Since both psychiatrists recommended the sealing of the records so that Kemper could get on with his life, on November 29, 1972, they were officially sealed.
* * *
After killing the Asian dancer, Kemper was able to keep a lid on his murderous impulses for the several months before and just after his juvenile records were sealed. With the turn of the new year, however, the urge to kill resurfaced. He returned the guns that he had borrowed from his friends and sought one of his own. Now that his records were sealed, he had a legal right to own a gun. He drove to the town where he had worked at the food factory and purchased a .22 pistol with a long barrel and some hollow-point ammunition that exploded on impact; that same afternoon, in daylight, he picked up another hitchhiker, a rather heavy young girl. He told her he wanted to talk, and she seemed sympathetic. Nonetheless, he killed her with a single bullet from his new gun, then drove to his mother’s home. She wasn’t there, so Kemper took the body from the car and stashed it in his bedroom closet. After his mother left for work the next morning, he dismembered it. Part of the reason for severing the head was to remove the spent bullet from it; that way, there would be no ballistic evidence to connect him with the crime. He threw the body parts over a remote cliff into the sea. Some of them were found within a few days. The head he buried underneath his mother’s window.
By this time, since Kemper and Herbert Mullin were both killing people in the area, many people had become frightened, and security forces were on alert to look for suspicious characters.
Less than a month after killing the heavy girl, and after a particularly heated argument with his mother, in February 1973, Kemper went onto the UCSC campus, picked up two young women, and shot them both before reaching the perimeter of the campus. The students were not quite dead, and one was groaning audibly when Kemper pulled up to the gates where two armed young rookie guards were manning the post. The men looked right into the car but either did not see the dying women or did not understand what they were viewing in the dark interior of the car. Though the exterior of the car was a drab tan, the interior was black. The woman in the front seat, dressed in black, was partially tumbled over into the wheel well, and the one in the back was covered by a blanket that Kemper had purposefully kept in the car for just such an occasion. The guards paid more attention to the campus sticker on the window than to the moaning bundles in the car, and they let Kemper pass. For Ed, it was a moment of triumph.
These bodies, too, he handled boldly when his mother was nearby, seemingly excited by the possibility that she might discover him doing it. He decapitated them in the trunk of the car while it sat in her driveway and took the heads into the house so he could look at them in his bedroom. Masturbation would be a part of this ghastly ritual. He returned the heads to the car in the morning, and kept all the parts in the car for the next day and more, driving the car to the home of some friends, where he had dinner. Later in the evening, he dumped the parts in various places, again taking care to remove the bullets from the heads.
There was a bullet hole in the car, however, and too much blood in the trunk for him to wash away completely, and other such telltale evidence. Kemper seemed aware of these matters, and was a bit skittish. In early April, he bought another gun, a .44 pistol. When a sheriff received the record of the sale of the weapon, he remembered something about Kemper’s early conviction, and decided to make a check on it. Finding the record sealed, he nevertheless drove to Kemper’s apartment and asked him for the pistol; he would hold it until a court decided whether it was legal for Kemper to own a weapon. Kemper opened the trunk of his car and, without an argument, gave the pistol to the sheriff. The sheriff was satisfied with that and did not search the car thoroughly—and so did not find the .22 murder weapon that was concealed under a seat.
After the sheriff left, however, Kemper started playing what-if games in his mind. What if the sheriff had seen traces of blood or hair in the trunk? What if the sheriff found out about the .22 pistol as he had learned about the .44? What if the authorities came back and searched his car, his apartment, his mother’s home? What if there was now a tail on him? Kemper later told the police it was then that he decided he must kill his mother and surrender.
Two weeks after the sheriff picked up the .44, on Good Friday, April 20, 1973, Kemper went to his mother’s home. She arrived later, after a faculty meeting, and they had a brief conversation in which his mother was, as usual, sarcastic to him. Once she had fallen asleep, at five in the morning, Kemper took a claw hammer from the kitchen and, as he had done so often in his imagination, went into her bedroom while she slept. This time, he actually brought the hammer down with considerable force on her right temple, then slashed her throat with his pocketknife. Blood was still gushing from her as he decided to sever the head as he had done with his other victims. Another slice removed her larynx, and he threw this part into the disposal unit in the kitchen sink. When the disposal was unable to digest the larynx and spewed it back out, Kemper thought this was poetic justice. He wrapped the body in the bloody sheets and stashed it in the closet.
Later in the morning, he went to the bar that was the police hangout, and to the gun shop, and talked calmly to some friends, even trying to borrow a gun from one of them, who refused. That afternoon, however, he reasoned that since this was a holiday weekend, family members or one of his mother’s close friends who also worked at the university might well appear at the house and discover the body. Taking the initiative, he invited his mother’s associate Sara Hallett to help him plan a surprise party for her, and when she arrived, he snapped her neck. He left her body on his own bed and spent the night on his mother’s. Easter Sunday morning, he stuffed the friend’s body in another closet, then piled his guns, the two women’s credit cards, and money into the friend’s car, and took off on his final journey.
