Original subtitles

[ominous music]

- I was dreaming, thinking, fantasizing murder all day long.

I couldn't get it outta my head.

[ominous music]

- He was the Coed Killer.

Taking the head off was his idea

of ultimate control over women.

[ominous music]

- Ed Kemper was 15 years old.

He was a ticking time bomb. [peaceful music]

- He said that if the knife wouldn't have broke,

he would've never stopped stabbing.

[suspenseful music]

- These were young women who were hitchhiking.

- Sexual assault, mutilation, butchery.

- It really hit home when it happened right

on our own campus. [suspenseful music]

- He was mad at everybody that rejected him.

- I had a real bad problem depriving people of their lives.

[dramatic music]

[suspenseful music]

[birds chirping]

- Two hikers were walking their dog up in Loma Prieta,

which is way up in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It's the highest point in the county.

[suspenseful music] [dog barking]

They came across what looked to be a skull,

The reality of finding something like that.

It can be a very upsetting situation.

[sirens wailing] [suspenseful music]

- So a call came in to the sheriff's office

from two hikers.

We drive up on top of this mountain.

[chopper buzzing] [suspenseful music]

At this point, we don't even know if it's a crime scene.

But we're sketching.

We're photographing.

We're picking up samples of everything.

- They went searching and digging

and seeing if there was any area under the trees

that was dug up or anything looked suspicious.

[suspenseful music]

- We were trying to search for anything

that doesn't belong in the dirt.

But we find no other body parts.

[suspenseful music]

We brought the skull back to the sheriff's office

and identify the remains.

And we found out the skull belongs to a woman,

a young woman, a teenager to early 20s.

[suspenseful music]

So is this a guy that killed his wife?

Boyfriend kills a girlfriend?

And why did somebody take the time

to cut a head off

in the first place? [ominous music]

[suspenseful music]

- I had an upbringing

that some have called dysfunctional.

The whole home life just, I watched it deteriorate.

[suspenseful music]

I was 7 1/2, 8 years old.

My parents divorced.

My mother's working to raise three kids.

[suspenseful music]

We lived in a house where there was a basement.

And at a certain time of the evening,

my sisters would go up to bed upstairs

where I used to go to bed upstairs.

I had to go down to the basement.

[suspenseful music]

- Just think of every creepy basement

you've seen in every horror movie.

And that's where Ed had to live.

- I walked into complete darkness.

With these pipes wheezing and banging over my head.

You know, the rattles,

the weird sounds in the night,

that can be spooky to a kid. [ominous music]

And I've got this horrible terror going on inside of me.

My imagination was vivid. [ominous music]

- I was studying forensic psychology in college.

So I wrote him.

And anybody that knows Kemper knows he likes to talk.

[ominous music]

I had close to 80 hours of interviews

and several years correspondence through the mail.

[ominous music]

He said the isolation in the basement

is when his fantasies really, really started to evolve.

[ominous music]

He was always scared

that the devil was gonna come outta the furnace.

[ominous music]

- Kemper was the middle child.

The only boy.

His mother thought Ed should not be sharing a room

with his sisters.

So it made sense to her to put him in the basement.

[suspenseful music]

Ed presents this living arrangement

as sort of a brutal thing for his mother to do

because it scared him so much.

But she thought Ed was awkward and timid.

And so she wanted to toughen him up

and also give him a little more independence as a boy.

[suspenseful music]

- From the beginning,

you had a kind of volatile relationship

between his mother and his father.

I think it was a very destabilizing time for him.

And his mother became the focus

in his particular narrative of all of his anger

and feelings of rejection.

- His father was 6'8".

His mother was six feet tall.

They both yelled.

But the home was dominated really by Ed's mother.

- If we're talking about Ed Kemper's formative years,

he probably saw a father who was using avoidance

and being out of the home

as a way of dealing with that stress.

[suspenseful music]

- When they got divorced, Edmund felt neglected.

His dad would say he was gonna show up and pick him up.

And not show up.

- There was a great hole in my life.

And I started becoming fascinated with things

evolving around death and destruction

and evil and all of that.

When I was about eight or nine years old,

I went to a magic show. [suspenseful music]

- It was a traveling show where they had the guillotine act.

Where they took a young girl out of the audience,

they put her head in the guillotine.

They made it look like they chopped it off

and everybody was horrified.

And Ed was thrilled. [ominous music]

- Right at that moment,

I departed reality

because logically I should have been able to ascertain

that that could not happen.

