Tag: Moscow

“…CANNIBALISTIC URGES” – Man on trial for brutal murder of four Idaho University students

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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.”

It is possible that he had been in touch with the so-called BTK killer, Dennis Rader, whose serial killings in Wichita were the subject of a book by his supervisor, Katherine Ramsland.

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.

His next court appearance will be June 26.

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.

Cannibalism in the Ukraine: GHOUL (Petr Jákl, 2015)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films1 Comment

Ghoul is a “found footage” movie, a postmodern affectation that pretends it is a documentary that has been ‘found’ after some gruesome disaster. The genre was popularised (although not originated) by the Blair Witch Project in 1999 which, like Ghoul, had young film-makers heading off to investigate the paranormal, and wishing they hadn’t. One of its most famous antecedents was Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, which was purportedly a documentary about missing documentary makers, and was (purportedly) believable enough to lead to a court case in which the actors had to be produced to prove they had not in fact been killed in some sort of snuff movie. This was of course great publicity for the film, as was the fact that it had been banned in several jurisdictions. The very first film in the genre was probably Punishment Park in 1971, in which anti-Vietnam War demonstrators are supposedly dropped in the desert and hunted by Nixon’s cops.

The main point of interest in this film (the found footage itself being unoriginal and totally preposterous) is the fact that it is set in The Ukraine which, at the time of writing, is again suffering from decisions taken in Moscow. The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by the collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, the history of Nazi and Soviet mass murders between the wars, examines the incidents of cannibalism in the Ukraine and Poland, and concludes “With starvation will come cannibalism”. When there is no bread or other meat, human flesh becomes the currency. Snyder describes several reports, including an orphanage in Kharkiv where the older children began eating the youngest, who himself joined in, “tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could.”

Pretty difficult to invent a story worse than such a reality. So to add some spice, we have in Ghoul an amateur film crew from America who are fascinated by cannibalism (as, apparently, are very many people: this blog is currently receiving over 10,000 views per month – THANK YOU for reading!) They are researching evidence of cannibalism during the Holodomor, as part of a planned television series on cannibals of the twentieth century. They are conducting interviews in Kyiv of elderly survivors of that time, but they are also hoping to interview a man named Boris who was arrested rather more recently for eating a colleague, confessed to the crime under hypnosis, but then was released, as the body was never found. He said that he was made to do it. By whom, they wonder.

The crew are taken to a local psychic/witch, who tells them that paranormal entities were behind that murder. The crew dismisses this as superstition, getting drunk and getting her to perform a séance involving a pentagram, in which they mockingly summon the ghost of Andrei Chikatilo, a notorious serial killer and cannibal who killed and partially consumed dozens of women and children in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The next morning is full of strange and uncanny events, but the crew are unable to leave for help. The Ukrainian psychic tries but fails to evict Chikatilo’s presence, with no luck: he’s back now, and killing again. The idea is that Chikatilo forced Boris, their reluctant interviewee, to kill and eat his victim. He possesses (as in takes over the body of) a cat, then Boris, who proceeds to chase the young filmmakers, screaming, through various dark, gothic passages.

WTF? (Or що за біса as they say in The Ukraine). The film’s poster (below) says “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. But where is the connection between Stalin’s attempted genocide in the 1930s and the ghost of a cannibal who had been active in Russia in the 1970s and 80s and was executed by a bullet behind his ear in 1994? Well, turns out Chikatilo had a brother that disappeared during the famine, and his ever-loving mummy told him the brother had been kidnapped and eaten. This may have just been to make him behave better (spoiler: didn’t work very well). So anyway, he decided to become a cannibal, specialising in small children. A real piece of work, and not one you’d want to reawaken from the dead.

I find hand-held filming annoying even in the hands of an expert, and this lot are supposed to be a bit sloppy, so the picture is jumping all over the place, to the point of seasickness. Reminds me of my dad’s Super-8 home movies (although he didn’t have a cannibal ghost to film, just bored kids). If you are patient enough to put up with the soundtrack (annoying bangs meant to scare you) and the shaky camera, the concept of a massacre being presented through the dispassionate eye of a video camera is interesting, in that it could be interpreted as the way the universe indifferently watches the suffering of its animals as they eat each other or, more immediately, the way the world watches as Russia tries to cannibalise Ukraine.

But besides the irritating camera work and the noisy things that go bump in the night, the plot is absurd – you have a historical tragedy, an imaginary murderer and the supposed ghost of a real murderer, who is somehow able to take over cats, people (including during sex) and of course kill people. The whole thing is frankly a bit of a yawn. It somehow managed to get to 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the LA Times critic summing it up well:

“Ghoul” can’t decide whether it should be about cannibals, serial killers, ghosts or demons. The found footage trivializes rather than reflects the horrific events that serve as the film’s basis.

According to IMDB, Ghoul was the highest grossing horror in Czech history. It also won the Vicious Cat Award at the Grossmann film and wine festival. Not sure if that will impress you or not.

The full movie was available on YouTube last time I checked, but all the dialog is in Czech and Ukrainian. Even if you speak both fluently, I wouldn’t bother.