Original subtitles

[dark music]

♪

- Just a week ago today,

four more bodies were discovered.

in a connected series of murders

that now numbers at least ten.

- He went for someone who he knew was weak and vulnerable.

Co-eds, college students.

- He eviscerates them, decapitates them,

has sex with the body parts.

- Roz Thorpe was a free spirit. She was bright.

- Aiko Koo was a little girl, really.

Who knows what these victims would've turned into,

and I think that's the tragedy of it all.

- By 10, 12 years of age,

he was getting abuse from his mother.

"You're nothing. You'll never amount to anything."

- We're still fighting. She's still belittling me.

I'm like a puppet on a string.

- If mom wasn't there,

he wouldn't have been a serial killer.

- He killed his mother.

He wanted to just humiliate and defile the corpse

any way he could, and he did.

- Here was a guy killing coeds.

He's a necrophiliac, what he did to his mother.

How is he different from us? What's going through his mind?

To understand the artist, you must look at the artwork.

Kemper is gonna be the first one

to help the FBI know what makes these guys tick.

- Kemper was very helpful because he's very intelligent.

He's more than just average intelligence.

- He's got total recall

for everything that he has ever done.

- He changed law enforcement forever.

- I'm not an expert. I'm not an authority.

I'm someone who has been a murderer for almost 20 years.

I was playing a dangerous game with a loaded gun

that got us all.

- In the '60s, Santa Cruz was a beach town

by basically a Yosemite-quality redwood forest.

- It was beautiful.

It was just really make-believe.

- UC Santa Cruz had opened in 1965

and was just gathering popularity,

and it was becoming a real counterculture location

where hippies loved to go.

It was a real party time.

Come to Santa Cruz and be free and easy.

Until the bodies started washing in on the beach.

- There are a number of unsolved murders in this area.

Four of these victims were co-eds from nearby UC.

At least two other young women are missing and feared dead.

- People were buying guns,

making sure their doors were locked,

and it was an atmosphere of fear.

- Until he called the police on himself,

I don't think anybody felt safe.

[tense music]

♪

[phone rings]

- So at that point, I'm feeling all of the blood

run from my head down to my feet.

- It was a shock to everybody.

Everybody was just buzzing around.

It was, like, all of a sudden, things were happening.

[sirens wailing]

- The police came up. He filled up the entire booth.

He was arrested in the telephone booth.

- He stands 6'9", 285 pounds. Just a huge man.

So the officers said when they arrived

he came out of the phone booth,

he literally put his hands on top of the phone booth

to say "I give up."

He's that big.

- Why did you wind up giving yourself up?

- It had to stop.

- This was such a crazy time and such a hideous evil

that Kemper perpetrated on these people.

- He tells me exactly, in graphic details,

what he did to these victims.

Just think if had he not turned himself in

and he just kept killing, he could've gone killing

for a long, long period of time.

- In those days, all of the research

that has been conducted on criminal psychology

has been from a rehabilitation perspective.

We've had to develop more of a proactive technique

to try to catch these guys.

I told my partner, "We got to go

and talk to the experts."

We did not ask for FBI permission

because the old saying, it's better to ask

for forgiveness than permission.

And the first person we'd be interviewing

would be Edmund Emil Kemper.

- He was not insane. He was perfectly conscious

of exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it,

and he told the police everything.

You can learn exactly what you wanted to learn.

- He was perfect for the FBI.

- The best way to understand

is to look at Kemper's childhood.

- Ed Kemper never had a normal childhood.

- It was a chaotic relationship

between his mother and his father.

This went on for a period of time,

this bickering and yelling,

demeaning his father.

The father couldn't take it any longer, so he took off.

And junior here was now left with the mother.

- His mother was very verbally abusive,

didn't like him, maybe hated him.

- His mother was very belittling

of him and humiliated him,

but somebody doesn't wake up one day

and decide, "I'll go out and kill women,"

because someone is trying

to symbolically kill their mother.

It begins 10, 15, 20 years earlier

in his mind, in his fantasies.

♪

- He had an older sister, and he had a younger sister,

and he played games called gas chamber, electric chair,

and what that was, was just like reenactment of death.

They would strap him to a chair,

and then his sister would make-believe

she's pushing on a button

to execute him, and he'd writhe

in the chair like he's being executed.

- And that was a game, and you wonder if there was

something in that experience that began

some of these very death-oriented fantasies.

[sinister music]

♪

- His mother was afraid of him.

- She put him in the basement.

- The rest of the family went upstairs

to retire for the evening. I went to the basement.

So we had an entire floor of the house between us,

and it was very scary.

My mother wouldn't allow me any negotiated settlement of light.

I couldn't have a night light. It was too expensive.

- And he talked about the rats running around at night

and how afraid he was of the rats.

[rats chittering]

- He'd be all alone in the dark

with only this furnace light going.

- And he would look in this gas furnace, and he would

just kind of fantasize that this was hell,

this was Satan.

♪

And the flames are coming out.

- And to me, that was the fires of hell.

All I saw was the flame shadows

or light playing on the grill

of the furnace shining on a wall and a hissing sound.

That I was making a bargain with demonic forces

that I was convinced

were gonna consume me and somehow do me in.

[creepy music]

♪

- And he had these dolls belonging to his older sister.

She loved these dolls.

So that's where he first started cutting the heads,

the arms, and legs off the dolls.

It didn't stop with the dolls.

He then transitioned over into animal cruelty.

Which we know that's a predictor

of future violence.

So he buries the cat alive

and then brings the cat up after it's dead,

decapitates the head of the cat.

He puts it on a stake.

If you see these characteristics in children,

there's a good chance he or she will become a violent offender.

They shipped him up to the paternal grandparents,

in a remote area.

- He loved his grandfather.

It's the only person I ever heard him

say that he loved.

His grandfather got him a rifle

and taught him to shoot.

[gun clicks]

- He was shooting birds.

And grandma, her name was Maude,

didn't like that.

- She took the gun

- We begin now to see

the dynamics of when he gets upset.

Her telling him to do something triggered a lot of rage.

- And unfortunately Maude was the same personality

as his mother.

- [yelling indistinctly]

- Very, very controlling, domineering,

nagging type of mother.

- He described her as verbally abusive.

He used the same terms for his mother.

- They get into an argument,

and he was just so fed up...

with her, and he decided to pick up that gun

and while she's at her kitchen table...

He came up and shot her

[gunshot] once in the back of the head

[gun cocks]

and a couple of times in the back.

