As his crimes continued, he developed a taste for necrophilia as well as decapitating and chopping up his victims, acts that only added to the horror of his crimes, but also initially earned him nicknames like the Chopper and the Butcher in newspaper reports before the Co-Ed Killer stuck.
“I lived as an ordinary person for most of my life,” Kemper said after he was arrested for his string of murders, “even though I was living a parallel and increasingly violent other life.”
Chapter 5: The traits of a serial killer
Kemper might have thought himself ordinary, but according to two FBI profilers, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, who later interviewed Kemper multiple times, there are 10 traits authorities generally look for in a serial killer, and Kemper had them all.
He was a male in his 20s – most serial killers are men in their 20s and 30s – and he had an established pattern, not only targeting similar victims, but also killing his victims in a similar manner.
And although Kemper’s first two coed murders were messy and seemed disorganized, for the most part, he was an organized killer who had spent months practicing and mapping out his plans to kill, a common trait for serial killers with a higher than average intelligence.
Kemper was a single, white male – about 90 percent of serial killers are men - who had never experienced a romantic relationship with a woman.
Kemper was smart, with an IQ of 145, which according to some was near genius. (Only 1 percent of the world’s population has an IQ of 135 and above.)
Kemper did not do well in school, and dropped out in 10th grade. He was too tall for law enforcement, so he ended up taking unskilled jobs including his job as a flagman for the State of California's Department of Public Works.
Kemper’s family background was troubled, and his mother was a dominant personality who only became more so after his parents’ divorce. Kemper’s domineering mother – much like the case of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein – also led to his deep resentment toward women.
Kemper’s family had a history of psychiatric problems, including alcoholism. Experts suggest that his mother might have suffered from borderline personality disorder.
As children, serial killers suffer significant abuse, either physical or psychological. In Kemper’s case, his mother regularly ridiculed him and locked him in the basement with the darkness and the skittering rats.
Serial killers have difficulty with male authority figures, often due to troubled relationships with their fathers. Although they were close when Kemper was young, after the divorce Kemper’s father rejected him when he asked to live with him, and instead sent him off to live with his paternal grandparents.
Serial killers usually show signs of psychiatric problems at an early age. Kemper was 10 when he killed the family cat, and 15 when he was institutionalized after shooting his paternal grandparents. He also once said something that seemed odd when one of his sisters teased him about his attraction for one of his teachers, and told her brother he should give the teacher a kiss. Kemper’s reply? “If I kissed her, I’d have to kill her first,” a hint that his fantasies about necrophilia started quite young.
Due to isolation and social rejection, serial killers often feel suicidal at a young age. Kemper didn’t act out those suicidal tendencies, however, until he was awaiting trial for the coed murders. Then, he twice tried to slice his wrists, using a ballpoint pen given to him by a female reporter.
Serial killers are often interested in violent, deviant sex practices including fetishism. Kemper’s fantasy life began at age 10, although he did not act out his fantasies until later, when he used his victims’ heads to simulate oral sex.
In reality, Kemper was anything but normal.
Chapter 6: Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, His First Victims
Both students at the University of California at Santa Cruz, roommates Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa had bright futures, and anything was possible in this new era that was offering so many more opportunities for women.
It was May 7, 1972, and the girls were hitchhiking to visit some friends at Berkeley, not only home to one of the top-notch schools in the country, but also one of the main attractions of the era of peace and love, thanks to the area’s burgeoning hippie counterculture.
They never made it, however, and as soon as they realized the girls had gone missing, both sets of parents reported it to police.
In newspaper stories from the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1972, Pesce was described as being 5’1”, wearing a maroon sweatshirt and faded blue jeans. She had blue eyes and dark hair. Luchessa was also 5’1”, a blond with gold-rimmed glasses, and was wearing a white shirt beneath denim bib overalls. Both girls were 18 years old, and easy targets for Kemper, who had learned how to make people – including the police officers he became chummy with – feel safe in his large-sized presence.
Mary Ann had more experience hitchhiking as she had hitchhiked through Europe, and was less trusting of the awkward Kemper, despite the habits he had developed to help his victims feel calm – and more likely to get into his car.
“They’re not going to get in your car if they can see you from half a block away, drooling,” he told one French interviewer.
Instead, he would check his watch as if he wasn’t sure he had enough time to pick anyone up, making himself seem casual rather than too eager.
That, combined with a specific pair of glasses Kemper wore to make himself seem more studious, erased some of Mary Ann’s apprehension.
“She was a haughty young lady, stuck up, a Valley girl. She was playing little miss distant with me,” Kemper said. “She had hitchhiked through Europe, she’d done it in the United States, and she was good at it. She didn’t want to get in the car.”
Her roommate Anita, however, was much more open, and after asking Kemper where he was headed, jumped into the front seat. Eventually, Mary Ann got into the back seat, although according to Kemper, she kept a close eye on him as they drove.
