Month: May 2023

Indiana court upholds life sentence for man convicted of murder and cannibalism

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On May 17, 2023, The Indiana Supreme Court in Indianapolis upheld the life sentence without parole for a 41-year-old Indiana man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and dismembering her body before partially eating several of her internal organs.

Joseph Oberhansley was convicted in September 2020 of murder and burglary in the slaying of 46-year-old Tammy Jo Blanton in Jeffersonville in September 2014. Clark Circuit Judge Vicki Carmichael sentenced Oberhansley to life in prison without parole, based on the jury’s recommendation.

Oberhansley’s legal team filed a brief for an appeal in June 2022. It is available at this link. His attorney, Victoria Casanova, argued before the court in April 2023 that her client’s mental health was not taken into consideration and that the jury did not return a proper verdict form in weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

The opinion, written by Justice Christopher Goff, said the jury made “the necessary weighing determination.” Three other justices concurred and Justice Geoffrey Slaughter agreed in part.

The body of Blanton, 46, was found at her home the morning of Sept. 11, 2014, badly mutilated with more than 25 sharp force injuries and multiple blunt force injuries.

Jeffersonville Police reported that at approximately 9:30 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2014, officers responded to a call requesting a welfare check at Blanton’s home. Several hours earlier, Blanton had called 911 because an angry Oberhansley was upset about the end of their relationship—refusing to leave her home until ordered by several police officers.

Upon arriving at Blanton’s home, officers knocked on the door and Oberhansley answered. A detective on the scene noticed a cut on Oberhansley’s hand and searched him, finding in his pocket a brass knuckle and a knife that appeared to have hair and blood on it.

Investigators obtained a warrant for the home and inside the bathroom found a “big bloody mound of something in the bathtub.” It was Blanton’s body. She had been stabbed 25 times in the head, neck, and chest.

The body had also been extensively mutilated. The front portion of her skull, a portion of her brain, lung, and most of her heart had been removed. Further investigation revealed that parts of her organs were found on a dinner plate next to a frying pan, bloody knives, and a pair of tongs that had blood on them.

During a subsequent interview with police, Oberhansley “revealed to the detectives that he ate Tammy’s brain” and that he also “tried to pull the ‘third eye’ out with tongs,” police wrote. He also admitted to eating the organs that he removed from Blanton. Oberhansley was originally charged with murder, abuse of a corpse (because cannibalism is not a crime in 49 US states) and breaking and entering.

Oberhansley testified that two men had been at the victim’s home when he arrived around 4 a.m. that morning and said they were responsible for Blanton’s death. He said the men had knocked him out and that he awoke when police arrived.

Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull told jurors Wednesday during opening statements in Oberhansley’s murder trial:

“Joseph Oberhansley butchered Tammy Blanton like you wouldn’t kill a livestock animal. But this lady died with dignity.”

Mull said Blanton locked herself in a bathroom before Oberhansley kicked a door down and attacked her — just one week after holding her captive and raping her. Oberhansley told police during a videotaped interview that Blanton “really wasn’t all that scared, surprisingly,” as if she knew she was about to die, Mull recalled. “In her last moments, she wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of seeing her scared,” the prosecutor said.

 A psychologist testified at trial that Oberhansley was “the most severely mentally ill person whose case she had reviewed,” Oberhansley’s defence attorney Cara Schaefer Wieneke wrote:

“It would be easy to look at the horrors visited upon Tammy and conclude they were simply the actions of a monster. But doing so would be reductive, and this Court’s 7(B) review must look deeper. This Court must consider his actions in the context of his profound mental illness.
There is also no question that Oberhansley was suffering from a severe mental illness when he committed this crime. What there is a question about, however, is whether Tammy would be alive today if Oberhansley were not so severely mentally ill. There are reasons to believe that she would. Because of that, Oberhansley asks this Court to find his sentence of life without parole is inappropriate.”

Oberhansley’s mental state was a recurring complication in the court process, in which he was found at different times competent and incompetent. For example, in 2017, his defence wrote that their client believed they were working for the devil, according to The Courier-Journal.

