Free Serial Killer Investigations by Colin Wilson Page A

with the headless corpse. He also cleaned up Rosalind, although it is not clear whether he again performed necrophiliac sex. He placed both bodies back in the trunk, cut off Alice’s hands, then drove to the coast highway south of Pacifica and disposed of the heads; the bodies were dumped in Eden Canyon, Alameda. They were found nine days later.
    Meanwhile, media coverage in the Santa Cruz area heightened the atmosphere of terror. Shortly after the discovery of Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu, a policeman checking through gun licenses realised that Ed Kemper had a criminal record, and had not declared this. He drove to Kemper’s house, and found him in his car with a young blonde woman. Kemper handed over the gun, and the policeman drove off. The visit probably saved the life of the blonde hitchhiker.
    Kemper felt that he was going to ‘blow up’ soon, commit a crime so obvious that he was going to be caught. He decided to kill his mother first. On the morning of Easter Sunday 1973 Kemper walked into his mother’s bedroom and hit her on the head with a hammer. He then cut off her head with the General, ‘humiliated’ her body in some unspecified way, and then dumped it in a closet wrapped in a blanket.
    He felt sick, and went out for a drive. On the way he saw an acquaintance who owed him $10 and they went for a drive in his friend’s car: his friend offered him the $10, which, said Kemper later, ‘saved his life’. But he felt the craving to kill again, so he rang a friend of his mother’s, Sara Hallett, and invited her for dinner with him and his mother. When she arrived, she was breathless, and said, ‘Let’s sit down. I’m dead.’ Kemper took this as a cue, hit her, and then strangled her, crooking his arm round her neck from behind and squeezing as he raised her from the floor. Later, in removing her head, he discovered that he had broken her neck.
    That night he slept in his mother’s bed. The next day he drove west in Mrs Hallett’s car. Then, using money he had taken from the dead woman, he rented a Hertz car. At one point he was stopped by a policeman for speeding, and fined $25 on the spot. The policeman did not notice the gun on the back seat.
    Kemper had been expecting a manhunt, but when, after three days, there was still no news on the radio of the discovery of the bodies, he stopped in Pueblo, Colorado, and telephoned the Santa Cruz police to confess to being the ‘co-ed killer’. They asked him to call back later. He did, several times, before he finally convinced them that he was serious. They sent a local policeman to arrest him. In custody in Pueblo, he showed himself eager to talk loquaciously about the killings, describing them all in detail—even how he had buried the head of one victim in the garden, facing towards the house, so that he could imagine her looking at him, and how he had cut out his mother’s larynx and dropped it in the trashcan ‘because it seemed appropriate after she had bitched me so much’. He explained that he had driven to Pueblo before turning himself in because he was afraid that if he went straight to the local police they might shoot first and ask questions later, and he was ‘terrified of violence’.
    Kemper was adjudged legally sane, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
    Ressler obviously felt that Kemper, unlike Frazier, Mullin, and Corona, was well worth the trip to Vacaville Prison—in fact, he visited there three times. Kemper told him how, at the age of ten, he had returned home one day to find that all his belongings had been moved to the windowless basement, his mother explaining that his size made his sisters feel uncomfortable (they were in their teens). She also spent much of her time belittling him—another unpleasant characteristic of many parents of serial killers. So Kemper was virtually condemned to fantasy.
    The importance of the role of fantasy in the early lives of serial killers could hardly be exaggerated. Kemper admitted that he had