Robert Berdella ran a curio shop, a booth named after himself, in the Old Westport Flea Market in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived in a house in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Neighbors thought of him as a community leader. In April 1988 a 22-year-old man escaped from that house by jumping from a second-story window and told police he had been held captive and sexually abused for days. Inside, officers found photographs of men being tortured, bondage equipment and a skull, and in the back yard they dug up a human head.
Berdella was 39. Within the year he pleaded guilty in Jackson County Circuit Court to killing six young men between 1984 and 1987, two of the murders in the first degree, and to forcible sodomy and felonious restraint against the man who escaped. Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for his confessions. He was serving life without parole when he died in October 1992, at 43, after suffering chest pains in his prison cell.
His booth was in the Old Westport Flea Market, a building that also held other small shops and a bar and grill. The Associated Press, describing it in April 1988, said it sold replicas of skulls, dragon and demon faces, and ornaments from other countries. His calling cards carried the words "poison in my head."
He also traded in antiques and art. When his collection was auctioned in November 1988 to pay for his defense, the Deseret News reported that more than 2,000 objects were offered over two days, among them Roman glass, terra cotta figures, African and Tibetan ceremonial masks, ancient Egyptian jewelry and carvings from New Guinea. "There has never been an auction of this type and dimension in the Midwest," the appraiser, R. Bond Blackman, said.
The house was a three-story nineteenth-century building in Hyde Park, Reuters reported in 1992. The Pitch later described it as white and cluttered with junk.
Little was reported about Berdella's life before the 1980s.
Six young men died between 1984 and 1987, UPI reported. Little was reported about most of them beyond their names, their families and the dates Berdella gave. Howell was the first and Wallace the third, by The Pitch's account; the full order of the other deaths was not reported.
Jerry Howell was the first. His parents were Paul and Betty Howell. Wire reports in 1988 gave his name as Gerald Howell or Gerald D. Howell. He disappeared in 1984, and at his plea hearing Berdella gave the date of his death as July 6, 1984. Howell's family told reporters in 1988 that Berdella had been among the last people to see him. His parents did not know he was dead, the Missouri Court of Appeals later recorded, until Berdella testified at his plea hearing on December 19, 1988, that he had killed him.
Robert Allen Sheldon was 23, according to United Press International, a man from California who had apparently once lived in the house. His parents were Robert James Sheldon and Connie Sheldon. Berdella gave the date of his death as April 14, 1985.
Mark Wallace was the third of the known victims, The Pitch reported in 2004. His sister told the documentary maker Ben Meade that her brother had worked for a lawn service and mowed Berdella's lawn. A niece of Wallace wrote to The Pitch that her mother had been coping with his death for more than a decade and suffered from post-traumatic stress.
Walter James Ferris died, by the date Berdella gave, on September 27, 1985. He left a wife, Bonnie Ferris, and a daughter, and his mother was Harriet Sanders. His family, like Howell's, told reporters in 1988 that Berdella was among the last people to see him.
Todd Lee Stoops was the son of Betty Ann Haste. He had been a friend of Jerry Howell. The Pitch reported in 2004, drawing on The Kansas City Times, that after Howell disappeared in 1984 Stoops told police he suspected Berdella and believed Howell had been drugged.
Larry W. Pearson was 20 and from Wichita, Kansas, when the Deseret News reported his case in 1988.
Berdella's own accounts are the main source for what happened in the house. What the courts recorded shows the nature of the crimes.
In a 1991 insurance case, the Missouri Court of Appeals summarized the record on three of the men, Ferris, Howell and Stoops. They were held captive and physically and sexually abused. Berdella injected them with drugs against their will and kept them gagged. The charges said Ferris and Howell were killed by being injected with substances and gagged; Stoops died of bleeding and infection from an injury Berdella inflicted during a sexual assault. Death came, the court said, by "either drug injection, asphyxiation from being gagged, bleeding or infection." Berdella's own testimony was that he meant to hold the men captive for his own sexual purposes, not to kill them.
