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Hey, weirdos. I'm Ash. I'm Elena. And this is Morbid.
I took off Friday. I didn't go to work. I called in sick, took CTO.
All right? Dismembered her body. Got rid of her body, but kept her head in her hands because they're identifiable.
They're highly identifiable. I kept those at the apartment.
Okay? That Friday night, Thursday night I took her.
Friday morning she was dismembered. Friday night she was disposed of.
Saturday morning I left. Right? And I wasn't satisfied that I took the head along in the hands, but I couldn't put them someplace that I could be sure they wouldn't be dug up by an animal. or just be somewhere.
It's scary going out there trying to bury somebody or dispose of body parts in a community or even in the boonies.
Alright guys, that voice you just heard right there, that deep...
Tom Sellecky voice. Who dat? As she's young.
Tom Selleck was in Three Men and a Baby and Friends.
He's in Blue Bloods now. Magnum P.I. You know, all those old people shit.
Hashtag oldies. Yeah. Either way. It was not Tom Selleck.
It was Edmund... The third. The co-ed killer.
We don't even have to pay for music. We don't, but we do.
We actually did. Edmin is a piece of work.
He did a lot of things. He's a real piece of work, is what I can say.
Don't be charmed by this asshole. Because he's charming.
He's charming. He's a charming dude. And he talks a lot.
As you're going to see. We're going to have a lot of clips from him.
And he seems chill AF. He does. But he's not.
Not chill. He's a true blue sociopath. And it's proof positive by how charming he really is.
For sure. Because he can suck you in and make you think he's just a... in his own words a bit of a bumblebutt you know i'm a bumblebutt sometimes but the good thing is you don't murder people As far as I know.
I don't. As far as I know. I'm not gonna confess if I did on this podcast.
Yeah, don't do that. I don't. I don't need that.
Nah. I don't need that in my life. Nah. So, let's just get right into it, shall we?
We shall. So, Edmund Kemper... The third.
Was a... Big Bad Larry. Six foot nine. Yeah.
Emphasis on the big. He was almost 300 pounds.
Some say 250, some say 280. He was close to 200.
He was close to 300. He was a big dude. He was also really smart, which is unfortunate.
I don't know why those kind of people get the biggest brains, but, you know, he got one.
What was his IQ? His IQ was 145. I think mine might be, like, along the lines of 12.
Then I'm really impressed that you're speaking right now.
Just kidding. That's really impressive. But it's not up there in the 140s.
No, not many people's is. That's the crazy thing.
He's known for murdering six female co-eds during his reign of crazy banana-ness.
And also in addition to his own mother and his mother's best friend.
And. His two grandparents. Yeah, he did.
We forgot about those. Yeah, 10 total. Why we forgot about those?
Because it's not even on his damn record.
That chick got expunged. We're not making fun of victims.
We're making fun of this big old bumblebee.
Yeah. Also, another warning. This is, I mean, you're in for the long haul, but this is a graphic one.
If you're not into... If you're not into...
If very graphic descriptions of defiling corpses... bothers you maybe tune in next week for you but i mean I say stick with us.
We'll make it fun. Yeah, we'll make it fun.
In the most respectable manner possible.
Let's be clear about that. It's not going to be like a great pile of fun.
No, but it's going to be something. It's going to be an experience.
Just be here with us. It was actually kind of in the movie American Psycho with Christian Bale.
Kind of. Kind of. And I say kind of because Christian Bale or Patrick Bateman misquoted him and misattributed the quote to another guy. bumblebutt so the quote that he says in the movie is he's sitting with his friends at a bar i'm sure the people have seen most of you have probably seen this if you're listening to this podcast you've probably seen america if you're doing this podcast only half of you has watched the movie my god i have so much work to do So he says to his friends, when I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things.
One part of me wants to take her out. Talk to her. be real nice and sweet and treat her right.
And one of his asshole friends is like, what's the other thing?
And he says, I'd like to know what her head would look like on a stick.
And then he laughs. Which you've probably seen the gif of him laughing like a maniac.
He says this quote is from Ed Gein, but it is not.
It is Edmund Kemper. So he had the wrong Ed.
Oh, what a dumb butt. And that is not something Ed Gein would say. no he was like a he's a whole different situation yeah we'll get there so We have plans, y'all.
Yeah, we have plans. We have so many plans.
During the time that he was killing was in the 1970s. and it was around the Santa Cruz, California area.
During that time, he was one of a trio of killers that were terrorizing people.
Him, along with John Lindley Frazier, who killed an entire family to save the environment.
Again, as one does. Pause for reaction. And also Herbert Mullen, who killed like 13 people in like a crazy spree because...
He said it would prevent earthquakes in San Francisco.
California has seen some shit. So, yeah.
So he was in some kind of messy company.
And so everybody was going, I don't know how people were still getting in cars during this time, like cars of people they don't know.
Oh, fun fact for that later. I know how they got into Edmund's car.
As do I. But you guys don't. Keep listening.
Hold on to that. So, Edmund Kemper III was born in Burbank, California on December 18, 1948.
And guess what? That's the day that John and I got engaged.
I kept looking at the date and I was like, why do I know this date as like a different special occasion?
It wasn't. 1948 because I'm not that old you're not but I thought you were 69 and you know what I don't think John knew this.
I don't think he did it on purpose. I know for a fact that he did, actually.
You know what? Then I love him more. But going back to the other news.
So Edmund was born to Edmund Jr. and Clarnell Kemper.
That's why she was so pissed because her name was fucking Clarnell.
Her name was Clarnell. That sounds like a sound you make when you're in pain.
Clarnell! Clarnell! I don't know. It sounds like something.
This sounds like a shitty name, Chica. Yeah, his parents, it wasn't like a big happy family.
The opposite, actually, I would say. His parents were not like super duper lovey and in love and, you know, all that good stuff.
They actually divorced in 1957 when Edmund was only nine years old.
And while that is not a big deal, because lots of people get divorced, He was left with his mother.
And this is not, again, not a weird thing in normal circumstances.
But... His mother was not super motherly.
I'm going to be real. No, not very maternal there.
With how I say this because she is no longer with us.
R.I.P. I mean, like. Well, the dad said that he served, I think, in World War II.
Yes. Is that what it was? Yes. And suicide – and I quote this – suicide missions in wartime – and atomic bomb testings were nothing compared to living with her, is what the father said.
Yeah. This guy was a nuclear weapons tester.
Like, he would rather do that to living with this woman.
But he said that. And then, when they got divorced, he allowed her to take his children, Edmund and his two sisters, to Helena, Montana.
So he's saying that this woman is worse than dealing with atomic bombs and suicide missions, but he's leaving his children.
But she's a suitable parent. So like, alright, Edmund...
Alaina literally wrote in her notes, seems fishy.
It seems fishy. All right, I don't know.
I feel like he's... I think Clarnell is getting a lot of the blame, which she should.
You'll see she's getting a lot of it. She kind of should.
She was real shitty. Yeah. But his dad doesn't seem like a prize either.
I'm just saying. I'm just saying. So, Clarnell... was an alcoholic who verbally and psychologically abused Edmund during his childhood.
This got way worse after she divorced his father.
For real. She was bitter. Yeah, she was real bitter.
And Edmund would say later that he thought that she looked at him and saw his father.
Well, and she would tell him, like, you're just like your dad.
And it was not a compliment to be like, you're just like your father.
Because she hated him. Um, it's been said that she was afflicted with borderline personality disorder.
