30 Classically Creepy Cannibal Killers
By Jim Goad
11. ‘MR. GAY UK’ MURDERED HIS BOYFRIEND AND COOKED HIS FLESH
Anthony Morley won the first-ever “Mr Gay UK” contest in 1993. Fiftheen years later, he invited another former Mr Gay UK contestant to his flat, where he stabbed him to death after they watched Brokeback Mountain together. He then sliced some flesh from his thigh and seasoned it in herbs and olive oil before frying and eating it.
12. HE MADE MEAT PIES FROM HIS VICTIMS’ FLESH AND SOLD THEM ON THE STREETS
Working in tandem with his wife and mistress, Jorge Beltrao Negromonte of northern Brazil formed a fanatical religious sect they called The Cartel whose purpose was to rid the world of bad souls by practicing “population control.” He was convicted in 2013 of murdering three young women, one of whom he slaughtered in front of her 18-month old daughter before feeding the infant pieces of her mom for lunch. Negromonte and his accomplices sautéed their victims’ flesh with onions and vegetables and made them into meat pies, which they sometimes ate and sometimes sold on the streets to unsuspecting customers. Brazen beyond all comprehension, the cultists even sold a book describing how they murdered, skinned, and ate one of their victims. After being sentenced to 23 years in prison, Negromonte would helpfully explain:
The women would prepare the meat. I can’t remember if we ever fried it like a steak. I did buy a mincing machine for Bruna, but I’m not sure if she used it….The meat would last for three or four days. We would have it for lunch and dinner until it was all gone….If I were let out as I am today, I could kill another one. Human meat, for me, is no different to beef.
13. SHE MURDERED WOMEN AND BAKED THEM INTO SWEET BUNS
An Italian serial killer who operated as World War II began raging, Leonarda Cianculli murdered three women. She would offer them drugged wine, then murder them with an axe and ritually dismember them. She made one of their corpses into soap and the other two into food. As she explained in her autobiography An Embittered Soul’s Confessions:
As for the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk and eggs, as well as a bit of margarine, kneading all the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit….
14. A SMALL HAND WAS COOKING IN A BOILING PAN OF WATER WHEN HE WAS ARRESTED
A borderline retarded bedwetting serial killer from Germany in the 1930s, Joachim Kroll confessed to fourteen murders, all but one of his victims being young girls. His typical MO was to surprise a victim, strangle her to death, strip her naked, rape her corpse, dismember her, and take pieces of her body home to eat. A neighbor in his apartment building became alarmed one day after Kroll told him not to use his toilet “because it is blocked up with guts.” When the neighbor notified police, they searched Kroll’s apartment and found parts of a chopped-up girl in his refrigerator, human entrails clogging a waste pipe, and a tiny hand boiling in a pan on his stove. Kroll would explain that young children had the best-tasting meat and that he ate them in order to save money on his food bills.
15. ‘ONCE I PUT THE PARTS THROUGH A MEAT GRINDER AND MADE DUMPLINGS’
Known as “Metal Fang” due to the fact that he had his real teeth replaced with metal ones, Kazakh serial killer Nikolai Dzhumagaliev was convicted of murdering seven people in 1979-1980. He would serve his victims’ flesh to friends at dinner parties, telling them they were eating “long pig.” Police were alerted after he murdered and started dismembering a party guest in another room during a house party. Describing his first murder, he told detectives:
I warmed my hands on the woman’s body and stripped her naked. I cut the corpse’s breast into strips, removed the ovaries, separated the pelvis and hips; I then folded these pieces into a backpack and carried them home. I melted the fat to fry with, and some parts I pickled. Once I put the parts through a meat grinder and made dumplings….The meat of this woman took me a month to eat.
16. HE SAID THAT EATING PEOPLE WAS LIKE EATING PEARS
Known in Venezuela as El Comegente (“People Eater”), a homeless man named Dorángel Vargas confessed to slaughtering and consuming at least ten men in the late 1990s. A man of high ethical standards, he refused to eat women and children. During an interrogation after his arrest, he blithely claimed that eating people was as simple and easy as eating pears.
17. HE COOKED A DEAD MAN’S BRAINS IN A FRYING PAN
After beating a woman to death with a hammer in 1993, Englishman Peter Bryan was judged to be insane and thus sent to a mental hospital rather than prison. After being suspected of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl near the hospital, he was transferred to an open psychiatric ward for his own safety, a move which seems fairly insane. He walked out of that ward one day in 2004 and murdered his friend Brian Cherry. Responding to neighbors’ reports of hearing screams from Cherry’s flat, police found Bryan cooking Cherry’s brain in a frying pan next to a tub of butter. Hair, scalp, and brain tissue were found on a nearby plate, along with a knife and fork. Bryan was sent to another mental hospital, where he beat a 60-year-old man to death. He said that if hospital workers hadn’t interrupted him, he would have eaten that man, too. When asked why he liked to eat his victims, Bryan nonchalantly explained, “I want their souls.”
18. HE DECAPITATED A MAN AND BEGAN EATING HIM ON A GREYHOUND BUS
When one boards a Greyhound bus headed for any destination, one must expect that some of the passengers might be unwashed, unruly, and even a tad smelly. One doesn’t someone to decapitate a fellow passenger and then begin eating him. But this is exactly what happened on March 5, 2009 on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba traveling the Trans Canada Highway. Vincent Li approached a sleeping Tim McLean and plunged a large knife into his neck and chest. The driver pulled to the roadside and exited the bus along with all the other passengers as Li locked the doors and displayed McLean’s severed head. During a police standoff, Li began eating parts of his victim’s body. Upon his arrest, police found McLean’s tongue, nose, and ear in Li’s pockets. The week after this gruesome attack, Greyhound Canada pulled a series of ads that included the line, “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of bus rage.”
19. FOR HIM, CANNIBALISM WAS ‘PART OF THE MAGIC’ OF KILLING
Describing himself on his MySpace profile as “Hatred Bound Tightly in Flesh,” Englishman Stephen Shaun Griffiths was an aficionado of high-tech archery, which eventually earned him the moniker “The Crossbow Cannibal.” He was found guilty of killing and eating three prostitutes in 2010. He filmed the murders and his subsequent acts of flesh-eating at his home, which he called “The Slaughterhouse.” A psychology grad, he told detectives that eating the dead prostitutes’ flesh was “part of the magic” of killing them.
20. BUCK-ASS NAKED, HE ATE A HOMELESS MAN’S FACE
Although it was originally thought that he was high on bath salts, police only found traces of cannabis in the bloodstream of Rudy Eugene, who gained national infamy in 2012 for assaulting a homeless man under a bridge in Miami. The entire 18-minute attack was filmed by a security camera at the Miami Herald building. Eugene had abandoned his car, stripped naked, accused 65-year-old homeless man Ronald Poppo of stealing his Bible, beat him unconscious, and proceeded to start eating his face. When Poppo was admitted to the hospital, 75-80% of his face was missing and one eye had been gouged out. During a standoff with police, Eugene allegedly only growled at them and was eventually shot to death. He became known as the “Causeway Cannibal” and the “Miami Zombie.”