At one in the morning on March 29, 1988, Robert Berdella picked up a twenty-two-year-old named Christopher Bryson with the promise of money for sex and brought him home to 4315 Charlotte Street in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City. There he knocked him out with an iron bar and tied him to a bed on the second floor. For four days Bryson was raped, drugged, shocked, photographed, and had ammonia swabbed into his eyes and drain cleaner injected into his throat to weaken his voice, while the man who held him went to work. By the third day he had talked Berdella into tying his hands in front of him instead of above his head, saying the old way cut off his circulation. The next day Berdella left a book of matches within his reach. Bryson burned through the cord, and on April 2, wearing nothing but a dog collar, he jumped from the upstairs window, broke a bone in his foot, and ran toward a meter reader across the street, shouting for him to call the police. The owner of the house was thirty-nine, sold primitive art and curios from a booth called Bob's Bazaar Bizarre at the Westport Flea Market, and had chaired the South Hyde Park Crime Prevention and Neighborhood Association. Six men had died in his house in four years.
Bryson told the four officers who answered that he had been held there for four days, and they could see the welts across his body and his red, swollen eyes. Two of them watched the house while he was driven to Menorah Medical Center. Berdella was arrested that afternoon, refused to let officers inside, and the search warrant came through the same day. In the upstairs bedroom were burned ropes tied to the bedposts, an electrical transformer plugged into the wall with wires running to the bed, and a metal tray of syringes, small bottles of drugs, swabs and eye drops. A human skull was in a second-floor closet. A partly decomposed head was buried in the back yard. There were vertebrae in a hallway scarred by a hacksaw and a knife, human teeth in two envelopes, a chainsaw fouled with blood and flesh, and basement floors and two plastic trash barrels that lit up under luminol. There were 334 Polaroids and 34 snapshot prints of men, many taken while they were being tortured and some after they had died. On a chest of drawers lay a stenographer's pad of typed and handwritten logs recording, in shorthand, what had been done to each man and when. In a closet were Kansas City Star clippings about a missing young man named Jerry Howell, and the wallet and driver's license of another missing man, James Ferris. Police had until 7:30 the next morning to show a judge probable cause, and they did it with Bryson, still in the hospital, picking Berdella out of a photo array.
Robert Andrew Berdella Jr. was born on January 31, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the elder of two sons of Robert Berdella Sr., a die setter for the Ford Motor Company, and Mary Louise Berdella, born Huffman. The family was devoutly Catholic. He had a speech impediment, was so nearsighted that he wore thick glasses from the age of five, and was treated for high blood pressure as a boy. His father, who prized sports, preferred the younger son, Daniel, seven years his junior, and sometimes beat both boys with a leather strap. At school Robert did well and was bullied. On Christmas Day 1965, visiting relatives in Canton, his father had a heart attack at thirty-nine and died; Robert was sixteen. His mother remarried soon after, and he took it as a betrayal. That same year he saw the film of John Fowles's novel The Collector, in which a man abducts a young woman and keeps her in his cellar until she dies, and he later told investigators it had made a lasting impression on him.
He graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School in 1967 and went to the Kansas City Art Institute, meaning to become a college professor. By his second year he was drinking heavily and selling drugs to other students. At nineteen he was arrested for trying to sell methamphetamine to an undercover officer and later pleaded guilty and received a five-year suspended sentence; a month after that arrest he spent five days in jail in Johnson County, Kansas, on marijuana and LSD charges that were dropped. Classmates saw him cut the head off a duck, and he experimented with sedatives on a dog. In 1969, after the school's administrators criticized him for killing and cooking a duck as a work of art, he withdrew, and that September he moved into the house on Charlotte Street.
He built a respectable life around it. He worked as a short-order cook, then as a senior cook in well-known Kansas City restaurants, joined a local chefs' association and helped set up a training program for cooks at a community college. On the side he traded in art and antiques through contacts in Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific Rim, and by 1981 that was his full-time work. In 1982 he took the flea-market booth. Neighbors found him flamboyant, haughty and helpful, and he became chairman of the neighborhood crime-prevention association in the early 1980s and encouraged its watch patrols. He also spent a great deal of time with male prostitutes, addicts, petty criminals and runaways, told neighbors he felt almost like a foster parent to them, and kept them close with loans and rent-free rooms. He had sex with many of them. One former lodger, Freddie Kellogg, later told detectives that Berdella drugged his lodgers, usually by injection, and had sex with them whether they agreed or not, and that the price of Kellogg's room was bringing attractive young men to parties at the house so that Berdella could drug them too.
