by Ray Black
After five years the doctors at Atascadero no longer believed Ed was a threat to society, although they did agree that his violence may come to the surface again if provoked. By the time Ed left the hospital he had grown to a full
6 ft 9 in and weighed 300 lbs. He was now an angry young man of 21, and just his appearance was enough to frighten anyone.
Back Home With Mum
Although the doctors had felt that his domineering mother may have been responsible for Ed’s simmering rage and it was best that they be kept apart, he returned to live with his mother. Clarnell was now working at the University of California. Ed’s time in the hospital had made him rather envious of anyone who was in authority and he had a desire to join the police force. Unfortunately for him his height made him ineligible, but this did not stop him hanging around with the local police in a bar called the Jury Room. He was well liked and became known as ‘Big Eddie’ the gentle giant. He managed to get a job as a flagman on the highways, and this meant that, now he was earning a living, he could move out of his mother’s apartment.
He moved in with a friend in an apartment in Alameda and bought himself a car. Ed started to fantasize once more about picking up women hitch-hikers and what he would do to them. He cruised around the highways and with the aid of a sticker from his mother’s job at the University, soon gained the trust of the hitch-hikers as they felt it was safe to accept a lift from a fellow student. After he had picked up around 150 hitch-hikers, Ed felt he was ready for the next step in his gruesome plan.
It was Sunday, May 7, 1972, and Ed Kemper was preparing for murder. He stashed away under his car seat a hunting knife, some rope, a plastic bag, a pair of handcuffs and a Browning 9 mm automatic pistol, then he set out to find his victims. Just after 4.00 p.m. he came across two teenage girls thumbing a lift. They were May Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, and they happily accepted Ed’s offer of a lift. They told him that they were on their way to see a friend at Stanford University but were unsure of the way. Ed used this information to his advantage, and unaware that they were being driven in the wrong direction, the girls were taken down a side road. Suddenly Mary sensed something was wrong and she asked Ed what he wanted. Ed immediately stopped the car, pointed the pistol at the two frightened girls and replied, ‘You know what I want!’
Mary tried to keep her wits about her and endeavoured to keep her attacker talking, but Ed was too astute and realized what she was up to. He forced the petrified Anita into the boot of his car and then returned to give Mary his full attention. He handcuffed her hands behind her and then tried to suffocate her with the plastic bag. But Mary was not prepared to give in without a fight and she bit holes through the plastic so that she could still breathe. Kemper got more and more angry and soon overpowered her by stabbing her twice in the back and once more in the chest. Then Ed grabbed Mary by the chin and slashed her throat.
Realizing that Anita would have heard the struggle from her position in the car’s boot, Ed knew he had to kill her too. So he got out of the car, opened the boot and began stabbing Anita all the while trying to subdue her screams of terror.
Ed decided to take the two bodies back to his apartment as he knew his flatmate wouldn’t be at home. Once back in his room he stripped both the girls naked and started to take Polaroid photos of the various stages of dissection before finally decapitating his prey. He wrote down all their details from their student ID cards and then destroyed all the possessions they had with them. Then he buried the body parts in the bush around Santa Cruz, but kept the two heads as trophies on his shelf. He later returned to the buried parts and threw them into a ravine, in the hope that they would be even harder to identify when they were eventually found.
However, Ed need not have worried because the two girls had not been reported as missing. Their colleagues at the University just assumed that they had gone off travelling as students so often did.
For a few months it seemed that the photographs he had taken were enough to satisfy Ed’s sexual fantasies. He had also suffered a broken arm in a motorcycle accident shortly after his last killings, but by September of that year Ed’s homicidal urges were starting to surface again.
