Guess Who’s for Dinner?

In December 2002, Armin Meiwes placed an ad on the internet. It wasn’t your ordinary ad. This one was special. Meiwes was in search of someone to eat. Yes, someone.

A college student who saw the ad followed the links that Meiwes had previously posted about killing and cannibalizing 43-year-old Bernd Jürgen Brandes of Berlin, Germany, and called the police. After the local police read the postings and investigated the allegations, Meiwes was arrested in that same month at his home, and investigators discovered the slaughter room, body parts, and videos.

Meiwes didn’t put up a fight; he admitted to what he had done. “I had the fantasy, and, in the end, I fulfilled it,” he told police.

Once the media picked up the sensational story, Meiwes’s neighbors were shocked. They knew him as a quiet, single man who never had wild parties. He repaired computers for a living and fixed classic vehicles in his spare time. He always smiled and waved to his neighbors.

But Meiwes had a dark side. He placed his first ad, which was short and succinct, on several websites in 2001: “Seeking young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter.”

Another, which he posted 80 times in The Cannibal Café and other chat rooms, read as follows: “Looking for a well-built man, 18–30, who would like to get eaten by me.”

Out of the sea of cyberreaders, Bernd responded, “I’m your meat.”

Meiwes liked the response and contacted the person who had expressed interest in becoming his next meal. As it turned out, Bernd, who undoubtedly had a death wish, was delighted. Not only was he going to be slaughtered, according to the ad, but he would also be eaten by another human. While Bernd was a bit older than Meiwes’s ad had specified, Meiwes knew he was the one.

At the time, Meiwes had already responded to 203 people who had emailed him, claiming that they wanted to be “eaten.” But when they saw the photos of the slaughter room he’d built in his house—showing the mattresses he’d added to soundproof the room and an old metal patio table for the butchering that would allow blood to drain to the floor—most never wrote back.

A few of Meiwes’s respondents, however, did visit him at his home, with some even agreeing to let him hang them up like sides of beef. Meiwes would go so far as to mark their bodies with a pen to indicate the various cuts. None of these hardy souls ever returned, until Bernd came along.

Bernd worked in Berlin for Siemens, a major computer manufacturer, where he was well-liked by his colleagues. He was athletic and openly bisexual, and lived with another man.

Meiwes and Bernd had dark secrets they kept from those closest to them. Meiwes fantasized about killing and cannibalism. He used to videotape himself dismembering Barbie dolls and smearing himself with ketchup. When authorities confiscated his computer after his arrest, they discovered a photo of Bernd’s body hanging on a meat hook with pieces of flesh ripped from it, videos of Bernd dying, and a collection of pornographic images.

Bernd’s obsession with self-mutilation had turned from fantasy to a desire he needed to act on. He frequently visited a male prostitute named Emmanuel, who testified in court that Bernd had not only been getting more demanding about sex, but had begun asking Emmanuel to bite or cut off his penis. Emmanuel thought he was just joking.

“Once, I brought a knife to him during sex and told him I was going to cut it off, but I thought it was fantasy,” Emmanuel said. Bernd eventually went in search of someone who would actually do it.

On March 9, 2001, Bernd boarded the train to Kassel, Germany, where Meiwes said he would meet him and take him to his gingerbread-style house in a quiet neighborhood in Rotenberg, about 90 minutes away.

Meiwes set up a video camera to film the event. In the videotape, the two men initially joked about the shadows on the slaughter room walls. Then, Bernd asked Meiwes to bite off his penis. Although Bernd’s testicles burst when Meiwes began biting, his penis would not come off, so Meiwes severed it with a knife. Bernd tried to eat his own penis but complained that it was “too chewy.”

Then, in true Hannibal Lecter–style, Meiwes sautéed the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine, and garlic, plus some fat that he had already cut from Bernd’s torso. But the penis burned, so Meiwes cut it up and put it in the dog dish. While Meiwes was busy cooking, Bernd lay in a bathtub bleeding and unconscious from the alcohol, painkillers, and sleeping pills Meiwes had given him.

