An eastern Kentucky woman was arrested in November on charges relating to human trafficking. A Morgan County grand jury has now indicted Elena Sparenberg on charges of conspiracy to human trafficking, solicitation to murder and sexual abuse and distribution of obscene matter.
The West Liberty Police Department said in a press release on December 11 2024 that they first detected the alleged crimes in September, after receiving an investigation referral from the Kentucky Department of Corrections Internal Affairs regarding conversations between an inmate and a visitor.
Sparenberg, a former youth counsellor from Illinois, was identified as the visitor, talking with a Harlan County man who had been in jail for murder and other charges since 2021.
While investigating, police searched Sparenberg’s home in Illinois and took electronic devices. They allege that Sparenberg and the inmate had shared images, videos, electronic messages, letters and calls.
Their conversations referenced minors and adults regarding sexual abuse, rape, kidnapping, murder, mutilation, torture, satanic rituals, cannibalism, human trafficking, abuse of a corpse, collecting human remains for sexual purposes and more.
Police say images they found showed children from a sporting organisation. Their coaches and parents were notified, along with others who are thought to be in danger as future victims.
A friend on TikTok, where Sparenberg posts charming videos of her baby, asked:
Sparenberg’s LinkedIn account, which lists her position as counsellor in Illinois, ironically states:
“…until then, I believe in starting at the bottom. By doing this, I am able to work my way up.”
Not clear if the alleged cannibalism planned to follow the same progression?
Sparenberg was extradited from Illinois to Kentucky on a Morgan County warrant.
She is being held at the Rowan County Detention Center.
If Donald Duck (who vaguely resembles a duck) eats a chicken’s body parts, such as wings, does that make him a cannibal? You know, because he’s a (sort of) bird eating body parts of birds.
Donald appeared this week on the YouTube interview show HOT ONES (see link above). Hot Ones calls itself:
The show with hot questions, and even hotter wings.
It’s a talk show produced by First We Feast and Complex Media and hosted by the very congenial host Sean Evans. The simple but ingenious premise is that Evans interviews celebrities while they eat a platter of spicy chicken wings. To make it interesting, the wings are served with increasingly hot chilli sauces. The questions become deeper and more personal as the Scoville hotness score of the sauces is ramped up and the guest becomes hot and bothered.
The Scoville score on Donald’s last sauce, “Straight out of Hades”, is 1,454,000, which has the expected result on poor Donald.
So anyway, would eating chicken wings be classified as cannibalism for young Mr Duck (who, we are told, is actually celebrating his 90th anniversary of his animated life)? Well, I covered the biological question pretty comprehensively in my blog last Christmas, which looked at the ethics of Donald and family eating chickens and turkeys for their festive meal.
The traditional definition of cannibalism is eating the flesh of a member of one’s own species. Now, it is not clear what species of duck Donald purports to be, but to be a cannibal, he would have to be eating a duck that wears clothes and speaks (sort of) English (the Hot Ones interview helpfully offers subtitles). This would probably limit his cannibalism feasting options to his nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, or Uncle Scrooge, and all of those people remain alive and uneaten, as far as we are aware. Or, of course, his long-time paramour Daisy, and he tells us that she is still around; indeed, she was the one who challenged him to agree to the interview while they were watching earlier episodes.
Now if we’re going to say that Donald eating any bird (Class: Aves) is cannibalism, then we need to agree that humans eating cows, pigs, sheep, goats, etc (Class: Mammalia) would also be cannibalism. I’m happy to go with that, but I haven’t found too many other takers.
But there is one more obstacle to the outrage of those condemning Donald’s consumption of chicken wings. Sean Evans states very clearly at the start of the feast
I notice you have the cauliflower wings on that side of the table, but no water or milk to help you out?
Donald doesn’t need them (he claims). What a rebel! That’s why we love Donald, far more than we love Mickey, at least, according to the totally unscientific surveys I have performed.
