In the year 2000, 44-year-old slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight had a night of passion with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked parts of him. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate place-names for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but couldn’t do so. The police arrived before Price’s children so, as far as we know, none of him was consumed (by humans anyway).
Knight pleaded guilty to murder and the judge ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released.” An appeal was quickly denied, and she is still serving her life sentence at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.
Shoreline Entertainment planned to make a film of the incident based on Peter Lalor’s book Blood Stain, but so far it has not surfaced.
It appears that Knight was NOT a cannibal, despite one of the favourite media labels about her being “Kathy the Cannibal”. Other reports called her “The Woman Hannibal Lecter”, a comparison that makes no sense at all, since Hannibal did not use 37 strokes to kill people, definitely did eat parts of them, and did not (as Knight did) take a cocktail of sleeping tablets afterwards while lying in bed with the mutilated corpse.
Darren O’Sullivan, whose documentary is linked at the top of this blog, commented,
“this is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever discovered”.
Although the series is called “Real Twisted Tales”, I suspect O’Sullivan must have led a sheltered life. Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, recognised for her skills in knife work. She grew up in the NSW town of Aberdeen, where everyone in her family and most of the town were employed in the abattoir. Her job, from a young age, was to kill and cut up animals. She did to John Price what she was trained to do to other animals – slaughter them, cut them up, cook them. She did try to feed bits to his children, which is what farmers did in the UK (feeding cattle bone-meal to cattle), an act of cannibalism which led to Mad Cow Disease. But there is little evidence that she herself ate any of him.
The documentary above states that Katherine Knight is “one of the most evil people in the world”, because she was found sane enough to stand trial. But really, what she did was what she was paid to do every day, just to a different species than those who usually suffered and died under her hand.
Superstitious anthropocentric beliefs put humans on a tier somewhere between angels and animals, but really we are a species of Great Ape, closely related to the chimpanzee. Rationally speaking, there really is only a thin red line between killing and eating any species of animal.
Tyree Smith, from Bridgeport Connecticut, killed a homeless man on December 15, 2011, and ate his brain and eyeballs. He has just been released into the community, ten years after being committed to a state psychiatric hospital, the Whiting Forensic Hospital, supposedly for sixty years.
Smith apologised for the murder at the trial, and the three-judge panel decided he was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, during his sentencing in July 2013.
In lieu of prison, Smith was committed to a state psychiatric hospital for sixty years. After just ten years, the state Psychiatric Security Review Board said Smith was ready to be transitioned back into the community and he has been released from the facility, Connecticut’s most secure.
He will be living in a Waterbury group home, under orders not to associate with anyone involved in criminal activity. The board stated in its report:
Tyree Smith is an individual with a psychiatric illness requiring care, custody and treatment. Since his last hearing, Tyree Smith has continued to demonstrate clinical stability. Mr. Smith is medication compliant, actively engaged in all recommended forms of treatment, and has been symptom-free for many years.
During the trial, Smith’s cousin Nicole Rabb claimed he arrived at her Connecticut home in December 2011, ranting about Greek gods and talking about needing to go out and get blood.
Police described in the arrest warrant what they believed happened.
Smith curled up outside the abandoned, boarded-up Brooks Street apartment building where he used to live. He was awakened by Angel “Tun Tun” Gonzalez, a homeless drunk who invited him in from the cold. Gonzalez was popular in the neighbourhood. Like Smith, he had also once lived in the Brooks Street building before it was boarded up. Once inside the apartment, Smith heard a voice saying, “This is your blood.” Police said Smith hacked Gonzalez to death with his axe and cannibalised the body.
When Smith’s cousin saw him the next evening, she noticed what appeared to be specks of blood on his pants, and found that he was carrying chopsticks and a bloody axe. Smith allegedly told Rabb he killed a man and ate his brains in the Lakeview Cemetery while drinking sake, and warned her he intended to eat more people. Smith said the rush he felt while hacking Gonzalez and consuming pieces of his body was unlike anything he had ever experienced before, according to the arrest warrant. He told Rabb he has a sexual lust for blood.
A month later, police found Angel Gonzalez’s mutilated body in the vacant apartment on Brooks Street in Bridgeport where Smith had lived as a child. Police later recovered the bloody axe and an empty bottle of sake in a streambed near the Boston Avenue cemetery.
In a videotaped statement to police, Smith said he used a hatchet to kill Gonzalez, then took out the man’s eyes and part of his brain and ate them, washed down with sake (rice wine).
