Category: Newspaper Archives (Page 1 of 6)

Susan Hughey Kemper’s wedding

March 5, 2023 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

Frontier Town Chapel Scene of Susan Hughey Kemper Irving R. Swanson Wedding

The chapel at Frontier Town was the setting for the wedding of Susan Hughey Kemper and Irving R. Swanson. Standards of white chrysanthemums and pink gladioli, tied with pink ribbon, decorated the sanctuary. The Rev. Roland S. Rasar officiated at the double ring rites in the presence of 30 relatives of the couple.

The bride is the daughter of Mrs. Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr., of Helena and Edmund Emil Kemper Jr., of North Hollywood, Calif. Her husband is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick E. Swanson of Big Timber.

Escorted by Brother

Given in marriage by her brother, [Ed] Guy Kemper, the bride wore a street-length, white sheath dress styled with scoop neckline and full, lace overskirt attached at the waistline with two pearls. She wore matching lace mitts, gathered at the wrist with seed pearls, and carried a white Bible topped with baby pink roses and shattered carnations tied with white streamers.

The bride’s shoulder-length veil of silk illusion cascaded from a circlet of pearls. Her jewelry, a single pearl pendant, was a gift of the bridegroom.

Sharon McDowell was maid of honor. Her gown of blue was similar in design to the one worn by the bride. She chose dyed-to-match shoes and a small pink headpiece of flowers and veiling. She carried pink carnations tied with white lace.

Mrs. Kemper chose a navy-blue shantung dress with peplum for her daughter’s wedding. The mother of the bridegroom chose an emerald green satin sheath dress. Each wore pink accessories and a pink corsage of roses and carnations.

Ray Swanson acted as best man for his brother. Harvey Jung, cousin of the bride, seated the guests.

Antique Organ

Mrs. Tate Peek played traditional nuptial music on the chapel’s antique organ before and during the ceremony. Two candelabra, holding white candles decorated with sprays of lily-of-the-valley and white streamers, decorated the table for a reception dinner in the Frontier Town dining room.

The five-tier wedding cake, decorated with white roses and white bells, was topped by two white satin bells ringed with pearls and shot with tulle. Elnora Jung, aunt of the bride, cut and served the cake. Sylvia Newburn of New York had charge of the guest book and assisted Mrs. Jung with the gifts.

Reside in Bozeman

Since returning from a wedding trip to Glacier Park, the newlyweds reside in Bozeman, where the bridegroom is employed by Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Co. He is a Navy veteran.

For traveling, the bride chose a navy blue and white suit with navy blue cummerbund, blue jewelry, white accessories and a red corsage.

The bride, who attended North Hollywood High School and Helena High School, was employed at St. Peter’s Hospital prior to her marriage.

Wedding guests included Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Swanson, Michael and Cherie, and Mr. and Mrs. Duane Kirkpatrick, Douglas and David, all of Livingston. Swanson and Mrs. Kirkpatrick are a brother and sister of the bride-groom.

Prior to her marriage, the bride was honored at a miscellaneous shower given by Miss McDowell at the home of Mrs. Jung.

Source: The Independent Record, Helena, Montana, Sunday, July 23, 1961

The Jury Room’s Marv Easterby

September 28, 2022 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

During our trip to Santa Cruz last August, we returned to the Jury Room, the bar where Ed Kemper would hang out regularly in 1972 and 1973, as it was also frequented by the police officers involved in the solving of his murders. At the time, they had no suspicion about Kemper.

On the day of our visit, legendary owner and bartender Marv Easterby was at work. He told us that he wasn’t the owner of the Jury Room at the time of Kemper’s crimes and never met the serial killer. The Jury Room was owned at the time by a fellow named Joe Mandela, who owned several bars in Santa Cruz. Mandela was the owner from 1968 to 1976. He then sold the Jury Room to Marv Easterby.