Lust and murder
Although Anita was more flirty, it was Mary Ann that Kemper found most attractive, which ultimately sealed her fate as his first victim.
“Anita at one point gave me a sexy little look, and I smiled back at her, but I saw it for what it was,” Kemper said. “It was an 18-year-old girl just feeling her oats, but I was getting caught up in the girl in the back seat. She had pretty blue eyes and beautiful black hair.”
As they watched each other in the rear view mirror, Kemper was formulating his plan, and he drove the young women to a remote area, turned off his car and brandished his gun.
The slight girls were no match for Kemper, and they wouldn’t have been able to escape, because Kemper has jimmied the door, essentially preventing it from being opened from the inside.
No chance to escape
According to Terry Medina, a former detective with the Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Office who was a critical part of the Kemper case, Kemper had already mapped out a plan to prevent his prey’s escape,
“He would say, ‘Hey, I don’t think your door is closed,’ and he was so big he could reach all the way across the car,” Medina said.
When he did so, he would open and close the door to secure it, and then would drop something small like a tube of chap stick behind the mechanism of the door handle, so the door wouldn’t open and his passenger would be trapped. Since he drove a two-door coupe, anyone riding in the back seat would be equally vulnerable.
According to police reports and taped confessions, Kemper began his co-ed murder spree by tying up Anita at gunpoint and forcing her into the trunk.
He then turned his attention to Ann Pesce in the back seat, intending to rape her, but even after he’d taken off her clothes, he was unable to complete the act because he had had no previous sexual experience and was inept at his attempts. His inability to perform sexually so enraged him he began stabbing her to death with a knife he’d purchased at a pawn shop.
“I stabbed her and she didn’t fall dead. They’re supposed to fall dead
, I’ve seen it in all the movies. It doesn’t work that way. When you stab someone, they leak to death,” he said. “It wasn’t working worth a damn. I stabbed her all over.
“When she turned around, I couldn’t see stabbing someone in their breasts, I was that affected by her presence,” he added. “She ended up getting her throat cut, and I learned the term ear to ear, because that’s the way it went.”
He then backed up out of the car, and said, “Shit, now I’ve got to kill the other one.”
Murder, round two
He then headed back to the trunk, where the terrified Anita – who had just listened to her best friend and roommate screaming - was waiting, her hands cuffed behind her back.
“I’d just gone through a horrible experience with her roommate and I was in shock because of it,” he said. “I was walking back to the car and thinking, ‘I can’t let her go, everyone’s going to know.’ She sees the blood on my hands and says, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘Your friend got smart with me, she got really smart with me, and I hit her. I think I broke her nose. You better come help.’”
Anita began crawling out of the trunk, and Kemper went in for the kill, again using the pawn shop knife.
“When I attacked her, at first she didn’t know what was happening,” he said. Eventually, however, Anita fell back into the trunk, dead of her injuries, and Kemper slammed the trunk shut.
It was then he started to panic, when he realized his car keys were gone.
“It was shock that first time. It horrified me, I did everything stupid, everything wrong if I wanted to get away with it,” Kemper remembered.
He immediately decided that his keys were locked in the trunk with Anita, and he started to run, tripping on his gun, which he had tossed on the ground. The action brought him back to his senses, and he searched his pockets again, eventually finding his keys in a back pocket.
“I never put my keys in my back pocket,” he said.
After regaining his composure, Kemper also deposited Mary Ann in his trunk. His plan was to sneak the girls’ bodies into the bedroom of his Alameda apartment – he had temporarily moved out of his mom’s house – under the cover of darkness in order to dismember them.
On the way home to his place, he was stopped by police due to a broken tail light, but got away with only a warning. He later said had the officer asked to search his vehicle, Kemper would have killed him alongside the remote stretch of road.
“I was playing a dangerous game,” he said.
A twinge of remorse
Kemper might have felt a bit of regret over the murder of Mary Ann, his first victim, because he later told Front Page Detective reporter Marj von Beroldingen that he liked the pretty girl, even though she was a bit stuck up, because she best represented the kind of girl he was attracted to, the kind of girl his mother told him he would never have.
“I was really quite struck by her personality and her looks and there was just almost a reverence there,” he said. “In a way, she epitomized what drove me.”
Detached from reality
Once Kemper arrived at his apartment in Alameda, he waited until dark, then took both bodies to his bedroom, where he decapitated them and placed their heads in plastic trash bags. He then cut the girls’ bodies into pieces in the bathtub.
“You know the head's where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That's the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off. That’s not quite true. With a girl there's a lot left in the girl's body without a head. Of course, the personality is gone,” he said.
“Holding a severed head in my hand, I’d say, ‘this is insane,’” Kemper said.
But then he thought perhaps it wasn’t – which in itself is a perfect example that the madman was absolutely, completely berserk.
“I didn’t go hog wild and totally live as a sadist,” he said. “I found myself doing things in an attempt to make things fit, but was appalled at the sense that it wasn’t working.”
