EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (17 page)

On 24 January 1989, having exhausted the appeals process Theodore Robert Bundy was executed at the State Prison at Starke in Florida. His last words before 2,000 volts pulsed through his body were, ‘I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends’.

Ed Kemper

The Co-ed Killer

Edmund Emil Kemper III had always been a little odd, but had been behaving increasingly strangely since the break-up of his parents’ marriage. At the age of nine, he had buried the family cat alive in the back garden of his house in Burbank, California. He had then dug it up, decapitated it and mounted its head on a stick. He dreamt of murdering people and would cut up his sister’s dolls and engage in strange sex games with them. His behaviour was not helped by his mother locking him in the basement at night for eight months, fearing that he would molest his sisters.

In 1963, aged fifteen, his mother was finding it impossible to control him and after he had run away from his father’s house, he was sent to live with his father’s parents on their remote Californian farm at North Fork, high in California's Sierra Mountains. Life there was very boring for Kemper. He was away from school and isolated from his normal life. One day there was an argument when his grandmother insisted that he stay home and do housework instead of going into the fields to work with his grandfather. He picked up a rifle to go outside and shoot something but when she told him not to shoot any birds he turned round and fired a bullet into her head before shooting her in the back. He heard his grandfather arrive and killed him with a single shot as he got out of his car. Kemper said to police interviewing him: ‘I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.’

He was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and detained in Atascadero State Mental Hospital for the criminally insane.

In 1969, aged twenty-one, standing six feet nine inches tall and weighing three hundred pounds, he was released into the care of his mother, Clarnell. The doctors considered Clarnell to be at the root of most of Kemper’s problems and warned him not to go back to her, but he did. Needless to say, life with her was no better than it had been before. They argued violently and she would blame him because she could not get any dates. Indeed, she seemed to get on better with the students at the University of Santa Cruz where she worked as a secretary than she did with her own son. He eventually moved out, to Alameda near San Francisco, sharing a rented flat with a

friend. Most of his time was spent cruising around

the California highways, picking up young, female hitch-hikers.

Kemper held down a job at a Green Giant canning factory and, still a virgin, worked out his sex and violence fantasies with pornography and detective magazines. In 1971, he had a motorcycle accident for which he received fifteen thousand dollars in compensation. He was unable to work and now had time and money on his hands.

In spring 1972, Kemper after yet another tempestuous argument with his mother, he went out looking for a victim on whom he could vent his anger. He quickly picked up two hitch-hikers, Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa, eighteen-year-old students making their way back to Stanford University. He pulled a gun on them and informed them that he was going to rape them. Pulling off onto a side road, he made one girl climb into the boot of the car. He handcuffed the other one and then stabbed and strangled her. Opening the boot, he stabbed the other girl. He then drove the bodies back to the apartment where he decapitated them and cut off their hands.

Returning to his apartment that night, he removed the clothing from the bodies and had sex with them. The next day he buried the heads and bodies in different places in order to make it difficult for them to be identified if discovered. He got rid of the clothes in remote parts of the Santa Cruz mountains. One of the girls’ heads was found the following August, but without the remainder of her body, it was impossible to prove how she had died.

In September he struck again. He picked up a fifteen-year-old Asian ballet student, Aiko Koo, and told her she was being kidnapped. When she became hysterical, he pulled his gun out and told her to be quiet. North of Santa Cruz, he smothered her until she lost consciousness and then strangled her and had sex with her dead body. He then visited his mother and chatted with her while the body lay in the car’s boot. Returning to his apartment, he had intercourse again with the corpse and in the morning he cut it up and drove it out into the country where he buried the hands and the torso in different places again. This time, he kept the head in the boot and it was still there when he visited a psychiatrist.

Around this time, in November 1972, Kemper’s records were sealed, meaning that they no longer existed as a blemish on his character. His mother had been fighting for this and he had been examined by two psychiatrists who agreed that he had made good progress. Little did they know what kind of progress he had really been making and it was not long before his murderous instinct forced him to strike again.

He picked up a girl one afternoon and killed her with a single shot from the new gun he had purchased; with his records sealed he could now own a gun. He drove her back to his mother’s house and hid her in the closet of his bedroom. The next morning, when his mother left for work, he dismembered the corpse, removing the bullet from the head, in case it was found. He tossed the parts off a cliff into the sea, some of them being found within days. He buried the head in the garden under his mother’s window. ‘She always wanted people to look up to her,’ he later joked.

By now, of course, there was panic and security was heightened everywhere. Papers spoke of the Co-ed Killer and girls were warned to be careful, but he still managed to pick two up on the UCSC campus less than a month later. He had shot them even before he had driven off university property. The guards at the gate failed to spot the bodies slumped inside the car and he drove them to his mother’s where he decapitated them in her driveway while she was in the house. It gave him a thrill to have her so close when he did it. He took the heads into his bedroom and masturbated over them. For a couple of days he drove around with the bodies in the car before disposing of them in the usual way, taking care to remove the bullets.