The case was originally declared a mistrial after witness testimony put forth information about Oberhansley’s past that parties had stipulated would not be introduced during the proceedings. For example, it was not specified in court that the defendant had spent a 12-year stint in a Utah prison for manslaughter because—while he was jealous and high on meth—he shot and killed his girlfriend Sabrina Elder, and shot his own mother (who later forgave him).

Oberhansley’s sister had grabbed his and Elder’s infant son. He shot at them, but missed. Then Oberhansley shot himself in the head. He survived, but a psychiatrist wrote he’d given himself a “partial lobotomy.” He pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge, down from murder. His family was reluctant to take the stand, prosecutors said.

In his first trial over Blanton’s death, Oberhansley’s defence asserted that their client’s mental state was a major factor. Lawyer Bart Betteau cited horrifying details of the murder, saying that jurors would hear that Oberhansley believed Blanton was going to kill him and that she could hear his thoughts.

“Think about the process and say to yourself, is this someone who’s thinking right? His thought was that someone was after him.”

Oberhansley’s attorneys couldn’t mount an insanity defence, however. They lost their ability to do so in return for the state declining to seek the death penalty. The attorneys’ previous attempt to lodge an insanity defence was thwarted when Oberhansley filed a motion to withdraw it. He denied living with a mental illness.

Oberhansley is incarcerated at the New Castle Psychiatric Unit of the Indiana Department of Correction.

The most interesting part of this extended legal battle (nine years) from the point of view of Cannibal Studies is the statement from the prosecutor about the victim being “butchered… like you wouldn’t kill a livestock animal.” Philosophers struggle with the inconsistency of our social customs – we cherish dogs and cats, protect whales, but accept the butchery in mind-boggling numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and others. We know about the horrendous suffering in the slaughterhouse, but close our minds to it. We know that on top of its appalling cruelty, the meat industry is one of the largest sources of greenhouse emissions as well as a cause of several severe human health problems such as hypertension and colon cancer. Yet the meat industry remains exempt from much of the environmental and health debate that surrounds other issues. Stanley Cavell states that becoming part of a social contract requires becoming “conspirators”, agreeing implicitly what will be acceptable, disregarding its ethical conundrums. Such “perpetual failure of justice invites the threat of madness”.

Cannibals are routinely described as insane, as if their capricious psychotic episodes fully explain both their choices and the appalled revulsion of the rest of society. Oberhansley’s appeal described him as “detached from reality”. But the persistent portrayal of cannibalism as unthinkable and cannibals as insane relates to their refusal of the fissure between reality and the language able to describe it. The cannibal personifies ruthless attempts to satisfy voracious human appetites, while realising the animality of fellow humans; he puts the unthinkable into reality through the flesh and blood of his victim. His madness arises in the gap between the carefully expurgated language of the social contract and the reality of the world as a giant slaughterhouse.

Spanish influencer “practiced cannibalism”: eats part of her own knee

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@paulagonu

no me dio poderes

♬ sonido original – Paulagonu

Cannibalism is usually defined as eating the flesh of another animal of the same species. In the case of humans, this of course means eating the flesh of another human. But sometimes people eat their own flesh. Is this still cannibalism, and is there anything wrong with it?

The answers usually given seem to be yes and yes. I agree that eating your own flesh is, by definition, a form of cannibalism, but I really cannot see what all the fuss is about. What about people that chew their fingernails, called onychophagia, or (oww!) their cuticles? Or perhaps more extreme is the fashion of eating placentas after childbirth – some women take them home and cook them, or there are companies that offer to sterilise and morcelise placentas and make pills from them. There is not, unfortunately, universal agreement on the supposed health benefits.

