There is a
book called ‘Why-The Serial Killer in America’ by Margaret Cheney that is about Ed Kemper. It is a revised version of her previous book ‘The Co-Ed
Killer’ also about Ed Kemper. However both these books are unfortunately out of print. The only way you could get your hands on them is if you magically found them at a second hand book store. This is a good book in that it describes Kemper’s whole
life in detail and what he is currently doing but for a revised book I would have expected more since I have found information about Kemper from bits in other
books or
online that are not in this book that should have been, for example interviews.
I think Ed Kemper is a most intriguing serial killer that deserves more of a mention than any other serial killer. He is more intelligent that most if not all serial killers, he committed the murders because he had to and once he was finished he told the police. There have been many theories as to ‘what he is’ in the sense that psychiatrists have been trying to label him schizophrenic or simply insane. None have really come to any real conclusion because it is impossible, and even Kemper himself said (who studied psychology to understand himself better) that his condition would be in the 8th edition of the DSM. The DSM is a manual that psychiatrists around the world use to diagnose people with mental disorders, the DSM outlines what symptoms one must display before being able to be diagnosed as psycho or not. Currently the DSM is in its 4th edition.!
What shocked me when reading this book is that the psychiatrists recommended that Kemper not be released back into his mothers custody following his release from Atascadero, (a mental institution) from killing his grandparents as a adolescent. What do the authorities do? Give him back to his mother!. The whole purpose of his killings was so that he could practise and learn how to kill perfectly, to finally get the courage to kill his mother, the root of all his problems.
The authorities did not even know or suspect Kemper as a killer of the Co-Ed’s until he gave himself up, and even then he had to prove to them that he did it because at first they did not believe him. Kemper is a cannibal and a necrophiliac. John Douglas a profiler for the FBI’s elite serial crimes unit has said that he believes that Kemper is the only true insane killer in all his dealings with serial killers for the past four decades.
Kemper is 6’9’ and was known to people as the ‘Gentle Giant’ because he seems so shy, nice and polite. In Cheney’s book, the first line is “A psychiatrists, asked off –the –record where he would rate serial killer Edmund Kemper, III on a scale of 1 to 100, ‘ if 100 were crazy’ replied unhesitatingly ‘oh, around 275’.”
If anyone plans to study serial killers, then reading about Kemper is a must.