TOP FOUR MODERN CASES OF CANNIBALISM

Cannibalism is still a thing. In Papua, New Guinea, the brains of the deceased are still eaten so that the person does not leave the community entirely.

A hotel restaurant in Nigeria was recently shut down because it was serving human flesh. The menu even included roasted human head. The customers who paid outrageous prices for the meat were not aware that it was human, or so they say.

But I am not going to talk about anonymous cannibals here, nor am I going to talk about Ed Gein, Albert Fish or Jeffrey Dahmer, because you probably know their life stories by heart already. Instead, I have made a selection of lesser known cannibals whose stories I consider to be equally terrifying.

4- Armin Meiwes - The cannibal of Rotenburg

Meiwes just did not want to commit a crime; he also wanted the victim to enjoy it. It is no wonder has he inspired songs (Mein Teil, by Ramnstein; Eat Me, Drink Me, by Marilyn Manson; Eaten, by a Swedish metal band called Bloodbath…) as well as several films, a play directed by Stuart Gordon, and a few TV show episodes (there was even a parody of the events on the English sitcom IT Crowd).

Meiwes was born in Essen, the third child of his mother and the first child of his second husband, whom walked out of his life when he was still very young, forcing him to stay alone (his two older brothers lived in Berlin) with her mother even though they did not share an emotional connection. She gave him a happy childhood for the most part, but did not bother to keep him from feeling lonely. In order to fill the void he invented an imaginary brother: Frank (named after a classmate who was responsible for his sexual awakening). Unlike his mother, Frank actually listened to him. He soon started thinking about bonding with him in pretty unusual ways. Meiwes was only eight years old then and the idea of consuming another human being was already ingrained in his mind, although it was not properly developed until after a few years later; when he was twelve, to be exact. He recalls fantasizing about having the leading boy from the TV show Flipper inside him (and not in the usual way) around that time. He also fantasized about eating his classmates, so they would become part of him and stay with him forever. And that is what ultimately made him look for someone to eat. It was not about the butchering; to him it was all about forming a relationship, about assimilating someone into himself so that he would never leave. His cannibalistic fantasies reached their peak at sixteen. Since then, he never abandoned the thought of consuming someone for a single day. By then he imagined himself raping, drugging and eating his schoolmates.

When he masturbated, he imagined himself cutting open and disembowelling other boys he had seen either on TV or in real life, but always reached his climax before eating them. After doing so he already felt a belonging to the person he had masturbated over. He would also imagine his male classmate’s meat on display when he was at the butcher store (where one of his friends worked). Then he headed home, locked himself in his room and fantasized about it. He had sex with both boys and girls. But he put his cannibalistic fantasies aside when he did so and concentrated on the person he was with.
Meiwes always felt alone, and claims to still feel alone to this day. It is not that he had trouble making friends, because he did not. The problem was he could not talk about his desires and worries with anybody.

He had a love-hate relationship with his mother and was once tempted to push her down the stairs when he was fifteen. However, he never thought of eating her. Meiwes was only interested in consuming males because, with his father and brothers gone, it was a male figure that was missing from his life. He says she thought she could control him, but she could not control his thoughts.

In 1980 Meiwes permanently moved to Wüstefeld (five kilometres away from Rotenburg) with his mother to the huge house that had previously been the family’s vacation retreat.

A year later, nineteen year old Meiwes started a new chapter by joining the Army, but that did not distance him from his mother, since he spent his evenings in Wüstefeld, and would take her along on trips, while the others brought their girlfriends or wives. He acted as a devoted son when in reality he did not want to be one and hated himself for it.
He got promoted several times and ended up extending his enrolment to twelve years. Meiwes remembers this period as a good time when he had nothing to worry about.
He even got engaged (or so he thought) to Petra, a girl he met through a contact agency. She described him as a gentleman, but his mother sabotaged the relationship. Petra always felt his mother was more important than she was. However, the fact that he gave her a ring did not mean they had gotten engaged to her.

When he was twenty-two he met another girl through the agency, also named Petra. But she could not have children and he wanted to start a family, so that was it.

In 1986 he crashed his car into a telephone pole under the influence of alcohol and had his driver’s license suspended for nine months. And that was not even his first accident, which resulted in him no longer reaching the number of points required to continue his career. When he left the Army he also left Frank, a man he frequently had sexual contact with.

