Bodies in the Back Garden_True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home by Cawthorne Nigel

Author:Cawthorne Nigel [Nigel, Cawthorne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784181796
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2014-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

8

A HEAD IN THE FLOWER BED

Ed Kemper is one of a number of American murderers who have earned the sobriquet ‘The Co-Ed Killer’. After killing his grandparents when he was just 15, he went on to kill and dismember six female hitch-hikers in the Santa Cruz area of California. His usual method of disposal was to dump their remains in remote rural areas, but he buried the head of 19-year-old Cindy Schall in his mother’s back garden, joking that his mother ‘always wanted people to look up to her’. Later, he killed his mother, too, along with one of her friends, then turned himself in to the authorities.

Edmund Emil Kemper III was born in Burbank, California, on 18 December 1948. He was the second child of Edmund Emil Kemper Jr and his wife Clarnell. He had two sisters – Susan was six years older than him and Allyn two years younger. Both his parents were big. His father was 6ft 8in tall and his mother was over 6ft. Ed grew up to be a giant – 6ft 9in tall, and weighing over 20 stone.

Dad worked as an electrician, but he had been a hero in the Second World War, serving in a special forces unit in Europe. He loved to collect guns and other weapons, and Ed hero-worshipped him.

Ed’s parents did not get on. After a series of heated arguments and trial separations, they split for good in 1957. Clarnell and the children went to live in Montana, where she worked in a bank. But Ed missed his dad and became emotional and clingy. Fearing he might become a homosexual, his mother tried toughening him up by putting him to bed in the basement with a heavy table over the trapdoor, the only way out. This continued for eight months, until his father came by for a visit and put a stop to it, but things barely improved. He complained that his mother was ‘an alcoholic and constantly bitched and screamed at me’.

When he was just nine, he buried the family’s cat alive in the back garden. The reason was, he later said, because it had transferred its affections to his two sisters and he had killed it ‘to make it mine’. It was the beginning of a grisly career. Later, he dug it up, cut off its head and stuck it on the end of a stick. He kept this gruesome relic in his bedroom and prayed to it. A year later, on a visit to New York, he tried to jump off the top of the Empire State Building, but was restrained by an aunt.

Already he was having fantasies about murdering people – sometimes all together, otherwise one at a time. His fantasy victims were mostly women and he dreamt of carrying their bodies off as trophies that he could love and cherish.

His little sister Allyn was upset at his habit of cutting up her dolls. In school, he was an outcast. He would annoy the other kids by sitting and staring at them.

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