Edmund Kemper

He picked up Cindy and drove her into the hills near Watsonville, where he forced her into the trunk and shot her with his new gun. The bullet lodged in her skull. Edmund had recently moved back in with his mother, so he brought the body to the duplex in Aptos and into his room there, and when Clarnell left for work the next morning he had sex with Cindy’s corpse. He dissected her in the bathtub, taking great care afterward to wash away all traces of what he’d done. He removed the bullet from her skull and buried the head in his mother’s back yard. Later he threw the body parts, which he put in plastic bags, off a cliff. This time, however, the body was discovered within twenty-four hours. Edmund took notice, but still wasn’t really worried. He’d been extraordinarily careful. Within a month he was ready to kill again.

Police finds Cindy's decapitated head in Kemper's backyard

On the night of February 5, 1973, Edmund and Clarnell had a monumental row, and Edmund stormed out of the apartment, keyed up and ready to strike. He picked up Rosalind first and engaged her in conversation. In a short while, he stopped for another hitchhiker, Alice. She had no trepidation about getting in the car, what with Rosalind already there and the UC Santa Cruz parking sticker (which Clarnell had procured) prominently displayed.

They rode for a while, and this time Edmund didn’t even stop the car to do his killing. He drew Rosalind’s attention to a lovely view off to the passenger side, and as she looked, he slowed down, drew his .22, and shot her in the head. Quickly, he pointed the gun at Alice in the back seat and fired several times. Unlike Rosalind, she didn’t die immediately. He shot her again point blank once he got out of town, and that finished her off. Pulling into a cul-de-sac, he quickly transferred the bodies to the trunk.

He stopped for gas, then went to his mother’s duplex, which he quickly left again, claiming to need cigarettes. Once outside the apartment, he pulled the car to the street, opened the trunk, and beheaded the bodies. The next morning, he brought Alice’s body inside and had sex with it in his room. He also brought in Rosalind’s head so he could remove the bullet that had lodged in it, as he had done before with Cindy’s. He drove away from Santa Cruz to dispose of most of the body parts, then on to Pacifica to get rid of the heads and hands.

Clarnell Strandberg never seemed to show any suspicion that Edmund was up to such depravity, and she probably didn’t suspect that she’d become his victim. But on Easter weekend, roughly a month after the killings of Rosalind and Alice, he decided the time had come to be rid of her. He waited all night in his room while Clarnell slept peacefully, carefully considering what he was about to do. At 5:15 a.m., he got a hammer from the kitchen and went to her bedroom. He struck her once, very hard, and then slashed her throat. Within a minute, he had killed and beheaded her, removing her larynx in the process. He tried to put it down the garbage disposal, but the machine spat it back out, which Edmund found darkly appropriate and not at all surprising. He hid her body in a closet and cleaned up a bit, then left the house.

Edmund's mother

That afternoon he pondered what to do, and decided that if someone else were found dead with his mother, then suspicion might point away from him. Returning to the duplex, he called Sara Hallett, a friend of Clarnell’s, to invite her dinner. He wasn’t able to reach her immediately, and he fretted about his plan until Sara called for Clarnell at around 5:00 p.m. He made the invitation, saying the dinner was a surprise for his mother. When Sara arrived he strangled her, first manually, and finally, with the scarf he had obtained from Aiko. He then removed Sara’s clothes and put her on his bed, and sometime that night attempted to have sex with her corpse.