Born on December 18, 1948, Ed Kemper is best known for his enormous size, intelligence, dark fantasies, and his ten serial murders and necrophilic acts. As of 2000, he was serving multiple, consecutive life terms at the California Sate Medical Facility in Vacaville.

Throughout childhood, Kemper had a chronically abrasive relationship with his authoritative mother. He was always excessively large for his age, and as an adolescent he began experiencing fantasies of killing his mother and having intercourse with corpses. After running away at the age of 13, Kemper was sent to live with his grandparents whom he shot and killed. He spent the next five years in mental institutions and was eventually released to live with his mother.

As an adult, Kemper was six foot nine and nearly 300 pounds. In the spring 1972, he started acting out his murderous fantasies by picking up college-age female hitchhikers in the Santa Cruz area, killing them, having sex with their corpses and dismembering them. He reported being motivated by a desire to possess the souls of his victims. To prevent authorities from identifying the remains of his victims Kemper disposed of their body parts and clothing in disparate areas.

Curiously, at the same time Kemper was murdering people, his juvenile records were permanently expunged after two psychiatrists agreed that he was in good mental heath and was no longer a threat to himself or society. Kemper eventually killed his mother by striking her in the head with a claw hammer while she slept. He removed her larynx with a pocketknife and discarded it in a garbage disposal unit. He also killed and beheaded a close friend of his mother's before calling authorities and confessing to his crimes.