MP of the week: Anita Luchessa

This week’s featured missing person is Anita Mary Luchessa, an 18-year-old college student who disappeared from Berkeley, California on May 7, 1972.

What happened to her is not a mystery: she was a victim of the serial killer Ed Kemper. Anita and a friend, Mary Anne Pesce, were hitchhiking when he picked them up. He later said he strangled and stabbed both of them to death, dismembered their bodies and dumped them near Loma Prieta Mountain. Mary Anne’s skull was found on the mountain in August 1972, but Anita has never been located.

Sometimes people ask me why I have cases on the Charley Project of people who are obviously deceased. Two reasons:

  1. To help identify them, if their remains are found.
  2. In memory of them.

If Anita Luchessa had not been murdered fifty years ago, she would be 68 today.

4 thoughts on “MP of the week: Anita Luchessa

  1. Basil October 4, 2022 / 6:54 pm

    I read on Edmundkemperstories.com that he led investigators to a ravine where he said he left her remains , only a pelvic bone was found and a spokesman said that animals most likely carried away the rest

    • Meaghan October 5, 2022 / 1:13 pm

      From what I’ve heard, nothing was found at all. I wonder if it was a situation where they found a bone that was probably hers but weren’t able to identify it cause DNA didn’t exist at the time. That’s what happened with Debra Jean Kent’s kneecap. She was a Ted Bundy victim and that’s all they ever found of her.

  2. Justin October 8, 2022 / 4:55 pm

    I contacted the CDOJ and they said she is not in their database as a missing person.

    • Meaghan October 8, 2022 / 4:56 pm

      Yeah, I know. I expect she isn’t because she is a presumed Kemper victim. I have just read in multiple places that she was never found.

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