Tag: USA

Cannibalism news – the 2024 round-up

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

‘There will be cannibalism, and rumours of cannibalism”

Yes, I paraphrased the Book of Matthew. Although not all that many people got eaten, the media was full of cannibal stories, and here are a few of them, sorted by their places of occurrence.

Australia

One of the men imprisoned for the so-called Snowtown murders (which mostly did not take place in the little town of Snowtown) was released. Mark Haydon was charged with assisting the men who did the actual killing and who ate part of one victim’s leg some 25 years earlier.

Brazil

Influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin) was arrested for desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, stealing human bones, and using human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Seems rotting human is a good substitute for pork.

Canada

Robert Pickton, the pig farmer convicted of six counts of second-degree murder (although he was charged with at least twenty others), was attacked by another inmate in prison and died a few weeks later. Pickton allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with pork products he sold to his neighbours for their personal consumption.

China

Netflix released a new version of the classic science fiction book 3 Body Problem and ran into a storm of criticism from China for its depictions of the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution. Although most of the victims of the purges were killed by shooting, live burial, drowning, boiling alive, and disembowelling, there is evidence that several hundred had been cannibalised, as the ultimate in humiliation.

The General who presided over a Cultural Revolution massacre that included cannibalism of those deemed “enemies of the people”, Wei Guoqing, was reburied (or at least his ashes were) with full honours in Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery – the resting place of China’s high-ranking leaders and revolutionary heroes. Wei’s name is most strongly linked in the public mind with cannibalism during the massacre period in Guangxi’s Wuxuan and Wuming counties and Nanning city. Researchers have found that at least 137 people were eaten, with thousands participating. “Paying tribute to a legendary gourmet,” wrote one wag on social media.

Cuba

Stories began circulating this year that the extreme food shortages in Cuba were leading to the danger, or actual occurrence, of cannibalism. This was bolstered by reports from 2022 of two hospital workers who had been stealing hearts and fat from human bodies and selling them as mince.

Haiti

Rumours circulated that the natural disasters and gang violence in Haiti was leading to starvation cannibalism. Jimmy Cherizier, a gang leader called Barbecue (“Babekyou” in the local parlance) was known for his penchant for burning people alive, and there was at least one video on Twitter/X of one gang member supposedly “tearing flesh from the leg of a burning corpse and eating it.” Such stories cannot be selfishly maintained by one little country, so of course it was not long before Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of joining the cannibal feast. To add to the hilarity, Elon Musk posted on his own site, X, that a picture of a man near a fire was evidence of cannibalism, only to have the post removed by his own team for violating community standards. The fact-checking website Snopes pointed out that videos of bodies in Haiti being roasted on spits had previously appeared as accusations against a Nigerian restaurant, and were in fact from a Halloween prank in China in 2018. Still, you know, voodoo and all. Meanwhile, Trump ally Laura Loomer supplied conclusive proof that Haitians were cannibals: apparently, if you Google it, you will see a lot of results. The Prosecution rests its case.

India

India’s top court put a temporary stay on the execution of a man convicted of killing his mother and eating her remains in what is being deemed as the “rarest of rare” cases of cannibalism. Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi of western Maharashtra state’s Kolhapur district was handed a death penalty by a lower court in 2021 for killing his 63-year-old mother in 2017. The High Court in October this year upheld the death sentence against Kuchkoravi, stating that the convict possibly has a “syndrome of pathological cannibalism”. The execution has been delayed until the case is reheard in April 2025.

Israel (and around there)

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, has been condemned for antisemitic rhetoric by the governments of the U.S., France and Germany among others. Albanese, known for accusing Israel of genocide (an odd charge seeing that the population of Gaza has increased in the last twelve months), wrote that the Israeli army was “rotten to the core”. A follower immediately introduced the classic blood libel: “Jews are capable of eating human flesh”, to which Albanese replied along the lines of “not all Jews”. Reassuring to note that a person paid by the taxpayers of the West, who finance the UN, can admit that some Jews are not cannibals!

A Yazidi woman was rescued from Gaza by Israeli troops. She revealed that, after being captured by ISIS in 2014 and forced to be sex slaves, the women were starved and finally fed meat which, they later told her, was from the bodies of a beheaded Yazidi baby, the child of one of the women. They told her:

‘We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate’.

Indonesia

Police investigated a suspected cannibalism case in West Java Province. The Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit confirmed that a video on social media showed the alleged perpetrator consuming a small portion of the victim’s flesh. He said that police had found 12 body parts of the victim at the crime scene.

Italy

An inmate in the notorious Poggioreale Prison in Naples tore the finger off another inmate and ate it. The Campania Guarantor, Samuele Ciambriello, observed that “it is now clear that the Poggioreale prison needs a structure suitable for hosting inmates suffering from mental disorders.” Seems like a good idea.

Mexico

A podcast called Mexico Unexplained revisited this year the story of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared some 15 years ago, after raging against the machine outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon. Ranting about the elites, including oddly the Queens of England and Germany (which is a Republic), she had shouted that “They ate humans! Disgusting!… They smell like human flesh!”

Nigeria

A man accused of being a sorcerer was blamed by villagers of the small town of Kirikiri for the disappearance of several children and elderly people. He was supposed to be “feeding on the flesh of the innocent.” Several claimed to have located the individual on the edge of a forest, wearing clothes “stained with blood” and mumbling mysterious incantations. A group of villagers beat the man and left him for dead.

Russia

Erkinzhon Abdurakhmanov, 47, intended to cure his own heart problems ‘after making a pact with the devil’, he told police. He killed a 65-year-old male pensioner in the Kuyurgazinsky district of Russian region Bashkortostan by striking him three times with an axe, according to reports. He then then cut out the heart and ‘ate the meal’ as he waited at a bus stop. He gave the uneaten remains to a woman also waiting for a bus ‘and asked her to bury it’. He was not arrested, however, until he headed into a liquor store and tried to steal some drinks. Cannibalism is not against the law in Russia, but murder and stealing alcohol is.

Vladimar Putin’s policy of giving pardons to criminals who agreed to fight in Ukraine in lieu of serving their sentences, was honoured in a pardon to a charmer named Denis Gorin, who had been convicted of at least four murders, and had eaten the flesh of his victims.

Another pardon involved Dmitri Malyshev. Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Neighbours seemed uneasy about his imminent return home.

South Africa

On December 26, 2024, eight illegal miners known as zama zamas emerged from Shaft 10 of a mine near Stilfontein, located in Northwest South Africa. They were taken by police, who confirmed that twelve bodies remained trapped beneath the ground, with miners reportedly resorting to eating human flesh due to severe food shortages.

Ukraine

Novosibirsk Archpriest Alexander Novopashin became notorious for claiming that Ukrainians are “cannibals”. Although conspiracy theories about cannibals are becoming more common, this particular Archpriest is taken seriously in Russia, and regularly lectures Russian security forces and soldiers.

UK

Marius Gustavson, who called himself “the eunuch maker”, offered a service where he charged men to destroy or remove their testicles, and then charged subscribers to his website to see him perform the operations. The court heard that that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”.

Meanwhile, a candidate from a party called Reform UK was suspended for saying that meat-eaters should “eat other humans” and said humanity should be “obliterated”. Just saying what many are thinking, perhaps.

USA

The cannibal story of the year was the President, Joe Biden, claiming that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea. The leaders of PNG took exception to the stereotyping of their people as cannibals. Apparently, only some of them had been.

Speaking of Presidents, Donald Trump embellished his rhetoric on immigration by pointing out that some of the undocumented people pouring over the border were from insane asylums, and called that “Silence of the Lambs stuff”. Trump had previously claimed that Hannibal Lecter had endorsed his candidacy, which is a bit odd since Hannibal is a fictional character, but by far not the oddest claim in the 2024 election.

In March, a homeless man in Kern County was arrested for picking up the leg of a person who had been killed in a train accident and chowing down on it. California has no laws against cannibalism, but he was charged with “mutilating the body” which is a bit odd, since the train had already done that.

In Utah, which also has no law against cannibalism (Idaho is the only state that does), a law was passed to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child’, which apparently regularly includes making the little ones eat “organic substance or material” (i.e. bits of people) before they are allowed to have their desserts. This in addition to claims that such rituals would sometimes involve eating the children instead.

A keen-eyed traveller pointed out that the road once taken by the Donner Party, which ended up in them getting lost and eating each other, was now signposted with a sign indicating dining was available. Much hilarity ensued on social media.

Conservative political commentator Candace Owens managed to link transexuals, Native Americans and cannibals, all in one sentence. No wonder she is so widely admired.

Much to the relief of the good people of Idaho (the only State in the Union with laws against cannibalism), the law was amended to ensure that giving someone else human flesh to eat was also prohibited. This led, on its long road to farce, to the accusation that bodies were being turned into compost which could be used to grow food for humans to consume. Rather than DNA test all compost, the law confined itself to banning the act of deliberately giving human flesh to another person. The legislator who introduced the bill cited a disturbing case on the show TruTV, which she admitted might have been a prank (it was) in which diners were told they had been eating human flesh, just to whet their appetites perhaps.

Ariana Grande raised some eyebrows when she was asked on a podcast whom she would most like to dine, and named Jeffrey Dahmer. Not sure Dahmer would have agreed – he was more into man-flesh, and there’s not much meat on Ariana anyway.

In April, a man was arrested in Las Vegas for eating a victim’s eyeballs and ears. The victim was pronounced dead. What happens in Vegas stays – internal.

Talking of ears, Mike Tyson, famous for biting the ear of Evander Holyfield in a fight in (where else) las Vegas in 1997, released a line of marijuana gummies shaped like nibbled ears.

Allegations were raised that Gilgo Beach ‘serial killer’ Rex Heuermann’s family was involved in the murders, which took place near the remote beach town of Gilgo in Suffolk County, New York from the 1990s to 2011. His daughter, who likes to paint the odd Satanic scene including body parts and cannibal feasts, was accused of being involved in his depredations. Homicide experts said that was insane, a word that gets tossed around a lot in cannibal stories. Heuermann was charged with a seventh murder last week.

On October 9, a woman in Kentucky, Torilena May Fields, was arrested after a dismembered body was found behind a home in Northern Kentucky and cooked human body parts were found in the oven. The body, and its parts, turned out to have been her mother. She was also charged with cruelty in that she “intentionally tortured and killed a domestic dog.”. A contractor found the dismembered body of the mother, and told police the perp had been “casting spells.” Her bail was set at $1.5 million. Her next court appearance is set for March 10, 2025 in Robertson County.
Some people just give cannibalism a bad name.

Another Kentucky woman, a former youth counsellor, was arrested for allegedly discussing cannibalism and other hobbies with a convicted murderer.

In Oklahoma, Kevin Ray Underwood was executed by lethal injection in December (on his 45th birthday, the press gleefully informed us) for killing a ten-year-old girl in a “cannibalistic fantasy.” The man admitted to luring the girl into his apartment and beating her over the head with a cutting board before suffocating and sexually assaulting her. He told investigators that he nearly beheaded her in his bathtub before abandoning his plans to eat her. So not really a cannibalism story, but near enough.

International

Citizen of the world, Donald Duck, appeared on the interview show Hot Ones on the Internet (which is global), where guests eat chicken wings with hot sauce. Turns out Donald is a vegan though, preferring cauliflower, and since ducks aren’t chickens, the controversy that ensued over whether he was (or would have been) a cannibal by partaking of chicken was just silly.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, and may your worst problems be mild gastro-oesophageal reflux.

And don’t forget to go to the dentist.

2021: THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBAL

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibals2 Comments

What a year it was – if a virus wasn’t invading your body, your neighbour might well be.

Thank you!

First of all, a big thanks for reading and sometimes commenting on my blog. Eighteen months ago, I was very excited at seeing over 1,000 views in a month. In December 2021, we had over 6,000 views.

The year by year growth of readership (59,002 in 2021) has been going, pardon the term, viral. So, thank you!!

Cannibals and rumours of cannibals in 2021

I decided to postpone this blog post until January 2022 because, at the end of 2021, new cannibalism cases were still being reported. In the previous year’s summary, I had missed THE GRANNY RIPPER, because she died of COVID on December 29 2020 while awaiting trial. So we’re sneaking her in to the section at the end – cannibals sentenced in 2021, although her judge and executioner was a tiny virus.

There were so many cannibal stories in 2021 that I am listing them alphabetically by country. I should point out for my American readers that the good ol’ USA won gold in the number and strangeness of cannibal acts last year, with Russia, Mexico and Nigeria tied for silver.

Australia

A Tasmanian man pleaded guilty to assault and attempted abduction of a five-year-old girl, telling the court that he just wanted a cuddle (albeit from a screaming child, whom he had just attempted to strangle) and later telling prison officers that he had wanted to eat her, and that he had been wanting to eat people since he was a child.

