Edmund Emil Kemper III

Genetics:

 Borderline personality (mother)

Childhood trauma:

 Kemper had a troubled upbringing.

 Early on, he exhibited antisocial behavior such as torture of insects[12] and cruelty to animals:
at the age of 10, he buried a pet cat alive; once it died, he dug it up, decapitated it, and
mounted its head on a spike. Kemper later stated that he derived pleasure from successfully
lying to his family about killing the cat.
 He also had close-to-death experiences as a child: once, when his elder sister tried to push
him in front of a train and another time when she successfully pushed him into the deep end
of a swimming pool, where he almost drowned.
 His parents divorced in early life; as a child, he moved to Montana with his mother Clarnell,
who locked Kemper in their basement which had been frequented by rats
 he murdered his paternal grandparents when at the age of 15
 Kemper had a close relationship with his father and was notably devastated when his
parents divorced in 1957
 He had a severely dysfunctional relationship with his mother, a neurotic, domineering
alcoholic who frequently belittled, humiliated, and abused him
 Kemper later described her as a "sick angry woman,"[23] and it has been postulated that she
suffered from borderline personality disorder.
 Kemper was briefly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by court psychiatrists and
sentenced to the Atascadero State Hospital as a criminally insane juvenile.

Verbal Abuse:

 He had a severely dysfunctional relationship with his mother, a neurotic, domineering

alcoholic who frequently belittled, humiliated, and abused him
Environment:

 His grandfather gave him rifle with live ammunition for hunting
 Dysfunctional family
 As he was driving around in the 1969 Ford Galaxie he bought with part of his settlement
money, he noticed a large number of young women hitchhiking and began storing plastic
bags, knives, blankets and handcuffs in his car. He then began picking up young women and
peacefully letting them go. According to Kemper, he picked up around 150 such
hitchhikers[34] before he felt homicidal sexual urges, which he called his "little zapples," [41] and
began acting on them

Peers:

 Kemper endeared himself to his psychiatrists by being a model prisoner, and he was trained
to administer psychiatric tests to other inmates
 After his second arrest, Kemper said that being able to understand how these tests
functioned allowed him to manipulate his psychiatrists, admitting that he learned a lot from
the sex offenders to whom he administered tests; for example, they told him that to avoid
leaving witnesses, it was best to kill a woman after raping her
 Kemper attended community college in accordance with his parole requirements and had
hoped to become a police officer, though he was rejected because of his size

During this 11-month murder spree, Kemper killed five college students, one high school student, his
mother, and his mother's best friend. Kemper has stated in interviews that he often searched for
victims after having arguments with his mother and that she refused to introduce him to women
attending the university where she worked. He recalled: "She would say, 'You're just like your father.
You don't deserve to get to know them'." [43] Psychiatrists, and Kemper himself, have espoused the
belief that the young women were surrogates for his ultimate target: his mother.

When questioned in an interview as to why he decapitated his victims, he explained: "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.

He then waited for her to fall asleep, then he snuck back into her room to bludgeon her with a claw
hammer and slit her throat with a penknife.[26][53] He then decapitated her and engaged in irrumatio
with her severed head, then used it as a dart board. Kemper stated that he "put [her head] on a shelf
and screamed at it for an hour ... threw darts at it," and, ultimately, "smashed her face in." [26][54] He
also cut out her tongue and larynx and put them in the garbage disposal. However, the garbage
disposal could not break down the tough vocal cords and ejected the tissue back into the sink. "That
seemed appropriate, as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many
years", Kemper later said.

Kemper hid his mother's corpse in a closet and went to drink at a nearby bar. Upon his return, he
invited his mother's best friend, 59-year-old Sara Taylor "Sally" Hallett, over to the house to have
dinner and watch a movie. When Hallett arrived, Kemper strangled her to death to create a cover
story that his mother and Hallett had gone away together on vacation. ] He subsequently put Hallett's
corpse in a closet, obscured any outward signs of a disturbance, and left a note to the police. It read:
Appx. 5:15 A.M. Saturday. No need for her to suffer any more at the hands of this horrible
"murderous Butcher". It was quick—asleep—the way I wanted it. Not sloppy and incomplete, gents.
Just a "lack of time". I got things to do!!
After not hearing any news on the radio about the murders of his mother and Hallett when he arrived
in Pueblo, he found a phone booth and called the police. He confessed to the murders of his mother
and Hallett, but the police did not take his call seriously and told him to call back at a later time.
Several hours later, Kemper called again, asking to speak to an officer he personally knew. He
confessed to that officer of killing his mother and Hallett, then waited for the police to arrive and take
him into custody. Upon his capture, Kemper also confessed to the murders of the six students

When asked in a later interview why he turned himself in, Kemper said: "The original purpose was
gone ... It wasn't serving any physical or real or emotional purpose. It was just a pure waste of
time ... Emotionally, I couldn't handle it much longer. Toward the end there, I started feeling the folly
of the whole damn thing, and at the point of near exhaustion, near collapse, I just said to hell with it
and called it all off.