British social anthropologist Alfred Gell reported that in the 1970s he was conducting fieldwork among the Umeda people of West Sepik in Papua New Guinea, when he accidentally cut his finger and, as people often do, put it in his mouth to suck the wound. The locals were horrified and considered him a cannibal:

“the shocked countenances and expressions of disgust evinced by my Umeda companions told me soon enough…”

If Gell was thought a cannibal for sucking his own blood, what would the Umeda think of Spanish ‘influencer’ Paula Gonu, who announced that she ate some cartilage that was removed from her knee during surgery? In an interview with the Club 113 podcast, Gonu, who had opted for local anaesthesia, spoke of watching the doctor operate on her knee in real-time on a screen. After the doctor finished the procedure, the influencer said he asked her if she wanted to keep the part of her meniscus that he had removed. Gonu said yes and the doctor put the piece of cartilage in a small bottle filled with preservative.

Gonu explained that she had to undergo surgery to remove her meniscus (cartilage in the knee joint) following an injury. A week after the surgery, Gonu decided she wanted to eat the cartilage.

“I was talking with the boyfriend I had at the time, and I told him, ‘I want to eat it. It’s mine and I have to reinsert it into my body’. He asked, ‘But why do you want to eat it?’ I answered, ‘Why not? It’s not going to hurt me.’ So, then I made a Bolognese sauce, I added it in, and I ate it.”

Gonu previously shared the story in a viral TikTok last November, which has been viewed more than 4.3 million times, with the caption: “It didn’t give me super powers.” However, after Gonu retold the story on the Club 113 podcast, it entered the news cycle again.

Spanish media was quick to trumpet Gonu’s cannibalism. “Paula Gonu practiced cannibalism: She ate her own meniscus,” read one headline. Another headline from November, when the influencer originally shared the story, stated: “The rich eat meniscus.”

One Twitter user  called it “Bizarre”. This was one of the more moderate comments.

Autocannibalism or autosarcophagy is in a sense universal, in that we all consume dead cells from our tongue and cheeks all the time. But autocannibalism is not always voluntary. The Hungarian noblewoman Erzsébet Báthory (the one who allegedly used to bathe in the blood of virgins in the early 17th century) is supposed to have forced some of her servants to eat their own flesh. In 1934, Claude Neal, a 23-year-old African-American, was brutally lynched by a group of white men who had stormed the county jail in Brewton, Alabama where he was being held after confessing to the murder of a 20-year-old white woman in Greenwood, Florida. One member of the mob told an NAACP investigator that during the lynching, which lasted ten-to-twelve hours, the men cut off Neal’s penis and testicles and forced him to eat them. Other incidents of coerced autocannibalism were reported in the years following the 1991 Haitian coup d’état. and in the 1990s, young people in Sudan were forced to eat their own ears.

As for the other kind, voluntary autocannibalism, there are many cases documented, well before Paula Gonu thought of the idea. A recent one was the case of Incrediblyshinyshart who told Vice that he had served his friends tacos, made from his own amputated leg.

So Gonu’s idea was far from original. But nor is there much wrong with it. Cannibalism is frowned upon when it involves disturbing a corpse, and definitely disapproved when it involves killing someone as prey. But Gonu did none of that – she merely ate a part of herself, with her own full consent, instead of throwing it away. You could almost say she was into recycling.

The cannibal weeping demon: Akira Kurosawa’s DREAMS (1990)

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Dreams (夢, Yume) is a 1990 magical realist anthology of eight stories, written and directed by Akira Kurosawa, inspired by his recurring dreams. An international co-production of Japan and the United States, Dreams was made with assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Akira Kurosawa (Japanese: 黒澤 明, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed thirty films in a career over fifty years. Kurosawa directed around one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of classics which were often adapted by other directors. These included Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) – which was remade in 1960 by John Sturges as The Magnificent Seven, Throne of Blood (1957), Yojimbo (1961) and High and Low (1963). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.

Kurosawa’s bold, dynamic style was strongly influenced by Western cinema, yet distinct. In 1990, the year Dreams was released, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Dreams is his most personal work, taken from his own life and unconscious mind. He addresses themes such as childhood, spirituality, art, death, and the mistakes and transgressions made by humans against nature. The episodes within Dreams do not have a single narrative, but are the fragmentary adventures of a “surrogate Kurosawa” (often recognizable by the character wearing Kurosawa’s trademark hat) through eight different segments, or “dreams”, each one with a title. Each is more a fairy tale than a dream in the filmic sense.

