Top 20 Human Cannibals by Country
There is nothing as disgusting as people who torture, murder,
and cannibalize humans. In the past, humans have practiced cannibalism
in many parts of the world. Today, the Korowai are one of the few
tribes believed to eat human flesh as a cultural practice. In most
countries, the act of human cannibalism is not illegal, nor a problem.
People who eat human flesh are unusually charged with a crime relating
to murder or desecration of a body. In the past, cannibalism has been
practiced by people suffering from famine or starvation, but this
article will not cover any such cases, only people who have committed
criminal cannibalism.
Within the field of psychology there is a debate on what factors lead
a person to practice criminal cannibalism. Some evidence suggests that
cannibalism is a result of trauma experienced in childhood. It has
been called a “psychological response to anger and frustration”
expressed through oral aggression and an urge to literally absorb a
person through consumption. In reality, people who kill and eat others
are mentally unstable and dangerous predators. These types of
individuals are rare and many countries have never seen a serial human
cannibal. The life of a cannibal encompasses some of the worst and most
sadistic examples of human capability.
This article will examine twenty people who were caught in the act of
eating or having just consumed a human victim. It was organized
specifically by country, with one person chosen from each area of the
world. However, it has two Russians and two Germans, as I could find
eighteen countries with documented cases of criminal cannibalism. The
article is a sequel to a list posted on December 18, 2008, which covers
the
Top 10 Cases of Human Cannibalism.
For that reason, it will not include any people mentioned in that
article, most notably Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, Armin Meiwes, Issei
Sagawa, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
20
Vince Weiguang Li
Canada
Vince Weiguang Li was born in Dandong, China on April 30, 1968. He
immigrated to Canada from China on June 11, 2001, and became an official
Canadian citizen on November 7, 2006. On the evening of July 30, 2008,
a 22-year-old Canadian man named Tim McLean was riding on the same
Greyhound bus as Vince Weiguang Li. The bus was traveling from Edmonton
to Winnipeg. According to witnesses, while McLean was sleeping on the
bus, Li suddenly produced a large knife and began to stab him repeatedly
in the neck and chest until he decapitated him. Li then displayed
McLean’s severed head to other passengers as they fled the bus in
horror. The event took place approximately 30 km west of Portage la
Prairie, Manitoba on the Trans Canada Highway.
On several occasions, Li went back to the body, severed parts, and
consumed some of McLean’s flesh. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP) responded to the call and found the suspect still on board the
bus. The other passengers were huddled at the roadside, some of them
crying and vomiting. Witnesses continually observed the suspect
stabbing and cutting McLean’s body, and carrying McLean’s severed head.
Five hours after the murder, the suspect attempted to escape from the
bus by breaking through a window.
Vince Weiguang Li was tazed twice, handcuffed, and placed in the back
of a police cruiser. Inside of his pockets, the police found parts of
the victim’s body. This included McLean’s ears, nose, and tongue. The
victim’s eyes and part of his heart were never recovered and are
presumed to have been eaten by Li. Vince Weiguang Li’s trial started on
March 3, 2009 and he plead not criminally responsible due to insanity.
He was remanded to a high-security mental health facility where he
remains to this day.
19
James Douglas
3rd Marquess of Queensberry, Scotland
James Douglas, 3rd Marquess of Queensberry, was a Scottish nobleman.
He was the eldest son of James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, who
was created Duke of Dover, Marquess of Beverley, and Earl of Ripon in
1708. In 1709, the elder Douglas was made Secretary of State for
Scotland. The younger James Douglas was born in 1697. Stories describe
him as an “imbecile,” and violently insane. Douglas was kept under
lock and key from childhood at Queensberry House in Edinburgh, which is
now part of the Scottish Parliament complex. In 1706, the elder James
Douglas attempted to have his son removed from the succession.
It is reported that when the Act of Union was signed in 1707, which
placed the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland under the same
monarch, the disruption allowed the 10-year-old James Douglas to
escape. He then entered the kitchen of Queensberry House and
slaughtered a young servant. The report says that Douglas roasted the
boy alive on a revolving spit. He then ate sections of the boy before
being apprehended. After the event, Douglas was known as “The
Cannibalistic Idiot,” and the oven he used to kill the boy can still be
seen in the Parliament’s Allowances Office. James Douglas died in 1715
and was buried in Calverley churchyard. His brother Charles Douglas,
3rd Duke of Queensberry succeeded him. The Queensberry House kitchen is
still said to be haunted to this day.