Surprisingly it's not done.

He was getting abuse from his mother,

and he can only take so much of this,

and it's going to, you know, overflow.

- I said, "She's got to die, or more girls are gonna die."

And that's when I decided I'm going to murder my mother.

[ominous music]

♪

- So then he became horrified.

He was so concerned about how this was going

to affect his grandfather,

so he decided the only reasonable thing

to do was to kill his grandfather

to keep him from suffering.

- Why did you shoot grandpa?

You liked him.

And he said, "I didn't want Grandpa

"to see that his wife is dead.

He would've had a heart attack."

It doesn't make sense.

And they call the cops. They come. They arrest him.

- At the time I was 6' 7 1/2".

I weighed 173 pounds.

They couldn't believe I was under 16.

The judge had appointed a psychiatrist.

His report was that I was mentally ill,

that I was what he called...

how did he put that? I was salvageable,

that I should be treated and not punished.

[TV playing indistinctly]

- Atascadero, that's a place basically

for the criminally insane, and you're dealing with a lot

of severely psychotic, mentally ill people that

did something in the throes of a psychosis.

Kemper didn't fit that mold.

- They felt he must be crazy because look what he did,

but unfortunately his condition

didn't fit within any of the diagnostic mental illnesses.

He wasn't a paranoid schizophrenic.

He didn't hear voices.

- This type of pathology

was not at all on anybody's radar screen,

even mental health professionals,

and I'm not sure that they knew what to do with him.

And so he was locked away.

- So from age 15 to 21, he was in a cage,

and that's just how he developed.

Here's a kid that had never had a girlfriend.

And he described that he would masturbate

several times a day.

A lot of what he was thinking about

during this--these activities was what he would do

to his mother and perhaps to other women.

- He hated his mother, and it's sexually arousing

and stimulating.

What that tells me is, as an early adolescent,

when people are just reaching puberty,

and their sexuality begins to take place,

you already see the early signs of a fusion

of sex and aggression.

- They do some psych tests on him.

- He's very intelligent.

He's more than just average intelligence.

- His IQ was 145.

- I wasn't aware of any intelligence.

I was being called stupid pretty frequently,

and unfortunately it was sinking in.

I was very positively impressed and surprised

to find out I wasn't mentally defective.

Literally. I thought I was a slow person.

- He's very, very disarming

because of his high intelligence

and his pleasant demeanor.

He's a very friendly and engaging

and really a very likeable person.

- They trusted him.

[daunting music]

- They thought he was just the perfect

recovered criminal,

and he assisted them as, like, a secretary in their offices

and administered tests to the inmates.

- He learned the buzzwords. He learned what to say

to make himself sound normal.

He memorized the questions.

- So he knew what the answers were supposed to be.

And that's why he passed his final examination.

- When Kemper was allowed out of Atascadero,

he was declared sane.

- Psychiatrists really didn't believe

he was a danger to himself or others.

He had been a model patient.

So they recommended that he be released.

But when they paroled him,

they made him live with his mother.

- Now he's with mom.

He's back in this environment, the nagging, the yelling.

She broke him.

- Within nine months, he killed his first hitchhiker.

- Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa

were the first ones that were murdered.

- He said he cut her ear to ear.

- When I attacked her, she didn't

at first realize what was happening.

I had just gone through a horrible experience

stabbing her, and I'm walking back there

with her roommate, bewildered. I got to kill her.

I can't let her go. She's gonna tell on me.

Everybody's gonna get me.

[suspenseful music]

♪

- After juvenile hall,

he was a bit of a loner. He didn't really fit in.

He wanted to hang with the cops and fit in with them.

- He actually had ambitions of becoming a policeman.

[chuckling] I mean, that's sort of crazy.

[ominous music]

- Many murderers wanted to be law enforcement officers,

and a few of them actually were law enforcement officers.

These guys are interested in law enforcement

because they want to learn investigative techniques

in order to avoid apprehension.

And how do you learn investigative techniques

any better than hanging around cops?

- Kemper wanted to be a police officer,

but he never could get on because he was 6'9",

300 pounds.

He exceeded the height limit.

- So he got a job with the highway department.

- What did people see?

- A nice guy.

I lived as an ordinary person most of my life,

even though I was living a parallel

and increasingly sick life, other life.

- He really couldn't function well at all in society.

- His love life was very lacking.

- He would see normal people, a man and a woman going out

on a date or being together.

The level of jealousy in him was just out of this world.

- He claimed that his mother was the one that

kept him from being with women his own age.

- He wanted his mother to fix him up with some girls

on campus, and the mother said, "No.

"You'll never get to date any of these girls.

You're just worthless."

[woman yelling indistinctly]

- My frustration, my inability to communicate socially,

sexually--I wasn't impotent,

but emotionally I was impotent.

I was scared to death of failing

in male-female relationships.

I knew absolutely nothing about that whole area,

even of just sitting down and talking with a young lady.

I need to be able to really communicate,

and ironically enough,

that's why I began picking people up.

- Hitchhiking culture in Santa Cruz was very active.

- People hitchhiked all over town.

But especially they hitchhiked at the university.

- He could've gone to prostitutes,

but prostitutes are street people.

They're strong. They're tough. They take care of themselves.

Kemper was too smart for that, so he went for someone

who he knew was weak and vulnerable.

[dramatic music]

Co-eds, college students.

He gained comfort by becoming familiar

with the process of picking up hitchhikers.

- He wanted to see how far he could get,

and he would advance it.

He would pick up a co-ed,

and he wanted to see whether he could let her go.

So he's testing himself, practicing.

- I'm picking up young women,

and I'm going a little bit farther each time.

It's a daring kind of a thing.

I'm driving along.

We go to a vulnerable place

where there aren't people watching,

where I could act out, and I say, "No, I can't."

And this craving, this awful, raging, eating feeling inside,

I could feel it consuming my insides,

this fantastic passion.

It was like drugs. It was like alcohol.

A little isn't enough. At first it is.

And as you adjust to that psychologically

and physically, you take more and more and more.

It's the same process.

So it finally came down to the thing of,

"Do I dare bring this gun out?"

Already realizing if that gun comes out,

something has to happen. It was going to happen.

I didn't see it then, but it was going to happen.

I was playing a dangerous game with a loaded gun

that got us all.

[tense music]

♪

- It would be displaced anger.

These are girls his mother said

and swore by, you can never have them.

But even though now, in his warped ways,

he's able to gain control over these girls. They're his.