A few months later, he bought another gun, a .44, but a sheriff noted the name on the record of the sale of the gun and decided to pay Kemper a visit. He asked Kemper for the pistol and said it would be retained by the authorities until a court decided whether it was lawful for him to own a gun. Kemper went to the boot of the car and took the pistol out, handing it to the officer who then left. But Kemper was shaken. He had come very close to being found out. The car, after all, had a bullet hole in it and had been awash with blood very recently. He realised that it was time for the endgame; he would kill his mother and then give himself up.

On 20 April, Kemper and his mother had their usual argument and, as usual, she humiliated him. At five, next morning, while she slept, he smashed her skull with a claw-hammer and slit her throat. He raped the corpse and cut her head off. He placed it on the mantle piece and used it as a dartboard. He then called Sally Hallett, a friend of his mother, and invited her to the house for a surprise dinner. When she arrived he clubbed her, strangled her and decapitated her. He then slept in his mother’s bed before going out and driving for miles through a number of states. He stopped in Colorado, called the police and gave himself up. It was over.

Ed Kemper confessed to everything, waiving his right to an attorney. He told them that he had kept hair, teeth and skin of some victims as trophies. He also told them that he had sliced some flesh off two of his victims’ legs, and cooked it in a macaroni casserole. When asked what punishment would fit the crimes he had committed, he replied: ‘Death by torture.’

The trial was over very quickly. Psychiatrists testified that he had been sane when committing the murders and he was found guilty of eight counts of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has proved to be a quiet, well-behaved inmate.

Richard Speck

It was unmistakably a man, but he had women’s breasts and was wearing blue silk panties. He paraded around, took a bit of cocaine, had sex with another inmate of the prison and said: ‘If they only knew how much fun I’m having, they’d turn me loose.’

The video tape had been sent anonymously to Chicago television news editor, Bill Kurtis, in 1996. It had been made in Stateville Prison in 1988 and depicted scenes of sex and drug use. At the centre of it was the bizarre spectacle of nurse-killer, Richard Speck, who had died in 1991 and whose breasts were the result of hormone treatments that had been smuggled into the jail. Speck joked when asked why he had killed eight nurses on the night of 14 July 1966. ‘It just wasn’t their night,’ he says. Then asked how he has felt since then, he replies, coldly: ‘Like I always feel. Had no feelings.’

Speck was born, the seventh of eight children, on 6 December 1941, in the small town of Kirkwood, Illinois. His parents, Benjamin and Mary, were religious people, but his father died when Richard was six years old and Mary, having moved the family to Fair Park, near Dallas, Texas, remarried. Her new husband, Carl Lindbergh, was the antithesis of Benjamin Speck. He drank, was abusive and was often gone from the family for long periods. He hated Richard and Richard hated him.

By the age of twelve, Richard Speck was already going off the rails. He was a poor student, eventually dropping out in ninth grade, and had discovered alcohol. In his defence, however, it has been suggested that the alcohol was used to counter the headaches from which he suffered. These were apparently a direct result of head injuries he suffered throughout childhood – aged five, he was injured while playing in a sandbox with a claw hammer; he twice fell out of trees and at fifteen, he ran into a steel girder, injuring his head yet again.

Aged nineteen, he had a tattoo done which would become significant in later life. It read: ‘Born to Raise Hell’ and that is just what he did. By his mid-twenties, a drug-dependent alcoholic, he had thirty-seven arrests to his name. Charges included public drunkenness, disorderly conduct and burglary.

At twenty he had married fifteen-year-old Shirley Malone and fathered a child, but the marriage ended in 1966. According to Malone, Speck often raped her at knifepoint, claiming that he needed sex four to five times each day. He spent a large part of their marriage in prison. He told people he wanted to kill his ex-wife, but he never got round to it and, heading back to Illinois, in a three month period, he seems to have vented his anger on other women.

The first to die was Mary Pierce, a divorcee who had rejected his advances. On 13 April, her naked body was found, strangled, in a shed behind the bar where she worked. A few days earlier, a sixty-five-year-old woman had been grabbed from behind and raped by a man with a southern drawl whose description matched that of Speck.

The cops were on to him and, tracing him to the Christy Hotel, they found jewellery and a radio belonging to the rape victim. Other items from burglaries he had carried out were also discovered. But Speck was gone.

He landed work on the iron ore barges of the Great Lakes, but was dismissed for repeated drunkenness on the job as well as his violent behaviour. On 2 July he was in the area of Indiana Harbor. Not far from there, that day, three young girls disappeared and their bodies were never found. All that remained were their clothes, left in their car.

On 13 July, Speck was drinking heavily in the Shipyard Inn in south Chicago. As ever, he was angry and depressed. He had tried to get work on a ship bound for New Orleans but had been unable to do so. Therefore, having consumed quantities of pills and booze, he decided that it was time to ‘raise some hell.’ He set off towards one of the nearby student dormitories of the South Chicago Community Hospital. In his possession was a hunting knife, a pocket-knife and a .22 caliber pistol.

For the past several weeks, Speck had been watching the women coming and going from the buildings, sunbathing in a nearby park and leaving the building to attend their classes. He knew their schedules well enough to know that, at that time of night, they would be home and in bed.

