Category: Jim Jackson (Page 1 of 2)

Ed Kemper turns 74 today

December 18, 2022 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

Born on December 18, 1948, Edmund Emil Kemper III turns 74 today. He is still incarcerated at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, CA.

We often receive messages from our dear followers asking news about Kemper’s health and current situation. We don’t have direct access to him. He apparently now lives in the G tower at Vacaville, which is where the hospice is located. This is from an unconfirmed source who knows someone who works there. As Kemper suffers from different medical conditions (diabetes, heart problems, etc.), it might not be surprising that he now lives in hospice.

Pictured above is Ed Kemper (center) during his 1973 trial. On his left is his lawyer, Jim Jackson, and to Kemper’s right is County sheriff’s deputy Bruce Colomy who accompanied Kemper during his trial and who Kemper considered as a father figure, although they were practically the same age.

Photo by Pete Amos / Source: Murder Capital of the World bay Emerson Murray, 2021 / Ed Kemper Chronicles Facebook page

Passing of Harold Cartwright (1940-2021)

April 16, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

We are saddened to hear that Harold Cartwright passed away a few days ago at the age of 80. Mr. Cartwright worked on Ed Kemper’s defense team. He was an investigator for Kemper’s lawyer, Jim Jackson. Thanks to @8folddharma on Instagram for letting us know.

During the 2018 two-hour special “Kemper on Kemper: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer,” former investigator with the Santa Cruz Public Defender’s Office Harold Cartwright opened up about what it was like working on “Co-Ed Killer” Ed Kemper’s defense team.

“Tell you a little bit about my interaction with Eddy, with Ed Kemper,” said Cartwright. “One day, I had a really stiff neck — I couldn’t move my head hardly at all.”

Cartwright continued, “[Kemper] said, ‘I know a lot about anatomy. I can make your neck feel better.’ So, I went around, and he worked on my neck for maybe, I don’t know, five minutes. And you know? It worked.”

Cartwright said that even though the 6-foot-9-inch, 285-pound Kemper “could have probably killed [him] with one hand,” he “never felt unsafe in his presence.”

“I felt that if somebody had attacked me, he would have come to my aid,” Cartwright told “Kemper on Kemper: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer.”

The two spent “a lot of time together,” and Cartwright said he and Kemper were “friendly.” While Kemper was in jail awaiting trial for murdering eight women — including his own mother and her best friend — many members of law enforcement also described him as “friendly,” “cooperative” and a model prisoner.

Still, defending an admitted serial killer took “a horrible toll” on all those involved in the investigation.

Cartwright said, “If I could change things in my life, I would definitely not have participated in these mass murders. I had a wife and two little kids; I worked 13 months without a day off. Within five years after these trials were completed, the district attorney was divorced, I was divorced, several of the police officers involved were divorced. … It was difficult, difficult time [sic], and it’s always a part of you.”

Mr. Cartwright’s obituary is available here.

Source: “Kemper on Kemper: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer” from Oxygen, 2018

Ed Kemper’s strange link to the Republican party

October 30, 2020 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

A few days away from the U.S. elections, a look at Ed Kemper’s strange link to the Republican party, as he received a letter from the Committee to re-elect President Nixon thanking him for volunteer work in the 1972 campaign.

On April 30, 1973, Kemper, after his arraignment in Superior court on eight counts of murder, startled reporters when he showed them the form letter on White House stationery. The First Family’s picture was on the front of it and the “thank you for campaign effort” message inside along with the mimeographed signatures of the President and his family.

Kemper’s Santa Cruz address was on the envelope. It bore a Washington postmark dated April 26, two days after Kemper was arrested in Pueblo, Colorado. Kemper’s attorney, Jim Jackson, could not shed much light on this rather unusual development:

Jackson: It was mailed to him apparently. It came yesterday.

Reporter: Did he have an active role in the campaign, do you know?

Jackson: He voted against Mr. Nixon. (laughs)

Reporter: Against Mr. Nixon?

Jackson: That’s what he told me.

Reporter: And how would he get this letter?

Jackson: You have to ask the Committee to re-elect the President.

Source: Bay Area TV Archive

“They can’t see the things going on in my mind.”

September 24, 2020 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

The testimony by Ed Kemper yesterday was no exception from the preceding grim testimony. With questioning from his lawyer Jim Jackson, he recalled his childhood fantasies which started out innocently and wistfully, later to become daydreams of murder and sex.

He said his first fantasy was that his “mother and father would be loving together and caring for their children.”

According to Kemper, it was a fantasy that never came true. Instead, there was “much violence, hatred, yelling and screaming” between his father and mother who separated and were divorced when he was around seven years old.

