The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (40 page)

Back at Riverside police headquarters, the police arrested Suff on suspicion of multiple murders. They began questioning him. The interrogation lasted for hours and Suff repeatedly denied any involvement in the prostitution murders. The police knew they were going to need evidence to gain a conviction and without a confession their job became even harder. The police obtained blood and hair samples from Suff, though, which, when analysed, would be crucial to the prosecution case.

Microscopic samples of hair found at two murder scenes matched Suff’s own hairs, and fibres from a pillow, blanket and sleeping bag found inside Suff’s van were similar to those discovered near the bodies of Kim Lyttle and Christina Leal. In addition, a towel that had covered Lyttle’s naked body contained two fibres similar to the carpeting in Suff’s vehicle. Other fibres, which were found on Suff’s car seat, matched those of a T-shirt and sock found on Leal’s body.

On 28 February 1992, Suff was arraigned before Judge Becky Dugan in Division 22 of the Riverside Municipal Courthouse on two charges of murder relating to Kim Lyttle and Christina Leal. Suff entered a plea of not guilty. After hearing arguments from both sides, the judge ruled that there was enough evidence to send the case for trial, which began on 25 March 1995 before Judge W Charles Morgan in the Riverside Hall of Justice. A jury consisting of seven men and five women was sworn in to hear the case. After 54 days of testimony and four days of deliberations, the jury found Suff guilty on 12 of the 13 counts of first-degree
murder and one count of attempted murder. The jury also found Suff guilty of multiple murder, use of a deadly weapon and lying in wait. The following day, 17 August 1995, Suff was given the death sentence. Although convicted of 12 murders, police believe he may have been responsible for as many as 22.

William Suff is still on death row at San Quentin Prison, where he is awaiting execution. He continues to maintain his innocence and claims that police used him as a scapegoat. It has been rumoured that Suff used two of his victims’ breasts in chillis he prepared for the Riverside County employees’ annual picnic, but that information has never been confirmed.

Edmund Kemper was born in Burbank, California, in 1948. Kemper began displaying strange behaviour at an early age. He mutilated two of the family cats and was caught playing games with his sister that involved portraying death rituals. Following these incidents, he was sent to live with his father but later ran away back to his mother, who again sent him away, this time to live with his grandparents on a farm in California. The farm life, away from his family, was not good for him. He soon became bored, agitated, lonely and homesick.

However, the event that took place on 27 August 1964 when Kemper was still only 15 would change the rest of his life. On that day, he was with his grandparents on their farm. There was an argument with his 66-year-old grandmother. Kemper became so angry he picked up a rifle and went to shoot birds. When his grandmother told him off again, he turned and shot her instead. He shot her in the head and then shot her twice in the back. Still enraged, he also stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife in the back. But then he had to do something to hide his crime from his grandfather. He dragged her body into the bedroom. Then his 72-year-old grandfather drove up; Kemper heard his car outside. Kemper went to the window and made the decision to shoot his grandfather as well. As his grandfather got out of the car, Kemper
raised the rifle and shot him, then hid the body in the garage. Not knowing what to do next, he phoned his mother in Montana, who alerted the police. Kemper was then arrested and charged with his grandparents’ murders.

Not surprisingly, following the motiveless double murder Kemper was diagnosed with what was called ‘personality trait disturbance, passive aggressive type’. He was committed to the Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he remained until 1969. He was released against the objections of psychiatrists and placed into his mother’s custody in Santa Cruz. By this time, Kemper was 20 years of age and a giant of a man measuring 6ft 7in tall and weighing around 300lb. He also managed to have his juvenile records sealed, making it difficult for checks to be carried out on him in the future.

For the next two years, Kemper held down odd jobs and enjoyed cruising around. He also made a habit of picking up young female hitchhikers. Santa Cruz seemed to be just the place at that time for beautiful Californian students. Kemper, after missing out on his teens while in the mental hospital, took an interest in these young women and their willingness to accept rides. Working for the Highways Department allowed him freedom to cruise the highways. But more and more his thoughts turned to what he could do to the female students – he prepared to embark on his killing spree, placing plastic bags, knives, a blanket and handcuffs in the boot of his car.