You're not gonna get away with chopping somebody's head off.

But the concept of it was so raw and it was titillating.

I says, wow!

And that got caught up in my morbid fascination.

[suspenseful music]

- He had issues with wanting to dominate and control people.

And in his mind, taking the head off and possessing it

was his idea of ultimate control over women.

- It was in that darkness

that he begins to really formulate the fantasy

of ultimately killing. [ominous music]

[suspenseful music]

- There's a feeling that exists in Santa Cruz

that we're some special place.

[suspenseful music]

Whatever horrible thing is happening in the world,

it's not gonna happen here.

Well, it does happen here.

[suspenseful music]

[suspenseful music] [birds chirping]

It was my very first day of work.

I walked into the sheriff's office.

And they said the news of the day

was that they had identified the woman

whose skull was found up in the mountains.

- The skull was identified as Mary Anne Pesce.

18 years old.

[suspenseful music]

Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa were students

at Fresno State University.

- Mary Ann Pesce was happy go lucky.

Teachers liked her.

Very upbeat, very adventurous girl.

Anita Luchessa is a 18-year-old college freshman.

She was very popular on the campus

and she was very close to her family.

[eerie music]

- [Announcer] On May 7th, 1972,

two Fresno State College coeds

were hitchhiking a ride from here in Berkeley.

- Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa

had traveled to Berkeley, California to see some friends.

- [Announcer] They both had the money for the bus.

Yet they preferred hitchhiking

because, as Mary Ann said,

you meet such interesting people.

- This was was a time

when there were lots of people hitchhiking.

People were freely getting in cars.

- [Reporter] Is there a mystique in hitchhiking

or something that you really get attached to?

- Yeah.

Being free.

- Police put together a story of what had probably happened.

That they had been kidnapped and apparently murdered.

- We hope and pray

that Anita Luchessa is still alive,

but we thought

there was another body we hadn't found yet.

[suspenseful music] [birds shrieking]

[phone ringing]

A call comes to the Santa Cruz Sheriff's Department.

- Cynthia Schall was a Cabrillo College student.

- They said she had gone to school, but had not returned.

They, of course, got worried.

- The Santa Cruz investigators talked

to a lot of people who knew Cynthia Schall.

Was she in trouble with anybody?

Was there any reason for her to flee?

And there wasn't. [suspenseful music]

- But they did say she was known to hitchhike.

[suspenseful music]

- [Announcer] Cynthia Ann Schall was last seen

as she left her Santa Cruz home,

saying she intended to hitchhike

to classes at Cabrillo College.

But there is no clue to her whereabouts.

- Cynthia Schall really hits home

in Santa Cruz County

because she lives

in a little seaside community called Capitola.

And that's right here.

People in the area are hyper aware

of the frantic search for her.

[suspenseful music] [waves whooshing]

- [Announcer] A grisly story began in this cove.

The upper part of a girl's torso washed up on this beach,

two miles north of the Santa Cruz Pier.

Then a hand was found two days later by a surfer

who was in the water near Capitola,

seven miles to the southeast.

- These are very, almost expertly,

severed pieces of body.

[suspenseful music]

- Very soon after that, other body parts were found.

A head was not found, however.

- We were able to positively ID those body parts

from fingerprints

and from x-rays. [suspenseful music]

- We have established beyond any reasonable

and questionable doubt that the remains found

are the remains of the missing person in our community.

- [Reporter] This is Cynthia Ann Schall?

- Correct.

- I was stunned.

My wife and I had three little kids

and we had arranged her to babysit occasionally for us.

Remembering her face.

Remembering her watching my children.

You know, these things are going through my mind.

[suspenseful music]

- We have a local girl murdered and cut to pieces.

So you can imagine now the anxiety

of what was going on in Santa Cruz County.

- I do remember when body parts started washing up

on the shore.

And it was really freaky.

It's just very unsettling to know

that whoever is doing this is still out there.

- The residents of this area, understandably, are edgy.

It was just six months ago that a human head

was found in the hills not too far from here.

And the details of that murder still are a mystery.

[suspenseful music]

[eerie music]

- When I was 14 years old, I ran away from my mother.

I wanted to be with my father.

And I wanted to get away from my mother

because I was dreaming, thinking, fantasizing murder

all day long.

[ominous music]

I couldn't get it outta my head.

[eerie music] [kettle whistling]

- An important part

in the life of many serial killers is fantasy.