The story of Tarrare is one of the most bizarre in history. Around
1772, Tarrare was born in France.
As a teenager, it became apparent
that Tarrare was different from other people because of his endless need
for food. His parents eventually had to disown him because Tarrare ate
everything in the house, including the pets. In his twenties, Tarrare
was the warm-up act to a traveling charlatan. He would swallow corks,
stones, live animals, and whole apples. To satisfy his hunger, Tarrare
would eat anything available from the town gutters and garbage piles.
His bizarre ability soon caught the attention of the government and
Tarrare was the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his
eating capacity.
Tarrare was known to eat live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies. On
one occasion, he swallowed an eel without chewing. Despite his unusual
diet and endless need for meat, Tarrare was of normal sized man with no
signs of mental illness. He was described as having unusually soft
hair, and an abnormally wide mouth in which his teeth were heavily
stained, and lips almost invisible. Tarrare constantly suffered from
foul body odor. He was described as stinking “to such a degree that he
could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces.”
General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare’s abilities
to use, and he was employed as a courier by the French army. He would
swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his
stool once safely at his destination. Tarrare was strongly chastened
for his hunger and wanted to fix the problem. He agreed to submit to a
procedure that would cure his appetite, but it failed. While at the
hospital getting treated, Tarrare would sneak out of his room and
scavenge for entrails left in gutters, rubbish heaps, and outside
butcher shops.
He attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and
looted the corpses in the morgue. After falling under suspicion of
eating a toddler, Tarrare was ejected from the hospital. In 1798, he
reappeared in Versailles suffering from severe tuberculosis and died.
After his death, Tarrare’s corpse rotted quickly. At the autopsy, his
body was found to be filled with pus. Tarrare’s liver, gallbladder, and
stomach were abnormally large and he was covered in ulcers.
Another man with a similar case to Tarrare is a Polish soldier named
Charles Domery (1778-1800). Domery is known to have eaten 174 cats in a
year, and although he disliked vegetables he would eat 4 to 5 pounds
(1.8 to 2.3 kg) of grass each day if he was unable to find other food.
During his service on the French frigate Hoche, he attempted to eat the
severed leg of a crew member hit by cannon fire, before other members of
the crew wrestled it from him.
17
Leonarda Cianciulli
Italy
In 1893, Leonarda Cianciulli was born in Montella, Italy. As a
child, she attempted suicide on two separate occasions and was greatly
disturbed. Cianciulli had seventeen pregnancies during her marriage,
but lost three of the children to miscarriage, and ten more died in
their youth. In 1939, Cianciulli heard that her eldest son, Giuseppe,
was to join the Italian army in preparation for World War II. She came
to the conclusion that his safety required human sacrifices. Cianciulli
then planned the murder of three middle-aged women. After the victims
were comfortable, she killed them with an axe and cut their bodies into
nine parts. She also gathered the blood into a basin.
In her memorial (titled “An embittered soul’s confessions”)
Cianciulli describes what happened next: “I threw the pieces into a pot,
added seven kilos of caustic soda, which I had bought to make soap, and
stirred the whole mixture until the pieces dissolved in a thick, dark
mush that I poured into several buckets and emptied in a nearby septic
tank. As for the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated,
dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar,
chocolate, milk and eggs, as well as a bit of margarine, kneading all
the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served
them to the ladies who came to visit, though Giuseppe and I also ate
them.”
In regard to her third murder, Cianciulli said: “She ended up in the
pot, like the other two…her flesh was fat and white, when it had melted I
added a bottle of cologne, and after a long time on the boil I was able
to make some most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to neighbors and
acquaintances. The cakes, too, were better, that woman was really
sweet.” Leonarda Cianciulli has become known as the “Soap-Maker of
Correggio,” because she turned the remains of her victims into soap and
food.
After a neighbor became suspicious of Cianciulli, the police were
called, and she immediately confessed to the murders, providing detailed
accounts of what she had done. Cianciulli was found guilty of her
crimes and sentenced to thirty years in prison and three years in a
criminal asylum. Leonarda Cianciulli died of cerebral apoplexy in the
women’s criminal asylum in Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970. A number of
artifacts from the case, including the pot in which the victims were
boiled, are on display at the Criminological Museum in Rome.
Until August 2011, people in the village of Sokol, Slovakia, knew
Matej Curko as an ordinary guy that lived with his wife and two
children. In reality, he is the latest person to be caught
cannibalizing victims he met on the Internet. We will never know the
full story behind the “Slovak Cannibal” because he was shot and killed
by police. However, in his online conversations, Curko is quoted as
saying “I am not a rapist, not gay, I am just a pervert who wants to
feel death.” In the summer of 2011, police were contacted by a Swiss
man who said that Curko was attempting to coerce him into suicide and
cannibalism on the Internet. The police responded by putting together
an online operation where Curko was tricked into meeting an agent.
After officers rushed the scene, Curko pulled out a gun, so a sniper
shot him five times. Curko later died in the hospital. After a search
of his home, police found a large collection of human body parts in his
“fridge of horrors.” Curko kept the body parts of his victims for later
consumption. Inside the fridge, police found the remains of two
Slovakian women who disappeared in 2010. The women are thought to have
volunteered themselves for murder and cannibalization. Police are now
attempting to link Matej Curko to the disappearance of thirty Italian
women between January 2009 and May 2011. The case shocked people in
Slovakia and made us all wonder how a seemingly ordinary man could carry
out such violent acts.
In 1969, Peter Bryan was born In London. His parents were immigrants
from Barbados. In 1994, Bryan was sent to Rampton Secure Hospital
after admitting to the unlawful killing of a 20-year-old shop assistant
named Nisha Sheth, who was beaten to death with a hammer in 1993. In
October 2003, psychiatrists noted that there had been “a continued
improvement in his mental state” and talked of plans to move Peter Bryan
to a more independent accommodation. In January 2004, social workers
applied for a transfer to a “low-support accommodation.” He was
described as a nice man, lonely with no friends.
However, in early 2004, Bryan was transferred to an open psychiatric
ward at Newham General Hospital after allegations that he had indecently
assaulted a 16-year-old girl. In February 2004, he walked out of the
mental health unit in Newham, east London and cannibalized his friend
Brian Cherry. Cherry was killed by at least 24 hammer blows to the
head. On the night in question, one of Cherry’s friends Nicola Newman
let herself into his flat around 7.15pm and noticed a strong smell of
disinfectant. Peter Bryan then emerged from the kitchen bare-chested,
holding a knife, and announced: “Brian is dead.” She didn’t believe him
at first until she saw Cherry’s body with his arms and legs separated.
The police arrived to find Peter Bryan standing in the hallway in the
dark with bloodstained hands, jeans, and shoes. In the kitchen
officers noticed a small amount of human flesh in a frying pan next to
an open tub of Clover butter. The meat was part of Brian Cherry’s
brain. The police also found brain tissue and hair matted with blood on
a plate next to a knife and fork on the draining board. Peter Bryan
told officers he had killed Mr. Cherry and “I ate his brain with butter,
it was really nice.” He later added: “I would have done someone else
if you hadn’t come along. I wanted their souls.”
While at Pentonville jail, Bryan told a member of the staff that he
wanted to eat someone’s nose and prison officers had to use riot shields
when unlocking his cell in case of attack. Despite the danger, doctors
believed that Peter Bryan, who had a long history of brutal violence
and deception, should be transferred to a medium risk ward. He was
moved to Broadmoor Hospital, where he killed his third victim, a fellow
patient, Richard Loudwell, aged 60. Bryan battered Loudwell and tied a
ligature around his neck. Mr. Loudwell died in the hospital later that
day. Peter Bryan said that if he had not been interrupted he would have
eaten Loudwell’s flesh.
On March 15, 2005, Peter Bryan pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to
two counts of manslaughters on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Judge Giles Forrester said: “You killed on these last two occasions
because it gave you a thrill and a feeling of power when you ate flesh.”
Bryan, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, will never be released
from jail.
Jarno Elg is responsible for the most gruesome homicide in Finnish
history. In 1975, Elg was born in Hyvinkää, Finland. As a child, he
had a long history of violence towards animals. In one case, Elg killed
a dog by duct taping it up and hitting it on a metal pipe. On November
21, 1998, Jarno Elg entered the house of an unnamed man and strangled
him to death. He then continued to dissect the man, wrap his head in
duct tape, and eat him with a group of accomplices. Elg had three
accomplices and they took various body parts from the man and used them
in a satanic ritual that included
torturing the victim while listening
to The Cainian Chronicle album by Norwegian black metal band Ancient.
