Ed Kemper by Dary Matera

Author:Dary Matera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Detective Terry Medina, left, and criminalist Paul Daugherty, right, of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department, walk away from Kemper’s car after searching it in April 1973; Daugherty carries a shovel, bagged for evidence.

Ed talked and talked, in Pueblo, on the trip back, at dinner, in the overnight cells, and locked up in Santa Cruz. In these conversations, when he sensed his listeners growing weary, he added a new—and then unknown—wrinkle to his necrophilia. He not only had sex with the torsos, he said, but with the severed heads as well! The sex he was talking about was, specifically, a form of forced (or receptive unforced) oral sex known as “irrumation,” since, of course, the heads were dead, couldn’t respond in kind, and his specific receptors had no choice in the matter. Those details usually woke up the detectives. Ed loved nothing better than making the hard-boiled cops cringe.

Pleased with their stunned reactions, Ed would explain to other investigators and reporters what his deal was with all the severed heads.

“The head-trip fantasies were a bit like a trophy. You know, the head is where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That’s the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off . . . well, that’s not quite true: there’s a lot left in the girl’s body without the head.”

Sensing their weariness and attention fatigue again, Ed added a new element to his “not my fault” abused childhood horrors. Instead of being the suspected sibling molester, Ed was actually the victim! He claimed that his older teenage sister lured him into playing sex games with her when he was eight—the traditional “let’s-play-doctor” and such. And to make matters worse, his man-hating mother punished him for it, not the sister. That’s why she locked him in the dark basement at night. Although Ed would occasionally repeat this tale to others, and psychiatrists and psychologists would debate the cause and effect, there’s no way of confirming or denying it. Ed’s sister, who died in 2014, was naturally aghast at the account and strongly denied it. There were never any reports showing that she had any youthful or adult behavior of the sort—unlike the frequent stories of Ed’s violent sexual fantasies.

Ed’s incessant chattering and soul-searching was not uncommon with serial killers of his breed, especially ones who give themselves up. They tend to have a lifetime of angst to get off their chest.

“Somebody doesn’t wake up one day and decide ‘I’ll go out and kill women’ because somebody is trying symbolically to kill their mother,” explains forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger. “It begins ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier in his mind. In his fantasies.”

As to why such a soon-to-be-legendary killer threw in the towel so peacefully instead of shooting it out with the “fuzz,” Ed had a decidedly Ed-like answer. It was another deeply Freudian answer, in fact. Putting on his accountant hat—his mother had worked at a bank in Montana—he let it fly.

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