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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 179. I am your Norwegian host, Tomas Roseland Weyborg Thun. At the end of Where We Left a Tale of Kemper, he had, including his grandparents, murdered eight human beings.
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. In this episode, we reach the climax of Kemper's murderous activities. Finally, we join him as he confronts his mother one last time. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Magic Man, Marilyn, Meow, Missy, Nick, Oakley, Operation Brownie Pockets, Robert O., Robert R., Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Sputnik, The Radio, Trent, Val, and Vanessa. 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. That was one week before I murdered my mother. I said she's gonna die. And I've gotta die. Or girls like that are gonna die.
And that's when I decided I'm going to murder my mother. I knew a week before she died I was going to kill her. And she went out to the party, she got soused, she came home, went to sleep. I was woken up by that, I came out, I walked up to her bed, she's laying there reading a paperback. What you just heard was the voice of Edmund Kemper, detailing his thoughts leading up to his final act of murder.
But let us not get too much ahead of ourselves. On the 2nd of April, 1973, Kemper decided to upgrade his weapon arsenal. Kemper's obsession with murder was not so much how he killed, but how he treated the victims after they were dead. But for the first time in his killing career, Kemper wanted to present his victims with some proper firepower.
He wanted to buy a .44 Magnum revolver. He thought it would make him feel more powerful than his current .22 caliber handgun. Kemper was able to walk into a firearm store and purchase the revolver. Remember, this was the early 1970s. Buying a gun back then was way easier than it is today.
In addition to this, because his youth records had been expunged, the store owner had no way of knowing that he was a convicted criminal. However, when a request for a proper background check was released to police, the police were able to see that he had a youth record for a double homicide.
They decided that they needed to do a more thorough check on Kemper, which normally took several weeks. In the meantime, they wanted to remove the weapon from Kemper's possession temporarily until the check came back clear. The day after Kemper purchased the revolver, police officers knocked on his door to confiscate it. Kemper was compliant and surrendered the weapon without incident.
The officers joked with the man and assured him that this procedure was purely protocol. And it was. The officers visiting his house had no idea that the huge man on the other side of the door was the serial killer they were desperately trying to find. The incident shook Kemper's newfound confidence. Although the officers had assured him that everything was fine,
Kemper couldn't shake the paranoia that told him the cops were surely on to him now. Over the next few weeks, Kemper became more and more paranoid, and had begun to lose his sense of rational thought. He began perceiving everything around him as a sign of his imminent capture. He was on a downward spiral and moving towards the bottom fast.
it was during this paranoid spiral that edmund kemper's murderous rage came to an all-time high and he committed the deed that he had been practising for his whole life killing his mother clarnell and so it was that on the twentieth of april nineteen seventy three edmund kemper was asleep at home on the couch while the fifty-two-year-old clarnell was away at a party
Kemper woke up a couple of hours later, around four, and she had already come home, gotten herself ready for bed, and had retired for the evening. This was after Kemper had gone to bed, around 2 a.m. Saturday morning. She was in bed reading a book, and Kemper woke up about four o'clock in the morning, roughly two hours after Kemper went to sleep. The lights were pretty much out in the house. Kemper didn't see any lights on.
He had not heard anything, and Kemper thought, gee, it's four o'clock and she's still not home. So Kemper got up and walked towards his mother's room. There he noticed a small light was on and walked into her bedroom, just as she had taken off her glasses and turned the light off. Without her turning it back on, she said, and I quote, Oh.
You're awake. Why are you up? Kemper answered that he just wanted to see if she was home. Then, in a sarcastic voice, Clarnell said the now famous phrase, and I quote again, Oh, I suppose you want to talk then. This had happened several times before, when she had come in late and Kemper wanted to talk, and they had talked before she had fallen asleep.
This time Kemper said no. He did not want to talk. Clarnell stated that they could talk in the morning. Kemper then wished her good night. She left the light out, and Kemper walked out of the room and back to his bedroom. There, he laid down and decided at that point to wait another hour or so until she was asleep before acting on his decision.
What happened next? Edmund Kemper can describe better than I can. So, here follows the sequence of events in his own words. I quote, I looked at my watch. It was about a quarter after four, something like that, and I lay there in bed thinking about it. Something hard to just up and do. It was the most insane of reasons for going and killing your mother.
But I was pretty fixed on that issue, because there were a lot of things involved. Someone just standing off on the side, watching something like that, isn't really going to see any kind of sense or rhyme or reason to do anything. I had done some things, and I felt that I had to carry the full weight of everything that happened.
i certainly wanted for my mother a nice quiet easy death like i guess everyone wants the only way i saw this possible was for it to be in bed while she was asleep the next thing was to decide how to do it the only possible answer to that that i saw was to take a hammer and hit her with it in her sleep and then to cut her throat
So I waited till about 5.15 a.m. I went into the kitchen and got a hammer. We have a regular claw hammer at home. Picked up my pocket knife, the same one I had used to kill Marianne Pesci with, opened it up, and I carried that in my right hand, and the hammer in my left, walked into the bedroom very quietly. She had been sound asleep.