That's unconfirmed and undiagnosed, but a lot of people said that that's something it seemed like she was suffering from.
That's what it sounds like. It kind of does sound that way.
She had a thing where she didn't want to treat Edmund lovingly or dote on him in any way. or be at all lenient with him.
Not even an ounce of leniency here. And her reasoning was she was worried she'd turn him gay.
He probably would have turned out to be a great guy if that was the case.
I didn't want him to turn out gay, so I made him a murderer.
So I decided to beat the possible gay out of him?
Like, that is insane to me. So she constantly belittled him, she humiliated him, and she really focused on his size.
She called him a freak. At 15 years old, he was 6'4".
Yeah, and that was at 15 years old, which at 15 years old... Aw, poor kid.
Like, you don't want any part of you to be different at 15.
And you're already, like... in the worst stage of life at 15 years old like the most awkward awful stage and then your mother you're six foot four and your mother is calling you out for it and calling you quote A real weirdo, which is what she called him all the time.
Not cool. I can picture Ma calling someone just like a real weirdo, but like in the cutest way possible.
You're a real weirdo. I'm pretty sure she's called me a real weirdo.
I think a lot of people have called you a real weirdo.
I'm 100% positive. And your real weirdoness has rubbed off on me.
Exactly. here we are podcasting about weird shit i passed the real weirdo torch for real And then I took some of it back so we could do it together.
Yeah. We share the torch. In a 1984 interview, which everybody should go listen, because one thing about Edmund is he talks a lot.
A lot. Yeah. He loves to tell you all about what was going on in his head, what he was doing, why he was doing it.
It is so interesting to hear him talk so.
It's crazy. Freaking calmly. Oh, he's a true sociopath, and you'll see it when you see these interviews.
He just speaks so calmly. It's like chilling.
Yeah, it's awful. And there's a particular 1984 interview where it's... I think it was part of a documentary.
And, um... You can see all of it on YouTube.
I'm sure you can find it. It's super easy to find. about his mother was my mother was a sick angry hungry and very sad woman I hated her But I wanted to love my mother.
I watched the alcohol increase. I watched the social life drop off.
I watched her get bizarre. She had terrible pain from her life, her upbringing, a failed marriage with my father.
I'm a constant reminder of that failure.
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So he knows where it comes from. Right. And identifies it.
Yeah. And can almost, it seems like, almost sympathize with it.
Yeah, and it's like every kid wants to love their mother, you know?
Like, it's gotta suck to have that kind of... like, inner conflict.
Yeah. I want to love this woman. Right. She's not giving me anything to love.
Let me tell you all about that. So one of the things that Clarnell did, which will kind of give you a little peek into Edmund's inner hell. when he was growing up was she locked him in a dark basement alone at only nine years old.
Well, that was his room. The family left the center room, the living room of the house.
My mother and my sisters or my sisters themselves would go up to bed upstairs where I used to go to bed upstairs.
I had to go down to the basement. And an eight-year-old child had a tough time differentiating the reason in that.
Why am I going to the basement? I'm going to hell, they're going to heaven.
Earth is the living room. I'm going down to deal with demons and monsters and ghosts and all the things that scare me.
They don't have to. Yeah, that was his room because he didn't... Her reasoning for this was she was wearing... I mean, maybe she wasn't so far off base with this one, but...
She was worried he was going to harm or molest his sisters, so she didn't want him being free. there at night to roam the house yikes which now you look back and you're like oh clarnell good on you all right i mean i get it But like, don't... Like, here's a little piece of parenting advice from me to you.
I only have two year olds, so... Who knows?
They are not six foot four yet. They are not six foot four yet, but who knows?
But, like, maybe don't lock a child in a basement.
Or at least throw a light in there. Or at least throw a blanket statement to just throw out there.
Like, I don't think I'm overstepping in any way.
I wouldn't say so. To say maybe don't lock your children in a basement.
No. No. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I just feel like that's a good thing.
Well, especially with a door that is like the kitchen table was over.
Oh yeah. Because the only way in and out of this dark basement was a trap door that was under the kitchen table.
So once he was in there, he was in there.
And they also locked it. So what if there was a fire in the house?
That's so sad. It's just like, and he even, there was a quote from him and I'll have to find it.
It's... He was talking about how the light that was in that basement was like this bare bulb.
And he would have to... go in the basement and run over in the pitch black to the bulb and like and he even said like he would run over in pure terror to run over to that bulb that stresses me out And it's like, that's a child.
Like, I'm not giving him any pass here. Like, let me be perfectly clear with that.
But like... He did have a fucked up time.
It is. This is the perfect argument for nature versus nurture.
For sure. You could go to town with this one.
Because you look at some of the things he was doing here, and we're going to go into them in a second.
He was showing clear signs that something was wrong.
And when it's like... I feel like if he had a loving mother and, like, a normal childhood... Right.
Maybe he would have possibly just been kind of a weird dude.
Stopped in his tracks, yeah. Like... I don't know, obviously.
Like, I'm not in its head, like, who really knows, but this really clearly played a role in it.
But that's not what happened. He was not a normal dude.
He did not have a normal childhood. So at one point when he was younger, he had a crush on his teacher.
And his sisters decided to tease him about it, and they asked him, like, why don't you try to kiss her?
But they didn't tease him after that. And his response... was if I kissed her, I would have to kill her first.
Like, the only way I can kiss this woman is if I kill her.
So he was, and this was when he was young.
I'm not clear on what age it was because it was different ages everywhere I saw.
But he was young, and too young to be thinking that way.
Or to connect any of those dots. No. Around these times, he started another serial killer trait where he was butchering the family cats.
At 10 years old, 10 years old, he buried one of them alive.
Or burned, because I found that places too.
Some people said, I think it's buried because I saw that more.
Buried. He buried one alive, then dug it up and put its head on a spike.
Because... Decapitated the cat. I literally can't.
What? And again at 13, he killed another family cat, this time Because he said he felt the cat loved his sister more than he loved him.
These poor cats. Like, why did you get another one?
Like, I don't understand. And it's like, yeah, because you're like a big weirdo creep.
That's probably why the cat didn't like you.
The cat doesn't like the basement. We're sorry.
What the hell? And he tortured this poor animal, killed and dismembered it.
And then he hid it in the closet. He kept the pieces in the closet until his mother found them and was just like...
Get the cat pieces out of the closet. No help was given.
I hope I never, never have to yell that as a parent.
If I ever have to tell my girls... Get the cat pieces out.
Please get that dead dismembered cat out of your closet.
There's gonna be a follow-up. There's going to be a follow-up.
I would call a therapist in my next sentence.
But not with Clarnell. She was just like, move on now.
Back to the basement, buddy. Move on now.
You real weirdo. Real weirdo. During these times, he was decapitating his sister's dolls because, you know...
And if that was it alone, that's fine. Because I think we've all decapitated a doll here and there.
Maybe it's just me. I don't know. You're weird, Barbie.
No, been there, done that. And Edmund has... an explanation of his own for why this happened, that he kind of downplays it.
I haven't heard this. We'll put a little clip here. to kind of show what he says happened.
Of course, we can only take this with a grain of salt, but...
I had a cap gun. It was by Mattel, right?
Fanner 50. It was a very fancy cap gun. I got it in New York City.
I went there for one summer with a cousin.
And when I came back, my sister was kind of jealous, my little sister.
For years I never really put any value on what happened. tried to figure out beyond the obvious what happened in this scenario.
But I've since found it plausible to believe that when she was angry or jealous about something, she would fuel her attitude toward resolving something.
