Ed Kemper Case Analysis | Mental Health & Personality Factors

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can take a look at the mental health and personality characteristics of Edmund Kemper Edie Kemper was referred to by the media as the co-ed killer he's a well known serial killer he was mostly active in 1972 and 1973 now ed Kemper is a real person so just a reminder I'm not diagnosing anybody here not him or anyone else involved in this case only speculating about what could be happening in a case like this so the ED Kemper case is kind of interesting because the popular Mental Health Professions counseling Social Work psychology psychiatry look at EDC attica orientations so those practitioners who have a psychodynamic orientation so they use the modality that was originally based on the work of Sigmund Freud they tend to look at the Edmund Kemper case as being a case that involves the relationship between a killer and his mother but that relationship was really central to what he did now individuals who use other theoretical modalities like cognitive behavioral therapy may look at this case a little differently so I'm a counselor and I tend to like cognitive behavioral therapy but I understand psychodynamic therapy fairly well so my conceptualization borrows from both schools of thought I'll go through the timeline of this case and then take a look at the mental health and personality factors that may have been at work so some of the information here comes from interviews of Kemper and he is someone who lied quite a bit so that's important to keep in mind some of his accounts of events have been disputed in 1948 we see that Ed Kemper was born in Burbank California his parents separated when he was about one year old his mother moved to Montana with Kemper and his two sisters in 1957 when he was 9 years old the mother remarried a year and a half later the second husband left her she remarried again two years later Kepler's mother was particularly harsh and cruel he was severely punished he was locked in a cellar she was often intoxicated she would ridicule him and berate him telling him that no woman would ever love him and calling him names at about age 10 Kemper killed and then decapitated the family cat and the entertained thoughts at that same time of killing family members specifically an older sister he would follow women down the street and fantasize about how they loved him and would never reject him when he was 13 he killed another family cat and this cat appeared to favor his sister so that could have been one of the motives for that crime he had two life-threatening experiences when he was a child his older sister attempted to push him in front of a train so that's pretty scary and later on he almost drowned when she pushed him into the deep end of a swimming pool right so we're seeing kind of a pattern emerging here in terms of how Kemper was treated when Kemper was around 14 or 15 he ran away from his mother's home in Montana to his father's residence in California he was only they are short while before his father sent him to live with his paternal grandparents now we see different stories about this with different sources some of the sources say he was 15 when he ran away from home and some of the sources say that his father sent him back to his mother and the mother sent him to live with the paternal grandparents but either way we know that the paternal grandparents lived in California on an isolated ranch evidently the grandmother was just as cruel as the mother a year later in 1964 when Kemper was 15 years old he shot and killed his grandmother after a verbal argument and then he waited for his grandfather to return home from running an errand and murdered him as well after the murders were complete he called his mother and she told him to call the police and that's what he did he would later say to the police that he just wanted to see what it was like to kill his grandmother that was his motive for this crime and that he killed his grandfather so that his grandfather would be spared the pain of finding out that his wife was dead Kemper was convicted of homicide clinicians that evaluated him and treated him indicated that Kemper had paranoid schizophrenia he was sent to a maximum-security mental hospital at the hospital he was diagnosed with personality trait disturbance passive-aggressive type so this is less severe than paranoid schizophrenia the staff there did not believe that he had psychosis or disorganized thinking and those two symptoms are very common with schizophrenia while at this facility he had an IQ test scoring 136 later on he had another one and he scored 145 he was cooperative and helpful while at that facility even learning how to administer psychometric tests to other inmates he was released from this facility in 1969 on the day he turned 21 he returned to live with his mother although the clinicians that treated him advised against that she now lived in California and they didn't get along well at all she berated him for failing to reach a sufficient social level so she was unhappy with his status I find this peculiar for a couple of reasons she didn't seem to upset that Kemper killed her ex-husband's parents I mean that wasn't an issue for her she was more concerned with the social status and I think the other thing strikes me as odd here is what status was he supposed to have achieved he had been in a secure mental facility for the years prior to this so I'm not sure what he was supposed to do there I'm not sure what type of status want achieves in that setting that would impress her but either way I just find that kind of interesting while living with his mother he had hopes of being a police officer but Kemper was 6 foot 9 which was too tall for their requirements he still hung out with local police officers at a bar though they knew him well he would go there quite often now he worked several jobs and eventually ended up with the California Highway Department in 1971 and he moved out of his mother's apartment for a short time Kemper started picking up hitchhikers around this time allegedly picking up about 150 he would pick them up take them to where they want to go and drop them off unharmed then this behavior changed we see in May 1972 he picked up two 18 year old females who were hitchhiking he took them to