vronsky / “Kemper explains why he murdered coeds”, Register-Pajaronian, November 1, 1973 / “Head found in Aptos”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, April 26, 1973

Body identified as Cynthia Ann Schall

January 20, 2020 / / 0 Comments

***Warning: graphic content***

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

“Just like, it amazed me so much because one second she’s animated and the next second, she’s not, and there was absolutely nothing between. Just a noise and absolute, absolute stillness.”

January 20, 2020 / / 0 Comments

***Warning: graphic content***

[REBLOG] On January 8, 1973, Edmund Kemper picked up Cynthia Ann “Cindy” Schall as she was hitchhiking to Cabrillo College and drove her out to the Corralitos – Freedom area where he talked her into getting into the trunk of his car, telling her he was going to take her to his house to talk, and then shot her in the head with a .22 caliber pistol he had purchased that day. She died instantly.

He decapitated her the next morning after engaging in sexual acts with her body. He disposed of her remains and her things, except for her head that he kept and buried in the backyard, just under his mother’s bedroom window.

Artwork by: @kkdtrooper / kkdtrooper.tumblr.com/

1997 – Ed Kemper parole hearing

January 15, 2020 / / 0 Comments

June 13, 1997 – Vacaville – No one thinks Edmund Kemper, an Aptos serial killer who haunted Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, should be paroled – including Kemper.

Kemper, 49, refused to attend his parole hearing Thursday but he directed his appointed attorney to read a short statement. “The severity of my commitment offenses, I believe, preclude my release at this time,” read Marcia Hurst.

A three-member panel from the state Board of Prison Terms agreed with Kemper, saying he remains a threat to society.

“Mr. Kemper terrorized Northern California,” said Commissioner Carol Bentley at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. “He poses an unreasonable risk to the public.”

Since 1988, this is the third consecutive time Kemper, who has diabetes, has declined to appear before a parole board [he had also declined in March 1991 and June 1994], and he has repeatedly stated that he does not believe he should be freed. In fact in the late 1970s, he twice tried unsuccessfully to get state doctors  to perform psychosurgery on him – similar to a lobotomy – claiming surgery may be the only way to squelch his urge to kill.

Assistant District Attorney Bob Lee represented Santa Cruz County at the hearing and recalled Kemper’s “absolutely shocking, violent, depraved acts.”

“I was a 12-year-old boy at the time and I remember instead of having a monster in our dreams we had him in real life,” Lee told the parole board.

Kemper, who attempted suicide four times before and during his trial, testified that he killed his mother because he didn’t want her to think he was the serial killer being reported in all the news accounts.

According to the parole board, Kemper has been a model prisoner at Vacaville. He works in the library and has had no disciplinary action taken against him in the last 23 years. However, no one wrote a letter to the parole board or came forward Thursday to say he should be released. His next parole hearing is in 2002.

Source: “Mass murderer denied parole for third time”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, June 13, 1997, by Robert Gammon, Sentinel Staff Writer

Ed Kemper and cigarettes

January 14, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Someone recently asked me if Ed Kemper smokes. He did smoke when he was young, at the time of his arrest and trial, as seen in the enclosed pictures. I don’t know if he continued smoking during his incarceration at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, or if he still does now. With his health issues, I wouldn’t think so.

Edmund Kemper III, 24, enjoys a smoke as unidentified detective adjusts his handcuffs after Kemper appeared in Pueblo District court extradition hearing. Kemper is being held by police in connection with eight California murders. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Kemper’s smoking was mentioned by reporter Marj von B in her interview with him in November 1973 just after his conviction on eight counts of first-degree murder:

“When dinner was over, I said I must go and, when he got up and proceeded toward the door, I said, “Do you think you could knock on the window and get the jailer to spring me, Ed?” 

He laughed and replied, “I’ll try.” 

He stood in the doorway, his hair brushing the top of the door jamb, watching me leave, as if he were graciously bidding a guest goodbye from his home. 

He said to a deputy, “Could I have some matches?” (I had been lighting his cigarettes all afternoon with my lighter.) 

The sergeant on duty at the desk said to the deputy, “He can’t have any matches, but light his cigarette for him.” Kemper looked at me and grinned like a teenager. “Yesterday,” he said, “I had matches, but isn’t it funny when you’re convicted, you immediately become combustible.” 

Edmund Kemper III from Aptos, California dwarfs escort officer en route to his cell a the Pueblo City jail after being questioned by officials about the unsolved murder of 6 co-ed’s. Police said Kemper admitted to killing his mother and a friend on a phone call to Santa Cruz police.

Source: Front Page Detective Magazine, March 1974, by Marj von Beroldingen

« Older posts

© 2023 Edmund Kemper Stories

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