Tag: Satanic Panic

IDAHO amends its anti-cannibalism bill – cannibalism news, March 2024

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

Idaho lawmakers have voted to expand a law that bans cannibalism because of fears about the popularity of human composting. Rep. Heather Scott introduced a bill in February 2024 to expand the state’s cannibalism ban and told a legislative committee that she’s worried about the possibility that people are eating other people.

Scott said:

“This is going to be normalized at some point, the way our society’s going and the direction we’re going.”

People are often surprised to hear that Idaho is the only state in the USA to have outlawed cannibalism. Other states have laws which target abuse or desecration of a corpse, making cannibalism legally impractical and problematic. Idaho introduced its law during the frenzy called the “Satanic Panic” last century.

The US is not unique in this – most countries do not have specific laws banning cannibalism. Germany didn’t, until Armin Meiwes ate his new social media friend.

The new bill, 522, adds to Idaho’s existing prohibition of cannibalism a ban on giving someone else “the flesh or blood of a human being” without that person’s “knowledge or consent.” Scott said she is “disturbed” by the practice of human composting, which is legal in several states as an option for disposing of the dead that is more sustainable than other burial methods and reduces a funeral’s carbon footprint. Human composting involves decomposing human remains like other organic matter and turning it into soil that can be returned to the family or used to make land more fertile. But Scott said outlawing composting would require overhauling rules for morticians, and so instead she focused on banning the act of deliberately giving human flesh to another person.

“I didn’t want to see that in my Home Depot stores.”

Scott said she was on a plane and watched a clip from a TV show displaying a chef feeding human flesh in sausage to contestants, which inspired her to take action. The clip, which she sent to the Idaho Statesman, is from a TruTV prank show, in which they pretend to feed people flesh. “They didn’t tell the people, they fed it to them,” Scott told the Statesman, though she noted it may have been a spoof.

Scott also submitted a link to a video featuring a Chinese official denying that his country had sold canned human flesh to people in Zambia. The canning claim was a hoax, spread with fake photos of butchery, according to news reports from 2016. Scott additionally pointed to a North Idaho man who pleaded guilty to murder last year and was initially also charged with cannibalism after investigators found postmortem mutilation and a bloodied bowl at the crime scene. The cannibalism charge was later dropped, meaning that the Idaho anti-cannibalism laws have still not been tried in court.

An editorial in the Idaho Statesman concluded:

But that’s where we are in Idaho: Unhinged, unreal legislators can bring forth just about any crazy idea and get a bill printed.

But imagining that humans might unwittingly eat other humans is not so far-fetched. Mythology is full of innocent cannibals—Agave eating her son Penteus, Thyestes eating his sons at his brother’s feast, Tereus eating Itys. Becoming “innocent” cannibals make us squirm, writes Donald Tuzin, because it denies us the escape of declaring the cannibal a maniac or monster—anyone can become a cannibal. In the movie The Farm, humans are treated as “living meat” exactly the way cattle are regarded on factory farms—the men are slaughtered for meat, the women bred and their infants pitilessly killed in front of the mother (as often happens in the dairy industry) so the farmers can sell the mothers’ milk. The final commodities are sold to innocent cannibals, who occasionally ring up, horrified to find residues such as a human tooth in their meat. Inverting the agricultural business plan, the “livestock” are human, while the farmers are dressed in animal masks.

But it doesn’t only happen in fiction. The Farm may be based on the Canadian pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton who confessed to 49 murders in the 1990s, and allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with the pork products he sold to neighbours.

Joe Metheny claimed to have killed 13 people in the Baltimore area in the 1990s and turned them into burgers. He reported:

“Over the next couple weeks on the weekends I opened up a little open-pit beef stand. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches and why not they were very good. The human body tastes very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.”

In 2007, two men in England were arrested for the murder of a 14-year-old girl, with the prosecution claiming that her body had been cut up and minced into kebabs in a Blackpool takeaway called “Funny Boys”.