She hated that cap gun because it came between us as brother and sister.
It was something I had that she didn't have.
That trip represented something she really wanted, she didn't get, and I did.
But very soon after getting back from that trip, She got in an argument with me.
It was over something really petty. She got really outraged.
She picked up that cap pistol. I said, don't throw that.
And she threw it right at me. Wham. Hard.
It hit the floor and my toe, and it hurt bad, but it broke the gun, the inner mechanism.
It wouldn't work after that. I picked it up, I found that out, it wouldn't conquer and pull the trigger anymore.
And that really outraged me. So I said, so you want to play like that, huh?
So I go running into her room. She says, what are you doing?
What are you doing? She's shrieking and chasing me, right?
So I run into her room, and I grab up her Barbie doll.
It was the one fancy doll she had, the Barbie doll.
Everybody has one, right? uh... she had a pair of sewing scissors sitting there in a sewing machine a sewing kit i grabbed the scissors out the head didn't decapitate it pops off So I popped that off.
I said, well, that's going to go right back on.
That's no damage. So I took the scissors and I cut the hands off the doll.
I said, here. Now, you got a toy that doesn't work too good, I got a toy that doesn't work too good.
That was my attitude. It wasn't quite just me going and dismembering her doll.
Again, I think that's a little bit too quick.
It's not me to judge these professionals, but when they look at me here on Monday morning after the football game and they say, gee, here's all these little parts of the puzzle, Oh, this indicates what he was going to do.
He was also did this, you know, really fun game with his sisters.
One of them was called Gas Chamber and the other one was called Electric Chair.
Did we play that game ever? I don't think we did.
No? No. I don't think these are, you know.
Yeah, I don't recall playing that as a child.
Like freeze tags. Freestag for sure. Sure.
Gas chamber? I don't remember that one. No, I don't remember.
No. We missed out, I guess. Yeah, we did.
And I think basically gas chamber was when they would like...
Throw one of the, like they throw Edmund into a room and they pretend to flip a switch and then he pretend to be gassed. fun for everybody right and then electric chair he'd sit in a chair and they pretend to flip a switch and he'd like writhe around like he was being electrocuted again Fun, right?
I wish you could all see the face that I'm making right now.
Ash is literally looking like... I'm like, I'm befuddled.
She's trying to put this together. It's not happening.
And I'm glad it's not happening because we don't need to make sense of him.
No, there is no sense to be made. No one needs to make sense of Edmund Kemper.
We'll let him try to make sense of himself.
And he does. A lot. So all that fun happened.
And then five years after he was living with his mother alone.
He couldn't handle it anymore, and he ran away to his father's new home in California.
Yeah. Where he was remarried, right? The dad?
Yeah, his father was remarried with a stepson.
Right. And when he got there, so this kid has been living with Carnell.
He's been going through all that crap. He gets to his father, who he adores.
I don't know why. Really idolizes dad. He really idolizes him.
He gets there. His dad has a new family.
And his dad is like, yeah, there's not a lot of room here for you.
Did he stay there for a little bit? He did.
He stayed there for a little bit, but I think it became a thing where like, the new wife and the new it just wasn't all well he probably was exhibiting some weird because he's already in this weird thing.
So his father sent him to live with his paternal grandparents, Maude and Edmund Kemper.
On a farm in North Fork, California. And it goes downhill from here, folks.
Yeah. So Edmund saw this as another form of rejection.
Yeah, I mean, both of your parents. I mean, his mother's constantly telling him you're... a monster.
You're a giant monster. She's always telling him no woman is ever going to like you because you're a giant, freaky weirdo.
Yikes. That's probably not something you want to hear growing up.
So that in itself is rejection because it's a mother's love.
Right. A rejection of a mother's love and acceptance.
Right. Like the one love that you're supposed to have.
Exactly. And then he goes to see his father and he's like, you know, runs away to his father and his father's like, yeah, I have a new family and you don't really fit in this.
So here you go. Right. Like, I mean, I can kind of understand why he was a little pissed.
When he got to the farm, he immediately saw his grandmother as his mother.
Because she was... She seemed to be domineering, too.
Again, domineering, yep. Just like his mother.
Like, that would seem to be a trend in his life, is the domineering women...
He saw her as emasculating his grandfather and belittling him.
He turned her right into his mother. And his mother had also kind of instilled in him that he should hate women almost well probably yeah she kind of instilled in him like they're never gonna like you they're never gonna like you it's like he's already not on a good path So after a while on the farm, August 27, 1964, Edmund was only 15 years old.
He had a... Pretty big argument with his grandmother.
The argument was over... Basically, she was saying, please stop killing the birds on the farm.
What? And he got so mad that he grabbed a .22 caliber hunting rifle that his grandfather had given him. and shot his grandmother in the head and twice in the back.
Now, his grandmother was also, I believe, was writing or illustrating a children's book at the time and fell slumped over on the kitchen table on top of her.
Bet they didn't publish that. In progress children's book.
So there's that. His grandfather... was coming home from grocery shopping or shopping of some sort.
This poor guy. And when he arrived, Edmund... shot him and killed him in the driveway.
And his reasoning for it? His reasoning for it was I didn't want my grandfather to see his dead wife.
Which is some kind of sympathy. Exactly.
But it's like. Or empathy. But it. But see where his, because then his reasoning for shooting his grandmother, I just wanted to see what it felt like to shoot grandma.
Right. So there's two totally different spectrums here, and it has to do with how he looks at males and how he looks at females.
Right. He looks at the male and he says...
I don't want him to go in there and see his dead wife.
Right. And he looks at the female and he's like, well, I just want to see what it looked like to shoot her.
That's all. So it's very clear how he views males and females in his life.
For sure. It's very clear how Clarnell kind of raised him to see this.
Um, there was also reports that there were multiple post-mortem stab wounds to his grandmother.
Oh, I read that. Which is rage. Right. Full rage.
Full rage. So what, this just, there's so many, he's like a goddamn evil onion.
Yeah. That's another good band name. I don't know about that one.
I don't know. I feel like I'm on a roll here.
Are we just going to evil band name every day?
I think Evil Onion's a pretty good band name.
I'm not going to lie. The efficiency was better.
It was, it was. I'll never be able to top that.
But Evil Onion's pretty good. He's an evil onion.
He's got so many goddamn layers. She digresses, everyone.
I digress a lot, but damn, he's got all these layers.
Because after he does all this shit, And he's run away from his mother to begin with and she's this, like, awful person who makes him feel awful.
He kills his grandmother. kills his grandfather, and then the first thing 15-year-old Edmund Kemper does is sit down and call his mother.
He's like, he sits down, Alexa, call Clarnell.
Way back in 1960s. And Clarnell answers and tells him to call the police.
So he does. He calls the police and waits on the front porch for them to arrive.
Wow. Just picture that scene. Everybody take a minute.
I don't know how he's so beyond understanding.
Rationale, yeah. Which goes again with him being a total sociopath.
He just can't. As a norm, we're not sociopaths because we don't get it.
He's just got all these crazy ass layers.
It's like I'm saying. Upon his arrest, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by a court psychiatrist. um that later changed they were like nah uh they did sentence them with it at first and he was um He carried out his sentence at Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane.
Um, the experts there believe that the grandparent killing was totally displaced rage. that was initially intended for his parents for rejecting him.
Well, and one person said he didn't show any signs of, uh, I quote, no flight of ideas, no interference or thought, no expressions of delusions or hallucinations and no evidence of bizarre thinking.
