Killers have always held a deep fascination within the general public, especially for those who want to try to comprehend the mindset of people who would wilfully end the lives of others around them, seemingly for their own pleasure or to fulfil an urge that is not present in the vast majority of people.
However, it is those who choose to consume the flesh of their victims that are perhaps the most intriguing members of this macabre collective. To kill somebody is a terrible crime, but to then follow this up by sampling the victim’s flesh is something that feels as though it stretches even further beyond the boundaries of decency and morality.
Throughout history there have been some horrific examples of cannibal killers, but it is perhaps those that are more recent that hit closest to home, not least because of the extensive amounts of reporting that have surrounded the cases of these disturbed individuals. The following are five of the most terrifying.
Jeffrey Dahmer
Perhaps one of the most famous serial killers of all time, Jeffrey Dahmer brought tragedy and devastation to every community that he made a home in.
While many contend that abusive childhoods often form the basis of serial killer urges, Dahmer lived a fairly trouble free childhood by all accounts, though he noted himself that he lived in a tense household due to his mother’s argumentative nature. Even so, the first hints of the man that he would become manifested when he was in his teens. He developed an interest in animals that extended far beyond the normal boundaries, with some of his friends claiming that he used to collect roadkill and dismember the corpses so that he could figure out how they fit together.
After serving in the army for a number of years, Dahmer returned to the United States and moved out on his own. Having discovered he was homosexual while he was in his teens, he began to frequent bathhouses and other establishments where he could find people with the same sexual orientation. It was likely during this time that his murderous urges returned, as he later noted that he became frustrated over the fact that his partners tended to move too much during the intimate act for his liking.
This desire led him down a path of gruesome killings, many of which were defined by his efforts to control his victims’ movements by injecting acid into their brains. Upon his failures with these methods, he would usually dismember the bodies, often eating flesh and maintaining bones and other parts of the bodies as grisly trophies to remind himself of his deeds.
Thankfully, he was eventually arrested in 1991 and received 16 life sentences for the many murders he had committed. He was later killed in prison by two fellow inmates after having served three years of his sentence.
Issei Sagawa
The case of Issei Sagawa is a disturbing one for many reasons. By all accounts a fairly intellectual and relatively soft-spoken man, Sagawa apparently believed that consuming the flesh of another would allow him to recreate the qualities of that person within himself.
Unfortunately, such fantasy became reality when he invited his classmate Renée Hartevelt to dinner, claiming that he needed her help to translate poetry for a school assignment. He shot her in the neck with a rifle and then claims to have fainted in shock at what he had done. This didn’t prevent him from carrying out the rest of his plan when he awoke and, after purchasing a butchers knife, he began dismembering her corpse and eating various parts of it, storing others in his refrigerator. He was caught soon after, when he was spotted by French police while attempting to dump her body in a lake.
While this is all disturbing in its own right, it is the celebrity that followed that makes Sagawa so intriguing and repulsive in equal measure. He was found legally insane and unfit to stand trial by the French courts, eventually being deported to Japan after serving time in a mental institution. However, because the charges had been dropped due to the insanity decision, the French case papers were sealed and not sent over to Japan with him. Sagawa could not be detained in Japan without them and he checked himself out of a mental institution in August of 1986, a little over five years after committing his murder.
Over the next decade he achieved a degree of fame, appearing in a number of Japanese films while also writing restaurant reviews for a Japanese magazine called Spa and discussing his crime in interviews and his writing. Thankfully, this celebrity has dried up in more recent times, with Sagawa once claiming that attempting to find employment when known as a murderer and cannibal was a “terrible punishment.”
Armin Meiwes
The case of Armin Meiwes raised some interesting questions about whether or not murder could be considered as such if the victim was apparently consenting to the act.
Meiwes met his eventual victim, Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, online in March of 2001 after posting an ad seeking a well-built man between 18 and 30 who was prepared to allow Meiwes to slaughter and consume him. Notably, Meiwes attracted a surprising amount of interest, though the vast majority eventually backed out. Meiwes never forced anybody to do anything that they were uncomfortable with and ensured consent through the entire process.
It was Brandes who granted him with what he was looking for. When the pair eventually met, they filmed a video of themselves to document the process. Brandes insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off and eat it, though Meiwes was unable to do so. Instead, he cut Brandes’ penis off with a knife and the pair attempted to consume it together, with Brandes himself noting that it was apparently too tough and chewy for consumption.
