The face of evil - psychotic murderers; includes related article - Cover Story

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Eugene H. Methvin

When she petitioned to have his juvenile murder record sealed, Kemper had to see a psychiatrist, who concluded, "I see no psychiatric reason to consider him a danger to himself or any other member of society." At the time of the examination, Kemper had a severed head stowed in the trunk of his car. After six co-ed murders, Kemper slaughtered his own mother, invited her best friend to come over and help him plan a surprise birthday dinner, and killed the friend too. He cannibalized his mother, then got in his car and drove aimlessly eastward, eventually calling police and begging them to arrest him before he killed again.

In 1978 FBI interviewers John Douglas and Robert Ressler, aware of Kemper's high IQ and sophistication in psychology, asked him where he thought he would fit in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, then in its second edition. Kemper had read the manual, did not find a description that fit him, and did not expect to until psychiatry had advanced considerably. "When would that be?" Ressler asked. When the DSM is in its sixth or seventh edition, Kemper answered--some time in the next century.

Kemper may be right. But research now under way is advancing the quest for that understanding and for the law-enforcement techniques to exploit it.