First Blood (2022–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Ed Kemper: The Co-ed Killer - full transcript

- I was dreaming, thinking,
fantasizing murder all day long.

I couldn't get it outta my head.

- He was the Coed Killer.

Taking the head off was his idea

of ultimate control over women.

- Ed Kemper was 15 years old.

He was a ticking time bomb.

- He said that if the
knife wouldn't have broke,

he would've never
stopped stabbing.

- These were young women
who were hitchhiking.

- Sexual assault,
mutilation, butchery.



- It really hit home
when it happened right

on our own campus.

- He was mad at everybody
that rejected him.

- I had a real bad problem
depriving people of their lives.

- Two hikers were walking
their dog up in Loma Prieta,

which is way up in the
Santa Cruz Mountains.

It's the highest
point in the county.

They came across what
looked to be a skull,

The reality of finding
something like that.

It can be a very
upsetting situation.

- So a call came in to
the sheriff's office

from two hikers.

We drive up on top
of this mountain.

At this point, we don't even
know if it's a crime scene.



But we're sketching.

We're photographing.

We're picking up
samples of everything.

- They went
searching and digging

and seeing if there was
any area under the trees

that was dug up or
anything looked suspicious.

- We were trying to
search for anything

that doesn't belong in the dirt.

But we find no other body parts.

We brought the skull back
to the sheriff's office

and identify the remains.

And we found out the
skull belongs to a woman,

a young woman, a
teenager to early 20s.

So is this a guy
that killed his wife?

Boyfriend kills a girlfriend?

And why did somebody
take the time

to cut a head off

in the first place?

- I had an upbringing

that some have
called dysfunctional.

The whole home life just,
I watched it deteriorate.

I was 7 1/2, 8 years old.

My parents divorced.

My mother's working
to raise three kids.

We lived in a house where
there was a basement.

And at a certain
time of the evening,

my sisters would go
up to bed upstairs

where I used to go
to bed upstairs.

I had to go down
to the basement.

- Just think of
every creepy basement

you've seen in
every horror movie.

And that's where Ed had to live.

- I walked into
complete darkness.

With these pipes wheezing
and banging over my head.

You know, the rattles,

the weird sounds in the night,

that can be spooky to a kid.

And I've got this horrible
terror going on inside of me.

My imagination was vivid.

- I was studying forensic
psychology in college.

So I wrote him.

And anybody that knows Kemper
knows he likes to talk.

I had close to 80
hours of interviews

and several years
correspondence through the mail.

He said the isolation
in the basement

is when his fantasies really,
really started to evolve.

He was always scared

that the devil was gonna
come outta the furnace.

- Kemper was the middle child.

The only boy.

His mother thought Ed
should not be sharing a room

with his sisters.

So it made sense to her to
put him in the basement.

Ed presents this
living arrangement

as sort of a brutal thing
for his mother to do

because it scared him so much.

But she thought Ed
was awkward and timid.

And so she wanted
to toughen him up

and also give him a little
more independence as a boy.

- From the beginning,

you had a kind of
volatile relationship

between his mother
and his father.

I think it was a very
destabilizing time for him.

And his mother became the focus

in his particular narrative
of all of his anger

and feelings of rejection.

- His father was 6'8".

His mother was six feet tall.

They both yelled.

But the home was dominated
really by Ed's mother.

- If we're talking about Ed
Kemper's formative years,

he probably saw a father
who was using avoidance

and being out of the home

as a way of dealing
with that stress.

- When they got divorced,
Edmund felt neglected.

His dad would say he was
gonna show up and pick him up.

And not show up.

- There was a great
hole in my life.

And I started becoming
fascinated with things

evolving around
death and destruction

and evil and all of that.

When I was about eight
or nine years old,

I went to a magic show.

- It was a traveling show where
they had the guillotine act.

Where they took a young
girl out of the audience,

they put her head
in the guillotine.

They made it look like
they chopped it off

and everybody was horrified.

And Ed was thrilled.

- Right at that moment,

I departed reality

because logically I should
have been able to ascertain

that that could not happen.

You're not gonna get away with
chopping somebody's head off.

But the concept of it was so
raw and it was titillating.

