Edmund Kemper, who butchered numerous family members and a string of young women, was notorious for his psychological torment of authorities and police officers.
Despite being brought in by the FBI as a consultant to help understand serial killers due to his purported intellect, he relished playing warped psychological games with them to demonstrate his dominance.
During one interrogation, Kemper exploded in rage, delivering a chilling four-word warning that he would “screw your head off” to an FBI agent who desperately hit the panic button, according to Dejure.
Kemper, who came into the world in Burbank, California, in 1948, had two younger sisters and grew up in a household where his parents, Clarnell and Kemper, were locked in perpetual conflict before ultimately divorcing.
The young Kemper exhibited bizarre and troubling conduct, including mutilating two family cats and participating in macabre death ritual games with one of his sisters, reports the Mirror.
His mother dispatched him to live with his father, but he fled and was subsequently sent to his grandparents.
His savage impulses continued to grow until one fateful afternoon when he claimed his first victims on August 27, 1964.
At just 14 he gunned down his grandfather Edmund Senior and grandmother Maude with a rifle before repeatedly plunging a kitchen knife into his grandmother’s corpse.
When interrogated by police, he nonchalantly shrugged and said “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.”
John E. Douglas, an FBI profiler whose book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit inspired David Fincher’s Netflix drama Mindhunter, spent years interviewing serial killer Edmund Kemper.
During one of these interviews, Kemper chillingly threatened an FBI agent with the words “screw your head off”, causing the agent to frantically press a panic button.
Douglas described Kemper as “among the brightest prison inmates” he had ever interviewed and noted that he possessed “rare insight for a violent criminal. In one interview, when Douglas’s colleague Robert Ressler was in a cell alone with Kemper had pressed the panic button multiple times calling a guard to open the cell.
Terrifyingly, Kemper told him to simply relax, saying “if I went apes*** in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you? I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”
Ressler was eventually rescued by a prison guard, but he never again returned to a cell alone with Kemper. After murdering his grandmother at the age of 14, Kemper was diagnosed with “personality trait disturbance, passive aggressive type,” and sent to Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane.
He remained in hospital for seven years before being released, a decision now widely regarded as a grave error of judgement. Kemper, who stood at 6ft 9in tall and weighed 21 stone, moved back in with his mother before going on to murder hitchhikers Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa in 1972.
He then murdered Aiko Koo, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, before attending a routine appointment with his psychiatrists with the dead teen’s head in his car boot. He struck again, kidnapping student Cindy Schall whom he forced into his boot and shot dead.
Kemper kept her head and buried it face-up in his mother’s back garden because, as he later confessed, “she had always wanted people to look up to her”. He then killed and violated Rosalind Thrope and Alice Liu, discarding their mutilated bodies in a canyon near San Francisco.
He then murdered his own mother while she was asleep – attacking her with a claw hammer until she died. He then decapitated her and had intercourse with her head before throwing darts at it.
He removed her larynx and placed it in the garbage disposal, but it jammed and spat the voice box back out.
Kemper later admitted to police: “It seemed appropriate as much as she’d bitched and screamed at me over the years. But even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up.”
