Cannibals

by Ray Black

  The more he killed, the more he got the taste for flesh, and Jeffrey started to put muscles and various other body parts in the freezer so that he could eat them later. Meanwhile, his grandmother, who was completely unaware of the grotesque things that were happening in her basement, she was fully aware of the noise and drunkenness of Jeffrey and his male friends. Finally the odd hours and the stench of her grandson’s experiments was too much for his grandmother and she asked him to leave.

  Jeffrey took an apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee and the very next day he got himself into trouble. He offered a 13-year-old Laotian boy named Sinthasomphone, $50 to come to his apartment and pose for some photographs. Jeffrey drugged the boy and then fondled him, but the boy escaped unharmed. When the boy returned home his parents realized that there was something wrong with him and after being checked out at the local hospital, discovered that he had been drugged. The boy was able to give a full description of Jeffrey and the address where he had been taken, and they arrested Dahmer on charges of indecent assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes.

  While Dahmer was waiting for his sentencing he once again went to live with his grandmother.

  In 1989 Jeffrey went for a drink at a gay bar called ‘La Cage’ and was approached by a man named Anthony Sears towards the end of the evening. Anthony’s friend, Jeffrey Connor, offered to drive the couple to Jeffrey’s grandmother’s house. He dropped them off in West Allis and Anthony Sears was never seen again, but his skull, scalp and penis were found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment when he was arrested over two years later.

  At his trial for the assault on the young Sinthasomphone, Jeffrey plays the part of a true psychopath and manages to convince the judge that he is a reformed character and is determined to turn his life around. Dahmer was put on probation for five years and was ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’ which meant that he could go to work during the day but had to return to the jail at night. After only ten months, and despite requests from Jeffrey’s father that he remain inside until he receives treatment, he is released back into an unsuspecting society.

  On his release Jeffrey went to stay with his grandmother for a short while but on May 14, 1990, he moves to an apartment on North 25th Street. It was then that his killing spree began in earnest. Over a period of 15 months, 13 men lost their lives.

  June 1990: Raymond Smith

  June 1990: Edward Smith

  July 1990: Ricky Lee Beeks

  Sep 1990: Ernest Miller

  Sep 1990: David Thomas

  Feb 1991: Curtis Straughter

  April 1991: Errol Lindsey

  May 1991: Anthony Hughes

  May 1991: Konerak Sinthasomphone (the younger brother of the boy assaulted in September 1988)

  June 1991: Matt Turner

  July 1991: Jeremiah Weinberger

  July 1991: Oliver Lacey

  July 1991: Joseph Bradehoft

  Dahmer’s normal practice was to pick up young homosexual or bisexual men at a bar and then either offer them money to pose for photographs or just to invite them back to his apartment for a drink. His unsuspecting victims would then fall into a drugged sleep after a couple of spiked drinks and would then be either strangled or stabbed to death, before being dismembered with a hacksaw. He frequently had sex with the corpse and often masturbated over it later on. The remainder of the body would be boiled down using chemicals and acids and then disposed of down the drain. He used a Polaroid camera to capture the entire experience so that he could remember every one. He was apparently fascinated by the colour of the viscera and would become sexually aroused by the heat of the freshly-mutilated body. Certain parts would be retained as trophies, usually the head and genitalia. The genitals would be preserved in formaldehyde, while the heads were boiled to remove all the flesh. Once the skull was clean he would paint it with grey paint to make it look like plastic.

  It is very common for a necrophiliac to also be a cannibal, and that was the case with Jeffrey Dahmer. He believed that if he ate the flesh of his victims they would come alive again within his own body. He tried various seasonings and meat tenderizers to make the flesh more palatable, and he later told his doctors that eating human flesh gave him an erection. He said he had also tried human blood, but he could not get the taste for it.