The criminal investigation started when a decapitated leg was found
at a dump site, thus giving the name “dump site murder” to the case.
Jarno Elg was tracked by the police and sentenced to life in prison for
murdering a 23-year-old man and eating some of his body parts. The
Hyvinkaa District Court in southern Finland sentenced accomplices Terhi
Johanna Tervashonka , 17, to eight years and six months in prison and
Mika Kristian Riska, 21, to two years and eight months. It was said
that the three people “were strongly influenced by Satanism.” The court
declared most of the details of the case sealed for 40 years. For this
reason, only a limited amount of information is available.
13
Jose Luis Calva
Mexico
In 1969, Jose Luis Calva was born in Mexico City. He had a traumatic
childhood that was full of sexual abuse and the death of his father.
In October 2007, the Federal Preventive Police visited Calva’s home to
arrest him for the disappearance of his girlfriend Alejandra Galeana.
As the police entered his home, they found Calva eating a dish of human
meat seasoned with lemon. Inside his flat, the police found the
mutilated body of his girlfriend in the closet, human remains in the
refrigerator, a frying pan full of cooked human flesh, and muscle tissue
in a box of cereal. Calva tried to escape by jumping through a window,
but was injured and arrested.
Inside his apartment, the police found an unfinished novel titled
Cannibal Instincts that bore on its cover a masked image of Hannibal
Lecter. Police also found a picture of Anthony Hopkins portraying
Hannibal Lecter. The Mexican press dubbed Calva the “cannibal poet” and
the case shocked even the most hardened veteran of the Mexico City
police. Jose Luis Calva was charged with two counts of murder in Mexico
City, convicted, and sentenced to 84 years in prison. There is
circumstantial evidence that links him to the murder of eight separate
girls. In the early morning of December 11, 2007, Calva committed
suicide in prison and was found hanging by his belt.
In 1933, Joachim Kroll was born in Hindenburg (Zabrze), Province of
Upper Silesia. In 1955, Kroll started a deadly killing spree in
Germany. He would surprise his victims and strangle them. Kroll would
then perform sexual acts on the body, mutilate it, and cut off pieces to
be eaten. At the time, the police were aware that they were dealing
with a human cannibal because of the skinned corpses. On July 3, 1976,
Kroll was arrested for killing a four-year-old girl named Marion
Kettner. As the police searched his home, a neighbor told them that
when he asked Kroll what was clogging his pipes, he simply replied:
“Guts.”
The police found the body of Marion Kettner dismembered in Kroll’s
house. Some of her parts were in the fridge, and Kroll was in the
process of cooking a small hand on the stove. The entrails of the girl
were found stuck in the waste-pipe. Kroll was immediately arrested and
he confessed to thirteen murders. He was labeled the Ruhr Cannibal,
Ruhr Hunter, and the Duisburg Man-Eater by the German media. At his
trial, Kroll said that he often sliced portions of the flesh from his
victims to save money on his grocery bills. In 1982, Joachim Kroll was
convicted of mass murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died of a
heart attack in 1991, in Rheinbach.
11
Tsutomu Miyazaki
Japan
In 1962, Tsutomu Miyazaki was born in Ōme, Tokyo, Japan. He was a
premature birth and had deformed hands, which were gnarled and fused
directly to the wrists. In order to rotate his hands, Miyazaki needed
to move his entire forearm. Due to his deformity, Miyazaki was
ostracized in school. Between 1988 and 1989, Tsutomu Miyazaki mutilated
and killed four girls, aged between four and seven, and sexually
molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim and ate her
limbs. In the Japanese media, Miyazaki became known as the Otaku
Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer, and Dracula.
During the murder spree, Miyazaki was a mild-mannered employee by
day, but outside of work, he randomly selected children to kill. He
also terrorized the families of his victims, often times sending them
letters which recalled the murders in graphic detail. He allowed the
corpse of his first victim, Mari Konno, to decompose and then he chopped
off her hands and feet, which Miyazaki kept in his closet until his
arrest. Miyazaki burned the bones of his victims, ground them into
powder, and sent them to the families in a box.
On July 23, 1989, Miyazaki sexual abused a girl in a park near her
home and was apprehended by the girl’s father. After fleeing naked on
foot, Miyazaki eventually returned to the park to get his car and was
arrested by police. During his trial, Miyazaki displayed a calm and
indifferent demeanor. His killings fueled a moral panic against otaku,
accusing anime and horror films of making him a murderer. Tsutomu
Miyazaki was sentenced to death on April 14, 1997 and hanged on June 17,
2008. The details surrounding his cannibalism have not been fully
released.
10
Nikolai Dzhumagaliev
Soviet Union
In 1952, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev was born in Uzun-Agach, Kazakh SSR,
Soviet Union. He was considered by all who knew him as a well-spoken,
nicely dressed, and clean-shaven gentleman. In 1979, Dzhumagaliev
decided to rid the world of prostitutes and began to murder them. He is
known to have killed seven women, but in an interview said that he
murdered somewhere between 50 to 100 women. In the press, he was known
as “Metal Fang” for his white metal teeth. Dzhumagaliev would lure
women into the dark end of a local park, where he would rape them and
hack them to death with an axe. He also cooked certain parts of his
victims, ate the remains, and served the human meat to his friends at
parties.
Nikolai Dzhumagaliev made a habit of preparing ethnic dishes out of
his victims. His crimes were discovered when two drunks, whom he
invited over to his house, discovered a woman’s severed head and
intestines inside his refrigerator. Dzhumagaliev was found to be insane
and committed to a Tashkent mental institution. In 1989, he escaped
while being transferred to a new hospital and wasn’t recaptured until
1991. After serving ten more years, Dzhumagaliev was released from the
hospital and is said to be living with relatives in Eastern Europe. He
is allowed to travel freely, which gives him the distinction of being
the only free man on the list.
Another convicted cannibal named Issei Sagawa, who was featured in
the previous article, is free in Japan. It appears that the only other
convicted cannibal who is not in jail or a mental hospital is Michael
Woodmansee. Woodmansee was released from prison on September 11, 2011,
after serving 28 years of a 40 year sentence for murdering and
cannibalizing a young boy in Rhode Island.
In 1980, Özgür Dengiz was born in Ankara, Turkey. When he was 17,
Dengiz killed a friend and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He
served three years before being released on parole. On June 5, 2007,
Dengiz killed Sedat Erzurumlu, a computer engineer, who angered him by
saying that he could not afford to buy the laptop he was looking at.
Three months later, Dengiz shot and killed a garbage collector at the
Mamak Dump. A few hours later, he murdered a 55-year-old municipal
worker. Dengiz skinned the corpse with a cleaver, ate some of the flesh
raw, and put the rest in a bag.
He then abandoned the corpse at the Mamak Dump and put the human
flesh in his refrigerator. Upon returning to the apartment, Dengiz gave
a piece of human flesh to a group of stray dogs. He was eventually
caught after the police traced him to a series of calls made with one of
the victim’s mobile phones. The police quickly searched Dangiz’s
apartment and discovered a collection of fresh human meat in the
refrigerator.
Özgür Dengiz was arrested, but showed no remorse for his crimes,
saying he was irresistibly drawn to eating human flesh. He is quoted:
“I love to eat human flesh. It makes me ecstatic. We are fools to have
been eating beef for so long.” The only emotion he displayed during
his confession was periodic fits of laughter. After making his
statement, Dengiz was sent to prison, but I can’t find information on
his official sentence or current whereabouts. His crimes caused public
outcry in Turkey, where cannibalism is a strong cultural taboo. A
Turkish Cypriot journalist said: “Dengiz appears to be Turkey’s first
man-eater and perhaps one of its few psychopaths.” However, Turkish
serial killer Adnan Çolak is also known to have cannibalized a victim.
In the media, Çolak was known as the “Artvin Monster,” while Dengiz the
“Cannibal of Ankara.”
8
John Bunting and Robert Wagner
Australia
John Bunting has been labeled “Australia’s worst serial killer.”
Between August 1992 and May 1999, he organized and carried out the
Snowtown murders. The crimes were discovered when the remains of eight
victims were found in barrels at a rented bank building in Snowtown,
South Australia.
