by Ray Black
This gruesome tale of slaughter and cannibalism that took place over 200 years ago, is a reminder to us of the differences that existed between the Maori and European cultures during that time.
SECTION TWO: CANNIBALISM MOST MACABRE
Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean
Alexander Sawney Bean was the head of an incestuous cannibalistic family, who oversaw a 25-year reign of murder and robbery
The story of Sawney Bean as been recounted over the years and is about a family who lived in a cave in the early part of the 17th century. For 25 years this family, against all standards of human decency and morality, chose murder, cannibalism and incest as their way of life.
Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean was born in the late 14th century in East Lothian. He was the son of a ditcher and hedger, and initially Bean followed in his father’s footsteps. However, he soon found that hard work and an honest living was not the way he wanted to live, so he fled his family home. So, accompanied by a woman with a similar personality to his own, he went to live in a deep cave at Bennane Head, near Ballantrae in Ayrshire.
The cave itself was enormous and penetrated more than a mile into the solid rock. The entrance into the cave was a dark passageway with many tortuous windings, and just a short way in the tunnel was plunged into complete darkness. Twice a day, at high tide, several hundred yards of this passage would be flooded, which meant that they very rarely got any unwanted visitors, which is probably why they went undiscovered for so many years.
Over the years Bean and his ‘wife’ had 14 children, and then the 14 children started to mate which produced more children and of course all these mouths needed feeding. Then Bean and his wife came upon the perfect solution, they robbed passers-by on the highland roads. Of course they didn’t want to get caught, so they made certain that none of their victims could tell the story by killing them. Then they realized that the people they were robbing and killing had meat on their bones, and meat was food. After they had killed the hapless traveller they would drag the body back to their cave, dismember it, eat some of the human flesh and then pickle the rest. The inside of their cave became like a butcher’s shop with the slaughtered bodies hung on hooks around the walls, while the bones were stacked in another part of their home. And this is how their ever-increasing family survived for more than two decades.
Local Fear
More and more people went missing and soon these abductions created intense fear in the local vicinity. It became an increasing worry that lone travellers seemed to disappear from the quiet country roads without leaving any trace. Although determined efforts were made to try and discover the whereabouts of the bodies, Bean and his family were never found. Their cave was far too deep and complex for anyone to bother to investigate it, and anyway nobody suspected that their murderer could possibly live in such a place that was flooded twice a day with water.
The Bean way of life seemed to settle into a nice pattern. His wife would have more children and, by incest, produced a second generation of eight grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. Soon the killings and cannibalism became just a way of life, a means of surviving. It seems remarkable that with so many children obviously running around near the cave, that the locals did not become suspicious. Perhaps they did and perhaps they themselves were eaten, because it is possible the children regarded any other human being as a source of food.
The Bean children received no form of education and were probably encouraged to join in their parents’ ‘occupation’ as they grew older. Soon the Bean gang swelled to a formidable size and over the years they perfected their art. It appears that although the family was swelling all the time, there was never any shortage of human flesh. Sometimes, despite the salting and pickling process, body pieces had to be disposed of due to the fact that it had gone putrid. Soon pieces of decaying human remains, which had been mysteriously preserved, were being washed up on remote pieces of beach. Since these ghastly objects only consisted of severed limbs or lumps of flesh, they could never be identified, but the authorities realized that they were dealing with something that was far more sinister.
The larger the family grew the more ambitious their attacks became and on occasions as many as six men and women would be attacked by a dozen or more of Sawney’s tribe. Their bodies were always dragged back to the cave and prepared for the larder by the women in the family.
No-one ever escaped to give even the slightest clue as to who the attackers were. The Beans had a very strategic plan, whereby they would place guards along the road where the attack took place, to cut down anyone who had the audacity to make a run for it. Although it is not known exactly how long the Beans continued their murderous cannibalistic spree, it is estimated that they killed close to 1,000 people before they were eventually caught.
The Mistake
The existence of the Bean family was never really known, and several of the nearby innkeepers were even wrongly executed after being accused of committing the crimes. It seemed that the problem would never be resolved, that is until the Bean family made a clumsy mistake. For the first time in almost 25 years the Beans, through bad judgement on their part, allowed themselves to be outnumbered.
One night members of the Bean gang attacked a man and his wife who were riding back along a quiet road from a nearby fair. They seized the woman first and while they were still struggling trying to get her husband off his horse, they killed, disembowelled and got her ready to take back to the cave. The same fate would almost certainly have befallen her husband had the Beans not been forced to retreat when a large party of people, also coming back from the fair, arrived unexpectedly on the scene. For the first time in their ‘career’ the Beans saw themselves at a disadvantage and, after a brief but violent fight, they scurried back to their retreat with their tails between their legs. This was a serious error of tactics as they had left the mutilated body of the woman behind, along with plenty of witnesses.
The man, who was the only person actually to survive a Bean ambush, was taken to the Chief Magistrate of Glasgow to relate his harrowing tale. At last they seemed to be making a breakthrough in the hunt for the attackers who apparently didn’t stop at murder. It was obvious they lived in the local vicinity and that they were dealing with quite a large group of people.
