"I never believed she ran away, not even that night when she didn’t come home,” said Koo’s mother, who nonetheless posted and sent flyers for about three months, stopping around the Christmas holiday. She also removed her daughter’s formal Korean dancing drums and dress she had displayed on the living room wall and packed the items away.
Unfortunately for Aiko Koo, she had chosen a ride with Edmund Kemper, and her mother’s flyers would do little good.
A third coed dies
“She got in the car and he drove across the bay to San Francisco, but unfortunately for her, he kept going,” said Tom Honig, then a reporter with the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “This little girl was terrified, obviously.”
Once Koo was in his car, Kemper told authorities he drove her to an isolated location in the mountains above Santa Cruz, where, he said, “I pulled the gun out to show her I had it…she was freaking out. Then I put the gun away and that had more effect on her than pulling it out.”
At one point, he locked himself out of his car, but a hysterical Koo let him back in.
He then taped her mouth shut and pinched her nostrils together until she blacked out. He raped her while she was unconscious, then strangled her to make sure she was dead.
He followed his previous modus operandi and took Koo’s body back to his apartment where he dismembered her and cut off her head.
“I remember it was very exciting … there was actually a sexual thrill … It was kind of an exalted triumphant type thing,” Kemper said, “like taking the head of a deer or an elk or something would be to a hunter. I was the hunter and they were the victims.”
A trophy in the trunk
He disposed of her body, but kept Koo’s head, which he stashed in the trunk of his car.
It was there the next day, when he attended a psychiatric parole hearing, and didn’t miss a beat telling the mental health professionals exactly what they wanted to hear, keeping his depravity a well-hidden secret.
(Kemper saw two doctors that day. The first said he saw no indication that Kemper was a danger, while the second called the depraved serial killer both “normal” and “safe.” Both recommended his juvenile records be sealed. “He has made an excellent response to the years of treatment. I see no psychiatric reason to consider him to be of danger to himself or any other member of society,” one of them wrote.
The other suggested that Kemper’s motorcycle had been more of a threat to him than he was to “to anyone else.”)
Kemper was given a clean bill of health and went back to his car, and Koo’s severed head in the trunk.
He then went to The Jury Room for a few drinks.
First, however, he opened his trunk to take another look at Koo’s head.
“I suppose as I was standing there looking, I was doing one of those triumphant things, too, admiring my work and admiring her beauty, and I might say admiring my catch like a fisherman,” he said. “I just wanted the exaltation over the party. In other words, winning over death. They were dead and I was alive. That was the victory in my case.”
He later buried Koo’s head in his mother's garden, joking about how his mother “always wanted people to look up to her.” The rest of Koo’s body – minus a scarf he saved as a trophy - Kemper buried in his mother’s backyard.
His records were sealed a month later, despite the objection of District Attorney Hanhart, who argued that given the nature of Kemper’s crimes, they should have been kept open for at least 10 more years.
Chapter 9: Kemper’s escalation and a city in fear
During the time of Kemper’s murders, there was another serial killer, 25-year-old Herbert Mullin, working the same territory, which had everyone’s nerves on edge.
Voted Most Likely to Succeed by his high school class, Mullin had been a popular student, but experimentation with LSD made him paranoid and delusional enough to kill 13 people, including a priest and two young children.
Police at the time believed that the same person was responsible for all the murders, making it difficult to establish a pattern, given the difference between the violent co-ed killings and the seemingly random murders that police eventually determined were the work of Mullin.
(In a strange twist, Kemper and Mullin were arrested close to the same time, and ended up in adjoining cells. According to Kemper, Mullin “had a habit of singing and bothering people when somebody tried to watch TV. So I threw water on him to shut him up. Then, when he was a good boy, I’d give him some peanuts. Herbie liked peanuts. That was effective, because pretty soon he asked permission to sing. That’s called behavior modification treatment.”)
The rash of missing girls even led District Attorney Peter Chang to suggest that the once peaceful tourist community of Santa Cruz might be “the murder capital of the world right now.”
At the University of Santa Cruz, a warning was posted: “When possible, girls especially, stay in dorms after midnight with doors locked. If you must be out at night, walk in pairs. If you see a campus police patrol car and wave, they will give you a ride. Use the bus even if somewhat inconvenient. Your safety is of first importance. If you are leaving campus, advise someone where you are going, where you can be reached and the approximate time of your return. DON'T HITCH A RIDE, PLEASE!!!”
Police were also keeping a watchful eye on young hitchhikers, especially after a skull later identified as that of Mary Ann Pesce was discovered on Loma Prieta Mountain.
“When we would see someone under the age of 18 out hitchhiking we’d pick them up and take them to juvenile hall,” said Aluffi. “There was a big outcry because we were violating their right to hitchhike, but in reality, we were saving their lives.”
Everybody was talking
People on the streets were often caught talking about the missing coeds, and a gun shop in Santa Cruz began developing a much bigger clientele as a result of the murders.
