Mark Olshaker - The Killer Across the Table

Before the interview, we familiarized ourselves with all the details of his grisly record. This would become a standard part of our process, so we wouldn’t be misled or conned by men who made a specialty of the practice. What we wanted was not the facts so much as what guys like Kemper were thinking and feeling as they planned and executed their crimes. We wanted to know what motivated them, what techniques they used, and how they regarded each assault or murder afterward. We wanted to know how and where the fantasy began, what the most emotionally satisfying parts of the crime were, and whether torture and the suffering of the victim were important components for them. In other words: What were the distinctions between the “practical” aspects of successfully committing the crime and the “emotional” reasons for doing it.

Born in 1948, Kemper grew up in a dysfunctional family in Burbank, California, with two younger sisters and parents Ed and Clarnell, who fought constantly and eventually separated. Early on, Ed showed a predilection for dismembering the family cats and playing death ritual games with his sister Susan. Clarnell sent him off to live with his father, and when he ran away, she sent him to live with his paternal grandparents on a remote farm in the foothills of the California Sierras.

Told by his grandmother Maude one day to stay and help her with the household chores rather than accompany his grandfather Ed into the field, the hulking fourteen-year-old shot Maude with a .22-caliber rifle and then stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When Grandpa Ed returned home, the boy shot him, too. This got him committed to Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane, until at age twenty-one and over the objection of state psychiatrists, he was placed in Clarnell’s custody.

Sitting calmly in the prison interview room, Kemper took us through his childhood and his mother’s fear he would molest his sisters, so she made him sleep in a windowless basement room, which terrified him and made him resentful of his mom and sisters. That was when he mutilated the cats. He described his succession of odd jobs once he got out of Atascadero, how Clarnell, a secretary at the newly opened University of California, Santa Cruz, was popular and caring with students, but gave him the message that he would never be in the league with the beautiful coeds who attended there. He described his habit of picking up beautiful female hitchhikers of the type he’d missed out on by being imprisoned throughout his formative years, and how this habit eventually evolved into abduction and murder. He told us how he would bring the bodies back to his mother’s house, have sex with them, then dismember them and dispose of the pieces. Though his victims certainly suffered horribly, he was not motivated by sadism as many serial killers are. What he told us he was doing—and this isn’t a phrase I’ve heard before or since—was “evicting them from their bodies” so he could possess them, at least temporarily, after death.

And then he related how, after two years of this, on Easter weekend he’d finally summoned the will and courage to go into his mother’s bedroom while she slept and bludgeon her to death with a claw hammer. He then decapitated her, raped her headless corpse, cut out her larynx, and fed it down the garbage disposal. But when he turned on the switch, the device jammed and threw the bloody voice box back out at him. He took this as a sign that his mother was never going to stop yelling at him.

He called a friend of his mother and invited her over to the house for dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed and strangled her and cut off her head. He left her body in his bed while he slept in his mother’s. On Easter Sunday morning, he took off and drove aimlessly until he reached the outskirts of Pueblo, Colorado. He stopped at a phone booth, called the Santa Cruz police department, took some pains to convince them that he was the Coed Killer, and waited to be picked up.

Kemper was lonely and narcissistic and wanted to talk to the point that at times I had to tell him to stop because we had specific questions to ask him. We used a handheld tape recorder and took notes. This was a mistake. We learned that because we had taped the interview the subject lost a measure of trust in us. These guys are mostly paranoid by nature, but in prison, there are good reasons for that. There was worry that we would share the recording with prison authorities or it would get out to the general population that a prisoner was talking to the feds. The notes were not a good idea, either, for much of the same reason. And the subject expected us to give him our full attention.

Still, despite these necessary adjustments, much of that first conversation gave us significant insights, Perhaps most important, it demonstrated from the start just how pertinent this question of nature versus nurture would be when it came to understanding what drove these men in their antisocial behavior. This issue would come to infuse just about every interview that I’ve ever done with a killer, and the same would likely be true with Joseph McGowan.

While McGowan did not suffer the same emotional trauma growing up as Ed Kemper had, his domineering and controlling mother clearly had a profound effect on his development. He was a highly intelligent twenty-seven-year-old teacher with a master’s degree in science, yet he was living in his mother’s basement and was still emotionally dependent on her. His inability to go against her and then being forced to live with her as a mature adult surely had an impact on his self-image and, as I would discover, the life of an innocent little girl.

In a bergen County courtroom, with a jury already impaneled, McGowan and his attorneys decided to forgo a trial and instead entered a guilty plea to first degree felony murder on June 19, 1974. From his perspective, I think that was probably a wise decision. Given the facts of the case and the certainty of his guilt, I can’t imagine a jury regarding him with any compassion or leniency when it came time for sentencing.

On November 4, New Jersey superior court judge Morris Malech sentenced him to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after fourteen years. McGowan had his lawyer try to appeal this sentence multiple times, but all of his attempts failed.

The following month, McGowan was examined by another psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Revitch, at the New Jersey Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. Dr. Revitch, trained in both psychiatry and neurology, was a clinical professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of Rutgers University and published some of the first papers on sexual assault and murder.

Once again, McGowan admitted to rape fantasies in college, caused by sexual frustration and anxiety. After listening to the account and examining his subject with and without sodium amytal (so-called truth serum) and finding little difference other than degree of affect, the psychiatrist stated that Joan’s homicide was “not a cold-blooded murder, but something committed in a state of extreme emotional disorganization and pressure. The killing was the consequence of an additional upset and failure due to premature ejaculation.” Dr. Revitch also recognized “a degree of dissociation with use of mechanism of denial.”

While I have seen some cases of rape turn into murder as a result of premature ejaculation or failure to achieve or maintain erection on the part of the attacker, it tends to be with two specific rapist typologies—the anger-retaliatory rapist and the exploitative rapist. These guys tend to focus on adult women as their victims, and if the premature ejaculation or similar embarrassment results in either a mocking response from the victim or a loss of face for the attacker, then the situation can turn dire. Given that the victim here was a child, I was pretty convinced that was not what we were seeing here. But it was Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that really had me wondering: