Robert Andrew Berdella was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, on January 31, 1949. His father died suddenly when he was sixteen and he resented his mother's remarriage. He enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1967, dropped out inside two years, and stayed in the city. He trained as a cook, taught culinary classes, and ran a stall and then a shop called Bob's Bizarre Bazaar in the Westport district, selling primitive art, skulls, curios and occult oddments. He was a founding member of his neighbourhood crime watch.
Between July 1984 and 1987 he killed six men: Jerry Howell, Robert Sheldon, Mark Wallace, Walter Ferris, Todd Stoops and Larry Pearson. They were men on the edge of things, several of them sex workers or drug users, some of whom he had known and helped. He drugged them, restrained them on a bed in an upstairs room, and kept them alive for days or weeks, injecting drain cleaner and other substances, applying electric shocks, and photographing what he did. He kept a typed log recording each man's condition hour by hour, in the manner of clinical notes. When they died he dismembered the bodies in the basement, put the pieces out in bin bags for the city collection, and kept the skulls. The Kansas City press called him the Butcher of Kansas City.
He was stopped by an escape. On the morning of April 2, 1988, Chris Bryson, who had been held for several days, worked a hand free while Berdella was at the shop and got out of a second-floor window wearing nothing but a dog collar. He flagged down a passing car. Police searched 4315 Charlotte Street and found two human skulls, more than three hundred Polaroids, and the log.
He pleaded guilty in December 1988 to the first degree murder of Larry Pearson, and in August 1989 to five further counts of first degree murder, in exchange for the state not seeking death. He was sentenced to life without parole. As part of the agreement he gave a long account of each killing, which is the source of most of what is known.
He died of a heart attack at the Missouri State Penitentiary on October 8, 1992, aged forty-three, having complained the day before that he had not been given his heart medication. The house on Charlotte Street was demolished.