All language subtitles for Very.Scary.People.S02E08.The.Co-ed.Killer.Thinking.Murder.All.Day.Long.Part.2.1080p.MAX.WEB-DL.DD+2.0.H.264-playWEB_track3_[eng]

♪♪

Kemper: So here I pick up these
two young ladies in Berkeley,

off Ashby Avenue.

And they're hitchhiking.
A couple of real experts.

I want to see how together I am,
if I can resist this temptation.

I'm trying to show you
just how awful this got,

how commanding
these rages got.

People weren't even aware
of what was happening.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome to "Very Scary People."

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Edmund Kemper's goal in life
was to be a police officer.

But he failed
the height requirement.

At 6'9", he was considered
too tall.

Now he had a new objective.

He was a one-man
killing machine.

Kemper had already murdered
six women hitchhikers,

but he wasn't done.

And no one felt safe.

His true identity was a mystery,

but he was known
as the "Co-ed Killer."

He cruised the streets
of Santa Cruz, California,

thinking of murder
all day long.

♪♪

♪♪

Honig:
It's the Age of Aquarius.

There's a lot of peace
and love in the air.

And then, suddenly,
this was shattered.

Aluffi:
One day, several body parts showed up right on the beach,

the main beach in Santa Cruz.

Honig: And cut-up bodies
were found around town.

Some were being found
on the side of the roads.

Reporter:
The bodies were discovered last week on Eden Canyon Road.

Both girls had been decapitated,

and the hands from one body
had been cut off.

Dowd: It wasn't long before
police realize

that all of these remains
belong to young women, co-eds,

who had last
been seen hitchhiking.

Kemper:
At the time, I wanted my case

to look like random killings,
unrelated.

Honig: The man responsible
was Edmund Kemper,

who was in the middle
of a killing spree

which started after he killed
his first two hitchhikers.

They were two 18-year-old
college students,

Anita Luchessa
and Mary Anne Pesce.

Kemper: In the first killing,
in May of '72,

it was something that had been
thought out in fantasy,

acted out, felt out hundreds of
times before it ever happened.

I'm driving along, we go to
a vulnerable place

where there
aren't people watching.

He attacks the young women,
but they're no match for him.

And I kept on just
mindlessly attacking.

Dowd: He stabs them to death
in this frantic scene.

And after that,
there was no stopping him.

In reality,
we really had no suspects.

Aluffi: We kind of figured
that maybe it's somebody

who had just gotten
out of state prison, maybe.

Maybe somebody with
some mental issues.

Dowd: Little did the police know
that Ed Kemper

was operating
right under their noses.

In fact, many of them knew him.

Ed's story in Santa Cruz focuses
on a place called The Jury Room.

The Jury Room was where
off-duty cops hung out.

And Kemper also went there
quite often.

Morrison:
He's accepted by the police.

He starts to be a very
well-known personage there.

They give him a nickname.

They call him "Big Ed."

They never would have suspected,

in a million years,
Big Ed was killing these co-eds.

Honig: And they had no idea
who this guy really was.

And Ed Kemper, he was a man
with a dark history.

When Kemper was a 15-year-old,
he had killed his grandmother

and then later killed
his grandfather the same day.

Morrison: Kemper is admitted
to Atascadero State Hospital,

a hospital
for the criminally insane.

But he was a master manipulator
all of his life.

He was able to fake his way out
of the hospital as being cured.

Verbrugge:
And then he came to Santa Cruz

because his mother lived there.

He had hated his mother
since he was a kid,

and it wasn't long after
he moved back in

that all hell broke loose.

By February of 1973,
Ed Kemper had killed six co-eds,

but he was reaching
a breaking point.

♪♪

Aluffi:
One day, out of the blue, in the middle of the night,

the Santa Cruz Police Department

gets a collect call
from Pueblo, Colorado,

wanting to talk
to this particular lieutenant

in the police department.