Exactly, which means he was not paranoid schizophrenic.
And they eventually turned that around when he got in there, because the hospital... psychiatrist said that instead he was going to be diagnosed with having a personality trait disturbance with passive aggressive type.
Which kind of makes sense. Does, yeah. Because he sounds like a passive-aggressive asshole.
Good on you, psychiatrist. He's super aggressive too, but, you know, whatever.
While he was there, he was a model prisoner.
That's what everybody said. Model prisoner.
Let me just tell you what I picture. Every single time today that I've read the phrase model prisoner...
I just picture Tyra Banks literally in an orange jumpsuit like running down the prison hallways being like, smile with your eyes.
Smile. Smize. Smize. You better work. That's all I can picture.
Edmund Kemper doing that. Edmund Kemper.
With, like, the rolled up bottoms and, like.
Just one leg rolled up, yes. And high heels.
Yes. Just walking with her and being like, you better work.
Like Beyonce's playing in the background.
Oh, that's all I'm going to picture now.
Yep. I hope you're all picturing that. Picture that.
Go look at a picture of him and then picture that.
Yeah. Quick, go do, we'll wait. One, two, three, go.
So he was a model prisoner, not of that type.
Bummer. He won everyone over there, and he eventually gained a ton of perks and freedom.
He had a weird, oddly charming personality, which you're going to see throughout this whole thing with the clips that we're playing.
He's weirdly charming. Right. Again, sociopath of the highest order.
Weirdly charming. Because of all of this...
I mean, they let him administer psychiatric tests to other patients and prisoners.
Because there was a lot of bad people in there.
So this allowed him to kind of get a better understanding of how these psychiatric tests work.
And the criminal mind. Exactly. And it kind of let him see how you should answer these tests to get yourself out of there, which is what he was looking to do. he was able to answer these questions now to make it look like he was in a better headspace than he actually was.
Right. Um, these people were really scary individuals.
I mean, they're like, you know, like the worst of the worst deviants and murderers, all of these, you know, really bad people.
And he was stuck in there during his adolescence, during 15 years old when you're so impressionable.
Yeah. learning from these people things like he said he was learning that if you rape someone, you have to kill them because you can't leave a witness.
So he got that in his head from a young age and he goes back to that a lot as he goes on.
He keeps going back to the idea that I had to kill her because I couldn't leave a witness.
She was going to tell on me. I was going to get in trouble.
Oy. It's insane. So, Edmund got out of there, was paroled on his 21st birthday.
December 18th. Happy birthday. Happy anniversary.
And despite what literally all the psychiatrists recommended in like. with him to do, he was released back to his mother.
All of these psychiatrists said... Oh, they didn't want him to be.
No way. They were all like... In fact, most of them said... Edmonton said...
That they actually said, cut her off. That's it.
Like, when you get out of here, don't even send her a Christmas card anymore.
He literally told him to cut all contact off and then he was released into her custody at 20.
How did he get released into her custody at 21, though?
Is it because of... It's probably because... I have no idea.
And he had nowhere else to go, I think. Right.
Because he didn't have any money. It's not like you can go to foster care at 21.
He was 15 when he went in. Right. So he had nothing.
I wonder whatever happened to his dad. Because, I mean, it was his parents that got murdered.
I think, I want to say that the stepson... spoke out at some point i believe i saw an article i would like to read that too far into it but i'll have to look at it later that'd be interesting But I think they kind of wanted to get the hell away from this whole thing.
Why? Yeah, I don't know why. Weird. Eventually, and I'm going to get into this in more detail later, but...
He eventually got, when he got out at 21, close after he got out, He got his entire juvenile record expunged.
Expunged, right. Which means the record of him killing his grandparents went away completely.
And we'll, I will get into that later because.
Talk about charming. But he was able to charm himself out of a rap sheet.
Basically, out of two counts of murder. Right.
Unbelievable. Well, it must have just been him taking those tests and...
They must have just thought it was a psychotic break.
And they didn't want it to affect him forever.
It's the actual situation where it happened will come up later and it's going to blow all your minds how it happened.
But... After a little while, he moved in with a roommate in Almeda, California.
But his mother was still... She would pop up all the time.
Yeah. surprise visits exactly she was just still all over his shit she was like hey real weirdo how you doing And he eventually got a job working for the highway department.
And he was able to get through a settlement for a motorcycle accident.
Yeah, he was, he bought a, from what I read on Wikipedia, he had like a motorcycle and was in an accident where he was.
And he got a settlement. Yeah, $15,000.
And that's how he bought his 1969 yellow Ford Galaxy.
I'm just telling you, and I thought this earlier when I was doing some research, in the 70s, just don't get into a yellow car.
Yeah. Don't do that. Yellow cars. Don't do it.
Or a battleman in the 70s in California.
Or Ted Bundy. Yeah. Either way, it's not going to happen.
And I'm sure there's probably more. Which we're totally going to do Ted Bundy.
Because he's my fave. Yeah. And favorite in the best way possible.
In the least weird way possible. Everyone has a favorite murderer.
Everyone has a favorite murderer. You're lying if you say you haven't.
Now, by this point he's basically missed ages 15 through 21.
Critical years. So he's out of here. The last time he was free was at 15.
So he's like super behind the curve socially.
Well, and the difference between 15 and 21 is... Is crazy.
It's not like... A lot in years, but it's a lot in life phases.
Exactly. And it's like at 21 now, he's still at 15.
Right. In socially. Trapped. yeah intelligence he's he's really intelligent but socially he's like super behind He didn't feel like he was adept at speaking with women his age at all.
In fact, in one interview he said that, I wasn't impotent physically, but emotionally I was impotent.
I was scared to death of failing in male female relationships.
I knew absolutely nothing about that whole area.
And it's true. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't know.
He probably never. He missed out on high school.
Right. He didn't know how to talk to women.
Um, during this time is when he started noticing, because again, we're like, we're like entering the hippie era.
Oh yeah. I wish that I had been born. I do not.
Well, and I wish that I had been born then but known all of this somehow.
Yeah. And, like, avoided hitchhiking. No way you'd be one of these chicks.
Listen. Yeah. You'd be in trouble. She gives me no credit.
I don't. You would totally be one of them.
I'd hop in there with my flower crown on acid.
Like, I'd be standing next to you, and I'd be lecturing you, being like, we're not supposed to be hitchhiking.
This is really bad. He'd be like, it's fine.
And then he'd pull up and I'd be like, that's a big dude.
I'm leaving. He'd be like, I'm going. Because I'm not missing the festival.
And I'd be like, I believe. I'm like, I'm on my way to Woodstock.
See ya. See ya. So that would be bad. We digress.
So this is when he started working up to killing.
By his own claims, he picked up and dropped off over 150 hitchhiking women without any incident.
But he wanted to, he just didn't. He just like chickened out.
Yeah, he was quoted in Front Page Detective, which is a magazine that like focuses on true crime and shit from the 70s. in 1973 is saying, at first I picked up girls just to talk to them, just to try and get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship.
At first he was trying to use these experiences as just getting more... you know, comfortable practice with talking to women of college age women, because you just didn't know how.
So he was like, well, if they're in a car with me, we have to talk.
Right. So I'm going to figure out how to do this.
Then he kind of began inching towards where he eventually ended up.
He began without a gun. And he would just kind of think about it and he would think about it.
Then he would have a hidden gun somewhere.
And he wouldn't bring it out. He would just have the gun in the car and he would know it was there.
