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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 176 I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg Thu. As promised, we continue on our sojourn into the twisted nightmare that is the life of the co-ed killer, Edmund Kemper.
Last episode ended with the murder of his grandparents, his stay at a mental hospital, and his eventual release into the arms of his not-so-much-loving mother. It is strange writing about the serial killer superstars. Many of them seem to flourish at the tail end of the hippie movement, i.e. the late 1960s and early 70s.
It is, in a way, as if the innocence of the peace and love movement birthered something dark into the world, something monstrous, something that hungers for nothing but the suffering of others. Stephen King, the greatest horror and thriller author to ever have walked the earth, personified such evil in the character of It, an extraterrestrial Lovecraftian monster that fed on fear.
It, too, blossomed in the seventies, according to King. But where King's masterpiece lives only in our minds, characters of absolute depravity such as Edmund Kemper are real and walk amongst us every day. Tonight we join the young man Kemper as he again finds himself under the same roof as the woman who made his childhood a house of horrors.
This time, however, he would no longer accept being bullied and abused by his cruel mother. This time he would show her and the world what she had birthed in him through the years. He would start to have his revenge. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
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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, dear listener, a chilly, rainy night near Christmas in 1969.
a young man of 21 years huge in stature is standing on the doorstep outside a modest home just outside santa cruz california from behind he seems like a black form blocking out the porch light it is edmund camper standing there looking up at the door he had not visited before
His mother, Clarnell, had moved while he was incarcerated at Atascadero State Hospital. Kemper had nothing to his name. No job, no money, no education. He sighs, grits his teeth, and knocks on the door. He is made to wait a while in the rain before Clarnell, in a faded bathroom robe and slippers, opens the door and looks at him.
There is no joy in her eyes at seeing her son again, only disdain. She tells him that there's no need to stand there, looking like an idiot. Just come on in already. Once inside, Edmund Kemper notices that the house has very much the same atmosphere as his childhood home. Since Clarnell is on her own, most of the lights are out, except in the kitchen and living room.
Today we might have called the house David Fincheresque. His mother was not poor. She had a job as an administrator at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she earned a comfortable living. Those who saw Claronelle noticed her large figure, dark hair, and no-nonsense attitude.
When Kemper returned to her after his stay at the mental hospital, she had turned forty-eight years old and had cut her hair short and wore what today is most commonly known as cat-eye glasses. At first, Kemper tried to get along with his mother. He did not want to return to the hospital and wanted to make his stay with Clarnell as short and conflict-free as possible.
It did not take long for the relative peace between them to end. Soon they were screaming at each other, and Clarnel wasted no opportunity to belittle her son. As a condition for release, Kemper had to take an education. So he had enrolled at the local community college. His mind was filled with rage and chaos from all the trauma and dark desires that blossomed inside him.
It did not help that, aside from his domineering mother, his immediate surroundings were also filled with chaos and mayhem. Santa Cruz had, by 1969, fallen victim to serious crime. It was a rebellious world of sex, drugs, and prostitutes.
In addition, the local students spent a lot of their time demonstrating loudly against the status quo, against the Vietnam War, against everything that resembled the order that Kemper craved. He hated his fellow students. He viewed them as agents of chaos. To fight this, he started studying to get a job in law enforcement.
The fact that he had committed double homicide as a youth did not disqualify him from working as a police officer, since his files had been sealed due to him being a minor when the crime occurred. However, while his murderous past did not disqualify him, his physique did.
Standing at six foot nine inches, that is a whopping two meters and six centimeters tall, he was outside the parameters required for law enforcement at the time. This discovery was a huge blow to Kemper's self-esteem. He was very self-conscious about his physique, as he had been bullied his whole life for it. But he would not let that roadblock hinder him on his road to get out of his mother's house.
In order to do that, he needed to earn his own living, and therefore needed a job. Even though he had murdered his grandfather, he still looked up to him as a role model. He had always admired his stories of when he worked for the California Highway Department, so Kemper managed to secure a position there himself.
This was a massive positive change in Kemper's life. For the first time in 21 years, he felt useful and competent. His massive size, he was by then weighing 300 pounds or 136 kilos, was no longer a hindrance. It was instead a major asset, since the work consisted of grueling physical work that his enormous strength
was perfectly suited for. The work was menial, but that was not a negative in Kemper's mind. He loved the regularity of the work and the structure it gave him. It took several months, but eventually he had managed to save up enough money to move out of his mother's house into an apartment at Alameda. His parole officer was thrilled that Kemper had managed this and wholeheartedly supported his request to move out.
By all accounts, Kemper was by then living a normal, all-American life. But if he thought he could escape his mother's clutches that easily, he was sorely mistaken. She constantly called him by telephone to harangue him, to belittle him, to tell him he was worthless, and just as bad as his no-good father. Even worse, she often came to his door on surprise inspections to check up on him.
not out of love, but to find even more reasons to torment her son whom she loathed. Kemper was starting to feel like his head was in a vice, like he was a living pressure cooker. No matter how hard he tried, he could not get away from Clarnell.