At the flea market Berdella's neighbor was a merchant named Paul Howell, and he came to know Paul's son Jerry, who had taunted him at first and whom he knew from 1979 on. On July 5, 1984, when Jerry Howell was nineteen, Berdella promised to drive him to a dance contest in Merriam, Kansas. Instead he plied him with alcohol, diazepam and acepromazine, an animal tranquilizer, took him home, injected him and tied him to the bed. Howell was held about twenty-eight hours, drugged, tortured and raped, asking why this was happening and begging to be let go. He died, Berdella said, either choking on his own vomit or because the gag and the drugs together left him unable to breathe. Berdella hung the body in the basement to drain, cut it up the next day with a chainsaw and boning knives, wrapped the pieces in newspaper and trash bags, and set them out for the garbage collectors, who took them to a landfill. When police asked about the missing young man, Berdella said he had dropped him off in Merriam as promised and had not seen him since.
Robert Sheldon was twenty, a former lodger who arrived at the door on April 10, 1985, asking for a room for a short time. He paid his rent. On April 12 Berdella came home, found him drunk, and decided to keep him. Over three days he swabbed drain cleaner into Sheldon's left eye, pushed needles under his fingertips, bound his wrists with piano wire meaning to damage the nerves of his hands, and filled his ears with caulk. On April 15 a workman arrived for a scheduled job on the roof, and Berdella killed Sheldon by pulling a sack over his head and tightening it with a rope. He dismembered him in the third-floor bathtub. He buried the head in the yard, and later dug it up, cleaned the skull, pulled the teeth, and kept it in the closet he called his gallery area. Sheldon's employers at a manufacturing plant would tell detectives he had been a reliable worker who simply stopped coming in that April.
In June 1985 Berdella found Mark Wallace, a slight acquaintance who had once helped him with yard work, sheltering from a thunderstorm in his tool shed. Accounts give Wallace's age as twenty-seven or as twenty. Berdella invited him in, saw how tense and low he was, and offered him an injection of chlorpromazine to calm him down. Wallace accepted, and half an hour later Berdella took him upstairs and tied him to the bed. He was held for almost a day, shocked through alligator clips whenever he began to lose consciousness, and injected with needles in the muscles of his back. He died at seven in the evening on June 23, from what Berdella listed as the drugs, the gag and the lack of oxygen.
On September 26, 1985, a man named James Ferris, twenty-five, telephoned to ask whether he could stay a while; Berdella, who alone called him by his first name, Walter, arranged to meet him at a bar that evening with the plan of keeping him. He fed him a meal laced with crushed tranquilizers, tied him to the bed, and tortured him almost without pause for about twenty-seven hours, with electric shocks from a transformer rated at 7,700 volts and needles in his neck and genitals. Ferris was the first man, Berdella said later, that he set out to torture on purpose. As Ferris became delirious the log recorded him as "Unable to sit up more than 10-15 sec," then "Very delayed breathing," and finally "86," a kitchen term Berdella said meant anything from "Throw it out" to "Stop the project." Ferris's family reported him missing. Berdella was questioned about both Howell and Ferris, gave a statement each time, then refused to say more without a lawyer, and his lawyer threatened harassment complaints unless the questioning and surveillance stopped. Police found nothing more to hold him on.
Todd Stoops was twenty-three, a drug user who sometimes sold sex, and in 1984 he and his wife had twice lived briefly in the house on Charlotte Street. On June 17, 1986, Berdella ran into him by chance at Liberty Memorial Park and offered him lunch at the house, and Stoops, who said he needed thirteen dollars for drugs, agreed to sex as well. Berdella was strongly attracted to him and kept him for two weeks, trying to make him a compliant captive. He ran electric current through Stoops's closed eyes in an attempt to blind him and injected drain cleaner into his larynx to stop him screaming. In the second week Stoops asked for a soft drink and a sandwich, and when Berdella refused he burst into tears. On June 27 Berdella tore the wall of his rectum. Stoops could not keep down the ice cream and soup he was given afterward, could not breathe sitting up, and died on July 1, 1986. A forensic pathologist later testified that the injury had caused the septic shock that killed him.
Larry Wayne Pearson was twenty and came into the shop in the spring of 1987 talking about a boyhood interest in witchcraft and wizardry. He lodged at the house and did chores for his rent, and in June Berdella paid a thirty-dollar bond to get him out of jail. On June 23 the two watched Creepshow 2 and ate lunch, and while they drove around afterward Pearson joked about robbing gay men in Wichita. That settled it. That night Berdella got him drunk, injected him with chlorpromazine, bound his hands above his head to a brick column in the basement, injected drain cleaner into his larynx, and brought down the transformer. He broke bones in Pearson's hands with an iron rod. On the fifth day, satisfied with Pearson's cooperation, he moved him upstairs with a promise of less pain. Pearson survived six weeks, longer than anyone, partly by teaching himself to sleep without moving so as not to provoke the man who held him. On August 5 he bit deep into Berdella's penis and screamed that he could not take any more. Berdella beat him unconscious with a tree limb and suffocated him with a bag and ligature, then drove himself to the hospital, where he filed an assault report against a man he called "Larry Person." He kept Pearson's head in his freezer before burying it in the back yard.
