Butchers & Cannibals

Mass murder is awful enough. But some serial killers not only embark on slaying to slake their perverted pleasures but enjoy the mutilation of their victims' bodies and sometimes also revert to cannibalism.The simple act of slaying would sicken most people. Yet that is not sufficient a thrill for those who find the excitement begins once their victims are dead. Cutting up corpses is, of course, one way of disposing of the evidence. But here we examine the butchers who dismember for pleasure.They are monsters like Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called 'Rostov Ripper', who tortured, murdered, chopped up and sometimes cannibalized as many as 50 victims. Or they can be quiet unassuming perverts like Dennis Nilsen, whose London house of horrors so overflowed with body parts that they blocked the drains.There is nothing new about this, the sickest side of homicide, of course. The most famous serial killer of all was Jack the Ripper and butchering maniacs have been...

The simple act of slaying would sicken most people. Yet that is not sufficient a thrill for those who find the excitement begins once their victims are dead. Cutting up corpses is, of course, one way of disposing of the evidence. But here we examine the butchers who dismember for pleasure.

They are monsters like Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called ‘Rostov Ripper’, who tortured, murdered, chopped up and sometimes cannibalized as many as 50 victims. Or they can be quiet unassuming perverts like Dennis Nilsen, whose London house of horrors so overflowed with body parts that they blocked the drains.

**The body snatcher who inspired *Psycho* , the noblewoman known as Countess Dracula, Jack the Ripper, and other killers for whom murder was just the beginning.**

From Gilles de Rais' castle in fifteenth-century France to "the Bloody Benders'" eighteenth-century Kansas farm to Jeffrey Dahmer's quiet apartment in twentieth-century Milwaukee, history is littered with serial murderers whose first impulse was to take a life. For some, it was never enough. The real thrill came after their victims were dead.

In this shocking anthology, true crime journalist Nigel Blundell brings together more than two dozen chilling profiles of the world's most unforgettable fiends, including: Ed Gein, the Plainfield necrophile and inspiration for *The Silence of the Lambs* ; Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper", whose uncontrollable hunger was satiated by more that fifty victims; Dennis Nilsen, whose London house of horrors so overflowed with body parts that they blocked the drains; Germany's Fritz Haarmann who killed and consumed more than two dozen men, then peddled the left-over meat on the black market; Hungarian countess *Elizabeth B�thory whose lust for the blood of virgins--a body count estimated to be in the hundreds--has branded her the most prolific female serial killer in world history; and many more human monsters whose appetites are still the stuff of nightmares.*