Nigel Blundell - Butchers & Cannibals

M ass murder is dreadful enough. But some serial killers not only slay to slake their perverted pleasures but they also enjoy the mutilation of their victims bodies and sometimes revert to cannibalism. The simple act of murder would sicken most people, yet that is not sufficient a thrill for those who find the excitement begins once their victims are dead. Cutting up corpses is, of course, one way of disposing of the evidence. But here we examine the butchers who dismember for pleasure.

There is nothing new about this, the sickest side of homicide. The most famous serial killer of all was Jack the Ripper and butchering maniacs have been slashing their bloody path through history ever since. They include monsters like Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called Rostov Ripper, who tortured, murdered, chopped up and sometimes cannibalised as many as 50 victims. Or they can be quiet, unassuming perverts like Dennis Nilsen, whose London house of horrors so overflowed with body parts that they blocked the drains. Nilsen liked to keep his partners at home, even in death. That is also what drove Americas Jeffrey Dahmer to retain and eventually consume parts of many of the young men he lured to his apartment to murder and dismember. He told prison psychiatrists that the reason he killed his victims was because he did not want them to leave him.

This weird rationale was further expounded by Russian cannibal Ilshat Kuzikov, a St Petersburg street sweeper who slew and dismembered his victims, marinating flesh for instant cooking and pickling body parts for later consumption. Explaining what drove him to cannibalism, he said: I always wanted to be a surgeon, but its better to be a cannibal. If youre a surgeon you have to put the body back together and you stop having any control over it. But a cannibal kills and then he can do what he wants with the body. After he kills, he owns it forever.

A more mundane reason for his crimes was explained by Joachim Kroll, the Ruhr Cannibal, who told police that, on a whim, he had consumed the flesh of one of his early victims and had found he liked the taste. From that moment, he pursued and killed girls whose bodies he judged likely to be most succulent. Another German cannibal, Fritz Haarman enjoyed cannibalising his victims but also made money by selling their flesh as prime pork.

Americas most renowned forensic psychiatrist, Dr Michael Stone, has personally interviewed a host of serial killers in his researches, and his judgment is relied upon by crime fighters and the judiciary. In his excellent analysis, The Anatomy of Evil (Prometheus Books), he says: We shudder when we hear about cannibalism: the crime involves, after all, the total annihilation of a human being by another human being willing to trample on this most sacred prohibition in the social code.

In earlier centuries, when such psychotic tendencies were not understood, human flesh eaters were often classified as werewolves. In recent times, however, forensic psychologists and police specialists have striven to identify and analyse the killers erotic disorders. Such an investigation was portrayed in fictionalised form in The Silence of the Lambs , in which FBI agents tried to get into the mind of a fiend who was making himself a new skin out of his victims. The story was not so far removed from fact for it was based on the evil exploits of Ed Gein, who was not only the inspiration for Jame Buffalo Bill Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs but also schizophrenic transvestite Norman Bates in Hitchcocks Psycho and probably the odious Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre .

The killers mentioned above all appear in this book. And, sadly, none of the horrors reported within these pages is fiction. So please dare to delve behind the horrifying headlines and examine what is in the minds of murderous, butchering monsters.