There's a kind of brooding about what life

could have been like if it weren't for factor X.

[eerie music]

Anytime Ed Kemper felt resentment,

it was tied back to his mother.

- So when he went to live with his father,

he found his father had a whole new life.

[ominous music]

- His father had remarried and had a beautiful wife.

A stepson about Kemper's age.

And Kemper had to try to fit into this new household.

[ominous music]

- I'm sure he was bitter.

He always thought he was the apple of his father's eye.

- Ed wanted that perfect sitcom of the 50s,

"Leave it to Beaver" type family.

So for a short period,

it was okay.

- We say, gee, dad, you know,

you're going out to dinner tonight.

Can we go someplace and eat?

And he'd say, sure.

Give us a few dollars.

We'd go down to some little diner down the street.

He treated us like little men.

[suspenseful music]

- But he so idealized his father

that he really didn't see how uncomfortable this was

for his father and his new stepmother.

[ominous music]

[ominous music]

- As the body parts floated in from the ocean,

there was no longer any doubt in the community's mind

that there was something really wrong.

There was somebody doing some bad things.

[suspenseful music]

- [Dispatcher] [indistinct] Roger.

- We didn't have any information as to a suspect.

So we were just doing guesswork.

[suspenseful music] [siren wailing]

- What is similar in these cases?

Coed.

Location.

- These were young women who were hitchhiking.

- A lot of warnings went out.

Please be careful.

Don't hitchhike.

Don't go out alone.

- We felt like our hands were not so much tied,

but we couldn't figure out how to stop it.

[suspenseful music]

- There was kind of a shock to the community.

How could this be happening in our little Garden of Eden?

[waves whooshing]

[suspenseful music]

[siren wails] [radio sputters]

I was talking to the investigators every single day.

They were extremely frustrated.

Because the victims of these crimes were completely random

and there is nothing more difficult to investigate

than random killings.

[suspenseful music]

- There's a lotta pressure to figure this out on all of us.

[suspenseful music]

This one truly tugged at everybody.

Aiko Koo is a 15-year-old high school student.

Very talented ballet dancer. [melancholy music]

Her mother's a librarian

at the University of California at Berkeley.

[melancholy music]

The police learned Aiko Koo missed the bus

and got into a car and disappeared.

Aiko Koo's mother was making thousands of posters

and putting 'em on every telephone pole in the Bay Area.

It's hard to describe how

painful this was. [melancholy music]

I mean, this was so

hard for her.

I mean, it just crushed her heart.

- Yeah. We used to hitchhike.

But now it's not real safe to do it.

So we don't.

- [Reporter] Why did you quit?

- Because of all the weird things that have been happening,

with the girls being chopped up and things like that.

[suspenseful music]

- When I was 14 years old, I go stay with my dad.

And this opened up whole new feelings in me

that I'd never had before.

And I wish I'd had more experience

with my father growing up.

[suspenseful music]

- He hated his mother.

He loved his dad.

That would've been a dream for Edmund

to have things work out living with his father.

- Ed's stepmother was absolutely terrified of him.

- Ed had this way of looking at people

with kind of a weird, empty stare.

That unnerved her.

On top of that, he's very tall and intimidating.

She had not bargained for having to deal

with this teenage boy coming into their home

out of the blue.

So she put pressure on Ed's father.

You know, he can't stay with us.

- 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.

[suspenseful music]

- Finally, Ed's father took Ed

to his parents' 17-acre ranch in California.

Ostensibly to go for a visit over a Christmas vacation.

But when Ed's father went to leave,

he told Ed, no, you're staying.

[eerie music]

- We went up to the mountains to stay for Christmas.

And I got left behind. [eerie music]

- Ed was completely betrayed.

His father basically lied to him and also abandoned him.

- I got left there.

I was old family. I was already failure.

So he got rid of me.

[suspenseful music]

[bright music] [people chattering]

- Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe

are coeds attending

the University of California at Santa Cruz.

They don't return from class.

Their friends get worried,

report them missing to the city of Santa Cruz.

[suspenseful music]

- It really hit home

when it happened right on our own campus,

our own students.

[suspenseful music]

We were all very frightened.

During my long walks home from my babysitting jobs

at 10 or 11 at night.

Alone in the dark.

And my keys clutched between my fingers.

So I could defend myself against an attacker.

I can still, almost 50 years later,

just feel in my bones

just being so afraid.