Berdella dismembered the bodies and put them out with the household trash, according to the Kansas City Public Library's catalogue of its clipping file on the case. The bodies of Jerry Howell and Walter James Ferris had never been found when he pleaded guilty, UPI reported. Remains found at the house in 1988 were identified as Robert Sheldon's and, by The Pitch's account, Larry Pearson's.
The case came to light on a Saturday early in April 1988, on Easter weekend. Kansas City was full of visitors for the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament at Kemper Arena, The Pitch recalled in 2004.
A 22-year-old man jumped from a second-story window of Berdella's house. He went to neighbors for help, the Associated Press reported. He told police he had been held captive and sexually abused in the house. Officials told the AP he had been held for five days; another wire item printed that week said four. He was taken to a hospital, where he was reported in stable condition.
Not every officer believed him at first. Troy Cole, then a sergeant in the homicide unit, later admitted that his first impression of the beaten young man was that he had been in a lovers' quarrel, The Pitch reported. Cole went on to co-write a book about the case.
Police searched the house over that weekend and returned later in the week with a new search warrant. Behind a cordon, officers used shovels and a backhoe to dig up the back yard, where they had found a severed human head. Two human skulls were found inside the house. One appeared to be very old and was discarded as evidence.
Inside the house police found torture and bondage devices and photographs. Sergeant Cole said the pictures had been taken inside the house and that they showed people, among them the man who escaped, being tortured. By the AP's count, 57 photographs showed that young man, and about 200 more showed similar abuse of other young men. By early May, UPI reported, police had found more than 200 photographs, picturing 22 men. Skulls and bone fragments were found at the house.
Berdella was charged at first with eight felonies against the man who escaped. The AP, in a report printed on April 7, listed seven counts of forcible sodomy, one count of felonious restraint and one count of first-degree assault. He was held on 750,000 dollars bail. He hired a lawyer, Sharlie Pender, that April to look after his personal finances while he was in jail awaiting trial, the Supreme Court of Missouri later recorded.
From the start, detectives asked whether Berdella was linked to unsolved disappearances. Rick Pilgrim, a homicide detective, told the AP that police were looking into whether he might be connected to unsolved missing-person cases. Within days police were examining 11 disappearances of young men. Two families, those of Jerry Howell and Walter James Ferris, said Berdella had been among the last people to see their sons. Sergeant Jon Perry led the work of comparing nine other missing-person cases with the evidence from the house.
The first identification came in May 1988. A Jackson County prosecutor said on May 10 that the skull found in the house was that of Robert A. Sheldon, 23, identified through hospital X-rays and dental records. The time of his death was not known. Sheldon was one of the 22 men in the photographs. The second skull, found buried in the yard, had not yet been identified, and no murder charge had yet been filed. Police had dug up much of the yard.
The Pitch reported in 2004 that Larry Pearson's head was dug up in 1988. How it was identified was not reported.
In March 1989 Karen Blakeman, who covered the courts for The Kansas City Times, reported that the warning signs had been there. "Although he was the subject of both drug and missing persons investigations, Robert A. Berdella was able to manipulate Kansas City's criminal justice system," she wrote, as The Pitch quoted her in 2004.
Her reporting, as The Pitch summarized it, was that Todd Stoops had told police in 1984 that he suspected Berdella in Jerry Howell's disappearance. It also found that a municipal judge, Marcia Walsh, had sent Stoops to Berdella for drug counseling, and that less than a week later Berdella was himself arrested for trying to sell marijuana to an undercover officer. Stoops later died in Berdella's house.
The first murder case was for Larry Pearson. On August 3, 1988, Berdella pleaded guilty in Jackson County Circuit Court to first-degree murder in Pearson's death. He was sentenced to life without parole. By the time his collection was auctioned in November 1988, he had also pleaded guilty to the offenses against the man who escaped, the Deseret News reported, and he was charged in the death of Robert Sheldon. The Supreme Court of Missouri later described his convictions as first-degree murder, forcible sodomy and felonious restraint.