Immediately after the discovery, a man named John
Bunting became the main suspect in the case. Bunting was found to be
the ringleader of a group of murderers. Under the instruction of
Bunting, the group would prey on the weak and steal their welfare
payments. The killers targeted people they thought were pedophiles and
homosexuals. The murder spree led to one of the longest and most
expensive investigations in Australia’s history.
In 2005, it was revealed that John Bunting and Robert Wagner
cannibalized the remains of one of their victims, a man named David
Johnson. During a confidential police interview with accomplice James
Vlassakis, he said: “They hacked at David Johnson’s body to make sure it
would fit in the barrel and then hacked a little bit more, taking a
sliver of flesh from the right thigh. There was no remorse. No second
thoughts. They heated a frying pan, cooked the flesh, and ate it.”
There have been more than 230 suppression orders in the case and the
Australian government is extremely reluctant to release any information
about the cannibalism. The occurrence remains one of the few
occurrences of criminal cannibalism in the history of Australia. John
Bunting and Robert Wagner are currently serving life sentences without
the possibility of parole. In 2010, federal legislation prohibited
capital punishment in all Australian states and territories.
7
Dorangel Vargas
Venezuela
In 1957, Dorangel Vargas was born in Venezuela. As a child, he was
said to be violent and bizarre. Due to his behavior, Dorangel’s family
believed he was possessed by “evil spirits.” By 1995, Vargas was
homeless and living in the city of San Cristobal, Táchira State, when he
started a deadly killing spree. Vargas claimed to have murdered and
eaten up to 10 men between 1995 and 1999. He was arrested in February
1999, in the city of San Cristobal, near to the Colombian border and
dubbed the “Hannibal Lecter of the Andes.”
In a country with few serial killers, the self-confessed cannibal
Vargas has become a Venezuelan media darling. In an interview he said:
“Sure I eat people, anyone can eat human flesh, but you have to wash and
garnish it well to avoid diseases. I only eat the parts with muscles,
particularly thighs and calves, which are my favorite. I make a very
tasty stew with the tongue and I use the eyes to make a nutritious and
healthy soup. Human meat is nice, but I also eat dogs, cats, and
lizards.”
Dorangel Vargas said that he preferred the taste of men to women. He
would not eat hands, feet, or testicles, “although I’ve been on the
point of trying them on various occasions.” He also said that he
rejected overweight men because they had too much cholesterol and
elderly people because their flesh “is contaminated and very tough.”
Some people have doubted his confessions. They speculate that Vargas
may be a scapegoat for a ring of human organ traffickers. In 2012,
Dorangel Vargas is in custody, but has not undergone a trial due to his
mental capacity.
In 1868, Enriqueta Martí was born in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Spain.
As a young woman, Enriqueta moved to Barcelona where she worked as a
maidservant and nanny, but soon turned to prostitution. Martí was
described as a strange, false, and unpredictable woman. As she grew
older, Enriqueta began to lead a double life. During the day, she
dressed in rags, begged for food, and looked for abandoned children to
kidnap. She would then make the children into prostitutes or murder
them.
By night, Martí dressed in luxurious clothes, hats, and wigs, and
attended the El Liceu, the Casino de la Arrabassada, and other places
where the wealthy of Barcelona gathered. Enriqueta Martí was also a
practicing witch-doctor who used the remains of her victims to make
remedies. From these children, she used everything from their fat to
blood, hair, and bones. For this reason, Martí did not have problems
disposing of the bodies of her victims. She used the human meat to make
black market medicines and food that wealthy people were willing to
buy.
Enriqueta Martí was finally arrested in El Raval, mezzanine number 29
of Ponent Street (today Joaquín Costa Street). The forensic experts
managed to differentiate a total of twelve different bodies with what
little evidence they were able to recover. In her house, police found
fifty pitchers, jars, and washbowls with preserved human remains, greasy
lard, coagulated blood, children’s hair, skeletons of hands, powdered
bones, pots with the potions, ointments, and salves already prepared for
sale. In spite of suspicions, experts at the time were unable to
verify if she was the deadliest serial killer in the history of Spain.
It is clear that Enriqueta Martí murdered a large collection of
children in Barcelona before being caught. Additionally, the public
suspected her of kidnapping babies. During this time in history, there
were many children who disappeared without a trace in Spain, so much so
that the population lived in fear. Enriqueta was never tried for her
crimes. She died a year and three months after her arrest at the hands
of prison mates. They killed her by lynching her on one of the prison
patios. The death robbed authorities of the opportunity to expose all
Martí’s secrets and gain information on her rich clients.
