Life for blood note monster

IT was July 1976 and in New York that meant The Summer of Sam.

A killer had slain six people with a .44 calibre gun, injured seven more and taunted the NYPD in letters to the press. John came up with the first profile of the killer and when David Berkowitz was finally captured in August 1977, it was an almost exact match.

John sat across from Berkowitz at New York’s Attica prison said he was very distrusting until John held up a newspaper with the headline “Son of Sam terrorises New York City” and his eyes lit up. John says: “That was the first time he didn’t feel like a nobody. And that began to break the ice with him.” John realised Berkowitz, now 64 and serving six life sentences, was fuelled by the rejection he felt from his mother and other women. In August, Berkowitz, now 64, claimed he was a rehabilitated man – a reformed born-again Christian. But John is not buying it. THE 6ft 9in monster Ed Kemper, dubbed The Co-ed Killer, casually relived the day he cut off his mother’s head and defiled it.

John had won the bright and articulate 10-time killer’s trust by laughing at his stomachchurning stories. “The trouble wasn’t getting him talking, the trouble was shutting him up.”

John faced the uncuffed 21-stone killer without guards to protect him.

Kemper, now 68, of Burbank, California, was just 15 when he killed his grandparents in 1964.

He was released aged 21 and went on to murder six female students, decapitating and dissecting their bodies.

He put student Cindy Schall’s head under his mother’s window, boasting “she always wanted people to look up to her.”

He then killed his mother’s friend and his mother. Kemper was jailed in 1973. John said Kemper’s obsessions came from being belittled as a child.

He said that Se7en director David Fincher got the meetings so spot on in TV series Mindhunter, even down to the reaction of Holden Ford, the character based on him, that it gave him a flashback.