Donald doesn’t want chicken meat, or cow’s milk. Donald is a vegan! I guess in a world where humans eat twelve million ducks (and 200 million chickens) every day, we shouldn’t expect anything else.
If you by any chance have watched any of the videos of the influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin), you may not have guessed that anything controversial was being shown. The Brazilian, from São Francisco do Conde, a city in the metropolitan area of Salvador in Bahiahad, had been gaining more and more followers on social media over the months before his arrest on July 23 2024, when he was apprehended after being caught desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count, in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, and stealing human bones.
Not just bones. The 22-year-old influencer used human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Both of which have been reported as tasting very similar to human flesh.
One of Pinguim’s videos, which went viral on social media, explained the secrets of adding meat to beans — and how to get the most out of the final dish.
“Treat and throw it in the beans. But you can’t eat it, no, you just chew it and then throw it away. You don’t swallow it, you just chew it and throw it away, you just taste it, it’s sweet.”
The remains were not only for use in his recipes. After being arrested, Israel led the local police to a mangrove swamp where he had hidden numerous bags of bones. He had been sending these to Salvador, the state capital, to be used in satanic rituals.
The suspect was caught after families of buried people reported that graves had been violated and several bones had been stolen.
Pinguim made a video confession to police which was later released to the media. He reported that he had spent hours at the cemetery to see which graves were the most recent; those with the freshest human flesh. He told police he had fried a piece of a person’s leg and seasoned it with lemon and vinegar before chewing on it.
Local reports say he told police that he stole the body parts to order, in exchange for a payment equivalent to about $US50 from three people who wanted to use the bones as part of a black magic ceremony. He used the money to buy shoes and sandwiches, as well as getting his hair cut.
Surprisingly, Pinguim was released on bail pending an ongoing investigation into charges of desecrating a tomb. His lawyer, Luan Santos, told local media his client suffered from mental health issues and was taking anti-depressants. He added that he would be demanding psychiatric tests to ascertain whether the accused was fully aware of what he was doing.
Pinguim’s social media accounts have been deleted.
Brazil has always been a fascinating area for students of cannibalism. One of the most famous tribes was the Tupinamba, who captured a German soldier and explorer named Hans Staden in the sixteenth century. He claimed to have witnessed their cannibalistic rituals and did very nicely from his subsequent writings, illustrated by the graphic woodcuts of Theodor de Bry. As a result, the Portuguese came to save the ‘savages’ from their sins, and through enslavement, assimilation, extermination and the introduction of Smallpox, managed to wipe them out completely.
The classic cannibalism film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês) is set in this period of imperial invasion, and tries to give a new perspective on the way colonialism used cannibalism as its pretext.
More recently, modern Brazilians have been involved in some of the more interesting cannibalism stories that have graced our news cycles, including the “Cartel” who sold pastries made from human flesh to unwitting customers, and the Brazilian who was arrested in Lisbon for eating a man who had tried to help him. Like most cannibalism films, the ones set in Brazil vary between seeing it as something savages naturally do, such as Emanuelle and the Cannibals, and those that see it as typifying the exploitation of the poor by the rich, such as The Cannibal Club.
The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposed a ‘post-structural anthropology’ in his book Cannibal Metaphysics. De Castro sought to ‘decolonise’ anthropology by challenging the increasingly familiar view that it was ‘exoticist and primitivist from birth’, denying that cannibalism even existed, and so transferred the conquered peoples from the cannibalistic villains of the West into mere fictions of colonialism. This alternative view of Amerindian culture rejects the automatic assumption of the repugnance of cannibalism, which serves to either confront it or deny its existence. Accepting those parts of colonial culture that are useful (they speak Portuguese for example) can be seen as a form of reverse, cultural cannibalism.
But Pinguim demonstrates that even Brazilians have not fully embraced this philosophy, particularly when it involves digging up their relatives.
Even the poster didn’t try to persuade people that it was true.
“crying, why are ppl actually believing this … y’all believe anything”
That is certainly true. You may recall an almost identical campaign a few years back which claimed that Anne Hathaway had left evidence of cannibalism in a house she sold in 2013. This turned out to have been a “sociological study.”
