Chapter 9: Sodeman asks wife for forgiveness
After Sodeman confessed to police he talked at length about “the mania” that took hold of him when he drank, and talked about how relieved he was that his reign of terror over the schoolgirls of Australia was over.
“I realize it must end,” he said. “I think that there is something wrong inside, and when I take a drink, I am then unable to keep it under control. If it was to go on tomorrow it would happen again. Life is no use to me or to anybody else. The sooner I go through the drop the better.”
From his Pentridge jail cell, he wrote a letter to his wife of 10 years, Bernice, whom he called Doll, who was still hoping her husband and the father of her daughter was innocent of the horrible crimes of which he was accused.
In the letter, he asked Bernice not to spend any of their family funds for his defense, since he intended to plead guilty, and wanted to be sure there was money for the two to use.
“May God be always with you and forgive the harm I have done,” he closed, signing the letter, “Arnold XXXXXXX, PS Love to Joan XXXXX.”
Two weeks later, Bernice replied, asking her husband to tell her the truth about the murders.
“I know in your right mind, you could never have hurt anything but you must know and only you. I try hard to convince myself it is a mistake. So play fair and tell me the truth. It will not make the least bit of difference as my sympathy will always be with you,” she wrote.
“You must realize that if those turns came on you before, they would do so again unless you have treatment and you would only be a worry to yourself,” Bernice added. “You know how dearly we loved our girlie and you must know that others love theirs just as much. Just think how we would have felt if it had been our little one. Your love for your own kiddie should help you to realize those things.”
Bernice offered to use their money – along with offerings of loans from friends – to help pay for his defense if he was innocent, but if not, she needed to keep it in order to help protect their daughter.
“It's the uncertainty of the thing that is driving me to distraction, so please Arnold tell me the truth,
she wrote. “If the kiddie was on your bike, then the fingerprints will be there and nothing can disprove it. Think carefully and please Arnold let me know.”
She signed her letter “Doll.”
Chapter 10: The trial of The Schoolgirl Strangler
It was a packed courtroom when Arnold Sodeman stood trial in February of 1936 for the murders of four young girls, his youngest victim just six years old.
“The court was packed out into the vestibule and to the main door of the building,” according to newspaper reports. “Sodeman pleaded guilty in a quiet and unemotional voice. He did not exercise his right of challenging the jury.”
The prosecutor, Mr. C.H. Book, read Sodeman’s detailed confession, and told jurors, “The crime of which Sodeman stands accused is a particularly revolting kind. Early in the evening of December 2, June Rushmer was playing with some companions on a recreation reserve. She left the reserve at about 7:15 p.m. and walked in the direction of her home. She never reached her home, and the following day her body was found in some bushes off a lonely lane. Her body was tied up in a peculiar manner. She had died from shock due to injuries and suffocation,” he said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
“I submit that you can have no doubt whatsoever when you have heard the evidence in this case that the man who was responsible for the deaths of these four girls is the man who stands before you charged with this offense,” he added. “You are only here to inquire as to his guilt on the one count of killing June Rushmer, but I propose to call evidence as to these other deaths and evidence as to his admissions as to each of these four deaths.”
Sodeman's appeals against his conviction due to his alcoholic blackouts failed because, although he was considered strange by neighbors and some witnesses, he fell short of the standard of insanity required by law at the time of his crimes.
Doctors did say during his trial that Sodeman’s mental state was such that he could not tell right from wrong while strangling the girls.
One said that while he could not officially certify Sodeman as insane, he would not let him out of an asylum once he was committed.
In addition to exploration of what happened to Sodeman when he drank, experts for the defense laid out his family history of mental illness, and said “that a strain of insanity was strong in his antecedents,” according to newspaper reports.
The judge and jury were told that his great-grandfather had died from inflammation of the brain.
Still, jurors decided that he was guilty, and in full control of his actions at the time of the murders.
After Sodeman was convicted of his crimes and sentenced to death, a special committee met to determine if the sentence should be carried out, based on the evidence given by the doctors.
Chapter 11: The execution of Arnold Karl Sodeman
Unlike many others in prisons, Sodeman did not want to appeal his death sentence, for fear that if he lived he might potentially commit more murders.
Still, his defense stepped in and attempted to save his life based on his family history of mental illness.
His execution was originally set for April 13, 1936, but a series of appeals delayed the hanging for more than a month.
On March 6 of that year, the Court of Criminal Appeal unanimously dismissed a first appeal by Sodeman against his conviction and death sentence for the murder of June Rushmer.
The Chief Justice Sir Frederick Mann said that the Court believed that no fault had been disclosed in the charge of the trial judge to the jury which would lend support to the appeal.
The court determined, despite questions raised by Sodeman’s defense, that the judge did not wrongly direct the jury as to the question of insanity.
