64–1973, Edmund Kemper terrorized California as the Co-Ed Killer.
Abused and neglected as a child, including imprisonment by his mother in a rat-infested basement, he would go on to commit grisly murders.
At age 15, he killed his grandparents. That landed him in a state hospital for the criminally insane.
Kemper was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia yet had an IQ of 145.
He grew to be unusually tall — 6 feet 9 inches.
By age 21, he convinced prison officials that his psychiatric episodes were over, and he was released into the general public.
Then began his serial murders of college women in the area of Santa Cruz, California.
His crimes included murder, rape, dismemberment, and even necrophilia. Authorities couldn’t apprehend him.
Kemper’s reign of terror ended after he killed his own mother and then turned himself in to the police.
A jury found him guilty, and Kemper requested the death penalty. But California had stopped capital punishment, so he was sentenced to life in prison at Vacaville.
Over the decades, Kemper has influenced numerous fictional characters including Buffalo Bill, the serial killer in the novel The Silence of the Lambs.
A nonprofit group called Volunteers of Vacaville created the Blind Project in 1960. As the names suggest, volunteers offer assistance to the blind.
They work in concert with the California Department of Corrections. Many of the volunteers are inmates.
The aims are to help people with sight impairments and rehabilitate the incarcerated.
Among the Blind Project services is narration of audiobooks.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Edmund Kemper recorded 17 audiobooks on tape and CD, all while in prison.
Each recording was professionally produced and edited, yet none of them are available to the general public. The audiobooks were for sight-impaired people only.
Kemper’s narration was considered quite good.
The titles he read include Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews, Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon, The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett, Dune, Book 4: God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert, and most famous of all, Star Wars by George Lucas.
Kemper is now in his early 70s and is still incarcerated at Vacaville.
But due to public clamor, he is no longer permitted to narrate audiobooks.
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