She moved around a little bit, and I thought maybe she was waking up. I just waited and waited, and she was just laying there. So I approached her right side, to my right, on the right side of the bed, on her side. I stood there for a couple of minutes, and spent most of that day, and most of that week, I suppose, and most of that night,
trying to get myself i guess you'd say hopped up to do something like that thinking nothing but reasons to do it and the need to do it trying to keep everything else out of my mind i stood by her side for a couple of minutes i suppose and about five fifteen
i struck and i hit her just above the temple on her right side of the head the side that was up from the pillow it was above and behind her temple on the right side of her head
I struck with a very hard blow, and I believe I dropped the hammer, or I laid it down or something. Immediately after striking that blow, I looked for a reaction, and there really wasn't one. Blood started running down her face from the wound, and she was still breathing. I could hear the breathing, and I heard blood running into her. I guess it was her windpipe.
It was obvious I had done severe damage to her, because in other cases where I had shot people in the head, I heard the same, or it had the same effect, blood running into the breathing passages. This all happened in a few moments. But after I struck, I moved her over in the bed, on her back, and with my right hand, holding her chin up, I slashed her throat.
"'She bled profusely all over, and I guess it was an afterthought. "'I hadn't really thought of it. "'But her being my mother, and me out doing those other things, "'and I knew right off I had torn everything out in the open, "'and my plan, which I didn't mention earlier, "'had been to just, well, everything's getting to an end, "'and I could either kill her and turn myself in,
or I could kill her and head out with everything I had in my arsenal. This was my choice at the time. So I decided at that time — it's a hell of a cliché to use — but I guess what was good for my victims was good for my mother. So after I slashed her throat, I went ahead and slashed the rest of the way around her neck and took off her head, and I guess half as much
of that was to make absolutely sure in my own mind that she was dead instantly and right then so the whole attack took maybe less than half a minute possibly even as little as twenty seconds and
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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.
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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. But Kemper was not finished with just killing his mother.
He repeatedly raped her severed head, and he did not just push his penis into his dead mother's mouth. No, he forced his penis into her severed neck, into the torn flesh. According to him, this was very tough, and he had to use a lot of force to get his penis inside. As always, he did not stop until he could not ejaculate anymore.
But he was not done with the head. He placed the head on the mantle and started using it as a dartboard. He also screamed at the head for an hour straight. As if that weren't enough, Kemper also cut out her tongue and larynx and placed them in the garbage disposal. But the mechanism couldn't break up the tissue properly and spit her remains back into the sink.
He laughed at this and joked about it in later interviews with authorities. Having spent a few hours humiliating and berating his mother's decapitated head, he once again managed to get an erection. So he went back to the blood-soaked bed where the rest of his mother's corpse lay. He proceeded to rape the body several times before stuffing the body into a closet.
feeling rather satisfied with himself he got dressed and went out for a drink while he was drinking at the bar kemper realized he did not want to die after all at least he did not want to be caught
And Clarnell's murder was going to point straight to him as the culprit. So he devised a plan to make the crime look like it had been committed by an intruder. He went back to the house and called Clarnell's friend, Sally Hallett, and invited her over on his mother's behalf.
She was Kemper's mother's best friend and a colleague of Clarnell's at University of California, Santa Cruz. Born on the 19th of October, 1913, in Washington, Hallett had two sons, Edward and Christopher Hallett. She was 59 years old at the time.
Kemper prepared for Ms. Hallett's murder by distributing weapons around the apartment to make sure he would have what he needed to kill her when she arrived. Soon after the phone call, Ms. Hallett arrived, came up behind her pretending to give her a hug, and crooked his arm around her neck. Then he squeezed and lifted her off the floor.
She hung there, and for a moment Kemper did not realize she was dead. Then he saw that he had broken her neck, and her head was wobbling around with the bones of her neck disconnected in the skin sack of her neck. With his dead mother's head on a mantle in her bedroom, her body in a closet, he dragged Miss Hallet's corpse to his own bed, where he undressed her.
Then he tried to rape her, but he could not manage to maintain an erection, probably due to having already reached climax so many times earlier in the night. The next day, Edmund Kemper fled town. He was sure he was going to be discovered as the co-ed killer after his last two murders. So he drove east for three days in Hallett's car, stopping in Pueblo, California.
Along the way, Kemper avidly listened to the radio, hoping to hear news about his mother's death and who the police thought was responsible. But he heard nothing. The crime had not yet been discovered, and the police had no idea that Kemper was the killer. After several days of running, Kemper gave up. He decided that he did not want to be on the run anymore.
