Edmund Emil Kemper III was convicted on November 8, 1973, of eight counts of first-degree murder in Santa Cruz County, California. Six of the people he killed were young women and girls he had picked up while they were hitchhiking between May 1972 and February 1973, among them two Fresno State students and a 15-year-old high school student. The last two were his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sara "Sally" Hallett, killed in his mother's home in Aptos in April 1973. He then drove east to Pueblo, Colorado, and telephoned the Santa Cruz police to say what he had done.
He had killed before. In 1964, at 15, he shot his paternal grandparents. That case went through juvenile court, and he spent the following years in the custody of the California Youth Authority and at Atascadero State Hospital before he was released to his mother's care. He has been held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville since November 1973. He was denied parole again on July 9, 2024, and reports at the time said his next hearing would come in 2031.
He stood 6 feet 9 inches tall and weighed about 280 pounds, according to a 1985 United Press International report. He was known as Big Ed, SF Weekly reported.
Much of what is on record about Kemper's childhood comes from his own account, given to parole commissioners and interviewers decades later, and from the summaries of psychiatric reports read into the record at his hearings. The transcript of his July 25, 2017, parole hearing, at which Presiding Commissioner Cynthia Fritz walked him through his life history, is the fullest version of that record. It should be read for what it is: the board's summary of his files and his own answers.
According to that hearing, his parents divorced when he was about eight or nine. Commissioner Fritz described his mother as abusive and alcoholic, and said he had grown up seeing domestic violence between his parents and, later, with stepfathers. Kemper said he had been scared and depressed watching his mother hit his father, and that his father was violent too.
The commissioner listed cruelty to animals from his childhood, including cats he killed, and his destruction of his sister's dolls. He agreed that he had killed animals, which he dated to about the age of 11 or 12, and said he did it "Instead of people." He described a running conflict with an older sister. The family moved to Montana, the commissioner said, and at one point Kemper was made to sleep in the basement. In 2017 he gave two explanations for that: that he was frightened of the dark, and that the basement arrangement was his mother's answer to his older sister sneaking out at night. He also told the board that at about eight he had fantasized about killing his mother with a hammer, and called it a childhood fantasy that he had never acted on. At the same hearing he said that his mother had played a role in decisions he made early in life, and that he loved her but also hated her.
He was sent to live with his father's parents, Edmund Kemper Sr. and Maude Kemper. In 2017 he told the board that the family had driven to his grandparents' home for Christmas and left him there. His grandparents treated him "Generally" well, he said, though he called his grandmother "in essence, my warden."
In 1964, when he was 15, he shot both of them. His grandfather was 72. By Kemper's account to the board, he had a .22 rifle under his arm when he stood at a window near his grandmother as she typed, with the family dog nearby. The commissioner noted that she had never harmed him, and Kemper agreed. His grandfather was in town shopping and was shot within a few minutes of returning home. Kemper told the board he had tried to tell his grandfather what had happened and could not speak. Asked why he had done it, he said "Fear," and described his grandfather as a fierce man who carried a .45. He then agreed that his grandfather had never hit him, and the commissioner pointed out that his grandfather had been unarmed. Kemper also said he had been "arguing with myself" at the time.
United Press International, writing in 1985, described them as his maternal grandparents. That is an error; he killed his father's parents, as the 1973 television reports and the 2024 Lookout Santa Cruz account both state.
Because he was 15, the killings were dealt with in juvenile court, not by an adult prosecution. At his 2017 hearing Kemper described a one-day juvenile trial. He said he was given a Youth Authority number, processed at the Youth Authority's northern reception center at Perkins, and then sent back to Madera County after the Youth Authority rejected him. He said a psychiatrist had told the judge he needed treatment, and that the judge sent him to the Youth Authority anyway. He ended up at Atascadero State Hospital, the maximum-security psychiatric facility in San Luis Obispo County. He told the board he left there "in chains" four years and six months after he arrived.
At Atascadero, he told the board, he worked in the scullery and joined the hospital chapter of the Jaycees, rising from a non-voting associate member to an external director.
