A man was arrested on Friday March 22 in Kern County (north of Los Angeles in the San Joaquin Valley) and charged with the “removal of human remains from other than a cemetary” (sic) according to the Sheriff’s office.
Construction workers in Wasco reported seeing the man near the Amtrak station.
“I’m not sure from where, but he walked this way and he was waving a person’s leg. And he started chewing on it over there, he was biting it and he was hitting it against the wall and everything.”
It seems a pedestrian (unidentified so far, some reports say male, others female) was killed by a train on Friday morning near 7th and G streets in Wasco. According to eyewitnesses, a man was subsequently seen eating a human leg that had been torn off in the accident.
The video shows the man in a red hoodie and black pants bending over something. He turns around and laughs at the person taking the video and then walks away. Shortly afterwards, the video shows the police responding and the man waving the leg at the officers.
A voice can be heard on the video saying, “He’s eating that shit!” in English and then in Spanish. Most of the news reports edit out the parts where it looks like he might be eating the leg.
Other news footage from KERO-TV showed what appeared to be bloodstains on the sidewalk at the scene of the incident. Some reports say he was charged with mutilating the body, supporting claims that he had consumed some of the limb.
The sheriff’s office later confirmed that they had arrested the man and identified him as 27-year-old Resendo Tellez. He was charged with six offences including possession of controlled substance paraphernalia.
Social media commentary varied from reflecting on drugs, homelessness and poverty to accusations of demonic possession and culture war accusations against California liberals allowing a “breakdown of societal norms”. One headline stated, “Cannibals Are Alive and Well in Newsom’s California.”
JUST IN: California man arrested for allegedly eating a severed leg that he took from a pedestrian who was struck by a train.
The incident happened in Wasco, California.
According to police, 27-year-old Resendo Tellez removed a leg from an Amtrak Station.
News footage of the story often contains warnings of “distressing material” and in most cases blur the leg when showing the video. Is there something weird about all this shock and horror?
If the same person had not been hit by a train, it would have been perfectly normal to show that person’s leg in a program on, say, beach holidays. On a porn site, the leg would have been the least of what we might have seen. Yet once detached from the torso, a human limb becomes so abject it must be blurred, and even then, warnings issued. The reason seems to be that we are terrified to admit our animality. We can go to a supermarket and push a trolley around containing the leg of a cow or a lamb, with the overt understanding that we will be eating it later, just as Tellez allegedly did with what he identified as a piece of meat lying on the ground. Yet because it is a human body part, it becomes obscene, repulsive, horrifying, because it reminds us that we, too, are mortal, edible animals, made of meat.
Another Russian convicted of murder and cannibalism has been pardoned by Vladimir Putin after fighting in the Ukraine.
Denis Gorin (Денис Горин), from the city of Aniva, Sakhalin region, was recruited into a private military company after signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence. He is known to have been convicted three times for murdering at least four people between 2003 and 2022. He and his brother were also convicted of eating the remains of his victims. Gorin killed his victims, then washed and refrigerated the remains. After his last conviction in 2018, Gorin was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
However, at least seventeen convicted murderers have been pardoned by the Russian President since 2022 for agreeing to serve in the war on Ukraine. A neighbour of Gorin, Dmitry Vladimirovich, said that Gorin was now free and had been admitted to a military hospital in the eastern Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk due to a moderate injury. The neighbour added that the victims’ relatives are likely to arrange a lynching.
“He’s basically free, pardoned, and half his sentence has been wiped out. But I don’t think he’ll stay free for long. His victims’ relatives remember everything.”
The first murder was in 2003.
“At the trial, he admitted that they ate the murdered man; he was their acquaintance. They killed him because they were drunk, and then the elder brother, Evgeniy (he had already tasted human flesh by that time), tried to force his wife to eat it. Then – his younger brother, Denis. According to Denis, he refused, but his brother threatened to kill him too. Then he started eating.”
After that first murder, Gorin was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but released after seven years due to “exemplary behaviour”. Gorin returned to Aniva where he stabbed to death the brother of another prisoner with whom he was in the pre-trial detention centre. After the murder, according to the case file, he “decided to remember the past, namely, to cut off the meat from [the victim] and subsequently eat it.”
