Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  ‘At first, I picked up girls just to talk to them, just to try to get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship,’ he said. Then he began to have sex fantasies about the girls he picked up hitchhiking, but feared being caught and convicted as a rapist. The bloodlust he had since childhood provided the solution. ‘I decided to mix the two,’ he said, ‘and have a situation of rape and murder and no witnesses and no prosecution.’

  He went about his campaign of sexual assault and homicide methodically. Knowing that he was most likely to be spotted when he was picking up the girls, he tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, despite his size. He learned to spot potential victims a long way off so that he did not have to turn back or make any manoeuvres that drew attention to his car.

  Once he had satisfied his lust and murdered the victim, he would dispose of the body in a remote place, hundreds of miles from where he was living. His work on the road gang introduced him to some of the wilder parts of the state and the wilderness techniques he had learned as a Boy Scout would help him conceal the bodies.

  He already knew that there were more hitch-hikers on the roads at weekends and that young women were more likely to get into his car when it was raining. He also decided that he would never go out when excited or angry. It was key that his crimes were well planned and committed when he was in control. And he resolved not to keep anything – a weapon or any of the victims’ personal possessions – that might tie him to the crime. Before long, he broke every one of these rules but the police still had no clue to his identity until he gave himself up.

  He started buying knives and borrowed a 9mm Browning automatic pistol from a friend. It was now time to put his plans into action.

  Kemper’s first two victims were 18-year-old Fresno State college co-eds, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, whom he picked up in Berkeley. ‘I had full intentions of killing them,’ he said.

  On the afternoon of 7 May 1972, the two girls were hitch-hiking to visit friends in Stanford University, no more than an hour’s drive away. The pair got in the back seat and Kemper struck up a conversation. It did not take long for him to figure out that they did not know where they were going. Instead of driving south towards Stanford, he headed inland on the freeways, then pulled off onto a side road.

  When the girls asked him what he was doing, he pulled the borrowed pistol from under the seat. He said that they were going back to his apartment. One of them would have to ride in the front seat with him, where he could keep an eye on her. The other would have to get in the trunk.

  He pulled a pair of handcuffs from under the driver’s seat and cuffed Mary Ann’s hands behind her back. Anita was then taken to the trunk at gunpoint.

  But he was not taking them back to his apartment. In the front seat, he put a plastic bag over Mary Ann’s head and wound a cord around her neck. Fighting for her life, she bit through the bag and managed to catch the cord in her mouth. Killing her was not as easy as he thought it would be.

  He pulled out a knife and began stabbing her. She did her best to dodge the blows, all the time pleading for her life. But Kemper just grabbed hold of her face and slit her throat.

  Then he went round to the trunk, opened it and told the terrified girl that he had hit Mary Ann because she had struggled and he needed her help. As Anita climbed out of the trunk, he lunged at her with another knife. He kept stabbing until she fell back dead into the trunk. Then he tossed the knife in after her and closed the boot.

  He was unapologetic and only regretted that it was all over so quickly. ‘I would loved to have raped them, but not having any experience at all …’ he said.

  He drove back to his apartment in Alameda. His flatmate was out. Wrapping the two girls’ bodies in blankets, he carried them up to his room where he began dismembering them, taking Polaroid photographs of their naked bodies and the grisly process of cutting them up. Curiously, he confessed to having feelings of tenderness towards Mary Ann Pesce, even as he butchered her. ‘I was really quite struck by her personality and her looks and there was just almost a reverence there,’ he said.

  He had oral sex with her severed head. Then he destroyed the girls’ meagre possessions and carried them and the body parts back out to the car. Anita Luchessa’s remains were thrown out into the brush on a hillside. Mary Ann Pesce’s body parts were buried in a redwood grove on a mountain highway. He kept their decapitated heads for some time, then threw them down a ravine on one of his forays into the hills.

  Again, for Kemper, Mary Ann Pesce was special and he returned to the redwood grove. ‘Sometimes, afterward, I visited there … to be near her … because I loved her and wanted her,’ he said. After his arrest, he took investigators to the grave where he had buried her.

  Meanwhile, the girls went on California’s burgeoning missing-persons list until, months later, Mary Ann Pesce’s head was found by hikers and she was identified from dental records. But the trail of the killer had gone cold. Neither Anita Luchessa’s head nor her body were ever found.

  For the time being, Kemper’s lust for killing was satisfied. He had the girls’ addresses from the contents of their handbags and liked to drive past their houses, imagining the grief felt by their families within.

  In a motorcycle accident, he fractured his arm and had to have a metal plate inserted. During his enforced lay-off from work, he spent his time getting his juvenile record deleted. Having to admit to murder on application forms made it difficult to get jobs and impossible to buy a gun.

  On 14 September 1972, 15-year-old Aiko Koo was waiting for the bus in University Avenue in Berkeley. She was tiny and slender, a talented dancer in both ballet and classical Korean styles. Fearing that she might be late for her dance class in San Francisco she accepted a lift from a seemingly helpful stranger. A witness said the driver who picked her up was a tall Caucasian male with light or medium brown hair driving a cream or tan-coloured sedan.