His defense continued to appeal the decision based on doctors’ testimony regarding Sodeman’s sanity, and after his execution date was rescheduled, another court took up the question and again delayed Sodeman’s hanging.
“There was a dramatic development last night in the tense legal fight to save the life of Arnold Sodeman, who was to be executed on Monday next for the murder of June Rushmer,” read the short story appearing in the Concurs Advocate that month. “After protracted negotiations between the Premier and his ministers it was announced that in view of the proposed appeal to the Privy Council the execution would be postponed for four weeks, The Premier said the Ministry was influenced in its decision by the tact the High Court was equally divided on the question of the appeal.”
Still, despite the split court and testimony from experts that again suggested Sodeman’s lack of control over his actions, his final appeal was dismissed on Friday, May 29, 1936.
The consistency of his crimes, with each of the murders carried out in the same manner, and each child bound and gagged with her own clothing, was likely the reason behind the rejection of his appeals.
Too, during his confession to police - who were at first quite skeptical that Sodeman was responsible for all four of the murders - he told them that he linked his thumbs together while strangling the girls in order to speed their deaths, a specific detail that suggested premeditation.
Appeals exhausted
The day before his execution was the next Sunday, and it was reported he played a game of cards with Edward Cornelius, who was on death row for the murder of a local minister.
His last words to the Governor of the Gaol – also known as prison warden - on the night before his execution were “I am glad it is nearly over.”
The next day, June 1, 1936 – where in America, “Show Boat” with Irene Dunne was playing at the movie theater, “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell was on its way to becoming a best-seller and the Queen Mary made its maiden voyage, arriving safely in New York Harbor – Sodeman has hanged at 8 a.m. When asked if he had any last words, he said “Nothing, sir,” and walked unaided to the
scaffold.
Sodeman was buried in Pentridge Prison in Coburg, a suburb of Melbourne. The prison was a maximum security prison built in 1851 and officially closed in 1997. His was one of only 11 executions to take place at the prison during its long tenure. Although executed at another site, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is also buried at Pentridge. His remains were moved after they were disturbed and ransacked during a demolition of Melbourne Gaol.
Arnold Karl Sodeman originally was buried in an unmarked grave, but his remains were later exhumed along with other executed killers who had been buried at Pentridge Prison.
The aftermath
Soon after Sodeman was executed, the Brisbane Courier-Mail printed a letter to the editor from one Thomas J. Peters, general secretary of the Racial Hygiene Association, which read: “Sir,— The recent tragedy in Melbourne, and the conviction of Arnold Sodeman, brings again before the public the urgent need for education along the lines advocated by the Racial Hygiene Association. When the evidence submitted by the doctors to the Court is analyzed it is seen that not only was the defendant’s father, but also his grandfather, mentally unbalanced. It is not to be wondered at that such an unstable mental inheritance should have resulted in such a tragedy. It gives all students of racial hygiene food for very serious thought.”
Founded in Australia in 1922, the Racial Hygiene Society advocated selective breeding of future generations in order to eliminate hereditary disease and defects, and campaigned for the segregation and sterilization of the mentally deficient. The group’s principal beliefs were later used by the Nazis during World War II as a reason for mass extermination in search of a perfect race.
As for Sodeman’s family, after her husband was executed, Bernice took back her maiden name due to the publicity generated by her husband’s case, and spent the next 45 years being the best mother she could be to her daughter, Joan.
She was described as an intelligent woman with common sense and good judgement, and police said she was shocked and horrified when she learned of her husband’s crimes.
She died in a Rye nursing home, and her death notices included the following from Joan: “There was only you and I, Mum, for so many of your years. We shared the laughter, we also had tears. But through it all you taught me, God is good and He knows best, and so I understand why He has taken you to rest.”
As of 2012, daughter Joan, now in her 80s, was living in a Melbourne retirement home.
Edmund Kemper:
The True Story of The Co-ed Killer
by Jack Rosewood
Historical Serial Killers and Murderers
True Crime by Evil Killers
Volume 2
Copyright © 2015 by Wiq Media
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
"My frustration. My inability to communicate socially, sexually. I wasn't impotent. I was scared to death of failing in male-female relationships."
-Edmund Kemper, on why he began trolling California’s highways in search of cute co-eds to kill
Introduction
Edmund Kemper – one of the most notorious and deranged of all American serial killers thanks to his union of grisly murder and necrophilia with a hint of cannibalism thrown in – always speaks matter-of-factly in interviews about his murder spree, which left six pretty California co-eds, his mother, his paternal grandparents and his mother’s best friend dead.
