This is a list of incidents of cannibalism, or anthropophagy, the consumption of human flesh or internal organs by other human beings. Accounts of human cannibalism date back as far as prehistoric times, and some anthropologists suggest that cannibalism was common in human societies as early as the Paleolithic. Historically, various peoples and groups have engaged in cannibalism, although very few continue the practice to this day.
Occasionally, starving people have resorted to cannibalism for survival. Classical antiquity recorded numerous references to cannibalism during siege-related famines. More recent well-documented examples include the Essex sinking in 1820, the Donner Party in 1846 and 1847, and the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972. Some murderers, such as Boone Helm, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, and Jeffrey Dahmer, are known to have eaten parts of their victims after killing them. Other individuals, such as journalist William Seabrook and artist Rick Gibson, have legally consumed human flesh out of curiosity or to attract attention to themselves.
A maxilla from Gough's Cave with cut marks near the teeth
The 100,000-year-old bones of six Neanderthals found in the Moula-Guercy[es] Cave, France, had been broken by other Neanderthals in such a way as to extract marrow and brains. Finds made in the Sidrón Cave in Spain also show evidence of exocannibalism.[1]
Genetic studies have revealed a "powerful episode" of natural selection concurrent with the extinction of the Neanderthals.[2] Drawing on hundreds of studies in relation to the kuru disease which is only known to spread through cannibalism, researchers concluded that the 127V gene, which is known for resisting kuru-like diseases, indicates widespread cannibalism among early humans. If modern humans and Neanderthals, who co-existed at that time, both practised cannibalism, it is theorized this gene would have protected humans from such diseases, while Neanderthals, who might have lacked it, were more susceptible to them – a factor that might have contributed to their extinction.[3]
Human bones and skulls found in Gough's Cave in Somerset, England, show that around 15,000 years ago, ritual cannibalism was practised in Stone Age Britain.[4][5]
Phalaris, who from c.570 to 554 BCE ruled Greek-settled Agrigento in Sicily as a tyrant, reportedly consumed suckling babies.[6]
During the Peloponnesian War (5th century BCE), the Athenian siege of the Corinthian colony of Potidaea reduced its inhabitants to cannibalism, according to the Athenian historian Thucydides.[7]
During the First Mithridatic War (89–85 BCE), Roman general Sulla laid siege to Athens, which was loyal to Mithridates VI of Pontus at the time. Threatened by starvation, Athenians resorted to cannibalism both according to the classical writer Appian and modern archaeological efforts.[8]
In 409, the Visigoths under the command of Alaric I took control of the city of Rome by convincing the Romans to install Priscus Attalus as usurper instead of the legitimate emperor Honorius. In order to regain control, Honorius blockaded the city's ports, and in the resulting famine "some persons were suspected of having partaken of human flesh", as the historian Sozomen writes.[12] Angry at having lost the city, Alaric laid siege to Rome again, finally conquering and sacking it. According to St. Jerome's account, the siege led to another cruel famine, in which "the starving people had recourse to hideous food and tore each other limb from limb that they might have flesh to eat. Even the mother did not spare the babe at her breast." He also describes the sack as very brutal, claiming that "numberless" citizens were killed. Procopius likewise writes that "the Romans... being destroyed by hunger and other suffering... were tasting each other's flesh". Another contemporary historian, Orosius, "painted a very different picture, reporting that the sack involved little if any loss of life" and not mentioning any cannibalism. It is unclear which source is closer to the truth, but archaeological evidence shows that few buildings were destroyed, pointing to a relatively mild sack. On the other hand, the city's population shrank from 800,000 inhabitants before the sieges to less than half of that nine years later.[13]
In the sixth century, Emperor Wu of Liang (ruled 502–549) in Southern China allowed prisoners of war to be traded for food. They were "caged" and "whenever there was a demand for meat, some of them were taken out, cut, broiled and consumed".[14] A few years later, the usurper Hou Jing was defeated. Parts of his body were said to have been salted and distributed in the regions that had suffered the most from his wars, where they were boiled in stews and consumed by angry mobs.[14]
According to an account written a few years later, "at the end of the Sui dynasty (581–618 A.D.), there was a wealthy man named Zhuge Ang who was open and high-spirited". For one of his feasts, attended by "hundreds of guests", a "pair of teenage twin brothers" were boiled together with "pigs and sheep". On the basis of this and similar accounts, the Chinese author Zheng Yi concluded that "the rich competed in wealth, a sport that included competition over cannibalism" as one way of surprising one's guests with exotic novelty food.[15]
In 618–619, when the newly established Tang dynasty was fighting to take control of the whole country, rebel soldiers tried to conquer a district near Luoyang. The inhabitants resisted, and the siege situation led to famine and cannibalism on both sides. The rebel soldiers "took to abducting children, whom they steamed and ate." Their leader boldly declared: "Of all the delicious things to eat, none surpasses human flesh. As long as there are people in neighboring districts we have nothing to fear from famine." He is said to have used a large inverted bell with a capacity of 200 bushels (7cubic metres) to stew "the flesh of children and women", which was then divided among his officers and some of his 200,000 soldiers.[16]
After the Battle of Uhud (625), Hind bint Utba ate (or at least attempted to) the liver of Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, an uncle of Muhammad. At that time, the liver was considered "the seat of life".[17] While at that time Hind opposed the spread of Islam, she converted a few years later.