  His Big Mistake

  Three police officers were called to a rundown suburb of Milwaukee on May 27, 1991. Two black teenage girls had come a cross a young Asian boy who was running around without any clothes on and rambling in an incoherent way. The two cousins, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, who were both 18, were convinced that the young boy was scared of the tall white man who had followed him out into the street and was trying to convince him to follow him back inside. However, when the police arrived on the scene they paid far more attention to the tall white man than the two young black girls, and they believed the man’s story when he told them that the boy was his 19-year-old lover and they had simply had an argument.

  Unwittingly the police actually escorted the Asian boy back into Dahmer’s apartment, despite the protests of the two teenage girls. It was to prove a very costly mistake for the police as this proved to the black Milwaukee community that the police force was inherently racist.

  The Asian boy in question was 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, and as soon as the officers left he was strangled by Dahmer. Next he abused his lifeless body and then proceeded to dismember it. Had the police bothered to check to see whether the white man had a record, they would have discovered that Jeffrey Dahmer was already a convicted child molester. Instead they chose to believe the word of a 31-year-old man over that of two teenagers and that cost the young Asian lad his life – and indeed four other young males before he was finally caught.

  The One That Got Away

  Tracey Edwards accepted the offer by Jeffrey to go back to his apartment and watch some pornographic videos. Tracey was a homosexual who enjoyed that sort of thing and couldn’t see anything wrong with his new friend’s offer. However, once inside Jeffrey’s apartment, Tracey realized that he was about to become a player in some sort of homosexual perversion. Tracey was given a ‘cocktail’ which made him drowsy, and then Jeffrey made sexual advances towards him. As Jeffrey tried to slip handcuffs on his victim, Tracey started to struggle which made Dahmer go for a knife. With that Tracey made a grab for the door handle of apartment number 213. He knew he had to escape the mad man who only moments before had threatened him with death. Dahmer tried to drag him back inside the apartment, but a fight broke out and Jeffrey was hit on the side of his head causing him to drop to the floor. Tracey managed to escape and ran into the street where he managed to flag down a patrolling police car.

  After listening to his fantastical story, the officers decided to accompany Tracey back to the apartment where the alleged attack had taken place.

  Dahmer answered the knock on the door and when he saw that it was the police tried to bluff his way out of the situation. He told them that he had just lost his job at the chocolate factory (which was true) and that he had lost his temper after getting rather drunk. He offered to go and get the key to the handcuffs from his bedroom, but as one of the officers followed him into the room he noticed the photographs. There were dozens of Polaroid pictures of bodies in various states of dismemberment and human skulls in a refrigerator.

  Becoming increasingly worried about what he had stumbled across, the police officer walked into the kitchen and noticed that the refrigerator was the same as the one in the photographs. When he opened the door to the refrigerator he literally screamed out loud at what he saw, as a human head lay on the shelf and was staring out blankly at him. Also inside the refrigerator were three bags containing a heart, flesh and portions of muscle. Inside the freezer were three heads, a human torso, a bag containing human flesh and some internal organs. A cupboard in the kitchen contained various chemicals and two bleached human skulls. On the floor there was a large kettle
containing two hands, a penis and testicles.

  In the other rooms, three more skulls were discovered in a filing cabinet, while a wardrobe contained a whole skeleton, dried human scalp and more genitalia. In a box there were two more skulls, and next to this was a 260-litre vat of acid. Finally the police found three human torsos in various stages of decomposition. Everywhere the stench of death and rotting flesh was making the officers retch.

  Dahmer’s calm exterior soon disappeared and he started to squeal and struggle as the three police officers attempted to overpower him. Tracey Edwards just stood aghast, with his mouth open, realizing that the threats by Jeffrey to cut out his heart and eat it, had probably been true.

  The End

  Dahmer entered a plea of guilty but insane on July 13, 1992. During the trial he was protected by an 18-foot high barrier because of the intense reaction created by his crimes. The trial was short and the jury found Jeffrey Dahmer to be guilty but sane. He was sentenced to serve 15 life sentences, or 957 years.

