This mugshot of Ed Kemper was taken on November 17, 2011 at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where Kemper has been imprisoned since November 1973.
Author: Edmund Kemper Stories (Page 18 of 29)
Mary Anne Pesce’s grave is located at the Conejo Mountain Memorial Park in Camarillo, Ventura County, in California. Miss Pesce was Ed Kemper’s first coed victim.
Memorial services will be held at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Camarillo Saturday for Mary Anne Pesce, 19, who died sometime this summer in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The services will be at 3 p.m. The church is located on Las Posas Road. The Rev. Alfred Smith and Msgr. John Hughes will officiate.
Miss Pesce was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Pesce of Buellton. Mr. Pesce is vice-president of Ventura International Inc., and was responsible for the design and construction, and is now manager of Flying Flags Camper Park in Buellton.
Miss Pesce, a student at San Francisco State, disappeared May 7 with a friend, Anita Luchessa, while the two were hitchhiking from the university to Menlo Park. Remains of her body were found last month in a remote area of the Santa Cruz Mountains by a hunter. Miss Luchessa has never been found.
She is survived by her parents; by two brothers, Vincent and Mark, and two sisters, Laurie and Barbara.
The family has asked that donations in her memory be made to the American Association of University Women, or Rio Mesa High School Scholarship Funds.
Source: Santa Ynez Valley News, October 5, 1972
Source: The San Francisco Examiner, May 15, 1972
This mugshot was taken at the California Medical Facility (CMF) in Vacaville on June 5, 1995. It was uncovered in 2018 as it was part of a series of items Kemper had given in the early 1990s to a former CMF inmate whom he befriended.
Kemper, who arrived at the courthouse with two guards this morning greeted the barrage of cameramen with a smile but his demeanor became more subdued as he sat in the courtroom when the parents of the murdered girls began to take the stand. He did not look at either of the fathers as they testified.
Gabriel Pesce of Camarillo was the first to testify. A man of medium height but solidly built, Pesce was the picture of controlled agony as he stood before the court clerk to be sworn in. He was asked by [DA Peter] Chang, “Did you have a daughter named Mary Anne Pesce?”
“Yes, I did,” said Pesce, and his eyes turned fastened on the giant young defender seated at the counsel table. Under questioning from Chang, Pesce said his daughter, though she weighed only about 100 pounds and was about five feet tall, had been an expert skier and aspired to try out for the Olympics. He said she was a good student and had been a trophy winner on her high school debating team.
He told of his efforts to file a missing persons’ report after her disappearance saying that in one instance, police told him, “There’s nothing to worry about. Just wait.”
Prior to the hearing this morning, Pesce told a reporter that he intended to listen to the testimony in the case because he thought it might help to “finalize” the loss of his daughter. He and his wife remained seated in the spectators’ section after he left the witness stand.
Source: Register-Pajaronian, October 23, 1973, by Marj von B
“I stabbed her, but she didn’t fall dead. They’re supposed to fall dead, they’re supposed to go “oh” and fall dead, I’d seen it in the movies, right? It doesn’t work that way. When you stab someone they leak to death.”
Ed Kemper explaining how he killed mary ANne Pesce, his first coed victim
Source: 1991 Interview with Stéphane Bourgoin
This mugshot of Kemper is often thought to have been taken in 1964 when he was arrested for the murder of his grandparents. But if you look closely at the board in front of Kemper, the date is November 9, 1973. That is the day he was sentenced to eight life prison terms for the murder of six coeds, his mother and her best friend.
“I felt that I was going to be caught pretty soon for the killing of these girls, or I was going to blow up and do something very open and get myself caught, and so I did not want my mother—. A long time ago, I had thought about what I was going to do in the event of being caught for the other crimes, and the only choices I saw were just accept it and go to jail, and let my mother carry the load and let the whole thing fall in her hands, like it happened the last time with my grandparents, or I could take her life.”
Ed Kemper explaining one of the reasons he murdered his mother
Photo ©Joey Tranchina
FBI criminal profiler John Douglas talks about his first meeting with Ed Kemper in his book Mindhunter:
“The first thing that struck me when they brought him in was how huge this guy was. I’d known that he was tall and had been considered a social outcast in school and in the neighborhood because of his size, but up close, he was enormous. He could easily have broken any of us in two. He had longish dark hair and a full mustache, and wore an open work shirt and white T-shirt that prominently displayed a massive gut.
It was also apparent before long that Kemper was a bright guy. Prison records listed his IQ as 145, and at times during the many hours we spent with him, Bob [Robert Ressler] and I worried he was a lot brighter than we were. He’d had a long time to sit and think about his life and crimes, and once he understood that we had carefully researched his files and would know if he was bullshitting us, he opened up and talked about himself for hours.
His attitude was neither cocky and arrogant nor remorseful and contrite. Rather, he was cool and soft-spoken, analytical and somewhat removed. In fact, as the interview went on, it was often difficult to break in and ask a question. The only times he got weepy was in recalling his treatment at the hands of his mother. (…)
We ended up doing several lengthy interviews with Kemper over the years, each one informative, each one harrowing in its detail. Here was a man who had coldly butchered intelligent young women in the prime of their lives. Yet I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I liked Ed. He was friendly, open, sensitive, and had a good sense of humor. As much as you can say such a thing in this setting, I enjoyed being around him. I don’t want him out walking the streets, and in his most lucid moments, neither does he. But my personal feelings about him then, which I still hold, do point up an important consideration for anyone dealing with repeat violent offenders. Many of these guys are quite charming, highly articulate, and glib. (…)
Quite clearly, some types of killers are much more likely to repeat their crimes than others. But for the violent, sexually based serial killers, I find myself agreeing with Dr. Park Dietz that “it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which they should be released to the public again.” Ed Kemper, who’s a lot brighter and has a lot more in the way of personal insight than most of the other killers I’ve talked to, acknowledges candidly that he shouldn’t be let out.”
Source: Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (1996) by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker / Photo: Getty Images