desecrated souls - edmund kemper

And then the killing began. On August 27, 1964, at the age of 15, Edmund picked up the 22-caliber rifle his grandfather had given him and whistled for his dog, telling his grandmother that he was going hunting. Edmund turned around upon exiting the house and watched his grandmother through the screen door as she sat at the kitchen table. With her back to him, he aimed the rifle at the back of her head. He fired one time, and then fired twice more hitting her in the back. He then went back inside and stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Within a few minutes, Edmund's grandmother returned home. As he began to unload groceries from the truck Edmund shot him in the back of the head also. Afterwards Ed was so confused and panicked. He called his mother in Montana, who in-turn advised him to call the local police. Upon their arrival Edmund confessed to both murders saying "I just wanted to see what it would be like to shoot grandma."

After awaiting a decision from the California Youth Authority in a juvenile detention center, he was committed to Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane on December 6, 1964. While incarcerated he claimed to under go a religious conversion, and was released to a halfway house in 1969. He began attending community college near Atascadero and after three months was paroled. The psychiatrists suggested he not be placed back with his mother, but were ignored and soon he was living once again with her. He had grown to a strapping 6-foot-9-inch, 300 pound hate machine.

Edmund purchased a vehicle that resembled an unmarked police car. He equipped it with a radio transmitter and microphone and a large whip antenna and began to drive the freeways and highways, picking up young female hitchhikers. Edmund eventually decided to fix the passenger door so that it could not be opened from the inside.