  Dahmer was sent to Columbia Correctional Institution, in Portage, Wisconsin. On November 28, 1994 Dahmer was ordered to clean the shower block by the prison warders, along with another inmate. As the warders turned a blind eye, the pair of inmates were clubbed to death by fellow prisoners carrying broom shanks. The leader of the rebel gang was a man named Christopher Scarver. Scarver was a convicted killer on antipsychotic medication, who claimed to be Christ because he was a carpenter and his mother’s name was Mary. Scarver was hailed as a hero for killing the cannibal and said that he was acting out his ‘father’s’ commands to kill Dahmer.

  Ironically this was only the second time that Jeffrey Dahmer had been allowed to associate with fellow inmates, and the previous occasion had also resulted in him being seriously injured. Jeffrey Dahmer was convinced that he would be killed while he was in jail, and as it happened he was right.

  Hoping to lay to rest the grisly ghosts which haunted Milwaukee, the city elders purchased all the gruesome memorabilia and incinerated the lot.

  Andrei Chikatilo

  Chikatilo – The Ripper of Rostov – was a former teacher, who preyed on adolescent boys and girls

  Although the Soviet Union liked to think they didn’t have any serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo soon disproved this theory. He was a self-described ‘mad beast’ and ‘mistake of nature’ who confessed to occasionally nibbling on internal organs.

  Born on October 16, 1936, Andrei Chikatilo was a native of the Ukraine. His background gives certain clues as to why he developed into a depraved killer. Andrei’s family had suffered greatly in the 1930s due to Stalin’s forced collectivization. Collectivization meant the destruction of a centuries-old way of life, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry. Apart from the poverty and hunger that Andrei experienced, he also lost an older brother, Stepan, who was allegedly murdered and cannibalized by neighbours during the famine that spread across the country. People, desperate for food, would remove meat from corpses just in an effort to survive. Human flesh was bought, sold, or even just hoarded. Children saw the terribly disfigured corpses, heard terrible tales, and Andrei’s mother warned the young lad to stay in his own yard or he might get eaten as well. All this must have had a terrible effect on a growing boy, and indeed he was to carry this memory with him for the rest of his life.

  Most of his childhood was spent alone and he used to live in his own world of fantasy. The other children in his neighbourhood often mocked him for being ‘strange’ and he developed a rage which would build up inside him. His first sexual experience was when he struggled with a ten-year-old friend of his sister’s and the experience excited him to such an extent that it caused him to ejaculate. To keep himself amused in his many hours of solitude he would dream up images of torture, and this was to be a major part of his killings in his adult life.

  After Andrei left school he joined the army for a while and when he returned home tried to have a girlfriend. However, he was unable to perform the sexual act and the girl made a fool out of him by spreading rumours of his lack of manhood. Andrei had visions of catching the girl and ripping her body to pieces, which caused him to become sexually excited – then he knew there was something very wrong inside him.

  Ironically, Andrei became a teacher and did get married to a local girl named Fayina, even though it was arranged by his sister. Andrei was painfully shy sexually and Fayina realized he had no real interest in conventional sex. She did manage, however, to coax him into providing her with two children, and to the outside world he presented himself as a meek family man. But beyond this facade there were dark and sinister urges brewing.

  Andrei’s mother died in 1973 when he was 37, and it wasn’t long before he realized that he loved the feeling of power when he molested young girls. He knew that to get real satisfaction he needed to get violent, and this is why this pervert turned into a cold-blooded killer.

  First Murder

  On December 22, 1978, in the town of Shakhty, Andrei Chikatilo followed nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova and managed to lure her back to his house. He used his teaching skills and kind manner to befriend the little girl, but behind the closed doors of his home Andrei turned into a monster. He jumped on top of the frightened girl, covered her mouth to suppress her screams, and began tearing at her clothes. He tore at her underwear and rubbed his genitals against her body. His inability to achieve an erection made Andrei angry, and his attack became more and more violent. The moment he saw blood trickling from her body he achieved the orgasm he was so desperate for, and from that moment on he knew that fondling and rape would not be enough for him, he needed the sight of his victim’s blood.

