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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 177. I am your Norwegian host, Samas Roseland Weyberg Thun. Last episode, we witnessed the beginning of Edmund Kemper's reign of serial murder horror.
Tonight, I take you further down his river of killings. It comes to a crescendo of blood and death before we close in on his final deeds. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Marilyn, Meow, Missy, Nick, Oakley, Operation Brownie Pockets, Reed, Richard, Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Shauna, Sputnik, The Radio, Tim, Tony, Trent, Vanessa, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine, if you will, D'Alison. A huge man, sitting alone in his apartment. He's not so much fat as he simply is big. Yes, he has a significant paunch.
But his arms and legs are muscular, and he is broad-shouldered. Most of all, he is tall. The apartment seems almost comically small when he sits in the living room. Edmund Kemper has blood on his hands, and he is looking at them. A few moments ago, he returned from his first foray into sexualized predatory murder, and he is both elated and disappointed.
Elated because aside from the murder of his grandparents many years prior, he has finally crossed the border between fantasy and reality. Disappointed because the kidnapping and murder of the two lovely girls did not go exactly as he had envisioned it in his head. Still, he unbuckles his belt and starts masturbating furiously to the memory of killing the girls.
He does not bother with washing his hands first. A good while later, he is finally drained and somewhat satisfied. After taking a shower, he goes to bed and sleeps peacefully until the next day. The murder of Marianne Pesci and Anita Duquesa is no longer at the forefront of his mind as he wakes up.
He is already thinking about what he will do next, because he knows in his heart that he has only just begun. The main thing he regretted after his first murder was the lack of absolute control he so desperately needed to feel. The girls had fought and panicked. He needed to make sure that his next victim would be docile and compliant, all the way up until her painful and brutal death.
Kemper was not in a rush, but he was always on the prowl, hunting. Four months after the double murder, he was driving home in his car in the late evening. The car was a used yellow 1969 Ford Galaxy 500 with a black hardtop. The inside of the car was also black.
As he drove by a bus station, he noticed a very young, very petite, very pretty Asian girl hitchhiking alone. The girl was only fifteen years old, and her name was Aiko Kuu. As Kemper pulled up beside her, she smiled and explained that she had missed the bus to a dance class and had no way of letting anyone know she was stranded.
Kemper, who by now was an expert at charming hitchhikers into believing he was harmless and kind, smiled at the girl and told her he would drive her to her dance class. No problem. In fact, he was heading that direction himself, and he totally understood how she was stuck. Koo did not hesitate before opening the passenger side door, the one which did not open from the inside.
and getting inside Kemper's car. As he drove away from the bus stop, Kemper chatted away with the girl, before suddenly turning off the main road. When Ku questioned him, he smiled again and calmly told her she was being kidnapped. As he had expected, the girl became quite hysterical. He knew he needed to calm her down if his plan was to work out for him.
Over and over again, Kemper had rehearsed what he would say to the girl. He explained that when he had first picked her up, he had planned to kill himself and take her with him. For so long, he had been alone, feeling deeply depressed about not being able to connect with anyone. In order to not spend his final moments on Earth alone, he had kidnapped the girl.
But, explained Kemper, during their conversation in the car, he had changed his mind. It would be a sin to kill such a sweet and lovely girl, and he simply wanted her to stay with him a while so he could have someone to talk to. As he started talking with Koo, he eventually managed to get her to feel sympathy for him, to believe that he had no intention of harming her.
When he stopped the car at a remote location, far away from prying eyes, he was very excited. So excited that when he exited the car in order to fetch his murder kit in the trunk, he managed to lock himself out. Koo could have easily gotten over in the driver's seat and driven away, leaving Kemper in the dust.
But she really believed in Kemper and actually ended up opening the door for him. As Kemper got back into the car, he quickly closed his massive hand around Ku's throat, squeezing hard on the sides so that she passed out instead of being choked to death. He proceeded to remove her clothes, then he raped her vaginally.
After a while, she woke up to him raping her. But before she could scream, he tightened the scarf he had put around her neck until nothing but a whimper came out. He tightened the scarf harder and harder until she once again became unconscious. But this time, he did not relent. He continued until he was certain the girl was dead. He dumped the lifeless body of Aikoku in the trunk of the car.
dusted himself off and drove away. One would, the Alicenna, perhaps think that after raping and murdering a young girl, the smart thing to do would be to get home as soon as possible and figuring out how to dispose of the body. No such thing occurred to Kemper. He was thirsty, so he drove to a roadside bar and had a couple of drinks.
