Edmund Kemper III - Ed Kemper's mom thought her son
was "a real weirdo." He had a near-genius IQ hidden within his
lanky body and twisted mind. As a child he liked playing execution and once
told his sister that if he were to love someone they would first have to
be dead. As a teenager mom forced Ed to live in the basement so he wouldn't
scare his sisters. When he was fourteen he killed his grandparents to get
back at his mother during her second honeymoon. He said he wanted to see
how it felt to kill grandma. Consequently he was sent to Atascadero State
Hospital for the criminally insane. There Eddie grew into a strapping six-foot-nine-inch
hate machine.
In the early seventies Ed was released from the hospital
and went to live with his overbearing mother. Mom had moved to Santa Cruz where she was working in the state college.
In 1972, after a particular vicious argument with mom, Ed left the house knowing he was going to kill someone. That night,
a hapless female hitchhiker was the first to fall prey to Ed's Oedipal mania. Over the ensuing years, with the help of his campus pass
obtained through his mother, Ed became known as the "Coed
Killer" . He enjoyed decapitating his victims and
having sex with their headless corpses. Sometimes he buried the heads
of his victims outside his house facing his mother's bedroom
window because she always wanted people "to look up to
her." He took Polaroid's of his accomplishments and
occasionally had one of his girls for dinner. Later he confessed that
his acts of cannibalism were because, "I wanted them
to be a part of me - and now they are." Once he visited his
court-appointed psychiatrist with a head in the trunk of
his car. Curiously, the psychiatrist thought he was doing great and
he was really well adjusted.
At the time Ed was killing there were two other maniacs,
John Lindley Frazier and Herbert Mullin, operating in proximity.
Police were baffled by the amount of bodies appearing around
their peaceful and bucolic surfer community. Kemper, who