True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology)

by Jack Rosewood

  “I wanted to kill my mother since I was eight years old,” he told one interviewer. “I’m not proud of that, but she went through three husbands like a hot knife through butter. I hated her.”

  The weekend before her death, he was driving around Ashby Avenue in Berkeley, the same place he’d picked up his first two victims, the blond Anita and the dark-haired Mary Ann.

  There, he saw two girls, one blond, one brunette, who were hitchhiking back to their nearby school, Mills College.

  To test himself – “I’m seeing if I can maintain, if I can just let go of it,” he said in an interview - Kemper pulled over to pick up the girls, using the little trick of looking at his watch that made him seem casual and somewhat pressed for time, rather than in the process of planning a murder.

  “I got to where I could diffuse the situation,” said Kemper. “It’s just little games I would play so they would get in the car. I had ways of developing it so they wouldn’t get suspicious. It’s like playing chess, then turning it into something ugly.”

  The girls hopped in, unaware of Kemper’s gun under his seat, and asked him to drive in the wrong direction, which would have taken them right past the spot where Mary Ann and Anita died, and Kemper would not have been able to control his urges.

  He tried to make them understand that they wanted to go the wrong way, and he instead drove in the opposite direction, toward the university. The girls, he later said, were stiff with fear, and when he pulled up to their dorm room, they ran out of his vehicle and up the stairs, never looking back.

  He sometimes wonders if they remember hitching a ride with him, and if they know how close they came to death that day in his infamous yellow Ford.

  “I let them out. They never even knew what was going on,” he said. “I could have gotten away with it but I didn’t.”

  A good day to kill mom

  On Good Friday of 1973, Kemper worked half a day, and before coming home contemplated his mother’s death, which he had been planning for a week.

  He came home late, and stopped in her bedroom to let her know he was home, hoping that she would say something nice to him to stop the inevitable murder. Instead of greeting him, the woman who was tucked in bed with a book said, “Oh my God, now I suppose you’re going to want to stay up and talk all night.”

  “I was hoping that she would say something that would stop this shit,” Kemper said. “But instead the last words we shared were a fight.”

  Hurt, Kemper left her room and went to his own bed, where he laid awake for several hours, stewing over his mother and all the past rejections.

  Usually, she would apologize the next day when she hurt her son’s feelings, but this time she didn’t get a chance.

  At about 5 a.m., before the sun was up, Kemper murdered his mother while she was asleep, battering her to death with a claw hammer.

  “I walled in there with a hammer and caved in the side of her head and cut her throat,” Kemper said.

  He then beheaded her, and after using her head for his favorite oral sex fetish, placed it ceremoniously on the mantel and used it as a dartboard.

  “He yelled and screamed at it, and threw darts at her face,” said Medina, who added that the murder of Kemper’s mother was “a very messy” act of depravity.

  He also cut out her larynx and tongue and attempted to put them down the garbage disposal, but the machine spewed the remnants of his mother’s words back into his face.

  “That seemed appropriate, he said later, “as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”

  But still, her cruel voice was running through his head.

  “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up,” Kemper said.

  To ease his guilt, he headed to the bar where he tossed back a few with his cop buddies, but still felt his sadistic urges had not yet been satisfied.

  This time to ease his rage he invited his mother's best friend, 59-year-old Sally Hallett, over for dinner.

  Pleased at the invite, she immediately came to the house.

  “I came up behind her and crooked my arm around her neck, like this," he told a reporter with Front Page Detective, demonstrating for her by bending his arm at his chin. “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.”

  Kemper then spent the night fulfilling his necrophilia fantasies with the body of his mother’s best friend, then drove away from the bloody scene in Hallett’s car.

  He left behind a note for police near his mother’s body:

  “Appx 5:15 a.m. Saturday. No need for her to suffer any more at the hands of this ‘Murderous Butcher.’ It was quick – asleep – the way I wanted it. Not sloppy and incomplete, gents. Just a ‘lack of time.’ I got things to do!!!!!”

  Chapter 14: The arrest of the Co-Ed Butcher

  Kemper began downing caffeine pills before ditching Hallett’s car in Nevada, where he rented a green Chevy Impala, which he drove for hours before landing in Pueblo, Colorado.

  There, he pulled over and called the Santa Cruz police from a telephone booth and confessed to murdering his mother.

  Santa Cruz police were surprised when they received the phone call from a Pueblo phone booth on April 23, 1973. The caller was 24-year-old Edmund Kemper, the guy they called Big Ed, confessing to the murders of not only the co-eds, but also his mother and her best friend.

  The first time, police thought he was joking. How could the tequila-loving guy who always said he would have been a cop if he hadn’t been so big do something so despicable? Impossible, the cops thought, and when the call became disconnected somehow when a dispatcher pressed a wrong button, police passed the call off as a prank.

  But when Kemper called back, another officer, Jim Conner, whose babysitter had died at the hands of the Co-Ed Killer, took the call.

