Edmund Kemper

Edmund Kemper and Behavioral Analysis The motivation for writing this paper is derived from my love of true crime and my profound curiosity in behavioral analysis and psychology. My introduction to behavioral analysis originated from reading an article that mentioned criminal psychology. It immediately sparked my interest and I wanted to know more, so I did some research, and behavioral analysis and criminal profiling kept coming up. After researching those topics, I became fascinated by the work of the behavioral analysts at the FBI. I hadn’t thought about the topic for a while because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, until I was listening to an episode on the Crime Junkie podcast called Serial Killer: Ed Kemper. At the end of the

He killed his grandmother, Maude, because Ed says he “just wanted to see what it felt like to kill grandma” (Ferrarin). Then he killed his grandfather, Edmund Kemper the First, because Ed didn’t want his grandfather to see his wife dead. Ed called the police to turn himself in. The police were noticeably astonished to learn what this young kid had done. They sent Ed to be tried as an adult because they were so surprised that a child would execute a crime to that extent. The judge trying Ed as an adult was just as astonished, so the judge sent him to Atascadero State Hospital, a high-security mental rehabilitation center. There, Ed was found to have a very high IQ, around 136, after completing psychological tests. Ed was so smart and such a “model prisoner” that he was even allowed to distribute these psychological tests to the grown men in the center. Six years later, Kemper was let out on parole at age 21 because of his good behavior. His diagnosis was reduced to a “personality disorder with passive aggression” rather than “paranoid schizophrenic” as it was when he started in the center (Flowers). The legal system in California at that point was very passionate about rehabilitation rather than punishment for committing a crime, so the police and psychologists saw Ed almost as a “success story,” according to the Ed Kemper Crime Junkie podcast episode. Ed lived contentedly with his

At this time, FBI Special Agent Howard Teten and a few others started thinking about the psychological science of serial killers. In 1972 the Behavioral Science Unit was launched and later renamed the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Congress’s viewpoint on the FBI being involved in serial killer cases is outlined predominantly in legislation passed during the 1980s. In 1983, there was a hearing on serial murders, and the people attending discussed the plan for a National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC. It’s a center that helps agencies process violent crimes by assisting with research, training, and criminal profiling. At the same hearing, the attendees talked about the idea for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP, which is a data center that collects, analyzes and provides reports on violent crimes from local agencies. This helps connect crimes that are related to those that wouldn’t have been connected otherwise. In the mid-1980s, law enforcement asked for the FBI’s assistance in around 600 cases per year. In the 1990s it was around 1,000 cases annually; in the 2000s, the average cases per year numbered only 371. There has been a clear link between the drop in cases in the 2000s and the BAU. Other establishments in the BAU and FBI that work closely together include ViCAP, NCVAC, National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS),