Edmund Kemper

When Kemper's grandfather, Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. (b. 1892), returned from grocery shopping, Kemper went outside and fatally shot him in the driveway next to his car.

He was unsure of what to do next, so he phoned his mother, who told him to contact the local police.

He was the middle child of three children and only son born to Clarnell Elizabeth Kemper (née Stage, 1921–1973) and Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. (1919–1985).

Edmund Jr. was a World War II veteran who, after the war, tested nuclear weapons at the Pacific Proving Grounds before returning to California, where he worked as an electrician.

Clarnell often complained about her husband's "menial" electrician job.

Edmund Jr. later stated that "suicide missions in wartime and the atomic bomb testings were nothing compared to living with [Clarnell]" and that she affected him "more than three hundred and ninety-six days and nights of fighting on the front did."

Weighing 13 lb as a newborn, Kemper was a head taller than his peers by the age of four.

Early on, he exhibited antisocial behavior such as cruelty to animals; at the age of 10, he buried a pet cat alive, then dug it up, decapitated it, and mounted its head on a spike.

Kemper later stated that he derived pleasure from successfully lying to his family about killing the cat.

In his youth, Kemper performed rites with his younger sister's dolls that culminated in his removing their heads and hands; on one occasion, when his elder sister, Susan Hughey Kemper (1943–2014), teased him and asked why he did not try to kiss his teacher, he replied, "If I kiss her, I'd have to kill her first."

Kemper recalled that as a young boy, he would sneak out of his house armed with his father's bayonet and go to his second-grade teacher's house to watch her through the windows.

Kemper also stated in interviews in his later life that some of his favorite games to play as a child were "Gas Chamber" and "Electric Chair", in which he asked his younger sister to tie him up and flip an imaginary switch; he would then tumble over and writhe on the floor, pretending that he was being executed by gas inhalation or electric shock.

Kemper also had near-death experiences as a child.

Once, his elder sister tried to push him in front of a train.

Another time, she pushed him into the deep end of a swimming pool, where Kemper almost drowned.

Edmund Emil Kemper III (born December 18, 1948) is an American serial killer convicted of murdering seven women and one girl, between May 1972 to April 1973.

Years earlier, at the age of 15, Kemper had murdered his paternal grandparents.

Kemper was nicknamed the Co-ed Killer, as most of his non-familial victims were female college students hitchhiking in the vicinity of Santa Cruz County, California.

Most of his murders included necrophilia, decapitation, and dismemberment.

Edmund Emil Kemper III was born in Burbank, California, on December 18, 1948.

At the age of 13, he killed another family cat when he perceived it to be favoring his younger sister, Allyn Lee Kemper (b. 1951), over him; he kept pieces of it in his closet until his mother found them.

Kemper was known to harbor dark fantasies and have a morbid imagination.

Kemper had a close relationship with his father, and was notably devastated when his parents separated in 1957 and divorced in 1961.

He was sent to live with his mother Clarnell in Helena, Montana.

Kemper had a severely dysfunctional relationship with his mother, a neurotic, domineering alcoholic who frequently belittled, humiliated, and abused him.

Clarnell often made her son sleep in a locked basement because she feared that he would harm his sisters, regularly mocked him for his large size — he stood 6 ft by the age of 15 — and derided him as "a real weirdo" in a phone conversation to Kemper's father, unaware that her son had been eavesdropping.

She also refused to show Kemper affection out of fear that she would "turn him gay" and told the young Kemper that he reminded her of his father and that no woman would ever love him.

Kemper later described her as a "sick, angry woman," and it has been postulated that she had borderline personality disorder.

At the age of 14, Kemper ran away from home in an attempt to reconcile with his father in Van Nuys, California.

Once there, Kemper learned that his father had remarried and now had a stepson.

Kemper stayed with his father for a short while until the elder Kemper sent him to live with his paternal grandparents, who lived on a ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada on Road 224, about two miles west of the town of North Fork.

Kemper hated living in North Fork; he described his grandfather as "senile" and said that his grandmother "was constantly emasculating me and my grandfather."

On August 27, 1964, at the age of 15, Kemper was sitting at the kitchen table with his grandmother Maude Matilda (Hughey) Kemper (b. 1897) when they had an argument.

Enraged, Kemper stormed off and retrieved a rifle that his grandfather had given him for hunting.

He then re-entered the kitchen and fatally shot her in the head before firing twice more into her back.

His grandmother's last words reportedly were, "Oh, you'd better not be shooting the birds again."

Some accounts mention that she also suffered multiple post-mortem stab wounds with a kitchen knife.

Found sane and guilty at his trial in 1973, Kemper requested the death penalty for his crimes.

Capital punishment was suspended in California at the time, and he instead received eight concurrent life sentences.

Since then, he has been incarcerated in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.