Before leaving for home, he opened the trunk to admire the body of the girl he had murdered. He looked at the body in the dim light in the same manner that a fisherman looks at a particularly large catch. This time, he felt truly proud. Everything had gone exactly according to plan. He had been in control the entire time. He had been the dominant one. He had felt like a man.
When he eventually returned home, he brought the body of Ku with him. Just like with his previous two victims, he laid her on his bed and raped the corpse over and over again. However, this time he decapitated the body before he raped it. He placed the head on a shelf by the bed so that he could look at it as he violated its body.
Much in the same manner as fellow serial killer superstar Jeffrey Dahmer, he kept Ku's corpse in his apartment for several days, raping it over and over until the flesh started to putrefy. When this occurred, he dissected it completely. Hands, arms, feet and legs were all sawed off and removed. He wrapped the pieces in plastic, took them in his car and drove around, throwing the body parts away in scattered locations.
The film American Psycho has been mentioned on this podcast several times. In many ways, even though the plot is fictional and unrealistic, the portrayal of Patrick Bateman is excellent as the archetypical psychopath. There is a line in the film as Bateman is sitting in a gentleman's club with his yuppie friends having lunch, when Bateman explains a quote that he likes.
It goes like this, and I quote, When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part wants to be real nice and sweet, and the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick. End quote. In the film, Bateman says this quote is by Ed Gein. This is wrong.
Edmund Kemper said those words to investigators, and unlike Bateman, Kemper is real. As Kemper was ramping up his favorite pastime, serial murder, he was also living a perfectly normal life and keeping up appearances to the outside world. He continued hanging around bars that were frequented by police and attended regular psychiatric appointments, as was a condition for his parole.
The day after he had murdered Aiko Kuu and her corpse lay in his apartment, he attended such a session with his psychiatrist. In this particular session, the psychiatrist told him that the courts had decreed that he no longer needed to attend meetings with his psychiatrist, and the criminal record from his youth would be officially expunged.
The psychiatrists that had followed Kemper after his release from the mental hospital believed that he had become a model citizen who lived a typical life. Kemper was very happy with how things were developing. Not needing to show up to sessions with his psychiatrist meant that he had more time on his hands to prowl the streets for more victims. Meanwhile,
Aiko Kuu's mother had reported her missing, but it was never followed up by police. As with the parents of Kemper's first victims, she did not let police inaction stop her looking. She tried to find answers and plastered the area where she disappeared with flyers. Kuu's mother never got any information about her daughter. Her remains were never found.
For Edmund Kemper, things took a turn for the worse, in the most common way there is. He ran out of money. With no job, he was once again forced to move back in with his mother, Clarnell. With her, nothing had changed. But Kemper did not take her abuse laying down any more.
He fought back, and the pair ended up almost continually shouting and screaming at each other when they were in the same rooms. The strained situation with his mother made it difficult for Kemper to keep up appearances too. He acted strangely around people, saying odd things, and it was very hard for him to get hired for work. This in turn prolonged his stay with Clarnell, which in turn made his mental state even worse.
A downward spiral, in other words. As always, the only thing that made him feel good was fantasizing about rape and murder. He knew it would be only a matter of time before he would find his next victim. It was the only thing, according to Kemper, that would quiet the howling and the pressure cooker sensation inside his head.
And so it was that on the 7th of January, 1973, Edmund Kemper left his mother's house to look for his next victim. According to Edmund Kemper in later interviews, he preferred targeting college student girls as they functioned as stand-ins for his mother. She worked at a university, so to Kemper, all female students came to represent her. Now, there isn't a
I am not so sure about this statement from Kemper. Sure, it sounds plausible. But why would he target exclusively young and attractive students if his victims were to represent his mother? It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about...
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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even psychopaths, even your humble host.
Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. She was a fat, middle-aged woman working in the university administration, not some young co-ed. Speculation is not something I like to do too much of,
But to me, reading about Kemper, one thing keeps nagging at the back of my head. Kemper is a bona fide psychopath. And as I have stated over and over and over again on this show, psychopaths have one trait that they all share. They lie. And they lie well. Also, Aiko Kuu was no college student.
She had hardly started high school, and looked more like an adolescent than a grown college student. Although Kemper's own theory about why he killed college girls rhymes somewhat with his burning hatred of his mother, it seems to me more likely that he simply wanted to rape and kill beautiful young women, because that is what turned him on.