And he decided on this one day,

this precipitating event, the argument

with mom, to pick up that gun.

[intense music]

- He thought about it for a long time,

and he just did it.

- Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa

were the first ones that were murdered.

One has flowers in her hand.

Petite little dolls and they're hitchhiking,

a couple of real experts.

I want to see how together I am,

if I can resist this temptation.

- These two victims really fit

the fantasy, the profile.

They're very, very petite, very attractive.

But he says, "I knew I was going to kill them."

♪

- Because he worked for the state,

he knew areas where to take the girls.

Luchessa was in the front seat.

Pesce was in the back.

He cuffs Pesce.

- [screams]

[screaming]

- Gained control of Luchessa.

Takes Luchessa, puts her in the trunk.

He's favoring Pesce in the back seat.

But he's going to kill her.

- When I attacked her, she didn't

at first realize what was happening.

It didn't go through.

- [screaming]

- She had very heavy coveralls on.

It knocked her right into the lid of the car,

but it didn't pierce the clothing.

It wasn't that swell a knife anyway.

I kept on just mindlessly attacking.

♪

- He said he cut her ear to ear.

He said, "It's not like in the movies.

You know, it's so tough.

It's so tough to kill somebody."

"You know, like in the movies," he says, "you cut somebody,

and then they bleed out, and it just didn't work."

Like many serial offenders--he would be the first one

to tell us this--he wasn't good at the beginning.

He didn't have control of his victims.

Now he had Luchessa in the trunk.

- I had just gone through a horrible experience

with her roommate, stabbing her,

and I was in shock because of it.

I couldn't believe that it was that way,

and I'm walking back there, bewildered.

I got to kill her. I can't let her go.

She's gonna tell on me.

Everybody's gonna get me.

She sees the blood on my hands.

"What are you doing?"

She pulled back, and she gasped.

And I think, "Whoa,

I don't want her to know what happened."

I said, "Your friend got smart with me, and I hit her.

I think I broke her nose. You better come help."

She's about to die. Why do--

Why does she have to know that?

I couldn't deal with telling her that.

- [screams]

- He said, "I was stabbing her in the back."

- [screaming]

- "And I was hitting her bone, and then as she turned around,

"I was stabbing her in the chest.

"Her breasts were there,

"but I couldn't stab her. That'd be terrible

for me to stab her in the breasts."

And it just seemed so weird

what's going through his brain.

So then he tosses them both in the trunk of his car.

- I slammed down the lid of the trunk.

She isn't dead. She's dying.

And I panicked. I thought,

I just locked the car keys in there

'cause I can't find them in my pocket.

Oh, my God, I locked them in the trunk.

I'm kicking on the trunk lid and yanking on it.

Oh, no, I don't believe this.

I stopped. I said,

"Stop and think."

I collected my wits.

Check all your pocket.

I checked all my pockets,

and there's the keys in the back pocket.

I never put them in my back pocket.

- He's driving now back to his apartment.

There are two dead bodies in his trunk.

[sirens whooping]

He was pulled over for a taillight.

He pulls him over, and he gets out of the car.

What's wrong, officer? You have a broken taillight.

And he says, "Do you want to go check in the trunk

to see what's wrong? Maybe it's a loose wire."

And the officer then

thinks that this is the most cooperative citizen

and just gives him a warning.

I said, "Ed." I said, "What would you have done--

"what would you have done if he took a look in there?

He's gonna find two bodies."

He was prepared to kill him.

[indistinct chatter]

[ominous music]

♪

- The first 24 hours, I should have been busted,

and I wasn't because people got scared

and minded their own business and looked the other way.

I thought I was pretty slick.

[keys jingle]

[door creaks]

- He takes those victims,

Pesce and Luchessa,

back to his apartment,

where he then...

eviscerates them...

and has sex with,

you know, the head and the body parts.

- I think what haunted me was that he had sex

with both the heads

and with the decapitated bodies.

You can picture that. You know, you just can,

and it sounded so brutal and so cold

and so calculated and so awful,

just so awful.

- But what people can't really understand easily is,

why do they have to go beyond the murder,

and the answer is, the killing alone

is not psychosexually sufficient.

And the idea is, someone kills someone

and then has sex with the body,

because if she was alive,

he'd be too intimidated, so if you kill her,

she's unresisting.

- He felt he would be rejected.

His sex life, it was almost nonexistent.

I don't think he felt comfortable

that he could have sex with a woman when she was alive.

By murdering them and dismembering them,

having sex with them, he was able to possess them

in a way that he felt he couldn't possess them alive.

[creepy music]

♪

- The only effect it had on him is ,"God, this was tough.

"It was tough killing them.

"I thought it would be a lot easier.

"I have to maybe modify my M.O.

a little bit in the future."

[ominous music]

♪

- My mother was a sick, angry,

hungry, and very sad woman.

I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother,

and I watched the alcohol increase.

I watched her social life drop off.

I watched her get bizarre.

She had terrible pain from her life, earlier life,

her upbringing,

a failed marriage with my father.

I'm a constant reminder of that failure.

- His mother belittled him.

Told him that nobody's gonna want him,

that he was no good.

[woman yelling indistinctly]

- She was an alcoholic.

She would come home soused at nighttime

and tell him, "You, you bum, I haven't had

sexual relations with a man in seven years."

Everything was on him.

Now, Kemper, he had what we call a murder kit.

A murder kit would include a knife, a gun, a gag, cuffs.

The next victim, Aiko Koo, was precipitated on the fact

that his mother was on his case again.

- Aiko Koo was a little girl, really.

She was just 15 years old,

and she had been going to dance class.

♪

- She misses a bus, so she's hitchhiking.

Up comes Kemper, sees her

at a distance, perfect victim, petite.

- She gets into the car with him,

and he starts driving.

She realizes she's not being taken where she wants to go.

- And he pulls a gun on her. It freaks her out.

So he soon realizes that "I can't do this with a gun,"

so he hides the gun 'cause she's freaking out,

so she calms down.

Then he has to get out of the car for some reason.

But the mistake that he made was,

is that he locked himself out of the car

with Aiko Koo in the car, with his gun.

He was such a mastermind, a manipulator.

He was able to convince her,

to talk her into opening up that door.

- She let me back in the car.

I locked myself out.

She opened the door for me.

What in the hell am I doing telling you that?

Am I a masochist? Am I looking to be tormented further?

I'm trying to show you just how

awful this got, how commanding these rages got.

- He's gonna use a scarf on her to strangle her to death.

Then he decapitates her.