And the desk officer says,

"No, I can't call him
to wake him up,

so you'll have to call back
after 8:00."

Honig: The caller said he had
killed his mother in Santa Cruz

the day before

and he had driven
all the way to Colorado

before deciding
to turn himself in.

The cop on the phone
doesn't believe him.

He think he's making a joke
or having a laugh.

But then the caller says
something startling.

He claims to be
the Co-ed Killer.

The policeman didn't understand
what he was saying

and ended up actually
hanging up on him.

Dowd: He actually has to call
back the department

a couple of times,
saying, "I did it, I did it,"

before they finally believe him

and actually tell him,
"Wait in your car.

Local cops are gonna come
get you,

and then we'll be out
to talk to you after that."

He sits and he waits.

He was still in the phone booth

when the Pueblo police officers
came and arrested him.

Honig: The man who claimed to be
the Co-ed Killer,

Edmund Kemper,
was now in police custody.

Aluffi: I was at home.

About 5:00 in the morning,
I got a phone call

from Santa Cruz
Police Department.

They told me that Ed Kemper
was on the phone

and he was confessing to doing
all of these co-ed murders

and that he had also killed
his mother and best friend.

As I'm standing there
on the telephone

with Santa Cruz
Police Department,

I could actually feel the blood
drain out of my body almost.

I just turned cold all over.

Kemper suggested that
I go to his house

because I had been there before.

I was familiar with where
his mother's apartment was from

when I went
to confiscate the gun.

♪♪

We went around to the back
of the apartment

and broke a window
in the kitchen.

If you've ever smelled death,

you know that that's what was
going on in that apartment.

As soon as you walk in,
that smell just hit you.

We went through the apartment
real quickly

and got to the closet
in his mother's room

and pulled the closet door back,

and there was a pile there
that was covered with a sheet.

And so we pulled the sheet back,
and we saw human remains.

They discovered the bodies
of his mother and her friend.

Reporter:
This morning, about 5:30,

county sheriff's investigators
found the bodies of two women,

one of them decapitated
and her right hand cut off.

The bodies were found in closets
in the apartment home

of one of the victims.

The son of that victim called
Santa Cruz police from Pueblo,

Colorado, this morning
and told them about the murders.

That call came from 24-year-old
Edmund Emil Kemper,

who lived at the address

where the murder victims
were discovered.

Kemper was arrested
in a Pueblo phone booth.

Aluffi: A few hours later,
I'm in my office

on the telephone
with Pueblo, Colorado.

And Peter Chang, who was the
district attorney at the time,

walked in.

He says, "Do you know
this guy Kemper?"

And I said, "I met him once when
I took the gun away from him."

And he says, "Do you think

you have a pretty good
rapport with him?"

And I said, "Yeah, I think so."

He said, "Okay, pack a bag.
We're going to Colorado."

By 1:00 that afternoon,
Peter Chang, myself,

Dick Verbrugge, we're on a plane
headed to Pueblo, Colorado.

We're thinking about what bases
we need to cover

when we interview him,

and we knew that
he was being cooperative,

so we were expecting
to get a lot of information.

We landed in Pueblo, Colorado,

and went to
the police department,

where he was being held.

Verbrugge: When I first put
my eyes on Edmund Kemper,

I couldn't believe
how big he was.

He was 6'9".

He was a formidable man.

He looked down at me and said,
"Hello. How are you?"

He was talking to me,
and I think,

"Wow, this is unbelievable."

Just unbelievable.

Verbrugge: It was decided
that we were gonna, of course,

bring him back to Santa Cruz.

In that regard, we tried
to make flight arrangements,

and the airlines
would not allow us

to bring him back
on their planes.

So we just decided it would be
the best to drive him back.

It was a three-day trip.

Aluffi:
I was in the right rear seat.

Kemper was in the left
rear seat.

He was spilling his guts
out all the way back.

Aluffi: Once he started to
confess, he just didn't stop.