In any case, what truly matters is not why he did what he did, but that he did it. And on this chilly January day, Kemper was prowling the grounds of Cabrillo College campus when he saw what he was looking for. A beautiful young woman with long hair parted in the middle, standing by the road hitchhiking. Her name was Cindy Schall, and she was only 18 years old.
Shawl was reluctant to get into Kemper's car. In the early 70s, there were several serial killers operating in California, and a lot of young women had gone missing. Shawl needed only to take one look at Kemper's huge frame to know that against him, she would stand no chance. For some reason, Kemper did manage to sweet-talk her to get into his car. Once she was in,
She was never leaving voluntarily. As with the other victims, Kemper drove her to a remote location where no one could see what he was doing. But he wanted to change his routine a little bit. He had a gun under his leg in the driver's seat, and when they stopped, he produced it. What happened next is a bit of a mystery.
Kemper is known for being very forthcoming regarding his crimes to authorities after his arrest. He did not gloss over gruesome details, and often elaborated more than he was asked to when interrogated. However, as I have already stated, all psychopaths lie. By the time of Charles' murder, Kemper's mind was not sound. His inner fantasy world was mixing with the real one,
and the situation with his mother made it difficult for him to keep events clear in his mind. Another theory is that something occurred while Kemper kidnapped Charles that made Kemper embarrassed, and to hide it, he told investigators a fictitious and ludicrous story of what took place.
According to Kemper, after he produced the gun, he left it on his seat and got out of the car. Schall could, in other words, have taken the gun and forced Kemper to drive her home or to the police. But, again, according to Kemper, she just looked at the gun and got out of the car herself.
Then she supposedly walked back to the trunk and asked Kemper if she could get inside. Obviously, this is not what happened. So we are left to speculate what did occur. I tend to think that the simplest explanation is often the right one. We know Kemper was embarrassed around girls when he was not kidnapping them, that is.
We also know that he never managed to keep a steady relationship with a woman. From a very early age, the only thing that thrilled him sexually was death. It is thus not unlikely that Kemper simply could not maintain an erection when forcing himself on Charles. And instead of his usual routine of manual strangulation, in a fit of rage, he simply took his gun and shot her in the head.
For Schall, this would have been a much easier death than what Kemper's earlier victims suffered. Being shot in the head is one of the only methods of being killed that almost always causes instantaneous death. Schall probably did not even hear the gunshot before the world went away. However, just as with his first murder of his grandmother, just shooting Cindy was not enough for Kemper.
with embarrassment, often follows rage, especially when it concerns Edmund Kemper. After he had shot Cindy, he took out his kitchen knife, that he always had with him as part of his kill kit. He proceeded to butcher Cindy's body with it, stabbing her in the abdomen and chest over and over and over again. After the deed was done, Kemper drove home to his mother with Charles' body,
He did not want Clarnell to discover it, so he hid it in his closet overnight, waiting for his mother to leave for work the next day before doing anything more to it. When Kemper was finally alone with the corpse of Schall, he did what he always did. He raped her lifeless body several times until he could not ejaculate anymore.
He then meticulously removed all forensic evidence from the body, including the bullet that was lodged inside Charles' head. Since he no longer had his own place where he could make use of the living room floor, he dragged Charles' body to his mother's bathtub. He laid it naked into the tub and repeated what he had done several times before. He dismembered the entire body and wrapped the pieces in plastic.
Hurriedly, he placed each piece inside his car before he left for a scenic drive down the Pacific coastline of California. Along the route, he tossed body parts into the ocean as he drove by. All body parts were thrown into the sea except Charles' head. He kept the head in his room's closet for several days. He performed oral sex with it several times a day until it started to decompose.
Then he buried it face up in his mother's yard. The reason he buried it that way, Edmund Kemper can best explain himself. I quote, My mother always liked having people looking up at her. End quote. Unlike Ico Coo's body, Cindy Schall's body parts were discovered a short time after Kemper disposed of them.
He had thrown them from his car into the coastline of the Pacific Ocean, probably believing they would disappear forever into the sea. But the sea constantly crashes against the shoreline, the waves along that stretch of coastline being famous for excellent surfing conditions. It's therefore no surprise that it did not take long for the body parts to wash up on shore and to be discovered within 24 hours.
