Former FBI agent reveals what it was like interrogating 'Co-Ed Killer' Ed Kemper

The former FBI agent who interrogated infamous 'Co-Ed Killer' Ed Kemper has revealed how the experience led him to develop a profile that analyzes serial killers that's still used today. 

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com, 'father of serial killer profiling' John Douglas described his chilling encounter 1973 with Kemper, who killed and dismembered six college students, three members of his own family, and a family friend in the '60s and '70s.

Douglas' 25-year career in the bureau inspired the David Fincher-directed series Mindhunter, and Kemper is the subject of the first episode of his new FOX Nation series The Killer Next Door, which examines five of the worst serial killers of our time, and is narrated by the decorated ex-agent.

Kemper's murderous spree started when he was only 15 years old, when he killed his grandparents to spite his abusive mother and father.

Years later, when Douglas asked Kemper why he would commit such an act at such a young age, the serial killer replied: ‘I wanted to see what it felt like.’

After those initial murders in 1964, Kemper spent fewer than five years in confinement.

He was released to his mother at the age of 20 after receiving psychiatric treatment, and his juvenile criminal record expunged.

Unfortunately, however, that was only the start of Kemper's killing spree - and the murders only got more brutal from there.

In the '70s, the 'Co-Ed' killer still lived with his mother, a professor at the University of Santa Cruz, in a modest home in the beachside city.

It was here that Kemper embarked on his descent into madness and murder, after receiving an increasing amount of abuse from his mother.

Douglas said the abuse left the hulking murderer - who stood at a towering 6-foot-9 and weighed nearly 300 pounds - permanently traumatized. 

‘His mother broke him,’ Douglas told DailyMail.com. 

‘She neutered him psychologically, through years of psychological abuse.’ 

Douglas said Kemper's mom would keep him locked in a cellar as a youth, where he would steal his sister's dolls without his mother's knowledge and dismember them.

'He would cut their heads, legs and arms off - like what he he would later do with real woman.’    

 Kemper would go on to snatch, murder and dismember six female college students over the course of two years, bringing the bodies back to his mother's apartment and removing their heads and hands. 

'He would keep them in the closet, and have sex with the corpses,' Douglas also detailed. 

Parts of the girls' bodies were found washed up on the beaches of Santa Cruz in the 1970s.

Kemper was eventually was arrested in 1973 after killing his mother and her best friend in what would be his final two murders. He was still only 22.

Douglas interviewed Kemper later that year, when the agent was just 25 years old.

The pair spoke at California Medical Facility in the city of Vacaville, a federal prison that ‘some killers like Kemper get into by playing up their mental instability to the courts.’

'He was very intelligent,' Douglas recalled of their encounter, which is dramatized in the new FOX Nation show. 

The ex-agent, now 76, added that Kemper also 'liked to talk – he had an IQ of 145.’ 

When Douglas asked to speak with Kemper, the federal agent attempted to diffuse the situation by taking of Kemper’s cuffs and shackles.

Douglas had served as a ‘street agent’ since joining the bureau just two years earlier.

He also worked as a hostage negotiator, and said that he looked to capitalized on that skillset when interviewing the serial killer, who was three years his junior.

‘I wanted him to think It was not an interview or an interrogation – it was a conversation,’ Douglas recalls. 

‘He [Kemper] asked to see my credentials, asked me about my job’

‘He told me he wanted to be a law enforcement officer’

During the interview, Douglas said he did things ‘he would not usually do in later cases.’

‘I brought a tape recorder and took notes – which was the wrong move. Kemper did not like that. People in that place [Vacaville] are generally very paranoid – and criminals in general do not want to be perceived as a snitch, especially when incarcerated.’

Kemper was a ‘hulking man, and had to duck under a 6’5” doorway when entering the room,' according to Douglas.

He dwarfed Douglas, who was 6’2”.

Despite his size, Douglas said Kemper was ‘not an intimidating figure’ – adding ‘he was not a bully – he was bullied upon.’  

‘He would talk to me at great lengths about the abuse he suffered as child by his mom.’

‘He said she would tell him, “You’re a bum, you’re nothing, you’re just like your father.’

‘His mother was a professor at the University of Santa Cruz, and Kemper would hang around the campus, sometimes trying to pick up girls and get a date, he told me during our interview’

‘His mom would tell him, “those women are too good for you” “Stop trying” “you could never have a woman like that.’

He told me ‘that he thought ‘Yes Mom, I can have them – by killing them.’

‘He told me he would rehearse pick up line, rehearse picking up coed before he actually started going through with murdering them.’

‘He would also rehearse killing them, and killing his mother – he would stand by the foot of her bed as she slept holding a claw hammer, fantasizing about killing her, but not yet going through with it.’

‘When I asked what he was thinking while standing over his sleeping mother, he told me, “I just wanted to smash her."’

‘He then started killing girls his mother said he could never have.’

What's more, ‘he would bury their severed heads outside her bedroom window, and position them so that they were angled so that they would be staring upwards toward her – since she would tell him that she enjoyed people looking up at her – what she deemed a sign of respect.’ 

During the meeting, Douglas ‘showed him [Kemper] a false sense of empathy to better understand his behavior and his motives behind

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