A severe famine in 698–700 was the first famine in Ireland for which the historian Cormac Ó Gráda found references to cannibalism. Cannibalism is also documented for a famine in 1116 and for several ones in the 16th and 17th centuries, including reports of little children being killed so they could be eaten.[18] He also found a few accounts pointing to the consumption of corpses in the Great Irish Famine in the late 1840, but concludes that in that famine cannibalism must have been rare, as there is very little "hard evidence" for it.[19]
During the prolonged siege of Suiyang in 757, the bodies of up to 30,000 civilians were reported to have been eaten by the city's defenders.[20]
In the immediate aftermath of the Harrying of the North in 1070, survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism to avoid starvation in the resulting famine.[21]
Archaeologists found evidence of cannibalism in a Native American tribe in what is now Colorado, dating to 1150.[24]
There is evidence that some Tibetan Buddhists ritualistically consumed pills made from the flesh of deceased people who were believed to have been born as Brahmins seven times, which could aid in attaining enlightenment.[25][26]
Numerous incidents of cannibalism were recorded during a severe drought of 1200–1201 in the Nile River region.[27] According to a detailed report by the Arab physician Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, the roasted or boiled bodies of young children, killed by kidnappers or their own parents, were eaten and sold as food; some older children and adults also fell victim to cannibalism. Though initially shocked, people became accustomed to such acts. Some even developed a liking for human flesh, which could also be found in elaborate dishes catering to the wealthy.[28]
The Mongols were reported by several European chroniclers such as Matthew Paris to have engaged in cannibalism. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine stated they did so only out of necessity, but Simon of Saint-Quentin believed they were also motivated by pleasure and a desire to instil fear into their enemies.[30] They invaded Hungary (Pannonia) and penetrated Austria almost to Vienna in 1241–1242. To the south of Vienna, they reached the Austrian town of Wiener Neustadt and devastated the countryside around it, torturing and eating civilians regardless of their age, sex, fortune, or class. According to Frenchman Ivo of Narbonne, who was in the town at that time, their soldiers ate old and deformed women right away, while virgin girls and beautiful women were gang-raped to death and then eaten; their breasts were cut off and served to the Mongol leaders as special delicacies.[31][32]
A Chinese writer who had lived through the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) likewise complained about their cannibalism, criticizing that Mongol soldiers did not hesitate to sacrifice civilians for their culinary pleasure: "Young children were the most appreciated; women came next and men last." He also criticized their cruelty, stating that victims were roasted alive (on iron grates) or boiled alive (by placing them "inside a double bag... which was put into a large pot"). Just like Ivo of Narbonne's, his account indicates that breasts were particularly prized – if there were more corpses around than needed, they were sometimes the only part of a woman's body that was eaten.[33] The Song Shi written during, as well as later chronicles written about the dynasty, also note that children and "the weak were killed and eaten" during war campaigns at that time.[33]
After his return from China in the late 13th century, Marco Polo wrote about the "kingdom of Fuzhou" in the south-east of the country that "they eat all manner of foul things and any kind of meat, including human flesh, which they devour with great relish. They will not touch someone who has died of natural causes, but if he has been stabbed to death or otherwise killed they eat him all up and consider it a great delicacy." Soldiers regularly drank the blood and ate the flesh of those they had killed, he added.[34]
In 1305, Giovanni do Aleramici, the marquess of Montferrat in Italy, died. Giovanni's personal doctor was suspected to have poisoned him and was subsequently stabbed to death by Giovanni's vassals, many of whom "ate his flesh", according to the chronicler Guglielmo Ventura.[35]
There are various reports of cannibalism during the Great Famine of 1315–1317 in Europe, including cases of desperate people killing and consuming their own family members.[36][37]