Bolivia

A woman chowed down on a burger in Santa Cruz de la Sierra only to find that she was chewing on a severed and decomposing human finger. The unfortunate incident (you’d have to call her an innocent cannibal) was the source of some semi-amusing puns from the world’s press, plus a hilarious unintentional pun from the burger company who told her “the issue is out of our hands”.

France

A man in Tarascon, a town between Avignon and Arles, was shot by police after the decapitated and partly consumed corpse of young boy was found in his apartment.

Ghana

Richard Appiah of Abesim near Sunyani in the Bono Region, allegedly lured three boys to his house, killed them and kept their mutilated bodies in his fridge. He is said to have cooked for them, before cooking them.

Indonesia

A family in Gowa allegedly gouged out their six-year-old daughter’s eye as part of a black magic cannibal ritual that was supposed to bring them wealth, before her mother ate her eyelid. Police also arrested a shaman, who allegedly convinced the family to sacrifice children.

Malawi

Patrick Gome from Ntcheu was allegedly found biting a nine-month old baby on her cheek and thigh. A police spokesperson said Gome acted “like a wild animal”.

Mexico

David Sanabria and his young daughter, trying to cross Mexico from Honduras in the hope of entering the United States, was kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and held for ransom. Those refugees who did not pay, he later told Noticias Telemundo Investiga, were murdered and cooked and the surviving migrants were made to eat the meat.

Andres Filomeno Mendoza Celis, 72, was arrested in Calle Margaritas, in the municipality of Atizapan de Zaragoza. Detectives arrived at Mendoza’s home to interview him about the suspicious disappearance of a woman, Reyna González, a mother of two, only to find her mutilated remains on a table. Mendoza reportedly admitted to slaughtering and eating parts of around thirty women over the last twenty years.

Nigeria

The cannibal of Ebonyi was the name given to a commercial driver in Abakaliki, the Ebonyi State capital, who reportedly bit off and swallowed the finger of a member of the taskforce raised by the state’s Ministry of Capital City Development to enforce compliance with urban planning regulations.

A video has surfaced online purporting to show the Eastern Security Network (ESN), the security wing of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), celebrating the abduction, beheading and cannibalisation of two police officers. The Director of State Security said “We saw human flesh being roasted, it was an eye-sore.” An IPOB spokesperson, Emma Powerful, denied claims that their members eat human flesh and engage in barbaric acts, saying that the claim by the DSS was meant to demonise IPOB and ESN operatives and tag them as criminals.

Russia

Vladimir Yadne killed three people in Siberia and ate their flesh, washed down with vodka.

On the other side of Russia, Yegor Komarov was seen running from his car, which he had crashed into a road safety barrier. The problem was not the accident, but the headless body which fell from the car boot. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and stated that he ‘likes killing people’. He confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a park in St Petersburg last year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, and said he had sliced off the tongue and fried it in butter.

South Africa

A community leader told the Financial Times newspaper that rioting and looting have caused food shortages which have led people to consider cannibalism.

Spain

National Police officers in Sevilla were deployed on Saturday, September 18, to deal with what they have described as one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the force, a case involving African witchcraft and cannibalism. Allegedly, a fight had broken out between two women after one threw a bottle of water containing salt at the other, and accused her of witchcraft. Believing that her roommate was possessed, she struck her on the head with a stone, and then bit off and ate two of the woman’s fingers. After this, the aggressor, in an attempt to rid the other woman of the supposed demon, inserted the stone into her anus in an attempt to extract her guts.

USA

The biggest cannibalism story in the USA in 2021 was about a man who almost certainly has not eaten anyone. He did, however, boast about it in text messages to some very pissed off girlfriends, who reported it widely. Yep, the actor (maybe former actor) Armie Hammer. Arguably now more famous for his cannibalism posts than for his movies.

On February 9 2021, Chickasha (Oklahoma) police responded to a 911 call. They found Leon Pye dead and his four-year-old granddaughter Kaeos critically injured. She died in the back of the ambulance. Delsie Pye, Leon’s wife, was alive, but had knife wounds to both eyes. Lawrence Anderson confessed to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation that before slaughtering his family, he had broken into the home of a neighbour and butchered the woman who lived there, cut out her heart, and cooked it with potatoes to feed to his family, to release the demons. Apparently unsuccessfully.