Oprah has a history of media interviews in which she discusses food. Recently, she extolled the idea of using medications for losing weight, revealing that she has been using such drugs. Who can say that a high protein, low carb diet based on the cuisine of Dr Hannibal Lecter might not prove effective? Have you ever met a fat cannibal?
In 2008, Oprah went on a three week “vegan cleanse”. At the end of that brief period, she wrote
“At the end of the 21 days, I could not declare myself vegan or even vegetarian. But I am, for sure, more mindful of my choices. I’m eating a far more plant-based diet.”
Maybe giving up meat for health, environmental or ethical reasons could go beyond just avoiding human flesh, for everyone’s health?
A keen-eyed Cannibal Studies student spotted this sign on the Interstate 80 in California recently.
The lake is named after the Donner Party, a group of Midwestern pioneers who were forced to spend the winter of 1846–47 in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They became snowbound in the bitter winter that year, and famously turned to cannibalism to survive. Only 48 of the original 87 members of the party endured and made it to California.
The best part of the sign is the symbol below it of a knife and fork. One presumes this was meant to advise weary travellers that there were restaurant facilities at the Lake, but it has caused some hilarity on Facebook where the poster tagged the picture,
Nicely played CalTrans, nicely played..
Many of the comments (and there are well over 3,000 of them when last checked) gloried in the cannibalism theme:
California Department of Transportation public information officer Steve Nelson said that there are 38 restaurants past the exit, “so the sign is appropriate to notify motorists, but [we] also understand the irony and that it may be considered insensitive.”
Well, the sensitive can always drive straight past the Donner Lake exit. But if they drive 8 miles beyond this sign, and take exit 188, they’ll see this one instead,
Nothing improves the appetite like a picnic in the snow.
In a recent episode of Penn Badgley's podcast, Ariana Grande said that Jeffrey Dahmer would be her dream dinner guest: "I think I would have loved to meet him."https://t.co/zfvrJCRxAj
Ariana Grande managed to raise some serious eyebrows when she was asked on Penn Badgley’s podcast in June 2024 whom she would most like to have dinner with. She replied:
“Jeffrey Dahmer’s pretty fascinating. I really wish I could have met him.”
The mother of Tony Hughes, one of the men Jeffrey Dahmer murdered, criticised Grande last week, calling the singer “sick in her mind.” Tony’s sister, Barbara, told TMZ that she hopes Grande will apologise for her comments, and both shared disappointment in the singer’s apparent lack of empathy for the victims’ families. “Unfortunately, until it happens to her and her family, she just doesn’t know what we have been through,” Barbara said.
Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen boys and young men between 1978 and 1991, mainly people of colour, and after his arrest spoke freely about consuming body parts from some of them.
According to Grande, her fascination with Dahmer began “years ago before the [Netflix] Dahmer series,” and she had mentioned it to young fans when she was a Nickelodeon star.
In the podcast, Grande suggested she would like to meet Dahmer, but “maybe with a third party or someone involved. I have questions,” she added.
Grande is a big deal in the world of celebs. She had reportedly sold over 85 million records and accrued 98 billion streams (so far), making her one of the most-streamed artists of all time. She was the most-streamed female act of the 2010s and has the second most songs with over a billion streams for a woman. Grande also has a massive social media following; with over 380 million followers, she is the sixth-most-followed individual on Instagram and one of the most-subscribed and most followed musicians on YouTube and Spotify.
I guess that keeps her busy, because honestly there is so much Dahmerabilia on the web that having dinner with him would be unnecessary (and messy, since he had his head caved in by another prisoner in 1994). Ryan Murphy made a hugely popular re-enactment of the case for Netflix in 2022, although it had been done before and rather well by Jeremy Renner (playing Dahmer) in a movie made by David Jacobson in 2002. Then there are the tape recordings – his defence team released their tapes of interviews with him a few weeks after the Ryan Murphy doco went to air. In 2023, Dahmer’s dad released his own interview tapes together with home movies etc, on Fox Nation. In prison, before his death, Dahmer was open and transparent about his activities with a range of interviewers. Not sure how much was left to uncover over a nice dinner of fava beans and a big Amaroni?