According to the 14th-century traveller Odoric of Pordenone, the inhabitants of Lamuri, a kingdom in northern Sumatra, purchased slave children from foreign merchants to "slaughter them in the shambles and eat them". Odoric states that the kingdom was wealthy and there was no lack of other food, suggesting that the custom was driven by a preference for human flesh rather than by hunger.[38]
In 1385, an anti-taxation riot broke out in Ferrara, Italy. In exchange for his own safety, the marquess turned over the man in charge of tax policies, Tommaso da Tortona, to the rioters. Da Tortona's heart and liver were torn out and eaten, while some other parts of his body were hung in the harbour as a warning.[39]
In 1437, a man from the village of Acquapendente in central Italy murdered a boy who had accidentally killed his son, and served the boy's cooked body parts to his father in an act of revenge. This led to a feud between the two families, which took the lives of 36 people during the following month.[40]
The Aztecs practised cannibalism in the context of human sacrifice, though there is debate about how widespread the practice was and disagreement about whether human flesh was a significant part of their diet.[43][44][45][46]
The Kalinago (Island Caribs) practised ritual cannibalism.[47]
In 1503, a group of Qizilbash militants ate the corpses of their enemies after taking over a fort in east Iran.[48]
On 21 July 1514, the captured Hungarian rebel leader György Dózsa was condemned to sit on a smouldering, heated iron throne, and forced to wear a heated iron crown and scepter (mocking his ambition to be king). While he was suffering, a procession of nine fellow rebels who had been starved beforehand were led to this throne. Next, executioners removed some pliers from a fire and forced them into Dózsa's skin. After tearing his flesh, the remaining rebels were ordered to bite spots where the hot pliers had been inserted and to swallow the flesh. The three or four who refused were simply cut up, prompting the others to comply. In the end, Dózsa died from the ordeal, while the rebels who obeyed were released.[49]
In 1521, two Frenchmen named Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun were executed for murder and lycanthropy after they admitted having killed and eaten six children while transformed into werewolves.[50]
From the 16th century on, an unusual form of medical cannibalism became widespread in several European countries, for which thousands of Egyptian mummies were ground up and sold as medicine. Powdered human mummy – called mummia – was thought to stop internal bleeding and to have other healing properties. The practice developed into a widespread business that flourished until the early 18th century. The demand was much higher than the supply of ancient mummies, leading to much of the offered "mummia" being counterfeit, made from recent Egyptian or European corpses – often from the gallows – instead. In a few cases, mummia was still offered in medical catalogues in the early 20th century.[53][54][55][56][57]
In 1563 French settlers from Charlesfort-Santa Elena Site are reported to have resorted to cannibalism while fleeing back to Europe.
French Catholics ate livers and hearts of Huguenots at the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572, in some cases also offering them for sale.[58][59] In Languedoc, Protestants took revenge by destroying the embalmed body of the 11th-century Catholic saint St. Fulcran at the Lodève Cathedral and eating his remains in a dinner mocking the Eucharist.[60] Jean de Léry unfavourably compared these events with the situation in South America, pointing out that the Tupinambá only ate their enemies, while in France family members and neighbours devoured each other because of religious differences.[61]
During the siege of Sancerre, France, in 1572–1573, some of the starving inhabitants resorted to cannibalism. In one household, Jean de Léry saw the dismembered body of a three-year-old girl; some parts were boiling in a pot on the fire, while others had apparently already been consumed. The girl's mother assured that the child had died of natural reasons.[62]
The so-called "Werewolf of Dole", Gilles Garnier, was executed in 1573 for strangling four children and eating their flesh.[63]
Peter Stumpp, nicknamed the "Werewolf of Bedburg", was executed in October 1589 after accusations of cannibalism and other crimes.