5
Yoo Young-chul
South Korea
Yoo Young-chul is a South Korean serial killer and self-confessed
cannibal. As a child, Young-chul was an animal mutilator and was
convicted of killed dogs. He was an unexpected, unwanted baby, who
lived in poverty with his father, a Vietnamese War veteran. Between
2003 and 2004, Yoo Young-chul murdered 21 people, mostly prostitutes and
wealthy old men. He would assault the victims and murder them with a
hammer. Young-chul would then decapitate the person and dump their head
at a construction site. He mutilated at least 11 of his victims and
ate their flesh and raw livers.
Yoo Young-chul’s acts have been deemed the worst serial killings in
the history of Korea. When asked to explain his motives, Yoo said in
front of a TV camera “Women shouldn’t be sluts, and the rich should know
what they’ve done.” Young-chul was sentenced to death on June 19,
2005, by the Supreme Court and remains on death row in South Korea. His
case fueled the debate on capital punishment in South Korea. It
appeared that capital punishment might be abolished prior to his arrest,
but support for the death penalty has grown since. South Korea is one
of only four developed industrialized democracies that still have the
death penalty (the others are the United States, Japan, and Taiwan).
4
Alexander Spesivtsev
Russia
In 1970, Alexander Spesivtsev was born in Kemerovo Oblast, Russia.
He was raised in an abusive home and had a violent father. As an adult,
Spesivtsev was convicted of murdering his girlfriend and committed to a
psychiatric institution, but later released. In 1991, he began a
deadly murder spree. Spesivtsev killed children he saw unfit or
detrimental to society and was responsible for the murders of at least
19 street kids. He took the bodies back to his house, cooked them, and
ate the meat with the help of his mother, Lyudmila. After news of the
horrible crimes reached the Russian media they named Spesivtsev “The
Cannibal of Siberia.”
Alexander Spesivtsev was captured in 1996 after a pipe broke near his
home and forced neighbors to call a plumber. The problem was
determined to be coming from Spesivtsev apartment. When nobody answered
his door, the suspicious plumber opened it by force. He saw blood
covering the walls and called the police. In his kitchen police
discovered bowls with pieces of human flesh. In the bathtub they found a
mutilated, headless body. A woman was found mutilated, but still alive
on the sofa. She was taken to a hospital, where she was able to tell
the public prosecutor about what had happened, but died seventeen hours
later.
In the house, police discovered a diary which detailed the murder of
nineteen girls, but Spesivtsev is generally suspected of having killed
80 people (because 80 different pieces of bloody clothing were found).
On October 5, 1999, Spesivtsev was ruled insane by a Russian court and
committed to a psychiatric hospital. He remains at the psychiatric
hospital to this day. Lyudmila Spesivtsev denied any involvement in the
murders, but was convicted as an accomplice and given thirteen years in
prison. The case remains one of the worst examples of human
cannibalism in Russian history.
In 1879, Fritz Haarmann was born in Hanover, Germany. He was a quiet
child and shunned by many boys’ activities. Between 1918 and 1924,
Haarmann committed at least 24 murders, although he is suspected of
murdering a minimum of 27 people. Haarmann’s victims largely consisted
of young male commuters, runaways and, occasionally, male prostitutes.
Haarmann would lure the men back to his apartment for sex and then kill
them by biting through their throats. For this reason, he has been
labeled the “Vampire of Hanover.”
All of Haarmann’s victims were dismembered, partially eaten, and cut
into sections before being discarded, usually in the Leine River. The
meat of several victims was sold on the black market as canned pork. At
the time, Haarmann was an active trader in the contraband meat market.
On the night June 22, 1924, Fritz Haarmann was placed under
surveillance by the police after they found numerous skeletal remains in
the Leine River. He was observed trying to lure a young boy to his
apartment and was arrested.
Fritz Haarmann quickly confessed to raping, killing, butchering, and
cannibalizing young men since 1918. When asked how many he had killed,
Haarmann claimed “somewhere between 50 and 70.” The trial of Haarmann
was spectacular and one of the first major media events in Germany. The
term “serial killer” had not yet been coined, and the public was at a
loss for words to describe him. Haarmann was referred to as the
“werewolf,” a “vampire,” and “The Wolf Man.” His trial lasted barely
two weeks and Fritz Haarmann was found guilty of mass murder and
sentenced to death. He was beheaded by guillotine on April 15, 1925.