In 2011, Denis Gorin and his brother killed a man and hid his body on the banks of the Lyutoga River, and at the beginning of 2012 they committed another murder, according to the regional prosecutor’s office. This was proven five years later. In 2018, the court sentenced Denis Gorin to 22 years of imprisonment in a special regime colony for the last three murders. The neighbour reported that:
“This came up by chance; they also tried to kill one local while they were drunk, but they couldn’t. When they were detained, (I was present), they opened the refrigerator, and it was filled to the brim with human meat! He told us right there how he cut meat from the legs of the dead, looked at the biceps to see if there was meat there. They showed the hole where the remains were buried – there were 12 people there. Not three, as stated in the verdict! And among the skeletons there was a very small one – some girl was killed. But we couldn’t prove it in court.”
In 2023, Putin pardoned him. Pro-Kremlin media has ignored the news of the cannibal’s pardon. Nevertheless, it appears sporadically on social networks and instant messengers.
“Maniacs are real. His brother was killed while still in prison, and this brother didn’t even serve five years, but is already free. Maybe he’ll be patient for a year, and then he’ll start killing again.”
A photo on Gorin’s social media profile on Odnoklassniki – a Russian social media platform shows him wearing a military uniform with the letter Z emblazoned on the sleeve, a pro-war symbol for conflicts in Ukraine and abroad widely used in Russia.
Another man, Nikolai Ogolobyak, a self-confessed Satanist, was convicted of ritual murders, and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2019 for murdering four teenagers and then consuming their remains. The 33-year-old man was reportedly pardoned by the Russian president for fighting in Ukraine.
This blog reported on another jailed cannibal, Yegor Komarov, who was purportedly released to fight in Ukraine in 2022.
Russia’s Defence Ministry and the Wagner mercenary group have recruited heavily from Russian prisons to the notorious “Storm Z” unit of convicts, to bolster their manpower in Ukraine, promising convicts a pardon in exchange for military service. Several of these pardoned convicts have reportedly committed new crimes after returning from Ukraine. And returned soldiers do tend to come home undernourished and voraciously hungry.
The 2006 Nithari serial murderscase was alleged to have taken place in the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher in Noida near Nithari village, Uttar Pradesh, India between 2005 and 2006. Moninder Singh was convicted in two out of the five cases against him, while his servant Surinder Koli, accused of assisting him or possibly instigating the killings, was convicted in 10 out of the 16 cases against him.
Koli admitted to killing six children and a 20-year-old woman referred to as “Payal” after sexually assaulting them. He later confessed to eating their livers and other parts of their bodies. Both men were sentenced to death, Koli ten times, but eventually, in October 2023, after some 2,000 hearings, Allahabad High Court acquitted them both, citing lack of evidence.
Despite being from a family of Hindu vegetarians, Koli was from the Dalit, the Untouchable caste, who are considered subhuman by much of society, marginalised, excluded, with their human rights routinely violated. They survive by doing the jobs no one else wants. From 14, Koli worked as a butcher’s assistant, learning to slaughter and dismember large mammals, which seems to have been a useful skill later in his life. He apparently developed a taste for meat at this time.
In 2005, Koli became a servant to Pandher, where he witnessed some pretty lively parties involving Pandher’s friends and visiting sex workers. In March that year, a little girl went missing in Nithari, and a couple of weeks later it happened again. Between 2005-06, a child went missing in Nithari every six weeks on average.
Police told parents they had probably run away (although the youngest was three years old) and would return by themselves. Frustrated by police inaction, parents and local residents in December 2006 organised the excavation of the reeking drains behind Pandher’s house where they found bags of bones, which proved to the hands and legs of small children. Skulls were found on the other side of the house. Police arrested the two men, and found some of the children’s belongings in the house. Police put the number of child victims at more than 31. Locals rioted outside the house, claiming that the police were corrupt and had concealed evidence of crimes involving rich people; the father of one girl alleged that the police had threatened and harassed him.