On 7 May 1972, Kemper picked up two girls from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were hitchhiking. He took them to a secluded area where he stabbed them both to death and then took the bodies home to his mother’s house, where he dismembered them, playing with various organs and taking Polaroid pictures. He then packed their remains in plastic bags and buried the bodies in the Santa Cruz Mountains, throwing the heads into a deep ravine beside the road. When the girls failed to arrive at their destination, their families contacted the police. But runaways were all too frequent in those days and
the girls had left behind no clues as to where they had gone, so there was little the authorities could do. Then, on 15 August, the remains of a female head were recovered from an area in the mountains and identified as belonging to Pisce. No other remains were found, but it was assumed that both girls were dead.

On 14 September, Kemper picked up a 15-year-old
high-school
girl named Aiko Koo. He suffocated her and then raped her lifeless body. He took her body back home, just like the others, and dismembered her. The next morning, he was visited by a state psychiatrist who had come to monitor his mental health. All the time the meeting took place, Koo’s head lay in the boot of Kemper’s car outside. Once his meeting was finished, he then drove back to the mountains and buried the body.

Kemper then waited until 9 January 1973, when he picked up a student from Santa Cruz named Cindy Schall. He forced her into his boot and shot her before bringing her back to his mother’s again, having sex with her body, dismembering it, then placing the remains in a bag and throwing them off a cliff into the ocean at Carmel. He had thought of burying her head in his mother’s garden, facing up to her bedroom. He said that his mother liked people looking up to her, so he thought that might have been fitting.

Less than two days later, dismembered arms and legs were found on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Then an upper torso washed ashore, which was identified via lung X-rays as Schall’s. Eventually, a lower torso came in. A surfer also found Schall’s left hand, which offered fingerprints, but her head and right hand remained missing.

By now, the town of Santa Cruz was gripped with fear. The young students from the campus were warned not to accept lifts from people outside the safety of the campus. This did nothing to stop Kemper, who drove his mother’s car with her university campus ID sticker on the windscreen.

Less than a month after murdering Cindy Schall, Kemper picked two more women up, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Lui. He
picked up Rosalind first and her presence in the car apparently reassured Alice, who willingly got in. Lui sat in the back, right behind Thorpe. As they drove along, Kemper was moving his pistol from down below his leg into his lap. He picked it up and pulled the trigger. Thorpe fell against the window. Lui panicked, and he had to fire through her hands. She was moving around and he missed twice. He hit her in the temple, aimed again and fired, but she was still alive as he approached the university gate; she was breathing loudly and moaning. Two young men were on duty at the security gate, but when they saw Kemper’s university sticker, they waved him through. As before, he took the bodies home, where he dismembered them both. He disposed of the remains in Eden Canyon, near San Francisco.

On 4 March, hikers came across a human skull and jawbone not far from Highway 1 in San Mateo County. They were not from the same person. The police searched the area and found another skull that went with the jawbone, so they knew they had two victims who had been killed close together. They had reports of several missing female hitchhikers, so they compared what they had to the descriptions, and identified the remains of Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Lui. Lui had been shot twice in the head, Thorpe once. It was not long thereafter that the university decided to institute a bus system that would assist off-campus students to get safely to their classes.

By now, Kemper was controlled by his need to kill. That Easter, he realised what he had been wanting all along. That weekend, as his mother lay asleep in her bed, he attacked her, repeatedly beating her with a claw hammer until she was dead. He followed this by decapitating her and raping the headless corpse. He finished by removing her larynx and trying to feed it through the waste disposal unit. He then called a friend of his mother’s, Sally Hallett, inviting her to a surprise dinner for his mother. Once she arrived, he clubbed and strangled her, cutting off her head and leaving the body in his own bed while he slept in his mother’s.