Lookout Santa Cruz reported in 2024 that he was released to his mother's care on his 21st birthday. A KPIX report from April 1973 said he had been paroled in 1970. In 2017 Kemper put it this way: he had never been on a date, and he was suddenly paroled by the Youth Authority.
Some later accounts call the outcome of the 1964 case a conviction. The record describes a juvenile court proceeding and a commitment, not an adult criminal conviction.
After his release he lived with his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, in Aptos, a community in Santa Cruz County. She worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which had opened a few years earlier. He worked at a gas station and later on a state highway crew, which he described in 2017 as the Division of Highways and as a dangerous roadside job. For about a year before his 1973 arrest he rented an apartment in Alameda, across the bay. A neighbor there told KPIX in April 1973 that he had seemed "an average person."
He was well known to Santa Cruz police, though not as a suspect. SF Weekly, in a 2016 account, said local officers drank at a bar called the Jury Room, liked him, and did not know he had killed his grandparents; he joked with them that he would have joined the force if he had not been over the height limit.
His record did not stop him buying guns. After his arrest a KPIX reporter, Bill Hillman, noted that Kemper had bought a .44 Magnum handgun despite his history of psychiatric treatment, and asked what that might mean for California's gun laws.
On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were hitchhiking in Berkeley. Both were students at Fresno State, and they were roommates, as the 2017 hearing record describes them. He killed them and later left their remains in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in the area of Loma Prieta Mountain, according to SF Weekly. In 2017 he described to the board what he had done with their bodies, and said he had made an oath at Mary Ann Pesce's grave.
Little else was reported about who the two young women were. Their names were the first two on the eight-count charge filed in Santa Cruz County in April 1973.
The third victim was Aiko Koo, who was 15. The parole board described her as a high school student. Kemper told the board that she had been hitchhiking in Berkeley and said she had been pretending to be 18 or 19, a claim that rests on his word alone. He said he smothered her. She is one of the eight people named in the counts on which he was convicted.
Cynthia Ann Schall, known as Cindy, was shot by Kemper on January 7, 1973, according to the Bay Area Television Archive's record of a KPIX report filmed that month. Her remains were left in the ocean and were found at several points along the coast near Santa Cruz, and the KPIX report covered their identification, with footage of the coastline, a woman hitchhiking and an interview with a law enforcement officer.
After his arrest, police removed human remains from the back yard of his mother's duplex on Ord Street in Aptos, as a KPIX report showed on April 26, 1973. UPI later reported his statement that he had buried part of one victim's remains in the yard.
On February 5, 1973, Kemper shot Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu, according to SF Weekly, after picking them up near the University of California, Santa Cruz. Liu is named as Alice in some records and as Allison in KPIX's record of his arraignment. By February 20 their remains had been found off Eden Canyon Road, east of Castro Valley in Alameda County, as KPIX reported that day.
By then the fear on the Santa Cruz campus was public. On February 15, 1973, KPIX interviewed students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who said they had stopped hitchhiking. One spoke of fear of assault. A student named Cameron Smith had organized a rape hotline. SF Weekly reported that the university told students to ride only in cars carrying an official campus sticker. Kemper's car had one, because his mother worked at the university.
The killings of young women were not the only ones in Santa Cruz County at the time, and that made them harder to read. In October 1970 John Linley Frazier had killed Dr. Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, their sons Derrick and Taggart, and the medical secretary Dorothy Cadwallader at the Ohta home, Good Times reported in 2022. Herbert Mullin, who heard voices telling him to kill to prevent earthquakes, was arrested on February 13, 1973, after shooting Fred Perez in his yard in Santa Cruz.
On February 20, 1973, KPIX reported that Mullin was being charged with some of the recent killings, while the remains of murdered college students were still being found. The next day a KPIX reporter, Peter Burns, said police expected no quick solution to the killings, and noted that Mullin, the prime suspect in the latest killings, was not linked to any dismemberment. On February 24 and 25 the county sheriff's posse searched the Santa Cruz Mountains behind the university campus. KPIX's reporter said several murdered students, and others missing and presumed dead, were still unexplained.