They demanded that the local police force be replaced by the Federal Government agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation. In 2007, six police were suspended for incompetence and the CBI filed sixteen cases against the two men involving abduction, rape, murder, criminal conspiracy and trafficking.
The CBI investigated the case, which by now was surrounded by accusations that tried to explain the disappearances – an organ transplant racket, or a child pornography ring. Pandher’s laptop was found to contain images of naked children, but they turned out to be his grandchildren. The logistics of harvesting and selling organs of small children turned out to be almost certainly insurmountable. Extensive psychological evaluations found that Koli was obsessed with young girls aged 5-7, while Pandher had a thing for 18-19 year old sex workers (one victim was twenty, the rest were children). Koli admitted on tape to luring the little girls into the house, strangling them and having sex with them before killing them, then cutting up their corpses and eating body parts. The way he dismembered them was similar to what he would have learned as a butcher’s assistant when he was a teenager. Yet investigators found that he had behaved entirely normally with his own children back in his home village, where his wife and family lived.
On 12 February 2009, both the accused—Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic servant Surinder Koli—were found guilty of the 8 February 2005 murder of Rimpa Haldar, 14, by a special sessions court in Ghaziabad. This verdict embarrassed the CBI, as they had earlier given a clean bill of health to Pandher in all their charge-sheets. Both were given the death sentence. Other victims were identified, including:
On 4 May 2010, Koli was found guilty of the 25 October 2006 murder of Arti Prasad, 7, and given a second death sentence eight days later.
On 27 September 2010, Koli was found guilty of the 10 April 2006 murder of Rachna Lal, 9, and given a third death sentence the following day.
On 22 December 2010, Koli was found guilty of the June 2006 murder of Deepali Sarkar, 12, and given a fourth death sentence.
On 24 December 2012, Koli was found guilty of the 4 June 2005 murder of Chhoti Kavita, 5, and given a fifth death sentence.
On 16 October 2023, 17 years after the crimes first came to light, Koli and Pandher were acquitted of all charges against them due to insufficient and largely circumstantial evidence, despite the recorded confessions of Koli. The parents were naturally shattered.
It seems likely that between the animalisation of lower caste humans and the sacralisation of certain species of cattle in India, some people are unable to discern any line between humans (except for their kin) and other large mammals.
“Moninder used to have call-girls coming home all the time. Seeing them, I wanted to have sex as well. Slowly, these feelings turned into my wanting to murder and eat them. A girl from Sector 30 called Dimple was passing in front of the house. I called her inside. I then strangled her with her chunni. When she was unconscious, I tried to have sex with her but failed. So I killed her. I wanted to eat her. So I took her body into the bathroom upstairs. I got a knife from the kitchen and cut her body into little pieces. I then cooked a piece of her arm and chest and ate it.”
Koli later denied any involvement in the murders, saying that the CBI made him “remember” names and details to frame him, as they were protecting rich men who were raping and killing girls and selling their organs (a high-tech form of cannibalism). Pandher is now free; Koli remains in jail. The victims’ families continue suffering, even as some of them were given houses and cash settlements. When money talks, nothing and no one is off the menu.
The BBC released a documentary on the case called The Slumdog Cannibal in 2012. This was after the initial trials, but before the several appeals. The documentary, which concentrates on the background and motivations of Surinder Koli, can be watched (at the time of writing) on YouTube.
Intertextuality is a term used to explain the way that similar or related texts influence, reflect, or differ from each other. In the start of this series, we heard the Stanley Holloway song “Sweeney Todd the Barber”, which this series clearly relates to, in that Sweeney would kill his hairdressing clients and send them down a trapdoor to the basement where his partner, Mrs Lovett, would fillet them into meat pies. The 2007 version of Sweeney differed from earlier versions by being a musical (!) and also giving Sweeney a motive—revenge—rather than just being, you know, batshit crazy. Intertexually, Delores turned a lot of this upside down: she was downstairs killing people; Luis was upstairs turning them into empanadas. The serial killer was female instead of male, the pastry cook male instead of female. The victims were not random people who needed a shave, but people who had pissed Delores off.
