Mindhunter: Who is Ed Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer? How accurate is the Netflix series?

The Netflix series stars Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany as Holden Ford and Bill Tench, two special agents seeking to understand what drives seemingly ordinary people to commit multiple murders.

Their first encounter is with Edmund ‘Ed’ Kemper, known as the Co-Ed Killer for his habit of murdering university students.

Groff said that Cameron Britton, who played Kemper, “came in with research like crazy, and had a very specific idea of what he wanted to do”.

The real Kemper is a large, imposing man, standing at 6’9 and weighing more than 17 stone. Like Britton’s portrayal, he is said to be a polite, intelligent man.

For almost 44 years, Kemper has been held in the California Medical Facility, having been found guilty of eight murders – including those of his mother and his grandparents – in 1973.

He has admitted to killing several young women before dismembering and having sex with their corpses.

Despite his violent, murderous tendencies, prison officials are said to regard Kemper a model prisoner, and he has even found work with the facility’s psychologists.

Kemper was first incarcerated in 1964 after killing his paternal grandparents.

At the age of 15 years old, he shot his grandmother in the head during an argument and then stabbed her in the back with a kitchen knife.

When his grandfather came home he shot him in the driveway so that he “wouldn’t have to see what happened”.

Unsure of what to do, Kemper called his mother – an alcoholic who emotionally abused him as a child, and once locked him in a basement fearing that he would rape his sisters. 

On her advice, he called the police and waited to be taken into custody.

When questioned by authorities, Kemper said: “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.”

His crimes were deemed incomprehensible for a boy of his age, so he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to the criminally insane unit of Atascadero State Hospital.

There, psychiatrists disagreed with Kemper’s original diagnosis and re-diagnosed him with a “personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive type”. 

They found that he had an IQ of 136; later testing would adjust that score upward to 145.

Because of his intelligence and his friendly demeanour, Kemper began working with doctors and eventually headed up the hospital’s psychological testing lab, where he helped develop new tests and scales.

He later admitted that while performing these tests he would pick up tips from sex offenders, one of whom told him it was best to kill a woman after raping her so that there would be no witnesses.

After five years Kemper convinced psychologists that he had been rehabilitated. He was released into his mother’s care with his records expunged.

He went a number of years without committing a crime, working menial jobs and picking up female hitch-hikers in his spare time.

“At first I picked up girls just to talk to them, just to try to get acquainted with people my own age and try to strike up a friendship,” he later told investigators.

But he began to have sexual fantasies about the girls, and recalling the rapists he had encountered in hospital “decided to  have a situation of rape and murder and no witnesses and no prosecution”.

In May 1972, Kemper picked up two 18-year-olds named Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa on the pretext of taking them to Stanford University.

Instead, he took them to a woodlands and killed them.

Kemper took the corpses to the flat he was by-then sharing with a friend, dismembered them and performed sex acts on them.

Over the next few months Kemper murdered another four young women in the same manner.

In April 1973, he killed his own mother with a claw hammer as she sat in her bed.

He cut off her head and used it as a dart board, had sex with it, and “smashed her face in”.

Later that night Kemper invited his mother’s best friend, Sally Hallett, over to the house and killed her.

He left the scene in Sally’s car and drove for miles before calling police from a phone booth and confessing to the two murders he had committed that night.

Initially, police didn’t take him seriously and told him to call back later. He did just that, and asked to speak to an officer he knew personally.

After his arrest Kemper confessed to both the murders of his mother and her friend, as well as the those of the six hitch-hikers.

When asked why he turned himself in, he said: “The original purpose was gone. It wasn’t serving any physical or real or emotional purpose.

“Toward the end, I started feeling the folly of the whole damn thing, and at the point of near exhaustion, near collapse, I just said to hell with it and called it all off.”

At his trial, Kemper pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was found sane and guilty of all eight murders, and in November 1973 was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Since 1985 he was waived his right to eight parole hearings, claiming that he does not consider himself fit to return to society, and is “happy going about life in prison”.