Before becoming one of California’s best-known serial killers, Edmund Kemper was a boy who grew up in a home marked by conflict, isolation, and an especially difficult relationship with his mother, Clarnell.
After his parents divorced in 1957, his mother took the three children to Montana. Clarnell was an alcoholic and, according to several sources, put him down and beat him for any reason. She made Edmund sleep in the basement. She said she was afraid he would harm his sisters. To get out, someone had to move the kitchen table and lift a trapdoor. According to Kemper himself, she denied him affection and repeatedly told him no woman would ever want him.
At 14, he ran away in search of his father. He found him with another family, who did not take him in. He was sent back to his mother, and she sent him to his grandparents’ farm.
There, in August 1964, at 15, he killed his grandparents. He spent five years in a psychiatric hospital. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and a very high IQ.
In 1969, he was released at 21. The doctors had recommended that he not live with his mother; they knew about their relationship. Even so, he returned to her home in Santa Cruz.
Psicología Today sums it up carefully. Childhood abuse offers clues, but it does not explain his actions. Not even a broken childhood can justify what came afterward.
The cycle ended in April 1973, when he killed his mother and later confessed to the crimes he had committed against six young women. Turning himself in to the police in Colorado.
There are houses no one escapes, even when they leave.