Once in custody, he was determined to give the police the evidence they needed to convict him. He was convinced that they would never have found it on their own, and that if he had simply confessed and not led them point by point to physical evidence, a smart lawyer might later be able to discount the confession and enable Kemper to escape conviction. And so, in addition to confessing, he told police just where to find the bodies in his mother’s home, and, even before the public was made aware of these killings, led police to the dump and burial sites of several of the other victims; still more evidence from the dead girls—a scarf, a textbook, and so on—was found in his mother’s home, his apartment, and his car. Part of this evidence was obtained by the police by smart interrogation: They kept complimenting Kemper on his intellect, his powers of memory, his wonderful recall of detail, until he led them to such items as a blood-soaked blanket, with a contemptuous remark such as, “Here’s another piece of evidence for your case.”
* * *
Awaiting trial, Kemper attempted twice to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, and was soon transferred to a solitary cell. The trial itself was rather short. The evidence was there, and it showed clear premeditation. All the psychiatrists called to testify said that Kemper had clearly been sane when he had committed the crimes. During the trial, Kemper was asked why he had killed the hitchhikers. “That was the only way they could be mine,” he said, and added, “I had their spirits. I still have them.” Kemper was soon convicted of seven murders and sentenced to death. Asked what he thought was the appropriate punishment for his crimes, he replied, “Torture.”
He got neither death or active torture; rather, he was put into prison, for although California had embraced the death penalty in principle, no one was being executed in that state at that time. In prison, Kemper calmed down and became a well-behaved inmate, accepted into the prison population, gradually given increasing amounts of privileges, if not freedom, within the institution.
In our interviews, which began five years after his crimes, Kemper concentrated at first on the facts of the murders, in the process telling me a number of things that were of interest to law enforcement; f
or example, that he had rather consciously tried to have his car appear as if it was a police vehicle, and that he had broken teeth away from the heads of his victims in order to foil attempts at identification. He spoke of the killings in a matter-of-fact way, not to shock, but as if he had been over the territory a million times in his mind and saw it as something unconnected to his everyday self. No one other than a pathologist, he contended, knew more about dead bodies than he did; for instance, he was still amused that one of the medical examiners who had made a report about one of his victims hadn’t understood that he had cut her Achilles tendons not because of some strange murderous ritual but to prevent further rigor mortis and to aid in his sexual acts with the body.
He spoke of his childhood, too, not in a way that would allow him to use it to avoid responsibility for the killings, but with a sense of wonderment at what he had experienced. It had not been until his years at Atascadero that he had first begun to realize that the climate in his mother’s orbit was abnormal. He was really just recovering when he had been released by the California Youth Authority and plunged back into the cauldron. I asked Kemper whether he had committed any sexual acts with his mother’s body after he killed her, and he glared at me and said that he had “humiliated her corpse.” He understood that even though he had killed the source of his problems, he was not relieved of them, and would never be fit for life in the outside world again. Equally important, he told me that his fantasies drove these killings, that as time went on, during the months that he was murdering, the fantasies became more and more intricate as well as intense. Nonetheless, in the course of the murders, there was always some detail that didn’t happen as planned, or that he felt could have been more perfect. That imperfection pushed him to kill the next time. The actual act of murder, Kemper concluded, was never as good as the fantasy, and never would be.
* * *
In 1988, during the satellite broadcast, Kemper and Gacy behaved pretty much as I expected they would. Kemper was totally candid about his crimes, admitting everything, going into gory detail at times, and giving quite a bit of psychological insight into the role that fantasy had played in his murders. His perspective was revelatory to many in the audience. In some ways, Kemper’s detailed memories and explanations of his acts were a demonstration of the need to keep even such heinous murderers alive. I believe they should not be executed but, rather, imprisoned and counseled so we can learn from them what we may do to prevent other would-be murderers from following their paths. Executions of such men do not serve any socially useful purpose. They do not deter other would-be serial killers, who are so caught up in their own fantasies that the possibility of being caught and killed themselves does not sway them from their crimes. And actually, executions don’t even save the state money, because to kill a prisoner today requires millions of dollars in legal expenses. It’s more useful to keep a man such as Ed Kemper alive, so we can study him.
John Gacy used his ninety minutes to try to persuade the watching audience of law-enforcement officials that he was innocent of the crimes for which he had been convicted, and that they, as police experts, should pursue the loose ends and lost witnesses and make it their business to overturn his conviction and see to it that he was set free. An appeal is actually in process for Gacy, and a ruling is expected shortly. Some audience members later were annoyed at me for not verbally pinning Gacy to the wall during that broadcast, for not forcing him to admit his crimes to our forum. I tried to explain that this would have served no real purpose, and that my goal had been to let each of these murderers display his personality for the audience, so that, for instance, they could see for themselves Gacy’s perspective, the way he now denied everything, the extent of his brilliance at manipulation. Some still didn’t comprehend the point, but I guess that’s why we need to have more seminars and continuing education about homicide and the minds of multiple murderers.