District Attorney Peter Chang prosecuted all three men. Picking up a reporter's phrase, he called Santa Cruz "the Murder Capital of the World," and the label reached Time magazine, according to Good Times.
Kemper's mother lived at 609A Ord Street in Aptos. Over the Easter weekend of 1973 he killed her there. UPI, reporting his account in 1985, said he struck her with a hammer while she slept; she was 52. He then killed her friend Sally Hallett. SF Weekly's account says he invited Hallett to the house after his mother's death, and that he planned to make it look as if the two women had gone away together for the holiday. Lookout Santa Cruz, in 2024, called his mother his last victim. The two accounts differ on the order; both women died in the Ord Street home.
At the 2017 hearing Kemper said he had told himself that if his mother ever died over what he had done, she would be going with him.
Then he left. SF Weekly says he took cash and credit cards, left a note for police, and drove off with loaded guns.
He drove as far as Pueblo, Colorado, and called the Santa Cruz police from a phone booth. He had to call three times before an officer believed him, SF Weekly reported. He confessed to killing his mother and her friend and said he had also killed several college students, according to KPIX's April 24, 1973, report, filmed outside the Ord Street duplex. SF Weekly says Pueblo police arrested him on April 23; KPIX gives April 24 as the day he confessed by phone. Asked in 2017 why he had turned himself in, he said "To stop what I was doing," and that he had called Santa Cruz long distance and insisted that they arrest him. He said he should have gone to a lawyer's office instead, to reduce the risk of being shot.
Footage from that week shows police, District Attorney Peter Chang and Sheriff Doug James at the Ord Street house. An upstairs neighbor told KRON-TV that Kemper had been odd, quiet and overly attached to his mother, that she was afraid of him, and that he and his mother often argued. Another neighbor told KPIX he was "Too quiet sometimes," and that she had seen him carrying guns.
On April 25, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that friends of Kemper had reacted with disbelief, and that police were saying nothing yet about any link to the deaths of the students. KPIX's Bill Hillman reported from outside the county courthouse that Kemper was being brought back from Colorado.
Kemper took investigators to the places where he had left remains. On April 27, KPIX filmed police and sheriff's deputies examining the trunks of his car and his mother's car, and reported that he might be taken into the Santa Cruz Mountains to look for remains he had described. On April 29 the Sentinel reported that he had led officers to several burial sites. On May 2 it reported that a slain victim's belongings had been found.
The same day, the Sentinel ran a story under the headline "Psychiatrists Admit Kemper Deceived Them." The catalog record of that story gives no further detail, and no fuller account of what the psychiatrists said was reported.
On April 30, 1973, Kemper was arraigned in Santa Cruz on eight counts of murder. KPIX filmed him being led from the courthouse. The counts named Mary Ann Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cindy Schall, Rosalind Thorpe, Alice Liu, Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett. At a press conference afterward, Peter Chang said Kemper claimed to have fantasized about such crimes for a long time, and that he could not have acted on them without the many young women hitchhiking in the Bay Area and the county, whom Chang described as "attractive, naive girls hitchhiking."
Chang took the case to a grand jury in mid-May, and on May 18 the Sentinel reported that Kemper had heard the charges in the eight killings. The 1964 deaths of his grandparents were not among the counts.
His lawyer was the county's public defender, James Jackson. At the end of May, KPIX reported from the courthouse that Kemper had made two failed suicide attempts in jail, that the authorities were considering moving him out of the Santa Cruz jail, and that Jackson had won a one-week delay. The Sentinel reported a failed suicide attempt on May 29 and a dispute over where to hold him on May 30, and on May 31 it reported that he had been moved to San Mateo. In early June it reported a defense request for dismissals and, on June 12, details from the grand jury transcript. On June 28 it reported that the trial was set for October 15. In July the county board approved cost overruns of 1,665 dollars on the case.
Kemper pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The Sentinel reported his plea on September 25, 1973, a change in the psychiatrists assigned to the case on September 28, and, on October 1, a psychiatric opinion that he was sane. The court-appointed psychiatrists found him sane, UPI reported in 1985.