Landon Copeland, an Army veteran from Utah who had been accused of assaulting police during the Capitol insurrection, was refused bail after he threatened to “eat the flesh” of a probation officer. He is said to have shouted “I will eat your flesh for nutrients. I don’t think you don’t know what I am!”

James Phelps, 58, and Timothy Norton, 56, were arrested and charged with kidnapping a young woman named Cassidy Rainwater in September. The County Sheriff said that Rainwater was disembowelled and dismembered after she was strangled. Some of her remains were found in a freezer. Conspiracies are floating around that both Norton and Phelps were involved in cannibalistic activities.

Cassidy Rainwater kidnappers arrested

Just squeaking into 2021 before the ball falls in Times Square, Idaho man James David Russell, 39, of Oldtown in Bonner County had cannibalism charges added to his accusations of first-degree murder. Police found pieces of the neighbour, some of which appeared to have been cooked in a microwave oven. According to the supplemental probable cause affidavit, Russell believed that he could “heal himself by cutting off portions of flesh” in order to “cure his brain.”

Sentenced

Some cannibals sit in jail for a while before they are finally sentenced. Here are a few who ate people in earlier years, but were sentenced in 2021.

  • On Friday, 18 June, a Swiss court sentenced 46-year-old Alieu Kosiah, a West African rebel leader, to 20 years in prison for rape, murder and cannibalism.
  • Bulawayo man, Rodney Tongai Jindu, has just lodged an appeal to the Zimbabwean Supreme Court against a High Court ruling which sentenced him to death for murdering two of his friends. Jindu had told the court, in gruesome detail, how he had eaten the men’s livers raw, and cooked and eaten their brains.
  • Alberto Sánchez Gómez, a Madrid waiter, was jailed for 15 years in June. He had told police he butchered his own mother before sharing her body parts with his dog. The 66-year-old pensioner had been chopped into at least 1,000 pieces and her vital organs were missing.
  • Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi (35) of Kolhapur India was found guilty of murder for killing his mother after she refused to give him money to buy liquor. He later chopped up parts of her body and ate them, after frying them in a pan.
  • A Sydney (Australia) woman who cut her 57-year-old mother’s head off with kitchen knives in July 2019 was found guilty of manslaughter in the NSW Supreme Court in March, and sentenced to 21 years imprisonment, after pleading not guilty to murder due to mental impairment. The court was told that Jessica Camilleri – who had a history of refusing to take psychiatric medications – had only stopped the attack when her mother’s head fell off and her eyeballs came out of their sockets. The judge said Camilleri had engaged in “acts of decapitation and cannibalism”.
  • Eduard Seleznev, known as the “Arkhangelsk Cannibal”, who killed and ate the flesh of three men, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Russian Supreme Court. Seleznev admitted the murders, and added that he had then sliced their bodies up, kept the meat in plastic bags, and disposed of the bodies in the Volokhnitsa river. He subsequently boiled and ate the flesh.
  • At the end of the year, we heard that Mark Latunski, who allegedly killed his Grindr date, hung him upside down and ate his testicles on Christmas Eve 2019 (thus missing out on my 2020 update), will go to trial early 2022. Very inconsiderate.
  • Sofia Zhukova, known as the ‘Granny Ripper’, who supposedly gave children sweets made from the flesh of her victims, died in Russia of COVID-19 on December 29 2020, at the age of 81, before the conclusion of her murder trial. You may have noticed that most of the 5,351,812 people who died of COVID up to December 20 (plus millions more whose deaths were not reported to WHO) did not have articles written about them. Sofia had heaps of media coverage though, because, you know, cannibalism.

2022

Well, I hope you can see why I nominated 2021 as THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBAL. But what does 2022 have in store for us? Well, if you follow the prophecies of Nostradamus, which a surprising number of people do, 2022 offers, yep, even more cannibalism, this time because of inflation and the price of food.

 “So high the price of wheat
that man is stirred
his fellow man to eat in his despair.”

Looking further ahead, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University has warned that humans who attempt to colonise other worlds such as Jupiter’s moon Callisto and Saturn’s moon Titan could well find themselves running out of food and resorting to cannibalism.  It happens – think of the “Starving Time” in the Virginia colony of Jamestown in 1609-10, or Sir John Franklin’s 1845 exploration of the Arctic that resulted in the crew cannibalising each other.

https://www.news24.com/witness/news/the-covid-jab-wont-turn-you-into-a-cannibal-kzn-health-mec-20211026

“As I stand before you, I’ve never had the urge to eat anyone, and it will never happen. So, what people are saying about the vaccine making people want to eat others… of being part of 5G technology, or linked to the work of the devil, is all nothing but a myth. It is not true.” 