Brandes then bled in Meiwes’ bathtub for three hours, with Meiwes feeding him a cocktail of painkillers and alcohol to dull the pain, before being taken to a specially-created Slaughter Room, where he was stabbed through the throat. Meiwes then proceeded to hang the body on a meat hook, consuming pieces of flesh over the course of the next ten months.
Interestingly, because of the odd nature of the case and the issue of consent, Meiwes was only sentenced with manslaughter for his crime, receiving an eight-year prison sentence in the process. He has expressed regret for what he did and is considering writing a book to dissuade others from following the same path. Startlingly, or perhaps not given your point of view, he has also since also become a vegetarian.
Albert Fish
Possibly the most prolific killer on this list, though many of the murders credited to him are actually unconfirmed in terms of whether or not he actually committed them, Albert Fish claimed to have “had children in every state” upon his arrest.
Born in Washington D.C. in 1870, Fish came from a family with a history of mental illness. Upon his father’s death he was placed into an orphanage, where he claimed he was subjected to brutal beatings that he eventually came to enjoy. This was perhaps the start of his descent into cannibalistic murder, though the perversions he was introduced to when he started dating a telegraph boy at the age of twelve, which included drinking his own urine and consuming faeces, probably didn’t help.
After reaching adulthood and getting married, Fish began molesting children. It was also during this time that he met Thomas Keddon, with whom he entered a sadomasochistic relationship that ended when Fish tied him up and cut off half of the man’s penis, apparently with the intention of killing him later on. Instead, Fish chose to leave his victim and it is unknown what became of him.
His crimes then began to escalate, as he started luring more children to his home and butchering them with what he claimed were his “instruments of hell.” He would often mutilate the genitals of the children that he killed. It was the case of Grace Budd that revealed his cannibalistic ways, as he wrote a disturbing letter to the parents of the child after murdering her, in which he described his intentions to eat her.
It was this letter that eventually led to his capture, as the envelope has a small, hexagonal emblem that pointed to the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association. After interviewing a janitor at the association, it was revealed that some of his stationary may have been left behind in the man’s old apartment. Police investigated and discovered Fish, who volunteered for questioning before brandishing a razor blade. He was disarmed and taken in for questioning, where he made no attempt to deny the murder of Budd and went on to claim responsibility for many more killings, speaking in graphic detail about his necrophilia and cannibalism in the process.
Albert Fish was executed for his crimes in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1936.
Andrei Chikatilo
We conclude with the case of Andrei Chikatilo, whose confirmed kill count far exceeds anybody else on this list, as he is credited with a minimum of 52 murders of women and children, though many believe that the actual number is far higher.
Known by a number of nicknames, including the Butcher of Rostov due to the fact that most of his crimes were committed in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR, Chikatilo was a chronic bed-wetter as a child, for which he would receive beatings from his mother. Perhaps even more disturbingly, it is also possible that he witnessed the rape of his mother that resulted in the birth of a baby girl. He was also consistently bullied at school, though it is noted that he took to academia and had a fondness for reading.
His adolescence was characterized by extreme shyness, particularly when in the presence of women. It is also noted that he apparently suffered from erectile dysfunction, which made it all the more difficult for him to maintain relationships. Even so, there appears to have been little hint that he would become the vicious murderer that terrorized so many later on in life.
His criminal tendencies began to appear when he started working as a teacher, when it was discovered that he had molested some of his students. He escaped punishment for these crimes, though he eventually lost his job.
From here he began his murderous career, killing nine-year old Yelena Zakotnova, a crime for which another man was sentenced. It was with this killing that Chikatilo found that he could achieve arousal and ejaculation while slicing the flesh of his victims and he made no efforts to quell his urges. As he began killing more frequently, he started cutting off parts of his victims’ bodies, likely for consumption, and teeth marks were often found on his victims.
Staggeringly, he was actually captured fairly early on in his “career” and then released, which prompted a short quelling of his murderous tendencies before he reappeared. He was eventually arrested again in 1984, though he denied his crimes at first. After intense questioning and an interview with a psychiatrist he gave a tearful confession, leading police to the remains of those they had yet to find in the process.
Chikatilo was eventually sentenced to death plus eight-six years for his crimes and was executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear in 1994.