Jury selection took place on October 17 and 18, 1973, in the Santa Cruz County Courthouse. On October 26 the Sentinel reported testimony describing how the victims were killed. Kemper himself testified. He told the jury, as UPI later summarized it, that he had killed the students because he wanted them "for myself." He said he had begun picking up hitchhikers after his years at Atascadero in the hope of making friends, and that the young women had been distant with him. On October 30 the Sentinel reported under the headline "Kemper Backs Death Penalty."
Final arguments were heard on November 7.
On November 8, 1973, the jury found Kemper guilty on all eight counts of first-degree murder. The Sentinel's report, by Tom Honig, appeared that day, alongside a story about the handcuffs going back on. The next day the paper reported that he had been given a life term. He was received by the California Department of Corrections on November 9, 1973, under the commitment for eight counts of first-degree murder under Penal Code section 187 from Santa Cruz County, according to the record read at his 2017 hearing.
The Bay Area Television Archive's record of the trial footage describes eight separate sentences of seven years to life, and says his request for the death penalty was denied. The 2024 reports describe the sentence as life. No appeal was reported.
Kemper has been held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. In 1977 he asked to have surgery on his brain. The Sentinel reported in March 1977 that he wanted his brain altered, and in September that his attempt to obtain a lobotomy had failed. UPI reported in 1985 that the courts had repeatedly rejected his requests for brain surgery to remove his violent impulses, and that he had tried to kill himself three times.
In July 1977 the Sentinel reported that he was the subject of a planned film. A book by Margaret Cheney, The Co-Ed Killer, was published by Walker in 1976; Kirkus Reviews, reviewing it that year, said it rested largely on Kemper's own confessions. Kemper has given many interviews since, and his own account has shaped much of what has been written about him.
At his 2017 hearing he told the board he had had twelve years of therapy in prison, including five years with one therapist, one on one. The commissioner read from his psychological reports diagnoses of antisocial, narcissistic and schizotypal personality disorder, and an assessment that he was a high risk for future violence. He told her he did not consider himself a narcissist, and said a therapist had concluded he had some kind of psychosis. He reported a stroke a few years earlier, part-time use of a wheelchair, diabetes and pseudobulbar affect. Asked about the killings, he said "I wish I could take all of them back," and that he was not much of a man for having done such things to innocent people.
Kemper first came before the parole board in 1979. The Sentinel reported on May 2, 1979, that a reluctant Kemper had been denied parole. Denials followed in 1980, 1981 and 1982, UPI said. In 1981 the Sentinel reported that the state parole board had refused to set a release date, and in 1982 that he had been denied again. After the June 1982 hearing, according to UPI, the panel concluded he would pose a threat to public safety if paroled and that the crimes showed callous disregard for human life. Kemper told the board he was not ready for parole.
In June 1985, moments before a hearing before the state Board of Prison Terms, he gave up his right to be heard. He was 36. A prison spokesman, Lieutenant Joe McGrath, said Kemper felt he could not state his case properly in front of the press, and that he had told officials he was not fit for release and would wait three years before asking again. McGrath described his prison record as "spotless."
The Sentinel reported a further denial in June 1988, another in September 1997, and, in June 2002, that he had waived a hearing. In 2017 he appeared before Commissioner Fritz and Deputy Commissioner Daniel Blake at the California Medical Facility, represented by the attorney Jeffrey Hall, with a deputy district attorney from Santa Cruz County attending. It was conducted as an elderly parole hearing. Patricia Kemper attended and told the panel that the victims were her grandparents. Lookout Santa Cruz reported in 2024 that his previous denial had been in 2017.
On Tuesday, July 9, 2024, a three-member panel of the Board of Parole Hearings met at the California Medical Facility to consider his case. It was the twelfth time he had become eligible for parole since his 1973 conviction, Lookout Santa Cruz reported. Kemper refused to attend.