The rest of the case was settled by agreement. After meetings in jail with public defenders, prosecutors and police detectives, Berdella was expected to plead guilty to five more charges at a Jackson County Circuit Court hearing on Monday, December 19, 1988, UPI reported that day. Prosecutors had reportedly agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for his confessions and information. The deaths of Gerald Howell and Walter James Ferris, whose bodies had never been found and whose families had linked him to their disappearances, were expected to be among the charges.
At that hearing he pleaded guilty and testified to the killings. The court records of the later civil cases set out what he admitted. He pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree for the death of Robert Allen Sheldon. He pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree for the deaths of Jerry Howell, James Ferris and Todd Stoops, under the section of the Missouri statute that covers a death caused in the course of another felony; the felony charged was felonious restraint. At the hearing he gave the dates of death as July 6, 1984, for Howell; April 14, 1985, for Sheldon; and September 27, 1985, for Ferris. He repeated those dates later in written answers and an affidavit.
Wire reports since then have described him as having pleaded guilty to killing six men. Mark Wallace's death was the sixth; the degree of murder in that plea was not reported.
The prosecutor at the time was Albert Riederer, the Jackson County prosecutor, who was in a hard reelection campaign against Carol Coe when the case broke. Riederer had said publicly that he would love to see Berdella executed. He later told the filmmaker Ben Meade that he spared Berdella's life because he assumed Berdella would do something in prison that would get him killed, The Pitch reported.
Berdella's property was used to pay for his defense and, later, to answer the claims of victims' families. Over two days in November 1988 his collection of artifacts was auctioned, with dealers and collectors expected from across the country, the Deseret News reported.
On the petition of the man who escaped, who had a civil suit pending against Berdella, a Jackson County court put Berdella's property in the hands of a trustee under a Missouri law on the estates of imprisoned felons. The trustee was Frank Murphy, the Jackson County public administrator. The Supreme Court of Missouri gave the date of appointment as March 16, 1989; the Missouri Court of Appeals, in a separate case, gave it as March 22, 1989.
The families of four of the men sued Berdella for wrongful death. Paul and Betty Howell filed their suit on May 10, 1989. The parents of Robert Sheldon sued, as did James Ferris's mother, wife and daughter, and Todd Stoops's mother, Betty Ann Haste.
Berdella had a homeowners policy with Economy Fire and Casualty Company, which went to court to establish that it owed nothing, on the ground that the policy excluded injuries he had expected or intended. A trial court agreed, but on December 17, 1991, the Missouri Court of Appeals reversed in part. Berdella's pleas to second-degree murder for Ferris, Howell and Stoops, the court held, did not establish that he had intended to kill them, and the families had not been parties to his criminal cases. Whether he expected or intended the deaths was a question for trial. The families could not recover from the insurer for the injuries inflicted before death, which were plainly intentional. The case was sent back for further proceedings.
Berdella fought the suits from prison. In the Howell case he refused to answer questions at three attempted depositions, in April and June 1990 and March 1991, and at the third he refused to leave his cell. He won summary judgment in the trial court, arguing that the suit had been filed too late. On October 20, 1992, the Missouri Court of Appeals reversed. The Howells had not known their son was dead until Berdella testified at his plea, the court held, and the trial court had abused its discretion by hearing Berdella's motion at all after his refusals. The wrongful death claims were sent back for trial.
The largest award went to Todd Stoops's mother. In a wrongful death case against Berdella, a jury awarded her 5 billion dollars, a verdict that appeared on a 1993 list of the country's ten largest jury awards. UPI, reporting the list, said the award was largely uncollectable because Berdella had died in prison, though his 100,000 dollar homeowners policy might leave the insurer liable for interest on the whole judgment.