Due to the severity of the case the magistrate contacted King James VI, who certainly took the matter seriously. He went in person to Ayrshire along with a small army of 400 armed men and a pack of tracker dogs. With the assistance of local volunteers and his army, the King instigated one of the largest manhunts ever known. They searched the entire Ayrshire countryside and its coastline but with no result. Then one day when they were patrolling the shore they walked past the partially waterlogged entrance to a cave. The dogs, picking up the smell of death and putrefaction, started baying and howling and tried to get into the dark interior.
Cautiously, the pursuers entered the tunnel with flaming torches to help light the way. With their swords at the ready they wound their way down the narrow twisting passages, until at the end of the mile-deep cave they came across the home of the Bean cannibal family.
They were completely sickened by what they saw. All along the damp walls of the cave were human limbs and pieces of flesh, that were hung up like carcasses in a butcher’s shop. In various crevices in the cave they found piles of clothing and valuables, including watches, rings and various pieces of jewellery. In another smaller cave they found all the bones that had been collected over the 25 years. When they entered the cave the entire Bean family, all 48 of them, were there in hiding. They knew that there was a large army out looking for them and they had decided to lie low. The Bean crew did try and fight their way out, but this time there was no escape. They were arrested and with the King still in attendance they were marched off to Edinburgh.
They were not offered a trial as the crimes were so horrendous that it was considered they were outside the normal jurisdiction of the law. The prisoners – 27 men and 21 women – all of
whom (with the exception of the parents) had been conceived and raised in the cave, were executed the following day.
The men were dismembered, their legs and arms cut off while they were still alive, just as they had done to their victims. Then they were left to bleed to death while the women were made to watch. The women were then burned like witches at the foot of great bonfires. It was a fitting end for a truly monstrous family.
Albert Fish
Albert Fish was a grandfatherly man who specialized in murdering and cannibalizing children – the real life Hannibal Lector
How could this grey-haired little old man be responsible for such atrocities? He molested more than a hundred children, murdered at least 30, and as if things weren’t bad enough he ate quite a few of them as well . . .
Hamilton Fish was born on May 10, 1870, in Washington DC. He was the product of a well-respected family and yet if you delve deep into their archives you will find that at least seven of his relatives had severe mental disorders, two of whom died in institutions. When Fish was five years old his father died and his mother placed him in St. John’s Orphanage so that she could go out to work and earn herself a living. It was in the orphanage that things started to go badly for him, and in the records he was described as a problem child. It is alleged that Fish was abused while he was at the orphanage and was forced to watch other boys ‘doing bad things’. He persistently tried to run away and was known to wet the bed up until the age of 11. As a child Fish had a fall from a cherry tree which caused a head injury severe enough to leave him with permanent problems such as headaches and dizzy spells. This is another factor that may explain why he became a crazed cannibal in later life.
When he was 15 Fish graduated from public school and started to call himself ‘Albert’. He discarded the name Hamilton, which he hated, because classmates used to tease him and call him ‘Ham and Eggs’.
Albert left the orphanage when he was 18 and started a career as a house painter and decorator, a job which he would keep for the rest of his life. In 1898 he married a woman who was nine years his junior and together they produced six children. However, in January 1917 his wife ran away with a boarder named John Straube, leaving Albert to look after their children. After a short while, Albert’s wife returned still with her lover in tow. Albert agreed to take her back as long as she sent her lover packing, but he later discovered that she had stowed Straube away in the attic and, following a stormy argument, she left with Straube never to return to the marital home.
By his own account Albert committed his first murder in 1910, killing a man in Wilmington, Delaware. But it was Albert’s own children who noticed a marked difference in their father’s behaviour after the departure of their mother. At first he would dance naked in the moonlight chanting, ‘I am Christ! I am Christ!’ But what became even more disturbing were his strange pastimes – burning himself with pokers, inserting needles into his groin and flagellating himself with a nail-studded paddle. A prison X-ray later in his life revealed that he had at least 29 separate needles in his pelvic region, some of which had eroded over time to mere fragments.
Without a wife to satisfy his sexual desires, Albert decided to answer some ‘lonely hearts’ adverts from widows who wanted to remarry. He would reply to their adverts with obscene letters and tell them about how he liked to inflict pain on himself and others. Apparently Albert stated that he bigamously married three women whom he met through this form of correspondence.
It was in 1928, when Albert Fish’s bizarre fascination with pain, both receiving and inflicting, turned towards children.
The Abduction of Gracie Budd
Albert Fish looked like every child’s favourite grandfather, but behind the gentle facade of silver hair and a moustache lurked a monster who preyed on small children. Albert made friends with a Manhattan family by the name of Budd. It wasn’t difficult to earn the trust of the family and he introduced himself as Frank Howard. He soon knew the family well enough to ask them if he could take their ten-year-old daughter, Gracie, to a birthday party. They agreed and foolishly let the daughter go off with the apparently gentle old man. But instead of a party, Albert took the child to an isolated cottage where he strangled her and dismembered her body. When he got back home he unwrapped a package of Gracie’s flesh which he cooked up in a stockpot with carrots and onions. The stew he had made lasted Albert for several days which left him in a continual state of sexual excitement.
