by Bob Couttie
Stand aside Dexter and Hannibal Lecter, Germany’s cannibal CSI (Crime Scene Investigator) puts you to shame: According to Dresden Police, after a sex-and-torture session, a 55-year-old unnamed police officer killed his partner for pleasure, devoured some of his body parts and dumped the leftovers in the Erz mountains.
The cannibal, who has been identified as a handwriting expert employed in the Forensics department of the Saxony State Office of Criminal Investigation, was arrested following the discovery of buried body parts. The remains belonged to a Hanover man who had been reported missing.
It is believe that the alleged killer and his victim met through a sex-and-torture website. While police have yet to say whether the death was deliberate or accidental, previous cases suggest that the victim may have been a willing accessory to his own demise.
In 2004, 44-year-old Armin Meiwes was sentenced to life in prison after killing and eating parts of a computer technician named Bernd Juergen Brandes. Meiwes had videotaped the killing and consumption.
Meiwes had a taste for human flesh and met Brandes in an internet chatroom. The victim apparently consented to being tortured and killed.
Investigators searching Meiwes’ home found a two-hour video tape showing the pair cooking and attempting to eat Brandes’ severed penis with salt, pepper, wine and garlic, before Brandes was taken to a “slaughter room” withing the home, repeatedly stabbed in the throat and subsequently dismembered. Meiwes kept the remaining body parts in a freezer, sampling tidbits occasionally.
Accept kinky German dinner invitations with caution.
To his credit, Meiwes has subsequently expressed regret over his actions and has turned to vegetarianism while serving his prison sentence. Meiwes has spoken extensively about his fetish in an effort to deter others from following in his footsteps, and estimates there could be up to 800 active cannibals living in Germany alone.
This is hardly the first case of cannibalism in Hanover, the victim’s home city, nor the first to have police connections. Between 1918 and 1924, when he was executed by guillotine, Fritz Haarmann, a Hanover police informant, killed as many as 27 victims. His favoured methodology was to tear out the victim’s throat while sodomising him.
Then there was Karl Denke whose own records, following his arrest in 1924, showed that he had killed at least 42 people. He cured their flesh and sold some of it as pork in a local market. There was no exeution — Denke hung himself in his cell.
Centuries earlier there was Peter Stumpp, Werewolf of Bedburg, who is alleged to have been an “insatiable bloodsucker” who gorged on the flesh of goats, lambs, and sheep, as well as men, women, and children.
A wikipedia entry states:
“The execution of Stumpp, on October 31, 1589, and of his daughter and his mistress is one of the most brutal on record: He was put to a wheel, where “flesh was torn from his body”, in ten places, with red-hot pincers, followed by his arms and legs. Then his limbs were broken with the blunt side of an axehead to prevent him from returning from the grave, before he was beheaded and burned on a pyre. His daughter and mistress had already been flayed and strangled and were burned along with Stumpp’s body. As a warning against similar behavior, local authorities erected a pole with the torture wheel and the figure of a wolf on it, and at the very top they placed Peter Stumpp’s severed head.”
More recently was the Ruhr Cannibal, Joachim Georg Kroll. Between 1955 and 1976 he killed and ate body parts of 13 people, one of them only four years old. He ate his victims, he said, to save on grocery bills.
Convicted in 1982, Kroll finally died in 1991 of a heart attack in Rheinbach prison.