12
BROADER HORIZONS
From the time of the formation of the BSU to the present, publicity has been a two-edged sword for those of us in the unit, and I’ve always had it swirling around me. The uproar began back in the era when I was becoming the senior profiler, taking over from Teten and Mullany. I was training hostage negotiators in Chicago. Patricia Leeds, a veteran police-beat reporter in Chicago, was attending the classes in preparation for writing an article on hostage negotiation. We talked, and I mentioned my interest in William Heirens, whose case she knew very well. She soon wanted to visit Quantico and prepare an article about profiling and violent crime. I checked with my superior at Quantico, and with the public-affairs division, and got a sort of half-approval for her to come down and interview me and others in the BSU for such an article.
Pat arrived and spent a day, and at the end of it wanted to stay for a second day. One prerogative that agents at Quantico have is to allow guests to stay overnight in special guest rooms, so I booked her into one of those. In the evening, we were chatting in the beer hall with several Chicago police officers who were at Quantico for a three-month period. It was late, and I wanted to go home, so I asked the Chicago men if they would escort Pat back to her room when they were finished with their beers and conversation. As fate—or the sort of luck I seem to attract—would have it, Pat was spotted in the beer hall, without her agent escort, by someone who knew her. He was John Otto, recently elevated to deputy director of the Bureau, and who had formerly been the SAC of the Chicago office. Otto was passing through in the company of a covey of other Bureau big shots, including Director Webster and Ken Joseph, then in charge at Quantico. Joseph was annoyed because a guest was loose at the Academy and had no agent escort.
In the morning, Joseph confronted the Academy’s public-affairs officer, who claimed he didn’t know what a police reporter was doing at Quantico, nor why she had been allowed to roam around without supervision. By the time I arrived for the day, Joseph was in a state of panic. Who knew what this demon reporter might write about Quantico! What if she wrote about police officers drinking beer on FBI property? About FBI agents whose white shirts were not properly starched? Clearly, there was some reason to believe that J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost really did haunt the halls at Quantico.
“Let’s not play what-if games,” I told Joseph as I sat in his office and listened to this speculation. This was a friendly reporter, engaged in research for what I was certain was going to a positive article. Moreover, I had checked with my superior and with public affairs before allowing her to come to Quantico. If the article came out and it was negative, I said, there would be plenty of reason and time to rake me over the coals; until that eventuality, however, I considered his panic to be unwarranted. As a good friend, Ken Joseph gave way to my view on this matter, but as I left his office, I knew I owed him a favor.
Pat Leeds’s front page article in the Chicago Tribune on February 15, 1980, was entitled “They Study the Strangest of Slayings,” with the subhead “Little-Known FBI Unit Profiles Bizarre Killers.” It was as accurate and as flattering as anybody could have wished, and I heard no more paranoid rumblings about unescorted reporters at the Academy. The article was picked up by the wire services and reprinted in many other newspapers, and it led to a flood of other articles, including important ones in The New York Times, People, and Psychology Today, just to name a few, as well as invitations to me to appear on various television and radio programs. Interest was high because the BSU was unique in law enforcement at the time. Both Los Angeles and New York City had psychologists working for their police departments, but these men did not regularly profile criminals, as we were doing.
Another part of outreach that I pioneered—much more deliberately than the publicity effort—was to the psychiatric and mental-health communities. My outreach to psychiatry was part of an overall thrust of mine to go beyond the bounds of what had traditionally been the purview of the FBI, and to link up with mental-health professionals. I started doing so in the mid-1970s, and have kept it up since then. I certainly felt I could
learn something from psychiatrists, psychologists, and other professionals involved in mental health, forensic sciences, prison work, and the like, and many of the mental-health associations, in particular, were delighted to have a participant from the FBI at their gatherings. Invariably, when I appeared on a program as a representative of the FBI, there was a full house. I found that the difference between presenting information about our work to a law-enforcement audience and to a room full of psychiatrists was that the police personnel generally sat, watched, and listened, often with arms folded, almost challenging me to tell them something they didn’t already know, while the psychiatrists (perhaps because of their many years of attending classes) invariably took copious notes.
An early, key incident in my outreach to psychiatry happened when at a psychiatric conference I presented the case of Monte Rissell. This case had fascinated me since I first learned about it, principally because had I profiled the unknown rapist and murderer at the time of the crimes, I would have guessed wrong. The number and magnitude of his crimes suggested to me a man in his late twenties or early thirties; if I’d said or written that to the Alexandria, Virginia, police when Rissell was still at large, they would have pursued the wrong sort of suspect. Given what I had come to know of the minds of murderers, I would have believed it improbable that someone still in his teens had been capable of committing a dozen rapes, of which in the last five the victims were also murdered. But that’s what Rissell had done.
As a researcher, I had learned to look long and hard at information that challenges preconceptions, including the data about Monte Rissell. Rissell’s problems had begun at the same young age as those of many of the offenders sketched earlier in this book, and he had a similar dysfunctional family, but everything else about him seemed to have been accelerated. He began raping women when he was fourteen; convicted, he was sent to a psychiatric facility in Florida, and committed five more rapes during the time he was technically in the charge of that facility: one while on vacation, another during a runaway episode, and others while he was actually living in the institution—in the facility’s parking lot, at a public swimming pool, and the like.
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