Oh sure, you have your Ed Geins, your Ted Bundys, your Sons of Sam, your Boston Stranglers - but you may not have heard of Edmund Emil Kemper III, one of the nastiest serial killers in history. When he was 15, he murdered his grandparents, and was locked away for five years. They released him then (due to his model behaviour in not murdering any more of his grandparents, most likely), and sent him to live with his mother. A couple of years later, he killed another eight people. Including his mother. So that all worked out fine, then. He then decided to give himself up to the police, who locked him up, melted the key, threw it away, put superglue in the keyhole, and purposely lost the address of the prison.

Some hilarious Ed-facts:

  • Once buried a kitten alive, dug it up again, decapitated it and put the head on a spike. Cruelty to cats didn't end there though; when he was a young lad he killed lots of local cats and dogs. One cat had the top of its head sliced off. It went into spasms, as its brain was exposed, and then Ed stabbed it to death. Oh, he burned it too, afterwards, just in case it wasn't dead enough.
  • When asked by a reporter what he thought when he saw a pretty girl walking down the street, Kemper replied: "One side of me says, 'I'd like to talk to her, date her.' The other side of me says, 'I wonder what her head would look like on a stick.'"
  • Ed was a witty chap - when asked why he buried the heads of some victims in the backyard facing upwards to his mother's bedroom window, he joked "Well, she always wanted people to look up to her." Ha ha! What a kidder!
  • He was a religious boy, our young Eddie. In fact, his favourite church prayer was for everyone in the world to die - except him, of course.
  • "I have fantasies about mass murder - whole groups of select women I could get together in one place, get them dead, and then make mad, passionate love to their dead corpses. Taking life away from them, from a living human being, and then having possession of everything that used to be theirs - all that would be mine. Everything."
  • Kemper was constantly verbally abused by his domineering mother. So he did what any reasonable person would do - he killed her with a hammer, cut her head off, had sex with her dead body, and stuffed her larynx down the waste disposal. When the waste disposal unit jammed, the larynx flew back out into his face. "Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me - I couldn't get her to shutup!" quipped Ed later, to a crowd of laughing police.
  • Ate many victims after killing them - once boiled parts of two women's flesh, and ate it with macaroni. "I wanted them to be a part of me - and now they are."

This is the sort of shit you just can't make up. There are some sick, sick, seriously evil people in this world. It's a dangerous place.


This started as a quick addition to the Ed Gein node, as I mistakenly thought the "head on a stick" quote came from him. When I found out who it really was, I was so amazed at the severity of Kemper's acts, I just had to bring it to a wider audience. Hope you weren't eating anything when you started reading...

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.

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