- Why did you keep the heads?

Why did you cut them off, and why did you keep them?

- Something out of my childhood.

Um... [chuckles]

I could put it on an incident, I mean,

my father chopping the heads off our two pet chickens

and my mother insisting that I eat them for dinner.

Uh [laughs] you know?

We could say it was something that simple.

I don't think it was.

Now, my dad heads out back with a hatchet.

I got on my bike, and I rode over.

I tried to stop it. I remember that.

I got on a bike, rode around the block.

I was crying. I haven't talked about that for a lot of years.

I'm sure that may have implemented something.

That may have gotten something rolling along fantasy lines,

but it took a lot of years of development

along those lines to really get off.

- The day after he murdered Aiko Koo,

he had to see a psychiatrist.

- When he got out of Atascadero as a juvenile,

he had to go through a certain period of time

and then be reevaluated.

- Kemper was smart.

He knew what they were looking for to determine

whether or not someone was sane or insane,

and because of that, he did extremely well.

- Kemper is gonna say, "You guys cured me

over there at Atascadero.

You guys are phenomenal."

And so the psychiatrist did what he thought was

right and basically said, "He's fine.

He doesn't need us anymore."

- Well, what they didn't know is that Aiko Koo's head

happened to be in the trunk of his vehicle.

- He had bodies in his trunk when he was declared sane.

It really bothered me as a therapist

that two psychiatrists had declared him sane.

I was horrified.

- In the meantime, bodies were turning up

in the city of Santa Cruz that might've been linked

toward the drug industry, but we had no idea.

[somber music]

♪

- My first day at work, my very first story that I wrote

was that a head had been found in the Santa Cruz mountains.

It was a shock to everybody.

- It's like a fog settled over the county.

People were scared.

- Being a small person --I'm 5'1"--

I never saw myself as somebody

that could defend myself. I never felt safe.

- Police were besides themselves.

What the hell do they have going on here?

Surf City was now evolving into Murder City.

- We were under a lot of pressure.

People would always want to know what's happening.

Why is this happening?

We had no idea.

We didn't have any real crime scenes,

so the evidence couldn't be traced back.

- There is no apparent motive.

The victims are all unrelated,

and they're just unprovoked, senseless killings.

- There wasn't DNA evidence.

There wasn't anything like that,

so they were trying to track

where bodies were coming from,

what pattern there was in there, and it was hard

to figure out any sort of pattern.

They would just throw up their hands and say,

"We don't know what's happening."

[dramatic music]

♪

- We're still fighting. She's still belittling.

I'm like a puppet on a string.

- It's like boiling water,

and he can only take so much of this.

- I knew a week before she died I was gonna kill my mother.

[dark music]

♪

- The minute he'd get upset with something,

his immediate response was to kill.

- And once he did it once, it was so stimulating

and so arousing that the urge

or the compulsion to do it again just took over.

- But rather than strike out at mom at this point,

he's going on the hunt.

He's a lion on the Serengeti plain

looking for that weak, vulnerable person.

- I was picking up some very lovely young women.

You know what we were talking about as we're driving around?

Almost as often as not,

this guy that's going around doing this stuff,

and the second they started talking that,

they didn't realize it, but they were getting a free ride.

I couldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole, I swear.

But they'd be telling me all about this guy,

and they're comparing notes,

speculating on what he looks like,

how he carries himself, why he's doing this stuff,

telling me about it.

- So how come they get in a car

with somebody at that time?

- She judged me not to be that guy.

I didn't look like him.

- He was getting better and better.

- And one of the things that he told me was,

eventually, when he picked somebody up,

once they got in and sat down

and they closed the passenger door,

he would reach across that passenger, open up the door,

and close it, pretending to make sure

that the door was closed, but in actuality

he was dropping a ChapStick in the track,

so that you could not open the door from the inside.

And he figured once they got in the car,

they belonged to him.

- When he decapitated her,

he then went outside with the head

and placed this victim's head in the ground,

facing up at mom's window. Why'd you do that?

And he laughs, and he says,

"Because Mom always wanted people to look up to her.

That's why I did it."

He was boasting about the crime.

- Meanwhile, why his mother didn't know that

there had been digging going on in the back yard, I don't know.

Neighbors could've found out. It was a small backyard.

There was a fence around it,

but, you know, it was very visible

from the other houses. I'm just trying to think

what time of day he must've buried them.

- It was getting easier to do. I was getting better at it.

I was getting less detectible.

I started flaunting that invisibility.

Severing a human head at night

in front of my mother's residence with her at home,

my neighbors at home upstairs,

their picture window open, the curtains open.

11:00 at night, the lights are on.

All they have to do is walk by, look out, and I've had it.

To be walking up the stairs with a camera bag

that belonged to a young woman

that had her severed head in it,

walking up to my apartment, past a happy young couple

coming down the stairs

who nodded and smiled at me

as they went by. "Good evening."

And they're going out on a date,

where I'd love to be going,

and I'm aware of both of these realities,

and the distance between those is so dramatic,

so amazing, so violent that it really--

I could feel the wheels squeaking inside.

Some people go crazy at that point.

I felt it. It was one hell of a tweak,

and I imagine at that point some people break,

but I didn't literally go insane.

I didn't get lost.

- Remember, Edmund Kemper wanted to be a policeman,

but there was no way he was gonna be a policeman,

but he did like to hang out with the policemen

at the Jury Room on Ocean Street.

[mellow rock music]

And he knew them. He drank with them.

- Sleazy little bar

across from the courthouse in Santa Cruz.

A lot of cops would go there in those days

[pool cue strikes] and have a drink.

[indistinct chatter]

He loved to hang out there.

He was a real groupie.

- It's what they call a wannabe.

- They'd buy me a beer. I'd buy them a beer.

Casual relationships. But that was--I was poking

around a little bit, trying to find some things out.

I knew they wouldn't be privy to hot information,

but there were some things that were bothering me.

Like, were there any speculations

on how they were dying.

- Did the cops like you?

- I could say, a friendly nuisance.

I got in the way, and it was deliberate.

Friendly nuisances are dismissed.

- He was just trying to gain whatever information he can.

If he overheard somebody say, "Well,

this guy did this, and he shouldn't have

done it that way. He should've done it this way.

- The dynamics of this type of behavior are very important

to make him feel unique,

to make him feel

ahead of everybody else, of getting away with it.

He's kind of the super killer,

not just an ordinary killer,

that he can put it over on them.

- High intelligence like that

helps Kemper in avoiding detection.