Smith’s defence team relied on the testimony of Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Reena Kapoor, who indicated that Smith had retained his lust for human flesh after his arrest, even offering to eat her. Kapoor claimed Smith suffered from psychotic incidents since childhood, and heard voices.
The voices ordered Smith to eat the victim’s brain so they would get a better understanding of human behaviour, and the eyes so that they could see into the ‘spirit realm’
Kapoor added that Smith went to Subway after eating the man’s body parts.
The report on Smith’s release said there was no evidence of “internal preoccupation or paranoia” and that “he denied experiencing cravings but stated that if they were to arise, he would reach out to his hospital and community supports and providers.”
A year before the murder, Smith wrote on Facebook,
Devouring your flesh. Smelling your bodies burn in a heap. I hate the day they created you filthy humans. There. Thats whats been on my mind since a child. Happy?
Of course, spouting abuse on Facebook doesn’t mean that the writer will eat people’s brains. Well, not always.
Gregg Wallace is arousing the fury of the Internet for hosting a show in which human meat is grown for human consumption. Yes, engineered cannibalism.
If you haven’t heard of Gregg Wallace (I plead guilty), he is a host of the UK version of MasterChef, a reality show where people have to cook flesh in a way that – I don’t really know, I don’t watch it.
This show is called The British Miracle Meat, and is quite obviously a satirical documentary, set in a factory which purportedly manufactures ‘engineered human meat’.
Following its debut, 408 people complained to the broadcasting regulator. The majority of complainants objected to the theme being the consumption of human meat. Which is, IMHO, pretty rich coming from people who tuned in to a show about meat.
It seems to have been inspired by a work written in 1729 by Jonathan Swift (the author of Gulliver’s Travels), which was called:
A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick
Swift suggested that the Irish could be relieved of their destitute states by selling their children to the Landlords who “have already devoured most of the parents”:
A young healthy Child, well nursed, is at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled; and I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragout
Since the British Empire was sucking the Irish populace dry and leaving them to starve, why not eat them as well? Satire has remained a popular form of political action ever since, and is used extensively, particularly in American politics (watch any late-night show).
Wallace is shown visiting a heavily guarded processing plant in Lincolnshire, which houses a production line and clinical facilities. He is told that, for the last eight months, they have been producing meat made from human cells. Line manager Mick Ross explains that it is a relatively new process. “Under EU law we couldn’t possibly operate machines like this.”
We see little shavings of flesh hanging in a nutrient-rich vat and quickly developing into huge slabs of meat. Wallace interviews ‘donors’ who sell their flesh to fictional firm ‘Good Harvest’ as a solution for cash-strapped families. One 67-year-old retired receptionist said she had agreed to have flesh taken from her buttock and thigh in order to fund two weeks’ energy bills. The flesh is then shown growing in labs into larger slabs of meat – which can be used to make steaks, burgers and sausages.
These can yield up to one hundred steaks, which— according to taste tests carried out with men and women in the street by co-presenter Michelle Ackerley—are remarkably fine substitutes for beef, and at a fraction of the price. Is this the answer to the cost of living crisis?
“Why human meat, why not animal meat?” asks Wallace, and Ross explains that we know more about humans, we have centuries of medical and scientific knowledge, so can more easily manipulate it.
Good Harvest’s chief executive revealed the firm’s premium range comes from the flesh of children aged six and below – with a promotional video which billed the womb as ‘nature’s oven’. Well, we already know from watching Snowpiercer that babies taste best. And Gregg – let’s try to remember that humans ARE animals, yes?
But apparently many of the British viewing public did not get Gregg Wallace’s joke. The show gave no warning ahead or during the broadcast to indicate that it was fictional. That was supposed to be, in British parlance, bleedin’ obvious. Interviewed after the show aired, Wallace said:
It’s satire – so I suppose that was the point. Everybody was an actor. I was acting. None of it was real… While it was a complete fantasy, we wanted to raise important questions about the nation’s relationship with food and what those struggling with the cost of living are being asked to do in order to stay afloat.
A Channel 4 spokesman said:
This “mockumentary” is a witty yet thought-provoking commentary on the extreme measures many people are being forced to take to stay afloat in our society during the cost-of-living crisis. Channel 4 has a long and rich history of satire and has often used humour as an accessible way to highlight society’s most important issues.
