18

The Real-life Cannibals

Hannibal Lecter, eat your heart out. Or someone else’s. With some fava beans and a nice chianti, perhaps. In Thomas Harris’ novel Hannibal, the author gives us a completely new perspective on eating human beings, making the unthinkable appear almost socially acceptable. The only problem, it would seem, is finding the flesh, murder being the obvious answer.

But as Tom would know only too well, considering that two of the role models for his serial killer in his previous book The Silence of The Lambs were real-life cannibals, people who enjoy eating human flesh have been around since the Stone Age (though surprisingly, there haven’t been all that many) and some of them would make the rapacious Dr Lecter look like a vegan.

Harris’ serial killer in Lambs, a charmer nicknamed ‘Buffalo Bill’ whose mission in life is to murder as many young women as it takes to make a dress out of their skin, was modelled partly on the life and times of one Ed Gein. Gein had a penchant for wearing human skin and making clothes out of the corpses of the females he had either murdered or dug up from the local cemetery. Among them was his mum. You will find the full story of Ed’s exciting adventures in Chapter 20 of this book.

Harris’ other role model for Billy Boy was 42-year-old army pensioner Gary Heidnik who, in Philadelphia, USA, in 1986, kidnapped women and kept them chained up in his cellar as sex slaves, eventually murdering some of them and eating their remains. The description of Heidnik’s cellar is not unlike that of Buffalo Bill’s in Lambs, though unlike Bill, who was monogamous, Heidnik kept as many as five women in his cellar at a time until one escaped and called the cops.

What police found defies imagination. Four young women who had been repeatedly tortured, raped and beaten, chained in filth and squalor in the dungeon, with a young woman’s head in a pot in the kitchen and human ribs in a roasting dish that was presumably going to be theirs and Gary’s dinner. Heidnik was executed by lethal injection on 6 July 1999.

But long before Ed and Gary shocked the world with their distinctly individual diets, people had been eating each other. Back in 1570, an evil bit of work named Peter Stump roamed the German countryside, faithfully aided and abetted by his mistress and daughter, in search of young women to tear to shreds to satisfy his bloodlust. Stump had also eaten a newborn baby that was the result of his incestuous relationship with his daughter. Urged on by the two women, in five years Stump murdered 15 women and children and ravenously ate their hearts while they were hot, along with other delectable body parts.

When caught, the law’s retribution for the evil trio was almost as savage as their crimes. Stump’s body was tied to a cartwheel and the flesh was pulled from his bones with red-hot pincers. Still alive, his arms and legs were then broken with a wooden hatchet and he was beheaded. His headless corpse was then burned alongside his mistress and daughter.

Australia’s dark past isn’t without a taste of human flesh either. In 1822, convict Alexander Pearce escaped from the Hell’s Gates penal settlement in southern Tasmania with seven other prisoners. After a few days in the freezing conditions, three of the escapees returned to prison, leaving the others to systematically murder and eat one another to survive.

Finally it came down to two men, Pearce and Robert Greenhill, who stalked each other until Pearce outwitted Greenhill and killed him with an axe and ate him. Pearce was eventually captured and returned to prison where, incredibly, he was flogged for escaping but received no punishment whatsoever for the confessed cannibalism because the authorities refused to believe him and there was (understandably) no one left to back up his story.

But Pearce wasn’t so fortunate the next time. He persuaded fellow convict Thomas Cox to escape with him, and once on the outside Pearce killed Cox and ate him too. Alexander Pearce was hung in Hobart in 1824.

The ‘Werewolf of Hannover’, Fritz Haarmann, delighted in killing his victims by biting through their throats while raping them, and gorging on the meat and blood. In cohorts with another depraved homosexual deviant, Hans Grans, the pair abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered as many as 50 transient young men in Germany between 1919 and 1924.

In his lucrative profession as a dealer in second-hand clothes and meat, Haarmann was in a perfect position to capitalise on Germany’s recent crushing defeat in World War I by giving his starving fellow Germans exactly what they wanted…at a price, of course. His black-market meat customers, who were delighted with their lovely cuts of veal and hindquarters of lamb, must have wondered where they came from in such grim times, but not in their wildest dreams did they think that they were from the two youths a week that Haarmann and Grans were raping, murdering and cutting up for sale. Haarmann was beheaded in 1924.

From 1955 to 1976 Joachim Kroll murdered, mutilated and had sex with the corpses of at least 14 young women and children throughout Germany. After he had had his way with their bodies he would cook them up and eat them, the younger the better. When captured, he told police that he loved the meat of young children as it fell off the bone, and he said it was of much better quality than the meat available in the West German butcher shops.

When police searched Kroll’s foul-smelling apartment, in the refrigerator they found pieces of human flesh on a plate. Scattered around the lounge room were putrefying bags of human flesh, stripped from his victims’ bones with a butcher’s knife. On the stove was a simmering vegetable stew with a tiny human hand in it.