It was like pulling the plug
on a bathtub full of water.

It was just gonna go
all the way.

Kemper: What I had wanted to do
was to secure them

and to suffocate them with
plastic bags over their heads.

Aluffi: And over the course
of the next three days,

we had over six hours'
worth of interviews with him.

♪♪

♪♪

Dowd: Santa Cruz detectives
were driving back to California

from Pueblo, Colorado,
with Ed Kemper.

Aluffi:
He's spilling his guts to me,

and I sat next to him
in the back seat for three days.

Verbrugge: He kept talking about
the murders

and giving us more information
and remembering small facts

and giving them
to us continuously

while we were driving.

And he would go into great
detail about his victims

and why he did it
and all of these things.

After a while, I'm thinking
to myself,

"God, will you just shut up?

You know, I've had enough."

But he'd keep talking.

He'd keep talking.

♪♪

His fourth victim was a woman
by the name of Cynthia Schall.

She was a university student,
and he picked her up.

Kemper: Ms. Schall, she actually
got back into the trunk

under her own power.

I told her I was going to
keep her undercover

so that I could get her
to my home,

where we could talk,
but I didn't want neighbors

seeing her coming to the house
or leaving the house.

And I made that sound
realistic to her.

So she didn't want to get in
the trunk, but was willing to.

When she got in the trunk,
I shot her.

Honig: After he cut off her
head, he took it to his house,

to his mother's house,

went in the backyard,
dug a hole.

And Kemper took the skull
of Cynthia,

buried it in his yard
with the skull

facing his mother's bedroom.

Aluffi: He told me
that the reason he did that

is because
he could look out there

and know that
she's looking at him.

So, we were passing
all that information on

to the crime-scene investigators
here in Santa Cruz.

Kemper is already on his way
back from Colorado.

He is due to arrive here
on Friday,

when further questioning
will take place.

Chang: Depending on whether and
what routes they may take,

he'll be back any time
between Friday and Monday.

He was especially enamored
with the notoriety

that he was getting.

One time we stopped
to get some gas,

and he had to go
to the restroom.

So I took him into the restroom,

and we had a chain
around his waist,

and he was handcuffed to it.

But when we went in to use
the restroom and we came out,

people recognized
who this guy was,

and there was a small crowd.

And he would just stand erect,
and he would kind of strut,

looking around
at all of these people.

So he was thoroughly enjoying
all of this stuff.

♪♪

Day three, we arrived
back in Santa Cruz.

And we met other investigators,
and the agreement is that Kemper

will show us
these disposal sites

before we take him in
to have him booked.

He took us to these
various sites

where he had disposed
of the remains.

Some of them were up
in the mountains,

and some of them
were in country roads.

There was no way we could've
found them without him.

Aluffi: He remembered
every location, every detail,

what he did to those victims,
how he disposed of them.

He could recall exactly where
he put this part, another part.

It was a very surreal experience
in all aspects.

♪♪

Aluffi: So then we get
to the county jail,

and there must have been,

I'm guessing, 100 people
out front, a lot of media.

Reporter:
How do you feel now

that you found out
he was a neighbor?

Just gives me the creeps
is kind of an understatement.

Aluffi: So we had to pull around
in back,

and we took him up
to the jail to be booked.

As they're filling out
the information,

it gets to the point of who
to notify in case of emergency.

And he looked at me,
and he says,

"I don't have anybody left.

Can I put you down?"
So he did.

So my name's
on his booking sheet.

I'll never forget the day
going into my morning visit

to the sheriff's department
and the spokesman there saying,

"We've solved it. We've got it.
We've got the guy."

Narrator: At the age of 24,
he murdered his mother,

then called police and confessed

to having dismembered
college co-eds for two years.

All I did was breathe
a sigh of relief. Thank God.

Those murders have been
part of a series

that had led Santa Cruz County
residents to fear their county

was becoming
some kind of murder capital.

I was so relieved.
I think everybody was.