The problem was, it was not clear what the point was. Lab meat can be grown from any animal cell. Find a readable chain of DNA and it may be possible to try whale, dodo or dinosaur flesh. Of course, the easiest cells to source are human ones – we routinely hand them to pathologists and crime scene investigators. When clean meat becomes commercially viable, there is no reason (other than administrative) to assume we could not grow human steaks, livers or sweetbreads. The eating of lab-grown flesh from celebrities is the starting point of the film Antiviral. Eating human meat grown in a lab would technically be cannibalism, but it would not, as with traditional cannibalism, involve cruelty, murder or despoiling of corpses.
The show concentrates on the cost of living crisis, and clearly cheaper food prices would help. Would people sell their own flesh, and would other people eat steaks grown from it? A better point might have been to point out that humans currently breed and slaughter some eighty billion (that’s 80,000,000,000) land animals every year to eat their flesh, not counting sea animals, whose numbers can only be estimated but might be about three trillion. Although most people prefer not to see the appalling conditions of the factory farms or the brutal deaths in the abattoirs, they tune in by the millions to watch cooking shows like MasterChef which treat the consumption of this flesh as unremarkable, and often the butt of crude humour.
So why not add one more animal to the conveyor belt?
As Herbert M. Shelton said in his book Superior Nutrition:
The cannibal goes out and hunts, pursues and kills another man and proceeds to cook and eat him precisely as he would any other game. There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favor of flesh eating that cannot be offered with equal strength, in favor of cannibalism.
I wonder if Jonathan Swift would have recognised the plagiarism of his book? His brand of satire is usually called “Menippean” and is characterised by attacking mental attitudes and beliefs.
The joke is not that Wallace pretended to visit a factory that pretended to pay willing donors for flesh. The real belly laugh is that over 400 people complained about that, while probably tucking in to the corpse of an animal who really did not want to die.
Two men in Odisha (eastern India, formerly known as Orissa) have been arrested and accused of cannibalism after locals found them eating half-burnt flesh from the body of a woman who was being cremated at a funeral in Mayurbhanj, Odisha.
The incident happened in a tribal village called Bandhasahi. The accused were identified as Sundar Mohan Singh, 58, and Narendra Singh, 25, both from Dantuni village. The deceased woman was identified as Madhusmita Singh, 25, who had died in the Bandhasahi village hospital. The family took her body to the cremation ground and performed the last rites. In Hinduism, the preferred way of disposing of the dead is Antyeṣṭi(अन्त्येष्टि), a composite Sanskrit word of antya and iṣṭi, meaning “final sacrifice.”
The two men, who were said to be drunk, were overseeing the proper burning of the body. As the cremation progressed, the body had been burnt almost entirely to ashes, except for a single unburnt piece of flesh. Mohan and Narendra claimed that it wouldn’t burn unless it was cut into smaller pieces and then thrown back into the fire.
Lobo Singh, the grandfather of the deceased girl, watched the men pull the unburnt flesh out of the fire. Narendra proceeded to divide it into three pieces, with Mohan tossing two pieces back into the flames. However, Lobo Singh said he witnessed Mohan concealing the remaining piece in his left hand, He questioned Mohan about this, to which Mohan casually replied that he would discard it later.
The woman’s uncle said that, when he asked them what they would do with the flesh, one of the accused, Sundar Mohan Singh, replied, “You don’t know about witchcraft.” After around 10 minutes, he announced that he would eat the piece of flesh. Before the others could do anything, Mohan put the piece in his mouth and began chewing it; he also offered a portion of flesh to Narendra, who also commenced eating it.
The villagers caught and beat the accused duo, tied them up in rugs, and informed the local police. Both accused admitted committing the crime, claiming that they had consumed the flesh in an inebriated condition. They were charged under section 297 of the Indian Penal Code. Senior police officer Sanjay Kumar Parida stated that the accused were arrested based on the complaints of the villagers, but no trace of human flesh was found on them. Further investigation into the case continues.