If you haven’t read my blogs on the first episodes, you might want to do that first. In a nutshell, in episode 1, Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years. She heads back to Washington Heights NY but it’s all gentrified now, except for the Empanada Loca shop of her old friend Luis, who offers her a room and sets her up as a masseuse, a skill she learnt in jail. In episodes 2 and 3, Delores kills the landlord who has been harassing Luis for his overdue rent, which he can’t afford because the neighbourhood is now fancy, and people don’t buy empanadas much. Luis creates a new empanada, MUY LOCO. It is hugely successful, like the chocolates in a recent blog, because it contains, yep, human flesh, in this case, the landlord, Pearlman. Whose son, Jonah, appears in the shop at the end of episode 3, with two cops behind him.
But in episode 4, it turned out Jonah didn’t know his dad is missing, and the cops are just waiting for their empanadas. But Delores is horrified by the idea of cannibalism (although, funnily, not so much the fact that the meat came from the body of the landlord she murdered) and disgusted by the secret contents of the muy loco empanadas—Mr Pearlman. She is particularly horrified when Luis offers Jonah an empanada to try, a muy loco, which she knows is a “mouthful of daddy”. Meanwhile, the local drug dealer, Marcie, has pissed off Delores, and now she is also in Luis’ fridge, and bits of her are in the empanadas.
So the link in the first half of the series was to Sweeney Todd, killing people and putting them in pies. But this story goes back well beyond Sweeney, to a new intertextual link, and the common thread now (besides pies) is revenge! Delores is intent on finding her ex who, she has discovered, set her up to take the fall when the drug police moved in, and who had been cheating on her all around town, including with Marcie. She is determined to put him in an empanada.
For this purpose, she goes looking for a friend of a friend, a Private Investigator called Ruthie, played by the wonderful Cyndi Lauper. Ruthie’s motto (or perhaps mission statement) is the title of this week’s episode:
“I NEVER DON’T FIND THEM“
Ruthie doesn’t like getting involved in drug issues (too dangerous), and warns Delores not to get her tangled in any such wars.
Ruthie also has a passion for the theatre, and is currently an usher in the Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, starring Jamie Lee Curtis. The production was invented for this series, which is a shame, as I would have flown to New York to see that!
Now, this link to Titus merits some unpacking…
Ruthie gives Delores tickets to see Titus Andronicus, which is all about a Roman general, Titus, who kills and cooks his enemy’s sons into a pie, which he then serves to the unwitting mother.
Shakespeare would have been well aware of the many Greek legends of revenge, particularly that of Thyestes, as told in Seneca’s play of the same name. Thyestes unknowingly ate the flesh of his sons, served by his brother, Atreus. Shakespeare used the trope in this, his first tragedy, which was filmed in 1999 as Titus, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role, again serving human flesh to his unsuspecting guests, eight years after winning his Oscar for doing just that as “Hannibal the Cannibal” in TheSilence of the Lambs.
There are lots of other nice little touches, like the delivery guy, Jeremiah (named after the Old Testament Prophet of doom) asking why Luis doesn’t buy meat off him any more. “Doesn’t need to”, is what Delores doesn’t dare reply. Jeremiah’s truck has the slogan “SO FRESH, IT BITES YOU BACK”:
Then there’s the drug pusher who works (or worked) for Marcie, or as Delores calls her “cunt face”. Marcie is currently supplying filling for the latest batches of Muy Loco empanadas, but this dude doesn’t know that yet and is enjoying a Marcie empanada.
There’s problems ahead though. Jonah is now actively looking for his dad, who was Delores’ first murder victim. And he has run into Ruthie, who has promised him:
But Delores doesn’t want anyone to find him. She knows where Mr Perlman (and Marcie) are, and when she stumbles into Luis’ bathroom, she certainly finds them!
Delores is painfully aware that she can hardly be judgemental at what Luis has done to her victims.
“Maybe I didn’t chop these people up, but I did this.”