Some of the news reports have rather pompously asked if her preference for a cannibal for dinner means that she is therefore a cannibal herself? Well sorry guys, but we happen to know that Ariana is a vegan, and has been since watching the documentary Forks Over Knives in 2013. Ariana told a UK paper:
“I love animals more than I love most people, not kidding.”
She insists that (besides being kinder to animals and better for the environment) going vegan has improved her health immensely.
“The way I’m eating now has actually helped even out my blood sugar. As some of you guys may know, I’ve struggled with awful hypoglycemia for my whole life and it’s improved a ton since I changed my eating habits.”
Would Ariana eat a human at her dinner with Dahmer? About as likely as her eating a cow or a pig!
There are tendencies, dispositions, that characterise each era, each year, sometimes each day. Call them spiritus mundi or the zeitgeist, they appear to us in the media of the time – never more so than now, when we can express instant expression and instant outrage on social media. The current trend seems to be about oppressive elites who are manipulating, enslaving, sometimes consuming us. On the ‘right’ this is sometimes expressed as “the Deep State”, on the ‘left’ it is variously called capitalist exploitation or racist colonialism.
A story that has been doing the rounds for a decade has recently gone (a bit) viral again this month after a podcast called Mexico Unexplained revisited the story of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared some 15 years ago after raging against the machine outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon. Jiménez is usually described as a “supermodel” although there is little evidence of that in Google searches. But then again, if she has been “disappeared” by the elites against whom she railed, then they would have made sure to delete her history as well, n’est pas? The Daily Mail rediscovered the story on June 1 2024 and brought it back to life:
Anyhow, she made some interesting if somewhat mystifying accusations:
“I wanted my freedom. Monterrey freed me but it cost me a lot of work. I was in Mexico City for a year and four months. All this began in mid-2001. I barely remember. They were young and powerful, and they killed them. I’ve been knocking on doors. What I wanted was my freedom. I want my freedom. Carlos Slim knew about this. I want my freedom. It hurts my soul that they took him away.”
Carlos Slim at that time was apparently the richest man in Mexico or maybe the world, controlling América Móvil, Latin America’s biggest mobile telecom firm, so it’s not too surprising that her rant was shut down pretty quick, and she was carted off, presumably to a mental asylum, wherein she perhaps still rots, unless she has been cured, killed, or eaten.
As the police (or stooges of the elites if you prefer) began to move in, she screamed,
“You! You were there! … You killed Mouriño! They told me who did they kill? The Queen of England? The Queen of Germany? Did they kill the princesses and Mickey Mouse? It was also him! What? Nothing is going to come here. The people where you come from are crazy! They killed a lot of people. Death to that kind of human! Go away! They ate humans! Disgusting! They ate humans! I wasn’t aware of anything. Of the murders, yes, but they ate humans! Humans! They smell like human flesh!”
Now, Germany does not have a Queen, nor is Mickey Mouse a real live mortal being (sorry for the spoiler, kids). Were other royals and plutocrats engaged in cannibalism? Unfortunately, the sudden disappearance of Ms Jiménez makes it difficult to work out what she was alleging, let alone the truth of such claims. But conspiracy theories love angry rants and disappearing complainants, and so a (smallish) cult has followed Jiménez, particularly after an anonymous person on a blog called “The Black Manik” claimed to have spoken to Jimenez and witnessed the incident, until he was pulled away by “some tall, well-dressed people”. Accusations fly thick and fast about elites and their alleged members, some of whom are occasionally accused of being rich cannibals.
Despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail, no further sightings of Gabriela Rico Jiménez have been reported.