After incidents of his mother calling on him, the only thing that managed to soothe him somewhat was fantasies of depraved acts of extreme violence. As with most psychopaths, fantasies soon did not cut it. Masturbating furiously to the idea of rape, torture, and murder soon lost its luster. He needed to act out his fantasies.
He needed to feast on the pain of others to quell his own.
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i know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care 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.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. Unsurprisingly, Kemper's troublesome relationship with his mother had poisoned his attitudes towards women in general. He had grown to fear them, to hate them, but also to lust after them.
He felt awkward in the presence of women, even though the healthy parts of his mind craved a normal romantic relationship. He did not give up, though, and actually did manage to secure one long-lasting relationship that started right after his move to Alameda. The girl in question was still in high school and was only sixteen years old. After a while, the couple actually got engaged.
Again, to no one's surprise, his mother was extremely critical of her son's choice of partner. She could not stand the idea of her son being loved by anyone, let alone another woman. The excuse she used to Kemper and anyone else who would listen was that the girl was too young.
She harassed Kemper ceaselessly, until he or she—I have not been able to figure out exactly what happened—gave up on the engagement, and the pair parted ways. Clarnell, satisfied that she had ruined her son's perhaps only chance of romantic love, returned to her regular berating and belittling.
Kemper actually asked her, since his first girlfriend apparently was too young, if she could introduce him to some women at the university where she worked that was more age-appropriate. She flatly refused, and with a sarcastic sneer told him that a man who resembled his deadbeat father as much as he did in no way deserved to be loved by anyone.
Even though Kemper could not join the police force, he wanted to stay connected with law enforcement. He admired the structure and order they represented. In order to achieve this, he started hanging around the various watering holes used by local police around Alameda. One place stood out, the jury room. It was known as a regular police hangout, and Kemper visited it every day after work.
Kemper was awkward around women, but he was not awkward around men. Actually, he was quite charming and polite. The cops who met him there soon took a liking to the friendly giant, as most human beings, cops too like to talk about themselves and what they do. Being police officers, this is not always easy, but in Kemper they found a rapt audience of one.
He seemingly took in every tidbit detailing the work life of a police officer. To them, he appeared totally harmless, a large geek who was really into police stories. Little did they know that behind Kemper's friendly and soft-spoken exterior sat a calculating criminal mind, noting down any detail that might be useful to him.
By spring of 1972, Kemper's urges were growing out of control. For some reason, he lost his job at the California Highway Department and was starting to run out of money. His fear of having to move back in with his main tormentor, Clarnell, flared up, and he felt rage like never before. More than anything, he wanted to kill his mother, to end her reign of terror.
She never accepted him. Therefore, he felt he would never be accepted by any woman. Still, he did not feel he was ready to commit the ultimate crime, matricide, just yet. Instead, he started to seriously plan how he could kill other women in her stead. Kemper knew from experience that he had big troubles getting to know women. He was awkward and bumbling when talking to any woman, and he hated them for it.
In his fantasies, he always managed to get the women to trust and like him before he murdered them. His preferred targets were young university student girls, a.k.a. coeds. California was teeming with them, and they often hitchhiked to get around. When he had been working for the highway department, he noticed an endless supply of supple young ladies in skimpy clothing with their thumb out by the side of the road.
Now he just needed to work out a way for him to get them to trust him enough to get in his car. By this time, he had gotten himself a vehicle, a Ford Galaxy. Again, he portrayed classic serial killer development. He started cruising for victims, not yet picking them up, just driving by and fantasizing about what he could do to them.
For each drive-by, he built up his nerve to breach the line between fantasy and reality. Finally, he was ready, and the floodgate of murderer's depravity opened up. Over the next few months, Edmund Kemper would pick up over one hundred and fifty female hitchhikers. His sole purpose for picking them was to practice.
He developed techniques on how to make the women trust and like him. Once they were in his car, his brilliant mind would carefully note how they reacted to everything he said and did, paying extra attention to what caused alarm and what caused them to relax. His practice made him no longer appear awkward when picking up and chatting with female hitchhikers.
As he was becoming more and more confident, he started preparing his kill kit. In the trunk of his car, he stashed plastic bags, knives, blankets, and handcuffs. He, in a manner very similar to Ted Bundy, rigged the passenger side door so it could not be opened from the inside. Once a hitchhiker was seated in his car, she had no way out unless Kemper allowed them to exit the car.
After a while, Kemper also brought along a gun that he kept under his seat or beneath his leg. And so it was, dear listener, that the date had finally arrived. The 7th of May, 1972. Kemper was filled to the brim with rage after a particularly nasty fight with his mother on the phone. As the sun set, Kemper got into his car and drove out.
This time he was not out for practice. He was out for blood. In the balmy California evening weather, Kemper soon came across two pretty girls hitchhiking from Fresno State College to Stanford, where they planned to visit some friends. The two girls were Mary Ann Pesci and Anita Lucchesa, both having just turned 18 years old.