[eerie music]

- Maybe they got a ride.

[suspenseful music]

Just got into a car and disappeared.

[police radio chatter]

We needed to get information into every officer,

every patrol car.

It's like, oh God, is this ever gonna end?

[suspenseful music]

- First weekend after we knew that Alice and Rosalind

had gone missing,

we instituted a search on campus.

We would walk along the edges of the roadways

because we knew that women

were being kidnapped by people in vehicles.

I was feeling a sense of dread of what we might find.

[suspenseful music] [birds chirping]

- They determine these are the dismembered bodies,

the remains, of Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe.

- I felt so sad for the parents.

After they learned that their daughters had been killed.

There was a huge amount of grief on campus.

It was maddening to know

that the perpetrator had not been found.

[suspenseful music]

- The feeling in the community was,

we've got a big problem here.

We've gotta protect ourselves.

But what do we do?

What the hell's going on?

[suspenseful music]

- You know, I went to live with Dad.

He sends me up to Grandma.

Now she's got me and my mother,

the last thing she said to me about my grandmother was,

don't hurt them.

You know, my grandparents.

Don't hurt them.

- Edmund got dumped off and abandoned

at his grandparents' house.

And that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

He was mad at everybody in his inner circle

that rejected him.

[suspenseful music] [birds chirping]

- I met Ed shortly after he moved in with his grandparents.

We were both freshmen in high school.

And Ed sort of stood out because he was very, very tall,

about 6'4".

I remember while we're waiting for the school bus,

Ed tells me this very, very detailed story.

One of our neighbors, he passed away.

Grandpa Kemper and Ed went down to the house.

And because Ed Kemper was, you know, a big, big kid,

he helped the coroner carry the body out.

And he talked about the man's wife.

She's crying. She's bereft.

And he was just so put off by that

and so contemptuous of her grief

And I was struck at the time

at the complete lack of empathy for the suffering

of somebody else.

Her husband just died.

You know, of course she's gonna cry.

[suspenseful music]

- He didn't socialize a lot.

That's usually where you learn empathy

and you begin to feel things for other people.

- Ed was a country boy.

And a lotta country boys grow up as hunters.

His father was a hunter.

You start with a BB gun.

Then you get a .22. [suspenseful music]

- He was always on little adventures outside.

One time he shot a blue jay.

The bird fell down and started like squawking really loud.

He was taught what he could kill and what he couldn't.

And blue jays were off limits.

[eerie music]

- Ed Kemper goes out and commits this brazen act

that he's coming to associate with masculinity and power.

And taking a life is linked to that.

[suspenseful music]

- His grandmother found out

and he got in trouble for killing the blue jay.

- His grandmother was a dominating figure

like his mother was.

And he began to build resentment toward her

because she didn't really trust him.

He didn't like being told what to do over and over and over.

- She never let me get out of her sight

for more than an hour without yelling my name out

to see where I was.

I would go back to my bedroom

and I'd go off into fantasy worlds

that you'd never wanna share with anybody

because they're so cruel

or they're so unspeakably out of sync with reality.

[suspenseful music]

- He got angry and resentful.

And he would then go down to the outhouse

and shoot bullets into it,

imagining her inside.

- And the fantasies started getting more and more harsh

and deviant and sick. [suspenseful music]

- I started developing the fantasies toward her.

Killing her.

And the decapitation fantasies were even there.

They were in place by then already.

- What were they?

- Possessing the severed heads of women.

[eerie music]

[siren wails]

- [Dispatcher] [indistinct] location.

- I was working the graveyard shift.

It got to be pretty boring.

And then the phone rings.

And the officer who was working dispatch answered the phone.

He said, it's Ed Kemper.

[suspenseful music]

And now, I know Ed.

He worked at a gas station

about three blocks from the Jury Room.

It was a watering hole for the law enforcement

around the Santa Cruz area.

Ed Kemper would occasionally come down to the Jury Room

and sit with us while we sit there and had beers.

So I get on the phone and I said,

hey, Ed, this is Jim Conner.

He said, oh, hi Jim, how you doing?

Something like that.

He said, well, I know you guys are looking for me.

And as soon as you guys find me, you're gonna kill me.

What do you mean Ed? [suspenseful music]

He said, well, I killed her.

[eerie music]

During my conversation with Ed,

he admitted to me that he had killed his mother

and her coworker.

[suspenseful music]

I can't describe the feeling

that I was overcome by at that point.