The narrative of cannibalism to describe class warfare is nothing new – in 1789, the sans-culottes felt that French aristocrats were (perhaps metaphorically) eating their flesh, and in turn, the poor eating the aristocrats (more literally) became popular after the Revolution. In films, there are a lot of phantasies about the poor eating the rich, such as the silly English movie Eat the Rich. Indigenous people were routinely accused of eating their European invaders, often as a pretext for enslavement and extermination, but sometimes the eating of the foreigner was presented as a form of liberation. Sawney Bean and his incestuous clan were supposedly preying on rich travellers in the fifteenth century, and have been revived for horror stories ever since. We see cannibalism as a form of revenge on rich exploiters in the classic Suddenly Last Summer, in which the rich, white, effete Sebastian is eaten by the impoverished boys he has been sexually abusing.
But the more realistic horror movies usually show those with money, influence and power eating the poor. Jack the Ripper was never conclusively identified, but seems to have been someone rich and powerful, who got his kicks in 1888 from killing sex workers and, in one case at least, eating parts of them. The film Never Let Me Go showed a future (or alternate present) in which the protagonists were bred as clones, not to be eaten exactly, but to be cut up for organ transplants. More recently, films have speculated on the rich forming clubs to eat the poor, or paying entrepreneurs to kidnap and sell parts of young women to satiate their jaded appetites. In the wonderful Welsh film The Feast, the rich are over-consumers of the environment, and their punishment is to eat each other. And let’s not forget the extraordinary accusations made against actor Armie Hammer, who declared to a girlfriend on social media “I am 100% a cannibal. I want to eat you.”
So it’s not clear who is eating whom – the rich or the poor, or perhaps there is some sort of cultural pendulum. But leaving aside the actual flesh, we are all involved in consumption of the other in some form. Philosophers from Voltaire to Derrida have declared “we are all cannibals”.
Police in Quebec report that convicted serial killer Robert Pickton is in a medically induced coma and on life support after being attacked by another inmate in prison.
The Canadian pig farmer was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with the maximum parole ineligibility period of 25 years in 2007. He was also charged with the murders of 21 other women, but those counts were stayed. In total, investigators found DNA from 33 women — many of them Indigenous sex workers who had vanished from Vancouver’s downtown eastside in the 1990s and early 2000s — at Pickton’s Port Coquitlam pig farm. Pickton also once allegedly bragged to an undercover police officer that he had killed as many as 49 women, and wanted one more to make an even 50.
Pickton allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with pork products he sold to his neighbours for their personal consumption. This puts him in the category of entrepreneurial cannibal, selling human products (directly or via porcine digestive tracts) to ‘innocent’ cannibals who bought his products; in the league of Sweeney Todd and Delores Roach.
Whether he fed human flesh to his pigs, his neighbours or himself, the revulsion and fascination in the media, which focussed on the possible cannibalism more than the torture and murder, sheds some light on the fragility of the thin red line between humans and (other) animals. The pigs had reportedly eaten humans and then been eaten by humans, with human meat incorporated into their flesh through digestion, plus possibly a more direct route to cannibalism via the sale of the meat, masquerading as pork. The headlines concentrated on the suffering of the dyspeptic neighbours who may have eaten (and probably enjoyed) the flesh, although it is obvious that their indigestion was far less painful than the torture endured by Pickton’s victims.
In February 2024, Alberta comedy group Danger Cats had their Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa performances cancelled after widespread backlash over T-shirts they made showing Pickton grinning and holding a slice of bacon with the caption “Pickton Farms, over 50 flavours of hookery smoked bacon.”
Sources told Radio-Canada on Tuesday that Pickton, 74, was clinging to life following what Correctional Service Canada (CSC) confirmed was a “major assault” on Sunday at the maximum-security Port-Cartier Institution, about 450 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. Pickton was in a segregated intervention unit at the maximum-security prison when he was speared in the head with a broken broom handle on Sunday evening, May 19, 2024.