An unidentified man (his name may have been Nicolas Damont) was burned at the stake in 1598 for the murders of 50 children in the French town of Châlons-en-Champagne after their remains were found in his home, including several partially-eaten cuts of human flesh. He admitted to having abducted, killed, and eaten his victims during psychotic episodes but denied accusations by authorities that he had done so while transformed into a werewolf.[64]
A French teenager named Jean Grenier claimed in 1603 that he was a werewolf, confessing that he had killed and eaten various children who had recently gone missing near the town of Saint-Sever. He was found guilty and, due to his young age, sentenced to confinement for life.[65]
Settlers in colonial Jamestown, Virginia, resorted to cannibalism during a period from 1609 to 1610 known as the Starving Time.[66] After food supplies had diminished, some colonists began to dig up corpses for food. One man confessed under torture to having killed, salted, and eaten his pregnant wife; he was burned alive as punishment.[67][68] Cannibalism was confirmed in 2013 to have occurred in at least one case: the remains of a teenage girl of about fourteen years were forensically analysed and shown to have telltale marks consistent with butchering meat.[69][70]
In 1612, Polish troops stationed in the Moscow Kremlin resorted to cannibalism, in the aftermath of a prolonged siege.[71]
On 16 March 1649, French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf was taken captive with Gabriel Lalemant when the Iroquois destroyed the Huron mission village at Saint-Louis. The Iroquois took the priests to the occupied village of Taenhatenteron (also known as St. Ignace), where they subjected the missionaries and native converts to ritual torture before killing them. As part of the ritual, the Iroquois drank his blood and ate his heart.
According to Samuel Clarke's General Martyrology, Catholic troops massacred a considerable number of Protestants in the Piedmontese valleys in April 1655. Clarke asserts that his description of these events, which took place between the first (1651) and second (1660) editions of his book, is based on signed eyewitness accounts of French soldiers. One of them stated that his comrades had eaten "the boiled brains of the Protestants"; both brains and heart of a killed man were fried for consumption, according to another witness. A soldier reported that after a woman was raped, her breasts were cut off and parts of her genitals cut out. They were fried together and served to other unsuspecting soldiers as "tripes". A young girl, aged about ten, was impaled on a pike and roasted alive over an open fire; the soldiers then tried to eat her flesh but found it too poorly roasted.[73] A modern commentator warns that, since "martyrologies are a form of religious polemic... we shouldn't assume that the atrocities they depict happened" as described in every single case, but also notes that Clarke's book is a stark remainder of the "ingenious capacity of humans to inflict ever more horrible suffering upon their fellows", with massacres and cruel violence being a reality in many wars.[74]
The French pirate François l'Olonnais reportedly ate the heart of a Spanish prisoner he had captured near Puerto Cavallo in 1667 after the man refused to show him the way to San Pedro Sula.[75]
The accounts of the sinking of the Luxborough Galley in 1727 reported cannibalism among the survivors during their two weeks on a small boat in the mid-Atlantic.
The July 1737 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine contains a sworn account by two sailors, Thomas Thompson (born in Rhode Island) and Simon McCrone (born in Drogheda, Ireland), crew survivors from a slave-carrying ship, the Mary, lost at sea en route from Lisbon to Guinea. Their account covers the period from mid-1735, when they first set sail, to January 1736, when they were rescued. Glanveil Nicholas, master of a schooner, picked them up and landed them in Bridgetown, Barbados, where they gave their disposition. The men described in some detail how the ship sprung a leak; how the slaves were unchained to help pump; how the ship finally sank; how eight men abandoned the ship and how some of them later ate human flesh as a means of surviving before they were rescued.[80]
In June 1752, a group of Ottawa and Chippewa raided a British trade post at Fort Pickawillany. According to newspaper reports, they killed and partially ate at least one English trader and a chief of the Miami people, apparently as an act of revenge and in order to humiliate their enemies.[81]
When provisions became scarce during the Revolt of the Altishahr Khojas in 1757, Manchu soldiers under Qing general Zhaohui stationed in a barracks in Karasu, Yarkand, started to cook and eat Uyghur Muslims after butchering them. When the soldiers caught a married couple, they would first eat the man and gang-rape the woman, who was cooked and eaten the next day.[82][83]
French showman and soldier Tarrare (c.1772–1798) was a voracious eater repeatedly caught consuming corpses stolen from a morgue. He was also suspected of having eaten a toddler who disappeared without a trace.[84]
Polish soldier Charles Domery was a similarly insatiable eater, said to have consumed, among many other things, a considerable number of cats. While he served on a French ship in the 1790s, the leg of another sailor was shot off by cannon fire. Domery grabbed it and began to eat it raw until a crew member wrestled it from him and threw it into the sea.[85]
In an 1809 incident known as the Boyd massacre, about 66 passengers and crew of the Boyd were killed and eaten by Māori on the Whangaroa peninsula, in the north of New Zealand.
