Multiple murder seems to multiply in this Mansonesque day and age which makes Leopold and Loeb look like Max and Moritz. This story, as horrific as that of Charlie Starkweather (see above), traces the all too eagerly confessed crimes of Edmund Emil Kemper III, who grew up worshiping John Wayne and then killed his grandparents at the age of fifteen. He was released as ""cured"" at nineteen. This enabled him to assert his ""poor ego strength"" and resentment of a dominant mother by killing eight college girls, his mother and her friend. Indeed he had his ""little zapple."" This straight account, conveniently provided by Kemper, also investigates at some length the confused judicial thinking about sanity vs. insanity and offers opinions, from Wertham to Szasz, as to just what is sane or sick or schizophrenic, socio- or psychopathic, with lots of educated variants thereof and an attempt to show just why. (Author Cheney brings it home to childhood and parents.) It leaves you however with little possible sympathy for this 280 pounds worth of double Y chromosomes.