Edmund Kemper

What the record shows

Edmund Emil Kemper III is a California serial killer convicted by a Santa Cruz County jury in November 1973 of eight counts of first-degree murder. Between May 1972 and April 1973, while living with his mother in Aptos, he killed six young women, most of them hitchhiking college students, then his mother and her closest friend. According to Lookout Santa Cruz and the Wikipedia article, the jury rejected his insanity plea and found him guilty on all eight counts; he received eight concurrent life sentences and has been held since at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. He had earlier killed his paternal grandparents in 1964, at age 15, a case handled through the juvenile and state hospital system rather than by criminal conviction.

The adult killings began on May 7, 1972, when Kemper picked up two 18-year-old Fresno State students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, hitchhiking in Berkeley, and killed them, according to the Wikipedia article and Biography.com. On September 14, 1972, he killed 15-year-old Aiko Koo after picking her up on her way to a dance class. On January 7, 1973, he shot 18-year-old Cabrillo College student Cynthia Schall. On February 5, 1973, he picked up Rosalind Thorpe, 23, and Alice Liu, 20, on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus and shot them. The bodies were dismembered and left in the Santa Cruz mountains and on beaches, UPI reported in 1985, and the unsolved killings earned him the press nickname "the Co-ed Killer."

On the weekend of April 20 to 21, 1973, Kemper killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, 52, at their home with a hammer and a knife, according to UPI, then invited her friend Sara "Sally" Hallett, 59, to the house and strangled her. He drove east and, from Pueblo, Colorado, telephoned Santa Cruz police to confess. According to the Wikipedia article, officers did not at first take the call seriously; he called again, spoke to an officer he knew, and waited at the phone booth to be arrested. Investigators seized his car on April 27, 1973, according to a photo caption published by KRON4, and his statements led police to evidence.

Kemper was indicted on eight counts of first-degree murder on May 7, 1973, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Trial began on October 23, 1973, and he testified on November 1. Three court-appointed psychiatrists found him sane, Newsweek and UPI reported. On November 8, 1973, after about five hours of deliberation, the jury found him sane and guilty on all eight counts. He asked for the death penalty, but California then had a moratorium on capital punishment, so the court imposed concurrent terms of seven years to life on each count, according to the Wikipedia article.

Kemper first became eligible for parole in 1979. According to UPI and Newsweek, the Board of Parole Hearings denied release in 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982, and again in 1988, 1991, 1994, 2007 and 2017; he waived hearings in 1985, 1997, 2002 and 2012. In July 2024 a three-member panel denied parole for seven more years at a hearing Kemper declined to attend. Lookout Santa Cruz reported that District Attorney Jeff Rosell told the panel Kemper "is still dangerous" and untreated, and that an April 2024 psychiatric evaluation rated him a high risk to reoffend; the board also cited a 2022 incident in which he groped a prison staff member. Kemper, then 75, used a wheelchair and had diabetes, heart disease and a prior stroke. He is next eligible in 2031.

Prison officials described his record as spotless, UPI reported in 1985. Newsweek reported that he scheduled appointments for other inmates, made ceramics and narrated audiobooks for the visually impaired until retiring from those roles after a stroke in 2015.

Kemper was born on December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California. On August 27, 1964, at 15, he shot and killed his grandmother, Maude Kemper, and grandfather, Edmund Kemper Sr., at their ranch near North Fork, according to the Wikipedia article and Biography.com. Court psychiatrists diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and he was committed to Atascadero State Hospital. He was released to his mother's care on December 18, 1969, his 21st birthday, and moved to Santa Cruz County.