Whoever Fights Monsters

by Robert K. Ressler

  * * *

  In late 1972, Santa Cruz, California, seemed like the murder capital of the United States. Every month, there would be the report of another grisly crime—a body found here, a hitchhiker vanished there. There were more such reports, per capita, than in any other locality in the country. Residents were conscious of the murder epidemic; many had bought guns, and security was beefed up at the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, from which several women had vanished. Later it would be understood that three multiple murderers were at work in the area at approximately the same time, John Linley Frazier, Herbert Mullin, and Edmund Emil Kemper.

  Frazier and Mullin were apprehended, but the killings continued until Easter weekend of 1973. The Tuesday afterward, at three in the morning on April 24, 1973, a call came in to the Santa Cruz police department from a public phone booth in Pueblo, California. The caller said he was Ed Kemper—a highway-department employee well known to the police because he often hung out with them in the bar near the courthouse and in the town’s gun shop. Kemper wanted to talk to a particular police lieutenant but settled for the man on duty. He wanted, he said, to confess to the killings of various coeds from the Santa Cruz campus and to the killing of his mother and a friend of his mother’s. If someone would come to Pueblo and pick him up, he’d point out where the bodies could be found.

  There was some disbelief at the Santa Cruz station; one of those on duty thought Kemper was just pulling the desk man’s leg. But Kemper responded to some questions with more intimate knowledge of the details of the coed murders than anyone other than the killer might possess. While Kemper was still on the line, the Santa Cruz department contacted the Pueblo department and asked them to pick up Kemper and hold him until a Santa Cruz man arrived. When the Pueblo department went to the phone booth, they thought at first that it was occupied by two people—Kemper, at six nine and three hundred pounds, was large enough to convey that illusion.

  Five years later, when I first talked to Kemper, his size struck me right away. I had known about it, of course, but a man that big gets your attention. He stuck out his hand, shook mine, and immediately wanted to know if in exchange for the interview I could obtain some privileges for him, and some stamps for his correspondence. I said I’d give him the stamps but couldn’t offer him anything else. Nonetheless, he was willing to talk, and had pretty good insight into his crimes, having been counseled by mental-health professionals for quite a while, and having spent part of his prison time as a clerk in the psychological section of the institution. He believed his crimes had been precipitated by his hostility toward his mother, who had been oppressive toward him, and that they had stopped when he had finally killed the source of his problems. That was quite a neat and precise explanation of a complex matter, so I asked Kemper where he thought he fit into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, then in its second edition. He said he knew the categories, had read the book, but didn’t find a description that fit him, and didn’t expect to, until psychiatry had obtained sufficient information to understand people like him. When would that be? When the DSM was in its sixth or seventh edition, he answered—and that wouldn’t happen until sometime in the next century.

  In answering in such a manner, Kemper was trying to tell me how unique he was, and was also reflecting the position of a leading psychiatrist who had spoken to him at length and written a book about him, and who thought that this sort of criminal came along about once in two hundred years. I disagree. Ed Kemper, though certainly remarkable, is not so rare a bird; there are other murderers like him; he differs from them, perhaps, in the degree of his brutality and the depth of what he endured in his childhood.

  His size had always been a problem; he had become too large too fast. He never had the opportunity to be a true child, because he was large enough so that people treated him as if he were older. He did not have friends of the same age, and those that were the same size as he were years ahead of him mentally. His size was not an insurmountable obstacle to a productive life; the ranks of professional sports are filled today with outsized men who were once outsized boys, and none of them have become multiple murderers. However, the fact of Kemper’s size was combined with the stresses of a severely dysfunctional home, one with an alcoholic and overbearing mother, an absent father, favored sisters, and a grandmother who was in many ways a worse nurturer than the mother. The mother would continually belittle Ed, tell him he was the source of her problems, and abuse him mentally in other ways. To me, the most telling event occurred when Kemper was ten: without his knowledge, his mother and sisters moved him from the second-story bedroom he had occupied down to a spooky old basement room, near the furnace, because he was too big and they considered it unhealthy for him to be around his thirteen-year-old sister or in the same bedroom as his younger sister—they considered him a sexual threat to them. This shocked Kemper and brought his attention to sexual issues; afterward, his fantasies, which had begun at an even earlier age, took a turn for the worse, now entailing bizarre sexual activity with his sisters and his mother, and the killing of these tormenters. From time to time, at night, Ed would take a knife and hammer and slip into his mother’s room and fantasize about killing her.

  The move into the basement at age ten came at around the same time as his mother’s first divorce, from Kemper’s natural father. The mother remarried and divorced twice more between the time Kemper was ten and fourteen. Each time, when the marriage was going badly, Kemper’s mother would send him out to live with his grandparents on their farm, and he came to hate that. At the same time, on the farm and in his mother’s orbit, he became familiar with firearms. One of his stepfathers was an expert and demanded that Kemper be a good shot and know about guns, safety, ammunition, and the like. As discussed earlier, the grandparents took a gun away from Kemper when he used it—as the stepfather seemed to be urging—to kill small animals. Such a confusion of messages characterized much of what Kemper had to bear.

  In 1965, at age fifteen, when his mother was in the throes of yet another marital change, Kemper was sent to the farm. He was miserable, and felt used by his grandmother and ostracized from his schoolmates. One day, Kemper came up behind his grandmother as she was typing a letter at her desk. She had decreed that he must stay around the house and help her with chores that day, when he had wanted to go out into the fields with his grandfather, whom he liked better. He shot his grandmother with a rifle, then stabbed her. Having done this, he next realized that he didn’t want his grandfather to see the gruesome sight, so he waited until his grandfather was approaching the house and then shot him, too, before he could enter the house. As if to make clear the connection between this murderous act and the source of his problems, Kemper then went into the house, called his mother at her vacation cottage, and told her that her honeymoon would have to be cut short because he had just killed her parents.

  Kemper spent the next four years in the Atascadero State Mental Hospital. During this time, he took dozens of mental tests and did well on them, possibly because he was able to find out the answers that the mental-health personnel found appropriate; later, he would let it be known that he had memorized twenty-eight of the tests and the correct answers. In 1969, the mental-health and correctional professionals at Atascadero State pronounced Kemper to be fit for return to society. He was, after all, still technically a juvenile; over the objections of a state prosecutor, he was released to a California Youth Authority Camp. The next year, at his mother’s intercession, he was paroled into her custody—this against the recommendations of the parole board and of some of the psychiatrists at Atascadero.

  Looking back, I found rather amazing this parole of Kemper into the custody of the woman who had been the source of his problems. He lived with his mother and worked as a laborer at a Green Giant canning plant. His mother continued to push the justice system to expunge Ed’s juvenile offense from his record as he neared adulthood. Though his mother had rescued him, she never stopped abusin
g Kemper mentally. “Because of you, my murderous son,” she would tell him after he returned from Atascadero, “I haven’t had sex with a man in five years, because no one wants to be with me out of fear of you.”

  In terms of sexuality, Kemper himself was still a virgin, and remained so; during the years he might have experimented with sexual contact, he was in a mental institution, and became even more fixated on himself and his fantasies. At an apartment he rented for the times when he was not staying in his mother’s house, he gazed at pornography and read detective magazines for erotic—and violent—stimulation. His murderous fantasies had not abated; in fact, they had grown more detailed and intense. Later, he would tell authorities that during his years in Atascadero, he spent a lot of time perfecting a method for disposing of bodies after he had murdered people. No psychologist had been able to elicit from Kemper this sort of information at the time he was an incarcerated teenager; my belief is that Kemper deliberately concealed the fantasy, knowing that to reveal it would surely hinder his release from custody.

  Kemper started work for the state highway department in 1971, and then put in an application to become a state trooper. Several law-enforcement agencies turned him down, evidently because of his size, but he began to hang out with the police in Santa Cruz. One friend gave him a training-school badge and a pair of handcuffs. He borrowed a gun from another acquaintance. He had a car that looked somewhat like a police cruiser, with a CB radio and a whip antenna. When he wasn’t in that car, he was on a motorcycle. His state credentials, when flashed quickly at a naïve observer, could pass for those of a state trooper. In February of 1971, while riding the motorcycle, he was hit by an automobile and severely injured his arm. He filed a civil suit because the injuries forced him to wear a cast for many months, and in December of 1971, he was awarded an out-of-court settlement of fifteen thousand dollars. The cast on his arm made it impossible for him to do the highway work, so now he had money and time on his hands.

  His mother had become a well-liked administrative aide on the campus of the Santa Cruz branch of the state university, and she obtained a car sticker for Kemper so that he could come on campus to pick her up after work. Helpful to students and faculty on campus, she seemed to take out all her frustrations on Kemper. Their relationship worsened. After one horrendous fight in the spring of 1972, Kemper slammed the doors of her home on his way out and vowed that the first good-looking girl he saw that night was going to die.

  That victim was never found, and Kemper was never indicted for that killing, about which he furnished few details. He did kill two young women on May 7, 1972, who were later identified. Both were Fresno State College students who had been to see their boyfriends at Berkeley, and were hitchhiking to Palo Alto to visit other friends at Stanford. Kemper went after these victims, he later told me, because they were “hippie girls” of the sort he professed both to admire and despise, and because there were lots of them on the roads; in other words, they were available victims who would probably not be missed for some time.

  That same summer of 1972, when Kemper picked up these two potential victims on the highway, a woman researcher named Cameron Smith was picking up female hitchhikers at Berkeley and asking them to fill out a questionnaire. According to a report of her work in Ward Damio’s book about the Santa Cruz murders, Ms. Smith discovered that 24 percent of those hitchhikers she interviewed had been raped while hitching, another 18 percent had been attacked, while 27 percent told her they had been subjected to attempted rapes or other perverse acts; only about a third had completed their rides without incident. Despite these frightening odds, young women continued to hitch rides in the Berkeley area, and so by the side of a major highway Ed Kemper was able to pick up two teenaged girls in blue jeans who were carrying overnight bags. He had his handcuffs and badge, as well as a knife and the borrowed gun. Pointing the gun at the girls, he told them he was going to rape them, and pulled off the highway onto a side road. Evidently, the women believed that they were not going to be killed, and therefore decided not to fight back at first. Kemper was able to talk one girl into climbing into the trunk, then he got in the backseat of his car, handcuffed and tied up the second girl, then stabbed and strangled her. He didn’t use the gun because bullets from it could be traced. After killing the first girl, he opened the trunk and stabbed the second to death. With the two bodies in the car, he drove to his apartment, and there he decapitated the bodies and cut off their hands.

  At the apartment, he cleaned himself up as much as possible. There was still blood on the cast; later, he’d cover this up with white shoe polish until he could convince his doctors to make a new cast for him. The amount of blood and the difficulties Kemper experienced in killing the women with a knife shook him, and he vowed that the next killings would be less messy. That night, he took off all the clothing from the dead bodies and copulated with them. Next morning, he realized that he had made at least three mistakes that could have gotten him caught, and he decided to proceed even more carefully from then on. As he had fantasized doing in Atascadero, that day he dumped and buried the bodies in several different places, the heads in a different spot from the torsos, and the hands in a third location. Anyone who found the torsos would be unable to identify the bodies, because there would be no faces or dental work, and no fingerprints. The burial sites were in a different county from the one where he had picked up the hitchhikers. He disposed of the victims’ clothing in remote canyons in the Santa Cruz mountains. The women were reported missing but were not found for several months. In August, the severed head of one girl was discovered. It yielded her identity but absolutely no clues as to how she had died.

  By that time, Kemper’s mother was lobbying hard to have Ed’s juvenile record of the murders of his grandparents sealed by the court. The district attorney objected, saying they should be kept open at least ten more years. A psychiatric examination of Kemper was scheduled for mid-September. Four days before that test, Kemper went out hunting again. He picked up an attractive woman hitchhiking with her twelve-year-old son. As he drove away, he noticed that the woman’s friend who saw her off had taken down his license plate number, so he ferried the mother and son to their destination and then returned to the outskirts of Berkeley, nearly desperate to find a victim. This indicates to me that Kemper is a highly organized offender whose intellect is firmly in control of his compulsion to kill. He saw an Asian girl, a fifteen-year-old ballet student, and picked her up.

  Told she was being kidnapped, the girl became hysterical, but when he pulled out a new gun borrowed from another friend, she quieted, and he kept her docile by saying that he had problems and wanted to talk to her about them. Stopping the car just north of Santa Cruz, he smothered her until she was unconscious, raped her, then strangled her to death with her own scarf and had intercourse with her corpse. With the body in the trunk of the car, Kemper then decided to go to visit his mother for a while; it was strangely pleasurable for him to chat with her while he had a dead girl in the car.

  An important element in the growth of a fantasy can be discerned from Kemper’s pleasure in conversing with his mother while he knew he has a dead woman in the car, just a few yards away. Here was something he would add to the ritual, to prolong the excitement of the fantasy. The reality would never become as good as the fantasy, he would later tell me, but he kept on trying to improve both his performance and the elaborate nature of the fantasy.

  Among the topics Kemper discussed with his mother that night may have been the forthcoming psychiatric examination; once the records were sealed, Kemper’s mother had told him many times, he would be free of the past. Later in the evening, in his apartment, Kemper placed the body in his bed and again had intercourse: In the morning, he spent several hours meticulously dismembering the body, flushing the fluids down the drain and afterward pouring Drano in the drain to remove any evidence from the system. Then he took to the back roads with his burden. He buried the hands in one county, the torso in another, and kept th
e head in the trunk of his car. The head was still in the trunk of the car when he went to visit one of the psychiatrists appointed by the court. That, too, gave Kemper a kick.

  Both psychiatrists who examined him in September of 1972 concluded that he had made excellent progress during his time at Atascadero. One of them wrote:

  If I were seeing this patient without having any history available or without getting the history from him, I would think that we’re dealing with a very well adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence and who was free of any psychiatric illness.… In effect, we are dealing with two different people when we talk of the 15 year old boy who committed the murder and of the 23 year old man we see before us now.… It is my opinion that he has made a very excellent response to the years of treatment and rehabilitation and I would see no psychiatric reason to consider him to be of any danger to himself or to any member of society.

  The second psychiatrist added:

  He appears to have made a good recovery from such a tragic and violent split within himself. He appears to be functioning in one piece now directing his feelings towards verbalization, work, sports and not allowing neurotic buildup within himself. Since it may allow him more freedom as an adult to develop his potential, I would consider it reasonable to have a permanent expunction of his juvenile records. I am glad he has recently “expunged” his motorcycle and I would hope that he would do that (“seal it”) permanently since this seemed more a threat to his life and health than any threat he is presently to anyone else.