Chief Marilyn Slett with the Heiltsuk Tribal Council in Bella Bella, B.C., said that discussion about Pickton’s assault has revived painful memories for the families of the victims and Indigenous people. Tammy Lynn Papin, the sister of one of Pickton’s victims, told CBC News that she felt relieved and happy when she heard that the serial killer had been attacked in prison.
“I said, ‘Good for him, he deserved it.’ I don’t wish any harm on anybody but — karma, you know?”
The movie The Farm may perhaps be based on the news reports about Robert Pickton. In the film, tourists are captured, caged, bred, slaughtered and sold as food. Which is what Pickton, the pig farmer, did to pigs for a living, and to humans for diversion. He ‘processed’ the captured women, in the same way that he ‘processed’ the pigs on his farm. Another movie called The Hermit is about to be released starring Lou Ferrigno (The Incredible Hulk) as a cannibalistic pig farmer, making human jerky for a living.
It’s what humans do to billions of farmed animals every year.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) summed this up with a billboard campaign in 2004 showing a young woman and a pig, with a caption saying, “Neither of us is meat”. Bruce Friedrich, director of PETA’s campaign, responded to the predictable outrage by observing that,
“Canadians who are shocked at the thought that they may have eaten human flesh should think about the fact that there appears not to be a difference in taste between pig flesh and human flesh. A corpse is a corpse, whether it formerly belonged to a pig, a cow, a chicken, or a human.”
The mastermind of a “grisly and gruesome” extreme body modification network who streamed mutilations on his “eunuch maker” website has been jailed for life, with a minimum term of 22 years.
Marius Gustavson, 46, was accused of being the “arch manipulator” of vulnerable victims and purportedly took part in at least 29 procedures, which were “little short of human butchery”, the Old Bailey in London heard.
The “large-scale, dangerous and extremely disturbing” four-year enterprise included castrations, the use of clamps to crush testicles, penis removals, the freezing of limbs and administering electric shocks to a 16-year-old boy, procedures which were streamed on Gustavson’s website.
The “busy and lucrative” business earned more than £300,000 from its global base of 22,841 paying subscribers between 2017 and 2021.
Gustavson, who had previously admitted charges including conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, appeared for sentence via video link alongside six other men who had all admitted their involvement. The charges relate to thirteen victims who are under police guard.
Judge Mark Lucraft, the recorder of London and most senior judge at the Old Bailey, said as he announced the sentence:
“Gustavson, you are very much the mastermind behind this grisly and gruesome enterprise. The business you set up was one that was both busy and lucrative. As with all the others involved, you have no medical qualifications. The footage uploaded was extremely explicit and made available to paying subscribers no doubt so they could watch it for their sexual gratification […] Like-minded individuals were recruited by you, Gustavson, to assist in what became a large-scale, dangerous, and extremely disturbing enterprise.”
The prosecutor, Caroline Carberry KC, told the three-day sentencing hearing that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson, who had two previous fraud convictions in Norway, had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”. He also kept numerous body parts as “trophies” in a fridge at his home in Harringay, north London and offered to sell the severed penis of one of his victims for hundreds of pounds. Penisectomy, the removal of the penis and emasculation of the subject, is a popular topic in cannibalism texts, signifying the loss of the dominance of the virile carnivore, eaten by others who are closer to nature, more adventurous in their carnivory, and so more savage. Think of Lenzi’s film Cannibal Ferox, where we have not one but two penisectomies, one by the white invader and the other by the enraged natives.
The court heard the procedures were carried out in “amateur and dangerous” ways with kitchen knives, surgical scalpels and farm or slaughterhouse implements designed to be used on slave animals, leaving victims in agony and often needing medical attention.
The judge said, “They are permanent and irreversible procedures and will have a long-term, lifetime effect on the ability of the victim to carry out their day-to-day activities.”
Gustavson’s film-production techniques seemed to have become more professional as the number of procedures increased. The videos were uploaded to the website and subscribers were offered varying levels of membership from “free” to “VIP”, which cost £100, the court heard.
The scale of the operation run by Gustavson, a Norwegian national, and others was “without precedent”, Carberry said, adding that it was “impossible to know” the full scale of the offending.