Following the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the ill-fated retreat saw some of Napoleon's soldiers resort to cannibalism when facing starvation in the Russian winter.
In 1816, the French frigate Méduse ran aground off Mauritania, and 147 passengers and crew took to sea on a hastily constructed raft. In the chaotic 13 days before they were rescued, the occupants of the raft were driven to suicide, murder, and cannibalism; only 15 men survived the experience, five of whom died soon afterwards.
1820s
A whale striking the Essex on 20 November 1820, depicted in a sketch by Thomas Nickerson
The Essex was sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean, in 1820. Most survivors of Captain Pollard's ship spent 90 days in small whaling boats before being rescued. Seven of the members who died during that time are documented to have been eaten, some after they died, while two others were sacrificed for that purpose after drawing lots. One of the small boats was found with two survivors sucking on the marrow of a human bone. The tale of the Essex was one of the events that inspired Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851).
In 1822, Alexander Pearce, an Irish convict, led an escape from Macquarie Harbour Penal Settlement in Van Diemen's Land (today Tasmania). Pearce was captured near Hobart and confessed that he and the other escapees had killed and cannibalized members of their group over a period of weeks, he being the last survivor.[86]
A French girl named Aimée Debully was raped and murdered by Antoine Léger in 1824. Léger then ate Debully's heart and performed acts of necrophilia on the body.
The 27 May 1826 issue of the Acadian Recorder reported that the surviving crew of the ship Francis Mary resorted to cannibalism.[87]
In 1827 in New Zealand, British painter Augustus Earle tried in vain to prevent the body of a murdered girl from being eaten. While staying in the Bay of Islands for a year, he had hired a 16-year-old Māori girl to take care of his household. Upon spotting the girl, a young man named Atoi claimed her to be a runaway slave and took her away with him. The next day, another European told Earle "that in the adjoining village a female slave... had been put to death, and that the people were at that very time preparing her flesh for cooking."[88][89] Earle went there and was horrified to spot the girl's severed head near an earth oven where a man was "preparing the four quarters of a human body for a feast". He went to Atoi, who confirmed that he had shot the girl for "running away from him" and that she would be eaten by him and his friends. Trying to prevent the cannibal meal, Earle fetched a few other white men who helped him to move the "half roasted" quarters of the girl out of the oven into a newly dug grave. But the next day, Te Whareumu, an influential relative of Atoi, rebuked him for doing such a "foolish thing" and pointed out that the girl had nevertheless been cooked and eaten, and indeed Earle found the grave empty upon returning there.[90][91]
1830s
During the 1833 Red Inn murder case, the Martin family, the proprietors of l'Auberge rouge (the Red Inn) in Ardèche, France, allegedly served some of their guests the cooked remains of people they had killed.[92]
In New Zealand in the 1830s, a European trader named Anscow saw how a 15-year-old slave girl was killed with a tomahawk in a Māori village, apparently as punishment for having been absent without permission. Her body was then dismembered, the flesh washed in the river, cooked and eaten. The next day, when Anscow moved on, some villagers insisted on accompanying him, carrying "small baskets" of the girl's cooked flesh, which they brought as gifts to a nearby village.[93][94] The unfortunate girl was one of a considerable number of slaves – most of them women and children – who were murdered and consumed in New Zealand up to the first half of the 19th century, either as punishment for perceived misbehaviours or to provide meat for "festive occasions such as coming-of-age or exhumation ceremonies".[95]
In 1837, a British cruiser captured the Portuguese schooner Arrogante, which had tried to bring several hundred West African slaves to Cuba, circumventing the British blockade. More than 60 Africans had died of hunger and diseases during the crossing, and the rest were severely undernourished. Many of the survivors reported "that one of the Africans on board the Arrogante had been murdered, and that, subsequently, the sailors had cooked pieces of his body and served them with rice to the rest of the Africans."[96] Half a dozen witnesses had seen "how the Portuguese sailors took Mina behind a sail that they had put up across the deck to stop the rest of the Africans from witnessing what was about to happen." One "who had peeped through the holes in the sail... described how they cut Mina's throat 'with a long knife'".[97] Several enslaved girls saw how "the flesh of Mina had been cut into small pieces and... cooked in the big pot destined for the Africans." One of them added "that the sailors had also cooked the liver and heart of Mina in their own smaller pot, and then had eaten those parts themselves", and another witness confirmed this observation.[98]