On April 9, 2012, police in Garanhuns, Brazil, arrested for murder Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira, his wife, Isabel Pires, and his mistress, Bruna Cristina Oliveira, who all lived together in a group they called “The Cartel”.

Residing with the Cartel was a small child named Vitória, who had been the daughter of their first victim. The child’s mother was a seventeen-year-old homeless woman whom the Cartel had invited into their home in Olinda in May 2008. She had been murdered by the Cartel, who then dismembered and skinned her body, storing the meat in their refrigerator before seasoning it with salt and cumin, grilling and eating it. The woman’s daughter was fed some of her mother’s flesh.

The worldwide public interest in the crimes did not stem from their murder of three young mothers, but from the fact that the Cartel had baked the victims’ flesh into salgados, salty, deep-fried pastries, which they then sold to the unsuspecting public. To the disappointment of the media, the pictures of the perpetrators showed them as three ordinary Brazilians, not the monsters the public had expected.

Back to Idaho, where Rep Heather Scott’s bill 522 sailed through the House and is heading to the Senate. She quoted in support of her bill from a recent article in The New Scientist which reviewed the human history of cannibalism (they concluded that it happened a lot) and stated:

“Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry? Our aversion has been explained in various ways. Perhaps it is down to the fact that, in Western religious traditions, bodies are seen as the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or maybe it is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation.”

We don’t have to buy mulch to end up cannibals. Any sausage or burger might have human flesh in it, and no one would know the difference. We are animals, large mammals, made of red meat like cows, pigs and sheep. Unless you think we have some sort of supernatural dissimilarity from other animals, the thin red line between different species can only be identified as a cultural construct.

Cannibalism and ‘Satanic Panic’ in Utah

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Utah lawmakers are attempting to pass a bill to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child,’ bringing back memories of the satanic panic of the 1980s, when other states passed similar laws.

Critics of the bill, however, say it is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Republican state Rep. Ken Ivory is sponsoring the bill, House Bill 196. It defines ritual abuse as abuse that occurs as “part of an event or act designed to commemorate, celebrate, or solemnize a particular occasion or significance in a religious, cultural, social, institutional, or other context.” The bill lists specific actions that fall under the proposed definition: abuse against children that includes rape and sodomy, involving them in animal torture, bestiality or cannibalism, or forcing a child to ingest urine or faeces, enter a coffin or grave containing a corpse, or take drugs as part of a ritual.

A hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on February 21 heard from several adults who described themselves as survivors of ritualistic child sexual abuse. They described devil worship, animal torture, forced bondage, rape, cannibalism, child prostitution and mind control, saying that the abuse was so physically and emotionally traumatic that they had repressed memories of it.

Kimberli Raya Koen, President and Founder of The Healing Center for Complex Trauma in Salt Lake City, told the Committee that she was trafficked into a family that ritually abused her for more than two decades.

She told them:

“I see the light and I have fought to be in this chair, to be in this moment, to have a chance to say this is real and this is happening.”

Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith spoke in favour of the bill, telling the committee that he began investigating a high-profile “ritual sex abuse” case two years ago.

The investigation (covered by this blog at the time) became embroiled in politics after then-Utah County Attorney David Leavitt accused him of dredging up an old, unverified witness statement that accused Leavitt and 14 others of “cannibalizing young children” and participating in a “ritualistic” sex ring. Leavitt subsequently lost his re-election bid.

Several states passed similar laws in the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of furore over satanic ritual abuse, but few, if any, prosecutions came from them. Since then, federal law enforcement agencies, scholars and historians have pointed to the scarcity of evidence for the claims of widespread ritual abuse and warned that such legislation risks generating false allegations, wrongful imprisonments and wasting law enforcement resources.

Mary deYoung, professor emeritus of sociology at Grand Valley State University, has documented the harms of the satanic panic.

“This bill is a very good example of panic legislation, hastily cobbled together, on the basis of testimony from a couple of women recollecting childhood histories of satanic ritual abuse. It’s a bill that responds with the kind of approach where we get really angry and say, ‘There ought to be a law.’ And we don’t think about whether it can be enforced in such a way that adds any benefit to society or that ensures that justice is done.”