The court previously heard that the procedures are linked to a subculture where men become “nullos”, short for nulloplasty or genital nullification, by having their penis and testicles removed. More details are available on the Queerdoc site.
In a video of one incident, which was played in court, one of the group’s victims was branded with the letters “EM”, for eunuch maker, on the back of his calf. The man later complained to police about Gustavson and his “circle of acolytes”, leading to the investigation and arrests in London, Scotland and South Wales. In his victim impact statement, the branded man described Gustavson as a “lunatic” running a “slick, professional website”.
The other six defendants admitted conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. The judge ruled that “I am entirely satisfied that the motivation of all those involved were a mix of sexual gratification as well as financial reward.”
Gustavson pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit grievous bodily harm, five counts of grievous bodily harm with intent, making and distributing an indecent photograph of a child, and possession of criminal property.
Peter Wates, 67, of Purley, Surrey, a retired former member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Forensic officers found a scrotum and two penile shafts inside a tub of butter marked with the instruction “do not defrost” at his home address.
Janus Atkin, 38, of Newport, Gwent, who had been completing a veterinary course, was jailed for 12 years.
Ion Ciucur, 30, of Gretna, Scotland, received five years and eight months’ imprisonment, and Stefan Scharf, 61, of no fixed address, was sentenced to four and a half years in jail.
David Carruthers, 61, and Ashley Williams, 32, of Newport, Gwent, were jailed for 11 years and four years, six months respectively.
This was not just a business venture, but an expression of nullo ideology. In January, three men were sentenced after admitting causing grievous bodily harm to Gustavson.
Damien Byrnes, 36, from north London, was jailed for five years for removing Gustavson’s penis with a kitchen knife on video at his home on 18 February 2017. Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, from Epsom in Surrey, was jailed for three years and eight months for freezing Gustavson’s leg leading to the need for it to be amputated in February 2019. Nathan Arnold, 48, from South Kensington, west London, received a two-year suspended sentence for the partial removal of Gustavson’s nipple with a scalpel in the summer of 2019.
In mitigation, defence barrister Rashvinderjeet Panesar said the breakdown of Gustavson’s marriage was the “trigger” for his offending.
“He had a desire to be the architect of his own body. His modification led him to feelings of empowerment. It appears at face value to be something that’s become an addiction for him.”
Kate Mulholland, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said, “Whilst the victims in this case all seemingly consented to surgeries and amputations, the victim who bravely reported his assault to the police expressed serious regret regarding his procedure and the lasting impact it has had upon him. This clearly emphasises why such practices are unlawful.”
Detective Inspector Amanda Greig, from the Metropolitan Police’s specialist crime command, thanked the victims for their bravery, adding, “I would like to highlight the excellent work of the Met’s investigation team, who have examined thousands of hours of horrific material seized from the suspects. Their diligence and professionalism have ensured no one else will suffer at the hands of these men.”
The Met said a search of Gustavson’s flat had uncovered boxes of medical needles and syringes, local anaesthetic packs, surgical tools, a wooden chopping board and a mallet, a body board with leg and arm restraints attached, disposable skin staplers, and numerous medical procedure videos.
Body modifications are not unusual; we see men and women proudly displaying tattoos and piercings in public now, although within living memory they were considered only for sailors and members of criminal gangs. Nor is it new; from about 1550 CE to the late 19th century, young boys were castrated, often quite brutally, before puberty, simply to ensure that their voices would not deepen, and they would become “castrati”, with the lung capacity and muscular strength of an adult male, and the vocal range of a prepubescent boy. Before that, since pre-Biblical times, young boys (and in many places girls) have undergone genital mutilations as part of religious or cultural rituals.
News stories about cases like the Eunuch Maker tend to start with warnings to sensitive readers that they may find the details disturbing. But there is also an intriguing ethical question that is largely ignored in all the coverage.