Berdella also went to court himself, without a lawyer. In November 1990 he sued Sharlie Pender, the lawyer he had hired in 1988, for malpractice. The trial court dismissed the case on the ground that, with a trustee appointed, he lacked the capacity to sue. Berdella argued that the trustee law had been repealed and was unconstitutional, and he filed several writs against the trial judge. On December 17, 1991, the Supreme Court of Missouri, in an opinion by Judge Benton, held that the law was valid and still in force and affirmed the dismissal. A prisoner who merely disagreed with his trustee's decisions, the court said, had no claim unless he alleged a breach of duty.
His quarrel with the trustee produced a federal case as well. Murphy had imposed limits on Berdella's spending. To get around them, Berdella sent Murphy unstamped letters for other people, to be forwarded. Murphy twice asked the Missouri Department of Corrections to restrict Berdella's mail to him, and the department, reading the letters as a request to receive no mail from Berdella at all, applied its policy of honoring such requests. At Potosi Correctional Center the mail clerk, Thelma Branson, after conferring with the superintendent, Paul Delo, refused to send a letter Berdella addressed to Murphy and warned him in writing that further attempts could lead to discipline.
Berdella sued Delo, Branson and Murphy in federal court on October 17, 1989. On August 4, 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Beam, held that it had no jurisdiction to review the judgment for Murphy and affirmed the judgment for the prison officials, finding no constitutional violation. The court remarked that the mail policy should contain an exception for mail related to court proceedings. The opinion described him as serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole or probation.
Berdella spoke publicly after his conviction. He claimed on television that he had treated his victims no worse than the media had treated him; the writer James Ellroy, whose name was attached to a 2004 documentary on the case, disputed that claim, The Pitch reported.
In 1991 Karen Blakeman interviewed him in prison. At the end of the interview, she said, prison officials confiscated her tapes for review, and later told her they had been destroyed by accident.
The Rev. Roger Coleman had counseled Berdella in his first period of imprisonment. Years later, according to The Pitch, Berdella called him in a panic and said prison officials were withholding his heart medication. He died shortly afterward.
The Associated Press reported from Jefferson City, in a story printed on October 9, 1992, that Berdella had died the previous afternoon of an apparent heart attack. He was 43. Gail Hughes, deputy director of the Missouri Department of Corrections, said he had begun having chest pains in his cell and was taken to the prison infirmary and then to Still Regional Medical Center, where he died. Autopsy results were not expected for a couple of weeks. The autopsy finding itself was not reported; the Kansas City Public Library's catalogue of its case file and The Pitch both record the cause as a heart attack. No official finding other than natural death was reported, and no evidence was reported for the claim, sometimes made, that he was poisoned.
Riederer said he had mixed feelings. "It is never to be enjoyed that someone dies, it is never cause for celebration," he told the AP, adding that, given how Berdella had burst onto the Kansas City scene from April through December 1988, his passing could not go unremarked. Relatives of the victims, the AP reported, said he had finally got what he deserved. Riederer used the same words years later, in the documentary described by The Pitch.
The house stood for several years after his conviction. A millionaire, Delbert Dunmire, bought it. In August 1992 Reuters described it as boarded up and drawing curious visitors, and reported that neighbors wanted it torn down. "It's like a dark cloud over the neighborhood, and everybody would like to see it gone," said Stephanie Smith, a member of the neighborhood association. The house was demolished in 1993, according to the Kansas City Public Library and The Pitch. Dunmire razed it and deeded the empty lot to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, The Pitch reported.
In October 2016 a Facebook post said someone would open a booth at the Westport Flea Market under the same name as Berdella's old shop. Commenters called the plan insulting to the victims' families. The market's owner told KSHB in Kansas City that he believed the post was a hoax and would not allow a booth under that name, and the people behind the post later said they had changed the name.
Tom Jackman, then a police reporter for The Kansas City Star, and Troy Cole, the homicide detective, wrote Rites of Burial, a book on the case. Its cover called Berdella "The butcher of Kansas City, Missouri!"