She makes up with Luis, who throws Jonah off the scent by sending a fake message from his father’s phone, and pledging that he will look after her, take the full blame if their crimes ever come out. They finally (five episodes in) head for the bedroom, where Luis performs cunnilingus, about as close as most humans come to cannibalism, and even crosses that line a little when he gets excited and bites her thigh.
Gynophagia, the fetish involving killing, cooking and eating women, is described by psychobiologist Clarence Herrick as a “morbid expression” of the universal desire to hug, often too violently, the object of our affection or desire, an extreme form of the grandmother painfully pinching a grandchild’s cheek or the child hugging to death a favourite kitten. So biting or in extreme cases eating women is perhaps rough love, an extended form of cunnilingus.
The thin red line between eating humans and eating other species has well and truly been crossed by the time Luis finally mounts Delores at the end of this episode.
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.
Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and the fourth-highest-grossing film director of all time, behind only Spielberg, Cameron and the Russo brothers. He is best known for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, as well as movies like King Kong and the documentary The Beatles: Get Back.
But we all have to start somewhere, and Jackson’s first feature was Bad Taste, a splatter comedy which took years to make as it began life self-funded and only later received a grant from the NZ Film Commission. Many of Jackson’s friends acted and worked on it for no charge. Shooting was mostly done on weekends since Jackson was then working full-time for a newspaper in Wellington, the NZ capital.
Bad Taste is about aliens who plan to capture humans for food. They take over a (fictional) NZ town called Kaihoro (which means something like “fast food” in Maori) and butcher all the residents.
“There’s no glowing fingers on these bastards. We’ve got a bunch of extra-terrestrial psychopaths on our hands.”
It turns out that they are not just hungry but entrepreneurs from the “Crumbs Crunchy Delights” company, and need to collect human flesh for the home planet market, and get it there before competing alien corporations.
“I am certain that when the Homo sapiens taste takes the galaxy by storm, as it will, Crumbs Crunchy Delights will be back at the top”
They are disguised as humans until they drop the pretence and, luckily for us, they speak English to each other to reveal their plans. Their plans are foiled by a team of agents from the Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) entering the town to take down the invaders.
The action sequences are actually very well done, long before Jackson had access to special effects studios, with choreographed fight sequences and buckets of gore and brains and other body parts. Jackson took two roles, a nerdy scientist who is a member of the government agents, and a leader of the aliens, including a famous scene in which he fights himself on top of a cliff.
The film is most famous for its unapologetic gore, including half-eaten bodies, heads coming off, and brains leaking out of skulls. The brave Kiwis mow the aliens down in an interminable gun-fight, which culminates in Derek (Jackson) killing the alien leader, Lord Crumb, by jumping on him from the floor above while wielding a chainsaw, a favourite of cannibal films, cutting the alien’s body in half and disappearing inside the corpse. The film was banned in Queensland briefly, which did wonders for its publicity; the video release proudly proclaimed on the cover “Banned in Queensland”.
But is it cannibalism? It is after all a completely alien species from another world eating humans, or at least trying to. So not strictly cannibalism, but humans being eaten by aliens dressed as humans is a popular narrative in science fiction texts (see for example Under The Skin), and raises some interesting questions. Anthropocentric humanism maintains that we are somehow on a higher level than “animals”, even though we are animals, a species of Hominidae (Great Apes). Because of this ontological division, bolstered in past centuries by religious beliefs about humans being made in the image of the divine, we tend to judge other animals as possessions, inferior beings to whom we can do as we wish, so we kill them, skin them, shear them, eat them, experiment on them, race them, and so on. Not just other animals; the colonisers of Africa, South America and other parts of the world felt the same way about the indigenous peoples who lived in the areas they coveted, and so they were conquered, enslaved, converted or simply exterminated.
What if travellers from another planet, considering themselves far superior to us (not an entirely unreasonable proposition if they have conquered deep space travel), decide to colonise, exploit or even eat us? If we could take them to the Galactic High Court, the learned judges might rule that the aliens were simply doing to us what we do to billions of other earthlings each year. As John Harris wrote:
Suppose that tomorrow a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth, beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals. Would they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food?