  Still in a state of frenzy he thrust a knife into the girl’s stomach and tore open her chest cavity to get at her blood and organs. This inflamed his pleasure even further and when he was satiated he put his hands round young Lena’s throat and simply squeezed the remaining breath out of her body.

  Coming out of his crazed state Andrei suddenly realized exactly what he had done. He looked down and saw the severely mutilated body of the young girl. There was blood all over the room and indeed all over his own body. He covered her body with what was left of her clothes and then carried her to the nearby Grushevka River. Her body was discovered two days later.

  Many men were questioned over the attack on Lena, and Chikatilo was one of them. However, his wife gave him an alibi and a man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was charged and later executed for her murder in 1984. Only when Chikatilo confessed to the girl’s murder in 1990 did the authorities realize that they had killed the wrong man.

  Three Years Later

  Chikatilo managed to control his violent urges for another three years. However, in 1981, he was fired from his teaching job due to allegations that he had molested some of the male students and, unable to get another teaching job due to his reputation, was forced to take a job as as a supply clerk at the Rostovnerud factory. This new position meant he had to travel to and from his place of work by bus or train. Turning this situation to his advantage, Andrei started looking for victims to satisfy his sexual cravings at the local bus and train stations.

  On the evening of September 3, 1981, Andrei was out looking for his next victim. He watched everyone as they walked past him, fantasizing what he would like to do with them. Soon he saw someone who took his fancy, 17-year-old Larisa Tkanchenko who was sitting at a bus stop. She was a girl who was well known locally for her loose morals and when Andrei approached her, Larisa was quite willing to accept the older man’s invitation to go for a walk. Once Chikatilo and Larisa reached a secluded spot, he instantly starting tearing at her clothes, his extreme desires taking complete control of his actions. As the young girl started to scream and fight off her attacker, Chikatilo’s pleasure heightened. He pushed Larisa onto the ground and pushed dirt into her mouth to su
ppress her screams, then he punched her in the face and chest and finally strangled her into unconsciousness. As Larisa gasped her last breath Chikatilo, at the height of his frenzy, ejaculated over her body and bit off one of her nipples. Unlike his first murder which had left him frustrated and confused, this time he felt elated and actually ‘danced with joy’ around the body. With his sexual appetite satisfied he threw the body in the River Don, where it was discovered the very next day.

  The murder of Larisa must have satiated his desires for a while because Chikatilo did not kill again until the following June. On June 12, 1982 Chikatilo was in Zaplavskaya on a business trip, when he came across 13-year-old Lyubov Biryuk who was walking along a quiet, wooded path to Donskoi Village. Chikatilo attempted to rape the young girl before stabbing her to death. Her body was discovered on June 27 and, although parts of it had been eaten away by animals, the medical examiner managed to find 22 separate stab wounds. Most of the wounds had been to the breasts and genitals, but even more disturbing was the fact that Lyubov had been stabbed in both eye sockets.

  Chikatilo took his fourth victim just two days before the discovery of the body of Lyubov Biryuk. Lyuba Volubuyeva was 14 years old and once again Chikatilo satisfied his sexual urges by repeated stabbing of the chest and the eyes.

  Then, for some reason, Chikatilo changed his usual pattern of killing as his next victim was a young male. Nine-year-old Oleg Pozhidayev was killed on August 13, 1982, although his body was never recovered.

  Again and again Chikatilo murdered young male and females and every time a body was discovered they had been severely mutilated around the genital area. On the girls he would gouge the breasts and destroy the vagina, uterus and bladder or abdomen. On the boys he would mutilate the penis, scrotum and anus.