In the nineties Meiwes developed a passion for computers, becoming a PC service technician. He had already worked with them in the Army, and now was buying every magazine about computers he could get his hands on.

Eventually Meiwes started working at the Kassel Accounting Center of the Volks and Raiffeisen banks, making a good living. It kept him busy and happy.

Later on he worked as a computer repair technician at Technologie Services Inc.
Of course, he eventually got into internet pornography featuring torture and started frequenting chat rooms, blogs and forums about cannibalism, including The Cannibal Café, where he placed the infamous add and expressed his desire to find a well-built male ranging from eighteen to twenty-five years old that was willing to be slaughtered and consumed. He ended up connecting with Bernd Brandes, a forty-four year old, in 2001. Bernd was a computer engineer at Siemens, in Berlin. Meiwes cut off Brend’s penis and then proceeded to slit his throat. When he was dead, he disembowelled and consumed him with a good red wine, finally fulfilling his life-long desire. The whole process was recorded on video for more than nine hours. Meiwes was then sentenced to a life behind bars (with the possibility of parole) in the Kassel Penitentiary, rated the highest security level in Germany.

In a way Meiwes blames his father for his crime and constant fear of loss. He despises him for leaving him behind and says things could have been different if it had not taken him ten years to get in touch with Meiwes.

3- Luka Rocco Magnotta - Killing for fame

Luka Magnotta (born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, he legally changed his name in 2006 claiming he was being followed) was accused of killing thirty-three-year-old international student Lin Jun in 2012 with an ice pick and mailing his severed limbs to offices of Canadian and political parties, as well as two schools in Vancouver. Before that, a video he shot containing acts of cannibalism and necrophilia was posted online.

Magnotta’s parents were still teenagers when he was born. Magnotta was home-schooled by his mother. She used to tell him the world was a dirty and dangerous place.
His parents got a divorce in 1994 and his mother had two more children with her second partner, who mistreated and insulted Magnotta. He eventually started living with his grandmother, his closest family member after his sister, whom he really seemed to love.
Magnotta was always a forgettable outcast in high school; maybe that is one of the reasons he was so eager to get noticed later on.

Magnotta suffered from several mental illnesses. He first started visiting psychiatrists at eighteen. At first they believed he was faking and could have ulterior motives but eventually got a personality disorder diagnosed and was put on medication that he occasionally overdosed on. He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which qualified him for collecting welfare payments. By then Magnotta started living at Harrison House in Ontario, a place for young people suffering from mental health issues. He used to tell his psychiatrist the other people were jealous of him and wanted him out of there because he was going to be a superstar.

By 2002/2003 Luka had stopped working as a stripper and became a male escort going by the name of Jimmy. He catered to a male clientele, even though he defined himself as being either bisexual or heterosexual. Around this time Magnotta admitted himself to the hospital claiming he wanted to kill himself and got moved from Harrison house to Rouge Valley Health Centenary Centre. Also in 2003 he starred in his first gay porn video.

A year later Magnotta moved to Toronto and got hospitalized again. He became extremely paranoid and thought everybody was out to get him.  

By 2006 he had a relationship with a transsexual girl named Barbie, who also worked in the adult industry. She claims he took her to see Basic Instinct 2 on their first date, which is quite creepy considering a victim in said movie gets killed with an ice pick, same way Magnotta ended up killing Lin Jun.

Barbie says they were barely intimate; other lovers have stated this as well. He did not seem interested in having sex. However, he wanted Barbie to work as an escort with him. She found his behaviour weird and was put off by the way he tended to react, but whenever she thought about leaving him Magnotta would do something to win her over.
She believes he killed for fame due to his narcissistic nature. He would always ask her to take pictures of him in different outfits. Barbie also claims he showed an unsettling admiration for Karla Homolka (whom he falsely stated he had dated) and Paul Bernardo, a couple of Canadian serial killers convicted of raping and killing young girls in the mid 90s. After four months they had a big fight. Barbie left his apartment and cut off contact with him.