This sort of phantasy, that eating human flesh will give the eater special powers, is not uncommon in Cannibal Studies texts; essentialist speculations that some part of the ‘donor’ remains imbued – such as the courage embodied in the brave enemy’s heart or strength in his or her limbs. Brigid Brophy, one of the seminal voices in the animal justice movement, called this “the primitive superstition that eating the flesh of bulls endows you with the strength of the bull”. Even Freud seemed to have subscribed to such thoughts, claiming in Totem and Taboo that the birth of civilisation occurred when a group of young prehumans came to resent their father’s monopolisation of the tribe’s females (common among primates) and rose up, killing the father to take their mothers and sisters for themselves. “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well” and, Freud added, as well as the protein they ingested from the fresh meat, the brothers would each have “acquired a portion of his strength”. Freud went on to speculate that their sense of remorse created the first ethical basis for civilisation, which seems rather far-fetched, and there is no evidence that the Singhs, even when they sober up, will be creating a new form of civilisation in Odisha. Although, to counter my obvious scepticism, there are reports that Armin Meiwes, currently in prison in Germany, allegedly claimed that, after he ate his bilingual lover in 2001, his own English improved considerably. We absorb the nutrition of our food, why should cannibals not absorb the strength, spirit and experiences of their victims?
The Orissa Post called the incident “extremely rare”, but this blog has reported on similar incidents in the past. In Assam in 2022, another inebriated man found edible flesh within the cremation flames.
In 2019, The Global Report on Food Crises estimated that there were some 135 million “acutely food-insecure people in crisis or worse”, including 17 million acutely malnourished children under 5 years old. The changing climate, or future pandemics, could easily double that number, leading to what the head of the UN’s food relief agency warned could be “a famine of biblical proportions”. Globally, over a million people die each (normal) week, many of them still covered in healthy flesh; if human meat is similar to that of other animals, why not let those who are starving eat some of the corpses, at least those who are minimally diseased? Is an agonising death by starvation less abject than eating human meat? And if, as most societies (not including Hindus) seem to believe, it’s OK to eat animals, and humans are animals (a species of Great Ape), then from carnivory to cannibalism is only a very thin red line.
A 32-year-old Mexican man, identified only as Alvaro N, and also known now as the CANNIBAL OF PUEBLA and the CANNIBAL OF RESURRECCIÓN (a town in the Municipality of Puebla), has allegedly killed his wife while under the influence of drugs. He is accused of dismembering her body, consuming parts of her brain inside some tacos, and using her shattered skull as an ashtray.
The incident occurred on June 29 2023, and Alvaro was apprehended at their home in Puebla on July 2. Authorities say that he claimed he committed the crime under the orders of Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death) and the devil. Death and the devil were contacted for comment, but have not responded.
His wife, known as Montserrat, was the mother of five daughters, aged 12 to 23. She and Alvaro had been married less than a year.
After committing the murder, Alvaro alegedly called the victim’s mother, Maria Alicia Montiel Serran, and said one of the victim’s daughters should come and collect their mother because “I already killed her and put her in bags”.
Grieving Maria Alicia added that Alvaro chopped up the 38-year-old victim’s body ‘with a machete, a chisel, and a hammer’. She went on: ‘I called him crying, asking why he did that to her if she wasn’t a bad person.’
According to Maria Alicia, the suspect confessed: ‘I killed her, I cut her into pieces, and I threw her into the ravine in bags.’ She added that he claimed: ‘She didn’t suffer.’
Alvaro’s family have requested his release, presumably on the basis that, you know,
Montserrat’s family believe otherwise, and he will be held in custody for at least two months while investigations continue. The victim’s mother, Maria Alicia Montiel Serran, said that Alvaro subjected her daughter and the youngest two stepdaughters (who lived with them) to violence and sexual abuse. She described instances of voyeurism while they showered, and lamented that her daughter often sided with Alvaro, despite the offensive behaviour.
The family claims that Alvaro, a builder, struggled with substance abuse and was often violent towards his wife.
The couple frequently posted about their devotion to Santa Muerte on social media, and the police reportedly found a black magic altar in their home. Maria Alicia mentioned Alvaro’s drug use, including cocaine, and said she had expressed concerns about his mental state. She disclosed that her daughter had a tattoo of Santa Muerte.
The victim’s family is still awaiting the opportunity to lay Maria Montserrat to rest as authorities continue their search for some of her remains. These remaining body parts need to undergo DNA testing for identification. Maria Alicia has called for justice, urging that her daughter be buried with dignity and emphasising that no mother would want her child sent back in pieces.
Mexico has a proud record of acts of cannibalism. Last year, we learned that eating rival sicarios is standard training to graduate as a fully-fledged member of certain Mexican cartels. Refugees from South and Central America are sometimes kidnapped by criminal gangs as they try to enter the United States, and sometimes eaten if a ransom is not paid. In 2021, a 72-year-old man was arrested in the Mexican municipality of Atizapan de Zaragoza and reportedly admitted to slaughtering around thirty women over the last twenty years, eating their body parts and saving their faces and scalps. And don’t forget the wonderful Mexican cannibalism film We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay) in which a family in Mexico City live on human flesh, and the coroner famously says “It’s shocking how many people eat one another in this city”.