A child sees a forbidden fox wedding ceremony and is told he must suicide, another weeps as he witnesses the spirits of a peach orchard that has been cut down by his family, reflecting the human war on nature.

The fear of nature fighting back is a bleak dream of men struggling through a mountain blizzard. The horror of war is demonstrated as a Japanese officer is confronted by the ghosts of his annihilated platoon.

Our understanding of nature is questioned in “Crows”, the only dream not made in Japanese, where Vincent van Gogh is portrayed by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese, with a broad New York accent, and the protagonist travels through the images that fill van Gogh’s tortured imagination.

Our abuse of nature comes to its logical conclusion as we see nuclear power points explode behind Mount Fuji, human ingenuity able to create but not control these forces; in the end, all they can do is colour the toxic pollution so people know what is killing them.

“The Weeping Demon” is the seventh dream, and of particular interest in Cannibal Studies. It shows the aftermath of nuclear devastation, a fear that has haunted us all for eighty years, particularly the Japanese, who were the first and only people to experience nuclear weapon attacks.

A man is wandering around a misty, bleak mountainous terrain. He meets an oni (demon or ogre), who is a mutated human with a single horn on his head. Oni are known for indulging in murder and cannibalism when they get the chance. They are typically portrayed as hulking figures with one or more horns growing out of their heads, massive teeth, and occasionally a third eye in the centre of the forehead.

The demon tells him that there was a nuclear conflagration, which resulted in the destruction of nature and animals, the growth of dandelions taller than humans, and horns sprouting on the heads of those humans left. The horns cause them to feel excruciating pain each evening; but they cannot die, so they howl in agony all night. Many of these demons were formerly millionaires and government officials, who are now suffering through a hell befitting their sins.

Even in this apocalyptic post-war world, the social hierarchies continue to oppress – the demons with two or three horns eat those with only one.

“There’s no food! We feed on ourselves. The weak ones go first. It’s about my turn now. Even here we have grades. One-horn demons like myself always get eaten by those who have two or three horns. Before they were powerful and pretentious. And now they still throw their weight around as demons.”

The demon that the man meets is waiting to be eaten, seeing this as an escape from his agony and nagging hunger, but also as a punishment – before the wars, he was a farmer who poured milk into the river and buried vegetables to maintain market prices. He warns the man to flee, but when the man asks where he should go, the demon just asks if he too wants to become a demon. The terrified man runs away with the demon in pursuit.

The film finishes with a meditation on death, the final and irrevocable return to nature. Laying down our technology, our appetites and our bodies is celebrated – peace at last.

Condemned as disjointed by some critics, the film has a logic to it, a dream logic, in which things are out of place yet seem quite natural. It starts with a little boy witnessing the wedding procession of the foxes, a slow funereal procession that is forbidden for human viewing, and finishes in a village that has spurned technology and progress in favour of clean air and water and long, peaceful lives, where we witness a funeral procession that is pure colourful celebration.

Dreams is a sumptuous, thoughtful, dramatic, film from which I found it hard to look away. Although it is one of Kurosawa’s last films, it shows him at the height of his power and creativity, and offers a glimpse into his mind, just as he glimpses the mind of van Gogh.

Dreams is now a classic, as are all Kurosawa’s works, but it currently has only 66% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, proving that a lot of people can’t be bothered listening to (or even watching) other people’s dreams. The New York Times critic called it:

“…a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future”

But dreams, like the evening news, are always fragmentary – narratives jump from tragedy to kitsch to humour. Dreams often reflect and amplify our repressed emotions and fears, and fairy tales are mythic versions of dreams. Many, perhaps most, fairy tales include cannibalistic giants, wicked step-parents, witches and ogres, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel or The Juniper Tree. Children wander, lost and hungry, through brooding forests and come across strange and fantastic creatures. Dreams reveal our repressed fears about the human attacks on nature and each other, the struggles and conflicts that lead to monsters or demons.