Kemper said he felt rejected and unloved by his mother and his father as well, though he indicated he yearned for a good relationship with his father.

He spoke of his mother as “alcoholic,” and said she once had beaten him with a heavy belt and buckle when he was a small child and told him not to scream, “because the neighbors will think I’m beating you.”

This was at the age of nine, and Kemper said after that he was afraid of her and began to have a recurring fantasy about sneaking up on her and hitting her in the head with a hammer.

Later, in Atascadero [where he was incarcerated for five years after the murder of his grandparents], Kemper’s fantasies turned to sex as well as murder. He said his final fantasy was, “I killed someone, cut them up and ate them… and I kept the head on a shelf and talked to it… I said the same things I would have said had she been alive, in love with me, had she been caring of me.”

Asked by Jackson if he ever told anyone at Atascadero about the fantasies, Kemper replied, “No, I would never got out if I had told psychiatrists I was having fantasies of sex with dead bodies and in some cases eating them I would never have gotten out ever.”

He paused and then said, “Wow! That’s like condemning yourself to life imprisonment, and I don’t know many people who do that.”

The young defendant, who worked for psychologists testing other inmates at Atascadero, said, “I hid it from them. They can’t see the things going on in my mind. All I had to do to conceal it from them was not talk about it.”

Source: “Kemper explains why he murdered coeds”, Register-Pajaronian, by Marj von B, November 1st. 1973 / Images from trial: Bay Area TV Archive

Upcoming book about the Santa Cruz murders in the early 1970s

June 3, 2020 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

A new book by author Emerson Murray is currently in the works. The book will be about the murders committed in the early 1970s by John Linley Frazier, Herbert Mullin and Ed Kemper. Here is the description that can be found on the book’s website:

The Santa Cruz community looks back at the Frazier, Mullin, and Kemper murder sprees of the early 1970’s

Over 25 people murdered in just over two and a half years. What was happening in the small coastal town of Santa Cruz between October 1970 and February 1973?

John Linley Frazier’s home invasion murders of the Ohta Family and Dorothy Cadwallader in 1970 and the serial murder sprees of Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper left an impact on Santa Cruz that can still be felt today.

Local law enforcement, victim’s families and friends, classmates and acquaintances of the killers, local historians, voices from the past and present, and the killers themselves all come together to tell the horrific stories and explain why Santa Cruz was dubbed THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD in the early 1970’s.

The book will feature new material in the Kemper case, including interviews with Detective Terry Medina and Public Defender James L. Jackson. It will also feature interviews with relatives of some of the victims, and with coworkers at the UCSC of Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett. It will also include new information about Kemper’s young fiancee.

Girl’s courtroom gesture brings Kemper trial to a halt

April 5, 2020 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

A threatening gesture by a young woman spectator seated in the rear row of the court brought the Edmund Emil Kemper murder trial to a halt for almost half an hour this morning.

The incident occurred during the playing of a tape interview of Kemper by investigators in which Kemper had described the killing of his mother, Mrs. Clarnell Strandberg on Easter weekend.

Kemper, who had said yesterday he would rather not be present in the courtroom during the playing of the confession tapes, was not allowed to remain out of the courtroom. This morning when he came to court his attorney said Kemper had been taking tranquilizers.

Despite this, Kemper was showing obvious strain listening to his own voice on the tape, and a number of times he turned from the counsel table and scanned the spectator section. After one such look at the spectators, Kemper turned back quickly and motioned to his sheriff’s guard sitting nearby.

A whisper consultation took place and Kemper’s lawyer, Jim Jackson, got up and immediately went to the bench and whispered something to Judge Harry F. Brauer, who promptly called for a recess.

Later, Judge Brauer told reporters Kemper had said a young woman in the back row had looked at him and drawn her forefinger across her throat, in a throat-cutting type gesture.

Brauer gave Kemper time to calm down and then resumed the court session, continuing with the playing of the confession tapes.

Bailiffs searched for the offending girl but she apparently left the courthouse immediately following the incident.