Marvin “Marv” Easterby is a bartender’s bartender. Known for his collared shirts, stylish cuffs, curled mustache and soft-spoken but take-no-shit attitude, Easterby, or Marv to his friends and regulars, “is the quintessential, strong, handsome, silver-tongued, no bullshit bartender,” says Molly McVeigh. She’s tended downtown Santa Cruz’s Rush Inn since 2009 and has known Easterby for 16 years.

Born in Andover, South Dakota, Easterby was the youngest of seven. His first job behind the bar was in 1963, when he was 19, in a small town called Pierpont which, in 2010, boasted a whopping population of 135.

“You could drink beer at 18 and then hard liquor at 21,” he remembers. “When I interviewed, I told them I was going to be 22; I just didn’t tell them how long it would take me.”

After he was subsequently fired for being underage, he followed a sister to Washington state, where he found a job as a fry cook and eventually managed a bar and restaurant.

He arrived in Santa Cruz in April 1976 and soon bought The Jury Room for $75,000. Over the next several decades, he would fine-tune his skills, rubbing elbows with locals and authorities.

“When I bought [The Jury Room], it was a total cop bar,” he remembers. “If I had 40 customers at once, I bet you 25 of them would’ve been off-duty law enforcement.”

Marv Easterby is seen behind the bar with tender and his dog

It seems he was always a favorite around town, earning the nickname “Judge Roy Beans,” given to him by a Jury Room regular, who also printed up business cards with the nickname and a caricature of Easterby on them. It’s the same caricature the bar still uses today on pins and other merchandise. During the holidays, local police acted as designated drivers for Easterby and gave him rides to and from their precinct parties, for which he helped supply the booze.

Easterby owned and operated The Jury Room for 23 years, until 1999, when a health scare made him relinquish some responsibilities. Still, he continued tending at the local institution, after Karen Madura purchased it.

In 2013 GTreaders voted Easterby the Best Bartender in Santa Cruz, a title he still cherishes proudly with a picture on his phone.

Jury Room tender Tim Hall says: “Marv’s said to me many times, ‘Anyone can sling drinks, but not everyone can be a bartender,’” he says. “He’s Santa Cruz’s Kris Kristofferson or Sam Elliott. A class act with the old school mentality. It’s a lost art.”

Warm thanks to Marv for taking the time to chat with us!

Source: https://www.goodtimes.sc/iconic-jury-room-bartender-marv-easterby-serves-farewell-drink/ / Photo and video: EKS

Death of Herbert Mullin

August 22, 2022 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP), August 19, 2022 — A California inmate who confessed to killing 13 people in a matter of months during the early 1970s has died of natural causes at age 75, state prison officials said Friday.

Herbert W. Mullin’s victims ranged in age from 4 to 73 and included a priest he killed in a confessional booth, according to the Santa Cruz County district attorney’s office.

Mullin died Thursday evening [August 18] at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, corrections officials said, and the San Joaquin County medical examiner will determine his exact cause of death.

Mullin was serving two concurrent sentences of life with the possibility of parole for first-degree murder from Santa Cruz County and nine terms of five years to life for second-degree murder from Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties.

All were for killings he committed during a four-month period in late 1972 and early 1973.

Prosecutors said Mullin committed two other murders for which he never faced charges.

Mullin was denied parole last year.

At the time, District Attorney Jeff Rosell said that Mullin again admitted to the 13 killings during his parole hearing. But he blamed his poor upbringing and said his parents and sister should be held responsible.

Mullin showed “no true remorse for these brutal murders,” Rosell argued.

Mullin had interactions with Edmund Kemper, another serial killer active in the same area and at the same time as he was. The two shared adjoining cells at one point at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. Kemper would describe Mullin as having a “lot of pain inside, he had a lot of anguish inside, he had a lot of hate inside, and it was addressed to people he didn’t even know because he didn’t dare do anything to the people he knew.” In that same interview, Kemper called Mullin “a kindred spirit there” due to their similar past of being institutionalized. Kemper said he told Mullin “Herbie, I know what happened. Don’t give me that bullshit about earthquakes and don’t give me that crap about God was telling you. I says you couldn’t even be talking to me now if God was talking to you because of the pressure I’m putting on you right now, these little shocking insights into what you did, God would start talking to you right now if you were that kind of ill. Because I grew up with people like that.”