Bad Taste is well made, entertaining and, if you are not worried by lots of gore and brains, very watchable. It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1987, which is not bad for a first movie, a splatter comedy, made on a shoestring. It currently has 71% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is far better than many far better financed films. A number of critics made great sport of the title, saying that “bad taste” described the film well, but that was deliberate, a clever combination that tells the audience that it is bad taste cinema (may leave a bad taste in your mouth) and that human meat tastes bad, which according to all the cannibals who have testified about it, is simply not true. We taste somewhere between veal and pork, and would certainly be very popular in galactic fast-food joints.
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”.
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.
A forensic psychiatrist has told Newsweek that the man charged in connection with the slayings of four University of Idaho students in November 2022 had battled with “cannibalistic urges“.
Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student and teaching assistant in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University, was arrested at his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania.
Kohberger is accused of breaking into a rental house in Moscow, Idaho, and fatally stabbing Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin in the early morning hours on November 13.
Reports have surfaced divulging that Kohberger follows a strict vegan diet and has reportedly struggled with heroin addiction in the past.
Forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman told Newsweek that Kohberger’s “obsessive-compulsive eating habits” indicate he was afraid he would become addicted to meat if he ate it.
“He was not only vegan, he refused to eat off of pots or plates that had had meat on them. Psychologically, this represents his struggle against his cannibalistic urges. He was afraid that if he let himself go to taste meat once, he would become addicted to it—like he had become to heroin—and start killing and eating people.”
A relative told the New York Post last week that Kohberger’s dietary restrictions were “very, very weird” and that he seemed “very OCD,” referring to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The woman, who asked not to be named, but said she was previously married into Kohberger’s family, said:
“It was above and beyond being vegan. His aunt and uncle had to buy new pots and pans because he would not eat from anything that had ever had meat cooked in them.”
Casey Arntz, who was friends with Kohberger in middle and high school, said in a video posted on TikTok that he had been “a heavy heroin user” in high school. Kohberger’s struggles with drug addiction continued into his college years, a friend from Northampton Community College told Fox News. Criminal profiler John Kelly told Fox News,
“This kind of person has this volcanic rage inside that’s going to explode on is victim of choice.”
Lieberman told Newsweek that Kohberger had probably studied criminology both to “calm the demons inside him that were telling him to kill” but also to “learn how to commit the perfect crime.”
Kohlberger may have corresponded with Rader (a lot of criminology students do) but we don’t know that yet. We have to wonder if Rader would have told him about working in the meat department of a Wichita IGA a few years before his murder spree began.
Kohberger has been held without bond in Pennsylvania since his arrest. He will be tried in Idaho, the state in which the crimes took place, the only state in the US with a law against cannibalism, although no such charges have been laid against Kohberger.
Kohlberger’s obsession with meat reflects a lot of issues considered in Cannibal Studies. Firstly, the question of human meat: there really is no significant difference between the meat of humans and other large mammals such as cows, pigs or sheep. Hannibal Lecter takes delight in feeding human meat to his guests, such as the flesh of the flautist of the Baltimore Philharmonic, whose Board members subsequently enjoy the meal immensely in the book and film Red Dragon, thus becoming innocent cannibals. Incidentally, being the Baltimore flautist seems to be a rocky road – their principal flautist Emily Skala, was fired in 2021 for spreading misinformation about the safety of coronavirus vaccines, the efficacy of face masks and the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, relieved of her post, but not eaten.
But the point is that once meat is prepared (cooked, seasoned, presented) it is very hard to tell its provenance. Cannibals who have been asked have mostly compared it to pork or veal, with Armin Meiwes telling an interviewer
“It would have made no difference in somebody else had tasted it; he wouldn’t have questioned the meat…. During preparation, it is not as dark, but bright and fresh as pork, and tastes so very close to pork.”
Kohlberger’s belief that he might like human flesh if he tried any meat at all therefore has some logic to it. Since Charles Darwin’s writings overthrew the special status of humans as closer to angels than animals, anthropocentrism has been amended to offer a story of humans as the culmination of evolution and thereby continues, rather less successfully, to obscure human animality. Should such beliefs falter, as happens repeatedly in many cases of contemporary cannibalism, it becomes a very short step from eating other animals to eating the human one.