As he cut the bodies into pieces, he took photos as each piece was removed and masturbated throughout the gruesome activity. The heads he saved as trophies, and used them for sexual acts, which were apparently easier when he didn’t have to worry about his lack of experience with women – or the ironically miniscule size of his penis.
He slept with the girls’ heads for a few nights, then returned the bodies to his trunk, dumping some parts in a grove of redwood trees alongside a remote highway, others in a brushy area that was also fairly remote. Mary Ann’s trunk, minus her arms and legs, was buried.
“Kemper kept both heads in his car for a while,” authorities said. “As he’d drive around, he’d take one out of the bag and use it on himself to simulate oral sex. In due course of time, the heads began to decompose, so he said he threw both of them into a ravine.”
Later, on the witness stand during his murder trial, he spoke about visiting the grave where he had buried at least pieces of Mary Ann’s body.
“Sometimes, afterward, I visited there ... to be near her ... because I loved her and wanted her,” he said.
The girls were considered missing persons for several months, until hikers stumbled upon the gruesome find that was Mary Ann’ Pesce’s head, so badly decomposed it had to be identified by dental records.
Later, after his arrest, Kemper showed investigators where he buried Mary Ann’s torso. Unfortunately, Anita’s body was never found.
Now, of course, Kemper had developed a taste for the depraved, and having gotten away with the murders of the first two girls, he was on the prowl for another.
Chapter 7: Making friends with the enemy
Kemper had always wanted to be a police officer, but his imposing size made it an impossible dream.
Instead, he befriended the cops in his neighborhood, and hung out with them at a bar called The Jury Room.
“I remember Ed being there on many occasions, especially when the homicides were going on, He would come in and have a few beers with the guys and talk to us,” said Jim Connor, a former city of Santa Cruz police officer who would play a role in Kemper’s later arrest. “He had a great personality, he was very friendly, very outgoing, and he was a likeable guy.”
That’s apparently why officers unwittingly gave Kemper a pair of handcuffs that he used to control his victims, along with a police training badge, although there is no evidence Kemper ever used to badge to either coerce or ease the minds of his victims.
“When he was with them, he was able to think about, here I am, an ongoing murderer, and they don’t know anything about it and they fully accept me,” said Fort. “I’m just one of the boys.”
Fort described him as a police groupie, which other psychologists also said was a common marker for sexual sadists as well as serial killers.
“Many serial sexual murderers have a fascination with police,” said Schlesinger. “That’s part of the psychology. And they do that for a number of reasons. They can hang out with them for one, but they can also follow the investigations, and see if they’re talking about it at all. This is very stimulating for them.”’
The conversations in The Jury Room were heavily focused on the missing coeds, which likely added to Kemper’s thrill.
“On the inside I was troubled, moody, sometimes serene, but people never saw what was going on,” Kemper said.
Instead, he and the police who were desperately searching for him were trading drinks and stories, while one of them chuckled inside.
Chapter 8: The disappearance of Aiko Koo
While Kemper sometimes safely gave hitchhiking girls rides, and talked with them about the depraved murderer who was stalking young co-eds, 15-year-old Aiko Koo wasn’t so lucky.
The girl was excited to have landed a chance to appear at the St. Louis World Trade Fair performing Korean ballet. Because the family had no car, her mother, Skaidrite Rubene Koo, an employee at the University of California Library, was unable
to take her to the event, so Koo planned to ride the bus to the fair.
The petite dancer never made it to the St. Louis World Trade Fair, however, and she also never made it home.
A mother’s intuition
“She’s been kidnapped,” Mrs. Koo told the officer who documented her daughter’s disappearance on September 14, 1972. “I’ve had a premonition all summer that something was going to happen to change our lives. She has started hitchhiking … you know we have no car.”
The night before Koo was to leave, she and her mother put the finishing touches on her costume, despite her mother’s misgivings about her daughter traveling alone from California to Missouri.
“I didn’t want her to go. It wasn’t that important for her to go to that class, but when my daughter wants things she wants them very bad. I’m no psychic, but I was afraid for her. She was so beautiful last night. I finally told her she could go if she took the bus, if she didn’t hitch a ride,” he mother said.
Koo missed the bus, however, and made a sign to alert drivers headed in the direction of St. Louis where she was going and that she needed a ride. Koo, despite being young, was used to hitchhiking during a time when the practice was more common, so she likely was more worried about missing her performance than whose car she might end up getting into.
“I told her I was very much against her hitchhiking,” he mother said, “But once people hitchhike and it goes well, they can’t believe anything can go wrong. Now I think something terrible has happened. That’s why Aiko didn’t come home last night.”
The officer who responded told Mrs. Koo not to worry, that her daughter had most likely teamed up with some other runaways. They suggested she put up missing person flyers in case anyone had seen anyone matching her daughter’s description.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 27