  “Knowing Ed, I got on the phone and we started talking and I could tell that something wasn’t right,” Conner said. “He hadn’t had any sleep, and he said he had done something really bad. He said that he had killed his mother and a friend of hers, and said that they were at his house.”

  “I killed my mother and her friend. And I killed those college girls. I killed six of them and I can show you where I hid the pieces of their bodies,” he said.

  Connor kept Kemper on the phone, but sent officers to Kemper’s mother’s house, including Sergeant Michael Aluffi, who knew where the house was because he had been recently gone there to confiscate Kemper’s illegally purchased .44-caliber revolver.

  A grisly discovery

  Medina was also sent to process the crime scene, and there, despite the stench of death from several days of decomposition, the place looked relatively normal.

  “When we arrived, there was nothing disturbed. It looked like somebody had just left on vacation,” Medina said. “We flipped over the mattress and of course it was soaked with blood.“

  It was there, on the bed now saturated with blood, that Kemper had dismembered and mutilated his two victims.

  It was also where he left the note, apologizing for not cleaning up as he’d had to leave in such a hurry.

  “That’s the first time in the history of my career that the suspect left a note,” he added.

  For Michael Aluffi – affectionately known as Mickey by both Kemper and his fellow officers - the crime scene brought the realization of how close he had come to discovering Kemper’s grisly secret.

  “I had this tremendous feeling of all the blood rushing out of my body,” said Aluffi, who along with Medina began the search for the two bodies. They found Kemper’s mother and her middle-aged best friend hidden in a closet.

  “In the closet, we pulled back the sheet and saw some hair and some blood,” Aluffi said.

  The claw hammer and a three-food saber with a curved, bloody blad
e were also found nearby.

  Pueblo makes a big arrest – in more ways than one

  Santa Cruz police contacted their Pueblo counterparts, who dispatched two officers to the phone booth where Kemper was waiting, still telling his story to Santa Cruz cops.

  The first officer to reach Kemper had been warned about Kemper’s size and weaponry, and approached him with caution.

  “When they said on the police radio that he was 6’ 9” and 280 pounds, I couldn't see anyone that big,” 30-year-old David Martinez later said. “I moved into the area and spotted him in the phone booth with his back to me. I came up in the cruiser and he looked like three people sitting in that phone booth. Then I put on my red lights, pulled my revolver and eased from the cruiser. I wasn't taking any chances.”

  The father of three children then walked up to the phone booth, where Kemper was holding the telephone receiver.

  “When I told him to move outside, he asked, ‘What do I do with the phone?’” Martinez said. “I told him just to drop it.”

  Kemper – who was “big enough to beat a mountain lion with a switch,” Pueblo Chief of Police Robert Mayber later said - put up no resistance during the arrest, and came out of the phone booth with his arms in front of him, preparing to be handcuffed. Meanwhile, Martinez waited out the four minutes it took for backup to arrive.

  “To me, it seemed like four hours,” he later told a reporter with the Pueblo Chieftain.

  When he was asked to put his hands up, Kemper put them on top of the phone booth, he was so tall. Police asked where his weapons were, and he indicated the trunk of his nearby rented Impala. He then immediately began talking about the gory specifics of his crimes.

  “With that kind of detail, I believe he knows what he’s talking about,” Mayber said.

  After Kemper was taken in for questioning, Martinez – who passed away in 2002, a legend in his hometown for arresting one of the most notorious serial killers in history – stayed behind to search Kemper’s rented car, where he turned up what he called “enough ammunition to hold off an army for about a week,” along with a shotgun, two rifles and a blood-stained knife stashed in the glove compartment.

  A coat Kemper had worn, splattered with blood, was also held as evidence.

  “The full realization of it all has not hit me yet,” Martinez told the newspaper the day after the arrest. “But it's not likely that I'll ever make as big an arrest again.”

  As for Kemper, he later said he wished he’d tried harder to stop himself from murdering, or had turned himself in after his first two co-ed victims had died such gruesome, awful deaths.

  “I wish I had given up,” he said. “Because the regret that came later wouldn’t have had to be.”

  Chapter 15: A serial killer tells his story

  Kemper, once in custody, was eager to talk about the crimes he’d committed.

  “He talked and talked and talked,” said Aluffi, who had been sent to Pueblo to escort Kemper back to Santa Cruz. “He said a lot of things that were kind of disturbing.”

  But the new detective had found his footing thanks to the complexity and depravity of the Kemper case.

  “After that I was more confident as an officer, absolutely,” said Aluffi, who later became the Chief of Police before retiring in 2010. “I felt like there wasn't anything I couldn't handle at that point.”

  As they traveled from Colorado back to California, Kemper sat in the back seat, shackled and handcuffed, attempting to melt his large form deeper into his seat so he wouldn’t be noticed by passersby.

  At night, Kemper was housed in local jails along the route, and during the day, they would stop for lunch at local drive-in restaurants.

  At one lunch spot, two young women walked by the car, causing Kemper to vomit, a reaction he said he often had in response to attractive women, at least those not under his control.