County Sheriff Smith acted on the reports, but his prosecutions have lagged in court for years, plagued by accusations that investigators mishandled witness statements and that the investigation was politically motivated from the start. He says:

“I was attacked, I was ridiculed, I’ve had memes made about me because of it. Without a doubt, these things do happen in Utah. I believe they’re happening, I believe they have happened.”

Utah’s proposed bill and the county sheriff’s investigation have attracted national interest from conservative media and online conspiracy theorists who believe this case will prove that the allegations in the satanic panic of the 1980s were true, and that cabals of satanists are still sexually abusing, murdering and cannibalising children. Several self-described internet investigators have, in blogs, videos and podcasts, accused hundreds of Utahns of participating in satanic ritual abuse rings.

Many of the claims in the 1980s were made in Utah, amid claims that local therapists used hypnosis and manipulative interview techniques to recover memories from alleged child victims. These were some of the earliest claims of widespread satanic ritual abuse.

Utah’s governor formed a task force in 1990 which spent $250,000 to address pervasive ritual abuse. Investigators interviewed hundreds of victims in more than 125 alleged cases, only one of which ended in prosecution. A final report from the state’s Attorney General in 1995 suggested that there was evidence of isolated instances of abuse involving rituals, but not a widespread plot to abuse children in this way.

National studies from the Department of Justice and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect found no evidence to support claims of widespread ritual abuse. Child sexual abuse, however, is staggeringly common; about 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the United States are victims, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Utah, the Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 1 to advance the ritual abuse bill to the full House; if passed there, it will advance to the Senate. No one testified in opposition to the bill. Rep. Brian King, one of the two Democrats on the committee, cast a dissenting vote and questioned its necessity, noting that state law already criminalises physical and sexual child abuse. Ivory, the sponsor, conceded the offenses were already criminal, but said a specific law was necessary because the crimes are “so heinous.”

​​Rep. Kera Birkeland, a Republican, cried as she addressed the people who spoke during the hearing.

“I had no idea that this was happening in our state. We believe you.”

Do we? Are children in Utah or elsewhere being forced to eat human flesh (the focus of this blog) or other matter usually considered inedible in polite society? One of the most famous allegations is the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip which maintains that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. No claims were made about making the child eat flesh though. So I guess that’s not covered by the bill.

Utah has a bit of a record here, with the ill-fated team eaten by Alferd (or Alfred) Packer leaving from the Bingham Canyon mines near Salt Lake City in November 1873 for the gold fields of Breckenridge in the Colorado Territory. They met Packer some 25 miles from their starting point, near Provo. Unrelated (I guess) is the story of a Utah man who was charged in September 2021 over the Capitol riots and later threatened to “eat the flesh” of a probation officer.

We might also wonder if these laws might be used against churches that practise the Eucharist, the eating and drinking of the wafer and wine in church, which is seen by some (particularly the Catholics) as a literal transubstantiation of wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. Children are usually expected to take communion, that is, eat the flesh and blood of Christ (in the form of wafer and wine), from the age of about seven. This does sound a lot like what the bill describes as “ingestion… of human bones, blood, or flesh”. I wonder what the churches might say about that?

Idaho is the only state to have a law against cannibalism, but it has never been used. Seems a terrible oversight, really, and perhaps the good folk of Utah can set it right.

THE UTAH CANNIBALS – Satanic Panic in Utah County

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News4 Comments

While we’re talking cannibalism investigations (it’s what we do on this blog), we’ve now got the Utah County Attorney going public to deny accusations that he and his wife are cannibals.

Here’s how it went down.

On June 1, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office (UCSO) sent a media release stating that:

Special Victims Unit Detectives and investigators from multiple county and federal agencies are investigating reports of ritualistic child sexual abuse from as far back as 1990.