And it would kind of give him the thrill.
It started getting bigger and bigger, and unfortunately, he started having a feeling of what he called a fantastic passion. building up inside of him like what a dick yeah calling it a fantastic passion like you're a piece of shit like my fantastic passion is doing hair exactly seriously My fantastic passion is true crime.
True crime and performing autopsies. you're weird so maybe i'm not that you're a real weirdo i don't know if i have a lot of Wait, have we not said that that's a good band name?
Real Weirdo? Did that just occur to me? That is a good band name, actually.
I still think Evil Onion's better. Anyways.
We're going to move on. We're going to agree to disagree.
So that whole fantastic passion, which is bad band name. was starting to build up inside him and become too much to handle.
And in that same 1984 interview that I mentioned earlier...
He said, I was raging inside. There was just incredible energies, positive and negative, depending on a mood that would trigger one or the other.
Outside I looked troubled at times. I looked moody.
Other times, perfectly serene. But again, people weren't even aware of what was happening.
So see, sociopath of the highest order. That is like a total sociopath.
Yeah. He himself compares the process to becoming more and more tolerant of drugs or alcohol and just needing more and more to get the effects that you want.
Which is a similar process, if you do think about it.
Yeah, it's kind of, I hate how, like, I don't want to agree with you, Ed.
I really don't like it. IQ, man. Right?
So it was early summer of 1972 that Kemper finally began to act.
These fantasies out. It was almost always after like a knockdown drag out fight with his mother that he would commit these crimes.
So he was in a rage. So he was already in a rage and he was displacing that rage.
So we're going to go through the victims now.
Things are going to get rough, so... Strap in, because it's gonna get rough.
This guy was a bad dude. The first and second victims... were on May 7th of 1972, and they were Fresno State University students Mary Ann Pesky and Anita Luchessa.
They were both 18-year-olds, and they were hitchhiking to Stanford University when they accepted a ride from Edmund Kemper.
His basic MO was he would drive these girls to a deserted area, which he did with Pesky and Luchessa.
Right. And he worked in the highway department, so he knew, like... So he knew all these weird offshoots.
Remote areas. Yeah, and, like, weird wooded areas.
Right. The first thing he did was he handcuffed Pesky...
And then he locked Luchesa in the trunk. while Pesky was in the front seat, or she was at least in the car, not in the trunk, he tried suffocating her with a bag.
But this bad bitch bit through the bag. Whoa.
I didn't know that. It's like, yeah, she fought. real hard and he did not see it coming because i guess he put a bag over her head which he like he mentioned the way he said it was he had this like nifty little trick He called it like a nifty little trick to use a bag to suffocate someone.
That's not even a nifty trick, Anne. And it's like, one, that's real messed up that you're calling it nifty.
And two, you didn't make that up. No, I didn't.
Come on. You don't get anything for that.
So after she bit through the bag, he was kind of fighting with her. he ended up stabbing her because that's all he could think of.
And he had a big old knife. So he stabbed her and she didn't fall dead.
And he was shocked by this because... In the interview, he says, I thought it was like a movie.
I thought when you stab someone, they die.
Like they fall over and go, oh. It doesn't quite work like that.
But in, and this is another quote from him.
He says, in reality, when you stab someone, they leak to death.
Oh. They lose blood pressure and you stab them more and more and more.
You complicate it many times. by where you're hitting, the pain you're causing, and the aggravation of the person involved, plus whether or not they leak a little faster.
First of all, the word leak. I could never say it again.
It rubs me in such a wrong way. Like, it makes me feel so many type of ways.
Like, I can't handle that. Well, it takes away the humanity. of the person.
It does. It makes it seem like a leaky faucet.
Or like a balloon. People don't leak. You bleed.
Exactly. You have blood running through your veins and that blood bleeds.
You're not leaking. It's just such an awful way to put it.
He said that wasn't working. Like he was stabbing her.
He even said I stabbed her all over her back and her sides and it wasn't working.
She was still alive. And, you know, you might, somebody might be thinking, why didn't he just stab her in the heart if he was really not wanting to stab this many times? and he was upsetting him because that's what he seems to be saying.
Why don't you stab her in the heart and end it?
Maybe in his frenzy he just didn't think that clearly.
Oh, no, he did. Oh, he said he thought of it.
He thought, why? Why don't I just stab her in the heart?
But then he thought, and I quote, her breasts were there. and that actually deflected me I couldn't see stabbing a young woman in the breast that's embarrassing For her or for him?
For him. Like, it's embarrassing for him to admit that.
What? He literally said that he felt some kind of weird thing about stabbing her in the... chest.
I read somewhere that he said he apologized to her mid-attack for accidentally touching her Yes, I read that as well.
He actually said, yeah, he said he accidentally like brushed against her breast when he was trying to do whatever he was doing.
Right. And he actually said, ooh, sorry.
Or, like, ooh, I'm sorry. In the middle of fucking murdering her.
He was like, ooh, my bad. Yep. Like, he literally said, like, I was embarrassed.
Be like, no, Edmund, this whole thing is your bad.
That's how, like, juvenile his social and sexual mind was.
Like, ooh, I touched your titties. He touched a breast.
Right. And he's like, ooh! Like, that's a 15-year-old reaction.
He's like, ooh, shit, sorry. Yeah. Like, ugh.
Unfortunately, he ended up ending her life by cutting her throat ear to ear.
Oh, wow. He said that stabbing her was definitely not what he expected.
And it was horrible. It shook him up. He lost all his calm and nerve at that moment.
And when he went back to Luchesa... In the trunk, he was obviously covered in blood because he had stabbed her a billion times.
And... she was like what the hell is going on what did you do oh my god this poor girl now he had kept her in the trunk as some like the way he says it is like it was almost this like favor he was doing to her like not He was trying to, like, be respectful and not have her see what he was doing to her friend.
Meanwhile, it's almost more terrifying that she has no idea what's going on.
She's locked in a damn trunk. And, like, what a dick.
Like, you think in your weird, twisted mind... Like, the gentleman thing to do is to leave the person in the trunk while you murder somebody else.
Like, fuck you. Such a goddamn gentleman, Miss Edmund Kemper.
Fuck you. And obviously she got upset. So what he said was, he said, your friend got smart with me.
And I hit her in the nose and I think I broke her nose.
And that's what this blood is. You better go see what she's, if she's okay.
That's what he said. And in the interview that I heard, he actually made sure to say, by the way.
Like Pesky did get super smart with me like a couple of times.
Like she was getting real smart with me and I never hit her.
So you stabbed her a billion times and slit her throat.
But I didn't hit her. But you didn't hit her.
Like, oh, again. Like, claps for you, bud.
Gentleman Edmund Kemper. I just got, like, legitimately a little angry.
Yeah, he's a dick. And it's like, it's...
He's such a sociopath. He's so charming when he wants to be, but then it creeps out.
Right. That awful monster just creeps out when you hear it.
Yeah, you can't hide that shit. Ugh, it's ridiculous.
So... Unfortunately, he ended up killing Luchesa.
He... stabbed her and he actually said when the knife didn't initially pierce her clothing because it was so dull.
Which is even more horrific. And he ended up killing her by actually strangling her in the end.
And the way he said it was, it wasn't that swell of a knife anyway.
Wasn't that swell of a knife? What? Yeah.
Yeah, he's a weird guy. So, he then brought... both of their bodies back to his apartment in the trunk.
And on the way to his apartment, he was stopped. pulled over by the police for a fucking taillight, a busted taillight.