The only parts not recovered were Cindy's head and her right hand. Pathologists, professionals that your humble host has the utmost respect for and admiration of, by the way, were able to complete a thorough examination of Charles' body. They determined that she had been the victim of brutal violence. First, she had been shot.
then stabbed several times with a kitchen knife, before finally being cut to pieces using a power saw. To police, this was brutality unlike anything they had seen, and they had seen extreme violence before. In fact, another serial killer was operating at the same time as Kemper, in the Santa Cruz area. His name was Herbert Mullen.
Unlike Kemper, Mullen, whom your humble host will feature in detail in a separate episode, was a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic. His delusions entailed voices in his head telling him that the only way to stop the quote-unquote Big One earthquake in California was to sacrifice humans. He did not try to conceal his murders.
Merlin went around in broad daylight, stabbing and gunning people down at random. Victims ranged from a grown man mowing his lawn to a mother camping with her two daughters. But he also killed a female college student and actually dismembered her. It is very possible that Merlin had read about Kemper's crimes and simply wanted to try out a new method of murder.
Mullen was eventually caught in 1973 after shooting someone in broad daylight, leaving lots of witnesses. Police had a thin hope the series of young college women being killed would stop, but their hopes were soon crushed. Edmund Kemper had had a raging fight with his mother, one of the worst ones so far. His head was like a vice, the headache and screaming ceaseless.
He needed to vent, and the only outlet he cared about was to kill. And so it was that less than a month after his murder of Cindy Schaal, Kemper was again on the prowl, looking for someone who could make him feel good again. He found what he was looking for at the place where his mother's influence was the strongest, aside from her house, the university where she worked.
the University of California, Santa Cruz. On campus, standing by the side of the road, were two gorgeous young coeds, 23-year-old Rosalind Thorpe and 20-year-old Allison Liu. Rosalind was a slender white girl with long hair parted in the middle. Allison was Asian,
Shorter than Rosalind, but very pretty, with long black hair and almost always a big cherry smile on her face. The university had at the time issued a warning to all students to not get into cars unless the car had a U of C sticker on. This advice was probably made in the faulty belief that the killer or killers
could not be any upstanding member of a fine institution such as the University of California. Hindsight being 20/20, this advice was not only naive, it was dangerous. Rosalind entered Kemper's car first, which reassured Liu to also enter. Kemper then fatally shot Thorpe and Liu with his .22 caliber pistol in the backseat of his car.
He did this while he was still on campus grounds. Unlike his other killings, he did not sexually assault the women in the car. After he had killed the women, he wrapped their bodies in blankets and was waved through the security gates owing to the fact that he had a university sticker on his car. He brought the bodies straight back to his mother's house.
When he had parked outside, Kemper dragged the bodies out onto the pavement and decapitated both bodies right there in front of the house. Kemper was, to use the proper serial killer terminology, escalating. He felt godlike and untouchable. So many times he had killed and gotten away with it, and he was confident he was much smarter than any police officer.
As he was beheading the two young women, he could see the neighbors sitting in their living room watching television. Had they turned around, they would have seen Kemper sawing off the heads of two young women right in front of his mother's house. However, the neighbors never turned around and Kemper carried the dead women inside the house while his mother was sleeping. He brought both corpses to his bedroom and locked his door.
Now he finally felt completely in control. Finally, he had the two women right where he wanted them: dead, naked, headless, and on his bed. Again and again he raped the headless bodies, moving the bodies in various positions, and only stopping long enough so that he could manage another ejaculation. The heads were placed on his bookshelf, so that they could silently witness his actions.
Next day, his mother left early for work. Knowing he was alone in the house, he removed the bullets from the corpses, took them to the bathtub, and sawed off all their limbs. The various body parts went into his trunk, and off he went to discard them like garbage along Highway 1 and Eden Canyon.
The remains at Eden Canyon were discovered only a week later. The remains along the highway were found the next month. By now, Edmund Kemper had, including his grandparents, murdered eight human beings. He felt fantastic, and the media had really ramped up their coverage of what they nicknamed the co-ed killer. Kemper loved the attention the media gave him.
As he read about his crimes in the newspaper, he felt his self-confidence grow exponentially. Finally, he was successful at something. People could finally witness his greatness. He felt like a god. Knowing the people of California feared him, the women trembling at the mention of him. The power he felt, it was like a drug, and he knew he was not finished yet.
And so it is that we come to the end of part three in the saga of Edmund Kemper, the Coed killer. Next episode will feature his final confrontation with his mother. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you. Good night, and good luck. ♪
I don't know.
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