Ed was pretty scary.
As a teenager he had killed his grandparents with a rifle for a triviality, but after juvie his life could have proceeded somehow, if it wasn’t for something that had been building up inside him which he claimed was rooted in the fact that his mom constantly ridiculed him in the presence of other people.
“Serial killing is always sculptured in childhood,” as they say.
The last two people Edmund killed were his mom and somewhat later her best friend. He had been screaming to his mom’s severed head for an hour or so and had thrown darts at her empty eyes (after having “engaged” with her empty mouth for a while), but the exhaustion finally kicked in after his mom’s friend was done as well.
And Ed Kemper has been in jail ever since.
And through his brilliant mind (and his calm and beautiful voice) he has prolifically narrated hundreds of audio children books for the visually impaired, and been a helping hand every which way.
But sometimes Ed cracked a joke (or two) to prison psychiatrists, journalists, agents or prison wardens, because Ed was 6′9′’ (2.06m) tall and nothing less than a Hulk, and strong enough to snap someone’s head in the blink of an eye.
He once famously told FBI agent Robert Ressler:
“The guard isn’t coming back. They’re on change of shift. He’s not going to be here for 30 minutes. In that time, I could snap your head and leave it on the table. I’d own the prison then. I killed an FBI agent.”
(Later he claimed it was a joke.)
He also used his intelligence to turn other lesser prisoners into slaves (through a gaslighting dog routine with peanuts), and Ed always enjoyed it —
What a wonderful man indeed.