*******

A few years ago, the Santa Cuz Ghost Hunters featured a story in one of their videos where a young woman named Sara interviewed her grandmother who turned out to be the young woman who made this throat-slashing gesture toward Kemper during the trial in 1973. This is what she said:

“The trial that you’re asking me about, Sara, was in 1973. And every morning, Alice Liu would wait on my husband and I with coffee and naturally, we knew her from the coffee shop. And when she was murdered by Edmund Kemper, I wanted to… I well… I wanted to be there and listen to the testimony, and it was just real graphic, so I don’t know whether I should tell you all about that…”

“Edmund Kemper got Alice Liu in his car when she was on her way to campus or coming back. He had his car rigged up in such a way that once you got in the passenger side, the handle would never for you to get out. She could never get out…”

“Picture this lovely little Oriental girl, 19, working hard in a little coffee shop. When he was describing all these things about Alice Liu, there was a break in the proceedings and when he comes in with his chains and he’s walking in, his eyes focused on me. And I told you I was so emotional with that horrible testimony, I said to him… and he focused on me, and I said [she whispers]: ‘I would love to cut your throat,’ and he went [she screams]: ‘Oohhh!’ And the bailiff saying: ‘What is it? What is it?’ And I had a dress with polka dots on it and the bailiff come over and said: ‘You’ve got to sit on the other side of the courtroom. You’ve upset Mr. Kemper.’”

Sources: Girl’s courtroom gesture brings Kemper trial to a halt, Register-Pajaronian, by Marj von B, October 25, 1973 / Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters

“I still have their spirits.”

September 13, 2019 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

Public defender Jim Jackson asked Kemper what the “real reason” was that he disposed of the girls’ bodies in the manner he did cutting them up and keeping parts of the bodies for a time.

Kemper hesitantly replied, “Because they were rotting and I was losing them.”

He explained, “when the girls died I kept them a certain length of time, but couldn’t keep them any longer.”

However, he declared, “I still have their spirits.”

Source: “Kemper explains why he murdered coeds”, Register-Pajaronian, November 1, 1973, by Marj von B

“Guilty, Sane, and First Degree to all eight counts.”

April 8, 2019 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

The trial of Edmund Kemper lasted three weeks, but it took the jury only five hours to reach a decision.

Defender Jim Jackson, in a final effort to do his professional best by a client he had never asked for, told jurors in his closing argument, “There are two people locked up in the body of this young giant, one good and one evil… One is fighting to be here with us and the other is slipping off to his own little world of fantasy where he is happy.”

When the jury returned, Kemper showed no emotion as Judge Brauer read the verdict: “Guilty, Sane, and First Degree to all eight counts.”

From: Why: The Serial Killer In America by Margaret Cheney (1992, update of The Co-Ed Killer, 1976) / Photos: Getty Images, Register Pajaronian

Photo on the left: Edmund Kemper and District Attorney’s investigator Richard Verbrugge exchange words in courtroom; Kemper’s “escort,” sheriff’s deputy Bruce Colomy, is at right.

Photo on the right: Edmund Kemper with sheriff’s deputy Bruce Colomy.

October 23, 1973 – Opening of Ed Kemper’s murder trial

March 21, 2019 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

October 23, 1973. Defendant Edmund Emil Kemper (left) sits with his attorney, public defender Jim Jackson, shortly before the defendant’s murder trial opened today. Standing behind Jackson is his private investigator, Harold Cartwright. (Photo by Sentinel Photographer Pete Amos.)

“I would have died too fast that way.”

March 7, 2019 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

November 1, 1973 – Kemper broke down shortly before 4 p.m. as he was being questioned by his attorney Jim Jackson about his suicide attempt Sunday morning in his San Mateo jail cell. Kemper’s cell is under constant surveillance by jailers by means of a television camera. But Kemper told how he avoided signalling his suicidal actions by simply turning his back to the camera and slashing his wrist with the flattened and sharpened casing of a ballpoint pen.

He said he had cut an artery, which was spurting blood, and a vein, which also was bleeding. Jackson interrupted him to ask why had he not, if he wanted to die, stuck himself in the throat. Kemper looked up blandly at the question and replied quietly, “I would have died too fast that way.” He explained that he could have cut an artery in his throat but he wanted to think about things as he bled.

“What were you thinking about, Ed?” asked Jackson.

Kemper looked down at his hands and began to reply slowly, “I was thinking about the girls who died… their fathers…” At this point, his voice broke and tears came to his eyes, which he brushed away.

Two fathers of his coed victims testified in court during the first week of the trial and Kemper had been unable or unwilling to look at them while they were on the stand.

Momentarily, Kemper recovered his composure and said, “Sorry,” and then continued “… their mothers, and I thought about what I did…” At this point, the young giant buried his face in his hands, apparently unable to continue.

Judge Harry F. Brauer immediately adjourned the court for the day, and Kemper jumped up from the witness chair and hastily headed for the back door of the courtroom, catching sheriff’s deputies across the room momentarily off guard.

Bailiff Don Chapman was the first to reach Kemper, and he patted him consolingly on the back as he led him into the jury room adjacent to the courtroom, where Kemper remained until Jackson went in to see him before he was taken back to San Mateo County jail.