His attorney, Nicholas Ageo, asked for a postponement and was refused. Ageo told the board he had met Kemper only once and that Kemper had since refused to speak with him. Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell attended and testified. "Ed Kemper is still dangerous. He remains a high risk," Rosell said, according to Lookout, adding that Kemper was untreated and essentially unchanged since he was first imprisoned. His office described Kemper as "one of the most depraved and prolific serial killers of our time," KRON4 reported, and Rosell said he still lacked remorse and would be a danger if released.
Patricia Kemper, his cousin, attended to speak for the victims, as she had in 2017.
Lookout reported that Kemper, then 75, had diabetes and coronary heart disease, wore a pacemaker, had had a stroke years earlier and used a wheelchair. A psychiatric evaluation in April 2024 rated him a high risk to reoffend. The board cited an incident in 2022 in which he grabbed a prison staff member while being moved to his wheelchair.
The panel denied parole for seven years. KRON4 reported that his next hearing would be in 2031.
In July 2024 Kemper was 75 and held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, serving his life sentences.
Proven by final judgment: the first-degree murders of Mary Ann Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cindy Schall, Rosalind Thorpe, Alice Liu, Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett (jury verdict, November 8, 1973).
Admitted and handled in juvenile court, not an adult conviction: the 1964 killings of his grandparents, Edmund and Maude Kemper. Good Times in 2022 and the archive record of a 1973 KPIX report both describe this as a conviction; the account given at his 2017 hearing describes a juvenile court trial and commitment.
Claims of cannibalism: SF Weekly in 2016 stated as fact that he ate parts of some victims, and Good Times in 2022 said he may have. No court finding to that effect was reported, and the claim rests on his own statements.
Accounts differ on whether he was arrested on April 23 (SF Weekly) or confessed on April 24, 1973 (KPIX); whether he was released in 1969 (on his 21st birthday, Lookout) or 1970 (KPIX); whether his mother (Lookout) or Sally Hallett (SF Weekly's account) died last; the spelling of his mother's first name (Clarnell in the 1973 archive records, Claranell in UPI's 1985 report); Alice or Allison Liu; whether his grandparents were his father's parents (1973 and 2024 reports) or his mother's (UPI, 1985, in error); and whether Kirkus's 1976 description of his victims as "eight college students" is accurate (it is not: one was a 15-year-old high school student, and two were his mother and her friend).
1964: at 15, shoots his paternal grandparents, Edmund Kemper Sr., 72, and Maude Kemper, in Madera County; the case goes to juvenile court.
1964 to 1969 or 1970: Youth Authority reception at Perkins, then Atascadero State Hospital, about four years and six months by his account.
1969 or 1970: released to his mother's care; lives in Aptos, later in Alameda; works at a gas station and on a state highway crew.
May 7, 1972: picks up Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, Fresno State students, in Berkeley, and kills them.
1972: kills Aiko Koo, 15.
January 7, 1973: shoots Cindy Schall; her remains are later found along the coast and identified.
February 5, 1973: kills Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu.
February 13, 1973: Herbert Mullin arrested in Santa Cruz.
February 15 to 25, 1973: UCSC students stop hitchhiking; Thorpe's and Liu's remains found off Eden Canyon Road; sheriff's posse searches the mountains behind the campus.
April 1973, Easter weekend: kills his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, 52, and Sally Hallett at 609A Ord Street, Aptos.
April 23 or 24, 1973: confesses by phone from Pueblo, Colorado, and is arrested there.
April 29, 1973: leads officers to burial sites.
April 30, 1973: arraigned in Santa Cruz on eight counts of murder.
May 1973: grand jury; suicide attempts reported; moved to San Mateo.
September 25, 1973: enters his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
October 17 and 18, 1973: jury selected; trial follows, and he testifies.
November 8, 1973: guilty on all eight counts of first-degree murder.
November 9, 1973: life term reported; received by the Department of Corrections.
1976: Margaret Cheney's The Co-Ed Killer published.
1977: requests for brain surgery fail.
1979, 1980, 1981, 1982: parole denied.
June 1985: waives his hearing.
June 1988: parole denied.
September 1997: parole denied.
June 2002: waives his hearing.
July 25, 2017: elderly parole hearing at Vacaville; parole denied.
July 9, 2024: parole denied after he refuses to attend; next hearing set for 2031.