Psychologically, he felt like he had completed his life's mission, and he had started to become annoyed that he had not been given any recognition yet. As well, he knew he had no means of survival without his mother. Kemperer needed money and structure, and he knew he could not do it by himself. He had realized he was running, but he had nowhere to go.
He was the same scared kid who had just killed his grandparents, but didn't know what to do. Except this time, he could not call his mom. Instead, he called the Santa Cruz police. The police officer who answered Edmund Kemper's call knew the man well, and also knew that he liked to drink heavily.
Because of this, when Kemper called and confessed to the murder of the mother as well as seven other women, the officer thought Kemper was joking and hung up on the phone. Outraged, Kemper called back and spoke to Officer Jim Connor, another drinking buddy of his. This time, though, Kemper began revealing details about co-ed murders that only the killer could have known.
He insisted the officers visit his mother's house to see exactly what he had done. Officer Connor stayed on the phone with Kemper while another officer went out to Clarnell's house to see if Kemper was telling the truth. When the other officer, Sergeant Alufi, entered, he found a gruesome scene. Once inside, he smelled the putrid odor of decomposition.
When he opened the closet and saw blood and hair, he secured the scene and called in the coroner and detectives. To their amazement, they found the two bodies, just as Kemper had described. Both had been decapitated, and Clarnell had been battered and apparently used for dark practice. Kemper stayed on the phone.
until Pueblo police picked him up and brought him to Colorado, where he was picked up by Santa Cruz police the next day. During the drive back to Santa Cruz, Kemper began confessing to all of his murders in such gory detail that the officers asked him to please stop.
Upon his return to Santa Cruz, Edmund Kemper led investigators to the various disposal sites he had used, and continued his seemingly endless confession. When he was finally finished, he had been so thorough that he left his court-appointed public defender, James Jackson, no avenue for defense except that of insanity.
a series of witnesses was brought in to try to establish that edmund was not responsible for his crimes but the prosecutor undermined the testimony of each one prosecution witness dr joel fort
did the most damage to Edmund's insanity defence. He had spent quite a bit of time reviewing Edmund's case, going all the way back to his diagnoses after the killing of his grandparents, and during his time at Atascadero. He had also interviewed Edmund Kemper himself, eliciting previously unknown information about his sexual practices with the bodies, and even cannibalisms.
Edmund Kemper was not a paranoid schizophrenic, Fort said. He was obsessed with sex and violence, and he craved attention, going so far as to slash his own wrists with a ballpoint pen during the trial in an ostensible suicide attempt. But he was not insane. Furthermore, Fort said, if he were ever released, he would kill again.
and he would kill the same sort of victim. During the three weeks of the trial, no witness, not even Edmund's sister or his doctors from Atascadero, was able to convince the jury that Edmund Kemper was insane. On the 8th of November, the six-man, six-woman jury deliberated for five hours before finding Kemper sane and guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder.
Although Kemper hoped to receive the death penalty, he was convicted during a time when the Supreme Court had placed a moratorium on capital punishment and all death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The death penalty became applicable only to crimes committed after the 1st of January 1974. The judge asked Kemper what he thought his punishment should be.
It was not difficult for Kemper to come up with something, as he had been thinking about that moment since childhood. He told the judge that he believed he ought to be tortured to death. Unsurprisingly, this was not something the judge could grant Kemper. Instead, he sentenced Kemper to life in prison.
At one point Kemper requested psychosurgery, which involved inserting a probe into his brain to kill brain tissue and potentially cure him of his compulsive sexual aggression. His request was denied, possibly because authorities feared that he might then petition for release. He became a model inmate, helping to read books on tape for the blind. In prison, he is reported to be cooperative and kind,
and would like to forget his past while he has readily participated in requests for interviews and self-examination hoping he would help others to learn about offenders like him he often disliked what some of his interviewers later said about him kemper was first eligible for parole in nineteen seventy nine
He was denied parole that year, as well as parole hearings in 1980, 1981, and 1982. He subsequently waived his right to a hearing in 1985. He was denied parole at his 1988 hearing, where he said, and I quote, "...society is not ready in any shape or form for me. I can't fault them for that." End quote.
He was denied parole again in 1991 and in 1994. He then waived his right to a hearing in 1997 and in 2002. He attended the next hearing in 2007, where he was again denied parole. Prosecutor Ariadne Simons said, and I quote,
We don't care how much of a model prisoner he is because of the enormity of his crimes. End quote. Kemper waived his right to a hearing again in 2012. He was denied parole in 2017 and is next eligible in 2024. As of this recording,
Edmund Kemper is 73 years old and resides in California Medical Facility, 1600 California Drive, P.O. Box 2000, Vacaville.
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So it is that we come to the end of the saga of Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer.
Next episode will feature a fresh Serial Killer Expo say. 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.
