Ed Kemper was a prominent character on 'Mindhunter'. Turns out, he recorded his voice on hundreds of audiobooks available to the public.
Eloquent. Clear diction. Soothing voice? You wouldn't expect any of these phrases to be associated with convicted felons, let alone confessed serial killers. But a 1987 Los Angeles Times article that has recently resurfaced describes project Volunteers of Vacaville, a prison initiative in which inmates would read and record audiobooks. What's shocking about it is that Mindhunter's favorite serial killer, real life Ed Kemper, recorded several of them. And it gets weirder. You can still listen to them today.
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Ed is an important character on Netflix's Mindhunter, who appears as an eloquent and polite inmate who is more than willing to talk about murdering his own grandparents, mother, and six female college students, and how he engaged in necrophilia, often going deep into gruesome and disturbing details. The real life Kemper doesn't stray away from this portrayal: ruthless but educated, polite but a monster. And prison didn't stop him from recording a reading of a "Star Wars" book. Other books recorded by Kemper are The Rosary Murders, and Flowers in the Attic. And you can check out some of the books in the list in here.
Some accounts even claim Kemper was running the volunteer program himself! Also known as the BlindProject, it involved inmates recording thousands of books; best sellers, textbooks, mysteries, science fiction, Westerns, children's books, and cookbooks onto tape cassettes.
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“I can’t begin to tell you what this has meant to me," he told the LA Times, "to be able to do something constructive for someone else, to be appreciated by so many people, the good feeling it gives me after what I have done."
Kemper, age 70, is still alive serving eight concurrent life sentences.
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