a secluded area and he murdered both of them then in September 1972 he picks up a 15 year old female hitchhiker he murders her and leaves her body and the trunk of his car as he gets a few drinks the next day so the next day after this murder in September 1972 he was able to convince the mental health clinicians who were working on his case because he was on parole that he was not a danger to society just two months later in November of 1972 his juvenile criminal history was expunged so this was after he killed three people which of course they didn't know about but also to people his paternal grandparents who they did know about now moving to January 1973 he was back living with his mother at this time he killed another eighteen year old female and hid her body at his mother's house disposing of it the next day but he buried the victim's head in his mother's backyard February 1973 Kemper gets into an argument with his mother he leaves the house angry he picks up two female hitchhikers one was 20 and almost 23 he shot and killed both of them with a 22 caliber automatic pistol he decapitated them and brought their bodies back to his mother's house again disposing of the bodies the next day then we moved to April 1973 Kemper was at his mother's house when his mother came home at this time Kemper was 24 and his mother was 52 after she fell asleep Kemper attacked her with a hammer and a knife he decapitated her he screamed at her head for about an hour and threw darts at it he went out to get some drinks at a bar he came back and invited one of his mother's friends to come over this was a 59 year old female when she came over he strangled her and put her body in a closet in that house Kemper fled in a motor vehicle he was armed but then he stopped in Colorado and he called the police and attempted to confess to the murders but they didn't believe him so finally he asked for an officer that he believed would be distrustful would be suspicious of him and he confessed to that officer and eventually the police believed him the police were sent out and they arrested him in November of 1973 he was sentenced to seven years to life for each count to be served concurrently which technically made him eligible for parole at some point of future at the time of making this video Kemper is still in prison and evidently he's a model prisoner he has been denied parole several times and he has waived his right to several of his parole hearings so now moving to the mental health and personality factors we see in this case so taking a look at the five factor model I would say that Edie Kemper is high and openness to experience he was intellectually curious and had a lot of fantasies probably somewhere around mid range for conscientiousness low extraversion we see mid to low agreeableness and extremely low neuroticism just as is the case with many serial killers Edie Kemper had the ability to appear to have different personality traits on a short-term basis for example he could appear highly agreeable and sometimes he appeared to have high neuroticism now we see what the majority of his murders the ones that started in 1972 Kemper decapitated his victims and performed sexual acts with their decapitated bodies and their heads we see these same types of post-mortem activities with other serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer near the beginning of the video I talked about how this is a popular case for psychodynamic conceptualization and of course the main reason has to do with the role that the mother played in at campers life Edie Kemper's mother was reported to be incredibly abusive in so many ways there's been a lot of speculation that she may have had borderline personality or at least borderline traits this may or may not be the case but based on her behavior toward Kemper she would seem to have narcissistic and antisocial traits but no matter how one looks at this all of these disorders represent cluster B personality pathology interesting note here later when she worked at a college when Kemper and her lived in California her colleagues reported that she was easy to get along with so really again it's hard to know what's going on here because so much information about the mother came from Kemper but moving back to the clustered bee pathology the cluster B personality pathology is important for a few reasons but to really stand out for me reason one it would appear that Ed Kemper meets many of the criteria for antisocial personality disorder so perhaps there was a genetic component here reason to when looking at the mother son dynamic when the mother has cluster B personality pathology we see that often the son is unable to express negative emotions to the mother and unable to act out in a violent way to the mother the theory here would be that there was repressed anger toward the mother so anger that was pushed into the unconscious mind and this anger was displaced on to the victims so looking at this as a continuum we see it starts with expressing negative feelings toward the mother and moves over toward violence we see that when Kemper is young he has trouble even arguing with his mother he doesn't feel like it's safe to express emotions like sadness or anger so his anger is converted or again displaced unto the family pests now eventually we see the Kemper is able to express some negative emotions toward the mother but he really can't cope with it too well so he runs away to the father essentially he gets rejected again and we see that he takes this desire to harm his mother and displaces this on to the paternal grandparents after his released from custody from these crimes we see that Kemper and his mother get into a number of heated arguments but he's still unable to act in a violent way toward the mother he had a desire to do it but he couldn't do it and now we see he commits six murders directing his anger toward those victims but this really doesn't take care of the murderous rage during this time he grabs his mother and throws her onto the bed and threatens to kill her so again we see him moving from expressing negative emotions to threats and to violence eventually all of these safeguards are removed in his relationship with his mother he decides to kill her one week before he did so his murder was premeditated and then he follows through with his plan we