It was 14 September, 1972, late in the afternoon, and Aiko Koo, a 15-year-old dancer from Korea, was thumbing a lift on University Avenue Berkeley. When the friendly-looking man offered her a lift she was delighted, that was until she realized they were heading off in the wrong direction. She started screaming, and in an effort to shut her up Ed produced his gun and shoved it into the girl’s ribs. He pretended that he was feeling suicidal and needed someone to talk to, and for a while this ruse seemed to work. Once they reached a secluded spot Ed suffocated the small girl until she was unconscious, and then proceeded to rape and finally strangle her. Ed placed the body of Aiko into the boot of his car and then drove to a nearby bar where he sat and enjoyed a beer, all the time savouring the delights of his slaughter.
Later that evening he took the body, bundled up in a blanket, back to his room. Once again he dissected the corpse, and then scattered the remains around the Santa Cruz woods. This time he kept the head of little Aiko in the boot of his car.
Ed Kemper had a follow-up evaluation on September 15 by the board of juvenile psychiatrists. By now he was expert at fooling his doctors and he was declared mentally stable. Little did they know that all the while they were interviewing their patient, Aiko Koo’s head lay in the boot of his car! Ed, with his slate now wiped clean, felt he was invincible. It also meant that now he had no-one looking over his shoulder he could go out and buy a gun of his own. The only real problem he could see was that his broken arm prevented him from working and earning the money he needed to live on his own, so back he went to live with Mum.
From Bad to Worse
There is no doubt that Clarnell tried to get along with her ‘freak’ of a son, but the quarrelling went from bad to worse. With each confrontation, Ed’s mother became more and more nervous and maybe she was just too scared to do anything about it.
Ed went out and bought himself a .22 Reuger automatic gun and he desperately wanted to try it out. It was now January 1973, and because the weather had been so bad it meant that there were very few young women out on the highways thumbing a lift. He was getting more and more frustrated but his luck was to change on January 8.
Ed’s next victim was an 18-year-old girl called Cindy Schall who was on her way to an evening class at her nearby college. He drove her into the hills above Watsonville, where he bound and gagged her and placed her in the boot of his car. Then he lovingly handled his new toy and felt excitement rise in his groins as the bullet hit Cindy’s head. Still buzzing from the thrill of his actions, Ed drove back to his mother’s house and took the body of the young girl inside. Clarnell was out so he was free to carry out his fantasies.
He laid Cindy’s body out on the bed and had sex with her and then the following morning, with some difficulty, due to the fact that his arm was still in a cast, he carried the body into his bathroom. He cut it into pieces and then placed the body parts into plastic bags and tossed the grisly remains into the ravine. This time he kept her shirt and ring as trophies, and put her head in the back of his wardrobe.
The next day there were reports buzzing around about the dismembered body of a girl being found. Ed decided that the safest thing to do was to bury Cindy’s head in the front garden.
About a month after the killing of Cindy Schall, the mother and son had another blazing row. Ed stormed out of the house taking his gun with him. He had an evil glint in his eyes and he drove down the road in a rage. Rosalind Thorpe was just coming out of a lecture and wondering how she was going to get home, when a kind young man stopped and offered her a lift. Seeing the student sticker in his window she accepted his kind offer and they chatted away like old friends. A little further down the road they spotted Alice Lui hitch-hiking, and she too jumped into the back of the car. However, the joviality of the situation was soon to change because as they we
nt over the brow of a hill, Ed pulled his gun out of his jacket and instantly fired it into Rosalind’s temple. Alice starting screaming in terror as Ed leaned over the seat and shot her in the head. Although Alice was no longer moving she started to make a strange guttural moan, which got on Ed’s nerves. He was starting to feel rather weak and nauseous – perhaps the reality of his actions was starting to hit home. He decided to stop the car and finish off Alice for good before heading off for home.
It was about 11.00 p.m. when Ed arrived home, but seeing that his mother was still up decided he would come back later and drove off to buy some cigarettes. He drove off to a secluded spot, grabbed his hunting knife and promptly decapitated both the girls.