That evening, with no word from either Mr. Howard or their daughter, the Budds went into a state of panic. The following morning they sent their son Edward to the police station to report his sister’s disappearance. The police started a full-scale investigation and it didn’t take long for them to realize that Frank Howard was a fraud. The hunt for Gracie lasted for six years and the police had almost given up any hope of finding her body or in fact any clues as to her disappearance.
Two years later, Albert started sending letters to a famous Hollywood producer, offering him large sums of money if he could put him in touch with women who were prepared to indulge in sadomasochistic orgies with Fish. The police were called in and Albert was subsequently confined to a psychiatric hospital. He was kept under constant observation for two months, but was discharged after a report stated that he was not insane but had a psychopathic personality. They did diagnose him as having sexual problems, but they attributed that to dementia and his advancing years. He was therefore deemed to he harmless and released into the custody of his daughter Anna.
On November 11, 1934, a full six years after the kidnapping of Gracie, the police received a slender clue in the form of an anonymous letter written to the Budds. Compelled to gloat about his crimes, Albert had written giving the full gory details of what had happened to their Gracie. The police managed to trace the letter back to the apartment where Albert Fish lived in New York. When they checked the register at the boarding house, they found the signature ‘A. H. Smith’ to be the same as that in the letter, and they knew they had their man. When they knocked on the door of his room, the police were rather taken aback by his appearance – he was just a harmless-looking, white-haired old man with a rather scruffy moustache. Detective King identified himself and asked Fish if he would accompany him back to police headquarters to answer some questions. Then, without warning, this harmless old man put his hand into his pocket, pulled out a vicious-looking razor blade and lunged at the detective. Luckily the police managed to overpower the little old man and once back at the station, Fish openly admitted to his crimes. He particularly relished recounting of how he had cut off his victim’s head, holding her body over a five-gallon paint drum so as not to lose a single drop of her precious blood. As he talked about drinking the virgin’s blood, the investigators were appalled to see how his eyes rolled in his head, they could hardly believe the horror that was coming from this old man’s mouth.
Fish’s confession didn’t stop at Gracie, he went on to tell them about 400 child murders that he had committed between 1910 and 1934. Although much of what he told the police in his statements later turned out to be grossly exaggerated or false, he still provided them with enough details of his gruesome past to sicken even the hardened investigators.
As the police began to build up a portfolio on Fish, they weren’t really surprised to find out that he had a long criminal record stretching back to 1903, when he had served 16 months in Sing Sing on a grand larceny charge. But what really shocked the police was the fact that he had been arrested six times since the disappearance of Gracie on charges that ranged from petty larceny, to vagrancy, to sending obscene literature through the post.
Sentenced to Death
At the trial of Albert Fish, the state was desperate to win a death penalty, despite his defence of insanity. The jury were not convinced with his plea and faced with his rambling, obscene confessions they found him both sane and guilty for premeditated murder. Fish was sentenced to die in the electric chair, and he was electrocuted at Sing Sing prison on January
16, 1936. It took two attempts before he died, because on the first attempt the machinery short-circuited due to all the needles that Fish had planted in his body. Albert Fish, monster extraordinary, was, at 65, the oldest prisoner ever to be executed at the New York prison.
Richard Chase
Richard Chase was proud to confess to drinking the blood of his victims and gnawing on pieces of their bodies when he felt hungry
Richard Trenton Chase became known as the ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’ and for good reason, he loved the taste of blood. He started off by killing animals and then gradually began to kill people to satisfy his bloodlust.
Richard Trenton Case was born on May 23, 1950. His childhood years were not happy as he grew up in a strict and very angry household, where he would frequently receive severe beatings. The darker side of his personality started to emerge even as a young boy, because he seemed to get immense pleasure out of harming, mutilating and killing small animals.
As a teenager Richard developed a liking for alcohol and smoking dope. He had several girlfriends but was unable to form a solid relationship partly due to his impotency. He consulted a psychiatrist about this problem when he was 18, and was informed that it was probably due to the fact that he had repressed anger. Even the doctor considered that he was suffering from a major mental illness it was suggested that he should be institutionalized at that time.
When he moved out of his parents home, his friends and several different roommates noted that his behaviour was becoming more and more weird. He became more dependent on drugs and developed a severe form of hypochondria. He was starting to show even more signs of mental instability which caused him to have an intense fear of disintegrating. In his delusioned state Chase believed that the only way to stop his blood turning into powder was to drink blood. His hypochondria became so bad at one stage that he ran into the emergency room of his local hospital claiming that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, that his bones were protruding out of his neck and that his stomach was backwards. He was put under observation for 72 hours but was allowed to leave whenever he wished.