Listen to the real Ed Kemper from Mindhunter reading audiobooks for the blind
David Fincher’s patient, almost essay-like Netflix show Mindhunter is driven by a series of long-playing interactions with monstrous serial killers. The first major one is also perhaps the show’s most indelible: The hulking, conversational sociopath Edmund Kemper, who, in between joking asides and bites of pizza, details exactly why and how he decapitated a series of women and had sex with their corpses, including his own mother. It is, obviously, a fucked-up show, made all the more fucked-up by how endearingly Kemper is portrayed by actor Cameron Britton.
As a recently unearthed 1987 article from the Los Angeles Times notes, the unredeemable sociopath is a longtime charmer. The article details a blind couple who, shortly before getting married, traveled to California Medical Facility State Prison to pay their respects to the prisoners there who participated in a decades-long project recording audiobooks for the visually impaired. Midway through the story, Kemper shows up:
“Their visit here is so special for us. We get letters of thanks from our blind patrons, but they never come inside the prison to meet us,” said Edmund E. Kemper III, 38, the inmate who runs the program.