We could stop wondering
what was gonna happen next.

We could really sleep at night.

Dowd: But the city was going
to wake up to learn

the sickening details of what
Kemper had done to his victims.

Narrator:
Kemper buried the mutilated bodies in the mountains

and took
the severed heads home.

Then he slept
with their heads for days,

and finally went
looking for more.

♪♪

♪♪

Edmund Kemper was finally back
in Santa Cruz and behind bars.

Aluffi:
In Santa Cruz, I sat down and interviewed him yet again.

He was just as loose
with the information

as he was
from the very beginning.

Kemper said he was killing
co-eds to fulfill fantasies

he had of killing his own
mother, who he despised.

I'd wanted to kill my mother
since I was 8 years old,

and I'm not proud of that.

Dowd: That's the age Ed's father
leaves the family

because he couldn't take
his wife's abuse anymore.

Kemper:
She was there to beat me, she was there to humiliate me,

she was there to use me as an
example of how inferior men are.

Honig: After that, his mother
banished him

to live in the dark basement.

Schlesinger:
This is very, very disturbing.

If a child is made to live
like that,

you could see
the amount of anger and rage

that's accumulated
in a young person's mind,

and particularly towards
his mother,

who was the one
who made him do it.

Kemper: I must be
a really evil little kid

because I'm thinking
all these horrible things.

I was thinking of them
in increasing amounts

and increasing frequency,
so it's a kind of conditioning.

And he retaliates by going
after the family cat.

And not just killing it,
but brutalizing the cat.

And even at a young age,
he knew that this was exciting,

and he was sort of testing out
the limits of these fantasies

and starting to put them
into real life.

He played some very,
very sick games.

There were aggressive fantasies,
as well as play-acting

where he would be electrocuted
on an electric chair.

Playing these violent games
are abnormal in and of itself,

but when you associate it
with sexual fantasies,

which are beginning
really around this time --

10, 11, 12 years old and so
on -- That is highly abnormal.

Puberty for him puts him
over the edge.

He becomes very much involved
in sexual fantasies

and spends most of his time
thinking about sex

and thinking about
what he can do to people.

So you're seeing a fusion
between sexual fantasies

and aggression.

Kemper: Between the ages
of about 10 and 13,

I was going through some
incredible emotional shifts.

And without a lot of positive

input from parental
or adult figures,

it can go in some really
wild directions.

I wanted to get away
from my mother

because I was dreaming,
thinking,

fantasizing murder all day long.

I couldn't get it
out of my head.

Honig: When he was 14, Ed Kemper
was reunited with his father,

who was the only person he
thought who ever cared for him.

Dowd: He thought it was gonna be
this great reunion

with his father,
he was gonna be so happy.

Kemper:
I'm desperate because I've never had the man in my life.

I wanted my father's love.
I wanted his approval.

I wanted his recognitions.

Dowd: He goes and lives
with his dad for a period,

and his father is remarried
and had a kid.

And Ed realizes this
is not the dynamic

he thought it was going to be.

I think Edmund Kemper saw
the stepson

as a replacement for him.

He was a good kid.

He didn't get into trouble.

He wasn't odd-looking.

He wasn't unusual.

He was just a normal kid.

Kemper: Friction with my
stepbrother and my stepmother.

There was problems there.

We were vying for his interest,
vying for his love.

So we fought each other a lot,
and it was a lot of friction,

and he couldn't handle that,
so he got rid of me.

I was old family.

Morrison:
When he's 15 years old,

the father takes him
to his grandparents',

leaves him there,
and abandons him.

Kemper: I got left there.

We went there for Christmas
from my father's in L.A.

We went up to the mountains
to stay for Christmas,

and I got left behind.

Morrison: The father changes
his phone number.

He can't be caught in any way,
shape, or form.

Kemper: I was already a failure,
so, you know,

I got parked up
in the mountains.