Not surprisingly, Joachim Kroll was declared a mental defective and placed in a mental asylum, and authorities threw away the key.

Of all of the modern-day cannibal serial killers, by far the most prolific was 56-year-old Andrei Chikatilo, who, in a 24-year killing career in Russia, was responsible for the horrific deaths and cannibalisation of 53 victims, mainly children. Like Kroll, Chikatilo was a necrophiliac in that his victims had to be dead before he could have sex with them.

Blaming his lust for human flesh on the fact that as a boy he’d witnessed his younger brother being eaten alive by villagers in a famine, Chikatilo selected his victims from the runaways and young prostitutes that hung around bus and train stations. Once he had lured his victims into the nearby woods on the promise of a meal or money, he would set upon them and hack them to death, rape the corpses and then disembowel his victims and ravage the warm internal body parts.

The fact that Chikatilo was an average-looking school teacher allowed him to blend in with the crowds at the busy venues where he selected his victims, and even though he was questioned nine times about the murders, twice near the scene of a murder (once he was carrying a knife in his bag), incredibly, police let him go, as he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and comrades didn’t do such things.

Chikatilo was eventually caught and executed with a single bullet to the back of the head in 1994. At his trial, people fainted in horror as he told in graphic details how he boiled and ate the sawn-off nipples and testicles of his victims. Chikatilo is the subject of the movie Citizen X.

The best-known real-life cannibal of modern times is Jeffrey Dahmer, which isn’t surprising. Dahmer was a monster beyond human belief. A handsome young man who wouldn’t have had a problem acquiring any number of sexual partners, Dahmer was a necrophiliac serial killer and cannibal whose perversions most human beings would find impossible to comprehend.

His Milwaukee, USA, apartment was an execution chamber, bordello, abattoir and exclusive café with only human remains on the menu. The beverage of the day was always human blood.

From 1988 to 1991, Dahmer, a 28-year-old chocolate factory worker, slaughtered 17 young men, raped and mutilated their corpses and ate their body parts. When police arrested him after a young man escaped and led them to Dahmer’s apartment, they were overwhelmed by the putrid smell that hit them when they opened the door.

Inside they found three bodies dissolving in acid vats in his bedroom, a man’s head in the fridge, along with three other severed heads and seven skulls, hands, heads and fingers stored in the freezer. Scattered about the apartment were decapitated penises and used condoms. Dahmer admitted to having sex with the bodies of the dead men as well as their decapitated heads and mutilated torsos. He pointed out to police that he always wore a condom when having sex with his dead partners or their body parts. Better to be safe than sorry, he said.

Jeffrey Dahmer was sent to prison for 1070 years, where he was murdered several years later by another inmate.

But no crimes in history were more abhorrent than those of deranged 64-year-old house painter Albert Fish. Passing himself off as an innocuous, benevolent little old man, Fish abducted, molested, tortured, castrated and ate at least 16 children in New York and all over the USA between 1928 and 1934.

What made Fish’s crimes so ghastly was that he was a prolific writer and his jottings included a letter to the parents of a little girl telling them in detail how he had murdered, dissected, cooked and ate their daughter. This letter would be his undoing.

Born in 1870, Albert Fish was a devout Christian who married in 1898, fathering six children. When his wife eloped with another man in 1917, Albert’s latent perversions came to the surface and he began indulging in coprophilia (eating human excreta), inserting alcohol-soaked cottonwool balls in his anus and lighting them, getting his children to beat him bloody with a nail-studded paddle and inserting needles into his genitals.

In 1928, in response to an advertisement, Fish, calling himself Frank Howard, called on the Budd family in New York, taking with him cheese and strawberries. While their 12-year-old daughter Gracie was sitting on the cuddly old man’s lap, he was fantasising about eating her. Fish convinced the Budds to let him take Gracie to a local children’s party. That was the last they would see of her.

Six years later, in 1934, the Budd family received a letter, which read in part:

I took Gracie to an empty house in the country. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick, bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her into small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook it and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her though I could have had I wished. She died a virgin.

The letter was traced to Fish and hardened police retched as Albert described to them how he had cooked and eaten another little boy’s buttocks:

I put strips of bacon over each cheek and put it in the oven. When the meat was roasted for about a quarter of an hour, I poured a pint of water over for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted with a wooden spoon so the meat would be nice and juicy. In two hours it was nice and brown. I never ate any turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet, fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days.

Albert Fish was delighted to die in the electric chair, describing it as the ‘ultimate experience in pain’, and went to his death like a man going to a picnic, even helping the attendants strap him in.

And no doubt to Albert Fish’s eternal pleasure, the metal pins and needles self-embedded in his genitals and scrotum caused the electric chair to short circuit and the first charge failed to kill him. Amid wisps of blue smoke, Albert was sent smiling to his maker with the second charge.