I says, wow!

And that got caught up
in my morbid fascination.

- He had issues with wanting
to dominate and control people.

And in his mind, taking the
head off and possessing it

was his idea of ultimate
control over women.

- It was in that darkness

that he begins to really
formulate the fantasy

of ultimately killing.

- There's a feeling that
exists in Santa Cruz

that we're some special place.

Whatever horrible thing
is happening in the world,

it's not gonna happen here.

Well, it does happen here.

It was my very
first day of work.

I walked into the
sheriff's office.

And they said the
news of the day

was that they had
identified the woman

whose skull was found
up in the mountains.

- The skull was identified
as Mary Anne Pesce.

18 years old.

Mary Ann Pesce and Anita
Luchessa were students

at Fresno State University.

- Mary Ann Pesce
was happy go lucky.

Teachers liked her.

Very upbeat, very
adventurous girl.

Anita Luchessa is a
18-year-old college freshman.

She was very popular
on the campus

and she was very
close to her family.

- [Announcer] On May 7th, 1972,

two Fresno State College coeds

were hitchhiking a ride
from here in Berkeley.

- Mary Ann Pesce
and Anita Luchessa

had traveled to Berkeley,
California to see some friends.

- [Announcer] They both
had the money for the bus.

Yet they preferred hitchhiking

because, as Mary Ann said,

you meet such
interesting people.

- This was was a time

when there were lots
of people hitchhiking.

People were freely
getting in cars.

- [Reporter] Is there a
mystique in hitchhiking

or something that you
really get attached to?

- Yeah.

Being free.

- Police put together a story
of what had probably happened.

That they had been kidnapped
and apparently murdered.

- We hope and pray

that Anita Luchessa
is still alive,

but we thought

there was another body
we hadn't found yet.

A call comes to the Santa
Cruz Sheriff's Department.

- Cynthia Schall was a
Cabrillo College student.

- They said she had gone to
school, but had not returned.

They, of course, got worried.

- The Santa Cruz
investigators talked

to a lot of people who
knew Cynthia Schall.

Was she in trouble with anybody?

Was there any reason
for her to flee?

And there wasn't.

- But they did say she
was known to hitchhike.

- [Announcer] Cynthia
Ann Schall was last seen

as she left her Santa Cruz home,

saying she intended to hitchhike

to classes at Cabrillo College.

But there is no clue
to her whereabouts.

- Cynthia Schall
really hits home

in Santa Cruz County

because she lives

in a little seaside
community called Capitola.

And that's right here.

People in the area
are hyper aware

of the frantic search for her.

- [Announcer] A grisly
story began in this cove.

The upper part of a girl's
torso washed up on this beach,

two miles north of
the Santa Cruz Pier.

Then a hand was found two
days later by a surfer

who was in the
water near Capitola,

seven miles to the southeast.

- These are very, almost
expertly,

severed pieces of body.

- Very soon after that,
other body parts were found.

A head was not found, however.

- We were able to positively
ID those body parts

from fingerprints

and from x-rays.

- We have established
beyond any reasonable

and questionable doubt
that the remains found

are the remains of the missing
person in our community.

- [Reporter] This is
Cynthia Ann Schall?

- Correct.

- I was stunned.

My wife and I had
three little kids

and we had arranged her to
babysit occasionally for us.

Remembering her face.

Remembering her
watching my children.

You know, these things
are going through my mind.

- We have a local girl
murdered and cut to pieces.

So you can imagine
now the anxiety

of what was going on
in Santa Cruz County.

- I do remember when body
parts started washing up

on the shore.

And it was really freaky.

It's just very
unsettling to know

that whoever is doing
this is still out there.

- The residents of this area,
understandably, are edgy.

It was just six months
ago that a human head

was found in the hills
not too far from here.

And the details of that
murder still are a mystery.

- When I was 14 years old,
I ran away from my mother.

I wanted to be with my father.

And I wanted to get
away from my mother

because I was dreaming,
thinking, fantasizing murder

all day long.

I couldn't get it outta my head.

- An important part

in the life of many
serial killers is fantasy.

There's a kind of
brooding about what life

could have been like if
it weren't for factor X.