And the police officer did not search his car.
He had two dead bodies in the trunk. And also, as I can imagine, there had to have been tons of blood in that car.
Right. So the officer obviously didn't pay attention.
It must have been dark. Just wasn't thinking of it.
But like, holy hell. Like, that could have been ended right there.
Well, and it was his old buddy Ed. Yeah, it was his old buddy Ed.
Because he was friends with all the police officers.
Yes, he was. was. In the last episode we did he was a police officer.
This episode he's friends with him. This is not looking good.
But I swear we're not like anti-police officers.
No, no, no, no. This is just a coincidence.
Right. But... Ed actually wanted to be a police officer, which you seem to find a lot in these guys because they like the authority thing and they like the power thing, but...
But in a weird turn of events, he was too big.
They have like a height thing and a weight thing.
And he was too big. I mean, you're almost seven feet tall.
We can't hand you a gun and a badge and have you troll in the streets as like, you know, an evil Hagrid.
Like it's not, it's just not something we need.
So because he couldn't be a police officer, he wanted to be around them all the time.
And there was this bar called The Jury Room, which is, like, so on the nose.
And all of these police officers... used to hang out at the jury room and drink their beer and like hang and talk about cases and whatnot.
And Edmund would go and hang out with them at this bar.
And they actually ended up liking him. He described himself, I think, as a friendly nuisance.
Yeah, which is totally what I would describe him as.
Just a friendly nuisance. I would just say a fucking nuisance.
Yeah, just a fucking monster. But they loved him because, again...
He's a charming guy. Right. If he was just talking to you, you probably would find him kind of likable.
Without knowing that he's, like, this awful beast.
Well, he knows how to turn it on and off for when he needs to.
He absolutely does. And... So, they would even, like, be discussing the co-ed killer crime.
And this would happen later, obviously, because he just began.
But later... Like, he would hear them talking about it, he would discuss it with them.
Commentate with it. And it had to have been some, like, weird thing where he felt, like, some kind of power.
Like a trophy thing, right. That he... was the guy and he had all the information and he was hearing them just sit there and try to grasp at it that's a movie just trying to put shit together and he's sitting there being like i know everything Like that had to have been part of his like getting off.
What? It was just a weird noise. It wasn't in the house, it was outside.
Oh, okay. We should leave that in. We really should.
So... I spooked you out. You did. All right.
So... So he gets stopped for the taillight.
Yeah. So then once he gets them back to his apartment...
He rapes their corpses, which is something he does every single time.
Yeah. And it gets weirder and weirder every time.
Yeah, he took explicit photographs of them, like, posed them in sexually explicit ways.
Like he's a real piece of shit. And that was kind of what he was infamous for doing is raping the corpses afterwards.
He really did that. He even did it with his own mother later.
Well, not just like raping the corpses, like raping the decapitated heads.
Because that's when he dismembered and decapitated their bodies.
And he placed their parts in plastic bags and raped themselves because that's something he really liked to do.
And that's really weird. Um, he ended up throwing the heads in a ravine and the bodies were dumped elsewhere and in the end only pesky's head was found Lou Chase's head wasn't found and none of their body parts were found.
Which is awful. Yeah. And after this whole thing, he went back to just giving women rides.
He started trying to just do the ride thing.
He was like, okay, I did that, so maybe we can just be friends.
I got it out of my system. I got it out of my system, but apparently he did not.
Suck. It was only when he raged that he would kill again.
It was like he'd get in a fight with his mother.
And he would displace that shit. He did say that if the women mentioned... the case and talked about the killings this dude was like is around and he's picking up people like oh i hope you're not him he wouldn't kill them Why?
And I don't know why. Like, he just wouldn't do it.
Huh. Like, which is weird. He had like, it was like this weird embarrassment thing.
Like, he, like, didn't want to be connected to it.
Right. I don't know. So that didn't last long because the third victim was on September 14th, 19...
72 15 years old 15 year old korean ballet dancer i goku Looking for a ride to dance because she missed the bus.
She missed her bus and she really wanted to get to dance class.
So she... Held out a sign that said, like, I think it said San Francisco on it, because you needed to get there.
Ugh. He picked her up and he immediately broke out a gun to scare the shit out of her.
Like, immediately broke out a gun and was like, and told her that I'm going to kill myself and I want you here as a witness.
That's what he initially told her. And he said, if you like, you know, if you struggle, if you scream, if you try to go away, I'm going to kill you too.
But this is what I want to do. I just want to kill myself.
You just need to be here. What? So she's probably like, what the actual fuck?
But that's what he told her. And he drove her to a wooded area like he did before.
Oh, no, honey. And at one point... He locked his keys in the car with her.
Oh I know. With the gun under the seat. And she let him back in the car.
Yeah, she somehow convinced her. He convinced her to let him back in the car.
And he says it. He's like... I don't know how this happened.
She could have picked that gun up. She could have drove that car away.
I was on the outside. She was on the inside.
She had everything. Which just goes to show how convincing he must have been.
How convincing and charming he was. Like, he must have made her feel like he wasn't as big a threat.
Maybe she just assumed... And it's like, she's this little 15 year old.
Yeah, she doesn't know. He's a fucking almost seven foot tall monster.
Giant man. I mean, this situation is just beyond.
And he did get back in the car. He did say that she fought back hard.
And he eventually strangled her to death with his...
I think it was her own scarf. He had initially tried to suffocate her by sticking his fingers up her nose.
What? Which I'm like... That's just where the 15-year-old Ed comes back in the play and he's like, she can't breathe through her mouth.
And that obviously didn't work and she fought hard at that point.
She was like, hell no. And then he used the scarf to strangle her.
He immediately raped her body. Ugh. On his way home, he stopped for a beer real quick.
Yeah, with his friends. Because, you know.
And then he brought her back to his apartment where, you guessed it, he dismembered and raped her again.
Oh. She was never found, despite huge efforts from her parents.
It hurts my heart so much when people aren't found because the family already has to go through, I can't even imagine like the pain that they go through and then to never be able to lay.
No closure at all. Your loved one to rest.
You get no part of it. You are always going to wonder where they are.
And you're going to just sit there and think about them alone.
I literally, I actually just felt like I was going to cry.
Right? That's horrible. It's awful. I can't imagine.
She was a baby. You don't move on from that.
And it gets even worse. And fuck him for doing that.
And it gets even worse. On the way to disposing of her severed head... which he had in a bag in his car.
He stopped at his scheduled court-mandated psychiatrist appointment.
With her head in a bag. I did not know this.
And at that appointment, it was when he was officially deemed to be no longer a threat to others. and was actually referred to as a very well-adjusted young man by two psychiatrists.
And it was then that they recommended that his juvenile record be sealed.
I wish you could see my fucking face right now.
With Aikoku's head in his trunk. In his car.
That was when his... juvenile record was sealed.
I think my face just permanently will be like this forever.
Yeah. Because that's what permanent means.
What? Yeah. So he was in there and they're asking him, you know, how's your day?
Yeah, everything's cool. Everything's fine.
And they were saying, you know, he seems like a very well-adjusted young man.
He seems like everything's fine. How do those psychiatrists feel about themselves now?
Right? And just the fact that they're sitting there being like, he's no longer a threat.
He's no longer a threat. To be that good at defying people.
And he's in the middle of a murder spree.
That's bad. That's real bad. That's bad on them.
Big bad on them. Like real bad. Whoa. Yeah.