For the next 3 hours, Meiwes read a Star Trek novel and waited for Bernd to die. When he felt the process was taking too long, he finally killed Bernd by stabbing him in the throat. Meiwes then hung Bernd’s body on a meat hook and began tearing chunks of flesh from the body with his hands. He didn’t want to waste any parts, so he even ground up the bones into powder to use as flour.

Over the next few months, Meiwes savored every meal he made with parts of Bernd. He ate some of Bernd’s remains with eggs for breakfast or for lunch. He was convinced that the more he ate, the closer he was to his victim. He confided to a reporter from Stern, the German newsmagazine, that his English became better with each meal due to Bernd’s excellent command of the language.

Later, at the trial, Meiwes bragged that he drank a robust South African red wine the first time he ate Bernd’s flesh, which he said tasted much like pork.

In court, two psychiatrists testified that Meiwes and Bernd had both had very bad relationships with their mothers. Meiwes’s mother was described as a domineering woman who berated her son in public; she accompanied him on dates and army outings, and lived with him until she died. As a defense mechanism, Meiwes invented and talked to an imaginary brother named Franky. He would use the name later when posting online and joining chat rooms.

Likewise, Bernd shouldered tremendous guilt, blaming himself for his mother’s death in a car accident when he was 12, although his father told him she had committed suicide.

Meiwes’s defense attorney referred to the crime as a case of assisted suicide and not murder. He claimed that cannibalism was not illegal in Germany and asserted that the victim willingly allowed himself to be killed. Assisted suicide carries a 5-year maximum sentence.

Prosecutors challenged the defense by pursuing a conviction for “murder for sexual satisfaction” and “disturbing the peace of the dead.”

On January 30, 2004, after Meiwes was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 years and 6 months in prison, he admitted to what he had done in a Welt am Sonntag newspaper article. “I accept that I am guilty and I regret my actions.”

But the ordeal was far from over. Prosecutors appealed the sentence, claiming that Meiwes should have been convicted of murder. At the retrial in April 2005, a psychologist noted that Meiwes still “had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people” and could kill again.

When the trial finally ended on May 10, 2006, Meiwes was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He has reportedly said he wants to write a book about his life in the hope that it will prevent others from doing what he did.

“They should go for treatment, so it doesn’t escalate like it did with me,” said Meiwes.

Forensic expert Manfred Risse, who worked on this case, did write a book in 2007 titled Last Supper of the Murderers. Also, a movie based on this gruesome tale was released in 2005, appropriately titled Cannibal.

***

Fantasies about cannibalism that flourish on the internet still become a reality for some. Take Kevin Ray Underwood of Purcell, Oklahoma. Underwood was obsessed with the movie Silence of the Lambs. He regarded the main character, Hannibal Lecter, as his hero and wrote on his Myspace profile about his own cannibalistic fantasies: “If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?” He answered his own question with, “The skin of last night’s main course.”

He described himself online as a “single, bored and lonely” man with “dangerously weird” fantasies. When he wasn’t restocking shelves at the grocery store where he worked, he stayed home with his pet rat, browsing the internet, posting entries on his blogs, and playing the computer role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing. On February 4, 2006, he posted a rambling note on his blog:

I’ve been really bad again lately. I need to have the doctor write me a prescription for more Lexapro or something, and start taking that again. I wonder if they even still make Lexapro? I checked some of those online pharmacies, to see if I could get it cheaper from Canada or something, but none of them I’ve looked at have it. They have five or six other antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, but not that one.

On April 12, 2006, the 28-year-old Underwood did the unthinkable. He lured his 10-year-old neighbor, Jamie Rose Bolen, into his apartment, hit her in the head with a cutting board, and then suffocated her.

The day after the murder, he wrote online, “I’ve been nervous all day. I’m afraid the cops would come into my apartment and see all the knives and swords and horror movies and commentaries about serial killers on my DVD rack and suspect me.”

