SANTA CRUZ — A state panel on Tuesday denied parole to convicted murderer Edmund Emil Kemper III, classified as one of Santa Cruz County’s notorious serial killers of the 1970s.
Edmund Emil Kemper towered over detectives Dom Smythe, left, and Terry Medina, right, as he was taken into court for arraignment in April 1973. Kemper was conflicted of killing eight women from 1964 to 1973, including his mother, Clarnell Strandberg.
Formerly of Aptos, Kemper, 75, is eligible for his next parole suitability hearing in seven years. Having been convicted and sentenced in the deaths of eight women, including six college coeds, his mother and her friend in less than a year, Kemper is currently serving his sentence at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Kemper also had earlier spent time in the Atascadero mental hospital after killing his grandparents at age 15. At the end of his later year-long killing spree between 1972 and 1973, during which Kemper killed, decapitated and dismembered his victims, he reportedly called the Santa Cruz Police Department from Colorado to confess and beg them to stop him.
Before his arrest in Colorado, the son of a UC Santa Cruz administrative assistant would regularly hang out at the Jury Room bar, then a popular hangout for local police on their off hours.
Kemper, as a serial killer in Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, was in good company. Fellow convicted killers included mass murderer John Lindley Frazier, who killed a family of four and their secretary, and Herbert Mullin, who was convicted of killing 11 people that he testified was an effort to prevent a catastrophic earthquake on the San Andreas Fault.
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Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell, who attended Tuesday’s hearing via a remote Zoom connection, said Kemper did not show up for his own hearing this week. Kemper’s last unsuccessful bid for parole before the Board of Parole Hearings took place Feb. 21, 2017. Kemper was similarly denied during at least eight past parole hearings, as listed on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website.
Rosell said he wrote and submitted a letter urging the board to keep Kemper imprisoned.
“We made the argument that he is essentially untreated for all these years,” Rosell said. “That in terms of serial killers, he is one of the most depraved in the country.”