And it was at this time- I'm shooketh. That warnings started coming out by the authorities telling women-
Don't accept rides from strangers. And especially do not get in a car unless it has a university sticker.
You know who had a university sticker? Edmund fucking Kemper did.
Because his mama worked at... UC Santa Cruz.
Yeah. And she worked as an administrative assistant, so she had a sticker and he got a sticker.
Which meant he was picking these girls up and he was looking like somebody from the college.
Which is what all the authorities were saying was totally fine.
It can't be someone from the college. I wonder why they thought that.
I think they just assumed that this was an outsider.
I mean... Because they were picking... I think he was also picking them up outside of the campus, too.
Oh, okay. So I think they were not thinking that it was somebody in...
They're supposed to know everybody that works there.
Right, and they're probably, like, checking cars and whatnot.
And it's like, if they work there, they're thinking, they can't be this killer.
We know their background. shit yeah he actually attributes the fact that she worked with college co-eds he attributes why he killed co-eds to the fact that his mother worked there Well, and she wouldn't introduce him to any of the girls.
And he says, they, and I quote... They represented not what my mother was, but what she liked, what she coveted, what was important to her and I was destroying it.
So he saw this as she worked with these co-eds.
She thought they were, like, the ideal. And he was gonna fuck it all up.
Yeah. And at this point, guess what? He moved back in with his mother on the UC Santa Cruz campus.
Why not? Because, you know, that seems like the next best step.
And I think he just like ran out of money and like couldn't pay his apartment because he was probably busy killing people and Didn't have a job.
That does not pay the bills. No. So this is also the time that he bought a .22 caliber pistol.
And this is when he said he went, quote, bananas when he bought it.
Which upsets me because I say bananas all the time.
Yeah, you're not going to say that the same anymore.
Because he's like, I got my .22 pistol and I want bananas.
But now I'm picturing him being like... This shit is bananas.
B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I hope he didn't do that. i bet he didn't because that song wasn't out yet yeah which is he's scary enough we don't need a seven foot fucking sociopathic time traveling nope need that.
It was after getting this .22 caliber pistol that he got his fourth victim, which was Cindy Shaw.
And that was on January 7, 1973. She was only 19 years old.
Yeah. He murdered her after, obviously, he picked her up hitchhiking.
That was his thing. He murdered her by shooting her.
And then he hid her in his fucking closet.
Yes he did, but not- before raping her corpse and dismembering her with an axe in the shower.
In his mother's shower, right? Yeah, of course it was his mother's shower.
Because it's so on the nose again. He's just all about the symbolism.
He's like, screw you mom, screw your shower, screw your co-eds.
Screw your damn shower. And he ended up throwing the pieces of her body into a nearby ravine.
One thing he always did from this point on, because this is when he had the gun, was he always removed the bullet from the skull.
Which again, was really smart. To remove like identification.
Because that way they can't trace it back.
They don't know what kind of gun it is. They probably know it's maybe a .22 because they can look at the bullet wound.
But they can't say for sure. They don't have that bullet and they can't trace it back to a gun.
Which, again, really smart. After having sex with her head for several days.
Her severed head. Her severed head. He then buried that head in a backyard garden at his mother's house.
And he said he faced her to look up at the window... because according to him, quote, my mother always wanted people to look up to her.
What a guy. What a guy. You thought your Mother's Day gift was good.
What a guy, right? Mother's Day is coming up, guys.
Don't get your mama that. Do not get ideas from this podcast.
Whoa. So, after he had escalated to that point, his fifth and sixth victims... which were the ones before his, you know, crescendo at the end.
His fifth and sixth victims were on February 5th, 1973.
It was after a particularly bad fight. Like a really bad fight.
And he picked up UC Santa Cruz students, Rosalind Thorpe, I think Rosalind's such a pretty name.
I just have to throw that in there. Rosalind, I think that's a really pretty name.
It was Rosalind Thorpe and Alison Liu. I believe Alison was 21.
I've gotten different reports of how old Rosalind is, so I don't want to...
I don't want to say what her age actually is.
I think Wikipedia said they were both 21, but I'm telling you Wikipedia.
I think they're both around 20, 21, somewhere around there.
He shot them both in the head while he was still on the university campus.
What? So he did it. He got them in the car and immediately shot them in the head.
How did nobody hear that? So he was really starting to go bananas.
Huh. B-A-N-A-S. On his way out of the campus, he passed right by campus security.
He claims that the security guard did obviously have to let him out, and he'd covered the two with a blanket. in the back seat, and he told the security guard, these two were drunk, they passed out, and I'm bringing them home.
So that's his first story. His second story is that the guard was passed out and you got by him.
Sometimes I just don't have words. So he's wearing a piece of shirt and you can't really tell what he's saying.
Either way, fucked up. he this is this is where you can tell he's really starting to lose it too because his other ones were very he brought him back home when he did all his shit right He got back to his mother's house and in the trunk, in full view of the neighborhood, right outside of his mother's house, he decapitated them both in the fucking trunk.
Like, in the driveway? He opened the trunk in the driveway, in full view, and decapitated two co-eds in the trunk of his car.
Where was that neighborhood watch? Full view. view of anybody passing by.
If you walked by his house at that point, you would have seen him sawing the heads off of two women.
I'm Like, I don't know if I should say this, but I'm glad that nobody was walking by.
Yeah, can you imagine? Because he probably would have just, like... gone berserk yeah i think he literally would have lost it and started just trapping people to bits yeah yeah So that's bananas.
Shit, dude. He ended up dumping the heads and bodies of these two in separate places as well.
And this was, like, several days later, after he had already defiled their corpses.
Ew. Now... His last victims... were Clarnell Kemper and her best friend, whose name...
I will tell you in a second. So his last victims were his mother and his mother's best friend.
Sally Hallett. It was April 20th, 1973 on Good Friday.
It was not a good Friday. Not at all. He ended up using a claw hammer on his mother to beat her to death and then slit her throat while she slept.
And right now, I'm going to let Edmund tell you exactly how it went down.
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 a party. She got soused.
She came home, went to sleep. I was woken up by that.
I got and came out. I walked up to her bed.
She's laying there reading a paperback as many thousands of nights before.
And she said, oh, I suppose you're going to want to sit up all night and talk now.
Shit. I looked at her and I said, no. I said, good night.
And I knew I was going to kill her. And I'm so cold, it's so hard.
And that's the first time in ten years I've looked at it that way.
I mean, that intensely, that honestly. It hurts.
Because I'm not a lizard. I'm not from under a rock.
I came out of her vagina. It came out of my mother.
And in a rage, I went right back in. For seven years, she said, I haven't had sex with a man because of you, my murderous son.
It's one of our arguments. I cut off her head, and I humiliated her corpse.
I said, there. You know? A six-year-old woman dead because of the way she raises her son and the way her son is raised, the way he grows up.
And what's her closing words? I suppose you want to sit up all night and talk.
God, I wish I had. So that happened. So, I mean, what's weird to me is that in the clip, Edmund starts to, like... almost sound like he's crying.
A little bit, yeah. And he sounds very...
Remorseful? It's like he didn't want... So it's weird that he connects himself to her, like...
In that way. Like, he can sit there and say, like, yes, I came out of her.
Like, I'm not a lizard. I didn't just get plopped here. to cause murder and mayhem i came from my mother right and then i can't it's such a weird connection he has it reminds me of that tupac song You know?
It is just like that. Alright, well, it's a little bit different, but...
But I see where you're going. Correlation.
Our brains work differently. Correlation is not causation.
So he ended up, you know, as he said, he decapitated his mother.