Of course, the taco is now enjoyed internationally, and particularly in the US, where a man who calls himself Incrediblyshinyshart, served his friends tacos, made from his own amputated leg.
One news report used an image of a taco to illustrate the story of the Cannibal of Puebla, noting only that it was a “representative image”. In other words, this particular taco contains no human brains (as far as can be ascertained), but certainly includes body parts of some other unfortunate earthling. There is a thin red line between eating humans and eating other animals, and the difference is very hard to distinguish once the meat cooked, and particularly when minced and thrust into a taco.
A Texas teen has been arrested on murder charges, accused of slaughtering his parents and two siblings — including a 5-year-old brother — because he believed they were all “cannibals” planning to eat him.
Cesar Olalde, 18, was arrested after a standoff with police on Tuesday May 23 in suburban Texarkana and charged with capital murder — punishable by the death penalty or life in prison without parole.
Police in the town of Nash — population about 3,800 — went to Olalde’s home after getting a report that a man had harmed his family and was threatening to kill himself.
When they arrived, they found the teen holed up, while family members were inside.
An affidavit by Nash Police Officer Craig Buster, said that the teen, barricaded inside, had called police, saying “he had pulled the trigger, and shot his family.”
After persuading Olalde to end his standoff and surrender, police went inside the home and found the bodies of his parents, Reuben Olalde and Aida Garcia, older sister, Lisbet Olalde, and 5-year-old brother, Oliver Olalde — all in a bathroom.
“It appeared as if the victims had been shot at various places in the residence and [had been dragged] to the bathroom,” according to the affidavit. Multiple spent cartridge casings were found throughout the home, and “blood spatter on multiple surfaces.”
The affidavit said Joseph Flieder, a colleague of Lisbet Olalde, had gone to the house because she’d missed work that day. He knocked on the door but got no response.
Flieder, together with a family member who had also arrived to check on the family, forced his way inside, where he was confronted by Cesar Olalde. The teen allegedly pointed a gun at the man several times and brandished a knife.
Flieder told responding police officers that Cesar Olalde said,
“he had killed his family because they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him”
Olalde was jailed on a $10 million bond.
Neighbour Robert Ward described the victims as a “beautiful family” made up of “extremely nice” and “hardworking people.” He said the daughter had recently graduated from college and planned to become a teacher, and that Cesar was “such a good kid. He was going to get into an apprentice program to be a plumber.”
There is no actual cannibalism involved in this story (unless Cesar Olalde was right about his family, as suggested by several people online).
But what is interesting is the fear of cannibalism that must have been strong enough to drive him to this desperate act, killing those closest to him. There are clearly major mental problems involved, but that’s not a sufficient explanation. Why see them as cannibals – why not aliens or pirates or something else?
The terror of cannibalism relates directly to our experience as babies, when we are altricial – totally dependent on caregivers, for far longer than any other animal of similar size. We gestate as cannibals, eating from the placenta – our mother’s body. We are born and fed from a breast (usually human or bovine), which is more eating of the body. As we grow, we experience rage when our needs are not immediately recognised and satisfied, and this rage may be homicidal in nature (Freud called the first six months of a child’s life the “cannibalistic stage”). We want to eat our mother, and are terrified that, being so much larger and more powerful, she may feel like eating us first. We fear, in other words, reabsorption into the maternal body from which we emerged.
The only difference between eating human meat and that of other animals is that we fear consumption by other humans, whereas the animals we eat – cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, fish, etc, are generally herbivorous or gentle, peaceful animals. We don’t recognise this fear at a conscious level, but under stress or psychic collapse, we find ourselves back inside our mental image of Freud’s primal “cannibalistic phase”.
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.
Bizarre….. Popular Spanish Twitch streamer #PaulaGonu recently shocked fans by revealing that she cooked and ate a part of her own knee after undergoing surgery. pic.twitter.com/yJXphLAa9L
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 recent tour of Australia by British anti-trans campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull— who also goes by the name of Posie Parker — added cannibalism to the culture wars already raging over transsexual rights.
Keen-Minshull organised a “Let Women Speak” tour of Australia and New Zealand, holding rallies in several cities to claim the push for transgender rights is “silencing”, endangering and discriminating against women.
