Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Killed His Own Mother - The Edmund Kemper Story

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

Edmund Kemper was a highly intelligent but profoundly disturbed killer whose violence grew out of years of psychological abuse and deep resentment toward his mother. After murdering his grandparents at fifteen and spending five years in a state psychiatric hospital, he was released as a “rehabilitated” young man and returned to Santa Cruz, where he began targeting female college students in 1972. Over the next year, he abducted and murdered six young women, carefully manipulating police and projecting the image of a polite, trustworthy giant

So this guy cut off his mom's head and he threw darts at it. Now, the guy's name is Edmund, and Edmund is 15 when all this starts, and he's living on a ranch in the middle of California. Now, Edmund, he has a lot of issues, like mentally. But his biggest issue is that he really, really hates his mom. His mom has been especially cruel and hateful to him all his life. And that's partly why he doesn't live with her. He actually lives on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, California,

with his grandparents. And one day in 1964, he's chilling in his grandparents' kitchen with his grandma. And something happens between them, and he starts arguing with her. And this argument gets heated, like really heated. And suddenly, he starts to see his grandma the same way he saw his mom, as someone who was trying to control him. And he isn't about to let that happen. So he goes, and he grabs his rifle and blam, blam, blam, blam,

he shoots his grandma. Then he grabs a knife and he stabs her, making sure that she's dead. But now, Edmund has another problem. His grandpa is just now getting home and he's pulling up into the driveway. And Edmund, he doesn't want his grandpa to see his grandma dead. So he goes outside with his rifle and blam, blam, he shoots his grandpa too, right there in the driveway.

Then, for some reason, Edmund decides to call up his mom, who he hates. But he calls her up and he's like, Mom, I killed Grandma and Grandpa. And his mom tells him to call police and turn himself in. And he does. And so, bam, he gets arrested. Here's his mugshot at 15 years old. And from here, the court-ordered psychiatrists deem him as mentally unwell, so they send him away to a psychiatric hospital where they normally house mentally ill convicts. Here's the thing about Edmund, though. He's a super smart kid. He's got like a genius level IQ and he's very manipulative. And he doesn't want to stay locked up in this psych hospital forever. So he comes up with a plan to get out by manipulating the doctors and staff and making them

believe that he's totally cured. So he memorizes all these psychological tests that he's supposed to take so that he does well on all of them. He also learns all the right things to say to the doctors and staff so that he no longer seems like a threat to society. And he does this for a long time, like he's playing the long game. And six years go by. And he's 21 now. And by this point, his plan has worked. The state actually believes that he's no longer a threat and he's released from the psych hospital. They also expunge his record for some reason, which means that now no one can find out that he killed his own grandparents. So now he's a free man. and he can start his life over with a clean slate.

So from here, Edmund goes to live with his mom in Santa Cruz. His mom who he still hates. But whatever, it's a place to live. And this sucks for him, because he's at home all the time with his mom, and that's not going so well, of course, because she's still awful to him. She's constantly putting him down, telling him that he'll never amount to anything in life,

and that no woman will ever want him. And to his credit, he does try to get his life together, you know, like find a job and integrate, into society, but he's having kind of a tough time. Like he applies to be a state trooper, but he gets rejected from the program because he's too big. I guess there are height limitations and Edmund is 6 foot 9 and he weighs 300 pounds. So he's way too tall to be a highway patrolman. Then eventually he moves out and he finally does find a job. But then he gets hit by a car and he injures his arm badly. So now he can't work. Just things don't

seemed to be going well for this guy. So one day in 1972, he gets the urge to commit murder again. And so he gets in his car and he drives around and he ends up picking up two college girls who are hitchhiking. I guess he picks up hitchhikers all the time. It's like sort of a quirky hobby of his, like a way to meet new people, I guess. And so he picks up these two women. And instead of bringing them to their destination, he takes them to a secluded area and he handcuffs them. And he throws one of the women in the trunk of the car. The other woman, he forces her into the woods and he stabs her. Then he goes back to the car, he opens up the trunk, and he stabs the other woman, and this kills both women. Then he takes both bodies back to his apartment, and he, and this is really gross,

but he smashes with them. Then he dumps the bodies in the mountains near Santa Cruz. And this whole experience actually feels good to him, like almost therapeutic, because it makes him feel better after getting berated by his own mom. So he decides that from now on, whenever he gets into an argument with his mom and she's belittling him and whatnot, he's going to go hunting for more female victims to murder. So basically, he's taking his mom issues out on these poor victims. And so several months pass, and he goes out driving again, and he picks up another female hitchhiker, and he stabs her to death. A few months after that, he picks up another one.

But this time, blam, he shoots her with a pistol. Then he buries her head in his mother's garden. Five months later, he picks up two more college students, and then later, blam, blam, he shoots them both in his car. Then he takes them back to his mother's house while she isn't at home, and he smashes with them. Then he dumps their bodies in a local canyon. Two months after that, he's at his mom's house one night.

And I don't know if he's living back there at this point or if he's just hanging out there, but he's there and he's actually asleep. Then his mom comes home and she's drunk. Like she was out at a party and her coming home actually wakes him up. And at some point, his mom lays in her bed and she starts reading a book. And Edmund goes into her room. And because she's always kind of a jerk to him, she says, I suppose you're going to want to sit up all night and talk now.

And Edmund's just like, no, good night. But apparently it's around this time that he realizes that she is the source of his problems, that he gets violent with all these women because he hates her. And he decides that maybe it's time to take care of this problem once and for all. And so he waits until she falls asleep. Then he grabs a hammer and he sneaks back into her room, and while she's still sleeping, boom, he hits her with that hammer. Then he decapitates her, and he places her head on a shelf in his room.

Then he screams at her for like an hour basically telling her all the things he's always wanted to say to her now that she can't argue back. And the guy even throws darts at her head. Anyway, a bit later, he calls up one of his mother's friends, and he invites her to her over to have dinner. But when she arrives, boom, he strangles her and he unalives her too. Then he steals her car and he just drives for hours from California all the way over to Colorado. And what he realizes at some point along the way is that once he killed his mom, his desire to murder actually stops. And that is when he starts feeling guilty. So he pulls over and he finds

a pay phone and he calls police and he confesses to being a serial killer. He confesses to murdering 10 people total, which he did. And so, bam, police arrest him. Here's his mugshot. And so Edmund goes to trial and he's ultimately found guilty for eight murders and he's sentenced to life in prison. And he's actually still alive, by the way. Here's what he looks like now.