Magnotta was obsessed with his appearance and went to the extreme of getting surgery in a attempt to look like James Dean. He even auditioned for Plastic Makes Perfect in order to win the prize: more plastic surgery. There are videos of the audition online, as well as of an interview he gave for Naked News about his life as an escort and his participation in Cover Guy, where he expected to get a role as an underwear model. He got rejected every time.

When he noticed he was not getting as many opportunities as he used to, Luka went down the rabbit hole and started acting even weirder. He once shared a video where a man was brutally beaten to death titled Three Guys, One Hammer on one of his Facebook profiles. I guess we can assume this video is what inspired him to film One Boy, Two Kittens. People were outraged and out to get him. They nicknamed the then unidentified Magnotta “the vacuum kitten killer”. He would send anonymous notes to the prosecutors giving out details about himself, but always lying about his location in order to avoid being caught. He did not use credit cards or had anything registered under his name, which made him more difficult to track down. Animal rights groups could officially prove the killer in the videos was Magnotta when they came across pictures of him posing with the kittens in the same room where he shot the video. Other elements from his videos could also be indentified in his pictures. But the police did not consider this to be valid evidence.

Luka had lots of different accounts for every social website, where he uploaded photoshoped pictures of himself in different places of the world, making it look like he lead a glamorous life. But the hidden information his pictures contained revealed he was in Toronto all along. However, nobody was able to track him down and his pursuers eventually decided to temporarily back off. And I say temporarily because at the end of 2011 (a year after he posted One Boy, Two Kittens) he uploaded a new video where he fed a live kitten to a Python, and another one where a kitten is duct taped to a broom handle and drowned in a bathtub.

Luka made it to headlines this time and at one point showed up at The Sun’s offices in London to deny any links to those videos, saying people were pretending to be him. Then they got the following anonymous letter: “It is fun watching people work so hard gathering all the evidence. Then not being able to name me or catch me. You see, I always win. I always hold the trump card, and I will continue to make more movies. Next time you hear from me, it will be in a movie I am producing that will have some humans in it, not just pussies.”

In 2012 Magnotta started posting promotional pictures for “1 Lunatic, 1 Ice pick”.
On May 24 Jun Lin (the Chinese University student he killed) did not show up for work. That same day on the website Ripoff Report, someone posted the following information: “Luka Magnotta is an extremely dangerous and sick psychopath; he is incapable of feeling remorse. Psychopaths can appear very charming and look beautiful, but beware; they are cunning and highly manipulative and maniacal.” There was also a compilation of links to the news stories about the search of the kitten killer.

The next day the actual video for “1 Lunatic, 1 Ice pick” was uploaded to the internet. It lasted eleven minutes and showed a man (Jun Lin, Magnotta’s ex-boyfriend) bound on a bed. After the edit it is obvious he is dead, but his corpse keeps being stabbed with an ice pick and is then cut up. Magnotta then proceeds to amputate his limbs, rapes the torso twice (the second time with a bottle) and then eats a piece of his butt cheek. Later he gets his dog to eat some of the flesh too. All the while, a True Faith (by New Order) plays, and a Casablanca poster can be seen on the wall. These elements contrasted against the gruesome nature of the video, making the document even more disturbing.
Four days later Jun Lin’s torso is found in a suitcase. Finally, police showed up at Magnotta’s house, but he was already gone. There was blood all over the place and the following message was written on a wall: “If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror. I don’t care.” Before he left the country, Luka posted a lengthy rant online, complaining about people who had hurt or disappointed him at some point of his life and signed it with his ex-girlfriend’s name.

Magnotta was arrested at an internet cafe in Berlin where he used to go to look up information about himself. On June 18, 2012, he got extradited to Canada on charges including murder and abusing a corpse. On December 23, 2014, he was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

2- The Mauerova Family - Cults, false identities and child abuse

In 2008 Klara Mauerova tortured one of her children for eight months. She even skinned him and eat some of his flesh.

Mauerova was born in Czechoslovakia in 1975. She went to College in the town of Kurim, even though she believed she had something far more important to accomplish in life; it was in her destiny to fulfil a mission for God.

Klara had two children: Jakub and Ondrej. Her sister Katerina (who seemed to be as delusional as she was) moved in with them eventually.