Anytime Ed Kemper
felt resentment,

it was tied back to his mother.

- So when he went to
live with his father,

he found his father
had a whole new life.

- His father had remarried
and had a beautiful wife.

A stepson about Kemper's age.

And Kemper had to try to
fit into this new household.

- I'm sure he was bitter.

He always thought he was the
apple of his father's eye.

- Ed wanted that perfect
sitcom of the 50s,

"Leave it to
Beaver" type family.

So for a short period,

it was okay.

- We say, gee, dad, you know,

you're going out
to dinner tonight.

Can we go someplace and eat?

And he'd say, sure.

Give us a few dollars.

We'd go down to some little
diner down the street.

He treated us like little men.

- But he so idealized his father

that he really didn't see
how uncomfortable this was

for his father and
his new stepmother.

- As the body parts
floated in from the ocean,

there was no longer any
doubt in the community's mind

that there was
something really wrong.

There was somebody
doing some bad things.

[Dispatcher] Roger.

- We didn't have any
information as to a suspect.

So we were just doing
guesswork.

- What is similar
in these cases?

Coed.

Location.

- These were young women
who were hitchhiking.

- A lot of warnings went out.

Please be careful.

Don't hitchhike.

Don't go out alone.

- We felt like our hands
were not so much tied,

but we couldn't figure
out how to stop it.

- There was kind of a
shock to the community.

How could this be happening
in our little Garden of Eden?

I was talking to the
investigators every single day.

They were extremely frustrated.

Because the victims of these
crimes were completely random

and there is nothing more
difficult to investigate

than random killings.

- There's a lotta pressure to
figure this out on all of us.

This one truly
tugged at everybody.

Aiko Koo is a 15-year-old
high school student.

Very talented ballet dancer.

Her mother's a librarian

at the University of
California at Berkeley.

The police learned
Aiko Koo missed the bus

and got into a car
and disappeared.

Aiko Koo's mother was
making thousands of posters

and putting 'em on every
telephone pole in the Bay Area.

It's hard to describe how

painful this was.

I mean, this was so

hard for her.

I mean, it just
crushed her heart.

- Yeah. We used to hitchhike.

But now it's not
real safe to do it.

So we don't.

- [Reporter] Why did you quit?

- Because of all the weird
things that have been happening,

with the girls being chopped
up and things like that.

- When I was 14 years old,
I go stay with my dad.

And this opened up
whole new feelings in me

that I'd never had before.

And I wish I'd had
more experience

with my father growing up.

- He hated his mother.

He loved his dad.

That would've been
a dream for Edmund

to have things work out
living with his father.

- Ed's stepmother was
absolutely terrified of him.

- Ed had this way
of looking at people

with kind of a
weird, empty stare.

That unnerved her.

On top of that, he's very
tall and intimidating.

She had not bargained
for having to deal

with this teenage boy
coming into their home

out of the blue.

So she put pressure
on Ed's father.

You know, he can't stay with us.

- We were vying for his
interest, vying for his love.

So we fought each other a lot.

And it was a lot of friction
and he couldn't handle that.

- Finally, Ed's father took Ed

to his parents' 17-acre
ranch in California.

Ostensibly to go for a visit
over a Christmas vacation.

But when Ed's father
went to leave,

he told Ed, no, you're staying.

- We went up to the mountains
to stay for Christmas.

And I got left behind.

- Ed was completely betrayed.

His father basically lied to
him and also abandoned him.

- I got left there.

I was old family. I
was already failure.

So he got rid of me.

- Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe

are coeds attending

the University of
California at Santa Cruz.

They don't return from class.

Their friends get worried,

report them missing to
the city of Santa Cruz.

- It really hit home

when it happened right
on our own campus,

our own students.

We were all very frightened.

During my long walks home
from my babysitting jobs

at 10 or 11 at night.

Alone in the dark.

And my keys clutched
between my fingers.

So I could defend myself
against an attacker.

I can still, almost
50 years later,

just feel in my bones

just being so afraid.

- Maybe they got a ride.

Just got into a car
and disappeared.

We needed to get information
into every officer,

every patrol car.

It's like, oh God, is
this ever gonna end?

