Edmund Kemper:Co-ed Killer :: essays research papers fc

The TV program MUGSHOTS uses the testimony of authorities that worked the case along with interviews with Kemper himself as to what was happening throughout the case from both sides of the story. The product of a broken and abusive home, Edmund Kemper grew up timid and resentful, with a perception of his declare inadequacy. Before the age of ten, Kemper graduated to living targets, burying the family cat liveborn and subsequently cutting off its head, returning with the gruesome trophy to his room, where it was dictated on proud display despite his tender age, he brooded oer fantasies of love and sex, with violence playing an inevitable role. One afternoon, discussing Edmunds childish muddle upon a grade-school teacher, Kempers sister asked him why he did not simply osculation the wo objet dart. Kemper answered, deadpan, "If I kiss her, I would have to kill her offset printing." A game family cat fell victim to his urges this one hacked with a machete, pieces of the c arcass orphic in his closet until his aim accidentally discovered them. Kempers mother first packed him off to live with her estranged husband, and then - after caterpillar tread away - the boy was delivered to his paternal grandparents, residing on a remote calcium ranch. There, in August 1963, fourteen-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother with a .22-caliber rifle, afterward smashing her body repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When his grandfather came home, Kemper shot the old man as well, leaving him dead in the yard. Interrogated by authorities, Kemper could only rank "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma." Motiveless violence displayed in his actions got Kemper committed to the states maximum-security hospital in Atascadero. In 1969, a 21-year-old behemoth freehanded to six-foot-nine and some 300 pounds, Kemper was paroled to his mothers custody over the objections of the state psychiatrists. During Kempers enforced absence, his mother had settled in S anta Cruz, a college town whose population boasted thousands of attractive co-eds. For the attached two years, through 1970 and 71, Kemper bided his time, holding odd jobs and cruising the highways in his leisure time, plectron up dozens of young female hitchhikers, refining his approach, his "line," until, he knew that he could put them totally at ease. Some evenings, he would frequent a saloon patronized by off-duty policemen, rubbing shoulders with the law and soaking up their tales of crime, becoming friendly with a number of detectives who would later be assign to track him down.