While police were investigating Jamie’s disappearance as a possible kidnapping, they had set up a roadblock at an intersection near the apartment building. Underwood was in one of the cars they stopped, and the officers remembered him as being a bit odd. They talked to him, but let him go. By 4:00 PM that afternoon, the police were suspicious enough to knock on Underwood’s apartment door.

“Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up,” he told them. Police found Jamie’s body stuffed into a plastic storage tub sealed with duct tape in the bedroom closet. She had been nearly decapitated and had knife marks elsewhere on her neck; she had also been sexually assaulted.

The police confiscated the arsenal of weapons he had mentioned online, along with meat tenderizers, barbecue skewers, and sex toys. Although he did not appear to have cannibalized anyone, police found plenty of evidence to indicate that he had plans to do so sooner or later.

“This appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones,” said David Tomkins, Purcell’s chief of police.

In March 2008, as the jury trial was in progress, district attorney Greg Mashburn showed graphic photos of the crime scene and played Underwood’s videotaped confession that provided details about his fantasies of cannibalism, torture, and murder. The district attorney was seeking the death penalty.

“This was the worst of the worst,” Mashburn told the jury. “There are cases for life without parole and for the possibility of parole. This just isn’t it. He should forfeit his life because this was so bad.”

The defense team claimed that Underwood’s depression and a personality disorder were to blame for his crimes, but the prosecutors didn’t believe it.

“Even if he was depressed, what does that do?” Mashburn asked. “Does that give him a green light to butcher a little girl?”

On April 3, 2008, the jury took less than an hour to find Underwood guilty of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Although he remains in jail, he appealed his sentence in October 2010. His appeal was denied.

***

In yet another recent cannibalism case, Karina Barduchian, a 16-year-old Russian girl, disappeared on her way to school in St. Petersburg, Russia, on January 19, 2009. Two 19-year-old men, Maxim Golovatskikh, a butcher, and Yuri Mozhnov, a florist, were charged with her murder. Authorities said the two men kidnapped the girl, drowned her in a bathtub, and cut her body into pieces.

Sergei Kapitonov, a spokesman for St. Petersburg’s prosecutors, testified, “They said they ate the girl’s body parts because they were hungry.” He claimed they baked her organs in an oven and ate them with potatoes. The two were apprehended when plastic bags containing some of the girl’s body parts were found and traced back to the pair.

Karina’s friend Ekaterina Zinovyeva later testified at the trial that she and Karina had gone to Golovatskikh’s apartment to party with him and Mozhnov. Karina had a crush on Mozhnov and stayed the night with him, while Zinovyeva went to sleep in another room.

“I was sleepy but heard splashes of water and some noise there but was not worried,” Zinovyeva said. “Sometime later I woke up and decided to check what was going on. I went to the bathroom but Yury [sic] stopped me on the way and told me to go back to bed. They had joked earlier that they could kill Karina but, of course, I couldn’t believe for a second that they were serious.”

During the final stage of trial, Karina’s relatives and witnesses received anonymous threats via the internet a few days before the verdict was announced, according to reports in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily. One of Karina’s friends had been worried that she would end up suffering the same fate as Karina if she testified. A profile was opened on the VKontakte social networking site (similar to Facebook) in Karina’s name and featured a photo of a disfigured female face.

On May 5, 2010, Golovatskikh was sentenced to 19 years in prison; Mozhnov was sentenced to 18 years. They are each required to pay Karina’s family almost $40,000 in compensation.

Karina’s mother, Nadya Barduchian, 45, shared her grief at the sentencing: “Our lives are ruined by Karina’s death and the horrible way she died,” she said. “[The killers] showed no remorse. They were oblivious to the pain they’d caused. They were so calm and matter of fact as they told how they’d killed and cooked her. I still don’t understand why they did it.”

Jamie Rose Bolen, killed by her neighbor Kevin Ray Underwood [Courtesy of Bonnie Kernene, mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com]

 

Underwood after his arrest and before his eventual sentence of death [Courtesy of Purcell Police Department]