♪♪

♪♪

First it was okay

because it was the calm
of being away from Montana.

One of the happy bonding
moments of Kemper's time

with his grandparents
is going out

and shooting
with his grandfather.

Morrison: His grandfather
is a very staunch,

straight guy who doesn't say
much to him,

but he is there for him.

The grandmother,
on the other hand,

started acting
like the mother did.

Kemper: My grandmother had made
agreements with me from the gate

that she wouldn't get into
little humiliating mind games

with me, like my mother
and stepfather had done.

And then this mind game stuff
started up.

Morrison:
She started to berate him.

She started to make fun of him.

She started to have almost
the same atmosphere in her house

as he had at his mother's house,

and he became very angry
at this.

Kemper: She never let me
leave the property,

and it started simmering,
I guess, started building --

the passions and the tension.

Honig: Tension between Ed and
his grandmother were escalating

and reached a boiling point.

Schlesinger: Kemper, he's
rejected by his mother,

he's dumped by his father,
his grandmother's on him,

and I think,
at this point, Kemper,

who's filled with anger
his whole life,

he just doesn't care.

Kemper: I was building up big
loads of frustration inside,

big loads of hatred
because I had no outlet for it.

I should have developed outlets,

but I didn't know
how at that time.

Dowd:
He starts, he says,

to kind of
get this obsession in his head

where he wants to know
what it's gonna feel like

to kill his grandmother,

and he starts thinking
about it more and more.

This just was so in his mind,
he couldn't get it out.

So Kemper gets up one morning,
the tension is built,

or maybe he's just decided
today's the day

in a very cold,
calculating way,

and he comes up behind
his grandmother, shoots her.

And he killed her.

But he also decided that he
didn't want his grandfather

to be upset with him,

so he decided to kill
the grandfather

before the grandfather found

that he had killed
the grandmother.

Honig:
Kemper was found insane

and sent to a state mental
hospital at the age of 15.

Six years later,
on his 21st birthday,

he was released.

And that's when
the trouble began.

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome back to
"Very Scary People."

When 21-year-old Edmund Kemper

was finally being released
from the mental institution,

doctors warned there
was one person

he should never be allowed
to live with again --

his mother.

Their relationship throughout
his childhood was toxic.

The outcome could be
catastrophic.

Turns out, they were right.

Kemper:
I can't get away from her.

We're still fighting,
she's still belittling me.

So Ed Kemper starts picking up
women who are hitchhiking

and fantasizes
about killing them.

Kemper:
I was dreaming, thinking,

fantasizing murder all day long.

I couldn't get it
out of my head.

And then, in May of 1972,
he kills his first two co-eds.

They were Mary Anne Pesce
and Anita Luchessa.

Kemper: The first young lady
that was in the back seat,

that was Mary Anne Pesce.

She argued a lot.

Honig:
This was the first time that he actually followed through

on what he had been thinking
about doing all this time.

Kemper: I just stabbed to death
and cut the throat

of an innocent young woman --

innocent in the sense that she
did not plan on that happening.

She didn't do anything
specifically for that

to happen to her.

And her roommate died
right after that.

♪♪

About nine months later, Kemper
kills his last two co-eds.

Kemper's living with his mother,
having constant fights with her,

and he says they had this kind
of knock-down, drag-out fight.

He was in such a blind rage,
he gets in his car,

and he decided no matter
who got in the car,

he was gonna kill them
that night.

And he picks up these two women,
Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu.

And this guy has a, you know,

UC Santa Cruz
sticker on the car,

seems like a safe guy
to get a ride with,

so they both hop in,

and he waves bye
to the campus security,

heads on back to his location
where he's gonna kill them.

And he claims this is one of
the more reckless moves

that he claims to do.

He says he doesn't even wait
to get the bodies in the house.

He opens the trunk,

and he decapitates
both women right there,

and he claims the neighbors
across the street,

they could have looked out
and seen what he was doing.

I was getting better at it.
I was getting less detectable.

