Cannibals

by Ray Black

  She was stabbed in the heart, scalped and also decapitated. The suspects then boiled her head in water and proceeded to eat pieces from it. The suspects were apprehended when they went to meet the young girl’s parents to collect a $3,000 ransom.

  Crimea

  Police were called out to a home of a former convict in the city of Sebastopol in March 1996. Although they were used to dealing with some quite horrific murder cases, nothing could have prepared them for the carnage they were about to discover.

  When the police entered the house they found the mutilated remains of human bodies that had been prepared for consumption. The owner of the flat, her mother and her boyfriend, had all been stabbed to death by the 33-year-old suspect. Not only had their bodies been neatly butchered, but the investigators also found the internal organs from two of the victims in a saucepan on the stove in the kitchen. On the table was a plate which had on it a freshly roasted piece of human flesh.

  Siberia

  ‘Pelmeni’ is the Russian equivalent of ravioli. In the year 1996 a man was arrested in the coal mining town of Kemerovo after he openly admitted to killing and cutting up a friend, and using his flesh to fill his pelmeni. This crime was discovered when some vagrants were scavenging through a rubbish dump and they uncovered a severed human head. Investigators were soon to learn that the rest of the body had been minced up, put into pelmeni, and subsequently sold at cut-price rates on the local market.

  Kyargyzstan

  Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev, known as 'Metal Fang' because of his white metal false teeth, is possibly the king of the Soviet cannibals, slaughtering and serving up around 100 women to his dinner guests in the Russian republic of Kyargyzstan. Nikolai is known to have used at least 47 of his victims to make ethnic recipes for many of his neighbours.

  Nikolai’s belief was that women and prostitution were the root of all evil. His evil doings were not discovered until two of his friends found a head and some intestines in his kitchen. He was immediately incarcerated in a lunatic asylum in Tashkent, but amazingly enough he managed to bribe his way out of the institution. His case went to trial and he was found guilty of only seven murders. Once again he was put into an asylum but managed to escape in 1989.

  Embarrassed by their failure to keep him locked up, the Russian authorities never admitted to the public that Nikolai had escaped, and spent two years trying to recapture him. They eventually managed to track him down in Uzbekistan. The Interior Minister, Colonel Yuri Dubyagin described him as, ‘absolutely normal, but at one point he got a taste for female flesh’. Nikolai himself admitted that two women could provide him with enough delicate meat to keep him going for a whole week.

  The attitude of this minister may possibly explain why there are so many high-scoring serial killers in Russia. Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev was considered not to be responsible for his actions, and he is once again under lock and key in a mental institution.

  Eating a Cell-Mate

  Two cases of cannibalism were reported in 2003 that involved prison inmates. Convicts that were kept in overcrowded prisons killed and ate their cellmates, claiming that they were being underfed and that they wanted to relieve the cramped conditions.

  In 1996, a twice-convicted murderer, Andrei Maslich, along with another inmate, killed and ate a fellow prisoner. Offering no other explanation than the fact that he did not want to share his cell with anyone, Andrei, who was only 24 at the time, strangled his cellmate and then cut out his liver with a shard of broken glass. He placed the liver in his drinking mug along with some water, and then made a makeshift fire out of his bedding on which to cook his ‘supper’. Both men told authorities that they were bored and wanted to visit Moscow, where they expected they would be sent for psychiatric examinations. Instead, the two men were sentenced to death.

  Another case of cannibalism was reported in the Semipalatinsk prison in Kazakstan. Four convincts blamed their actions on the fact that the prison diet was inadequate and on newspaper articles they had read regarding instances of cannibalism in prison. The four inmates made a pact that they would kill and eat the first ‘new guy’ to be placed in their cell, and this just happened to be a convict named Volchenkov. They kept to their word and killed him, cutting the meat from his arms and back, cooking it and eating it. Some of the flesh was fried on a hot plate while other parts were boiled in an electric kettle which was kept in their cell.

  Bergen-Belsen

  Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp established in 1943 originally to hold prisoners to be used in political exchanges. Administered by the SS, it included five sub-camps where some 50,000 Jews, political hostages, and other prisoners died of starvation, disease, brutality and sadistic medical practices.

  Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British in 1945. Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds. The stench was intolerable even though the air was quite cold. The ground was muddy and a pile of corpses balanced carefully on one another, rose geometrically like a haystack. This was due to the fact that there was no more room in the crematoria. The Russian prisoners who had been incarcerated in this open-air camp were given no food or water. Driven by starvation, people went mad, and eventually many turned to cannibalism.

  Berezniki

  The grim discovery of a terrible murder involving cannibalism in the small town of Berezniki, in Perm Oblast, unfolded when a man brought a package of human flesh to the police station. He told them that he had bought the meat on the street, but his wife, on discovering skin on it, told her husband to take it to the police.

