Original subtitles

The residents of this area understandably are edgy.

They're asking themselves, is the killer still around these parts?

It was just six months ago that a human head

was found in the hills not too far from here...

and the details of that murder still are a mystery.

[men speaking]

[Monty] My dad interviewed Kemper over several months.

Each time he went in, they would develop a little bit more of a relationship.

And at the time, they didn't really have a category

for the type of killer that Ed Kemper was.

He really wanted to get into the mind of the killer

and figure out what were the causal factors

in making him go from a normal human being to a sociopathic killer.

[reporter] Local people don't think Santa Cruz is the murder capital of the world

but there is concern, short of alarm, that a killer may still be at large.

[Emerson] Gruesome details, skull found in a remote Loma Prieta.

So these are newspapers from the time when it happened.

This is my local history, this is Santa Cruz's history,

these murders changed Santa Cruz.

It impacted so many people in the community

and it was something that we talked about a lot in our family.

Ed Kemper, he was my boogeyman, he was our family's boogeyman.

There are so many rumors about Kemper and what he did, what he didn't do.

So many outrageous stories.

It's interesting to me to get to the bottom and try to see where the truth lies.

[man] Okay, fellas, move on in.

After Kemper murdered his grandparents,

he was sent to Atascadero, which is a, basically a mental hospital for adults.

[man] Okay, fellas, be seated.

[Emerson] So here's a 15-year-old boy,

massive, but he's still 15 years old,

in this facility with other adults.

There were 1,600 inmates, 24 of them were murderers

and 800 of them were sex offenders.

[man 1 speaking]

During your teenage formative years,

this is the company that he grew up with.

And I believe it was the other inmates that taught him...

if you're gonna rape someone, you need to kill them,

you need to get rid of the evidence, you can't leave anyone alive.

They put him through a battery of tests

and gave him this label of sociopathic disorder, anti-social...

and that he was a passive-aggressive type of person.

Kemper had a facade of being polite and cooperative

because that had worked for him in many ways.

He would pretend to be normal, pleasing, you know, good manners.

At the same time, having these aggressive, nasty fantasies

about killing people.

[man 1 speaking]

Because his IQ score came up in the superior range,

the psychiatrist thought that maybe it would be good

to give him more responsibility.

And so, when he wants to help them handle the psychological tests

that seems like a good idea to them.

[man 1 speaking]

Kemper's genius was the manipulation

of getting the psychiatrists and psychologists

to actually allow him to see the contents of the test,

so he could memorize them in order to get passable scores on these tests

and be able to get out.

[man 1 speaking]

The sealing of the records meaning they're still there

but nobody gets access to them.

Future employers would not be able to find out if he had, in fact, a juvenile record.

[Emerson] Edmund Kemper was released from Atascadero in 1969.

They felt like he was cured,

they felt like he was gonna be an upstanding citizen the rest of his life.

[narrator] The grizzly story began in this cove,

the upper part of a girl's torso washed up on this beach

two miles north of the Santa Cruz pier...

then a hand was found two days later

by a surfer who was in the water near Capitola, seven miles to the southeast.

[Mickey] A highway patrol officer found body parts over the cliff,

over down by Carmel, which is about 20-25 miles across the bay.

About seven days later, a torso washed up here on the city of Santa Cruz.

Subsequently, the torso and the other body parts were matched together

with x-rays, they did fingerprints and everything,

and determined that it was Cynthia Schall

who was reported missing here in Santa Cruz.

[men speaking]

I think this is one of my favorite pictures of Forrest and Cynthia.

She just has the sweetest face and the sweetest disposition and it's just adorable.

Cynthia was 18,

she was going to Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz...

and she lived with a family and took care of the kids in her off-school hours.

She was very much looking forward to getting a car

that was a point of contention with her mother, my mother.

She didn't have a car and that's why she ended up hitchhiking.

My mother called me and she said that Cynthia is missing.

The parents that Cynthia was taking care of the children,

let my mom know that she hasn't been home in three days.

When Cynthia disappeared and we heard nothing,

I didn't wanna jump to conclusions

but I felt something was very, very wrong.

[man 1 speaking]

[Forrest] I got the news on the TV that she had been murdered.

The whole family was just devastated.

We all came together to be with my mother

and we had a service for Cynthia.

There's a nice picture of Candy and Cynthia.

Candace was my other sister, she was never the same.

She became a drug addict and she died when she was about 33.

So it basically destroyed our family.

I lost a best friend.

And I still miss her today.