As Kemper pulled into the curb, the girls happily jumped into his car and was charmed by Kemper's rehearsed smooth talking. He chatted with them, and they giggled at his small jokes, feeling charmed and quite safe in the presence of such a large and friendly man. They did not notice that Kemper had left the road to Stanford and was on a completely different route.
After a while, the trio reached a secluded wooded area just outside of Alameda. Kemper had staked out the location while working for the highway department. The girls had by then started to panic, but Kemper calmed them down by promising to return them safely to the highway if they only complied to his demands. First, he ordered Pesci out of the car, leaving Lucchessa locked inside.
He brought the frightened young woman to the back of his car, where he opened the trunk. When she saw the array of murderer's items there, she whimpered, but his massive hand held her in a vice-like grip. Picking up a knife and a plastic bag, he then forced her inside the trunk. She fought back, breaking one of his taillights. First Kemper tried to suffocate her by holding the plastic bag tightly over her head.
This did not work well, as she repeatedly managed to rip a hole in it. He became angrier and frustrated, feeling as if he was losing control over the situation. To gain back his sense of control, he took his knife and plunged it into the chest of the woman, causing extreme pain and bloodlust. The girl shrieked in pain and curled up,
He withdrew the knife, causing even more pain, like a thousand paper cuts at once, and plunged it into her side, then into her neck, into her stomach, her chest again, over and over and over and over. His arm was coated in blood, and eventually the girl stopped bucking and lay still. She was dead. Lucasa had been sitting in the back seat, listening to her friend being brutally and painfully murdered.
The fair she felt must have been unimaginable. When Kemper returned and opened the door on her, she pleaded with him to let her go. She did not want to die. Kemper did not listen, and instead pulled her out and held her tightly and plunged his knife into the side of her neck and drew it across her throat. The pain this caused was extreme.
The neck is one of the most sensitive areas on the human body. Lucasa's trachea was cut and her carotid artery. Blood and air gushed out of the wound, and she could not scream. Only a gurgle came out. Blood pumped out of her neck, and she lost consciousness relatively quickly as the brain was drained of oxygen. Kemper was not satisfied.
The night had not gone the way he had hoped at all. The girls had not behaved how they, in his fantasies, should have behaved. After Luchessa's body had stopped spasming on the ground, he dumped her body in the trunk along with her dead friend. He rinsed off the blood on himself as good as he could and got behind the wheel. During his drive home, he was pulled over by police for having a broken taillight.
having spent a lot of time chatting with cops at their favorite bar kemper knew exactly what to say in order to be let off with a warning smiling at the police officer he waved as he drove off towards his home it was late at night when he was back at his place in alameda after a lifetime of fantasizing about death he now had the opportunity to explore these beautiful young bodies to his heart's content
he did not bother washing the girls he simply took off their clothes and laid them naked on his bed then he raped their dead bodies over and over and over again once he had ejaculated so many times that he finally felt sated
he started to photograph the violated corpses. He posed the girls in various suggestive and lewd positions and snapped several photographs he would masturbate to later when he was alone again. Living on his own with no friends that came visiting, Kemper took his time with the dead girls. Only after two days did he feel he was finished with them. Then he laid out tarp on his living room floor and started to dismember the corpses.
cut off the hands the feet the thighs and arms finally he sliced off their heads before he wrapped the body parts up in individual body bags he used the severed heads for oral sex one thing that was somewhat unique with edmund kemper was his fixation on his victim's head
In his mind, the head was where the very essence of a person was held. Judgment was held. Made and expressed by the head. By removing the women's heads, Kemper felt he finally controlled them completely. The act of severing their heads meant, to Kemper, that he removed the women's ability to reject or judge him.
After this final violation was complete, Kemper wrapped up the heads in plastic and together with the other body parts drove out into the night to throw away the various parts of the murdered girls at various places to make identification difficult for the authorities. Marianne Pesci and Anita Lucchesa were reported missing by their parents after they never returned from visiting friends at Stanford.
Police, as was customary at the time, did not take the missing persons report seriously. Students running away from parents and society was common in the early 70s. In the police's view, they could not waste resources looking for young people who did not want to be found. The Pesci and Lucchessa families did not take this laying down.
They were resourceful families, and let it be known that the police handling of their missing daughters was completely unacceptable. Lucasa's father hired a private investigator, but he had little to nothing to go on. Kemper's plan was working flawlessly. However, what is lost will eventually be found.
Marianne Pesci's decomposing head was discovered by a hiker who stumbled upon it in the mountains near Santa Cruz. Her identity was confirmed by dental records. No other body parts from either young woman were ever found. The police now knew the girls had been murdered, but they had no leads and no evidence to investigate. For Edmund Kemper, things had only just started.
He had gotten a taste of his fantasies come to life, but he was far from being satisfied. He wanted more, and it did not take very long before he was out hunting again. And so it is that we come to the end of part two in the saga of Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer. Next episode, we'll continue his saga. 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.
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