I started flaunting
that invisibility,

severing a human head,

two of them, at night in front
of my mother's residence

with her at home,
my neighbors at home upstairs,

their picture window open,
the curtains open.

11:00 at night,
the lights are on.

All they have to do is walk by,
look out, and I've had it.

Ed Kemper had killed a total
of six female hitchhikers.

Dowd: For months, Kemper had
been killing young women,

but finally he was going to get
to the root of his hate,

his own mother.

Kemper:
It was springtime, it was April,

and for two months,
I hadn't killed.

I said, "It's not going to
happen to any more girls.

It's gotta stay between me
and my mother."

Dowd:
He tells himself, "I got to stop killing these other women.

I need to kill my mother."

Kemper:
I said, "She's gotta die,

or girls
like that are gonna die."

And that's when I decided,
"I'm going to murder my mother."

She went out to a party,
she got soused,

she came home,
went to sleep.

I was woken up by that,
I 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 gonna wanna

sit up all night
and talk now."

I looked at her, I said, "No."

I said, "Good night."

♪♪

And I knew I was gonna kill her.

♪♪

Dowd: And he left the room,
waited till she fell asleep,

came in with a claw hammer,
hit her in the head,

and then he slit her throat.

Once my mother was dead,
there was almost a cathartic

process at that point,
when I murdered her.

Dowd:
And Kemper talks about thinking,

"What's good enough
for my other victims

is good enough
for my own mother."

So he does to his mother what
he did to his other victims.

I cut off her head,

and I humiliated her corpse.

And what he did after that
is truly hard to hear.

Dowd: He dismembers her,
he rapes her corpse.

He then takes a couple
of additional steps

that really go
into the pathology

of why this guy
hated his own mother.

He takes her vocal cords,

and he puts them
in the garbage disposal.

I think what it means
symbolically to him was,

he couldn't stand her yelling
and belittling him

all these years.

Morrison: It was the way to stop
his mother

from saying anything again,
once and for all.

And then the garbage disposal
basically spat it back at him.

Honig:
After he murdered his mother,

he obviously had to think
what he was gonna do next

because she would be
reported as missing.

Dowd: So Kemper then realizes
that if anyone is gonna notice

that his mother
has gone missing,

it's her best friend,
Sally Hallett.

So Ed calls up Sally and says,
"Hey, do you want to come over?"

♪♪

♪♪

Dowd: Ed Kemper had just killed
his mother,

the woman he claimed
was the source of his anger.

Honig:
After he murdered his mother,

he obviously had to think
what he was gonna do next

because she would be reported
as missing.

Dowd: So Kemper then realizes
that if anyone is gonna notice

that his mother
has gone missing,

it's her best friend,
Sally Hallett.

Honig: They worked together
at the university.

Sally Hallett was a fairly
typical administrator

that worked in
the dormitory system.

She was a competent,
hard-working person.

Dowd:
So Ed calls up Sally and says,

"Hey, do you want to come over?"

And he prepares the house

so that no one will hear
anything or see anything.

Closed all the blinds
so that no one can see in.

Brings her in the door.

As soon as she walked in,
he grabbed her.

Schlesinger: He attacks her,
punches her in the stomach.

She puts up somewhat of a fight,
but ultimately he smothers her.

And now he has two dead bodies.

Honig: After he committed
these last murders,

before he left town,

in a very famous getaway,
he stopped off at The Jury Room,

which is the one place
he felt comfortable, I suppose.

Dowd: Gets a couple drinks,
does his sort of usual cool-off.

But it's only a matter of time
before Kemper gets caught,

and he knows this
very, very well.

Eventually they're gonna find
his mother dead,

and he's immediately gonna be
the number-one suspect.

So he heads out,
gets in his car,

and just starts driving.

He's taking NoDoz,
he's trying to keep up.

Dowd:
He was listening to the radio,

expecting to hear news,
either of his mother's death

or that the police were in this
chase for him,

but it never happened.