People are definitely uptight,

they don't know exactly what we have running loose around here

and they're very concerned.

[reporter] Why are all these murders here?

Well, one reason is that we have a homicidal maniac

apparently who's been running around.

[Tom] I would go visit the Santa Cruz Police

and Santa Cruz Sheriff's Department Detectives on a daily basis, saying,

"What the hell is going on here?"

And the police were saying, "We just don't know, we just don't have any clues."

At the time Santa Cruz was so small,

there was a very limited police department.

Most of the cops were local kids,

who had grown up and they hadn't had training in major investigations.

[Terry] There was a lot of discussion about why these bodies have been dismembered.

Is it somebody that knows how to dismember?

Could it be somebody that was at one time a butcher, a doctor,

or somebody like that?

So our discussions now about the totality of these murder cases

really starts to focus on somebody that is very smart.

This does not now seem to us to be some outraged monster-killer

randomly doing things on the spur of the moment.

This is somebody that is thinking about what they are doing.

[Emerson] He was getting better as a killer...

he had what he called his murder car,

he had his murder clothes that were dark,

if they got stained with blood, people wouldn't be able to see.

He had his car with the handle latch

that he could reach across,

drop a little chap stick in the door,

so they couldn't open it again from the inside.

He knew how to commit crimes that were very hard to detect.

It's the age-old issue of across districts,

across counties, across law enforcement agencies

and Kemper was smart, he knew that.

He knew he was gonna pick up over here,

he was gonna kill over here, he was gonna dump over here.

He was gonna massacre these bodies beyond recognition,

try to make identification impossible.

I think that's one of the reasons a lot of people in law enforcement

felt like he was a genius.

[indistinct chatter]

[man 1 speaking]

At Atascadero, they said,

"When he is released, he should not be released

into the custody of his mother."

Because his mother is a precipitating factor for a lot of his anger.

But in their infinite wisdom, the California Youth Authority

released Kemper into the custody of his mother.

[man 1 speaking]

My name is Jim Connor.

This is me, 70s, and you see how beautiful I am.

Before I went to work for the police department,

I worked at a local tire shop

and I would take tires to small businesses around Santa Cruz...

and one of those businesses was this gas station where Ed worked.

My first impression of him, when I first met him, is that,

"Oh, my God, this guy's a giant."

You know, he had a great personality, easy to talk to.

He's just kind of a guy's kind of guy.

As far back as I can remember, I always had a desire to be a cop.

[siren wailing]

And I became a full-fledged police officer in 1970.

One of the first things I did is I took my police car

and I drove down to show myself off to Ed.

He came out and I remember just being so proud.

I talked to him a lot about being a police officer

and, "you're a big guy, you're gonna make a great cop."

And he would say, "No, you know, they wouldn't take me."

And he had his reasons for saying that.

I didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

I just figured that it wasn't his cup of tea, so to speak.

[men speaking]

[reporter] This spot is just a stone's throw

from the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California.

It's not far from here that just a week ago today,

four more bodies were discovered in a connected series

of unsolved murders in this area.

By January of '73, we had about 13 different homicides

that we were investigating, which is a huge number for Santa Cruz area.

Most of our homicides were gunshots...

people in the counter-culture lifestyle,

that sort of thing, some hitchhikers.

It was just going crazy.

[Terry] We were reeling under the strain of just the amount of crime.

A woman and her two young sons were found murdered in their tiny cabin,

and if it can get any more bizarre, it does.

The killing of a catholic priest,

found in a confessional in his church, stabbed to death.

The volume of the homicides, it is very overwhelming

but you look at each one and you try to piece them together,

are these cases related?

What's my next step?

And then boom, there's another murder.

So it just keeps piling up and piling up.

I'm thinking, "Well, is this one person?

Is this two people? Is it more than that? What's going on?"

I don't know how much more I can handle.

[reporter] Hill's beautiful and green for walking, camping, fishing.

Just coming someplace where it's nice.

Those things remain but there is a horrible overlay to it all now,

for this is also the area

in which 13 murders have been committed in the past six weeks.

At least the co-eds at the University of Santa Cruz

and at Cabrillo College started to take the message of don't hitchhike, seriously.

And we did see a change.

Do you hitchhike?

Only if absolutely necessary. And only with females now.

-Why? -Well, I'm afraid.

Why did you quit?

Because of all the weird things that have been happening,

with the rapes and girls being chopped up and things like that.

[Mickey] We were working six and seven days a week,

12-14 hours a day, trying to get a handle on all this stuff.