- How did you get the knowledge

to outsmart the police?

- Watching television, believe it or not.

Joseph Wambaugh, "Police Story."

I got some tremendous insights into not just the gimmicks,

the actual things, the tidbits

that you would pick up from their procedures

but the mechanics behind that, the logic behind it

was, I would not allow myself to walk into

even a potential trap of behavior.

And one of those was talking about those crimes too much

to people, initiating conversations about that.

- He likes to claim that he's smarter than everybody else.

He may be.

- Some police department, now, they actually

came to your house to pick up a handgun.

- Sheriff's representatives.

One of the detectives was

upset because he heard I had a .44 magnum pistol

and was a convicted mental patient and killer.

- I got a notification that a man by the name

of Edmund Emil Kemper III had purchased a handgun.

In looking at Mr. Kemper's record,

he had been convicted of murdering his grandparents

a few years earlier, so there was some question as to

whether or not he should be allowed to own that gun,

so when you look at the dealer's record of sale,

it gives his physical description.

- They joked about it at the sheriff's department.

This guy's 6'9" or 6'10".

I'm gonna need some help getting the gun away.

- So being the junior detective,

I was the one that was tasked with

going out and confiscating this weapon.

So we went out to Kemper's residence.

- They came to take the gun away,

he and his sergeant detective.

They were staking out the wrong house.

It was across the street, and I'm playing around

with the car, standing next to the gun

in the trunk.

- So I told Don, I says, "Hang on a second.

Let's go talk to this guy and see if he knows Kemper."

So I walk over, and by then the gentleman in the car

was lying across the seat

like he's working up under his dashboard,

like, wires or something like that.

So I said, "Excuse me, can I talk to you?"

The guy says, "Sure." So he gets out of the car,

and he gets out of the car, and he gets out of the car.

He's 6'9", 285 pounds.

I told Don. I said,

"I think we found the right guy."

- I knew a week before she died I was gonna murder my mother.

- He drags her over into the kitchen.

- I cut off her head, and I humiliated her corpse.

- Having sex with his mother's head,

I don't know what it says psychologically.

- Six young women dead because of the way she raises her son,

and what's her closing words?

"I suppose you want to sit up all night and talk."

God, I wish I had.

[dark music]

♪

- A week ago today, four more bodies were discovered

in a connected series of murders.

- Neither the mayor nor police are making any predictions

as to when or how an arrest will be made.

- Women hitchhikers were in danger.

Not just were body parts flowing in,

but people were missing, and nobody was understanding.

- They come over and asked me about,

"Excuse me, sir, uh,

do you know who lives in this house across the street here?"

And they were looking for me and didn't even know that--

see what I mean? Bad news.

They said, "Are you Ed Kemper?" Yes. And it goes on.

- I explained to him why we were there,

what our position is, that we needed

to confiscate this handgun.

So he said, "Sure, no problem." He was very cooperative.

- And, uh, I needed to find out what they were looking for,

the murder weapon, the .22 automatic

or the .44 magnum, and I don't want to advertise

that I've got a whole bunch of guns.

Uh...

So I made a comment to divine between the two,

and I said, "Yes, quite a little gun, isn't it?"

And he retorted, "A .44 magnum? I hope so."

And I said, "Phew, okay," because that loaded .22

was under the front seat and would guarantee me

an arrest right on the spot,

and the .44 was in the trunk.

[tense music]

And he's thinking, "Boy, this is a really nice

and helpful guy here."

- We go to the trunk of his car.

Instinctively, my partner and I

went to each side of the car.

And so as soon as he popped open the trunk,

we told him just to step back and we would take it.

So we opened up the trunk,

and there was--it's, like, a blanket,

and you unroll the blanket,

and there was this western holster

with this huge .44 magnum revolver in there,

so we took it.

- You had some other stuff in the house too, yeah?

- Yeah. I had the personal effects

and identification of the last two co-eds

that had been murdered about two months before

right next to the guns in the closet, in a box.

- Could he have seen it? - No.

But when he arrested me for having all those guns

and went through the rest of the closet looking to see

if there were any pistols or anything else,

he wouldn't have--couldn't have helped notice

a purse, a book bag,

and co-ed I.D. inside of those

belonging to their two latest murder victims.

- He told me later that had Don and I

not separated to each side of the car,

that he was contemplating getting the gun out

and killing both of us.

In the meantime, all of these other homicides

are occurring, and we had no clue.

He was a very smart guy.

[ominous music]

♪

- We're still fighting. She's still belittling me,

like a puppet on a string. She knows all my buttons,

and I dance like a puppet with that pain,

and it even got physical

to where I had physically grabbed her

and thrown her onto her bed,

trying to emphasize the point that she's--

I was threatening to kill her.

- Ed Kemper's mother was an administrative assistant

at UC Santa Cruz.

- She was well liked.

She was integrated into the campus.

She clearly was part of that

Santa Cruz community at the time.

- You were involved in the campus

because your mother worked there.

- Yes.

I was also involved in killing co-eds

because my mother was associated

with college work, college co-eds,

women,

and had had a very strong and violently

outspoken position on men for much of my upbringing.

- The university had said only to accept rides

from people with UC stickers. Well, his mom worked at UC,

and he was in a car that had a UC sticker.

- So he looked safe,

and that's how he was so successful.

- You could see the pattern.

- After a huge fight with his mother

where they had screamed at each other for hours...

he would go out and kill.

- The next victims, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu

were UC Santa Cruz students

who just were too trusting and got in the car.

- Roz Thorpe was a free spirit.

She was bright and lively.

When she'd get a new record, she'd run into my office

and say, "Got to hear this, got to hear this."

When Roz went missing, they knocked on my door

and said did I know where Roz Thorpe was.

I knew that they were beginning to worry

about the existence of this killer.

[intense music]

And I immediately, um...

worried.

- Edmund Kemper by this time was very

experienced at what he was doing.

- I thought it was fascinating, you know, with him

was, how do you make them feel comfortable?

What I do, I pull up and look at them

and I wanted myself kinda almost look like

a little businessman but having a place to go,

so I'd look at my watch.

By looking at my watch, it tells them

that I have an appointment. I have someplace

to go to, and that kind of, I believe,

relieved any kind of stress or hesitation

that they had getting into the car.

- He says that she's moving around,

trying to cover herself.

She's holding her hands up,

so she gets shot through the hand.

- He's got both victims in the car.

He has a dead girl in the front

and a girl that is not dead but moaning in the back.

