Ed Kemper's mom thought her son was "a real weirdo." He had a near-genius IQ hidden within his lanky body and twisted mind. As a child he liked playing execution and once told his sister that if he were to love someone they would first have to be dead. As a teenager mom forced Ed to live in the basement so he wouldn't scare his sisters.
When he was fourteen he killed his grandparents to get back at his mother during her second honeymoon. He said he wanted to see how it felt to kill grandma. Consequently he was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane. There Eddie grew into a strapping six-foot-nine-inch hate machine.
In the early seventies Ed was released from the hospital and went to live with his overbearing mother. Mom had moved to Santa Cruz where she was working in the state college. In 1972, after a particular vicious argument with mom, Ed left the house knowing he was going to kill someone. That night, a hapless female hitchhiker was the first to fall prey to Ed's Oedipal mania.
Over the ensuing years, with the help of his campus pass obtained through his mother, Ed became known as the "Coed Killer" . He enjoyed decapitating his victims and having sex with their headless corpses. Sometimes he buried the heads of his victims outside his house facing his mother's bedroom window because she always wanted people "to look up to her." He took Polaroid's of his accomplishments and occasionally had one of his girls for dinner. Later he confessed that his acts of cannibalism were because, "I wanted them to be a part of me- and now they are." Once he visited his court-appointed psychiatrist with a head in the trunk of his car. Curiously, the psychiatrist thought he was doing great and he was really well adjusted.
At the time Ed was killing there were two other maniacs, John Lindley Frazier and Herbert Mullin, operating in proximity. Police were baffled by the amount of bodies appearing around their peaceful and bucolic surfer community. Kemper, who always wanted to be a cop, was fascinated with the investigation of his and the other crimes. He became friendly with the investigating officers and frequented their favorite haunts to grill them for grisly details.
Like Ed Gein, Kemper liked killing women who reminded him of his mother. On Easter Sunday 1973 he went after the root of his problem. Ed, the consumate mother's boy, beat her head in, then decapitated her and threw her vocal chords down the garbage disposal. When he turned it on, they chords came flying back out. Kemper later told police, "even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn't get her to shut up!" Then he decided to use her head as a dart board. Not satisfied, he called mom's best friend, invited her over and killed her too. After, he drove to Colorado where he called his cop friends and confessed. At first they thought he was kidding. What they found at his mom's house made them change their mind. Ed now resides in the Vacaville Prison where he is their model serial killer prisoner with a heart of gold.