see the rage during and after the murder screaming at the mother's head throwing darts at it he had all this anger built up he displaced that on to the murder victims but that didn't actually remove the rage rather it just delayed his expression of rage toward the mother so this is a really important point if displacement was truly going on in a complete sense the rage would be going even after Kemper kills his mother we see the kills one more victim he allegedly did this to create a narrative where his mother and the last victim would be on vacation so he did this to escape the consequences of his crime after this he contemplated continuing his murder spree so again we see that that rage really doesn't get resolved right even the homicide of his mother which is what he thought he was resisting didn't really change much with the rage another key feature that stands out with Kemper was his IQ when he was first tested in custody who is 136 later 145 I find this a little peculiar IQ test usually aren't given repeatedly right they're not used for like pretest and post-test you wouldn't see somebody come into a study or into a treatment facility and get an IQ test and then get another one three six months later or a year later or really ever again right so for him to be tested twice with an expensive instrument like this again I find this a little unusual it might have been that the staff was really impressed by the first score so they ordered another IQ test because they thought it was interesting or perhaps they thought that something was wrong with that first administration we also see evidence that he learned how to score some of the psychometric tests when he was incarcerated so it could have been that he memorized some of the items on the IQ test to boost his the second time around but either way assuming that the 136 was his actual IQ this is exceptionally high 2.4 standard deviations above the mean this puts him a little bit above the 99th percentile now we see some evidence of this intelligence in his attempts to cover up his crimes but at the same time we also see a lot of impulsivity and taking a number of unnecessary risks there were many opportunities where he could have been caught including the time he was pulled over for having a taillight out when he had dead bodies in the trunk we also see that the police came to confiscate one of his guns a 44 Magnum and they didn't know that he had a 22 caliber automatic that's the gun he used in the murder so if they had found that it seems fairly likely he would have been caught Kemper also manifested quite a bit of pro-social behavior in prison enough so that he was able to deceive the clinicians when he was younger and be labeled a model prisoner during his incarceration after his second arrest and convictions we see a lot of superficial charm and during the time when he was committing the murders we see he hung out and bar with police officers a number of those police officers and other people in the criminal justice system who interacted with him really liked him we see the Kemper said in an interview once that he came in out of the cold making it seem like he was aware that what he was doing was wrong that it was bad and he did the right thing by calling the police and confessing in addition we see that he waived his right to several parole hearings I mentioned that before I think this has led some people to believe that Kemper is safe to be released or at least he's been reformed a much better argument could be made that Kemper is still quite dangerous I'll go through the points that some people have brought up here there's this idea that because the relationship with the mother is over because of that murder that Kemper wouldn't hurt anyone else even though he committed a murder after that murder so the argument we hear is that the crisis was resolved right so again with the mother's homicide Kemper shouldn't go on to do anything wrong well there are two reasons why this isn't the case first a rage that deep doesn't get resolved with mother's murder if anything that would only increase the rage second personality traits are tendencies their tendencies we tend to see throughout the lifespan personality traits just don't change because of a particular event once they are set they're not really influenced too much by environmental factors in terms of the fact that he turned himself in he had just murdered his mother and a friend of hers again he was trying to set the story to make it look like they were on vacation so to make it look like he didn't commit a crime so he had a connection to the victims and he knew that he would be a suspect for those murders pepper knew that whether he turned himself in or not he was going to get caught so I don't think that really matters too much now in terms of the parole hearings Kemper is never going to be released from prison he knew he would never be released when he was sentenced so this idea that he's really reformed he's reformed murder who's trying to do the right thing by waiving his right to the parole hearings those hearings are simply academic no actual release from prison will ever occur because those hearings Kemper killed 10 people right so again no chance of parole I can't ever imagine that happening no matter how long he lives Kemper is one of the most famous serial killers probably because he's done so many interviews and he's helped people write books about him he's clearly quite intelligent and I think that helps him to be popular but I think his relationship with his mother is what really stands out from a mental health and personality perspective and I think that's why this case is really so interesting to analyze and why it's attracted so much attention in terms of case conceptualization so those are my thoughts on the ED Kemper case I know that whenever I talk about the mental health and personality characteristics of serial killers there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this analysis to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 367,090

Keywords: Edmund Kemper, Ed Kemper, co-ed killer, antisocial personality disorder, schizophrenia, psychodynamic, repression, displacement, defense mechanisms, FFM, big five, five-factor model, mental health, counseling

Id: cDbt3dYXYY8

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020