There has been a lot said about Keen-Minshull, mostly debating her claim to be a warrior for women’s rights and accusing her of being an extremist, expressing views that are designed to be harmful to the transgender community. The rhetoric she uses is far more extreme than usually expressed in Australian politics, although it has become common in other countries, particularly the USA. She suggests, among other claims, that trans women are sexual predators who pose a safety threat to girls in female bathrooms. She describes gender affirmation healthcare as mutilation, and being transgender as a “fetish” — positions totally at odds with the views of experts who work with people who are transitioning.
Keen-Minshull’s rally in Melbourne was attended by far-right extremists who performed Nazi salutes. Although organisers claimed the masked thugs had “gate-crashed” the event, a trans rights activist and TikTok star known online as LilahRPG said “everyone was just furious, seeing Nazis doing salutes uninterrupted and interacting with the TERFs.” TERF is an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist“.
This is one of the clearest indications that far-right social media is using the “gender-critical” movement to promote membership of their groups.
Keen-Minshull has made a series of videos (see Twitter message above) about “Grooming Gangs” – repeating unproven claims that a young girl in England was killed and eaten as kebab meat. These claims are then used as racist conspiracy theories, saying that the botched police investigation was in fact a cover-up of paedophile elites who, they say, control everything. Keen-Minshull says:
“What we know is that there’s grooming gangs in Telford. A young woman that never actually really made it to mainstream news, wasn’t a big story, was cut up and I think she was put into meat that was sold for human consumption. We know that there are vast numbers of men involved in these grooming gangs, and we know that there’s weird cover-up stuff going on, that only makes sense if the other people in power are also raping children.”
The case she is referring to seems to be the disappearance of 14-year-old Charlene Downes, who disappeared in Blackpool in north-west England in November 2003. Accusations were made of a child-grooming ring, which induced young girls into having sex in return for cigarettes, food and alcohol. At least one newspaper was quick to claim that investigations had been “hampered by political correctness”, because the girls were white and the perpetrators non-white.
Two men, Ilyad Albattikh and Mohammed Reveshi, were tried in May 2007—the first for Downes’ murder, the other for helping dispose of the body—but the jury failed to reach a verdict. A re-trial was scheduled, but in April 2008 the accused were released because of concerns about serious errors in the evidence compiled by Lancashire Constabulary, who were chastised for their inept handling of the case.
The prosecution had claimed Charlene’s body had been cut up and minced into kebabs in a Blackpool takeaway called “Funny Boys”.
At the time of the trial, the court was told the fast food shop owner had “joked” that Charlene Downes had been chopped up and put into kebabs that were sold to the public.
There is a lot of racism involved in this story. White children being raped by men of colour is stated or implied in many of the reports, although there is little evidence to show that white offenders were not also involved. Many actual cases of the cannibalism of children indicate the opposite – that white men like Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish prey on children of colour, because such missing children are less likely to be investigated by white detectives. Meanwhile, the Indian current affairs website OpIndia did not mince its words about the alleged mincing of the victim:
Groomed by Muslim gangs, minced into pieces, fed as kebabs
Of course, Ms Keen-Minshull did not invent the idea of using cannibalism as a weapon of dehumanisation (Christopher Columbus did that very successfully) or even as a part of the culture wars – recall the hate and scorn aimed at the New York Times when it suggested the “cannibalism has a time and a place… and others suggest that that time is now”.
Classical mythologies told of savage gods who ate their own children, and paranormal entities such as witches, who used body parts for their rituals. Such usages were not exclusively supernatural, with “blood libel” accusations that Jews were killing Christian children to use their blood for religious rituals and cannibalism dating back to the twelfth century, and being revived with nauseating regularity up to the present day.
QAnon has been very successful recruiting members in the US, partly based on accusing everyone from Hillary Clinton to a pizza shop owner of killing and eating children. The accusations are meant to dehumanise the alleged perpetrators, but usually end up doing the same to the victim. Poor little Charlene is now almost unknown, except as the “kebab meat girl”.
Lots more details of her case are available on YouTube investigations such as the one below, some of them are quite lurid.
Francis Wolke, 30, was found guilty on March 2, 2023 of first-degree murder for killing 62-year-old Kathleen Anderson in her Menlo Park bedroom in December of 2018, and sentenced on April 5 to a term of 26 years to life in prison.
San Mateo County prosecutors stated that a friend of Anderson found her body while the killer was still inside the house. The friend called the Menlo Park Police Department and detained Wolke at knifepoint until police arrived.