[intense, dark music]

He said the two policemen, they were checking

all of the cars going through.

- When I drove up to the two officers

and stopped, I mean, they got very industrious

about looking at me,

and I used that opportunity to glare at them

with that fascist look, like, "Oh, you fascist pigs.

You'd like to shoot me, wouldn't you?"

I had sort of a bored, annoyed,

tired, end of the day,

"I don't need you guys right now" look

and they backed off at that point.

- He gets away with it.

♪

[tense music]

♪

- He went into detail in saying

how he dismembered them

and how one of them had more fat on her body

than the rest of them did, and he said he learned

about cutting through fat of a human body,

and it just turned my stomach.

- When they found her body parts, uh,

it was shocking.

The students kept coming into my office to talk about it.

We knew that something needed to be done to

address the students and engage them

in expressing their feelings

and dealing with grief and mourning,

so they decided to hold this big event,

and about 1,000 students and faculty showed up.

- There was a memorial service for two of the victims.

- Yes.

- Were you tempted to go? - Yes.

I had seen one too many episodes

of one too many crime shows

where that is one of the available resources for clues,

tracking down the attenders. Take--one man

taking pictures of the people there

to eliminate as potential suspects.

- He's forensically aware,

he has a good knowledge base of criminal investigation,

and he's trying his best to elude law enforcement.

[ominous music]

♪

- She says, "You're nothing, you'll never amount

to anything, and you're just like your father."

It's like boiling water,

and he can only take so much of this,

and it's going to, you know, overflow, and that was it.

It was springtime. It was April.

And for two months I hadn't killed, and I said,

"It's not going to happen to any more girls.

It's got to stay between me and my mother."

♪

I said, "She's got to die, or more girls are gonna die,"

and that's when I decided I'm going to murder my mother.

I knew a week before she died I was gonna kill her.

And she went out to a party. She got soused.

She came home, went to sleep. I was woken up by that.

I got--came out. I walked up to her bed.

She's laying there, reading a paperback.

- She says, in a real sarcastic way,

"Oh, you're probably gonna want to talk now, huh?

You're gonna want to talk."

- Sh--. I looked at her. I said, "No."

I said, "Good night."

[crying]

And I knew I was gonna kill her.

[dark, tense music]

♪

- He said that he had gone into her room

early in the morning, like, 4:00, 5:00 in the morning.

- He killed her when she was sound asleep.

He beat her to death with a claw hammer.

- Sadism is the infliction of pain on someone else,

but more basic than inflicting pain

is the sadist having total control

and domination over someone else,

where inflicting pain is one way the sadist assures himself

that he is in fact in control of her life and death.

Killing his mother was very, very different,

up close and personal.

- He's not finished yet. He then takes the mother

and drags her over into the kitchen.

- I cut off her head, and I humiliated her corpse.

- He put it on the mantel. He threw darts at it.

- And he spends over an hour

chewing her out and yelling at her.

- It hurts.

'Cause I'm not a lizard. I'm not from under a rock.

I came out of her vagina.

I came out of my mother,

and in a rage, I went right back in.

- He hated her. He wanted to defile her

in any possible way that he could, and he did it.

- He does penetrate her head.

- Having sex with his mother's head,

I don't know what it says psychologically

because it's unstudied. All we can do is speculate,

and I think the behavior speaks for itself.

- It's not done.

He decided to cut out her tongue

and rip out her larynx 'cause she's such a nag.

He then throws it down the garbage disposal.

- He describes throwing the larynx

into the garbage disposal, popping out.

Him catching it, throwing back it

in the garbage disposal, popping out again.

- And he says, "Even now. Even now, you bitch.

"Even now, after this, you're still nagging me.

I hate you. You're still, you know, nagging me."

- She just ridiculed him his whole life,

and symbolically he just wanted to take her voice box out

and throw it in the garbage where he thought it belonged.

- Clearly he was trying to kill his mother's voice,

even though she was dead.

- So there, you know.

Six young women dead because of the way she raises her son

and the way her son is raised,

the way he grows up, and what's her closing words?

"I suppose you want to sit up all night and talk."

God, I wish I had.

I was suicidal, very disturbed,

grasping out at someone 'cause I was tired

of people walking away from me.

- We studied him. We know all about him.

We know your motivation. We know what makes you tick.

Now we can profile other serial offenders.

[ominous music]

♪

- I still loved my mother,

and it's hard for somebody to comprehend

that you murdered your mother through love.

It isn't a rational process. It's a very painful process.

It isn't rational, and I've got to still live with that.

- He decided that he needed a reason

that nobody would be looking for his mother,

so he chose her best friend,

and he said that if he were to dispose of her best friend,

then people would not be inquiring as to where they are

because they have a tendency to go away for the weekend,

so he had called Mrs. Hallett.

- He invited her to dinner, said he was gonna take

both women out to dinner.

- So she thought that was just fine,

so she went over to the house that night.

♪

- She comes over.

Punches her once in the abdomen.

- [groans]

And then he demonstrates, 'cause he's so big,

how he's able to get neck in the crook of the arm.

- [strained yelling]

And just to put on pressure

and where he hears cracking in her neck.

[bones cracking]

- He told me that as he was choking Mrs. Hallett,

he actually had an orgasm.

- He spends the night with her in bed

and attempts sex acts with the mother's friend.

The mother is still over in another part of the bedroom.

[engine starts]

- Kemper had freaked out,

had loaded an arsenal of guns into his car,

and then he got the hell out of town.

[engine sputtering]

- He was hoping for his gigantic man face

to be all over the news,

and he's driving for three days.

He covers 1,500 miles, popping NoDoz, NoDoz.

Turning on the radio, hoping to hear

there's this serial killer.

- But what happened is, nobody came after him.

- He got as far as Pueblo, Colorado.

[suspenseful music]

♪

- One morning, at about 5:00 in the morning,

Edmund Kemper calls the Santa Cruz Police Department.

- And he talks to the dispatcher

and says, "You know, I'm the guy that you're looking for,"

and the dispatcher hangs up on him.

- The person on the other end of the line

didn't believe him and didn't

want to wake somebody up.

- So he calls back.

- Kemper tells them that he killed his mother.

He is the Co-ed Killer.

He was the one responsible for these crimes.

- He told the lieutenant to get a hold of me

because I knew exactly where he lived.

We had no idea. Totally amazing.

- He thought they were on to him.

The fact is, they had no idea who it was.

It was a shock to everybody.