In dreams, we lose our rational sense of causality – anything can happen. We get lost, like in fairy tales, in forests or snowstorms or in the mind of Vincent van Gogh, seeing the world the way he had to, consuming it and reimagining it before he could paint it. We meet ghosts of people who don’t know they are dead. Nuclear power plants explode, a fear on everyone’s mind in 1990, four years after The Chernobyl disaster. In dreams, ethics become aesthetics, to quote from Hannibal.  Dreams, like fairy tales, are episodic and disjointed, and the film captures this brilliantly.

Although fairy tales date back centuries, they remain ever popular, with new versions or completely new stories released to reflect the fears of each historical period. In our modern period, the growing and changing presence of media makes us all aware of the bloodshed on the battlefields and in the death camps and slaughterhouses of modern industrial societies, images that we desperately try to forget or repress. It is no wonder that dreams are full of cannibals.

Jack The Ripper – “a different breed of killer” – “FROM HELL” (Hughes Brothers, 2001)

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Even those who are not True Crime aficionados know of Jack the Ripper, a mysterious serial killer who slaughtered women in the Whitechapel district of London in 1888, took body parts for trophies, and on one occasion wrote to the authorities boasting of having eaten a victim’s kidney. Well, half a kidney – the other half was enclosed in the letter, and was positively identified as human tissue. The letter was entitled “FROM HELL”.

In my thesis, I date modern, domestic cannibalism from 1888, when Jack the Ripper murdered five or more women in the summer and autumn of that year.

The From Hell letter was sent to the Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October with a box containing half a kidney.  The letter stated that the writer had taken the kidney from a woman, and half of it was enclosed as proof. “tother piece I fried and ate it very nise” (sic).

This letter, and the half-kidney, are featured in this week’s movie.

A huge literature has developed on the history and likely identity of Jack, but none of it is conclusive; the crime writer Patricia Cornwell argued that the Ripper was the famous artist Walter Sickert. Others have written credible accounts of other suspects, including Prince Edward Albert Victor, second in line to the British throne. The enduring mythology of Jack the Ripper, though, depends on the fact that he remains unknown, a figure hidden by his presumed uniformity with those of his milieu. Jack was the domestic cannibal – murderous, voracious, and indistinguishable from any other citizen, just another face in the street, as demonstrated by the fact that he was never apprehended, or even conclusively identified.

Jack rapidly became an international phenomenon. A Chicago doctor wrote in the Medical Standard that,

… the Whitechapel murderer is a cannibal pure and simple. The Whitechapel murders are clearly the work of a lunatic of the so-called “sexual pervert” type, fortunately rare in Anglo-Saxon lands but not infrequently met with in Russia, Germany, Bohemia and France. In these lunatics there is a return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races. Cannibalism is shown in a thirst for blood, and these animal passions come to the surface when the checks imposed by centuries of civilization are removed either by disease or by the defects inherited from degenerate parents.

So critical to the creation of the domestic monster was The Ripper that almost a century and a half later, books and films are still investigating and theorising on his acts and identity.

Jack went “viral” long before the internet was around to invent the term. Jack conventions are held around the world offering attendees the opportunity to view and buy merch and listen to “experts” tell them who Jack (maybe) was. Many books have offered definitive proof of Jack’s secret identity, only to have other experts contradict them. One writer actually bought at auction a shawl belonging to one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes, and had it forensically examined, finding, through links to the DNA of descendants, that it contained her blood, and the semen of a long-suspected Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. Seems conclusive, doesn’t it, but other Jack-fans were sceptical; DNA can be contaminated. Richard Cobb, who organizes Jack the Ripper conventions, told the Guardian that the shawl had been “openly handled by loads of people and been touched, breathed on, spat upon.”