  The police managed to establish the identities of the traders, who turned out to be F. A. Boldyshev, who had previous convictions, and his friend N. V. Ostanin. These traders, however, turned out to be the murderers as well. It appeared that they had been sharing a bottle of spirits with a third man, A. P. Vavilin, when things got out of hand and they murdered him. Next they dismembered his corpse and had one of their mothers cook up the best pieces of flesh. After gorging themselves on their human feast, the two men packaged up the remainder and sold it on the streets. They claimed they had committed the act in order to obtain some money for their next bottle of spirits and to save money on the cost of normal meat. Police discovered the remains of Vavilin’s head, hands and feet discarded in the attic of one of their houses.

  Sasha Spesivtsev

  Twenty-seven-year-old Sasha Spesivtsev decided to take it into his own hands to cleanse the Russian streets of permissiveness. He killed at least 19 street children whom he saw as the dregs of society. The unemployed former mental patient, lured his homeless victims from the streets and local train stations in his home town of Novokuznetsk, back to his house. It was here, with the help of his mother, that Spesivtsev murdered his victims and then ate them.

  Suspicions that there might be a serial killer active in the area surfaced in the summer of 1996 when body parts appeared in the river Aba near the school where Sasha’s mother, Lyudmila, worked. However, the investigation moved rather slowly due to the nature of the victims – the poor children of the forgotten underclass – and the inept Russian judicial beaurocracy. During the early stages of the investigation, one of Sasha’s neighbours repeatedly complained to the police of the nauseating stench and deafening music coming from Sasha’s apartment. However, no investigation ensued, even though in 1991 a teenage girl was found dead in Sasha’s house. A year later, when police finally entered his home they found 15-year-old Olga Galtseva dying on the couch with multiple stab wounds to her stomach. In the bathroom they found a headless corpse and in the living room there was a rib cage.

  Before she died, Olga managed to tell the police that she, together with two 13-year-old friends, helped Sasha’s mother carry some bags into her apartment. Once inside they were trapped by Sasha and a fierce dog. No trace of Olga’s two little friends was ever found, and the police can only assume that they also died. A searc
h of Spesivtsev’s apartment revealed 80 bloodstained pieces of clothing, and DNA tests established that none of them contained blood from anyone in Spesivtsev’s family.

  Sasha was eventually committed after being convicted of murdering his girlfriend. In prison he spends all his time undergoing psychiatric testing and writing poems about the evils of democracy. His mother, on the other hand, has withdrawn into herself and has not uttered a word since her arrest.

  Vladimir Nikolayev

  On July 3, 1997, 38-year-old Vladimir Nikolayev was sentenced to death for the murdering and cannibalising two people in the town of Novocheboksary. Already on police records as a paricularly dangerous criminal, investigators found a pan of roasted human meat on the stove and another in the oven, when they went to arrest Nikolayev at his apartment. More bodies had been stored in the snow on the apartment’s balcony, bodies which Nikolayev claimed he was storing to eat later on. When questioned later by an investigator, Nikolayev jokingly asked the officer if he would be prepared to make him a dinner using his own stores of human meat.

  Manturovo

  Manturovo is a quiet little town of around 22,000 inhabitants, situated on the tributary of the Volga river, but it was soon to be shaken by a case of cannibalism. Valentina Dolbilina, a 36-year-old mother of a four-year-old boy, and 28-year-old Vitaly Bezrodnov, a factory worker, were both accused of killing their drinking partner and then cooking and eating his flesh.

  Dolbilina and Bezrodnov had been out for a night of heavy drinking. Bezrodnov said that he was feeling hungry and would like to eat some juicy meat. They eyed up their drinking partner who was asleep in the corner in a drunken stupor. However, they said that he was too skinny to be of any use to them, and they packed him off home. Then their attention turned to the fourth member of their drinking party, who had more flesh on him. Luring him back to Dolbilina’s house, they ushered him into the tiny kitchen where Bezrodnov asked Dolbilina for something heavy. She immediately went and fetched and axe, and their hapless victim was hit on the head, beheaded, undressed and then cut up into pieces. When they had finished their grisly deed, some 15 pounds of meat was cut from the thigh and rump, and put into a frying pan.

  The smell of the cooking meat aroused her sleeping flatmate, Boris Komarov, who came into the room and asked if he could join in the feast. However, despite the effects of a night of drinking, Boris noticed that there was something strange about the meat he was eating, and stated that ‘it was a bit tough’. To put his mind at ease, Bezrodnov claimed that they had killed a stray dog on their way home, and that it was canine flesh that he was consuming. Reassured by Bezrodnov’s explanation, Boris kept on eating the joint of meat straight from the pan. Little did he realise the true ghastliness of the situation – the dead man he was eating was his own brother, Leonid.

  The horror of the situation did not end there, however, even Dolbilina’s own son, Roma, was served a slice of the hapless Leonid. Later, when questioned, the boy blurted out: ‘Mummy killed a man and served him up to her friends.’

  Ilshat Kuzikov

  Russian police are currently investigating a possible case of cannibalism in which an elderly woman is suspected of having stored bits and pieces of her dead husband in her refrigerator. The 83-year-old victim was found lying outside the couple’s Kalingrad flat with parts of his body missing. When they searched the apartment, police found tin cans with the remains of muscles and meat in the refrigerator. Conclusive tests are still to be carried out.

