Reverend Scott

In 1973, college girls in Santa Cruz would get into a stranger's car and spend the ride guessing what the killer looked like. The driver was the killer. His name was Ed Kemper. Students had been warned to accept rides only from cars with a university sticker. His mother worked at UC Santa Cruz, so he had one. He was 6 foot 9, and his IQ had tested at 145. At 15 he shot and killed his grandparents. He was released at 21, against the advice of the hospital's psychiatrists, and in November 1972 his juvenile record was erased. By then he had already killed three times. The day after he killed a 15-year-old girl named Aiko Koo, he sat in front of a panel of psychiatrists for a parole check. They found no reason to consider him dangerous. He had wanted to be a cop, but he was rejected for being too tall. So he drank with cops instead, at a bar across the street from the courthouse, and asked them how the investigation was going. Kemper says a detective once came to his house to take away a gun he wasn't supposed to have. The loaded .22 he had used in the murders was under the front seat of his car. A purse, a book bag and the IDs of his last two victims were in a box in his bedroom closet. The detective left thinking he was a nice, helpful guy. In the video below, recorded in prison in 1984, Kemper tells these stories himself. In April 1973 he killed his mother and her best friend, then called the Santa Cruz police from a phone booth in Colorado to confess. They thought it was a joke and told him to call back later. He asked for death by torture and got life instead. He is 77 now and was denied parole again in 2024. Psychiatrists, cops and the girls in his passenger seat all looked at him and saw nothing. Who was supposed to stop him?