For him, I think
the paranoia was building

and building and building,

and it was starting to make him
feel like he was cracking.

Schlesinger: And eventually,
it just has to end.

Where's he going?

What's he gonna do?

Kemper then drives about
18 hours in total.

Then he decided
that the jig was up.

Dowd: At that point, he finds
himself over 1,000 miles

east of Santa Cruz, and he stops
to make a phone call.

In Pueblo, Colorado,
he gets in a phone booth

and confessed to the murders.

Kemper:
I just killed a young woman,

and I kept on
just mindlessly attacking.

Ring:
When I think about what he did,

especially the way
he dismembered

and then had sex
with body parts, it disgusts me.

It makes me want to vomit.

I can't imagine a human being
being that distorted

and inhumane.

Kemper: It wasn't the aspect
of killing them,

it was the aspect of possessing
their bodies afterwards.

So it was almost
after an effect --

evicting someone
from their human body.

And I'm sorry it sounds so cold,

but that's about
what it analogizes to.

The reason people commit
necrophilia

is because they are in
complete control of the person.

They are not going
to be rejected,

they're not going
to be objected to.

They cannot say,
"Oh, you're awful,"

or, "Yeah, I don't want
to have sex with you."

Reporter: Kemper was arraigned
this afternoon on charges

of killing six young women,
his mother,

and a friend of hers.

Reporter #2: The sight
of Edmund Emil Kemper III

is an awesome experience
in itself.

He stands 6 feet, 9 inches tall
and weighs about 280 pounds.

But the crimes with which
he's been charged

are even more awesome.

Dowd: So, it was an interesting
sort of legal case

for Kemper's lawyers

because he had confessed
to all the crimes.

Schlesinger:
From the defense perspective,

there is really nowhere else

to go
other than an insanity defense.

The hope for a defense attorney
at this point

is that you could convince
just one juror what he did

is just so outrageous,
it's just so extraordinary,

with necrophilia
and cutting heads off,

he has to be insane.

He has to be out of touch
with reality.

Honig: Meanwhile,
the prosecution strategy

was to just point out
this was all thought out,

that he's an intelligent person,
he's not insane,

that he knew the difference
between right and wrong.

Schlesinger: When you try to
elude law enforcement,

it shows consciousness of guilt

and an awareness of the
wrongfulness of your behavior.

And he knew it was wrong,
but he did it anyway.

♪♪

♪♪

Honig: I covered the trial,
and it was a media circus.

But in those days, they wouldn't
allow cameras into courtrooms,

except occasionally
before the trial started.

In a way, the hardest part
of the entire case for me

was the day that Kemper's
taped confession was played,

and it was played all day long.

Kemper: I went out and bought
at a pawn shop a huge knife.

And I kept on just
mindlessly attacking.

Honig:
And I focused on the parents.

And the look on their face
was something

that I just to this day
can't get over.

I can't imagine the horror
in their life.

There was one father,
and for some reason,

the look on his face got to me,
and I started tearing up,

and I was crying,
and I couldn't stop.

And, you know, that was after
months of dealing with this.

♪♪

The jury trial
lasted three weeks.

The jury came back
within five hours.

I don't think there was
much question at any point

that he was guilty and sane.

"May God have mercy
on your soul, Mr. Kemper."

That was the only words
that were spoken,

and then he was whisked off.

♪♪

♪♪

He was sentenced to life
in prison.

Since he's been in prison,
Ed has been a model inmate.

From the prison staff
perspective,

Kemper is somebody
you could rely on.

He has done an awful lot
of volunteer work in the prison.

There's the ability to work into
that picture positive things,

like working
on the Blind Project,

where we read books
onto tape for the blind.

I participated in that program
for the last 14 years.

Man: What have been
your favorite readings?

Sometimes children's books --

some of the more complex
children's books,

like White's "Charlotte's Web,"
"Stuart Little,"

"Trumpet of the Swan,"

which are amazingly complex
and before their times.