- First weekend after we
knew that Alice and Rosalind

had gone missing,

we instituted a
search on campus.

We would walk along the
edges of the roadways

because we knew that women

were being kidnapped
by people in vehicles.

I was feeling a sense of
dread of what we might find.

- They determine these are
the dismembered bodies,

the remains, of Alice
Liu and Rosalind Thorpe.

- I felt so sad for the parents.

After they learned that their
daughters had been killed.

There was a huge amount
of grief on campus.

It was maddening to know

that the perpetrator
had not been found.

- The feeling in
the community was,

we've got a big problem here.

We've gotta protect ourselves.

But what do we do?

What the hell's going on?

- You know, I went
to live with Dad.

He sends me up to Grandma.

Now she's got me and my mother,

the last thing she said to
me about my grandmother was,

don't hurt them.

You know, my grandparents.

Don't hurt them.

- Edmund got dumped
off and abandoned

at his grandparents' house.

And that was the straw that
broke the camel's back.

He was mad at everybody
in his inner circle

that rejected him.

- I met Ed shortly after he
moved in with his grandparents.

We were both freshmen
in high school.

And Ed sort of stood out because
he was very, very tall,

about 6'4".

I remember while we're
waiting for the school bus,

Ed tells me this very,
very detailed story.

One of our neighbors,
he passed away.

Grandpa Kemper and Ed
went down to the house.

And because Ed Kemper was,
you know, a big, big kid,

he helped the coroner
carry the body out.

And he talked about
the man's wife.

She's crying. She's bereft.

And he was just
so put off by that

and so contemptuous of her grief

And I was struck at the time

at the complete lack of
empathy for the suffering

of somebody else.

Her husband just died.

You know, of course
she's gonna cry.

- He didn't socialize a lot.

That's usually where
you learn empathy

and you begin to feel
things for other people.

- Ed was a country boy.

And a lotta country
boys grow up as hunters.

His father was a hunter.

You start with a BB gun.

Then you get a .22.

- He was always on little
adventures outside.

One time he shot a blue jay.

The bird fell down and started
like squawking really loud.

He was taught what he could
kill and what he couldn't.

And blue jays were off limits.

- Ed Kemper goes out and
commits this brazen act

that he's coming to associate
with masculinity and power.

And taking a life
is linked to that.

- His grandmother found out

and he got in trouble
for killing the blue jay.

- His grandmother was
a dominating figure

like his mother was.

And he began to build
resentment toward her

because she didn't
really trust him.

He didn't like being told what
to do over and over and over.

- She never let me
get out of her sight

for more than an hour
without yelling my name out

to see where I was.

I would go back to my bedroom

and I'd go off
into fantasy worlds

that you'd never wanna
share with anybody

because they're so cruel

or they're so unspeakably
out of sync with reality.

- He got angry and resentful.

And he would then go
down to the outhouse

and shoot bullets into it,

imagining her inside.

- And the fantasies started
getting more and more harsh

and deviant and sick.

- I started developing
the fantasies toward her.

Killing her.

And the decapitation
fantasies were even there.

They were in place
by then already.

- What were they?

- Possessing the
severed heads of women.

location.

- I was working the
graveyard shift.

It got to be pretty boring.

And then the phone rings.

And the officer who was working
dispatch answered the phone.

He said, it's Ed Kemper.

And now, I know Ed.

He worked at a gas station

about three blocks
from the Jury Room.

It was a watering hole
for the law enforcement

around the Santa Cruz area.

Ed Kemper would occasionally
come down to the Jury Room

and sit with us while we
sit there and had beers.

So I get on the
phone and I said,

hey, Ed, this is Jim Conner.

He said, oh, hi
Jim, how you doing?

Something like that.

He said, well, I know you
guys are looking for me.

And as soon as you guys find
me, you're gonna kill me.

What do you mean Ed?

He said, well, I killed her.

During my conversation with Ed,

he admitted to me that
he had killed his mother

and her coworker.

I can't describe the feeling

that I was overcome
by at that point.

I am just so blown away
because I've known this guy,

at least I thought I knew him,

for quite some time.

So I said, Ed, you've
known me for a long time.

I just need know where you are.

