This is just flat out eerie. The overlapping dialogue between Mindhunter and the Ed Kemper interviews that took place in real life are almost word for word and with the same deadpan, lack of emotion that made them so creepy. The real Ed Kemper killed a lot of people, mostly women, in the early 1970’s and was so nonchalant about it that he wasn’t even caught, he gave himself up. That’s right, Ed Kemper, a serious threat to the public and a self-confessed murderer, gave himself up without a fight.
But why?
It might seem horrible to ask that question and you’d be right, except for the fact that most killers don’t just give themselves up. Subconsciously a criminal wants to be caught, as you might have heard from any number of criminal psychologists. There’s still a need to follow the right and wrong way of doing things and those criminals that engage in illegal acts still want to pay for their sins, so they will unknowingly start messing up here and there in order to finally bring the authorities down on their heads. Honestly it sounds more like the authorities want to justify the fact that some people simply get careless and can’t out think the cops anymore. It makes much more sense to build up a cop’s confidence than make them think they’re going after someone that’s mentally unsound.
Anyway, Kemper gave himself up after the murder of Sally Hallet, a friend of his mother’s whom he strangled and then eventually stuffed in a closet with a note for the authorities. After that he made his way to Colorado and, not hearing anything about the murder on the news, he called the police. At first they didn’t believe him, but when he managed to talk to a cop that he knew he confessed again and then waited for police to come pick him up.
Who in the world does that?
Kemper reportedly had an IQ of 145 when he was last tested, which means that he’s extremely intelligent. This could explain why he was never caught and why the police had to settle with arresting Kemper once he’d turned himself in. He knew the ins and outs of police procedure it would seem, knew how to evade them, and how to keep himself at a distance so as not to be connected to the murders. And one thing he said that he learned it from was a TV show called Police Story, an older TV show that depicted actual case files and the details of old cases. Now whoever thought that showing such things to the general public was a good idea obviously didn’t have any thought that someone out there might not be entirely trustworthy.
I won’t say that TV is the problem when it comes to criminals but the idea that someone could and would take what they saw on TV and make a run at being a career criminal out of it is disturbing. In fact the only reason that Kemper gave when it came to explaining why he stopped was that he no longer saw the point of it. There was just nothing there anymore, no feeling at all.
That is undeniably disturbing.
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