Hope you enjoyed your New Year festivities! Next year you might need a barbeque. Please keep reading and liking, and commenting! If you need some light reading, here’s my complete listing of Hannibal films and episodes.

HANNIBAL: a complete listing of my Hannibal film and TV blogs

Satanic rituals and forced cannibalism. How many refugees share this fate?

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films, Cannibal News5 Comments

The news service Noticias Telemundo recently reported a case of kidnapping, murder and cannibalism which, it seems, may not be so uncommon among refugees trying to cross Mexico into the United States.

Noticias Telemundo Investiga interviewed 32 migrants kidnapped from 2019 to 2021 in Mexico and the U.S. Their relatives were made to pay $1,500 to $5,000 as ransom to criminal gangs for the release of the kidnapped migrants.

The latest story follows the ordeal of a young man named David Sanabria and his little girl Ximena, who are from Honduras.

David Sanabria had arranged a coyote (smuggler) to escort them to the Texan border, where he planned to turn himself and his daughter in to U.S. immigration authorities and seek asylum. But when they reached Reynosa in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, the coyote turned them over to a cartel gang. David and other captives were repeatedly made to call relatives to ask for a ransom, and were beaten if the relative said they couldn’t afford it. The victims are not US citizens so relatives cannot ask for help from the FBI, and in many cases the local police in Mexico are in the pay of the cartels.

If the ransom was not paid by the deadline, the captives would be murdered. David said:

“With a machete they dismembered them, killed them, and the only thing I could do was cover my daughter’s eyes and ears so that she would not know what was happening, nor would she have those memories for her whole life.”

After that, the corpses were cooked and the surviving migrants were made to eat the human meat, “so that there would be no trace of anything — that’s what one had to eat.” The term “innocent cannibal” is usually reserved for those who are not aware that human meat is in their meal, but in this case, I think we can apply it to David and Ximena.

At night, the kidnappers performed satanic rituals. “They knelt down. They had images of the devil, of Santa Muerte. They made pleas. They made offerings. It was something horrible,” he said. Several survivors who spoke to Noticias Telemundo Investiga talked about the kidnappers’ “cult of death”.

David’s brother borrowed money from his co-workers, friends and relatives and even asked strangers for money on the streets of Nashville. He eventually raised the $7,500 ransom and David and Ximena were released. David waded across the Rio Grande with Ximena on his back. So they made it to the US border where they were detained for three days, but then were returned to Mexico. Under Title 42 to curb the spread of COVID-19, migrants who are detained at the border are returned to Mexico while their petitions for asylum are processed. This year, 100,000 migrants a month are being returned to Mexico.

They were put in a shelter by the National Migration Institute of Mexico, and Al Otro Lado, which provides free legal assistance to migrants from Baja California, helped David fill out an asylum application.

In August, the U.S. granted David and Ximena humanitarian parole so they could enter the country and live with his brother in Tennessee while they await the results of their asylum petitions.

This is Ximena in the shelter.

The United Nations estimates there are over 82 million people in the world who have fled their homes, of whom 26 million are refugees, half of those under the age of eighteen. That means one in every ninety-five people on earth has fled their home as a result of conflict or persecution.

Imagine, if you can, being a refugee, anywhere in the world. You are fleeing from a place which doesn’t want you, and where people are possibly threatening to imprison or kill you, to another place that also does not want you and may send you back, and almost no one will support you en route. Men, women and children are helpless, easy prey for unscrupulous smugglers and criminal gangs. If you disappear, no one will find you, particularly if you have been eaten.

Migrant kidnappings happen all the time. Mexican authorities at the beginning of September 2021 reported a total of 697 migrants kidnapped and rescued in just 10 days. These are not statistics. They are people like David and Ximena, who may be robbed, kidnapped, beaten, killed, forced into cannibalism, and even eaten themselves, as the world ignores them. In a world where we capture, kill and eat some 350 million animals every hour of every day, is it really surprising that we sometimes do the same to members of our own species?

It made me think of the last line of the film Cannibal Holocaust:

“He is pure evil” – the Jeffrey Dahmer interviews

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal documentaries14 Comments

Serial killers and/or cannibals don’t usually give interviews, probably at the insistence of their legal counsel, but after his arrest, and sentenced to 937 years behind bars, Jeffrey Dahmer was willing, even keen, to tell his story to whoever would listen.