I am just so blown away because I've known this guy,

at least I thought I knew him,

for quite some time.

[suspenseful music]

So I said, Ed, you've known me for a long time.

I just need know where you are.

He said, I'm in a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado.

[suspenseful music]

- After Ed murdered his mother and her friend,

he took off across the country to Colorado.

He was exhausted and he realized he had no place to go.

His mother had always taken care of him

and now she was dead, thanks to him.

- And I had the other officer get on the phone

and call Pueblo PD

and have him go out and put Ed under arrest.

[suspenseful music]

- It was the cleanest house you've ever walked into.

The only way you would know

that there was something wrong in that house

was because of the smell.

There's this long walk-in closet.

At the end of the closet, we find Kemper's mother.

[suspenseful music]

He cut her head off.

And she was completely washed clean.

[suspenseful music]

And her friend,

she was in the front closet,

had been beaten to death.

When the contingent of officers

from Santa Cruz County arrived in Pueblo,

they sat down with Ed Kemper

and he confessed

to killing six co-eds.

[suspenseful music]

- I think there was probably a great deal of shock

that this individual could be the person killing the co-eds.

Because there were certain aspects of Kemper's personality

where he was, in fact, very charming, likable.

But when they look back and realize

that he had killed before at the young age of 15,

it must have been quite a wake up call

about the type of individual

that they were actually dealing with.

[suspenseful music]

- I got this domineering grandmother on my father's side.

I was up there with them for 10 months.

At first, it was okay,

'cause it was the calm of being away from my mother.

Was going to a good school.

As the months went on,

the veneer went away

and the passions and the tension started building.

[suspenseful music]

- Ed Kemper was 15 years old.

And at that point, had hit a peak of aggression

and he was sort of a ticking time bomb.

[suspenseful music]

- That day, Ed's grandfather had gone

to the store to pick up groceries.

Ed was alone with his grandmother.

She was working on stories for a boy's magazine.

He wanted to go hunting.

Picked up his rifle.

And she said again to him,

don't shoot the birds.

[dramatic music]

- I was building up big loads of frustration inside.

Big loads of hatred

because I had no outlet for it.

And it started simmering, I guess.

[dramatic music]

- He just turns around,

looks at his grandmother.

- I mean, it wasn't rational.

- He sees the back of her head, aims his rifle.

- And it was pure horror.

[ominous music]

[suspenseful music]

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 had done.

[suspenseful music]

Well very soon after that,

the mind game stuff started up.

- Kemper was prone to sudden rage.

It was, I've had it!

She's mouthed off for the last time.

[suspenseful music]

- I was really aware of the evil I was capable of.

You know, the murderous violence.

- And something snaps in his head.

He turned a gun on her and he shoots her in the head.

[dramatic music]

- He then shot her twice more,

dragged her body into the bedroom.

And he needed to be sure she was dead, so he stabbed her.

[suspenseful music]

- He had such rage.

He said that

if the knife wouldn't have broke

under the clavicle of his grandmother,

he would've never stopped stabbing.

[suspenseful music]

- So now Ed's panicking.

And he calls his mother,

of all people in the world,

and tells her I just killed grandpa and grandma.

[suspenseful music]

- One thing that Kemper is learning

as he listens to sex offenders is that women are objects.

And he's being affirmed

in some of the fantasies he's already had

about how to control them by killing them.

Ed also learned very quickly the kinds of things

the psychiatrists were looking for.

[suspenseful music]

- When he's put in an environment with his mother,

he began to fantasize about acting out.

The unfortunate reality is

that upon his release from Atascadero,

innocent people would become victims of his fantasy world.

[suspenseful music]

Ultimately, Ed Kemper fell into the pattern

that you see in some men who commit serial sexual homicide.

Aggressive and sexualized fantasies.

The feelings of rejection.

And then ultimately it spills over into the first act.

And then with every killing,

there's an attempt to perfect that fantasy

until its actual underpinnings are revealed.

Which is the killing of his mother.

[suspenseful music]

- I had a real bad problem depriving people of their lives.

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.

[suspenseful music]

I'm sorry it sounds so cold,

but that's about what it analogizes to.

- What would've been ahead for all these people

whose lives were snuffed out?

I'm sure they all could have had lives

just as wonderful as mine. [suspenseful music]

- You can't investigate all these murder cases

or any murder case

and not have things kind of just get burned into your brain.

You can't erase it.

[suspenseful music] [waves whooshing]