When the trial opened on Tuesday, February 14, Wolke’s attorney, Connie O’Brien, had declared, in a rather unusual opening statement, that her client was driven to murder by a desire to engage in cannibalism. She stated that Volke believed that, if he committed cannibalism, he would “stay young forever” and join the “1%” of people who eat human protein to become rich.
Anderson had never met Wolke, 30, before the murder. “There was no known relationship or contact between defendant and victim, nor a known motive for the crime,” prosecutors said. Wolke lived in Cincinnati, Ohio and had arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area just days before the murder. He was also wanted in Santa Clara County for prowling and drug possession. According to the Palo Alto Daily Post, Anderson worked as the City of Atherton’s arborist for two decades.
In 2020, Wolke had pleaded not guilty due to insanity. The trial jury deliberated for three days before finding him guilty, and then reconvened to consider the insanity issue, which could have seen Wolke sentenced to state hospitals, instead of state prison. The jury handed down its ruling on March 8 2023 in San Mateo County Court in Redwood City, finding that Wolke was sane at the time of the murder.
Defence lawyers had argued the insanity defence based on Volke’s belief that he had to commit cannibalism in order to join “the 1%” and stay young forever. They testified that Wolke said he wanted to join an elite group of wealthy people whom he believed killed humans and ate their flesh to become “protein harvesters” and that he, too, would enjoy wealth and eternal youth after consuming human stem cells.
Deputy District Attorney Tricia Povah argued the case for Wolke’s intent to murder. Povah laid out in graphic details the injuries that Wolke inflicted during multiple attempts to take the life of Anderson, including attempted strangulation.
Wolke was accused of stabbing Anderson in the eye with a pencil, hitting her brain. The allegation that Wolke used a deadly and dangerous weapon in this act was also accepted by the jury.
Wolke also attempted to behead Anderson, which his defence lawyers alleged was due to his intention to engage in cannibalism. Wolke reportedly told investigators he:
“wasn’t very good at (it) because (he’d) never done it before.”
Wolke, according to court testimony, had a history of heavy methamphetamine use, but did not test positive for any drugs at the time of the murder. According to defence attorney Connie O’Brien, he was experiencing psychosis in the form of auditory hallucinations while on the bus ride from his family’s home in Cincinnati to the Bay Area, with voices telling him that he had to commit sins to join the 1%.
Despite Wolke’s hallucinations, the prosecution argued that Wolke had an understanding of the morals surrounding murder and that he was aware of his actions as he committed the killing. Dr George Wilkinson, a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness for the prosecution, testified that Wolke understood his actions.
“He was well aware of what he was doing, in fact, it would have been necessary to fulfil the delusions.”
Povah argued that he showed awareness of his situation. When police officers went to enter the house to investigate, Wolke told them where to find Anderson, saying:
“The body’s in the basement. I have a mental problem. I very seriously killed that woman.”
Lots of interesting Cannibal Studies issues are raised by this case. Cannibals are almost routinely labelled as psychotic, on the anthropocentric assumption that human flesh is sacred and inviolable. But to be found insane, as Wolke discovered, a murderer has to prove that he (or she) did not know what he was doing, or that it was wrong. Hannibal Lecter, in the books, movies and TV series, was not executed for his crimes because the jury found him insane. He strongly denied this.
An intention to achieve social status through the ingestion of human flesh seems to show a clear understanding of (some rather dubious) causality. That is, he knew what he was doing, even though he was doing something that would seem to most people irrational.
Or is it? The mythology of the Wendigo tells of cannibals who gain strength, size and often healing powers or long life through eating the flesh of other humans, but also develop an insatiable appetite for ever more of the stuff. What appetites distinguish and define the so-called “1%”, that tiny group of uber-rich who absorb around a quarter of the nation’s income and own 40% of the wealth? Psychiatrists will happily tell you that those who achieve huge fortunes or high office are often psychopaths, immune to fear of failure, or empathy for those they exploit. The accumulation of capital, whether by imperialists or corporate raiders, is metaphorically a form of cannibalism, feeding on the flesh of others in a zero-sum game, that is supposed to gain them enormous wealth and eternal life (or a botox version of it).
A part of Wolke’s mind must have worked out that he was not made of such stern stuff, and told him that, to get there, he would need to cultivate his inner cannibal.
A man calling himself The Chinese Zodiac Killer has been sentenced to 16 months in prison for sending threatening letters to various establishments for over a year.