Dahmer was arrested in 1991 after a killing spree that started in 1978 and took the lives of seventeen young men and boys. Serial killers are not so rare, particularly in the US, that they get worldwide attention, but Dahmer also readily admitted to eating parts of some of his victims, and the police found body parts in his fridge, apparently ready for the next meal. He quickly became known as “The Milwaukee Cannibal”. The media frenzy was awesome to behold.

In 1993, Dahmer sat down with Nancy Glass for an interview that was aired on Bill O’Reilly’s show Inside Edition. The segment (link below) was called

“INSIDE THE MIND OF JEFFREY DAHMER: SERIAL KILLER’S CHILLING JAILHOUSE INTERVIEW”.

O’Reilly introduced the segment by saying

“He is pure evil, but you’d never know it by looking at him.”

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The tools of true crime interviews are graphics, eerie music and a suitably horrified interviewer. This segment had all three, in spades.

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Dahmer, though, was calm and rational, answering each question fully and, apparently, as honestly as he could. He spoke of his “sexual fantasies of control, power, complete dominance” which became reality, and stated

“It’s a process, it doesn’t happen overnight. When you depersonalise another person and view them as just an object, an object for pleasure instead of a living, breathing human being, it seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn’t do.”

The cannibalism was “a way of making me feel that they were a part of me”.

Nancy Glass concluded that

“Jeffrey Dahmer is intelligent and articulate. That is what makes him so frightening.”

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In February 1994, nine months before Dahmer was bashed to death in prison, Stone Phillips recorded an interview with Jeffrey and Lionel Dahmer (his Dad) who had just published a book on his side of the story. Phillips included excerpts from other interviews with Jeffrey’s father and, separately, his mother. This was shown on DATELINE, and later put together with some of the unaired footage into a TV movie (link below) called

“CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL KILLER”

Dahmer’s father spoke of Jeffrey’s trauma when he was two or three and suffered a double hernia, which can make the penis seem to disappear into the body.

“You know, the old Freudian castration complex might come to bear here… he was concerned about losing his penis. He asked his mother if he had lost it, if it had been cut off”

Which is what Jeffrey did to some of his victims later, so there just might be something to that.

Lionel added that, when he first saw Jeffrey after the arrest,

“He just looked very innocuous. He looked like an average person who couldn’t possibly do the things that he did”

Dahmer made several interesting admissions to Phillips

  • It was not about race (even though ten of his victims were African American): he said that race didn’t matter – his first two victims were white, the third was American Indian, the fourth and fifth were Hispanic. It was just their looks he was after.
  • The cannibalism “made me feel like they were a permanent part of me”. Also, he was curious as to what it would be like to eat human flesh.
  • He didn’t enjoy the killing. What he wanted was to create “living zombies” by drilling holes in their heads and pouring in muriatic acid or hot water, but it never worked.
  • Why? “I just wanted to have the person under my complete control, not having to consider their wishes, being able to keep them there as long as I wanted”.
  • He became a Christian in jail, because of material sent by his Dad, which (he said) proved that evolution was “a complete lie” which “cheapens life”.

Dahmer refused to blame his parents or education or society for his actions, but was happy to blame his formerly secular viewpoint:

“…if a person doesn’t think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour, to keep it within acceptable ranges?”

Dostoevsky felt the same way in Brothers Karamazov:

“…if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful even cannibalism.”

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JEFFREY DAHMER: MIND OF A MONSTER

A new documentary was released on May 25, 2020. This is not specifically an interview with Dahmer, although it uses the  transcripts of the lengthy (66 hours) of police interrogations, as well as speaking to cops, journalists, neighbours, his father and even a couple of victims who escaped. 

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only.

Most importantly, Dahmer was invisible to the society he lived in. Look at the descriptions of him above:

  • intelligent and articulate
  • polite and unnervingly normal
  • innocuous

Dahmer was not the terrifying ‘monster’ or ‘savage’ from beyond the borders of the polis. He looked and sounded just like one of us. His fantasies of control, power, complete dominance and his curiosity and appetite are driving forces of modern, capitalist societies. As, of course, is objectification of people and other animals for pleasure.