But why should he become addicted to any meat? Well, we know Kohlberger has an addictive personality, shown by his very heavy usage of heroin. But we’re not talking drugs of addiction but lumps of protein, aren’t we? Well, there are plenty of studies about that. Marta Zaraska, for example, wrote in her book Meathooked that meat is highly addictive on several fronts – genetic, cultural, historic and commercial, and coined the term “meathooked” for the incongruous compulsion to eat meat despite the pangs of cognitive dissonance – the repressed feeling of guilt when considering oneself an animal-lover while also paying big corporations to kill them. Then there is the mythology of the Wendigo, a creature from Algonquin legend who starts off as a human but becomes a being who can only live on human flesh, which makes him grow bigger and at the same time hungrier. If you believe in Wendigos, then the slippery slope from carnivore to cannibal seems reasonably clear.
This leads us to the issue of Kohlberger’s apparently very strict veganism. Most people seem to believe (or want to believe) that vegans are fanatics, obsessed with animal welfare (or environment or their own health) who therefore compulsively avoid meat. But in fact most vegans I know would wash a pot well after a relative had cooked meat, but are unlikely to throw it out as irretrievably ruined, as Kohlberger purportedly did. Veganism is an ethical system that attempts to minimise harm to sentient animals, which includes humans (yes, Virginia, we are animals). If there is a slippery slope from the flesh of other animals to the flesh of Homo sapiens, then the vegan is furthest from the edge of that slope. If Kohlberger did kill those students (and at this stage it’s only alleged), then he is no vegan, even if he didn’t sample them on the way out.
Gannibalis a new seven-episode television series set in present day, rural Japan. The show is based on a Manga series (comic or graphic novel) which appears to be available on-line.
In the first episode, we see a policeman raging outside a house, accusing the occupants of cannibalism. He soon comes to a sticky end.
Police officer Daigo Agawa becomes Chuzai (residential police officer) at the Kuge village, accompanied by his wife Yuki and daughter Mashiro, after the previous Chuzai mysteriously went missing (the same officer seen being killed in the opening). Daigo has caused some incident in his previous posting, which has led to his transfer to this remote and eerie (but very beautiful) village.
The daughter, Mashiro, seems to have no fear, but also refuses to speak, which Daigo believes is his fault. On his first day, Daigo is summoned by the Goto family, who seem to run the small forestry village, like a local crime family.
They have found the body of their grandmother, Gin Goto, the head of the family. They insist she was attacked by a bear, and pull out firearms when Daigo points out that the tooth marks on her arm are human.
Meanwhile the little girl Mashiro wanders away from home, and meets up with a large blind guy who seems only able to snarl.
Showing no fear, she offers him a sugar candy, and in turn comes home with a human finger.
Problem: the finger is not from Gin Goto. Lots of people are, apparently, getting dismembered.
Daigo accompanies the Goto family on a hunt to find the bear that they claim ate Grandma, and is then attacked by a bear, who turns out to have granny’s specs in his stomach.
In a scene that could almost define carnivorous virility, the men gather around the bear and eat his flesh, a ritual that is supposed to keep Grandma within them.
This is what we call, in Cannibal Studies, “essentialism”, the idea that the spirit or strength of a person lives on by eating them, even if only via the bear that ate her (even though that’s clearly not what happened).
In the following episodes, Daigo slowly unravels the truth about cannibalism in the village.
Gannibal is directed by Shinzô Katayama, the director of the horror-thriller Missing. Reviews have been glowing, stressing how ‘gross’ and unsettling the show is. One tweet said:
Except for the opening, which is over the top in Japanese anime style, the acting is great, the suspense interesting without jump scares, the music eerie, and the photography beautiful. If you like a good suspense show and don’t mind subtitles, this one is highly recommended.
Gannibal started streaming December 28 on Hulu. Also available on Disney+.
The Cannibal Guy 