46-year-old Jesse Bartlett of LaFargeville in Jefferson County was arrested in Jefferson County on May 19 2022 for sending letters to media outlets, government offices including the White House, and other organisations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington D.C. In the letters, he claimed that he killed people, ate their flesh and plans to kill more, including an unidentified bus driver. Bartlett was arrested by the FBI and charged with Mailing Threatening Letters.
Bartlett, a school bus driver who, according to prosecutors, owned multiple firearms, was arrested after he was allegedly caught on surveillance cameras placing brown envelopes into U.S. Postal Service collection boxes. On May 12, the FBI filmed Bartlett dropping 21 envelopes into U.S. Postal Service boxes in Watertown and Clayton, and another 21 in the same Watertown bin on May 15.
Further investigation found that the letters were consistent with those written by the so-called “Chinese Zodiac Killer.” Authorities said the letters were signed “Aleister Crowley,” a name that was also referenced in earlier Chinese Zodiac Killer letters, and presumably refers to the late English occultist and artist.
The letters said in part:
EVERY MONTH SINCE NOVEMBER I HAVE KILLED BOTH MALE AND FEMALES. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT I AM KILLING INDIVIDUALS WHOSE IDENTITIES ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO TRACK (I.E., HOMELESS, RUNAWAYS, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS), AND DESTROYING ALL EVIDENCE SO EFFICIENTLY.
In August 2021, a letter was received by a retail company in Syracuse. In the letter, Bartlett allegedly stated:
“EACH MONTHLY LETTER CONTAINS MY CURRENT KILL COUNT – AND WHETHER OR NOT I FEASTED ON THE FLESH OF MY VICTIMS.”
Another letter sent to The Day newsroom pledged to enslave people in a “macabre paradice”, using the same misspellings as the original Zodiac. The case was investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, along with New York State Police, and the United States Postal Inspection Service.
The original Zodiac Killer stabbed or shot to death five people in Northern California in 1968 and 1969. He had sent taunting letters and cryptograms to police and newspapers that included astrological symbols. As far as we know, he did not eat anyone (human).
That original Zodiac Killer was never caught. Bartlett copied the original Zodiac by inserting cryptic codes into his letters, which have not been interpreted (if, in fact, they are not simply gibberish.)
Bartlett pleaded guilty to mailing a threatening communication in December 2022. District Judge Brenda Sannes also imposed a three-year term of supervised release once Bartlett completes his sentence. He also faces local counts of third- and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon brought on March 21 by state police. He was allegedly found to be in possession of two illegally owned long guns and expandable magazines, in violation of the state’s Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013, or “SAFE Act”. According to troopers, the charges are a result of the investigation and execution of a search warrant in May 2022 at Mr. Bartlett’s residence in the town of Alexandria.
Bartlett is clearly not Chinese, the Zodiac Killer or, it seems, a cannibal killer, but simply a copycat who added cannibalism to his modus operandi because it’s so fashionable. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Barnett, there’s no evidence that Bartlett ever tried to carry out any of the things he described in his letters. Bartlett was not charged with any homicide offences, although he was acquitted of killing a friend in 2010 after pleading self-defence. His main motivation seems to be recognition and celebrity, warning “I WILL MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF ANYONE WHO REFUSES TO EDUCATE THE PUBLIC OF MY EXISTENCE”:
I HAVE ALREADY KILLED SOMEONE IN THE NEW YORK AREA. HEAR MY PROPHECY: I WILL KILL AGAIN. HELL WANTS MORE SOULS. I AM A SEXUAL PREDATOR AND A KILLER AMONG THE LIVING. I AM NOT HIDING. I AM VERY EASY TO FIND …BECAUSE I NEED TO BE FOUND. BUT I MUST TEST YOU.
Prosecutors also said that Bartlett had stated that he is “a sexual predator” and is “on the hunt for your women at all times.” Although prosecutors have not pursued any leads to do with murder or cannibalism, we may never know for sure what Jesse Bartlett got up to. Could it be the case, as he wrote, that he is killing people whose identities are impossible to track (i.e. homeless, runaways, illegal immigrants), “AND DESTROYING ALL EVIDENCE SO EFFICIENTLY”?
Assistant U.S. Attorney Barnett said that Bartlett’s sentence includes the time he has already served behind bars. So, he’ll be out pretty soon. There are a range of hilarious comments on social media already, many of them ingeniously weaving partisan politics into the story.
The Cannibal Guy 