WARNING: DISTRESSING DETAILS. With a genius-level intellect and an imposing 6'9" frame, Edmund Kemper III is regarded as one of the most twisted and dangerous predators ever
15:01, 15 Jan 2026Updated 16:43, 15 Jan 2026
There are often early signs that a child will grow up to be a serial killer, and as a young boy Edmund Kemper III certainly exhibited several of them. He delighted in torturing and killing animals and, in an eerie foreshadowing of his later crimes, Kemper also performed strange rituals with his sister’s Barbie dolls that involved cutting off their heads and hands.
The hulking Californian, who would grow to be 6’9” as an adult, also spent most of his childhood sleeping in the locked basement of his mother’s home. In a new podcast about Kemper’s life, true crime expert Kristina Collins explains: “As Ed would grow older, his gem of a mother would banish him to the basement. So he wouldn't have a room.
“He would just have to literally live in the basement anytime he was in the house. because [his mother] considered him sharing a room with his sisters unseemly.”
At the age of 15, Kemper was later sent to live with his grandparents, and it was there that the killings began. After an argument with his grandmother, Maude Kemper, he shot her once in the head and twice in the back with his .22 rifle, before then stabbing her several times. A little while later, Kemper’s grandfather Edmund Kemper Sr. returned home and he immediately shot him dead.
Kemper than calmly called the police and waited until they arrived. When questioned, he told the officers: “I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma.” But much worse was to come.
After being found guilty of his grandparents’ murders, Kemper was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to the maximum-security Atascadero State Hospital. There, he proved to be a model inmate, scoring highly on intelligence tests and given responsible jobs.
An Atascadero psychiatrist said of Kemper’s time there: "He was a very good worker and this is not typical of a sociopath. He really took pride in his work.” Kemper later said that being allowed to administer psychiatric tests to other inmates helped him learn how the system works, and manipulate his psychiatrists.
Kemper added that he learned a lot from the sex offenders to whom he administered tests: “He had a genius IQ of 145, just a recipe for a final boss serial killer,” Kristina says. “So he would thrive in his new hospital environment, learning how to be a better serial killer. And he would make some friends along the way, including a serial rapist who shared stories of his own crimes with Ed.”
Kemper managed to convince staff that he was rehabilitated and, on his 21st birthday, was released on parole. Moving back into his mother’s home, the friction resumed immediately: “My mother and I started right in on horrendous battles, just horrible battles, violent and vicious,” Kemper said. “I've never been in such a vicious verbal battle with anyone. It would go to fists with a man, but this was my mother…”
While still in his early twenties, Kemper suffered severe injuries in a motorcycle accident and used the $15,000 compensation he received (equivalent to around £83,000 in today’s money) to buy a 1969 Ford Galaxie that closely resembled a police car. He then cruised up and down the California highways, picking up young, pretty, female hitchhikers.
At first, Kemper didn’t act on the murderous impulses that he described as his “little zappies,” but that changed on May 7, 1972, when he picked up Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Mary Luchessa, two 18-year-old students from Fresno State University. Admitting his reasons for selecting these particular victims, Kemper said it was because they seemed upper middle class, "of a better class of people than the scroungy, messy, dirty, smelly, hippy types I wasn't at all interested in".
He handcuffed both women, apologising to Pesce when he accidentally touched her breasts moments before stabbing her to death. After he had killed them both, he drove home with the bodies in the boot of his car, after being stopped by a police officer on his way because of a broken brake light.
After taking the two young women’s bodies into his apartment, Kemper stripped and photographed them before performing sex acts on both corpses. He then dismembered them, distributing body parts along a nearby hiking trail. Before dumping the heads, Kemper used them sexually one last time.
A few months later, Kemper found his next victim, a 15-year-old Korean dance student named Aiko Koo. Again he would throw her body in the boot of his car after strangling her. Kemper stopped off at a bar on his way home and, after enjoying a couple of beers, went back out into the parking lot and opened the boot of his car to look at Aiko’s body: “I suppose I was standing there looking,” he said in an interview. He added: “I was doing one of those triumphant things, too. Admiring my work and admiring her beauty, and I might say admiring my catch like a fisherman.”
Kemper’s next kill was followed by perhaps his most shocking act. By January 1973, he had moved back into his mother’s house, and, after picking up 18-year-old student Cindy Schall and shooting her dead, he drove back home where he stuffed Cindy’s body into a wardrobe.
The following day, while his mother was at work, he followed the same procedure as before, stripping the corpse and engaging in sexual intercourse with it. This time, though, after decapitating his victim with a power saw Kemper kept her severed head for several days, regularly using it for sexual pleasure.
Finally, he buried Cindy’s head in the garden, positioned so it was facing his mother’s bedroom window because, he said, Clarnell Kemper ”always wanted people to look up to her.”
A month later, two more young women fell victim to Kemper’s tricks. He picked them up separately in the Santa Cruz area, before driving to a remote area and shooting them both in the head. This time he beheaded the victims in his car and carried the headless corpses into his mother's house to have sexual intercourse with them.
Questioned later about why he always chose to decapitate his victims, Kemper explained: "The head trip fantasies were a bit like a trophy. You know, the head is where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That's the person.
“I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off... well, that's not quite true, there's a lot left in the girl's body without the head.”
In another statement, that called back to his childhood “rituals” with his sister’s toys, Kemper said: “It was more or less making a doll out of a human being, and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.”
Kemper’s penultimate kill, his ninth, was the closest to home. After a final argument with his mother, Kemper waited until she had gone to bed before sneaking into her room with a claw hammer and bludgeoning her to death. He then beheaded his mother and "humiliated her corpse.”
He explained how he placed his mother’s head on a shelf and screamed at it for an hour, threw darts at it, before finally "smashing her face in.”
He noted that after he tried to put her tongue and vocal cords down the waste disposal, large pieces of her throat spewed back out of the sink: "That seemed appropriate,” he later recalled, “as much as she'd b****ed and screamed and yelled at me over so many years."
But the killer wasn’t quite finished yet. He invited his mother’s best friend, 59-year-old Sally Hallett to the house to have dinner. When she arrived, Kemper strangled her and shoved the body in a wardrobe.
Expecting imminent arrest, Kemper then left a note for police and drove over a thousand miles to Pueblo, Colorado, taking dozens of caffeine pills to stay awake.
Realising that the police had not yet launched a manhunt for him, Kemper called the Santa Cruz police and attempted to turn himself in. He had to call three times before he got through to an officer who actually believed his shocking confession.
He was finally arrested in April 1973, and sent back to California where he was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. While he has been eligible for parole from 2017, Kemper has said he’s “happy going about his life in prison.”