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Edmund Emil Kemper III was convicted on November 8, 1973, of eight first-degree murders committed in California between May 1972 and April 1973, months after he called Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado, and confessed.

Kemper had been shuttled between his divorced parents and, at 15, was sent to his father's parents in North Fork, Madera County. After an argument on August 27, 1964, he shot his grandmother Maude with a .22 rifle and stabbed her, then shot his grandfather, Edmund Kemper Sr., 72, in the driveway when he returned from the post office. Kemper was dealt with as a juvenile and committed to Atascadero State Hospital as a criminally insane juvenile. He served about five years there under the California Youth Authority and was paroled into his mother's care on his 21st birthday, December 18, 1969. His mother, Clarnell Strandberg, worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he moved into her duplex in Aptos.

On May 7, 1972, Kemper took Fresno State students Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Mary Luchessa, both 18, to a remote spot and stabbed them to death. He picked up Aiko Koo, 15, a dance student who had missed her bus, on September 14, 1972, and strangled her. On January 7, 1973, he shot Cindy Schall, 18, of Cabrillo College. He picked up Rosalind Thorpe, 23, and Alice Liu, 20, on the UC Santa Cruz campus on February 5, 1973, and shot them both. He mutilated and decapitated the bodies.

On April 20, 1973, Kemper beat Clarnell Strandberg, 52, to death with a hammer while she slept and cut off her head. The next day he invited her friend Sara "Sally" Hallett, 59, to the apartment and strangled her. He left a note for police and drove east.

A manhunt failed to find him. On April 24, 1973, Kemper stopped at a payphone in Pueblo and called Santa Cruz police to confess. By several accounts, he had to call three times and ask for an officer he knew personally before he was believed. Television crews filmed that day at 609A Ord Street in Aptos, where the bodies of Clarnell Strandberg and Sally Hallett were found. Kemper was arraigned in Santa Cruz on April 30, 1973, indicted on eight counts of first-degree murder and twice tried to kill himself while awaiting trial.

Kemper pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but court-appointed psychiatrists found him sane. After about five hours of deliberation, the jury found him legally sane and guilty on all eight counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison the following day and has since been held at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.

Kemper became eligible for parole in 1979 and was refused in 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982. From June 1985, he repeatedly waived hearings or was refused, most recently before 2024 in 2017. A three-member panel denied him parole again on July 9, 2024. Kemper, then 75 and in a wheelchair, refused to attend and had met his lawyer once. District attorney Jeff Rosell told the panel, "Ed Kemper is still dangerous. He remains a high risk" and "he is untreated." An April 2024 evaluation rated Kemper at high risk to reoffend, and the panel cited a 2022 incident in which he grabbed a member of prison staff. His next hearing is due in 2031.

The recording is not a police interview. It is the Kemper segment of Murder: No Apparent Motive, a one-hour HBO documentary produced and directed by Imre Horvath, a former CBS 60 Minutes producer, that premiered on April 24, 1984, as the first film in HBO's America Undercover strand. Horvath wrote to Kemper for three months before Kemper agreed to be filmed, and Horvath, the bearded man across the table, asks the questions. The archived copy runs 22 minutes 21 seconds and carries the film's caption, "EDMUND KEMPER, Convicted Murderer." The Cinema Guild holds the copyright. The year in the uploader's file name is the film's year, not a filming date; when the interview was shot was not established.