Klara and Katerina met a thirty-three-year-old woman named Barbora Skrlova who suffered from a rare glandular disease that made her look like a twelve-year-old. By 2005 she moved in with Klara too and lived under the false identity of Anicka, a stepdaughter in Mawerova’s custody.

The three of them were members of The Grail Movement, a cult founded in Germany in the 1940s which claimed someone could enter Heaven by doing good deeds on Earth, but paradoxically allowed its members to commit certain crimes. Barbora occupied a special place in the sect and made Klara lock up her kids (eight and nine years old by then, respectively) in the basement, bound and gagged. Ondrej ended up spending the most time there: eight months. They were abused in every way imaginable, especially Ondrej. Barbora always told the sisters how they should be punished and they obliged. One day Barbora and Katerina held Ondrej while Klara partially skinned him. All three eat his flesh and mocked him as he watched and cried. On top of everything they made the boys consume Ondrej’s flesh too. Apparently, the cult dictated they should have their wills broken.

It was later discovered that the children had even more abusers: Jan Skrlova (Barbora’s brother), Jan Turek (both of them were twenty five) and Hana Basova (twenty eight). The all worked at a youth centre with Katerina (thirty five) and were linked to a splinter sect of The Grail Movement led by Josef Skrlova (Barbora’s father).

The three women got a CCTV camera and placed it in the basement so that they could watch the ongoing suffering from their kitchen. It turns out a neighbour had the exact same system set up to monitor the baby’s room, which accidentally intercepted images of Ondrej. The police had to bust open a locked door Klara would not open. Eight-year-old Ondrej was found naked, bound, gagged, terrified and covered in blood. This obviously led to Klara’s arrest in May of 2007 on charges of abusing her children and the supposed stepdaughter, Anicka (Barbora’s false name).

Barbora was taken to a children’s home as Anicka but disappeared soon after. Assuming a new identity as a thirteen-year-old boy named Adam she fled to Norway and attended a school in Oslo for several months, pretending to be the son of Martin Fharner, a dramaturge and theatre manager. Then she showed up at an emergency youth shelter claiming to be a victim of child abuse but soon disappeared. Norway was covered in “missing child” posters, so Adam/Barbora was immediately spotted by someone in Tromsoe and was temporarily placed in another youth home there. Soon she was returned to Oslo, where police finally found out the real Adam Fharmer had been in the Czech Republic all along.

Martin Fharner and his wife turned out to be devoted members of the cult as well; so much that they allowed Barbora to impersonate their son by letting her use his passport. By the time she travelled to Denmark she was a fugitive; one of Katerina’s friends had found out she was actually a grown woman and told other people about it.

She had committed numerous crimes posing as a minor so that no charges could be filed against her. After a year they caught her and she had a trial, receiving five years of sentence. Her story inspired the movie The Orphan.

The then thirty-one-year-old Klara was sentenced to nine years. During the trial she sobbed uncontrollably, blaming Barbora and Katerina, who was sentenced to ten years. Klara said she had been manipulated and brainwashed by Barbora, and also affirmed that she was under the orders of “The Doctor” (a cult leader). "Terrible things have happened; I realize it and can’t understand how I could have allowed it."
Hana Basova and Jan Skrla got seven years each and Jan Turek got five.

1- Issei Sagawa - Cannibal turned best-selling author

Sagawa was born in Kobe (Japan) in 1949 and is known for murdering, raping and eating fellow twenty-five year old student Renée Hartevelt in Paris when he was thirty-two.

Sagawa came from a wealthy and loving family, although this did not stop him from developing cannibalistic fantasies from an early age. I guess the fact that he often took part in a game where his uncle used to play a cannibal out to get him and his brother tying them up, putting them in a big pot and pretending to boil them alive did not help.
He was an intelligent child with a love for books and continued to be a remarkable student as a teenager, but he could not bring himself to talk to his female classmates.
Sagawa had low self esteem and was very self-conscious. He took shelter in his obsession with western women who were the opposite of him, admiring their “beautiful existence”, as he put it. Sagawa says it was only admiration, but that fascination combined with his cannibalistic desires made everything complicated.