This film, From Hell, has a somewhat more circuitous lineage, being based on a graphic novel (formerly called comic book series) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell which was published from 1989-1998 and then collected into book form. That novel is based on a 1976 non-fiction book by Stephen Knight with the rather unfortunate title of Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Knight’s theory proposes a conspiracy by the Freemasons, in which high-ranking Freemason Sir William Gull, royal surgeon to Queen Victoria, is told to cover up the marriage of a shopgirl, Annie Crook to Prince Albert Victor, the heir to the throne, which had resulted in a baby who would be in line for the crown, particularly as the Prince was dying of syphilis. The murders themselves were not the crimes of passion common in impoverished London, particularly from the pimps that the women feared most, but involved the careful dissection of the bodies and removal of organs and often vulvas. The basis of many theories was that these were clearly the work of an educated man with medical or at least anatomical training.

“Martha Tabram was raped, tortured and killed. This is methodical. The butchery is irrational, yet meticulous and deliberate. Altogether a different breed of killer.”

The film had mixed reviews, getting a 57% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I found it an easy to watch, interesting tale told with some gusto, by a stellar cast: Sir William Gull, physician to His Maj and presumed serial killer, is played by the late lamented Ian Holm, who was playing a sweet, doddery, 111 year old Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the same year he played Jack.

Johnny Depp plays Inspector Abberline, the cop searching for Jack, with his usual brooding sensual close-ups, while Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) is quite luminous as the sex worker Mary Kelly, who becomes his love interest as well as a target of Jack. Then there’s a delightful performance by Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid from the Harry Potter films) as Abberline’s sergeant, who quotes Shakespeare as he tries to revive Abberline from his opium den dreams, where he imbibes absinthe laced with laudanum and “sees” the murders as they happen.

Ian McNeice (Bert Large from Doc Martin) pops up as the coroner, and there are a host of other familiar faces. If you like a boisterous story and some great performances, you might enjoy this. But if you are serious Jack groupie, you will wince at the anachronism that puts the receipt of the kidney some time before the murder of Catherine Eddowes, from whom that kidney is likely to have been taken.

Like any fictional recreation of history, there is inevitably exaggeration and speculation. The film depicts an all-powerful Freemason movement infiltrating the police and medical establishment and threatening or killing anyone in their way. There is an evocative depiction of the life of late nineteenth century sex workers (called “whores” by the police, and often themselves, and “unfortunates” in official language). There is also some cursory mention of the classism and racism that English society exhibited in the age of Empire (and still does), seeking to blame the American natives in “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” (perhaps a wink to the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs?), foreigners, Orientals, Jews, Socialists – anyone other than the rich and powerful. Several scenes feature the hatred of Jews that saw the police and the populace open to antisemitic provocation when looking for a scapegoat. The chasm between the respectable killer and the honest but disreputable poor is made by means of an (otherwise gratuitous) appearance by the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick who, like Jack, was a famous denizen of Whitechapel. He stands surrounded by respectable white men, wondering at his ugliness, but having no inkling of his humanity.

Foreigners, the disfigured, the “unfortunates” and Jews were outsiders in English society, and outsiders are denied the protection that other citizens expect, and so are easily accused, attacked, killed and sometimes even eaten. The “unfortunate” mother of the royal baby is kidnapped and given a frontal lobotomy, a new scientific technique which was instantly turned to the advantage of the elite.

In Victorian England, the poor were blamed for any and all of society’s ills, with the idea of suspecting a rich, educated man excluded from consideration. Of course, the Indigenous people in Queen Victoria’s empire were similarly objectified, enslaved or slaughtered, also using the benefits of modern technology such as the gunboat and machine-gun.

The movie opens with a quote, Jack, saying “One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.”

I can see no other reference to such a quote in any source other than this movie, but it has a certain ring to it, it makes sense of this modern drama between the rich, who only ever want more, and the poor, who scrabble just to stay alive. At a time when the environment has been appropriated and cannibalised by the ruling class, has Jack’s comment in 1888 proved prophetic?

Jack the Ripper was less “a return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races” and more a manifestation of the voracious appetite and greed of modern capitalist industrial society, where the value of everything, including the life of humans and other animals, is counted only in monetary terms, and the marginalised and objectified are cast out and consumed.