In fact, one local gun dealer was selling handguns almost as fast as he could get them in, and most customers brought up the co-ed killings when they made their purchases.
“I’ve never owned a gun before, but I'm frightened,” an attractive office worker told the shop owner as she slipped the snub-nosed .38 she’d just purchased into the pocket of her purse. “From now on, I'm keeping this handy at all times.”
A tall man with a mustache was standing near the counter during the conversation, a regular that the owner knew as Big Ed.
The two had also talked about to coed murders before, so it was natural for the man to join in.
“The guy who’s doing this to those girls must be sick. He needs help,” the gun shop owner said,
“Sure does,” responded Big Ed Kemper with a nod.
Chapter 10: Cynthia Ann Schall
All the warnings in the world were not enough to save 19-year-old Cynthia Ann Schall, who made the terrible mistake of accepting a ride with Kemper on January 8, 1972, the same day he’d purchased a .22 caliber Ruger handgun.
“I went bananas after I got that .22,” Kemper said in an interview with Front Page Detective.
Cynthia was babysitting to earn money for college, and one of her regular babysitting gigs was for Santa Cruz police officer Jim Connor, who had spent plenty of time drinking with Kemper at The Jury Room.
“She was young, needed money like everyone else, and she was a pleasant girl,” he said. “Knowing she was a student at the university, we felt very safe and knew we could trust her with our children.”
But on that January day, one week after the New Year, Cynthia made a fatal mistake when she accepted a ride with Kemper. She was on her way from her home in Santa Cruz to class at Cabrillo College in Aptos.
He drove her from Santa Cruz to nearby Watsonville, where he shot her with his .22-caliber rifle, then drove the body back to his mother’s duplex, where he was once again living.
The next day, while his mother was away at work, he had sex with the body, then dismembered Cynthia and packed her remains in plastic bags and boxes he stashed in h
is closet.
Her head, however, he buried outside his bedroom window as a way to keep her close.
“He had an attachment to her,” said Connor, who had a hard time accepting that his drinking buddy was also the man who’d killed his babysitter.
“It was unbelievable, but Ed – excuse the phrase - seemed like a gentle giant,” Connor said. “He was a likeable kind of guy. That he could be responsible for something like this….”
Discovery of gruesome evidence
On January 10, a day after Cynthia Ann Schall disappeared, a highway patrolman driving on Highway 1 spotted two severed human arms along the side of the road.
A few days later, a human torso was found floating in a lagoon near Santa Cruz.
Two days after that ghastly find, a surfer catching some waves at Capitola south of Santa Cruz instead caught a left hand.
Soon after, a woman’s pelvis washed up on shore.
Each of the parts belonged to Cynthia Ann Schall, according to fingerprints and chest X-rays.
Only her head and right hand remained missing after detectives had pieced together the found body parts like a macabre horror film puzzle.
Police determined she had been hacked to death, then sawed into pieces with power tools.
Just as disconcerting, the time between Edmund Kemper’s crimes was growing shorter, which made him all the more dangerous.
“It’s speeding up, it’s coming to a head,” Kemper said. “It wasn’t a cyclical thing but it was coming to where it was happening more often.”
Unknowingly for them, Kemper’s last two co-ed victims had less than a month left to live.
Chapter 11: Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu
On Feb. 5, 1973, Kemper and his mother got into a fight, and the serial killer headed out, enraged from the incident and looking for a kill.
“My mother and I had had a real tiff,” he later told investigators. “I was pissed. I told her I was going to a movie and I jumped up and went straight to the campus because it was still early.”
Part of him, however, was tempted to go to the phone and call the police to say, “Hello, I'm the Co-ed Killer,” just to see his mother’s reaction, but instead, he set out in search of a stand-in victim.
Ed stated that the next “good looking” girl he saw would die.
“I might not have been much to look at myself, but I always went for pretty girls,” he said. “And I was so pissed I would have killed anyone who got in the car.”
Unfortunately, two students who had stayed late to study – missing the last buses to leave campus – were the ones to accept his offer of a ride.
22-year-old Rosalind Thorpe was smart, and usually took the bus from her apartment in downtown Santa Cruz to the university and back.
But on this day, Thorpe spent too much time in the library, and when it closed at 9 p.m., she headed to the bus stop, arms full of books, hoping the last bus hadn’t already passed her stop.
It was a rainy night, and when Kemper spotted her standing at the bus stop, illuminated by a street light, it was easy for him, especially driving his 1969 Ford with the university staff parking sticker, to entice the unlucky girl into his car.
Kemper rolled down the passenger window and leaned out, telling Rosalind, “The bus is gone. I know. I've missed it before, too. Can I give you a lift? It's pretty late.”
Likely desperate to get out of the drizzle and get home, she got in the car and they drove off.
The two only drove a few blocks before Kemper noticed Alice Liu, 21, who had also spent too long at the campus library, and was wondering how she was going to get home from school.
When Kemper’s car slowed down, Liu also noticed the university staff sticker, as well as Rosalind in the front seat, so she climbed into the back seat with no worries whatsoever.
