desecrated souls - edmund kemper

"...you know the head's where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. that's the person. i remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. the body is nothing after the head is cut off... well that's not quite true. with a girl there's a lot left in the girl's body without a head..."

"...i just wanted to see what it would be like to shoot grandma..."

"...i wanted them to be part of me, and now they are..."

"...one side of me says, 'i'd like to talk to her, date her.' the other side of me says, 'i wonder how her head would look on a stick?'"

"...i am the hunter, and they are the hunted"

what others said about him

"...if i were seeing this patient without any history available or without getting the history from him, i would think that we're dealing with a very well adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence, and who was free of any psychiatric illness. if effect, we are dealing with two different people when we talk of the fifteen year old boy who committed the murder and the twenty-three year old man we see before us now. it is my opinion that he had made a very excellent response to the years of treatment and rehabilitation and i would see no psychiatric reason to consider him to be of any danger to himself or to any member of society..."

from "the anatomy of motive" by john douglas

"...as ed kemper put it, he was in for life, so what more could they do to him if he killed one of us - take away his desert?..."

"...if he wanted to - and at one point he suggested that he might - he could have twisted our heads off and set them down on the table for the guard to find..."