On 23 April 1973, the Santa Cruz police received a call that they could not quite believe. It was from a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado, from Edmund Kemper. He told them that he had committed murder, in fact a double murder, four days previously. He also said that he had killed his mother on Good Friday and her friend a short time later. He told police both bodies were still in the house. He also confessed over the phone to six more murders and asked police to come and arrest him. But the officer who took the first call believed it was a hoax call and ignored it, suggesting that he call again later. Kemper did so, but once again had a difficult time convincing the person at the other end of the line to take him seriously. He continued to place calls until he was able to persuade an officer to check out his mother’s house. He said that an officer, Sergeant Aluffi, had been there not long before to confiscate the .44-calibre revolver he had purchased; Aluffi would know.

Sergeant Aluffi did indeed know, and went to the home himself. As he entered, he smelt the revolting odour of decomposition. When he opened a cupboard and saw blood and hair, he secured the scene and called in the coroner and detectives. To their amazement, they found the two bodies, just as Kemper had described. Both had been decapitated, and Kemper’s mother’s body had been battered and apparently used for darts practice. Her tongue and larynx, Kemper had said, were chopped up, having been placed in the waste disposal unit, which had spat them back out. Police now knew they had captured the Co-Ed Killer.

When Kemper was questioned, the story that unfolded was as bizarre as any the police had yet heard. He went on for hours, confessing everything that he had done to the six students, his mother and her friend. Adding these to the murders of his grandparents years earlier, he had committed 10 murders in all. To prove his story, he took detectives to areas where he had buried or thrown away parts of his victims that had not yet been found. He described having sex with the heads of his victims and
said that he’d loved the feeling of totally possessing them and their property.

Edmund Kemper was indicted on eight counts of first-degree murder on 7 May 1973. The Chief Public Defender of Santa Cruz County, attorney Jim Jackson, took on Kemper’s defence, which he offered as an insanity plea. While awaiting trial, Kemper twice tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, but failed. The trial began on 23 October 1973; three prosecution psychiatrists deemed him sane. It lasted less than three weeks. How many of his outrageous admissions were actually true is anyone’s guess. While Kemper had admitted to cannibalism during a psychiatric analysis, he recanted this later, claiming it was meant as part of an insanity defence.

On 8 November, the jury deliberated for five hours, before finding Kemper sane and guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder. Although Kemper hoped to receive the death penalty, he was convicted during a time when the Supreme Court had placed a moratorium on capital punishment and all death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The death penalty became applicable only to crimes committed after 1 January 1974. Before passing sentence, the judge asked him what he thought his punishment should be. It wasn’t difficult for him to come up with something, as he’d been thinking about this moment since childhood. He told the judge that he believed he ought to be tortured to death. Sadly, that was not an option for the judge to consider. Instead, Kemper was sentenced to life imprisonment.

At the time of writing, Kemper is held in a maximum-security prison at Folsom in California. He has been eligible to be considered for parole periodically, but so far has declined, stating that he did not feel ready to be freed.

Coral Watts (b. 1953) was originally named Carl but developed an affection for the state of Texas and changed his name to Coral, which is a southern pronunciation of Carl. In his early
teens, he began having violent dreams that disturbed his sleeping patterns. He was restless when he slept because he would spend the night trying to fight off what he called ‘the evil spirits of women’.

At 15, he felt the urge to act out his dreams. One day he knocked on the apartment door of Joan Gave, 26, while on his paper round. When she answered the door, Watts punched and kicked her. He then continued delivering papers as if nothing happened. The police arrested Watts at his home. He was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment at the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit. On his sixteenth birthday, Watts was released from the clinic.

Watts returned to high school, graduating at 19. In 1974, after one year of working as a mechanic for a Detroit wheel company, Watts enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Soon after he enrolled, a series of attacks took place around the campus. Initially they were minor but later they became more serious.