Edmund Kemper was a small serial killer in the 1970s, also known as the “co-ed killer” or the “coed Butcher.” Kemper got his nickname because six out of his 10 victims were coed students at Fresno State College.
Kemper was born on December 18th, 1948, and is still alive to this day. When Kemper was young his parents got divorced and he moved in with his mother and his two sisters (Allyn Lee Kemper and Susan Hughey Kemper), where he and his alcoholic mother had a strained relationship and he often blamed her for all his problems. Kemper showed many signs of trouble from his childhood like having fantasies of killing his mother, cutting off the heads of his sisters’ dolls, and killing both of their family cats, one at age 10 which he buried alive, and the second one at age 13 which he killed with a knife.
Kempers later went to live with his grandparents who were his first victims, Maude M. Hughey Kemper and Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. On August 27th, 1964, he and his grandmother got into an argument because he hated it there and he ended up shooting her in the kitchen. He explained he shot her because he “wanted to know how it felt like.” Later when his grandfather got home, he shot him and hid the body. He then said he shot his grandfather because he didn’t want him to find out he shot his wife. He had some tests done after he was caught and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was incarcerated at Atascadero state hospital. In the summer of 1969, he was released at the age of 21.
Kemper’s victims who got him his nickname are Mary Anne Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cindy Shall, Rosalind Thorpe, and Alice Liu, all co-ed students. He started by picking up female hitchhikers and letting them go but when his first two victims got into his car they did not make it out. Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa were hitchhiking and explained that he stabbed and strangled Pesce before then also stabbing Luchessa. He brought the bodies back to his apartment and cut off their hands and heads. Luchessa’s remains were never identified but in the woods near Santa Cruz, there was a female’s head which was later identified as Pesce. Kemper continued to act on his murderous impulses toward the other victims.
In April 1973, Kemper murdered his mother, Clarnell Strandberg. He walked into his mother’s room in the middle of the night and bludgeoned his mother with a claw hammer. When she was dead, he cut off her head and “humiliated” her corpse, then placed her head on a shelf and screamed at it for hours before throwing darts at it. He disposed of her tongue and larynx in the garbage disposal. After hiding his mother’s body parts, he called his mother’s friend Sally Hallett and invited her over, and shortly after she arrived, he strangled her to death and hid her body in the closet. The next day he called the cops and confessed to his crimes.
Edmund Kemper was charged with 8 counts of first-degree murder. Kemper went to trial in October 1973 and the judge asked him what he thought his punishment should be, to which he replied he should be tortured to death. Instead, he got 8 consecutive life sentences and he is in a California medical facility in Vacaville and still alive to this day.
