Rosewood - Edmund Kemper: The True Story of The Co-ed Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers

Edmund Kemper one of the most notorious and deranged of all American serial killers thanks to his union of grisly murder and necrophilia with a hint of cannibalism thrown in always speaks matter-of-factly in interviews about his murder spree, which left six pretty California co-eds, his mother, his paternal grandparents and his mothers best friend dead.

He describes in sordid detail his first murder, committed because he said he wanted to see what it would feel like to kill Grandma, the sound his knife made when he opened it to stab his first hitchhiking coed and the week he spent fantasizing and planning his mothers untimely but some might say deserved demise.

Ultimately, Kemper puts much of the blame on his overwhelming, uncontrollable urge to kill on his mother, a cruel woman who is believed to have suffered from borderline personality disorder, which showed itself most prominently with her son. In her middle child and only boy, she saw the image of his father, Edmund Emil Kemper, Jr., and viewed him as little more than unwanted evidence of one of her three marriages gone wrong.

Clarnell Strandberg Kemper, who worked as an administrative assistant at the University of California at Santa Cruz, often locked young Kemper in the basement for fear he might molest his two sisters, and she constantly berated him, especially as he grew into an awkward, oversized adolescent. She regularly told him he wasnt good enough to land one of the pretty co-eds at the school where she worked, and Kemper became more and more resentful.

At first he took out his rage on the girls his mother said he could never have, using them as substitutes in an attempt to quell his rage. Eventually, though, after years of ridicule, Kemper bludgeoned his mother to death with a claw hammer, then turned her head into a three-dimensional dart board, but only after he had satisfied his sexual urges using the mouth of his mothers severed head.

Kemper would end up killing 10 victims, but police are most troubled by the six pretty co-eds that Kemper picked up while they were hitchhiking, then dismembered and tossed in various places in and around Santa Cruz, including in his mothers backyard.

All the while, he was making friends with those same policemen who were working the case of the killer who would become known as the Co-Ed Butcher, talking about new evidence with them at the lawmens favorite bar. It was a calculated act that not only kept Kemper abreast of any progress in the case, but also threw police off his trail.

Eventually, the twisted serial killers appetite for murder became intertwined with his sexual desires, and it made him one of the most deviant serial killers of all time. He saved sick mementoes from his kills, most often his victims heads, which he buried in his mothers yard so they would be close to him.

He also reportedly used the flesh of at least two of his victims as the main ingredient in his macaroni casseroles.

His is a story of deranged depravity, and one that continues to haunt the cops who sat next to Kemper, throwing back a few cold ones with a man who would become the inspiration for the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.