  Once they were back in Santa Cruz, police impounded Kemper’s battered yellow Ford, where they found human hair, some blond, some brunette, .30-caliber ammunition, a bullet Kemper had failed to extract from an interior panel of the car and dried blood streaked across the back seat.

  A search of the trunk yielded more hair along with a rash of makeshift tools including a shovel, a raincoat, a water bottle and an enamel-coated dish pan.

  A death tour

  Meanwhile, Kemper took police on a grisly tour, showing them the numerous places where he had thrown, hidden or buried body parts of his victims.

  Kemper and the police first stopped in Alameda County, where Kemper had lived for a time in his own apartment. He then took them to several sites where he had deposited the decapitated heads and other body parts of some of his victims.

  More sites were revealed in Mateo County, and then the small group arrived in Santa Cruz County, where Kemper had committed most of his crimes. There they were met by at least 20 officials, which sent Kemper into a rage.

  “This is no circus to me, man. Get me out of here,” he told officers, before calming down and beginning a six-hour tour of the county.

  During the tour, he led them to the grave where he’d buried the torso of his first co-ed victim, Mary Ann Pesce, some bones and clothing he’s tossed into a canyon, an arm stashed in a plastic bag, also at the bottom of a mountain canyon, a skeleton believed to be that of budding dancer Aiko Koo and personal items belonging to some of the victims on a ledge beneath a cliff where Kemper said he’s tossed parts of Cynthia Schall.

  “I am an American, and I killed Americans, I am a human being, and I killed human beings, and I did it in my society,” he said.

  Everything was within 20 miles of Kemper's mother's apartment on Ord Street.

  Chapter 16: A neighborhood full of surprise

  As is the case with most serial killers, neighbors of Edmund Kemper were surprised when they saw police carry the blood-soaked mattress out of their downstairs neighbor’s apartment.

  As officers carried the bloodstained bed from the house, an upstairs neighbor told her sisters she had overheard officers say that Kemper had killed his mother, her friend and the missing coeds that had sparked months of fear in the seaside community.

  The sisters remembered talking to Kemper about the missing college girls, and at the time he told them, “It must be some crazy person doing all this.”

  That’s why the horrified girls – who now wondered how many young women Kemper might have dismembered in the rooms beneath them - thought nothing about seeing Kemper carry cardboard boxes “in and out of the apartment all the time.”

  A few days later, police began excavating the Kemper apartment backyard, the sisters watching from their upstairs apartment.

  They’d only dug a few feet when they uncovered a human skull. It was that of Cynthia Schall.

  “When we first heard he was confessing all this stuff, we thought it might be for the publicity,” the horrified neighbor said. “But we changed our minds when the officers dug up that head.”

  Some of the body parts were disposed of near detective Terry Medina’s home.

  “When I did find out that he was up here, that made me reflect on my wife,” Medina said. “We had two small kids up here, and she was home alone a lot. That gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. He was a predator.”

  Chapter 17: Wondering why

  Neighbors and police who’d spent hours hanging out with Kemper weren’t the only ones to wonder why Kemper had killed so many people.

  An investigator for the defense, Harold Cartwright, spent 100 hours with Kemper in an effort to determine “why would this large, friendly, cooperative guy, why would he kill all these people?”

  Cartwright said he “never at all felt threatened at any time” by Kemper. “He was just sort of a gentle giant.”

  Still, there was something that led Kemper to kill, and for Cartwright, that was his mother.

  “You look at him and you say, ‘ok, something happened, there’s a wire that was crossed, he had a chemical imbalance, he had somet
hing.’ But then you look at him and you say. ‘No, this strictly was environmental. The way he grew up, the life experiences he had led him to the point that he becomes this serial mass murderer,” Cartwright said. “Maybe he was killing his mother all along. Who knows?”

  Towards women, however, Kemper was anything but gentle.

  Dr. Cameron Jackson, then a psychology student, was assigned to question Kemper, and one question led him to leap from his seat, “erupting like a volcano. It was just so fast.”

  Two officers had to come in to diffuse the situation, but the incident led Jackson to believe Kemper should be locked up for a very, very long time.

  “He only once said something like ‘It was the way I could control them,’” said Kemper’s attorney, James Jackson. “And that’s the only thing he ever said the entire time I dealt with him that had anything to do about why he did what he did.”

  Blaming a blast from the past

  While his rage at his mother fueled his predication for murder, after his arrest, Kemper talked a bit about his childhood incarceration, the vast numbers of people being housed at the facility and the complete lack of follow-up after he was released.

  "I didn't have the supervision I should have had once I got out,” he said in an interview with Front Page Detective, a story that appeared in an issue with a salacious red cover featuring a screaming young woman clad only in a bra and jeans. “I was supposed to see my parole officer every other week and a social worker the other week. I never did.

  “I think if I had, I would have made it,” he said. “Two weeks after I was on the streets, I got scared because I hadn't seen anyone. Finally, I called the district parole office and asked if I was doing something wrong.”

  Kemper asked if he was required to visit his parole officer, or if his parole officer would be coming to see him.