He raped her head several times. whole nother level.
He then used her head as a dartboard. Yeah.
And screamed at it for hours. She placed it on a shelf to yell at it for hours.
The rage. And just insanity that that requires to put your place, your mother, first of all, to use your mother's head as a diaper.
First of all, to kill your mother. Exactly.
But it's like... To take it to the level of them putting her head on the shelf and yelling at it.
And using it as a dartboard. Like, that's the only time he felt like he could... like fight back is like now she's decapitated she's dead i can put her head on a shelf and i can fucking yell at her back and just to not see something so off about exactly But he said his whole because I'm sitting here doing all this research and I'm like, why did he want to decapitate them?
Like, what is that all about? And he said.
The head trip fantasies were a bit like a trophy.
You know, the head is where everything is.
The brain, the eyes, the mouth. That's the person.
I remember being told as a kid, you were 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.
Holy hell. What? Like, he's trying to sound profound, and maybe he does in some way, I guess.
He's profound in the most evil, darkest, twisted, awful way. awful way i just and i still don't get the head i can't because because it's literally i think it's literally the worst thing you can do to a person well it's so like and since he's displacing his anger of his mother at these women he's thinking of the worst thing he could do to his mother which he eventually did And then he also took her tongue and larynx out.
He cut them out. And then he threw them down the garbage disposal.
He turned it on and the garbage disposal spat pieces on them back.
Symbolic. Of course. Even the garbage disposal cannot grind up her voice box.
Her voice box just wasn't going anywhere.
He, after that, he raped her body and then put her in a closet and went out for a drink.
Later, he called her best friend, 59 year old Sally Hallett, and asked her over for dinner.
When she got there, he strangled her, he decapitated her, and raped her body.
After he did that, he stuffed her in a closet too.
He stole her car and he started driving and ended up in Pueblo, Colorado.
There he pulled over at a payphone and he called police and confessed.
At first, the police were like, oh, Ed. That's funny.
Stop. And they didn't believe him. Well, because they had talked about the co-ed killer with him so many times.
He had to call them back and ask for a police officer that he was actually friendly with. and he actually told this police like no I really didn't do this like please come and get me and to make them understand he confessed to all the other crimes So he was like, yeah, I killed my mother, blah, blah, blah.
And then he was like, you don't believe me?
Okay, well, I did this one, this one, this one, this one.
He told them all about it. So they ended up coming and, you know... they arrested him.
At that point, when they asked him why he confessed, he said, quote, the original purpose was gone.
I just said to hell with it and called it off.
Because once he had killed his mother, that was it.
That was the apex. He didn't need to do it anymore.
Right. He was like, that was it. This whole thing was about his mother.
Yeah. Yeah. And he was arrested in April of 1973 at 24 years old.
He faced eight counts of first-degree murder.
He attempted suicide twice while waiting trial.
And he really tried for an insanity defense.
He even confessed to cannibalism and then recanted.
Do you think that's true? Not at all. He recanted it.
He said he didn't. He said the reason he said he had cannibalized was he wanted that insanity defense and he thought that would get it for him. it failed and once it failed he was like i didn't need anybody yeah like oh don't worry everybody i did everything else but i didn't like how dare you say that When he was found guilty, he actually requested to be put to death by torture.
I read that. But at the time there was a moratorium in California on the death penalty.
Yeah. So he just ended up getting seven life sentences to be served concurrently.
Right. He was sent to a California medical facility.
And he served alongside... Herbert Mullen.
And my boy, Charlie Manson. And, but he was next to, you know.
Herbert Mullen, who is also terrorizing everybody at the same time.
He did not like Herbert Mullen. No, he did not.
Nope. Because he's a crazy dude. Well, he used to sing when everyone was trying to watch TV, Ed said.
And Ed would pour water on his head. but then give him peanuts when he was a good old boy.
He was a good old boy. A good old boy. Well...
Now, there's an amazing show that... Edmund's, you know, likeness is in.
Netflix. On Netflix Mindhunter. Awesome show.
The resemblance between Ed, real Ed, and that is insane.
Well, the show is based on the book Mindhunter Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, and it's written by Johnny Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
They were two FBI agents who are kind of credited with like propelling criminals psychology and profiling forward.
And they brought attention to the idea of serial murder. murder right uh they did this by interviewing like several serial killers in prison including kemper um They actually called John Douglas the serial killer whisperer, which is kind of a fun name.
Kemper's played by Cameron Britton. on the show.
It's uncanny. He's phenomenal. He sounds like him.
Phenomenal. He sounds like him. He has his mannerisms down.
He looks like him. I mean, it's, you, just watch it.
You really have to watch it. It's so good.
I'm not done yet, so don't, like, ruin it.
It's got, like, Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, I think his name is. playing the two main, the two agents.
And it's everything. I mean, they even, besides Kemper, they also have... you know, BTK on there, who I fucking hate and will cover him, but I have such disdain for that man.
He's like my least favorite. He's such a little bitch there.
They have, you know, Richard Speck on there.
They have Jerry Brudos. All people we're going to cover later.
We're going to cover so many people. Just give you a little tidbit.
Um, He's said to be a model prisoner now.
Like, again. Here's Tyra. He's Tyra Banks in it still.
He's staying with it. He can even, now he's even tasked with scheduling other inmates psychiatric appointments.
And he has spent over 5,000 hours narrating several hundred books on tape.
That's a long time. Including children's books.
I haven't found the titles of which children's books.
He has actually narrated, but let's not give them to your kids.
He's quoted recently as saying, I can't tell you what this has meant to me.
To be able to do something constructive for someone else.
To be appreciated by so many people. The good feeling it gives me after what I have done.
Well, I don't know if they necessarily appreciate Ed.
It's upsetting. Some of the titles that he has narrated include Flowers in the Attic.
Can you imagine Edmund Kemper reading you the just garbage dumpster fire that has caught flowers in the attic.
Can you please... I legit loved that Lifetime movie.
Can you imagine him reading about that? Like, I can.
No, what else? The Glass Key. Merlin's Mirror.
Petal on the Wind, which is... Is that the sequel?
I think that's like one of the sequels. The Rosemary Murders, Sphinx, and Star Wars.
Star Wars? Star Wars. So if you want to hear Edmund Kemper doing a killer Darth Vader.
Or a Chewbacca impression. Check it out.
Yeah. So, yeah. That about gets us to nowadays, where Edmund Kemper is still sitting in prison.
And still talking. Yeah. That is Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer.
How are you guys feeling right now? How are you feeling?
I'm feeling good. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening.
We appreciate all of you. We hope you keep coming back.
We hope you keep it weird. Next week, we're going to be hitting some dead Russians.
In the Dyatlov Pass incident. This is a good, not a good one, but it's interesting. this is gonna, it's gonna get, we're gonna get into some weird conspiracy theories.
The wheels are gonna be turning in your brains.
Yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna I'm almost scared to research it.
It's a crazy one. So stay tuned. Yes. Bye.
Bye bye bye bye bye bye bye. to be walking up the stairs with a camera bag that belonged to a young woman that had her severed head in it. walking up to my apartment, passed a happy young couple coming down the stairs who nodded and smiled at me.
As they went by, good evening. And they're going out on a date where I'd love to be going.
And I'm aware of both of these realities, and the distance between those two is so dramatic, so amazing, so violent. that really, I could feel the wheels squeaking inside.
That was really pulling on it. And I imagine at that point some people break.
But I didn't literally go insane. I didn't get lost.
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