Pogo's Warning to Business: 'We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us ...
“I’m just gonna make you my zombie”: DAHMER: MONSTER – The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Murphy and Brennan, Netflix, 2022)

Cannibalism 2020: the year so far

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibalsLeave a comment

Look, 2020 hasn’t been dull, you gotta admit. So far this year, we’ve had fire, flood, famine and pestilence (pandemic variety) and it’s not even the solstice yet.

What Does 2020 Have in Store for the Life Sciences? | BioSpace

In reports of cannibalism, it’s all happening in the countries starting with the letter U; the United States and Ukraine are neck and neck. The US could have pulled ahead, but the guy who allegedly hung his Grindr date upside down, cut off his testicles and ate them, did it on Christmas eve, so technically that’s still 2019 (a pretty big year for cannibal stories – six cases documented).

2020: USA

In Brooklyn NY on April 15, Khaled Ahmad ran up to some cops from the 68th Precinct who were on meal break in a bagel shop about 4:30 a.m., and told them he had killed his 57-year-old father. The victim had been gutted and “the victim’s innards were removed but not found, leading some investigators to believe Ahmad may have eaten them”. Ahmad “had a history of mental illness” while the unfortunate father was a retired grocer, who had just sold his store in Rockaway Beach, Queens.

On the other side of the country, police were called to a home in Richmond, California, where they found Dwayne Wallick, a “suspected” cannibal, “digging into his grandmother’s dead body and trying to eat her remains”. The murder involved both a knife and an ice pick. “Police believe unspecified drugs may have played a role in the crime”. No shit, Sherlock.

PICTURED: California 'cannibal', 37, 'found eating his 90-year-old ...

2020: Ukraine

A 41-year-old Ukrainian admitted that he killed his girlfriend, then fried and ate her legs after the two had a drinking session at home on April 13. He hid the rest of her body in the reeds of a nearby river, where it was found the next day by a father taking his two children for a stroll.

Officers ambushed Oleksandr in his home and found him frying flesh from his girlfriend’s leg before eating it. Local reports said the police felt sick after witnessing the horrific scene. According to Ukrainian media, Oleksandr cooked his girlfriend’s legs and ate them after he reportedly ‘got hungry’.

Also in Ukraine, Maxim and Yaroslav Kostyukov, 42 and 21, were convicted of killing Yevgeny ‘Zhenya’ Petrov, 45, in Ukraine. The three had been drinking together when a row developed over the conflict between Kiev’s army and pro-Moscow rebels in the eastern part of the country.

A court heard how the son had held Petrov from behind while the father stabbed him twice in the chest. Yaroslav Kostyukov then beheaded the victim and cut flesh from the corpse as well as his heart, kidneys, liver and other internal organs. He confessed to cooking the “meat” which was served when the father and son hosted a homeless man called Yura.

Prosecutor Oksana Karnaukh said: “There is no such crime as cannibalism listed in the Criminal Code of Ukraine.” The pair were, however, charged them with murder and aggravating circumstances committed by a group of persons, and illegal possession of arms. And, presumably, legs.

Father and son cannibals who beheaded an ex-cop and cooked his ...

 

Here’s the thing – would you pick any of these guys as cannibals? They don’t have a single eye in the middle of their forehead like the cyclops or dog-faces like the cyanocephali. They don’t have bones through their noses like the mythical cannibals of the colonial stories. In fact, since Jack the Ripper, cannibals have looked “normal” – indistinguishable from anyone else. Cannibalism has come home, and the cannibal could be living next door.

This one is NOT cannibalism

“The US has been processing dead bodies from Covid-19 diseases into hamburgers”

That was a post on the now defunct WeChat conspiracy theory site Zhidao Xuegong (it translates as “the Scholar Forum for Ultimate Truth”) in May 2020. Another post claimed that Covid-19 may have killed a million people in the US, with the corpses:

“very likely being processed into frozen meat, fake beef or pork, or processed into cooked meat as hamburgers and hot dogs. Cannibalism has existed in the US before … and only a few dozen years ago, Americans ate blacks, Indians and Chinese.”

The site reportedly had millions of followers on WeChat, which is the Chinese equivalent to Facebook, before the Chinese government shut them down. Apparently China did not want to make relations with the US any worse than they already were.  The site was closed for “fabricating facts, stoking xenophobia and misleading the public” which apparently is illegal in some parts of the world (and very popular in others).

Now THAT would have supplied some interesting stats for my 2020 cannibalism tally.