Edmund Kemper: The Co-Ed Killer

Alma Puga

Criminology

Soc-240

The Co-ed Killer

“…I really killed my grandmother because I wanted to kill my mom...I had this love-hate complex with my mother that was very hard for me to handle.” “Co-ed Killer” is referred to the serial killer by the name of Edmund Kemper. Edmund was born on December 18, 1948 in Burkbank California. He began his killing career by taking the life of his own grandmother at the age of 15. By the time he was 24 years old, the psychopath was arrested for the murder of 6 female students, his own mother and his mother’s friend.

Edmund was born to Edmund and Clarnell Kemper however, nearly a decade later his parents divorced and Ed along with his two other sisters moved with their mother to Montana. He growing up

As soon as both the girls were dead he drove the girls to his apartment, but he soon was stopped by a police officer because of a broken rear light. Much to Kemper’s relief, he doesn’t check the trunk of his car where he has the bodies and lets him off with a warning. Once in the apartment, he removed the girls’ head and arms and had sex with their corpses. The parents of the girls reported them missing, but nothing was discovered until August 15. They found the head of Mary Ann in the woods near Santa Cruz, but the remains of Anita were never found. Altogether he murdered 6 young female hitchhikers, after his 6th kill he came to the decision he was now ready to kill his mother.

On April 1973, Good Friday, after a fueled discussion with his mother, Kemper went into her bedroom after she had gone to bed and began to hit his mother with a hammer in the head. If that wasn’t gruesome enough, he cut her throat open with a knife and cut her whole entire head off and her hands like he had done with his other victims. He had also ripped open her voice box and thrown it down the garbage disposal. He hid her mother’s parts and afterward called his mother best friend, Sally Hallet, and invited her over to the house. Kemper strangled her by choking her to death with his arm and hid her in

More specifically the Social Bond Theory is an excellent example of what Edmund Kemper lacked. Hirschi stated that if one does not create a bond to societies institutions then criminal behavior is more likely to occur. Something that Edmund lacked was sensitivity especially since he knew her mother disliked him because of the resemblance to his father and thus he didn’t care about hurting her feelings or letting her down. This goes to show that because he was not sensitive to the opinion of his mother he was more likely to break the law. The major component of this is a higher risk of delinquency because of family interaction and family structure. Edmund Kemper grew up with a single mother because his parents divorced this becomes a problem because he didn’t have a father role model with him to guide him. There is enough research to conclude that children with parents who are distant with their children and do not supervise them are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. The families tend to be unstable and thus the child becomes