- They were keeping him on the phone

[sirens wailing]

until the police came

and then put him under arrest.

- Why did you wind up giving yourself up?

- Once my mother was dead, there was almost

a cathartic process at that point.

I got physically ill right then

when she died, when I murdered her,

and once she was dead, there was no way I could back out.

I had backed down from giving up a thousand times.

- He turned himself in right after he killed his mother

because he then solved his problem.

He didn't have to kill symbolically anymore.

He killed his mother.

[dark rock music]

- The root of his problems goes back to mom.

Killing was a displacement of anger.

Once she's out, out of the picture, it's over.

The Santa Cruz police come out and take him back.

- Kemper is being brought back here to Santa Cruz

from Pueblo, Colorado, by car,

a rather unusual method of transportation in such cases,

a method chosen for security purposes, authorities say.

- I spent a lot of time with Ed.

I actually sat in the back seat

with him for 3 1/2 days.

And he never stopped talking.

It got to the point where I would think to myself,

"God, will you just shut up?

You know, it's getting to be too much."

[tense music]

If we had to make a stop to get some gas,

use the restroom or whatever...

He was wearing this leather jacket

with all of the frills hanging off them.

He had his hands chained to him,

and he would get out of the car and just kind of

strut around, so everybody could see him,

'cause everywhere we went, it drew a crowd.

He loved the notoriety.

When we finally got back to Santa Cruz...

he wanted to know if there was a lot of press

in front of the building, which there was,

obviously, but we had gone around the back

and took him upstairs and booked him.

- The interesting thing about his whole booking process is,

there's a sheet, and it has all of his information,

what he's charged with and everything.

And when it gets down to the section of who to notify

in case of emergency, he turned to me, and he says,

"I don't have anybody left. Can I put you down?"

So that's why my name is on his booking sheet.

- Kemper was arraigned this afternoon

on charges of killing six young women,

his mother, and a friend of hers.

- By the time he got to Santa Cruz,

the newspapers were full of some of the details.

I--I was horrified.

This sleepy little town along the coastline just

never really recovered.

[solemn music]

♪

- I'll tell you a little bit about my interaction

with Eddie, with Ed Kemper.

One day I had a really stiff neck.

I couldn't move my head hardly at all.

He said, "I know a lot about anatomy.

I can make your neck feel better."

So I went around,

and he worked on my neck for maybe, I don't know,

five minutes, and, you know, it worked.

Thinking about it, here's this huge man

who could've probably killed me with one hand,

and I never, ever felt unsafe in his presence.

I felt that if somebody had've attacked me,

he would've come to my aid.

I spent a lot of time with him.

We were friendly.

- The ability of Ed Kemper to be able to

be very charming was really remarkable.

That's how clever or manipulative he is.

- He was a model prisoner, and he was a nice guy.

He wasn't crazy. He wasn't, uh,

he wasn't particularly violent.

He would joke with the jailers. The jailers liked him.

- He was this big, overgrown kid

that was very friendly, very cooperative,

loved the police...

and would tell you anything you wanted to know.

[suspenseful music]

[birds chirping]

♪

- He took us to these various places

throughout the mountains in Santa Cruz County.

- Where he showed them all the places

he dropped off body parts.

- We were missing some body parts,

and those were important for the families,

so what we would do is, we would drive him

to those locations, and he would

point it out to us

just very matter-of-factly.

There's so-and-so. There's so-and-so.

One of his victims, he had actually skinned the skull

and put it underground.

- The day they dug up Cindy Schall's head

was a day I'll never forget.

The thing I remember about it is them lifting this

rotted head up out of the ground

and the reality of it all of a sudden

became all too true, but what the worst part was,

was the smell.

The smell just stuck with me.

♪

[solemn music]

♪

- And so when he finally had to go to trial,

his defense will be the insanity defense.

- When a person admits to everything they've done

to everybody who'll listen,

you know, the only possible defense

we had was not guilty by reason of insanity.

- What a lawyer hopes for in a case like Kemper

is that the jury will look at this and say,

"This is so ridiculous. This is just so bizarre.

He has to be completely out of his mind."

It has to be to such an extent

that you didn't know the nature and quality

of your acts, you didn't know what you were doing.

Well, that wouldn't apply in Kemper's case.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

- He felt the need to take the stand

to show everyone how crazy he really was.

He went through all the graphics

of how he did the killings.

- And when he was testifying...

you found yourself

wrapped up in his words.

He wanted you to feel sorry for him,

and he was describing what he had done to these young girls.

I looked over my shoulder, and I saw the father

of one of the victims,

and the look on his face

was so affecting

that I started crying in court,

and I couldn't stop crying.

He was convicted and sentenced to life.

[dark music]

♪

- The things I learned from Kemper

we apply to other cases.

He taught us how we should link these cases together,

how to classify different crimes,

and how to profile for a serial killer.

They bring him in, and we stand up to greet him,

and my goodness, the guy is--he's mammoth.

He just towers over us.

Before I even start talking to him, I told him,

"You're a big case back at the FBI academy.

"Everyone wants to learn from you.

We want to take your knowledge and apply it to ongoing cases."

So I made him feel like he is my professor.

Teach me.

- Bob Ressler and John Douglas were top drawer, absolutely.

They were very dedicated.

They were excellent in terms of getting information.

They were expert interviewers.

- I want to know why, Ed. I want to know what

transformed you into participating and precipitating

these particular crimes.

- Ed Kemper was very helpful because he was so articulate,

and he really gave important information

that we were able to use for the basis for profiling.

- He's an insightful guy. He knows the criminal mind,

obviously, on some level

because he knows himself awfully well.

- These guys, they go off in a trance like that,

and then they're back there, and they start

providing specifics that--

I mean, I can't remember what things I did yesterday,

and they're remembering all these specifics of the crimes

and the colors of the victim's clothing and their hair

and maybe a pendant they were wearing,

so that was one of the things that happened

during the interview with Kemper.

That's the whole thing when you do a profiling and analysis.

You can't think like me. I got to think like them.

- You want to get the information,

so that maybe you can prevent

somebody from getting hurt in the future.

- After the first interviews,

we realized that if we're going to have

a good mythological handle on this,

we had to have a survey questionnaire

that they all ask the same questions

to other killers.

We came up with a 57-page color-coded survey,

and we had 36 killers in the study.

- And we came up with very, very good predictors.

It's a thing known as the homicidal triangle.

That is bed-wetting

into the teens,

fire setting,

but the big one

is animal cruelty.

I've talked to SPCAs about that,

and now the FBI even has that today.