A documentary directed by Ben Meade, named after Berdella's shop and presented under James Ellroy's name, closed the Kansas International Film Festival on September 16, 2004. It mixed interviews with re-creations. The man who escaped, who had since changed his name and moved to southern Missouri, agreed for a fee to tell his story on camera, The Pitch reported. Mark Wallace's family objected to the film. A niece wrote to The Pitch that Meade had turned the crimes into entertainment, and that her mother had asked him not to make a tragedy worse. A dramatized film about him was reviewed by The Pitch in 2009.
Proven by final judgment, on guilty pleas: the first-degree murders of Larry Pearson and Robert Sheldon; the second-degree murders of Jerry Howell, James Ferris and Todd Stoops; forcible sodomy and felonious restraint of the man who escaped. Reported by wire services as one of the six killings he pleaded guilty to: Mark Wallace, with the degree not reported.
Never charged: in 1988 police examined about 11 disappearances of young men, and the photographs showed 22 men. The reports do not describe any killing beyond the six being charged or attributed to him, and his pleas covered six deaths.
Details that vary between sources: how long the man who escaped was held (five days, according to officials quoted by the AP; four days in another wire item printed the same week); the number of photographs (about 200 more than the 57 of the man who escaped, by the AP's count, and more than 200 picturing 22 men, by UPI's); the date the trustee was appointed (March 16 or March 22, 1989); and the year in which Berdella confessed, which a 1992 Reuters report wrongly gave as 1986. The cause of his death is reported as a heart attack, but no autopsy finding was reported. No evidence was reported for a claim that he was poisoned.
1984: Jerry Howell disappears; Berdella later gives July 6, 1984, as the date of his death. Todd Stoops tells police he suspects Berdella.
April 14, 1985: the date Berdella gave for the death of Robert Sheldon.
Mark Wallace, the third known victim, is killed (date not reported).
September 27, 1985: the date Berdella gave for the death of Walter James Ferris.
1984 to 1987: six young men in all die, among them Todd Stoops and Larry Pearson, 20, of Wichita (UPI; Deseret News).
Easter weekend, early April 1988: a 22-year-old man escapes through a second-story window; Berdella is arrested and charged with sodomy, assault and felonious restraint.
April 1988: police dig up the yard, find a head and skulls, and compare 11 disappearances; Berdella hires Sharlie Pender to manage his finances.
May 10, 1988: the skull in the house is identified as Robert Sheldon's.
August 3, 1988: Berdella pleads guilty to the first-degree murder of Larry Pearson; life without parole.
By November 1988: pleads guilty to the offenses against the man who escaped; his collection is auctioned.
December 19, 1988: pleads guilty to the first-degree murder of Robert Sheldon and to second-degree murder for Jerry Howell, James Ferris and Todd Stoops; Wallace's death is among the six he admits.
March 1989: Frank Murphy is appointed trustee of his estate; Karen Blakeman's report in The Kansas City Times.
May 10, 1989: the Howells file a wrongful death suit.
October 17, 1989: Berdella sues prison officials and his trustee in federal court.
November 1990: sues Sharlie Pender for malpractice.
1991: prison interview with Karen Blakeman; her tapes are later destroyed.
December 17, 1991: the Supreme Court of Missouri rules against him in Berdella v. Pender; the Court of Appeals rules on insurance coverage in Economy Fire and Casualty Co. v. Haste.
August 4, 1992: the Eighth Circuit rules against him in Berdella v. Delo.
August 1992: neighbors ask for the house to be torn down.
October 1992: Berdella dies after chest pains in his cell (AP, October 9, 1992).
October 20, 1992: the Court of Appeals revives the Howells' suit in Howell v. Murphy.
1993: the house is demolished; a 5 billion dollar wrongful death award to Todd Stoops's mother appears on the year's list of the largest jury awards.
September 16, 2004: Ben Meade's documentary on the case premieres in Kansas City.
October 2016: a proposal to reopen a booth under his shop's name is called a hoax.