After the arrest the Kansas City police set up a task force of eleven detectives and a sergeant. They learned that Berdella was known among the city's hustlers, some of whom refused him as a client because of his habit of drugging and injecting partners and because he had long been suspected in Howell's disappearance. Ferris's wife picked her husband out of the Polaroids, some taken after his death, and Paul Howell identified a picture of a young man hanging upside down in the basement as his son. Freddie Kellogg named three more of the men in the photographs as Todd Stoops, Robert Sheldon and Larry Pearson. On April 13 Berdella was made to pose nude in the same angles as the Polaroids, some of which showed part of the photographer's body; when he refused to give handwriting samples to match the logs, he was jailed six months for contempt. In late April dental X-rays from the University of Kansas Medical Center identified the skull in the closet as Sheldon's. After police released a photo array of seven unidentified men on April 27, two callers recognized one as a high-school acquaintance, Mark Wallace, whose sister said he had been missing since mid-1985. The head in the yard was identified on May 12 as Pearson's, from dental records kept when he was a ward of the court in Wichita.
He was first charged with felonious restraint, assault and seven counts of forcible sodomy against Bryson and held on $500,000 bail, raised to $750,000 when the murder charge came. On July 22, 1988, a Jackson County grand jury indicted him for the murder of Larry Pearson. At his arraignment on August 3, before Judge Alvin C. Randall, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, to the surprise of both the judge and the prosecutors. Because the state had not yet filed notice that it would seek death, the plea carried an automatic sentence of life without parole. Under oath he said, "I put a plastic bag over his head, and tied it with rope and allowed him to suffocate." On August 24 he pleaded guilty to one count of forcible sodomy against Bryson, for another life term, and to felonious restraint, for seven years, and the remaining counts were dropped. On September 13 he pleaded not guilty to the five other murders, and then bargained: a full confession in exchange for the state not seeking death. He gave it between December 13 and 15, and on December 19, 1988, before Judge Robert Meyers in a hearing closed to the public but open to the victims' families and reporters, he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Robert Sheldon and the second-degree murders of Jerry Howell, Mark Wallace, James Ferris and Todd Stoops, and received five more concurrent life sentences.
The confession is the source of almost everything known about what happened in the house and in what order. He said The Collector had come back to him after the first killing and shaped the ones that followed. Once a man was bound, he said, "They became something other than people to me." He explained the log's shorthand: "CP" for chlorpromazine, "DC" for drain cleaner in the eyes or throat, "EK" or "EKG" for electric shock. He claimed he had given some of the men antibiotics or intravenous nutrients as the torture went on, and he denied rumors that he practiced Satanism or sold body parts at his booth. Apart from the two heads, every body had gone out in trash bags to landfills that were never identified, and none was recovered. More than twenty men in the photographs appeared unconscious or dead, and he had been suspected in two other disappearances, but he insisted the six were the only men he killed.
In November 1988 the contents of his house and business were sold at four auctions to pay his legal fees, drawing telephone bids from across the country and more than $60,000 on the first day. A local businessman bought the house in December, and it was later torn down. Berdella served his sentences at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, with a period in protective custody at the Potosi Correctional Center. He gave a television interview to the Kansas City public station KCPT, wrote letters presenting himself as a sensitive man who had made mistakes and been demonized by the press, and in an interview shortly before his death called his victims "play toys." In 1992 he wrote to the Rev. Roger Coleman, a minister he had met when he first went to prison, that staff were withholding his heart medication. At two in the afternoon on October 8, 1992, he complained of severe chest pain and was taken to the prison infirmary and then by ambulance to a hospital in Columbia, where he was pronounced dead of a heart attack at 3:55 p.m. He was forty-three. Told of the death, Judge Randall said, "Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."
Christopher Bryson testified at a pretrial hearing on June 9, 1988. Afterward he fell into cocaine use and, with the state's help, went through a rehabilitation program, and years later he spoke on camera about the house on Charlotte Street for the 2004 documentary Bazaar Bizarre, based on Tom Jackman and Troy Cole's book Rites of Burial. Of the six men who did not get out, two had been reported missing, and after each report detectives had come to Berdella's door, heard him out, and gone away.