30 Classically Creepy Cannibal Killers
By Jim Goad
21. ‘WHEN THEY OPENED THE DOOR HE WAS EATING HER FACE’
When Welsh police responded to a call about suspicious activity in a hotel room in 2014, they opened the door to the sight of recently released violent criminal Matthew Williams eating a dead woman’s face. They Tasered him, which eventually led to his death. A former female associate of Williams described him as an “animal”:
Security said they told him no girls in his room and he didn’t answer; when they opened his door he was eating her face.
22. A TASTE FOR RAW LIVER
Like most murderers, South Korean serial killer Yoo Young-chul was motivated by an implacable sense that he was doing the right thing. Claiming that “Women shouldn’t be sluts, and the rich should know what they’ve done,” he murdered 21 women and rich people between 2003 and 2004, beating most of them to death with a hammer. He told investigators that he ate some of their livers raw.
23. HE DRANK LITTLE GIRLS’ BLOOD AND TAUNTED THEIR PARENTS BY MAIL
Known in Japan as “The Little Girl Murderer,” Tsutomu Miyazaki’s rage was allegedly fueled by the fact that nature had saddled him with a micropenis. He developed a taste for child porn in the early 1980s. In 1988 and 1989, he murdered four girls between the ages of four and seven, drinking their blood, sexually defiling their corpses, and eating part of one victim’s hand.
Like Albert Fish, he had a sick tendency to taunt his victims’ parents. He sent the charred remains of a little girl named Mari to her parents in a box along with a postcard reading: “Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove.” To the parents of another victim, he sent a postcard using words cut out of magazines: “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.” He would also call victims’ parents via phone but remain silent when they answered. In court he blamed his actions on a cartoon character named “Rat Man.” He was hanged in 2008.
24. ‘THE HUMAN BODY TASTE WAS VERY SIMILAR TO PORK’
A morbidly obese Baltimore trailer park resident, Joe “The Cannibal” Metheny admitted to eight murders starting in 1976. He would dismember his victims and save their flesh for consumption. He also mixed their flesh with beef and pork and sold it to unsuspecting customers. At trial he told the court:
I cut the meat up and put it in some Tupperware bowls then put it in a freezer….I opened up a little open-pit beef stand. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches. They were very good….The human body taste was very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.
25. HE ATE HIS MOTHER ‘BECAUSE HE WAS HUNGRY’
An unemployed Russian man named Sergey Gavrilov killed his 55-year-old mother in January 2009 by smashing her on the head with a brick, then used flesh from her legs to make soup and pasta dishes for weeks. “I did not like the flesh,” he complained to detectives. “It was too fatty.” But a judge gave Gavrilov a reduced prison sentence due to his economic indigence and “because he was hungry.”
26. HE ALLEGEDLY COMMITTED A MURDER WHILE WEARING A ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN’ HAT
On his YouTube channel, 19-year-old Floridian Austin Harrouff wrote, “I’ve got a psycho side and a normal side. I’ve lost my mind help me find it.”
After allegedly stabbing a couple to death this summer while wearing a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” cap, Harrouff was found in a driveway by police, biting into the head of one victim. He was subdued by a Taser and subsequently went into an eleven-day coma. He awaits trial for murder.
27. TWO BROTHERS WHO MADE CURRY OUT OF HUMAN CORPSES
After serving a paltry two years in jail when police discovered they’d dug up and eaten more than 100 corpses from a local graveyard, Pakistani brothers Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali were arrested again in 2014 after a boy’s severed head was found in one of their homes. Police found that they were making curry from a toddler’s corpse.
28. TWO BROTHERS WHO ATE THEIR OTHER BROTHER
In 2009, two Russian brothers identified only as Timur and Marat G. pleaded guilty to killing and eating their older brother, who’d been released after a ten-year-prison sentence. One of the brothers explained to police that they ate his remains to hide evidence of his murder:
Yes, we’ve decided to eat him. I did not want to return behind the bars, so we have cut off his head and buried it and the body have cut in parts and kept in a refrigerator. We have been cooking and eating his meat for six months.
29. THEY ATE FEMALE BREASTS AS PART OF A SATANIC RITUAL
A four-man satanic cult variously known as the “Ripper Crew” and the “Chicago Rippers” were suspected in the disappearances of at least 18 women from 1981 to 1982. After murdering their victims, they’d bring the corpses back to cult leader Robin Gecht’s apartment, which he referred to as a “satanic chapel.” One of Gecht’s accomplices described how they would sever the women’s breasts with a wire garrote and partially eat them as a sort of sacramental ritual. Gecht would then masturbate onto the breasts before placing them in a box. The accomplice said he once saw fifteen breasts in that box.
30. POLICE FOUND HUGE JARS OF HUMAN FLESH IN CURING SALTS
German serial killer Karl Denke was arrested in 1924 after an axe attack on a man in his house. Police found a notebook wherein Denke detailed murdering and eating 42 victims between 1914 and 1918. He allegedly sold some of their flesh at market, fobbing it off as pork. A search of Denke’s residence uncovered human flesh being cured with salt in huge jars. Denke hanged himself to death in his jail cell.