Transcription
Well, I'm not an expert. I'm not an authority. I'm someone who has been a murderer for almost 20 years. Can you say how many people might be doing crimes like you were doing? It would be a guess, but it's far more than 35. It isn't that impossible in this society; it happens. Are there more people? They didn't give up. How? He, she didn't give up. I did. I came in out of the cold.
What I'm saying is there are some people who prefer it in the cold. Good people say, "A nice guy." Did you like Keer? I like camper. You were able to appear like an ordinary person, non-threatening. I lived as an ordinary person most of my life, even though I was living a parallel and increasingly sick life.
One victim let me back in the car. I locked myself out. She opened the door for me. My gun was under the seat. What in the hell am I doing telling you that? Am I looking? Am I a masochist? Am I looking to be tormented further? I'm trying to show you just how awful this got, how commanding these rages got. I was raging inside. There was just incredible energy, positive and negative, depending on a mood that would trigger one or the other.
Outside, I looked troubled at times, other times I looked moody, and other times perfectly serene. Not very sane, but again, people weren't even aware of what was happening. In 1972 and 1973, a series of murders shocked Northern California. College girls began to disappear while hitchhiking. Two of the victims were picked up from the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. That's where Ed Ker's mother was working as an administrative assistant.
You were involved in the campus because your mother worked there? Yes, I was also involved in killing co-eds because my mother was associated with college work, college co-eds, women, and had a very strong and violently outspoken position on men for much of my upbringing. My mother was a sick, angry, hungry, and very sad woman. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother.
I watched the alcohol increase. I watched her social life drop off. I watched her get bizarre. She had terrible pain from her earlier life, her upbringing, a failed marriage with my father. I'm a constant reminder of that failure. I hate to distill it down into such one-word reality. There's a lot that leads into that happening, but that is what happened. They represented not what my mother was, but what she liked, what she coveted, what was important to her, and I was destroying it.
Why did you actually kill the girls? My frustration, my inability to communicate socially, sexually. I wasn't impotent, but emotionally I was impotent. I was scared to death of failing in male-female relationships. I knew absolutely nothing about that whole area. Even if just sitting down and talking with a young lady, I needed to be able to really communicate.
Ironically enough, that's why I began picking people up. I'm picking up young women, and I'm going a little bit farther each time. It's a daring kind of a thing. At first, there wasn't a gun. I'm driving along, we go to a vulnerable place where there aren't people watching, where I could act out, and I say, "No, I can't." Then a gun is in the car, hidden.
This craving, this awful, raging, eating feeling inside, I could feel it consuming my insides. This fantastic passion, it was overwhelming me. It was like drugs; it was like alcohol. A little isn't enough. At first, it is, and as you adjust to that psychologically and physically, you take more and more and more. It's the same process.
So it finally came down to the thing of, do I dare bring this gun out? Already realizing if that gun comes out, something has to happen. It was going to happen. I didn't see it then, but it was going to happen. I was playing a dangerous game with a loaded gun.
On one occasion, Keer picked up two roommates in Berkeley in their first killing in May of '72. When that gun was pulled out, I launched it out. I had it under my leg, out of sight, parallel to my leg in the seat. It was something that had been thought out in fantasy, acted out, felt out hundreds of times before it ever happened.
Keer drove them at gunpoint to a secluded area near a park. He took one of them into the woods, leaving the second girl tied in the car. I just gone through a horrible experience with her roommate, stabbing her, and I was in shock because of that. I couldn't believe that it was that way, and I'm walking back there bewildered.
I got to kill her. I can't let her go. She's going to tell on me. Everybody's going to get me. She sees the blood on my hands. What are you doing? She pulled back and gasped, and I think, "Whoa, I don't want her to know what happened." I said, "Your friend got smart with me." She'd been getting really smart with me a lot, but I never hit her. I killed her, but I didn't hit her.
I said, "Your friend got smart with me, and I hit her. I think I broke her nose. You better come help; she's about to die." Why does she have to know that? I couldn't deal with telling her that. When I attacked her, she didn't at first realize what was happening. It didn't go through. She had very heavy coveralls on. It knocked her right up into the lid of the car, but it didn't pierce the clothing.
So wasn't that swell? A knife? Anyway, I went out and bought a pawn shop huge knife, and I kept on it, just mindlessly attacking. She falls back into the trunk. I just killed a young woman. I slammed down the lid of the trunk. She isn't dead; she's dying, and I panicked. I thought I just locked the car keys in because I can't find them in my pocket.
Oh my God, I locked them in the trunk. I'm kicking on the trunk lid and yanking on it. Oh no, I don't believe this. I started to run, and I tripped over the gun that I had in my pants that I had totally forgotten was there. I stopped. I said, "Stop and think." I collected my wits. Check all your pockets. I picked the gun up. I stuck it back in my pants, now remembering I had one.
I checked all my pockets, and there's the keys in the back pocket. I never put them in my back pocket. Everyone makes mistakes, and that's what we have to hope for. The more mistakes they make, the better their chances. I thought I was pretty slick and went and stripped all over myself.
That first two murders, the first 24 hours, there were three clear times I should have been busted, and I wasn't because three different individuals or three different groups of people got scared and minded their own business and looked the other way. Some of the people who are committing murders, even as we speak, if they're doing it by themselves and they tell no one about it, they could go on undetected until they decided to stop.
The police wouldn't catch them unless we just happened to roll up on them while they were doing it. Even after police warnings against hitchhiking and an increased bus schedule on the campus, Keer had no trouble picking up hitchhikers. Ironically, one warning advised riding only in cars with University stickers. Ker's car had such a sticker.
My mother worked at the campus, and I had a sticker on my car and obvious access day or night to the campus. I was picking up some very lovely young women. You know what we were talking about as we were driving around? Almost as often as not, this guy that's going around doing this stuff. The second they started talking, they didn't realize it, but they were getting a free ride.
I couldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole, I swear. But they'd be telling me all about this guy, comparing notes, and speculating on what he looks like, how he carries himself, why he's doing this stuff, telling me about it. So how come they get in a car with somebody? At that time, she judged me not to be that guy.
I didn't look like it. It was getting easier to do. I was getting better at it. I was getting less detectable. I started flaunting that invisibility, severing a human head, two of them at night in front of my mother's residence with her at home, my neighbors at home upstairs, their picture window open, the curtains open, 11:00 at night, the lights are on. All they have to do is walk by, look out, and I've had it.
Why did you keep the heads? Why'd you cut them off, and why did you keep them? Something out of my childhood. I could put it on an incident. I mean, my father chopping the heads off of our two pet chickens and my mother insisting that I eat them for dinner. You know, we could say it was something that simple. I don't think it was.
Now my dad heads out back with a hatchet. I got on my bike and rode. I tried to stop it. I remember that I got on the bike, rode around the block. I was crying. I haven't talked about that for a lot of years. I'm sure that may have implemented something that may have gotten something rolling, but along fantasy lines.
But it took a lot of years of development along those lines to really get off. But how are you able to, in one minute, have someone's head in your hand, and very shortly thereafter, living through a fantasy, however that would relate to that severed head? Then five minutes later, I'd put that away, and there'd be a knock on the door, and I'd put it away and answer the door, and the landlady would be there, and we discuss it.
Discuss what? Reality? Her reality, not mine. Some people go crazy at that point. I felt it. It was one hell of a tweak. I mean, to just flip out and not know where I was, to be walking up the stairs with a camera bag that belonged to a young woman that had her severed head in it, walking up to my apartment, passed a happy young couple coming down the stairs who nodded and smiled at me as they went by.
Good evening, and they're going out on a date where I'd love to be going. I'm aware of both of these realities, and the distance between those two was so dramatic, so amazing, so violent that really I could feel the wheel squeaking inside that was really pulling on it. I imagine at that point some people break, but I didn't literally go insane.
I didn't get lost. All this time, Keer was able to seem normal. He even hung out at a bar across the street from the courthouse, making friends with policemen, trying to pick up information. They'd buy me a beer; I'd buy them a beer. Casual relationships, but that was I was poking around a little bit, trying to find some things out.
I knew they wouldn't be privy to hot information, but there were some things that were bothering me, like were there any speculations on how they were dying? Did the cops like you? Like I said, a friendly nuisance. I got in the way, and it was deliberate. Again, friendly nuisances are dismissed.
How did you get the knowledge to outsmart the police? Watching television, Believe It or Not, Joseph Woma, police story, got some tremendous insights into it. Not just the gimmicks, the actual things, the tidbits that he would pick up from their procedures, but the mechanics behind that, the logic behind it. I would not allow myself to walk into even a potential trap of behavior, and one of those was talking about those crimes too much to people.
Initiating conversations about that. There was a memorial service for two of the victims. Yes, were you tempted to go? Yes, but I had seen one too many episodes of one too many crime shows where that is one of the available resources for clues, tracking down the attenders. Take one man taking pictures of the people there to eliminate as potential suspects.
Some police department now, they actually came to your house to pick up a handgun. Sheriff's representatives, one of the detectives was upset because he heard I had a .44 Magnum pistol and was a convicted. He came to take the gun away, and it was on. He and his sergeant detective, they were staking out the wrong house. It was across the street, and I'm playing around with a car, standing next to the gun in the trunk.
They come over and ask me about, "Excuse me, sir, do you know who lives in this house across the street here?" Well, that house was 609 Harriet. He crossed back over to this side, and 609, and they were looking for me and didn't even know that. See what I mean? Bad news.
Well, at any rate, we walk in the house to have them ask my mother about this other house, and I'm saying, "Hey, which 609 are you looking for?" They said, "Are you at Kamper?" Yes, and it goes on. I needed to find out what they were looking for, the murder weapon, the .22 automatic or the .44 Magnum, and I didn't want to advertise that I've got a whole bunch of guns.
So I made a comment to divine between the two, and I said, "Yes, quite a little gun, isn't it?" He retorted, ".44 Magnum, I hope so." I said, "Okay," because that loaded .22 was under the front seat and guaranteed me an arrest right on the spot, and the .44 was in the trunk. I forgot that.
I took him in the house. We went into my bedroom, and the closet doors were open, and I have a high-powered rifle with a scope on it. You had some other stuff in the house too? Yes, I had the personal effects and identification of the last two co-eds that had been murdered about two months before, right next to the guns in the closet in a box.
Could he have seen it? No, but when he arrested me for having all those guns and went through the rest of the closet looking to see if there were any pistols or anything else, he wouldn't have been able to help but notice a purse, a book bag, and co-ed ID inside of those belonging to their two latest murder victims.
I'd back up and said, "Oh, excuse me, I just remembered so," and instantly he responds to what I'm saying. My hand moves back. We go outside, and you're still thinking, "Boy, this is a really nice and helpful guy here." Some of these people do what you and I do to become better killers; they practice their trade.
Didn't Keer stop himself? Toward the end of his career, Keer says he did. He says he could have gone on. He said he had fantasies of killing dozens more people, of leaving a trail of bodies across the country, and at one point just got on a telephone and turned himself in. He said it was time for the killing to stop.
In his case, he said publicly that it was his mother that he was killing all along, and when he killed his mother, that was the end. It's a very deep psychological observation from himself. It may be very accurate. It was springtime. It was April. For two months, I hadn't killed, and I said it's not going to happen to any more girls.
It's got to stay between me and my mother, and I can't get away from her. We're still fighting. She's still belittling me. I'm like a puppet on a string, and I entertain her. She knows all my buttons, and I dance like a puppet with that pain. It had even gotten physical to where I had physically grabbed her and thrown her onto her bed, trying to emphasize a point that she's threatening to kill her.
So here I pick up these two young ladies in Berkeley on Ashby Avenue. One has flowers in her hand, pretty little dolls. They're in granny dresses, and they're hitchhiking. A couple of real experts. I want to see how together I am, if I can resist this temptation. "You going to Walnut Creek?" Great. They get in my car. They want to go one way. I know they need to go the other.
If they go the way they're insisting on, we're headed right back out to where the first two co-eds were murdered. I'm saying to myself, "Oh my God, all I got to do is relax, and they'll take me to their death." I've got the gun in the car, the same one I've been doing it with. I insisted, as gently as I could, I took them where they needed to go, to their college.
That was one week before I murdered my mother. I said she's got to die, and I've got to die, or girls like that are going to die. That's when I decided I'm going to murder my mother. I knew a week before she died I was going to kill her. She went out to a party, she got SED, she came home, went to sleep. I was woken up by that.
I came out, I walked up to her bed. She's laying there reading a paper as many thousands of nights before, and she said, "Oh, I suppose you're going to want to sit up all night and talk now." I looked at her. I said, "No, I said good night," and I knew I was going to kill her. You know, and I was so cold and so hard.
That's the first time in 10 years I've looked at it that way, I mean that intensely, that honestly. It hurts because I'm not a lizard, not from under a rock. I came out of her vagina. See, I came out of my mother, and in a rage, I went right back in. For seven years, she said, "I haven't had sex with a man because of you, my murderous son," is one of our arguments.
I cut off her head, and I humiliated her corpse. I said, "There you go." A young woman dead because of the way she raises her son and the way her son is raised, the way he grows up. And what's her closing words? "I suppose you want to sit up all night and talk."
God, I wish I had. Your grandmother and her daughter-in-law, your mother, were two women very important in your life, and you killed them both. Could you say what they were like that led them to the same fate? Same thing that kept them from ever being friends. They were both aggressive, matriarchal women. They'd been the daughters of strong matriarchal women.
I still loved my mother, and it's hard for somebody to comprehend that you murder your mother through love. It isn't a rational process; it's a very painful process. It isn't rational, and I've got to still live with that. Why did you wind up giving yourself up? It had to stop. It had to stop.
Once my mother was dead, there was almost a cathartic process at that point. I got physically ill right then when she died, when I murdered her. Once she was dead, there was no way I could back out. I had backed down from giving up a thousand times. You know, I used to get drunk and go sit out in front of the sheriff's department in a parking lot across the street on one of those little concrete parking BMS, and I just sit there and say, "No, I still can't."
The clanging doors, I can still hear them. No, because it'll never open again. You know, so I rationalized that to give up would be insane. To give up would be crazy. I'd be giving away my freedom, and I don't need to. But I look back on that and wish I had earlier. When I was saying those things to myself, the people who were later dead wouldn't be.
The regret that came later would not have to be those people, not things. Those people would still be with their families, with their loved ones. They would have their own families if I had had the courage to make that decision instead of painting myself into the corner. Where might you be if you'd never given an end to the impulse to murder? Where might I be if my parole had been successful?
I believe I'd be married. I'd have children. I'd be heading toward my first grandchildren.