Free Criminal Minds by Jeff Mariotte

the privacy of his apartment he decapitated Luchessa. He removed Pesce’s clothes and dissected her, cut off her head, and sexually assaulted some of the body parts he had strewn about the room. He dumped the bodies in the mountains, remembering the spot so he could visit later. After keeping both heads for a time, he tossed them into a ravine. He photographed the whole affair with a Polaroid camera.
    His fantasy fulfilled for the time being, Kemper kept picking up hitchhikers without harming them—until September 14. On that day he spotted fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo hitchhiking, so he stopped, enticed her into his car, and took her to a rural road. He strangled the girl into unconsciousness and raped her. When she started coming to before he was finished, he strangled her to death and continued. With Koo’s body in his trunk, he paid his mother a visit, then took his “prize” home for dissection. The next day, he had an appointment with a psychiatrist; according to some accounts, while he was inside convincing the doctor that all was well with him, Koo’s head sat in his trunk.
    Another four-month stretch passed, during which time Kemper bought a .22 caliber pistol. On January 8, 1973, his victim was Cindy Schall, a hitchhiking college student. He killed her with one shot to the head, then took her to his mother’s house, put her in a closet, and went to bed. In the morning, after his mother left for work, he took the corpse out of the closet, had sex with it, and dissected it, then washed the blood away in the bathtub, placed the pieces in plastic bags, and threw them off a cliff into the ocean. He buried Schall’s head in the yard so that it would be gazing up at his mother’s bedroom window, because, he explained, Clarnell always liked to think people “looked up to her.”
    Less than a month went by before Kemper struck again. This time, he went onto the university campus and picked up two separate hitchhikers, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. Shooting them both on campus, he drove through the guard station at the campus gates with the bodies sitting upright in the car, then moved them into the trunk when he was safely past. At his mother’s house, he decapitated both girls, then carried the heads into his room to sexually assault them.
    On March 4, body parts began turning up. Santa Cruz police had recently arrested Herbert Mullin and yet a third Santa Cruz murderer, John Linley Frazier, but when the University of California at Santa Cruz girls disappeared, the authorities knew that a killer still operated in their vicinity. Kemper had kept up his relationship with cops, getting regular reports on how the investigations were proceeding.
    He was growing concerned, however. There was a bullet hole in his car and a lot of blood inside it. He bought a new handgun, a .44, and a sheriff ’s officer who saw the paperwork and remembered Kemper’s earlier conviction decided to visit him at his apartment. Kemper handed over the .44 but kept his .22. He didn’t know if the officer had looked inside his car, however, or what other dots he might have connected. It was time to bring his murderous streak to an end—but not before he killed his most significant victim.
    On Good Friday, April 20, 1973, Kemper went to his mother’s house. When she got home from work, they talked, and their discussion became an argument. He let her go to bed, and at around 5:15 a.m. he carried a claw hammer into her room, as he had fantasized about doing many times. He hit her in the head with the hammer, then slashed her throat. Once she was dead he decapitated her, handcuffed her wrists, and put her in the closet. He argued with her head, threw darts at it, and removed the larynx, which he tried to shove down the garbage disposal. The disposal spat it back out. “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me,” he later said. “I couldn’t get her to shut up!” Back in her room, he had sex with her corpse.
    He knew that