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A giant of a man, Ed Kemper was mistreated by his mum from an early age and later exacted his revenge, murdering her in one of the most macabre and disturbing ways imaginable.

Described as charming and articulate, he often "taunted" authorities by hanging out in police bars and driving around with his victims' dead or dying bodies in his car.

But the interviews he gave to FBI agents after his imprisonment proved invaluable, his insight helping specialists formulate the profile of other serial killers and catch future murderers.

Kemper was born in Burbank, California, in 1948. He had two younger sisters and grew up in a dysfunctional family in which his mother Clarnell and father Ed, fought constantly and eventually separated.

Young Ed exhibited strange and bizarre behaviour, including dismembering two family cats and playing death ritual games with one of his sisters.

(Image: Santa Cruz Sheriff Department)

His mum sent him off to live with his father but he ran away and was then dispatched to his grandparents, who lived on a isolated farm in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Miserably bored and lonely, his strange personality developed festered until one afternoon he turned again to violence.

Aged 14, he shot and killed his grandmother Maude with a rifle and then stabbed her body repeatedly with a kitchen knife.

She had insisted he stay with her and help out with chores rather than accompanying his grandfather into the fields.

He liked his grandfather but knowing he would not accept the murder of his wife, young Ed shot and killed him too.

(Image: Youtube)

Questioned by police, he shrugged telling them: "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma."

Diagnosed as having "personality trait disturbance, passive aggressive type," he was committed to the Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane.

He spent seven years in hospital and was let out against the wishes of state psychiatrists before going to live with his mother in Santa Cruz.

By now Kemper was 6ft 9in and weighed 21 stone.

For two years he did odd jobs and cruised the streets, picking up young hitchhikers until on May 7, 1972, he defaulted to violence once more.

(Image: Youtube)

Kemper picked up two roommates, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, from Fresno State College and drove them to a secluded area where he stabbed them both to death.

He then took their bodies home and dissected them, played with their organs and took Polaroid photos of them before packing up their bodies in plastic bags and burying them, throwing their heads in to a deep ravine.

Four months later he struck again. After giving a ride to Aiko Koo, a 15-year-old high school student, he suffocated her, sexually assaulted her corpse and then took it home for disection.

The next day when he visited for a check-up appoint with his psychiatrists, he had the dead student's head in the boot of his car.

Incredibly, the interview went well and he was declared no longer a threat.

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It was January next year when he struck again, picking up student Cindy Schall whom he forced into his boot and shot dead.

He took her corpse back to his house and had sex with it before dissecting the dead body in his bath, later disposing it in the sea.

Kemper kept her head and buried it face-up in his mother's back garden because, he later said, "she had always wanted people to look up to her".

By now police were hunting the "Coed Killer". Young women were warned not to accept lifts from strangers, particularly those not connected to the campus - but Kemper's mother had a university sticker in her car window,

A month later he picked up, attacked, killed and sexually assaulted Rosalind Thrope and Alice Liu, dumping their mutilated bodies in a canyon near San Francisco.

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His lust for death had grown at an alarming rate - to such an extent that he considered killing everyone in his street before deciding against it.

Instead, he realised that all he had ever wanted to do was take revenge on his mother.

While she was sleeping, he attacked her with a claw hammer until she died. He then decapitated her and had sex with her head before throwing darts at it.

He cut her larynx out and put it in the garbage disposal, but it jammed and spat the voice box back.

Kemper later told police: "It seemed appropriate as much as she'd bitched and screamed at me over the years.

"But even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn't get her to shut up."

(Image: NETFLIX)

After the grisly killing, he called his mother's best friend, Sally Hallett, over for a "surprise dinner" but when she arrived he clubbed and strangled her before cutting off her head too.

That night, he slept in his mother's bed and the next day left the body on his bed while he went for a drive.

He listened to the radio for news of a manhunt but nothing came.

Exhausted, he pulled over and called the police from a telephone box. Convincing them of what he had done, he confessed to his other murders and waited for them to pick him up.

He was subsequently convicted of eight counts of murder. When asked what punishment he thought he should get, he suggested "death by torture".

In interviews with the FBI, he revealed that as a boy his mother had made him sleep in a windowless basement, where he fostered his hatred towards her and began having dark thoughts.

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His mother had told him that he wasn't good enough for any of the women she knew from the university, so he ended up being unhappy in normal relationships.

Instead, he had to completely possess his partner - and that meant killing her.

FBI profiler John E. Douglas - whose book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit inspired David Fincher's new Netflix drama Mindhunter - interviewed Kemper over several years.

He said he was "among the brightest prison inmates" he ever interviewed and capable of "rare insight for a violent criminal."

In one interview, Kemper chillingly said: "There's somebody out there that is watching this and hasn't done that – hasn't killed people, and wants to, and rages inside and struggles with that feeling, or is so sure they have it under control.

"They need to talk to somebody about it. Trust somebody enough to sit down and talk about something that isn't a crime; thinking that way isn't a crime.

"Doing it isn't just a crime, it's a horrible thing, it doesn't know when to quit and it can't be stopped easily once it starts."

(Image: NETFLIX)

On one occasion, when Douglas' colleague Robert Ressler was in a cell alone with Kemper, the killer noticed apprehension in the FBI agent after he pressed a hidden button repeatedly to call a guard to open the door and no-one came.

Kemper said to him: "Relax. They're changing the shift.

"If I went apes*** in here, you'd be in a lot of trouble, wouldn't you? I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard."

Kemper later insisted he was joking, but Ressler never entered a cell alone again with the brute again and it became FBI policy to interview serial killers in pairs.

He was first eligible for parole in 1979, but was denied it that year, as well as at subsequent hearings in 1980, 1981 and 1982. He then waived his right to parole hearings in 1985, 1988, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2002, 2007, and again in 2012.

He told the parole board he was not fit to return to society and in February last year attorney Scott Currey said Kemper believed no one is ever going to grant him parole and that he is "happy going about his life in prison."

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker published by Arrow is out in paperback on November 2, 2017.