Haarmann’s last words were: “I repent, but I do not fear death.”
2
Ottis Toole
United States
Ottis Toole was an American serial killer, arsonist, and cannibal.
He was an accomplice of the convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.
Toole and Lucas admitted to hundreds of unsolved murders over the span
of several decades. Unlike Henry Lee Lucas, Ottis Toole confessed to
cannibalism and went into extreme detail about the act. From a young
age, Ottis Toole was a serial arsonist who was sexually aroused by fire.
In 1976, Toole met Henry Lee Lucas at a Jacksonville soup kitchen and
the two developed a sexual relationship. Toole later claimed to have
accompanied Lucas in 108 murders. In reality, Ottis Toole and Henry Lee
Lucas helped police recover the bodies of 246 missing people and
confessed to or implicated themselves in a further 430 murders.
Boiled Angel was an independent comic book by artist Mike Diana that
contained graphic depictions of a variety of taboo and gory subject
matters. In 1993, a copy of Boiled Angel #8 (or Ate) found its way into
the hands of Florida Assistant State’s Attorney Stuart Baggish. Diana
was subsequently charged with several counts of obscenity and convicted.
Boiled Angel #8 included a tabloid article that is said to contain a
graphic interview on cannibalism with Ottis Toole. The material is too
obscene to discuss, but Toole goes into detail about cooking and eating
humans with his homemade barbeque sauce. On September 15, 1996, at the
age of 49, Ottis Toole died in his prison cell from liver failure.
Twenty-seven years after the murder of Adam Walsh (son of John Walsh),
authorities officially named Ottis Toole as the likely killer.
During the 19th century, the Fijian people were known around the
world for ritualistic cannibalism. Udre Udre was a Fijian commoner. He
holds the Guinness World Record for “most prolific cannibal.” Udre
Udre reportedly ate between 872 and 999 people. He kept a stone for
each body and the stones were placed alongside his tomb in Rakiraki, in
northern Viti Levu after his death. According to Udre Udre’s son, the
chiefs of Rakiraki would go to the battlefield along with Udre Udre and
they would each give him every body part of their victims, especially
the head. Udre Udre preserved the human remains and ate them. He
believed that after he consumed the 1000th body, he would become
immortal.
In 1945, Dennis Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire,
Scotland. Nilsen grew up in a well adjusted family and was loved as a
child. From 1978 to 1983, Dennis Nilsen killed at least fifteen men and
boys under gruesome circumstances. He was known to retain the corpses
for sexual acts. Most of his victims were students or homeless men.
Nilsen picked up the victims at bars or on the streets and brought them
back to his house for sex. In the middle of the night, he strangled and
drowned the victims.
Nilsen used his butchering skills to help him dispose of the bodies.
The bodies were not immediately dismembered, but were kept, sometimes
for several months, in different locations in his home, usually under
the floorboards. Nilsen attempted to dispose of the bodies by boiling
the heads, hands, and feet to remove the flesh and by chopping the
entrails into small pieces and flushing them down the toilet. Disposal
via the toilet, however, eventually blocked the flats’ drains. Nilsen’s
murders were first discovered by Dyno-Rod, a drain cleaning company who
responding to the blocked drain. The company found the drain was
packed with a flesh-like substance and called the police.
After it was determined that the flesh was human, Dennis Nilsen was
visited by Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay. As Jay entered the
house, he immediately smelled rotting flesh. He told Nilsen that his
drains were filled with human remains. Nilsen responded: “Good grief,
how awful!” Peter Jay said: “Don’t mess about, where’s the rest of the
body?” Nilsen then calmly admitted that there were two plastic bags in
his wardrobe with human remains. On the way back to the station, Nilsen
was asked how many bodies there were talking about. He replied: “15 or
16, since 1978.” The British government has sealed a large amount of
information in the case and Nilsen is currently categorized as not
having consumed any human flesh, but this fact is controversial given
the fact that he cooked the meat. For this reason, he has been placed
as a bonus entry on this list.
Source: http://listverse.com/2012/03/04/top-20-human-cannibals-by-country/