When Sagawa was twenty-three, a beautiful German girl moved into his neighbourhood in Tokyo. He could not keep himself from entering her room through the window one night while she was sleeping, equipped with an umbrella (to knock her out) and a mask. She woke up screaming and Sagawa tried to escape, but the girl was taller and stronger than him. He was arrested for attempted rape, although the charges were dropped when Sagawa’s father bribed her with a considerable sum of money. After the incident, he made Sagawa see a psychiatrist, whom concluded he was extremely dangerous.

In 1977 Sagawa flew to Paris to study in the prestigious Sobornne Univertity.
When he met Dutch student Renée, he secretly drew a portrait of her based on the first time he laid eyes upon her. She turned up to be trusting and kind, always making the effort to talk to the very shy and lonely Sagawa, something not many classmates bothered doing. She even invited him out to dinner with other students, which made him really happy. They often talked about theatre and literature. He fell deeply in love with her and could not suppress his cannibalistic desires any longer. Sagawa invited her over to his place. He wanted her to read a piece of poetry in German (a language she was fluent in) and record it for a class. A few months earlier he had bough a rifle.

He could not shoot her while she was facing him, so he made her sit at his desk, facing a wall, and shot her at the back of the neck. The poem was about cannibalism.

Sagawa had decided in advance that he would take the first bite from the buttocks. He says he expected the flesh to be bright red right away and was surprised to find a thick layer of fat, which he ended up grabbing with his fingers and putting into his mouth. Right after that he told her he loved her (in French). Afterwards he spent 48 hours alone with it. When he considered it was time to get rid of the corpse Sagawa took a cab while carrying two large suitcases. He asked the driver to take him to a park in the outskirts of Paris. He was not aware the place was quite popular and it was still early, so it was crowded; but this did not dissuade him from dumping the remains in the lake. Sagawa was exhausted from carrying the heavy suitcases and decided to rest at the location for a bit. After a while he saw a man opening one of the suitcases, screaming as he found out what was inside. Sagawa then proceeded to walk away slowly.

The police arrived within minutes. The autopsy revealed there had been post-mortem intercourse.

Since many people had seen the small Asian man at the park struggling to carry the suitcases he was not hard to identify. The taxi driver also contacted the police and gave them all the information he had, so it was pretty easy for them to track him down.
When they arrested Sagawa, he immediately admitted he had killed Renée inside his house. After his arrest they found plates containing cooked pieces of Renée’s body (he had even eaten one of her breasts), a fridge full of human flesh (his favourite body parts), a tape recording of the murder and some incriminating photographs depicting what went on after he killed the girl.

Sagawa showed no remorse when he was interrogated by the police. He says he did not want to kill, but there was no other way for him to obtain fresh human meat.

He was arrested in June, 1981, and locked away in a maximum security prison. His psychiatric examination took a year to complete.

His father hired the best lawyer he could find in order to save him under the premise that it was unfair for the French tax payers to pay for Sagawa’s hospitalization and that sending him back to Japan so he could receive psychiatric treatment there was a better option. The French government agreed and thirty-four months after his confession he was repatriated with one condition: he could never set foot on France again. But since he did not have a criminal record in Japan, eighteen months after his arrival he was able to check himself out of the hospital.

His crime did not have many consequences for him, but his family paid the price. His mother tried to commit suicide, his father had to resign from his high power position and his brother developed stress-related asthma.

In the mid eighties Sagawa published In The Fog, a book in which he told the story of his crime. It was a huge success, selling out all across Japan and finding him fame as an anti-hero. After that came more books (one of them included his psychiatric examination report and very detailed pictures of Renée’s corpse), constant appearances on TV shows and magazines and a symposium at a university. With the help of an agent he also sells portraits of women he draws. He even made it to the porn industry; one of his movies took place in Holland with a half-Dutch actress. Apparently, letting go of his obsession with Renée took him time.

He often pursued western girls. He would spend a lot of money to take a couple of them on vacation until the boyfriend of one of them found out what Sagawa had done.

Nowadays he lives in the outskirts of Tokyo under a false name, completely free of supervision. Over time his taste in women experienced a change; he is no longer interested in western women; in fact his bedroom walls are plastered with pictures of Japanese girls. Sagawa admits he is not cured and still has cannibalistic fantasies. He does not necessarily have to be the one performing cannibalism though. “I would not mind if a beautiful lady eat me” he confessed once. “I want to die suffering” he stated in another occasion.