“I went on down a ways and slowed down,” Kemper later recalled in interviews. “I remarked on the beautiful view.”
Kemper’s final kills were quick
All the while, still driving down the road as if he was taking the girls to their desired destination, he was maneuvering his gun from near his foot to his lap. He then picked it up and pulled the trigger, killing Rosalind, who slumped against the passenger door window.
In the back seat, Alice was frantic, panicked and struggling to escape Kemper’s bullets.
“I had to fire through her hands,” he recalled. “She was moving around and I missed twice.”
He finally hit her in the temple, but she wasn’t yet dead and he shot her again. According to some accounts, she was still alive and moaning loudly as he approached the entrance to the university.
If she was, however, guards who also saw Kemper’s university parking sticker, believed his story that the girls were drunk and he was taking them back to their dorms.
“It was getting easier to do,” Kemper said. “And I was getting better at it.”
Instead, he took the two back to his mother’s, where he took Alice’s body inside to have sex with it and Rosalind’s in order to remove the bullet from her head to reduce his risk of detection, then dismembered and beheaded both girls, even as his mother and neighbors went about their normal daily activities.
He said that one of his neighbors only had to turn his head in order to see what Kemper was doing, but never did.
The next morning – even as friends and family were reporting both girls missing - he tossed body parts of both girls in the ocean and the surrounding hills of Alameda County, tossing the heads separately from the rest of the bodies.
Too late, Santa Cruz police immediately issued an all-points bulletin so officers would be on the lookout for the girls, and students on campus immediately formed search parties and began combing the wooded 2,000-acre campus. Of course, they turned up nothing.
And again, Kemper had gotten away with what seemed like the perfect murder.
Almost two weeks later, after a storm had struck Alameda County’s Eden Canyon, a road crew checking for damage from the heavy wind and rain saw what at the time they thought were mannequins. Instead, they found two decaying, mutilated corpses, both missing their heads.
X-rays and descriptions of the girls’ families would later determine that the bodies were those of Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe.
Later, according to John Godwin in “Murder U.S.A.,” other random body parts soon appeared.
“Occasionally unidentifiable scraps turned up: a woman’s hand without fingers; a female pelvic bone, one breast. Authorities would later learn that Kemper was a cannibal as well as a necrophiliac, which accounted for the missing body parts.”
It was a terrifying time for people living in and around Santa Cruz.
Chapter 12: Another close call
Police were concerned when they received paperwork about a gun purchase made by Edmund Kemper, whose juvenile record prevented him from legally owning a gun.
While Sergeant Michael Aluffi, knowing Kemper’s size from spending time with him at the bar, was hesitant to make the call to confiscate the gun – “Big man, big gun and little old me,” he said - he and his partner jumped into their patrol car and headed toward Kemper’s mother’s home on Ord Street.
While Sergeant Aluffi found Clarnell Strandberg Kemper’s road easily, he had a hard time determining which of the homes or apartments belonged to her, since addresses weren’t clearly marked.
When he saw a car coming around the corner, Aluffi decided that he and his partner should ask the driver if he knew where Kemper lived.
“I approached the car, and there was a guy laying across the seat, fiddling with something under the dashboard, and I said, ‘excuse me,’ and he got out of the car and got out of the car and got out of the car,” Aluffi recalled, referring to his size. They knew immediately based on his enormous size that they’d found their guy.
The personable young man put up no resistance when the officers requested he turn over his revolver, and he opened the trunk to retrieve it.
Still, the ne
w detective who had been injured during a tour of duty in Vietnam felt on edge all the same.
"There was something about Kemper that made me uneasy when we visited his house," said Aluffi, who made the call with his partner, Don Smythe. “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. He later told me that if we hadn't been watching him so closely he planned to kill us.”
Officers were surprised to find nothing inside but the gun, wrapped in a blanket or a towel. There was no liner in the trunk, no tools, just the gun and the blanket.
They took it, shrugged off the empty trunk, and left.
Afterwards, however, Kemper started to worry, and believed that the officers had come to his mother’s duplex that day not just to get the .44 Magnum revolver he had purchased, but also “to size me up,” he later said.
“This whole process of me taking the handgun from him, he thought we were playing cat and mouse with him,” Aluffi said. “He thought we were playing a game, that we really knew he was a murderer.”
He thought that authorities had finally determined that he was the Co-Ed Killer, and his nerves began to come into play.
And despite his hatred of his mother and his long-standing desire to see her dead, he didn’t want her to know that he had never put his murderous past behind him, probably because he had no desire to hear the caustic words that would come out of her mouth.
That visit from Aluffi to confiscate Kemper’s illegal gun likely accelerated Kemper’s plans to kill his mother.
Chapter 13: Clarnell Strandberg Kemper and Sally Hallett
One of Kemper’s final victims was his mother, the woman who likely played a major role in her son devolving into one of the world’s most notorious, depraved serial killers.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 28