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A day with Ed Kemper…

“A Day With Ed Kemper” (Part 1)

May 1980

Over the course of 10 hours, on an otherwise sunny Northern California day, I shot 10 rolls of Tri-X & 5 rolls of Kodachrome focused on the prison life of convicted serial killer, Ed Kemper. 

Even though I had worked very happily with Leonard Wolf, both as grad student and professional collaborator, I was not enthusiastic about this project and I had made my objections known to Leonard.

The gruesome character of Kemper’s ten murders certify him as deeply disturbed, by any human standard, yet Kemp’s intense mental acuity, masked evidence of psychosis, if he didn’t come pre-packaged with a scrap-book of victims, I don’t know that I would have sorted him out as a potential killer. That was the most frightening element of the day spent shadowing his life. When I was with him, he looked nothing like a killer on the hunt, I wouldn’t have seen it, had I not already known the man he was, by knowing what he had done.

The nature of this assignment required that I’d do more than show up without doing homework. Weeks before our day trip to Vacaville, I spent hours in the library at San Francisco State, pulling together the information that, now,  you could find in 2 minutes on the internet. For homework, I read all of the jaw-droopingly shocking quotes, of a thoughtful, reflective, and articulate man who became a monster.  

Having seen more than enough horror in my life, none of what I learned attracted me to the project.  When I drive by an auto accident, I look only long enough to make sure that there’s someone at the scene taking care of the victims.  Once I see that there is, I turn away. I have no fascination with the gruesome or grotesque. Add to that the fact that I grew up in the Santa Cruz mountains, where Kemper stalked and killed his victims, I was turned off to the idea of being in the same space with this person.

Several times I thought that Leonard Wolf doubted that I had the proper open mind-set, to accomplish his mission, until finally, we had a conversation where he spoke about the psychological perversity of Kemper’s childhood, and about his life in virtual isolation — never as a way to attempt to excuse Kemper’s inexcusable acts rather as a way to attempt to understand them.  This was bridging a chasm.

That conversation, more than anything else, brought me around to the challenge to tell a dark and complex story in images. I set out to construct a bridge between the monster and the man. Thus began my constant quasi-desperate search to unearth Ed Kemper’s  humanity, without becoming an apologist for acts of inhumanity.

I would attempt to see Edmund Kemper, the human being and not try to characterize him as one of the most notorious, violent, terrifying serial killers of my lifetime.  We’ll see…jt

A day with Ed Kemper

Since I started going over photographs and gathering recollections, I’ve thought about Ed Kemper more in the last few weeks than I have in the past 30 years.

Finally after reflecting on our personal interaction and reviewing field notes and photographs to spark my memory. I was sufficiently comfortable with the authenticity of my recollections, to watch YouTube videos on Kemper, for the first time — Including one entitled “Born to Kill,” which was a digest of the terrors of his adolescent life (“Kemper grew taller, stronger and stranger…”) and the horrors of his crimes augmented only by interviews with the Santa Cruz police officers who knew Kemper both before and after they arrested him (“Ed seemed like a #gentlegiant…”).  I knew all those things and too much more before I met Kemp.

The sickening reports of Kemper’s horrifying crimes from the daily papers as they were revealed, A witness to the terror of his horrific acts. I lived in the area.  Those were the things that I had to work through, before I agreed to go into a prison to meet Edmund Kemper. If that was all there was to Kemper, I knew too much already. I didn’t need to be in the same room with him to know disturbing facts about a disturbed person, who had inflicted so much pain on so many people, for… barely comprehensible reasons.

Neither did I intend to enter Kemper’s prison life to take a case-history in order to psychoanalyze him. There wasn’t going to be enough time to attempt that — plus, even back then, too many amateurs had already published reams of pop-psychological articles on multiple-murderers — and I was with Leonard Wolf, a man who had spent months developing a genuine relationship with Edmund Kemper while doing a serious, thoughtful analysis, as he peeled the onion of Kemper’s tortured life and twisted heart. I was aware of that work; I was exposed to Leonard’s incites that’s what enabled me to accept the assignment.

I no longer cared that Kemper created multiple personalities, like "horcruxes”, to protect himself from a morbid obsession with mortality propelled by inadequacy at his core.  I was past that. I just wanted to hang out with Kemper and let him tell me what I should think of what he had made, from that person.   That  was the question: What — if anything worthwhile — could an intelligent person make of the incomparable wreckage of such a horrifying life?

It wasn’t take long before I got what must pass for the first answer.

As I mounted my Nikon on the tripod, I asked a question: “Kemp, we waited for an hour while you were with that German film crew. How does it make you feel that people come from all over to interview you?   Kemper’s words are burned into my memory — “How do you think you’d feel, if people came from all over the world to speak with you and all they EVER wanted to talk about was the 10 worst things you EVER did in your life.”

-Merry Christmas Tumblr

The Charming Side of Ed Kemper

Since so many people are interested in Kemp, here’s our portrait showing the charming side of Ed Kemper. As I’ve written in other places, I never had the experience  of any other side, yet, the history of those gruesome facts is undeniably there — never far from the surface of memory. Kemp’s crimes are too starkly abominable to go away… ever.

That was the fascinating element of engaging with Ed Kemper, his intelligence and his open and honest nature, is a constant exploration of what it is for a polite, bright and seemingly civilized man to contain not only that explicitly bad past, but the rage that created it.