The following morning, back at home, Ed was lying in his bed when he felt all his sexual frustrations rising up within him. He went down to the car and brought Alice’s headless body into his room where he had sex with the corpse after ritually cutting off both her hands. As for Rosalind, he left the body where it was but brought her head back to his room where he desperately tried to remove the bullet that was lodged in her skull. He did not want to be traced through the bullet, and when he had finished he stuffed everything back in the car and drove out of town to dispose of the bodies. This time he dumped the torsos in the ravine but threw the heads and hands into a nearby canyon called Devil’s Slide.
At the time of Ed’s killing rampage two other maniacs were wreaking havoc – John Lindley Frazier and Herbert Mullin. Police were baffled by the amount of bodies that were turning up on their normal peaceful patch. Ed, who had always wanted to be a policeman, took great interest in their investigations and he used to frequent their favourite haunts so that he could hear all the grisly details.
By April 1973, Ed felt like his life was falling apart and decided to pack up all the evidence of his murders in one case, together with his gun, and toss it into the ocean. He felt that the stress of killing was becoming too much and he was also constantly in discomfort from stomach ulcers.
The Ultimate Kill
On Good Friday, April 20, Ed sat drinking beer with his mother, pondering about what he should do with his life. Suddenly he came to a decision. He had always hated his mother, after all she had locked him in a black cellar full of evil spirits that were trying to harm him when he was only a child. Now he knew it was time for revenge.
Later that day Ed crept into his mother’s bedroom. She was still awake and, feeling that something was really troubling her son, asked him if he needed to talk. He said no he was okay, but returned shortly afterwards carrying a hammer and a knife in his hands.
By this time she was asleep and Ed brought the hammer down full force onto her skull. With anger racing through his veins he turned his mother onto her back and started to saw into her throat until she was decapitated. Cutting off his mother’s head gave him a lot of satisfaction but he wasn’t finished yet. The part of her that he hated the most was the area around her vocal cords, because this was the part that had given him the most misery. He removed her larynx and angrily tried to push it into the waste disposal, but it jammed. When the waste disposal started to spit pieces of tissue back at him, Ed wasn’t surprised. He felt that she had bitched and screamed at him for years and even in death she wasn’t going to stop.
Ed Kemper was now totally out of control, the killing had not calmed him in the way he had hoped. Still on a sexual high, Ed had sex with his headless mother. He then decided he would go out for some beers before coming back home and deciding what to do next. He called a friend of his mother’s, Sara Hallett, and told her that he was doing a surprise dinner for his mum and would she like to come as well.
Back at home he propped his mother’s head onto a hatbox and used it as a dartboard, all the while she just sat there staring at her deranged son – between them they were not a pretty sight.
Sara Hallett had been delighted by the invitation to come round for dinner, after all the old friends had a lot of gossip to catch up on. She arrived all dressed up for dinner and slumped down in a chair innocently saying, ‘Let’s sit down. I’m dead.’ And what do you know, within a few minutes she was. Ed killed the poor woman by placing his enormous hands around her throat, squeezing all the life out of her. A little later on that evening, with the initial excitement of the kill over, Ed started to feel bored. So he stripped the now headless Sara Hallett, dragged her to his bed, committed necrophilia and then went to sleep in his mother’s bed.
Enough’s Enough
Ed Kemper now felt that enough was enough and that he didn’t want to kill any more. He drove away from his last two murders leaving a note behind him, and then reflected on all his previous murders. He had been nick-named the ‘Co-Ed Murderer’ by the press and he had murdered six pretty hitchhikers. They were shot, stabbed, strangled, decapitated and he had even cooked and eaten their flesh, and he still hadn’t been caught. Due to his immense size Ed decided to dump the small car he was driving and opted for a larger one that would afford him more comfort. He drove for 18 hours arriving at Pueblo, Colorado, where he set about finding some digs. The town was buzzing with tourists and it was easy for the big man to go unnoticed. He scanned the newspapers and listened to the radio to hear the reports of the ‘Co-Ed Killer’ and of his two latest victims. But there were no reports and this made Ed really angry. He felt like running out into the streets and shouting at the top of his voice that he was the one they were looking for. He was the evil behind all those killings.
