In 1973, Edmund Kemper saw that journalist Marj von Beroldingen had written about him and didn’t hesitate to propose a special interview. It was obvious that he liked her, but Marj never imagined that an hour would turn into five.
At the Santa Cruz County Jail in California, just a few hours before the journalist arrived, a jury had found Kemper guilty of eight murders.
He was 24 years old and stood 2,06 meters tall. They locked him in a tiny glass-walled room with the interviewer. The guards could see them but not hear them, and although he wore shackles around his ankles, his hands were free.
They talked for hours until Kemper blurted out something she didn’t expect: “You haven’t asked me the questions I expected from a journalist.”
Marj asked him for examples, and he gave them without batting an eye.
“You haven’t asked me the questions I expected a journalist to ask me”, Kemper told reporter Marj von B.
“Oh, what’s it like to have sex with a lifeless body”, “what’s it like to sit on the living room couch and see two heads on the arm of the couch?”. The first time, it turns your stomach.
At another point in the conversation, Kemper began describing how he had strangled Sara Hallett, a friend of his mother. He straightened up in his chair and mimed with his arm the motion he had used to kill her. His face reddened, his eyes seemed glassy, and he began to breathe faster.
Marj felt afraid because that woman had been the same age as she was. To change the subject without showing her unease, she took out a cigarette and asked him if he had always been so strong.
Kemper calmed down, and they continued talking.
When it got dark, the journalist tried to leave, but the interview still wasn’t over. The prisoner’s meal arrived, and an official invited her to stay. So, after hearing confessions about necrophilia and witnessing a reenactment of a murder, Marj ended up sharing dinner with Edmund Kemper.
He arranged the trays, ate rice with meat gravy, and accepted some of the food she had left. He even told her to save some for herself.
The interview was published in March 1974, and Marj admitted how terrifying it was that Kemper had the power to be a kind person and then revel in what he had done.