At this point, we had no clues,

we went for quite a while without any suspect, whatsoever.

The guy was... He covered his tracks really well.

[men speaking]

My name is Isebill Gruhn.

I joined the UCSC in 1960.

I worked with Clarnell Strandberg at Stevenson College.

I was a faculty member,

she was the administrative assistant to the provost.

My impression of Clarnell at first was that she was shy.

Sometimes when I passed her door

and she didn't seem to be doing anything,

I would just greet her and say, "How are you?"

She was not very chatty, she would say, "Oh, things are not easy."

One day, I saw a very tall, young man pick her up in a car...

some kind of sedan.

Many of us those days had, you know, Volkswagens and small cars

and it was the biggest car.

So I sort of said to her, "Is this a relative of yours?"

And she said, "Oh, yes, that's my son."

He was a tall, young man,

who didn't dress or look any different than lots of student types.

He didn't look suspicious, he didn't look creepy...

but I can tell you, I never saw any kind of interaction like hugging

or somebody putting his arm or her arm around the other, or anything of the sort.

Do I think she was carrying a burden?

I think so.

[man 2 speaking]

Donald Lunde, as part of his attempt to learn about Kemper,

also interviewed Kemper's younger sister.

He talked to Allyn and got more from her

in terms of corroboration and perspective on the family.

[woman speaking]

In a way, he's replicating his father's relationship with her.

His father was already a role model

of this is how you deal with Clarnell, you yell at her.

[man 1 speaking]

Kemper has now become his father

and has the same acrimonious relationship

with his mother that his father had had.

[man 2 and woman speaking]

Kemper and Clarnell were both raging alcoholics.

They both drank a lot, they were not afraid to speak their mind.

I think he said one of their biggest fights

was about whether he should get his teeth cleaned.

Benign issues that were just, would explode.

[man 1 speaking]

[Jim] I would have to say that the community was on edge...

and with no suspects...

wanting the police to do more,

because they felt like that they were maybe next in line.

Every agency had a local watering hole,

ours was The Jury Room,

and we're talking about the cases that we worked that day.

[Mickey] And this is where the police officers would go after work to unwind,

I used to go there and have a couple of drinks on my way home.

You would have officers from Santa Cruz Police Department,

maybe even the Highway Patrol,

District Attorney's Investigators, that sort of thing.

And Ed would come there once in a while and have a beer with us.

[men speaking]

He was kind of quiet...

he would sit there and not be a major part of the conversation

but he was just basically listening and having his beer.

[man 1 speaking]

I couldn't go anywhere without somebody asking me about what is happening

or, you know, updates on the homicides

or how close are we to arresting somebody.

We had no clue at that point,

who this person might be, we had no clues, whatsoever.

[man 1 speaking]

I first met Rosalind and got to know her

because we were both taking women's studies classes and we were both lesbians.

And so, we were basically in the same circle of people.

And she was really good at making pie.

Everybody was always happy

when she would come to a potluck with one of her pies.

If you could think of a, you know, a feminist lesbian

who is All-American, that was Ros.

I assure you, nobody stands very gently

and puts their hands on your throat.

They choke you and they put you down on that floor

and you're down, like this man.

Here's Alice.

She was in the same karate class as me.

Neither one of us was skillful,

we were beginners, but she was into it.

She could kick well, she was very supple,

and it certainly wasn't a self-defense

because we felt like there was no need, we felt immortal.

February is when they both disappeared.

[men speaking]

He convinced her to get him an A permit,

an A permit is a parking permit up on UC Santa Cruz.

He told her that he wanted to go to the library.

So anyone hitchhiking would see this A permit on his car and think,

"Oh, this is another student, this is a faculty member or staff member."

And would assume that it was safe.

Additionally, at that time,

they had guards posted at the entrance of UC Santa Cruz,

if you had an A permit, right on through.

The police were not really proactive.

Their initial reaction, every time a woman disappeared was,

"Oh, you know, girls of that age.

They frequently just go off. They'll be back."

These were not people who were running away from home.

Ros was not running away from her housemate.

These were people who were already living an independent life,

they had nothing to run away from.

[Terry] Their parents were adamant that they would not hitchhike...

they would not accept rides,

they were last seen on the campus,

not hitchhiking off the campus someplace.

So yes, we did get focused on students

and faculty trying to get a focus on a possible motive.

And then one of the sort of weird suspicions that arose was,

well, if they don't get in cars with men,

maybe they would get in a car with a woman

and that could be some kind of lesbian thing.

At one point, and this was kind of interesting,

they interviewed me

and asked me questions circling around the lesbian community.

And I was, you know, basically freaked out.

You follow me? Captain.

More of the other boys are, you'll need to spread out

in there to cover the flatland.

Well, when the girls disappeared,

there was a very large scale search of the campus area

with the last place that the girls were seen.

When you call me just call the command post.

[Luita] I participated in an organized search,

they separated us

into groups according to the difficulty of the terrain.

We were going through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

And I was very fit,

so I participated in the group that went through the rough terrain.

And they had us in a grid six feet apart about.

And what I really remember is that while I was walking,

looking carefully on either side of me,

it was Ros' voice that I was hearing within me.

I could hear the tenor of her voice

and I think it was a way of keeping her alive.

But it became clearer and clearer to me

that I wasn't looking for somebody

who had broken her leg or something like that...

we were looking for a body.

[reporter] Alice Lui and Rosalind Thorpe were last seen February 5th.

The bodies were discovered east of Castro Valley,

both girls had been decapitated

and the hands from one body had been cut off.

We knew that it was Rosalind and Al through their clothing

and they had been shot to death.

Once that information had come through,

that spread instantly throughout the community.

Each one of us went into ourselves

with our individual reactions

to that kind of level of horror.

That level of...

nightmare, it was beyond our imagination.

At the same time,

as the discovery of the latest victims,

we got probably one of the biggest breaks

that we've had in any of these cases.

There was a shooting in the city of Santa Cruz.

A description was put out of a particular vehicle

and that vehicle was stopped a couple of miles away

and the person was arrested.

[reporter] A 25-year-old Felton area resident

has been charged with multiple murders.

Authorities are operating with the theory,

the murders are linked with drugs.

A Herbert Mullin, age 25, has previously been charged

with the murder of members of the Gianera family, Francis family and Fred Perez.

We started to piece together his life.

People knew him as Herbie.

He took hallucinate drugs, LSD, a lot of pot.

[Tom] Herbert Mullin was killing people for crazy reasons.

He had a strange theory that by killing somebody

then that would lessen the chance of a killer earthquake coming in.

[Mickey] He matched the description of the person

who was seen at previous homicides,

which homicides, all of them, we had no clue, whatsoever.

We were kind of hoping that he was the one

that was responsible for all of them.

So we began to feel a little bit better about ourselves.

When law enforcement caught Mullin,

the community took a big sigh of relief,

they thought this was over, the nightmare was over.

The serial killer had been caught.

We know he's killed 10 people,

so that's 10 of how many other murders we have.

Herbert Mullin has been accused in 10 of the 15 murders

tied to this south coast community.

However, Mullin's alleged connection with death

does not involve the cutting up of the victims.

[Mickey] Once we had Mullin,

we knew that we had him for some of the homicides,

and probably a good number of them,

but that was only the ones where the victims had been shot,

there still was the question of the people who had been dismembered.

[Terry] It is fairly clear to us,

there's another person out there killing people in a different manner,

for different reasons.

And our job isn't done yet.

[man 1 speaking]

April 1973, we were still solving all of these homicides,

trying to put everything together.

And I got a notification from our record section of a dealer's record of sale,

indicating that the handgun had been bought in the name of Edmund Emil Kemper III.

It's a quite large gun, that's a .44 magnum,

the same gun that Dirty Harry used in all of those movies.

Like I say, it's a huge gun.

[gunshot]

So when that record of sale came in,

they matched it to this particular person

that showed that he had been convicted of a double homicide a few years earlier...

and that his juvenile record had been sealed.

So that raises the question,

does that mean that his prior convictions cannot be held against him?

We're not sure of that,

so we decided to confiscate that handgun

until we could get a judicial decision.

This four plex on the left is 609 A, B,

and right there is 609-A, where is the Kemper household.

My partner and I go out to his house, this car pulls up...

I told my partner, I said, "Wait, let's go talk to this guy."

So I go over there and I said, "Excuse me, can I talk to you for a second?"

And I identified myself.

He said, "Sure." And he got out of the car.

And he got out of the car, and he got out of the car.

Because he was huge.

We explained the situation to him.

He was very cooperative, very personable.

He said, "It's in the trunk."

As he pulls the keys out to put them in the lock,

my partner and I instinctively separated to each side of the car.

He backed up, I opened up the trunk, and there was this gun.

So I confiscated it, gave him the receipt.

He told me later that had we not separated

when he went to unlock the trunk,

he was thinking about killing both of us.

[man 1 speaking]