The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online

after inflicting a terrible vengeance on the world they had come to find unbearable.
“Despite both the shackles on the collar cap, Jesse had a book in his hand and was quietly reading. . . . ‘Pretty hard to get an education in this place,’ Jesse said, after the door had closed. ‘But I’m trying. I figure maybe that’s where I went wrong—no education. . . ’ ” “Laszlo nodded. ‘Admirable. I see you’re wearing a collar cap.’
“Jesse laughed. ‘Ahh—-they claim I burned a guy’s face with a cigarette while he was sleeping. . . . But I ask you—’ He turned my way, the milky eye floating aimlessly in his head. ‘Does that sound like me?’ “
From Caleb Carr’s The Alienist

Edmund Kemper
    In August 1963, when Edmund Kemper was fifteen years old, he stepped up behind his grandmother and casually shot her in the back of the head. After stabbing her a few times for good measure, he calmly waited for his grandfather to return from work, then gunned him down, too. His motive? “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma,” he explained to the police.
    In retrospect, this homicidal outburst wasn’t really very surprising. From his earliest years, Kemper had been what his mother euphemistically described as a “real weirdo.” One of his favorite childhood games was to pretend that he was being asphyxiated in the gas chamber. He also enjoyed decapitating his sisters’ dolls.
    By the time he was ten, he had graduated to Animal Torture , chopping up a cat with a machete and stashing the dismembered parts in his closet. He buried another cat alive, then—after exhuming the corpse—cut off its head, which he proudly displayed in his bedroom.
    Deemed mentally unsound after the double murder of his grandparents, Kemper was committed to a maximum-security mental hospital in 1963.
    Just six years later, he was released. Physically, he had undergone a striking change, having grown into a hulking, six-foot-nine, three-hundred-pounder. Psychologically, however, he was the same as ever—a sadistic psychopath obsessed with necrophiliac fantasies.
    Two years after his discharge from the mental hospital, Kemper picked up a pair of hitchhiking coeds, drove them to an isolated spot, and stabbed them to death. After smuggling their bodies back home, he amused himself for several hours with his “trophies”—photographing them, dissecting them, having sex with their viscera. Eventually, he bagged and buried the body parts and tossed the heads into a ravine.
    Four months later, he abducted another teenage hitchhiker, strangled her, raped her corpse, then took it home for more fun and games. The same pattern would repeat itself with three more female victims, all of them hitchhiking students. Though Kemper clearly enjoyed the killing, it was the postmortem perversions that gave him the most satisfaction. He decapitated all of the women and enjoyed having sex with their headless bodies. He also liked to dissect the corpses and save various “keepsakes.” On at least two occasions, he cannibalized his victims, slicing the flesh from their legs and cooking it in a macaroni casserole.
    By January 1973, Santa Cruz authorities were aware that a serial murderer—dubbed the “Coed Killer”—was on the loose, though they never suspected Kemper, who, in fact, had befriended a number of local police officers. Several months later, on Easter weekend, Kemper committed matricide, hammering in the skull of his sleeping mother, then cutting off her head. After raping the decapitated body, he ripped out her larynx and jammed it down the garbage disposal. (“That seemed appropriate,” he would later tell the police, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”) Afterward, he telephoned his mother’s best friend and invited her over for dinner. When she arrived, he crushed her skull with a brick and subjected her corpse to the usual postmortem outrages.
    On Easter