Edmund Kemper Research Paper

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Edmund Kemper was born in Burbank, California on December 18, 1948. His parents divorced in 1957, and he moved with his mother and two sisters to Montana. His mother was alcoholic and known to have a borderline personality disorder, and Edmund Kemper claims that she favored his two sisters above him. His mother forced Edmund Kemper to live in the basement when he was ten years old, so that his sisters could be “safe” away from him. Later when he was caught, he blamed his mother for all of his problems. Edmund Kemper lived with a chaotic and cruel parents who once made him kill his pet chicken and eat it as a punishment. Living in this dark fantasy life, he confessed of sometimes dreaming about killing his mother. As a “habit”, Edmund cut off his sisters’ dolls and went onto do the same cruel things to his cat and neighbors’ dogs. Outrageous of his acts, his mother sends him away to live with his paternal grandparents in North Fork, California (1). Edmund killed his grandmother at age 15, because he “wanted to know how it would feel like”, then killed his grandfather because he knew that his grandfather would be “angry at him” for killing grandmother. He started hitchhiking college women and kidnapped them, but let them go after wards (3). However, he started to stop letting his victims go and started to kill the kidnapped women. He killed six female college students, including two from UC Santa Cruz where his mother worked at, by picking them up from hitchhiking. With this, Edmund Kemper earned the nickname of “The Co-ed Killer). Edmund Kemper was also identified as being smart, with an IQ of 136, and appeared professional (1). Then, he went on to kill his mother, and later invited one of her friends to the house to also murder he...

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... between places regularly. These killers usually have lowest IQ out of the three types of criminals and are extremely anti-social. Out of the three categories, Edmund Kemper seems to be most identifiable with the organized killer, as he also planned most of his crimes and carried them out secretly (10). The mean percentage of serial killers by race is found to be 52.4% of White, 40,7% of Black, 5.3% of Hispanic, 0.7% of Asian, and 0.9% to be Native American. In gender, men greatly outnumbered women, 90.7% (3029) of them being men compared to only 9.3% (309) female serial killers. 26.89% of them were in between their mid-to-late twenties, and 12.72% of them were white male in their mid-to-late twenties-the stereotypical myth about serial killer (11). Edmund Kemper fit in this percentage: he was white male, in mid-to-late twenties when he was committing his crimes.

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