Sources: Santa Cruz Sentinel, by Associated Press, August 19, 2022 | Wikipedia for Herbert Mullin | 1991 Interview by Stéphane Bourgoin

California inmate who admitted 13 murders dies natural death

Ed Kemper’s last victim – Sally Hallett

July 17, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 2 Comments

Sara “Sally” Taylor Hallett was Ed Kemper’s last victim. She was Kemper’s mother’s best friend and a colleague of Clarnell’s at UCSC. Born on October 19, 1913 in Washington, Hallett had two sons, Edward and Christopher Hallett. Kemper murdered Hallett in his mother’s apartment on Easter weekend in 1973. She was 59 years old.

After killing and decapitating his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, early on the Saturday morning before Easter, Ed Kemper spent much of the day drinking. That evening, he telephoned his mother’s close friend, Sara Taylor Hallett, saying he wanted to surprise his mother and take her and Ms. Hallett to dinner that night.

Kemper prepared for Ms. Hallett’s murder by distributing weapons around the apartment but in the end, none of them would be necessary. Soon after the phone call, Ms. Hallett arrived: “I came up behind her and crooked my arm around her neck, like this,” Kemper said, bending his powerful arm in front of himself at chin level. “I squeezed and just lifted her off the floor. She just hung there and, for a moment, I didn’t realize she was dead … I had broken her neck and her head was just wobbling around with the bones of her neck disconnected in the skin sack of her neck.”

Later that night, Kemper attempted to have intercourse with Ms. Hallett’s body.

He fled the next day in her car.

Kemper said he had to kill a friend of his mother’s “as an excuse.” In other words, Kemper said he had to provide a reasonable story for friends of his mother’s to explain her absence. If she were away on a trip with a friend, Kemper reasoned, nobody would be concerned about her absence.

At his 2017 parole hearing, Kemper gave an alternate explanation as to why he murdered Sally Hallett. He said it was revenge for ruining his mother’s holiday. The two women were supposed to go to Europe together for four weeks, but Hallett backed out at the last minute. Clarnell went on the trip by herself. At some point, during the hearing, Kemper referred to Hallett as his mother’s “lover”, but: “When [my mother] got back, she tried sharing those vacation moments with Sally, and Sally got very loud with her and rude, and told her ‘I don’t want to hear about that. I didn’t even go on that vacation, why are you bringing this up?’ So, she – that cut off that release. So, here I am at the house having heard this from my mother and she’s frustrated and I said ‘I’d like to know, I’d like you to share with me.’ So, she went and got all of her travel logs and the papers and stuff from the places that she went and she started systematically sharing this stuff with me, and then all of a sudden, she stops and she looks at me in this strange way, and she said, ‘I’m not gonna let you pity me.’ And she just walked away from the whole thing. And I said, ‘Hey, I wanted to hear this stuff…’

“I had told myself that if my mother ever dies over this stuff that I did, [Hallett]’s going with her. That’s one trip she’s not gonna miss. She’s not gonna back off on that one… I swore an oath to it. I was angry at the time… I haven’t sworn many oaths in my life and everyone that I have sworn I followed through with.”

Sources: “The Co-ed Killer” by Margaret Cheney, 1976 / “Gruesome Details on Tape at Trial”, Santa Cruz Sentinel, October 25th, 1973 / “Coed Sex Murders Detailed by Chang”, Register-Pajaronian, by Marj von Beroldingen, October 23rd, 1973 / Front Page Detective Magazine, by Marj von Beroldingen, March 1974 / Ed Kemper’s 2017 Parole hearing

“I’d love to take credit for more [victims]”

April 15, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

The following is from a taped interview between suspect Edmund Emil Kemper III and investigator Michael Aluffi, held at the Santa Cruz Jail on April 28, 1973.

Aluffi: Ed, you’ve admitted to the deaths of six coeds, your mother and Mrs. Hallett, are there any other homicides that you’ve committed other than your grandmother and your grandfather?

Kemper: No.

Aluffi: None whatsoever?

Kemper: None whatsoever.

Aluffi: What about in Santa Rosa?

Kemper: No. There almost was a victim there, but I guess pretty much for the same reason I didn’t kill so many others, it was a surprise pickup and quite a lovely young lady, and I just psychologically was not prepared for it. But when I was psychologically in the mood for it and everything worked out right, the person didn’t have a chance, when I knew ahead of time.

Aluffi: But you did pick up a hitchhiker in Santa Rosa?

Kemper: Yes, the deposited her safely. She was probably 16 or 17 years old.

Aluffi: What about Los Angeles?

Kemper: No, I picked up people up and down there for the same reason, only on one occasion, two girls, and I released them at their destination and picked up one girl in Santa Barbara that was headed for Santa Cruz. But at that time, all I had was my knife and I didn’t really see an opportunity to use it.

Aluffi: Did you ever pick up any hitchhikers in Las Vegas?

Kemper: No.

Aluffi: Have you ever been to Las Vegas?

Kemper: Yes, long, long ago and only by bus.

Aluffi: So in essence, the killings that you have admitted, those are the only ones that you’ve ever completed.

Kemper: I’d love to take credit for more, not because I’m looking for a big score, but that I wouldn’t take credit for any that I didn’t do because, well, there’s partially the guilt factor involved and there also is the uh, well I didn’t do it, so I didn’t get any pleasure out of it or any guilt out of it and why take somebody else off the hook who did do it. Obviously, whoever did these other crimes that haven’t been solved doesn’t have too many clues against him. I’m not trying to pat anybody on the back or help anybody else get away with anything, but I figure I can’t even cop out to these crimes because they’re gonna find out that I didn’t do them and I wouldn’t be able to give you any details, not even under a lie detector test.

Aluffi: Would you be willing to submit to a lie detector test?

Kemper: Sure, as long as it only pertained to any cases that I didn’t involve myself in. You know, there’s always questions people don’t like to sit there and have a lie detector test on concerning other parts in their lives.

Aluffi: But you would be willing to submit to a lie detector test in reference to…

Kemper: Any unsolved murders that you might think I had something to do with, or to verify certain statements I have made concerning the crimes I did commit.

Aluffi: You would submit to the subjects of these coeds deaths?

Kemper: Certainly.

Aluffi: Do you think you could remember anything else that might be of any consequence in these investigations?

Kemper: Not at this time I don’t.

Aluffi: Would you be willing to talk to me at a later time if you did remember something like that?

Kemper: Yes.

Sources: Ed Kemper’s official jailhouse confessions in April 1973 / Photos are from the Santa Cruz Sentinel (for Aluffi) and another unknown newspaper (for Kemper) / Kemper photo by W. H. Hawkins found on Reddit and first published by the Facebook Ed Kemper Discussion page

After 41 years in law enforcement, Aluffi retires

April 15, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

Michael Aluffi became homicide detective in 1972, just as the United States’ attention was about to fix on Santa Cruz, where three different serial killers, John Linley Frazier, Edmund Kemper and Herbert Mullin, would send the country into a panic.

As new detective, Aluffi had to manage the paperwork from registered firearm sales. One day, a record of sale landed on his desk for a .44 caliber magnum pistol bought by Kemper, who had a sealed juvenile record. Suspicious, Aluffi went to Kemper’s house with his partner Don Smythe to confiscate the gun until they could find out more about Kemper’s past.

“There was something about Kemper that made me uneasy when we visited his house,” Aluffi said about the 6-foot-9-inch behemoth of a man who would later be convicted of eight murders. “When he went to the trunk of his car to get the gun, Don and I instinctively put our hands on our guns and went to either side of the car. Kemper later told me that if we hadn’t been watching him so closely, he planned to kill us.”

