The Co-Ed Killer

By: Emily Eade 

Imagine being a young attractive girl during the 60s and 70s, the height of the hippie and civil rights movement. People all around you are fighting for peace, love, and equality. All of a sudden young attractive girls like yourself start to go missing. You think nothing about it until it hits a little too close to home… There is yet another serial killer on the loose and they are after female co-ed students. 

This is the story of Edmund Kemper… 

Kemper was born December 18th, 1948, in Burbank, California. From an early age, Kemper would show weird behaviors, such as cutting off doll heads, playing send the prisoner to the electric chair, and more concerning things… At the age of 10 Kemper would become unwanted by his parents, his father would ultimately leave and his mother would become abusive. He would be told that he was the reason behind his father leaving. His mother would force him to live in the basement with rodents. 

At 15, Kemper would end up moving to his grandparent's house and that's when things started to change for the worse. On August 27th, 1964 there was the birth of a prolific killer. After a fight with his grandmother, Kemper would kill her and his grandfather. Instead of being put into a detention home, the killer was put into a mental institution. 

After being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, he was released at age 21. He’d work various jobs and study police officers, as he wanted to be one. He’d be rejected from the academy for his height and his criminal past. In 1972, Kemper would start up with his antics again and start his killing spree. He would be known for picking up women, strangling them, killing them, beheading them, and then doing sexual acts to their corpses. 

In April 1973, Kemper would commit his last two murders, his mother and her friend. First, he would attack his mother after she went to sleep, decapitating her. Then it would be her friend after inviting her over. Kemper would turn himself in, but it would take the police a while to convict the killer. They did not believe that the man they knew was the Co-ed killer. Thanks to multiple interrogations, he would lead them to all the evidence they needed to prove that he was the infamous "Co-ed Killer."

It has been 50 years since his last murder and since he turned himself in. Ed Kemper would become the main subject studied by FBI profilers, for being one of the only original killers still living to this day that followed the majority of the “serial killer” stereotypes.