He said, I'm in a phone
booth in Pueblo, Colorado.

- After Ed murdered his
mother and her friend,

he took off across the
country to Colorado.

He was exhausted and he
realized he had no place to go.

His mother had always
taken care of him

and now she was
dead, thanks to him.

- And I had the other
officer get on the phone

and call Pueblo PD

and have him go out and
put Ed under arrest.

- It was the cleanest house
you've ever walked into.

The only way you would know

that there was something
wrong in that house

was because of the smell.

There's this long
walk-in closet.

At the end of the closet,
we find Kemper's mother.

He cut her head off.

And she was completely
washed clean.

And her friend,

she was in the front closet,

had been beaten to death.

When the contingent of officers

from Santa Cruz County
arrived in Pueblo,

they sat down with Ed Kemper

and he confessed

to killing six co-eds.

- I think there was probably
a great deal of shock

that this individual could be
the person killing the co-eds.

Because there were certain
aspects of Kemper's personality

where he was, in fact,
very charming, likable.

But when they look
back and realize

that he had killed before
at the young age of 15,

it must have been
quite a wake up call

about the type of individual

that they were
actually dealing with.

- I got this domineering
grandmother on my father's side.

I was up there with
them for 10 months.

At first, it was okay,

'cause it was the calm of
being away from my mother.

Was going to a good school.

As the months went on,

the veneer went away

and the passions and the
tension started building.

- Ed Kemper was 15 years old.

And at that point, had
hit a peak of aggression

and he was sort of
a ticking time bomb.

- That day, Ed's
grandfather had gone

to the store to
pick up groceries.

Ed was alone with
his grandmother.

She was working on stories
for a boy's magazine.

He wanted to go hunting.

Picked up his rifle.

And she said again to him,

don't shoot the birds.

- I was building up big
loads of frustration inside.

Big loads of hatred

because I had no outlet for it.

And it started
simmering, I guess.

- He just turns around,

looks at his grandmother.

- I mean, it wasn't rational.

- He sees the back of
her head, aims his rifle.

- And it was pure horror.

My grandmother had made
agreements with me from the gate

that she wouldn't get

into little humiliating
mind games with me.

Like my mother had done.

Well very soon after that,

the mind game stuff started up.

- Kemper was prone
to sudden rage.

It was, I've had it!

She's mouthed off
for the last time.

- I was really aware of
the evil I was capable of.

You know, the
murderous violence.

- And something
snaps in his head.

He turned a gun on her and
he shoots her in the head.

- He then shot her twice more,

dragged her body
into the bedroom.

And he needed to be sure she
was dead, so he stabbed her.

- He had such rage.

He said that

if the knife wouldn't have broke

under the clavicle
of his grandmother,

he would've never
stopped stabbing.

- So now Ed's panicking.

And he calls his mother,

of all people in the world,

and tells her I just
killed grandpa and grandma.

- One thing that
Kemper is learning

as he listens to sex offenders
is that women are objects.

And he's being affirmed

in some of the fantasies
he's already had

about how to control
them by killing them.

Ed also learned very
quickly the kinds of things

the psychiatrists
were looking for.

- When he's put in an
environment with his mother,

he began to fantasize
about acting out.

The unfortunate reality is

that upon his release
from Atascadero,

innocent people would become
victims of his fantasy world.

Ultimately, Ed Kemper
fell into the pattern

that you see in some men who
commit serial sexual homicide.

Aggressive and
sexualized fantasies.

The feelings of rejection.

And then ultimately it spills
over into the first act.

And then with every killing,

there's an attempt to
perfect that fantasy

until its actual
underpinnings are revealed.

Which is the killing
of his mother.

- I had a real bad problem
depriving people of their lives.

It wasn't the aspect
of killing them.

It was the aspect of possessing
their bodies afterwards.

So it was almost
after an effect,

evicting someone from
their human body.

I'm sorry it sounds so cold,

but that's about what
it analogizes to.

- What would've been
ahead for all these people

whose lives were snuffed out?

I'm sure they all
could have had lives

just as wonderful as mine.

- You can't investigate
all these murder cases

or any murder case

and not have things kind of
just get burned into your brain.

You can't erase it.