  Once in the car, Kemper took the hapless young girl on a bewildering tour of San Francisco’s freeways, then pulled a gun on her – this time a .357 Magnum. He told her he was not going to hurt her, but he was suicidal and needed someone to talk to. Then he drove her into the mountains. There he taped her mouth shut and pinched her nostrils until she suffocated. Once she was dead, he raped her inert body and put it in the trunk of the car.

  A few miles away, he stopped at a country bar for a few beers. Outside the bar, he opened the trunk to make sure she was dead. ‘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. He felt an exhilaration at the sight of the body. ‘I just wanted the exaltation over the party. In other words, winning over death,’ he said. ‘They were dead and I was alive. That was the victory in my case.’

  He drove to see his mother, then took Aiko’s body back to his apartment to dismember it. The following day, he drove back to Santa Cruz County where he disposed of the body parts in the mountains – though for the next few days he kept Aiko’s head in the trunk of his car.

  For Kemper, the decapitation was the best bit. ‘I remember it was very exciting,’ he said. ‘There was actually a sexual thrill … It was kind of an exalted, triumphant type thing, 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.’

  Aiko Koo’s head was still in the trunk of his car when he drove to Fresno for a meeting with a couple of court psychiatrists. They were so pleased with his progress that they recommended his juvenile record be sealed. In November, a court confirmed this judgement. Meanwhile, Aiko Koo had been written off by the police as another runaway. Her head was buried along with the body near a religious camp in the Sierra.

  Kemper’s arm had still not healed and he was running out of money. In December, he moved back to his mother’s house in Aptos and returned to the Jury Room to drink with the cops. There, he got the additional
thrill of hearing them discuss the missing girls.

  On 8 January 1973, Kemper bought a gun, a .22 automatic. There was no problem as he now had a clean record. ‘I went bananas after I got that .22,’ he said.

  That evening he drove up to the Santa Cruz campus on the hill above the town. His mother had given him an employee’s sticker so that he could drive on and off the campus without problem. It was raining and there was no shortage of girls looking for lifts down to the town.

  He picked up two or three students that night but, concerned that they might have been seen getting into his car, he took them where they wanted to go. He had given up the hunt for that night and was on his way home when he saw 19-year-old Cindy Schall hitching a ride in the town itself. She was a trainee teacher who had been babysitting and was now on her way back to Cabrillo Community College. On the way, Kemper pulled out his gun and told her the same story he had told Aiko.

  He drove her out to the small town of Freedom in the hills. There he stopped and ordered her at gunpoint to get into the trunk of the car. As she got in, he shot her in the head. She died instantly.

  His mother was out for the evening, so Kemper took her body home and hid it in a cupboard in his bedroom. Cindy’s blood had splashed on the plaster cast on his arm. He covered it with shoe whitener and settled down in front of the TV until his mother came home.

  In the morning, when his mother had gone to work, he got out Cindy’s corpse and sexually assaulted it. Then he took it into the bathroom where he cut it up. He put the head back in the cupboard. The rest of the body was put into plastic sacks; these were loaded into the car. Then he drove down to Monterrey where he threw the sacks over a cliff into the sea.

  The next day, one of the bags washed ashore. It was spotted by a Highway Patrolman; an arm was sticking out of it. Enough of her body was recovered for her to be identified.

  The off-duty cops in the Jury Room discussed the case, little suspecting that their friend Ed was the culprit. Happy to buy them drinks, Kemper got an informal briefing about the progress of the investigation.

  Hearing that some of Cindy Schall’s remains had been found, he panicked. Hanging around with policemen, he had learnt about ballistics and the identification of bullets. As he had used his own gun, he dug the bullet out of Cindy’s head and buried the head in a flowerbed in the back garden, facing towards the house. He even remarked to his mother, casually, ‘People really look up to you around here’. Even more weirdly, he admitted later, ‘Sometimes at night, I talked to her, saying love things, the way you do to a girlfriend or wife.’

  Less than a month later, on 5 February, Kemper had another violent row with his mother. He stormed out, saying that he was going to a movie. Instead, he drove back to the Santa Cruz campus with murderous intent. ‘My mother and I had had a real tiff,’ he said. ‘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. I said, “The first girl that’s halfway decent that I pick up, I’m gonna blow her brains out.”’

  It was another wet night, so there were plenty of possibilities. He picked up Rosalind Thorpe as she came out of a lecture and decided that the 24-year-old linguistics student would make an ideal victim. ‘Circumstances were perfect,’ he said later. ‘Nobody else was around, the guard didn’t notice me coming in, nothing would look unusual going out, and she was not the least bit suspecting.’

  As he drove off the campus, Kemper spotted another girl hitching a ride. He stopped and Rosalind got out so that 23-year-old Alice Liu could get into the back seat. Rosalind got back in the front seat and he drove off with the two girls.

  The road from the university down to the town of Santa Cruz descends in a series of sweeping curves with views over the ocean and the city lights below. Kemper slowed to walking pace, reached down, pulled out his gun and shot Rosalind in the head. She slumped forward against her seatbelt.