He describes in sordid detail his first murder, committed because he said he wanted to see what it would feel like to kill Grandma, the sound his knife made when he opened it to stab his first hitchhiking coed and the week he spent fantasizing and planning his mother’s untimely but some might say deserved demise.
Ultimately, Kemper puts much of the blame on his overwhelming, uncontrollable urge to kill on his mother, a cruel woman who is believed to have suffered from borderline personality disorder, which showed itself most prominently with her son. In her middle child and only boy, she saw the image of his father, Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr., and viewed him as little more than unwanted evidence of one of her three marriages gone wrong.
Clarnell Strandberg Kemper, who worked as an administrative assistant at the University of California at Santa Cruz, often locked young Kemper in the basement for fear he might molest his two sisters, and she constantly berated him, especially as he grew into an awkward, oversized adolescent. She regularly told him he wasn’t good enough to land one of the pretty co-eds at the school where she worked, and Kemper became more and more resentful.
At first he took out his rage on the girls his mother said he could never have, using them as substitutes in an attempt to quell his rage. Eventually, though, after years of ridicule, Kemper bludgeoned his mother to death with a claw hammer, then turned her head into a three-dimensional dart board, but only after he had satisfied his sexual urges using the mouth of his mother’s severed head.
Kemper would end up killing 10 victims, but police are most troubled by the six pretty co-eds that Kemper picked up while they were hitchhiking, then dismembered and tossed in various places in and around Santa Cruz, including in his mother’s backyard.
All the while, he was making friends with those same policemen who were working the case of the killer who would become known as the Co-Ed Butcher, talking about new evidence with them at the lawmen’s favorite bar. It was a calculated act that not only kept Kemper abreast of any progress in the case, but also threw police off his trail.
Eventually, the twisted serial killer’s appetite for murder became intertwined with his sexual desires, and it made him one of the most deviant serial killers of all time. He saved sick mementoes from his kills, most often his victims’ heads, which he buried in his mother’s yard so they would be close to him.
He also reportedly used the flesh of at least two of his victims as the main ingredient in his macaroni casseroles.
His is a story of deranged depravity, and one that continues to haunt the cops who sat next to Kemper, throwing back a few cold ones with a man who would become the inspiration for the character of Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The making of the Co-Ed Killer
The first hints of depravity
Divorce changes everything
Another painful rejection
Kemper’s first murders
Chapter 2: Turning himself in
But doctors make mistakes, too
Chapter 3: An era of peace, love and murder
An attempt at normalcy
Chapter 4: A life fueled by anger and hatred
Practice rounds
Preparing for madness
Chapter 5: The traits of a serial killer
Chapter 6: Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, His First Victims
Lust and murder
No chance to escape
Murder, round two
A twinge of remorse
Detached from reality
Chapter 7: Making friends with the enemy
Chapter 8: The disappearance of Aiko Koo
A mother’s intuition
A third coed dies
A trophy in the trunk
Chapter 9: Kemper’s escalation and a city in fear
Everybody was talking
Chapter 10: Cynthia Ann Schall
Discovery of gruesome evidence
Chapter 11: Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu
Kemper’s final kills were quick
Chapter 12: Another close call
Chapter 13: Clarnell Strandberg Kemper and Sally Hallett
A good day to kill mom
Chapter 14: The arrest of the Co-Ed Butcher
A grisly discovery
Pueblo makes a big arrest – in more ways than one
Chapter 15: A serial killer tells his story
A death tour
Chapter 16: A neighborhood full of surprise
Chapter 17: Wondering why
Blaming a blast from the past
Chapter 18: Kemper’s trial and the aftermath
Kemper’s life behind prison walls
Kemper made infamous through music
A Note From The Author
Chapter 1: The making of the Co-Ed Killer
Born December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California, the land of fun and sun and celebrity, Edmund Kemper III should have had it all.
But the Sagittarius, the middle child and only son of Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr. and Clarnell Strandberg Kemper had a troubled childhood, only made more difficult by his huge size - six-foot-nine and nearly three hundred pounds - along with the mind of a psychopath that gave him an itch to kill.
“I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that. The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate,” said the man who would become known as both the Co-Ed Killer and the Co-Ed Butcher, depending on which media outlet was writing the story, in one of many interviews he gave after his arrest.
Kemper was a young man full of rage. If anyone had been paying close attention to him early in his life, they would have realized that he was exhibiting the well-known signs that he had the potential to become a serial killer.
The first hints of depravity
According to psychiatrist Donald Lunde, author of “Murder and Madness,” Kemper as a child wished that everyone else in the world would die, and he began practicing his favorite method of dismemberment on the dolls his sisters played with.
“I remember there was actually a sexual thrill,” he said about his earliest decapitations. “You hear that little pop and pull their heads off and hold their heads up by the hair, whipping their heads off, their body sitting there. That’d get me off.”
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