  Whatever the results, this case pales in comparison to that of Ilshat Kuzikov, a 35-year-old schizophrenic.

  Kuzikov liked to marinate choice cuts of human flesh with onions and hang them outside of his apartment window in plastic bags. When the police forced their way into his home, they also found old Pepsi bottles containing blood, and ears hanging from his walls, which he claimed were his winter supply. They also found severed arms, legs, human bones and buckets of human flesh left to marinate with onions. Kuzikov tried to bribe the officers by offering them some of his choice meat along with a glass of vodka.

  Kuzikov was found guilty of murdering three of his vodka-drinking friends and eating their internal organs on March 19, 1997. He is currently being held in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital at St. Petersburg. The self-confessed cannibal said he killed his first victim in 1992 after inviting him into his flat for a nightcap. He claimed that he became a cannibal because he was unable to buy enough food on his meagre $20 pension.

  The American West in 1846

  Of the 83 members of the Donner Party who were trapped in the mountains, only 45 survived to tell the tale

  There were very few white people living in the American West in the year 1846. San Francisco, originally an Indian town, was still a very small community which eventually flourished in an international farming community. Sacramento, which was originally little more than a lush river valley, was starting to gain popularity because of its fertile soil, and it soon became a prosperous land for grazing livestock. People from far and wide soon started flocking to the American West in search of a new life.

  The Donner Party

  James Frazier Reed was 45 at the time of the Donner Party. He was born in Ireland, but had become a well-known businessman, who owned a furniture manufacturing company and was also a member of the masons in Springfield, Illinois. During the American Blackhawk War, Reed had served in the military alongside the future president, Abraham Lincoln. He married Margaret Keyes-Backenstoe-Reed and together they raised three children, along with his stepdaughter, Virginia. Although Reed was disliked by his party for his wealth and culture, he was known to be a kind and caring man.

  In the year 1846 three families from Springfield decided to move and try to make their fortunes ‘Out West’. The three families in question were those of George Donner, Jacob Donner and James F. Reed. George and Jacob were brothers and they knew Reed by reputation.

  The Oregon Trail officially started at Independence, Missouri and then moved along the Platte River in the Midwest, over the Rocky Mountains, through Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, and then down the treacherous Columbia River to Oregon city. The families were looking forward to their journey when they started out from Springfield. Many wagon trains before them had made the 2000-mile trek and, although most people suffered various hardships along the way, they managed to get over the Sierras and on to California in safety.

  And so it was that the two Donner families and the Reed family set out from Springfield in April 1846. To help them drive the additional wagons loaded with food and luggage, the families had hired teamsters. They also brought with them their trusted family servants who had come along of their own free will, as they wanted to stay working with their employers. Margaret’s mother, Sarah Keyes, was already frail when they started the journey, and by the time they reached Independence on May 11, she had weakened considerably and become virtually blind.

  The Bryant party, led by William Russell, joined up with them at Independence and George Donner, aged 60, and his friend James F. Reed, aged 46, were chosen to be the leaders for the duration of the journey. At the end of May, Sarah Keyes died at a place near Alcove Springs. Further along the trail various other groups joined the Donner party and everything went smoothly until they decided to take the Hastings’s Cut-off, which was supposed to be a shortcut. This was to be the first of a series of very peculiar events along their ill-fated journey. The reason they took the supposed shortcut was because somewhere along their route they met a man named Wales B. Bonney who was carrying an open letter from a man called Lansford Hastings. This letter told travellers of a newly-discovered route to the south of the Great Salt Lake, and encouraged people to go this way to save time. It pointed out that this route was shorter and would save the travellers around 400 miles. Despite being previously warned by experienced travellers not to take the shortcut, the Donners thought it sounded promising and decided to go against their advice.

  Veering off from the normal route, the Donner p
arty travelled on towards Fort Bridger, where they expected to find Lansford Hastings waiting for them. However, by the time they reached the Fort it was already quite late in the season and Hastings had already left, taking with him a large wagon. He had left directions for any parties that would like to follow him along his new trail. Convinced that this was the right thing to do, the Donners stocked up with supplies, and four days later their party of nine families, plus sixteen single men, left the Fort on the last day of July.

  A little way out of Fort Bridger the party came across a fork in the road. The fork to the right would lead them up the old road towards Fort Hall, but as the tracks of Hastings’s wagon were clear on the left fork, this is the way the Donner party headed. It wasn’t too long before the countryside became very mountainous and the road barely passable. In certain places along the route they had to actually lock the wheels of their wagons to stop them sliding down the narrow ravines and steep hillsides. Still convinced that this was the way to go, the party continued to follow the wheel tracks made by the Hastings’s wagon. They managed to make around 10 to 12 miles in a day, but by the time they reached the Red Fork of the Weber river the trail had stopped. Attached to a bush was a note written by Hastings, warning any party that decided to follow him through the Weber canyon, that the route was very treacherous. His advice to the party was for them to make camp and send a messenger ahead to catch up with him so that he could return and give them exact directions across the mountains. Reed, along with two other men were the appointed messengers, and they left on horseback to see if they could catch up with Hastings.