On May 7, 1972, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, two eighteen-year-old students at Fresno State, were hitchhiking in Berkeley on their way to Stanford University. They were picked up by Ed Kemper, a twenty-three-year-old man who worked for the State of California’s Division of Highways. Neither of them reached her destination. Between that date and April 1973, Kemper killed six young hitchhikers, his mother and a friend of hers. This case file reads the series through crime pattern theory: which places made up his life, which roads connected them, and why his crimes lined up with them. It does so with restraint, with respect for the victims and without any lurid detail.
// The theoryNodes, paths and a car
Paul and Patricia Brantingham described a person’s activity space as a set of nodes (home, work, places of leisure) joined by paths. What a person sees while traveling those paths again and again forms the awareness space: the mental map in which someone feels safe. Their thesis is that crime appears where that map meets an opportunity. An offender who drives a great deal has an elongated map, a strip that follows the roads between his nodes, and his crimes tend to line up with it. Kim Rossmo formalized this reading as geographic profiling, which he developed in his 1995 doctoral thesis on the target patterns of serial murderers: given the locations of a linked series, the method estimates where the offender is most likely to be based.
A strip, not a circle
The simplest geographic profile imagines a circle around the offender’s home. With a driver split between two nodes, the circle misleads: the pattern looks more like a strip joining the two ends. In those years Kemper shared an apartment with a friend in Alameda, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, but often went back to his mother’s apartment in Aptos, in Santa Cruz County, more than a hundred kilometers away by road. His mother worked as an administrative assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and through her Kemper had a campus parking sticker on his car. Students had been advised to accept rides only from cars bearing that sticker. The detail shows how someone else’s node, his mother’s workplace, entered the offender’s awareness space and gave him more than knowledge of the terrain: an appearance of trust within it.
// The subjectWhere they got in, where they were left
Placed on a map, the locations of the series fall inside that strip. Pesce and Luchessa got into his car in Berkeley, a few minutes from Alameda; Pesce’s remains were found on Loma Prieta Mountain, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In September 1972, Aiko Koo, a fifteen-year-old dance student, missed her bus and hitchhiked. In January 1973, eighteen-year-old Cindy Schall got into his car on the campus of Cabrillo College, in Aptos, his mother’s town. In February, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu got in on the UCSC campus, his mother’s workplace; their remains were found in Eden Canyon, in Alameda County, and near Route 1. On the last night, in April 1973, he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and a friend of hers, Sally Hallett, in the Aptos home. Then he drove without stopping to Pueblo, Colorado, and from there called the police to turn himself in. Convicted in 1973 of eight first-degree murders, he has been denied parole twelve times, the last in 2024, and as of October 2026 he remains imprisoned at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
The Kemper case confirms the central premise of the theory: the pickup points match his nodes and the places his family’s routine had made familiar to him, and the places where he left remains are hills and canyons reached by the same roads. He turned himself in, so his map did not serve to find him. Read afterward, though, it explains why students from three different schools, more than a hundred kilometers apart, belonged to a single series.
Ed Kemper
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// The flawTwo series on one map
The theory’s flaw in this case is the shared territory. Between 1972 and 1973, Herbert Mullin killed thirteen people in the same area and over the same months as Kemper. Two offenders moving through the same space produce two overlapping patterns, and geography alone does not separate them: a profile mixing the crimes of both would point to a base belonging to neither. Before reading a map, the series has to be linked correctly, and that comes from evidence, not coordinates. The second flaw is the driver’s: the longer the routes, the wider the search strip, and in a region of highways the profile sets priorities but leaves many kilometers to check.
Respect for the victims requires remembering their names: Mary Ann Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cindy Schall, Rosalind Thorpe, Alice Liu, Sally Hallett and Clarnell Strandberg. That their absence can be drawn on a road map does not turn it into one more data point. Analyzing routes helps to understand how an offender exploits mobility and other people’s trust, and what can be changed, such as the advice given to students about hitchhiking, so that trust does not become a trap.
The map of the crime is the map of a routine
The Kemper case matters for crime pattern theory because it shows clearly that a driver’s activity space is not a circle but a network of paths between nodes, and that crime clings to that network. The places where his victims got into his car belonged to his life and his family’s: the area around Alameda, Aptos and the campus where his mother worked. For investigation, that means crossing scenes with suspects’ habitual routes, not only with their addresses. For prevention, it means that roadside pickup points and campus entrances are edges where strangers meet without witnesses. And for the theory, it means that a sign of trust, such as a sticker, is also part of the offender’s mental map.
Three key takeaways
- Ed Kemper (California, 1972-1973) picked up his victims, young women who were hitchhiking, in Berkeley, in Aptos and on the UCSC campus: the surroundings of his two nodes (his apartment in Alameda and his mother’s home in Aptos) and of his mother’s workplace.
- A driver’s activity space is a strip of paths between nodes, not a circle around a house. The UCSC parking sticker shows that the awareness space also includes signs of trust.
- Its limit: Herbert Mullin was killing in the same area over the same months, and geography alone cannot separate two series. Without correct linkage of the cases there is no pattern to read. Respect for the victims, by name.
Sources · further reading
- Brantingham, P. J. & Brantingham, P. L. (1984). Patterns in Crime. Macmillan.
- Brantingham, P. L. & Brantingham, P. J. (1993). “Nodes, Paths and Edges: Considerations on the Complexity of Crime and the Physical Environment”. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 13.
- Rossmo, D. K. (2000). Geographic Profiling. CRC Press.
- Cheney, M. (1976). The Coed Killer. Walker.
- Baine, W. (2024, July 9). “Santa Cruz serial killer Ed Kemper denied parole again”. Lookout Santa Cruz. https://lookout.co/santa-cruz-serial-killer-ed-kemper-denied-parole-again/story
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Ed Kemper?
Ed Kemper (“El Asesino de Colegialas”) is a villain from Mindhunter, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He worked for California’s Division of Highways and spent hours behind the wheel.
Why does Ed Kemper become a villain?
Ed Kemper picked up young hitchhikers between his apartment in Alameda and his mother’s home in Aptos, with a UCSC parking sticker on his car. What do his nodes and paths say about where he chose his victims?
Which criminological theory explains Ed Kemper?
Ed Kemper's case is analysed through Crime pattern. Crime pattern theory (Brantingham) holds that offenders act where their nodes and the paths connecting them meet opportunity. Ed Kemper (California, 1972-1973) picked up young hitchhikers in Berkeley, at Cabrillo College and on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, between his apartment in Alameda and his mother’s home in Aptos, and left remains in hills and canyons along those same routes. A real case treated with restraint and respect for the victims.