When the issue of modification and mutilation is related to other species, it bizarrely becomes innocuous. Companion animals are usually desexed to ensure they remain docile. Farmed animals such as bulls and boars are routinely castrated when babies, usually without any anaesthetics, so that their taste is not affected by puberty, which gives the meat an unpleasant “taint”. Like most anthropocentric ethics, whatever we choose to do to “animals” is functional, advantageous (to humans only), and considered unremarkable and inculpable, while doing the same things to humans, even consenting ones, is considered (to quote the Judge) “grisly and gruesome”. The exact same baffling and discombobulating shift of perspective happens when portraying the difference between the eating of animal “meat” and human “flesh”. Gustavson ate the flesh of the human animals he castrated, the difference being they had asked for the operation. If one occurrence is repulsive, surely so is the other?
The website is no longer available, but this is what it looked like:
Dmitri Malyshev was recently released from a 25-year sentence for murder and cannibalism to fight on the Ukrainian front for the Russian “Storm V” and “Storm Z” forces.
The enormous number of casualties and shortage of Russian volunteer troops in Ukraine inspired Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin, to scour the worst prisons in Russia and recruit murderers, rapists and cannibals for his army, the Wagner Group. They were dropped into the thick of the fighting, and promised a full pardon if they survived six months against the Ukrainian army. Prigozhin has since been killed, but the scheme apparently survives, now run by the Russian military.
The latest recruit is Dmitri Malyshev. Originally from Volgograd, Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Malyshev, part of an organized criminal group, had previously killed two businessmen for their money.
In the video, Malyshev said:
“We’re roasting a human. Here it is – a heart. I’ve already added the onion.”
Malyshev subsequently apologized for his actions, “carried out under the influence of alcohol.” Well, that’s OK then. Who hasn’t acted ill-advisedly after a few drinks and eaten a friend?
In March 2024, Malyshev took a photo in Ukraine with another participant in the war, Alexander Maslennikov from Volzhsky, who was convicted in 2017 for stabbing to death two girls he met at a karaoke joint, dismembering them, and hiding them in the forest, for which he received a 22-year sentence. In 2023, residents of Volgograd and Volzhsky expressed their fear on social media about Maslennikov’s potential return to the region.
A cannibal and a serial killer were released from prison and went to the front line
The cannibal Dmitry Malyshev, who ate Tajik’s heart and recorded the whole process on camera, was released from prison and went to war in Ukraine to "fight" sex education in school and gays. At… pic.twitter.com/R26pDYHAMh
During his conversation with V1 journalists, Malyshev confirmed that he had served his prison term alongside Maslennikov, and they both signed a military contract in October 2023. Malyshev was deployed to the ‘Storm V’ unit. The cannibal asserted that he had decided to “fight for the preservation of traditional Russian values.” He added that he came to Ukraine to “fight” against sex education in schools and gays.
Malyshev is currently in hospital. He told reporters:
“A grenade landed on me during an assault manoeuvre. I have a broken jaw, shrapnel in my knee and left hand and my left eardrum burst. Nothing to see here.”
Other cannibals purportedly sent to fight in Ukraine include:
Nikolai Ogolobyak, a Satanist who, with his followers, killed four college students and ate their internal organs in a ritual feast
Denis Gorin, who killed and ate parts of at least three victims, although parts of around twelve bodies were found
From Putin’s point of view, it’s an ideal solution. Why feed these guys (even if not very lavishly) for the next twenty years or so, when they can go off and be killed or else fend for themselves, finding their own sources of meat and onions? And, if they happen to survive the hellish battles in which they are dropped, then they are ‘pardoned’ and sent home where, more than likely, their victims’ relatives may have plans for them. From a military point of view, too, they have proved that the life of a human is worth no more to them than any other kind of edible animal, which, together with having nothing to lose, makes them ideal killing machines.
“…there is no article ‘cannibalism’ in the legislation of the Russian Federation. Perhaps that is why the dehumanization of Russians has already acquired a literal meaning.”
Meat the twenty-first century version of super-soldiers.
The Cannibal Guy 