He was even more incensed when he got stopped for speeding and, having given his correct name and details, still wasn’t recognized. He paid his fine, drove away, and suddenly decided it was all too much. Feeling totally desperate he reached for a phone and called the Santa Cruz police headquarters:
It’s me . . . Ed Kemper. K-e-m-p-e-r . . . I’m the guy you’re looking for. I am the Co-Ed Killer. If you want me I’m here in Pueblo.
He gave his address and waited. However, back at the busy police station the policeman who took the call simply slammed the receiver back into place and muttered something about it being another damned crank. Frustration rising in his body, Kemper tried again, almost pleading with them to arrest him. He told them they couldn’t miss the great hulk of a man who was 6 ft 9 in tall. This time someone was prepared to listen. An officer who knew about Ed Kemper sent a fleet of squad cars with their sirens blaring to go and pick up the man from the telephone booth.
Ed’s confession to the police was long, articulate and detailed – after all he had spent many many hours fantasizing about each and every minute of his killings. The details were horrendous even down to the slaying of his mother and her friend. He confessed to eight murders and gave details of cannibalism. The more Kemper revealed to the police the more and more relaxed he became, he seemed to be basking in the attention.
He was charged on eight counts of first degree murder on October 25, 1973 and on November 8 he was found guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in California Medical Facility in Vacaville. Although his crimes were serious enough to receive the death penalty this was not available at the time in California.
When Ed was asked what he thought would be a fitting punishment for his crimes, he replied, ‘Death by Torture’. Edmund Emil Kemper was definitely a misfit from the moment he was born.
The Team From Hell
Henry Lucas was to meet his lover and friend Ottis Toole in a soup kitchen in Florida and they were soon to become the ‘Team from Hell’
Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were indeed the team from hell. No one can be sure how many people they actually killed – it has been said as many as 600 – but whatever the number they certainly left a wake of destruction wherever they went. Toole openly admitted to being a cannibal whereas Lucas abstained because he said ‘he didn’t like the taste’.
Henry Lee Lucas was the epitome of a child who would grow up to be a killer. Born on August 23, 1936 in the back woods of Virginia, he lived with his family in a two-room lo
g cabin with dirt floors. He had eight brothers and sisters who were all either placed in institutions, looked after by relatives or put into foster care, but for some reason Henry stayed at home with his parents. His mother, Viola appears to have hated Henry right from the start and would seize every moment to make his life a living hell. He was constantly subjected to abuse and was thoroughly mistreated. He was undernourished, uneducated and forced to watch his mother, Viola, carrying out the tricks of her trade as a prostitute. His father was an alcoholic and was known by the name of ‘No Legs’ due to an unfortunate incident involving a train earlier in his life. His father eventually committed suicide to escape the repeated humiliation he received at the hands of his wife.
Once, when little Henry was playing with one of his brothers with a knife he accidentally sliced his own eye. His uncaring mother, probably preoccupied in another direction, declined from taking the poor lad to a doctor and his eye simply withered away and eventually had to be removed and replaced with prosthetic glass. He was beaten so badly by his mother on one occasion that it left him in a semi-conscious state for three days. Viola’s boyfriend at the time, ‘Uncle Bernie’, eventually showed some compassion for the lad and took him to the local hospital where he received treatment. Finally, as if all this was not enough for a young boy, his mother often sent him to school barefoot, wearing a dress and with curlers in his hair. Obviously he became the subject of ridicule and dropped out by fifth grade, which left him semi-literate for the remainder of his life. Henry was lonely and when he turned to animals to receive the affection he craved, his mother would simply kill the animal and consequently Henry grew up thinking that life – just like sex – was cheap.