Aluffi and Smythe’s visit to his house made Kemper nervous that the cops were closing in on him, and he killed and beheaded his mother and her best friend before fleeing. He made it to Pueblo, Colorado, before he decided to call Santa Cruz to confess. Aluffi, along with other law enforcement, was sent to Colorado to accompany the serial killer on the long ride back.

“After that I was more confident as an officer, absolutely,” Aluffi said. “I felt like there wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle at that point.”

Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel, November 20, 2010

Kemper on Kemper book – Expanded

January 31, 2021 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 6 Comments

We published a post on December 30 about this book, but we learned recently that an expanded version was just released. And what has been added to the book is quite awesome. Indeed, Kemper’s 1973 confessions after his arrest in Pueblo, Colorado, are now included in the book. Quite a riveting read for any Kemper researcher!

This book was already fun since it collects all of Kemper’s most important interviews. Now, it’s even more complete! Available to buy on Amazon.

Kemper on Kemper book

December 30, 2020 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 7 Comments

Got this for Christmas! I wasn’t aware of this book before receiving it as a gift. Independently published in 2020 by author Peter Scott Jr., it presents Kemper’s story through newspapers articles, interviews and personal encounters. It includes written transcripts of some of Kemper’s most famous video interviews, such as the ones for the documentary “Murder – No Apparent Motive” (1984), the FBI Academy (1989) and Stéphane Bourgoin’s “Serial Killers” (1991). Also included is the full transcript of Kemper’s 2017 parole hearing.

This book is nothing new for seasoned Kemper researchers, but it is fun to have a book that collects all of Kemper’s most important interviews. This book is also a good starting point for anyone interested in knowing more about Kemper.

Author Peter Scott Jr. has published a similar book about Charles Manson, Manson on Manson, also released in 2020. Both books are available on Amazon.

“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

Kemper scared his father’s new wife

September 9, 2020 / Edmund Kemper Stories / 0 Comments

In the Fall of 1963, Ed Kemper, now 14 years-old, was allowed to go to Los Angeles to the home which his father, Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. II, shared with his new wife, Elfriede Weber, and her son from a previous marriage, Gilbert Otto Brechtefeld, who was two years older than Kemper.

The second Mrs. Kemper quickly began to feel extremely ill-at-ease with her dour and hulking stepson, now more than six feet tall, hanging around the house and staring at her until she became upset. She began to get migraine headaches. Once the boy happened to catch a glimpse of her nude, in the bedroom. Later, Kemper recalled that he had felt sexually excited by this episode. And still later it would be reinterpreted, perhaps at his instigation, but at least by the journalists, as a sexual overture on the woman’s part: “…the woman had appeared naked before him, using her sexuality to take his father away from him.”

Kemper was in Los Angeles for only a few weeks when at his stepmother’s urging, his father sent him back to Montana to live with his mother and sisters. E. E. Kemper Jr. II told his son that he was financially unable to keep him.

A few months later, around Thanksgiving, Kemper ran away from home in Montana and returned to Los Angeles to see his father. Another incident had Kemper following his pregnant stepmother around the house, shutting all the drapes and blinds claiming it was too bright. Afraid, she opened them up again and told Kemper he needed to leave. Her son Gilbert happened to arrive home at that moment. He saw how scared his mother was and how creepy Kemper was acting. He grabbed a hammer and chased Kemper away. This incident was apparently the reason why Kemper was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in late 1963. His father brought him to North Fork in California for Christmas and left him there once the holidays were over.

Kemper’s father and Elfriede Weber had a son together. He is known as David Weber but it’s not his real name. He keeps his real name private for security reasons. He was born in 1963 or 1964. As for Elfriede’s first son Gilbert, he died in 1975 at the age of 28. We were unable to find the cause of death. Elfriede passed away in 2009 at the age of 89.

Sources: The Co-ed Killer by Margaret Cheney / Sacrifice Unto Me by Don West / https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5168247/Brother-Edmund-Kempner-speaks-time.html