  Alice was now trapped in the back. She dodged as he tried to shoot her. The first two bullets missed as he was shooting with his right hand. He was left-handed, but his left arm was in a cast. The third bullet hit Alice in the temple. She lay still as he covered her with a blanket and, with Rosalind leaning against his shoulder, he passed through the security check at the edge of the campus. For Kemper, it was the ultimate thrill to get away with his ghastly crimes right under the nose of the law.

  He drove out of town and stopped in a quiet road, where he stashed the bodies in the boot. Driving home, he ate dinner and waited for his mother to go to bed. Then he went out to the car and opened the trunk. There, in the street, he cut off their heads with a hunting knife and removed the bullets. He carried Liu’s headless body into the house and raped it on the floor. Then he returned it to the car, chopping the hands off the corpses as an afterthought.

  Kemper did not bother to cut up the corpses any further − the thrill had gone. But he still had to get rid of them. He decided to drive up to the San Francisco area and dump them there. When they were found, he thought the police would assume that they had been killed by a local man.

  He had a friend who lived in northern California and went to visit him. After midnight, he dumped his victims’ bodies in Eden Canyon. Then he drove on to the coast and threw the girls’ heads and hands over a cliff called Devil’s Slide.

  The bodies were found a week later. When they were identified, the murders were linked to that of Cindy Schall and Mary Guilfoyle, another student from Cabrillo College whose body had been found that January. She had been the victim of another serial killer named Herbert Mullin, who was doing the rounds in California at the time. By then, Mullin had killed 13.

  From his police friends, Kemper knew the hunt was on. He became a bundle of nerves and developed stomach ulcers. It was time, he decided, to carry out one last bloody act. He fantasised about murdering everyone on the block as ‘a demonstration to the authorities,’ he said later, ‘that he was not a man to be trifled with.’ He would sneak around at night and kill as many people as possible before he was stopped.

  There was one problem with this − mass murderers who go about their business that way end up getting cornered, then are either shot down by the authorities or kill themselves. He did not want to die. Then his thoughts turned to his mother. How could she cope with knowing that he had killed all those girls? It was a weapon he could use against her.

  ‘There were times when she was bitching and yelling at me,’ he said, ‘that I felt like retaliating and walking over to the telephone in her presence and calling the police, to say, “Hello … I’m the Co-ed Killer,” just to lay it on her.’

  In the end, he said he killed his mother to spare her the suffering and shame that knowledge of his crimes would bring. In his view, it was an act of mercy.

  In the week before Easter, he went back to see his old flatmate in the apartment in Alameda and put in some time at his old job. Finishing work on Good Friday, 20 April, he drove back to Aptos. His mother had gone out after work so, alone, he sat drinking and watching TV. At midnight he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Each time he woke, he padded along to his mother’s room to see if she had come home.

  She eventually turned up at 4.00am. They talked briefly, then he went back to bed. He lay there until 5.00am, when he was sure she would be asleep. Then he walked quietly back to her bedroom carrying a hammer and a penknife. For a while, he watched her sleeping. Then he raised the hammer and brought it down on her head with all the force he could muster. She did not stir, but she was still breathing. He turned her over on to her back and slit her throat. Then he cut her head off and raped her headless corpse. The final bloody act was to cut out her larynx and shove it down the garbage disposal unit.

  ‘It seemed appropriate,’ he said, ‘as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.’

  He propped her severed head up on the mantelpiece and screamed at it for an hour. Then he threw darts at it and, finally, smashed her face in.

  The d
eed was done, but Kemper did not feel the usual sense of relief he felt after he had killed. He felt terrible. Only then did it dawn on him that her workmates were going to start asking questions when she did not turn up to work after the Easter holiday.

  He decided to tell her friends and colleagues that she had gone away. It would make this more plausible, he thought, if one of her friends had gone with her and both disappeared at the same time. So he phoned Sally Hallett, a woman in her late fifties who worked with his mother at the university and was fairly friendly with her. He told Mrs Hallett that he was arranging a surprise dinner for his mother to celebrate his return to work and invited her over.

  When she arrived, he overpowered her. ‘I came up behind her and crooked my arm around her neck,’ he said. ‘I squeezed and just lifted her off the floor. She just hung there and, for a moment, I didn’t realise 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.’ He then cut off her head and deposited her body in bed. Afterwards, he went to the Jury Room for a drink. Returning, he went to sleep in his mother’s bed.

  Waking on Easter Sunday, he decided that there was nothing left to do but make a run for it. He had, after all, broken a number of his own rules. He had killed when angry and had kept the weapon and some of his victims’ possessions, even some of their body parts. Now he had killed two people who could be directly connected to him.

  By then, he had built up a considerable arsenal. He loaded this into the trunk of his Ford Galaxie before heading off eastwards. America was a big country and he was sure he could get lost in it. Keeping himself awake with Coca-Cola and caffeine tablets, he drove on through Sunday night and Monday.

  As he drove, he listened to the radio, expecting to hear news of the discovery of the bodies of his mother and Mrs Hallett. There was none and he did not know whether to be please or disappointed. By midnight on 23 April, he was over the Rocky Mountains. As fatigue kicked in, his mood swung wildly from elation to despair. Desperation began to creep in. Even America was not big enough to escape from what he had done.