Twenty-three-year-old Cora Amurao, a nursing exchange student from the Philippines, opened the door at Jeffrey Manor, a two-storey townhouse occupied by student nurses. In front of her stood Speck, dressed in dark clothing, reeking of alcohol, high as a kite and brandishing the pistol and the knife. ‘I'm not going to hurt you,’ he told the terrified woman. ‘I'm only going to tie you up. I need your money to go to New Orleans.’

He went into the house and got the five other nurses there at the time out of bed. All six were herded into one room where he tied them up and sat them in a circle on the floor. In the next hour another three arrived home from evenings out. They, too, were tied up and sat on the floor.

Twenty-year-old Pamela Wilkening was the first to die. He took her into another room and stabbed her in the chest before strangling her with a torn piece of bedsheet. Returning to the room, he selected twenty-year-old Mary Jordan and twenty-one-year-old Suzanne Farris. He took them into another bedroom and stabbed Jordan in the heart, neck and eye. Turning to Farris, he stabbed her eighteen times and then strangled her already dead body. He also raped her.

Nina Schmale, twenty-four years of age, was now taken to a room where he told her to lie on a bed. He cut her throat and strangled her. Valentine Pasion, twenty-three, was stabbed in the throat and Nerlita Gargullo was stabbed four times and then strangled. He washed his hands before returning to carry Patricia Matusek into the bathroom where he kicked her in the stomach and strangled her.

For the next twenty minutes he raped Gloria Davy upstairs and then took her down to the ground floor where he raped her anally with an unknown implement. Then he strangled her, before leaving the house, thinking everyone was dead.

Unknown to Speck, however, Cora Amurao, who had first opened the door to him, had slithered under one of the beds in the room and pressed herself up against the wall. She lay there, terrified, until 6 am to be certain that he had gone. Then she clambered out on to the balcony shouting: ‘My friends are all dead! I’m the only one alive! Oh God, I’m the only one alive!’

When the police arrived on the scene, the house resembled a charnel house. The carpet squished underfoot from the amount of blood it had soaked up. Experienced policemen took one look and then ran outside to throw up. There was one strong clue, however, to the killer’s identity. The neatness of the square knots used to tie the girls up suggested that he was, most likely, a seaman.

The cops went to work and within hours knew their killer was Richard Speck. Cora, although heavily sedated, had managed to give a description of the killer and a gas station attendant recalled that one of his managers had been talking about a guy of the same description who complained about missing a ship and losing out on a job just a couple of days before. A police sketch artist drew an uncanny likeness of Speck, which was taken to the Maritime Union Hall. Someone there remembered an angry seaman who had lost out on a double booking - two men had been sent for one job – and he was able to retrieve the crumpled assignment sheet from the wastebasket. The sheet gave the name of Richard Speck.

Speck was on the loose for the next few days, drinking and crashing in cheap hotels in Chicago. The police were always close on his tail and at one point he was interviewed by a couple of them in his room because he had a gun. They did not realise who he was, however. Eventually, he was staying in a hotel in Skid Row, the Starr. He had drunk a pint of cheap wine and, feeling suicidal, he smashed the bottle and dragged its jagged ends across his wrist and inner elbow, severing an artery. He then lay, bleeding on the bed in his tiny cubicle in the hotel, surrounded by newspapers carrying his picture. He called out for water and help, but was ignored.

Eventually, one of the down-and-outs Speck had been drinking with in the last few days recognised Speck’s picture and, having returned to the hotel, discovered him lying on the bed. He called the police anonymously to tell them where he was, but no patrol car was dispatched.

Instead, Speck was taken to Cook County Hospital, the very same hospital in which the nurses’ bodies lay. Leroy Smith, a first year resident examined Speck and thought there was something familiar about him. He washed the blood off his arm and there it was – the tattoo saying ‘Born to Raise Hell’. He found a newspaper and confirmed that it was Speck from the photo. When Speck asked for water, Smith held him tight by the neck and asked him: ‘Did you give water to the nurses?’

The trial began on 3 April 1967, in the Peoria County Courthouse, in Peoria, Illinois, three hours south of Chicago. Cora Amurao testified at the trial and a dramatic and defining moment came when she was asked if she could identify the killer of her fellow students. She rose from her seat in the witness box, walked across the courtroom to stand in front of Speck. She pointed at him, almost touching him, and said: ‘This is the man’.

On 15 April 1967, after forty-nine minutes of deliberation, the jury found Richard Benjamin Speck guilty of all eight murders. The court was cleared and Judge Paschen sentenced Speck to death in the electric chair. He avoided it, however, when the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional. Instead, Speck was sentenced to fifty to 100 years in prison for each count of murder – a total of 400 to 1,200 years.

In Stateville Prison, in Joliet, he was known as ‘birdman’ after the
Birdman of Alcatraz
due to the fact that he kept a pair of sparrows that had flown into his cell. He was often caught with drugs or distilled moonshine, however, and was far from a model prisoner. Punishment for such breaches never phased him. ‘How am I going to get in trouble? I’m here for 1,200 years!’ His time in prison, however, was cut short when he died from a massive heart attack on 5 December 1991.

No one claimed his body. He was cremated and his ashes were dispersed in an unknown location.