Animal cruelty, they track that,

where we never tracked that before,

because we know that's a predictor of future violence.

- The FBI back in the late 1970s,

including John Douglas and Robert Ressler,

made major contributions

in applying the knowledge base of sexual murder,

particularly to investigations.

- We came up with the term serial murderer.

A serial murderer is three or more people

with a cooling off period

in between each of the killings.

A mass murderer is someone who kills

four or more people in one event.

A spree murderer,

it's a form of a serial killer,

but there is no cooling off period.

- Today you can't find a person in the United States

who doesn't know what a serial killer is.

You hear it all the time, and you really have to credit

John Douglas and Ressler for popularizing that

and making it part of the consciousness

in the culture of the United States.

- Then we came up with descriptions

regarding the different types of offenders

when we classify a case,

and we came up with major categories

of criminal enterprise, group cause,

sexual homicide, and personal cause.

When we look at a case, we try to put them

in one of these four categories.

Then as far as describing the crime scenes,

when we look at a case like Kemper,

Kemper, it's obvious it's very, very organized.

There's planning involved.

- The profiling cases would come in,

and they would say, "Is this like Kemper?"

They would be able to actually--is he organized?

Does he plan? Is there something new or different?

So they bounced off of these new cases,

unsolved cases, and were able to say,

"Why don't you look for a suspect

that has A, B, C, D, these factors."

- Look, for example, at the case of Ted Bundy.

The connection between somebody like Kemper and Ted Bundy

is that the reason they're killing is sexual.

It's an abnormal sexual arousal pattern.

- I found it with Kemper, and I found it with the likes

of Dennis Rader, the BTK Strangler,

Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz,

the Son of Sam. There was no empathy.

There was never any remorse for the crimes at all.

The only time we touched on the mother.

It seemed to be always a mother thing

with these guys, always a mother thing.

- Your grandmother and her daughter-in-law, your mother,

were two women very important in your life,

and you killed them both.

Could you say what they were like

that led them to the same fate?

- The same thing that kept them from ever being friends.

They were both aggressive,

um,

matriarchal women.

They'd been the daughters

of strong, matriarchal women.

- They love the mother. They want the mother's love.

But at the same time, you know, they hate the mother.

They hate her, so then when you get them to talk,

you get them to talk, and you reach that point

about mothers,

and you got them back at that crime.

That's when you'll see them, you know, breaking down.

Some of the most hardened criminals

I've talked to, it happened to them.

Gary Heidnik in Philadelphia, who kept women in a pit

and I interviewed him with another agent,

and when I got to the mother, you know,

he just ripped off the mic and just, you know--you know,

he just broke down. He loved the mother,

but he hated her at the same time

and projected his problems on his mother, like Kemper.

- There's no question that he hated his mother,

but that's not why he went out killing women.

Thousands of people have horrible relationships

with their mothers.

Thousands and thousands of people

grow up in horrific conditions where one parent or another

not only belittles or humiliates the person

but abuses the person and burns the person,

but they're not going around killing people

because they're symbolically killing their mother.

I just don't believe that.

If Kemper explains why he did what he did,

you should take it at face value.

Murderers, in general, lie all the time.

It was his relationship with his mother that did this.

He was abused by this person. It may just not be true.

[ominous music]

- Six young women dead.

There's a lot that leads into that happening,

but that is what happened.

They represented not what my mother was

but what she liked, what she coveted,

what was important to her, and I was destroying it.

- People think he's a manipulator

and a psychopath.

That's true.

As far as, like, the mother part,

where they don't believe that, I disagree with them.

The mother had a major impact.

The reason he decided now was the time

to kill them because of the mother.

I don't forgive Kemper, but mom is the influence.

If mom wasn't there,

he wouldn't have been a serial killer.

- I was suicidal,

uh, very disturbed, grasping out at someone.

I had abducted them, and I wasn't going to

let them out of the car because I was tired

of people walking away from me.

- Ed Kemper's murder of his mother

is done at the end of his killing career.

It's important to look at what he does with his victims,

the co-ed victims.

- And where it might not be realistic

to someone who has decided I'm just incarnate evil,

there's not much else I can say other than I did surrender.

I did make it stop.

I didn't kill my mother in a rage.

I didn't attack her out of some argument.

I went out of my way to find her and to kill her,

to make sure that whatever cover I had was blown.

There was no way I could explain my way out of it.

I started pursuing ways out of what I was doing

because it was getting totally out of hand.

- He said, "I had schoolteachers

"and counselors talking to me, but he never

"really talked to me about my feelings

"and what was going through my mind.

Had they done that," he said,

"I would've talked to them about this."

If a counselor talked to him, he may

or she may get something out of him.

- If you'd never given in to the impulse to murder--

- Where might I be?

If my parole had been successful...

Um,

I believe I'd be married and have children.

I'd be heading toward my first grandchildren.

- This story just never goes away,

and people are fascinated by it,

how horrid it all was.

- When I get back to the motel after doing his interview,

I had problems. I had problems

that would then begin to carry over

where I had flashbacks of those crime scenes.

- [screaming] [knife piercing]

- I've been involved in I couldn't tell you

how many investigations where people have died,

and this, to me, has no sense whatsoever.

I still have issues that come up occasionally.

[dark music]

- [choking, gasping]

- It really, really bothers me. It does have an effect on me.

- If I could change, um,

things in my life,

I would definitely not have

participated in these mass murders.

I had a wife and two little kids.

I worked 13 months without a day off.

Within five years after these trials were completed,

the district attorney was divorced.

I was divorced.

Several of the police officers

involved were divorced.

It took a horrible toll

on us individually

and on our families.

You know, it was difficult, a difficult time,

and it's always a part of you.

- This was such a hideous evil

that Kemper perpetrated on these people.

The lesson of Edmund Kemper is, the human animal

is capable of just about everything,

and we can't be surprised by what happens.

I'm sorry it happened. It was horrible what happened.

I think of the lives that were not lived

that--who knows what these victims would've turned into,

and I think that's the tragedy of it all.

- If there's somebody out there that is watching this

and hasn't done that, hasn't killed people

and wants to and rages inside and struggles for that feeling

or is so sure they have it under control,

they need to talk to somebody about it.

Trust somebody enough to sit down

and talk about something that isn't a crime.

Thinking that way isn't a crime.

Doing it isn't just a crime.

It's a horrible thing that doesn't know when to quit.

It can't be stopped easily.

- For more information, go to Oxygen.com.