Man: The day we visited,
mass murderer Ed Kemper

was transcribing "Star Wars."

"Reaching for the internal
controls, 3PO was shocked.

'Behave yourself, R2,' he
finally chastised his companion.

'You're going to get us
into trouble!'"

Schlesinger:
I think he is much more adjusted

and feels much more comfortable
in prison

than what he felt
when he was out in society,

because he couldn't
live in society.

He was too wrapped up
in his jealousy

and his envy and his inadequacy

and the torment
of his inner life.

Everything is very structured.

He doesn't have to try to get
a girlfriend.

There are no girls there.

Verbrugge: Since he's been in
prison, over all these years,

he has only had one write-up
for misconduct,

and I was always afraid that
when they looked at his record,

looked at his intelligence,

looked at the way he could
come across with sincerity,

that somebody might say,
"Yeah, let's let him out."

I just know in my heart
that he would kill again.

Dowd: One of the reasons people
are so interested in Kemper

is that he's one of
the very few serial killers

who's spoken at length
about his crimes

and also his motivations.

And he's spoken with the FBI
Behavioral Sciences Unit

and given them insights
into why he did it.

I was invited to the FBI Academy
to talk about rape victimology,

serial killers,
and serial crime,

and they didn't have anybody
that was expert in that area.

And that was the start, if you
will, of criminal profiling.

Bob Ressler and John Douglas had
just been given the green light

to be able to do
their own research.

The goal to the project
was to do interviews

and get data
from 36 serial killers,

to use the data
in the profiling.

Kemper was an important part
of our study

because we learned
a lot from him.

He wanted to tell his story,

and I think that was a high
for him to talk about it.

It was "his handiwork,"

if you want to look at it
in a rather dark way.

Kemper: As I'm sitting there
with a severed head in my hand,

talking to it, I say,
"Wow, this is insane."

And then I told myself,
"No, it isn't.

You're saying that,
and that makes it not insane."

Kemper was very articulate,
he was very open,

and he would talk and talk and
talk, which was very helpful.

Talked about how the thoughts
all began.

Talked about the fantasy and how
some of his first murders went.

But I was losing a grasp
on something

that was too violent
to keep inside forever.

Burgess: What did we learn
from Ed Kemper?

We learned a lot of things.

First of all, the most important
thing was the fantasy life.

He was very clear on that.

He went into great detail about
how those fantasies started.

He also told us about
how he practiced

and he practiced on animals
and that he --

cats especially,
where he would behead the cat,

and torture the cat,
and so forth.

I started with surrogates
at a non-human level.

Small animals, insects, animals,
and then finally people.

Burgess: And then we learned
how he followed his crimes --

He would read the paper,
he would interject himself in

with the police
when they were investigating,

see how far along
they were getting,

and
putting it over on the police.

He was certainly getting
vicarious satisfaction

out of that.

So, those were just some of
the takeaways from Ed Kemper,

which later got translated
to other serial killers.

♪♪

Honig: I still think about
the experience,

what happened to the community,
what happened to these girls.

I think it's fair to say
that the family members

who are still surviving,

I'm sure they live
with this every day.

And in that way, I do, too,

because my heart goes out
to all of them,

and it's never changed.

Ring:
He affected all of us.

He taught us
that life is not safe,

that bad things do happen
to good people,

and that it's our job to be
responsible for our own safety.

Now, would you get in a car
with this man, huh?

♪♪

I've never stopped looking
to my right and to my left.

I'll always be that way.

♪♪

Edmund Kemper was sentenced
to life in prison in 1973.

Incredibly, he was eligible
for parole in 1979.

It was denied.

He has been denied
parole multiple times since,

most recently in 2017.

He'll be eligible
for release again in 2024.

The '70s may seem like
a long time ago,

but the families
will never forget

what this monster
took from them.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching.
Good night.