The statement specified investigations into child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking that occurred in Utah County, Juab County, and Sanpete County between 1990 and 2010.

Sgt. Spencer Cannon with the UCSO stated that:

“We have gotten to the point where we believe we have been able to verify some of the information that we’ve been told.”

The Utah County Attorney, David Leavitt, held a press conference that day, calling for the resignation of Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith and for an investigation into his activities for misuse of taxpayer and county resources. He said that he had been wrongly accused of cannibalism, as well as the murder of small children.

Leavitt said that he had been provided a copy of an alleged witness statement from a person he called a “tragically mentally ill woman.”

“And for the first time in the reportedly 15 or 20 years since the report was given, I learned that my wife and I were part of those allegations, alleging that we were guilty of cannibalizing young children.”

Leavitt says the woman in question made sex abuse claims against 15 to 20 people before he was ever in office in Utah County. That case was dismissed, he said, because the allegations were deemed not credible by the special victims unit. He called the allegations “ludicrous” and “outlandish” and a “pack of lies.”

When asked whether Leavitt is a subject of that investigation, the sheriff responded: “We don’t talk about who is under investigation.”

But Leavitt insisted that the report names him. He believed the timing of the announcement from the sheriff’s office was suspicious, since Leavitt is running for re-election — and ballots are expected to go out next week.

“I am calling upon Sheriff Mike Smith to open his office to an outside investigation,” Leavitt said, “where outside, independent investigators are able to investigate and confirm or deny that documents from a debunked investigation from more than a decade ago were or were not used for political purposes in a Utah County Attorney’s race.”

Sheriff Smith said he won’t resign, and he doesn’t apologize for using county resources on the investigation. He stressed that this “was not a politically motivated investigation,” and that a year ago his office was contacted by people reporting crimes that were similar in nature to those brought up by Leavitt.

“Leavitt,” said Sheriff Smith, “is using his authority and his pulpit to bully, distract, and mischaracterize the facts of an ongoing investigation.”

The sheriff emphasized that while Leavitt focused on accusations of “cannibalism”, the primary investigation involves sexual abuse.

The only forum where Leavitt is publicly alleged to have been involved with the sex ring is purportedly published online by a man who Leavitt’s office is prosecuting for a 2008 rape case. Prosecutors allege that the man faked his death in the United States, and is now living in Scotland under a different name. He has denied, through his attorney, that he is the person prosecutors allege he is.

That website claims that County Sheriff Sgt. Spencer Cannon confirmed that Leavitt was the head of a “widespread ritual sex abuse ring in Utah.” Cannon said Wednesday that he spoke to the man, but never confirmed to him that Leavitt or any other specific persons were suspected.

Conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon, and they have often involved cannibalism, often in the form of drinking blood, such as the blood libel accusations levelled at Jews during the Middle Ages, and resurfacing in the development of antisemitic movements from the nineteenth century until the Nazis, and even present day.

Since the 1980s, accusations of “ritual sex abuse” have been rife in the United States, and in Utah in particular. The US has seen over 12,000 alleged cases of satanic ritual abuse, leading to the coining of a new term: SATANIC PANIC. Satanic cults were said to have engaged in bizarre sexual acts such as necrophilia, forced ingestion of semen, blood and faeces, cannibalism, orgies, liturgical parody such as pseudo-sacramental use of faeces and urine; infanticide, sacrificial abortions to eat fetuses, and human sacrifice. Accusations of Satanic groups engaging in torture and cannibalism of children were extensively made during recent US elections. The event called “#Pizzagate” arose from QAnon claims that Democrats were torturing and killing children in the basement of a (basementless) pizza shop in Washington DC, following which a dude with a rifle entered the shop to save the supposed victims.

Proponents of the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip believe that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. Supposedly, the video was later found on the hard drive of Abedin’s former husband, Anthony Weiner, under the code name ‘Frazzledrip’. Snopes found the whole thing to be a giant fake.

Looking forward to hearing new and, hopefully, more original cannibalism stories in the mid-terms!