The British colonial authorities in Jamaica decided not to press charges against any of the Portuguese sailors, mostly based on the argument that they considered the ship's captain – who was known to have directed at least six slave voyages – too "inoffensive" to be capable "of such a horrible transaction".[99] Observing that this was not the only case where accusations of "White cannibalism" by Black victims of the slave trade were dismissed, the author of the paper investigating the case concludes that, "sheltered by distance, isolation, and lawlessness while at sea, other similar instances may have indeed taken place between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries".[100]
An ex-voto painting at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Tal-Ħerba in Birkirkara, Malta, dated 29 March 1840 depicts the crew of a ship being massacred in an unknown West African location by pygmies who appear to be cannibals. They are depicted as drinking the blood of three beheaded crew members, while five other people are still alive and awaiting a similar fate. It is unclear if the crew were from a British ship[102] or a Maltese brigantine.[103] The painting was commissioned or possibly painted by Michele Cachia, who might have been the sole survivor, and he attributed his survival to divine intervention.[102][103]
In the 1840s in Sumatra, a Batakraja served the German-Dutch botanist and geologist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn a soup containing the flesh of freshly slaughtered captives. The host was genuinely surprised to learn that Europeans did not like to eat human flesh, which in Sumatra was widely praised as particularly tasty. At that time, captured enemies and convicted criminals were generally eaten, and some wealthy men bought slaves for fattening and consumption.[105][106]
In the United States, the group of settlers known as the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism while snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains, for the winter of 1846–1847.
Clergyman Sabine Baring-Gould, in his 1865 book The Book of Were-Wolves, Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition, recorded an 1849 case in which a vagrant named Swiatek was arrested in the Galician village of Połomia for murdering a 14-year-old girl and eating parts of her body. Swiatek also admitted to having killed and eaten five other people since 1846, although evidence was found of up to fourteen victims. He claimed that he had developed a taste for human flesh three years previously after hunger obliged him to eat the body of a man killed in a tavern fire.[107] Baring-Gould also recorded another case from the same year in which a French graverobber named Bertrand was sentenced to one year's imprisonment after admitting that he had spent the past three years partially devouring corpses he had dug up from Parisian cemeteries.[108]
1850s
Boone Helm, also known as "The Kentucky Cannibal", was an American mountain man, serial killer, and fugitive, who ate human flesh on several occasions between 1850 and 1854, often out of necessity in extreme conditions. He made no secret of the fact and is reported to have said: "Many's the poor devil I've killed, at one time or another – and the time has been that I've been obliged to feed on some of 'em."
In 1858, a French ship, the Saint Paul, carrying 300 Chinese "coolies" destined for Australia, became shipwrecked on Rossel Island east of New Guinea. According to the testimony of survivors, the majority of the Chinese were killed and eaten by the native islanders over the course of three months.[109][110]
1860s
The eight persons found guilty of murdering and eating a girl in a Vodou ritual in Haiti, 1864
In the United States, ten survivors, found nearly two months after the Utter Party Massacre of 1860 – an attack against a group of emigrants on the Oregon Trail – had eaten five deceased party members.[111]
In February 1864, eight Haitians – four men and four women – were convicted to death and executed for having murdered and cannibalized a girl in a Vodou ritual held in a village near Port-au-Prince. Accounts of the trial vary regarding the girl's age – reported to range from seven to twelve – but are otherwise largely in agreement. The niece of one of the men was kidnapped while her mother was away, and a few days later "strangled, flayed, decapitated and dismembered" in a sacrificial ritual allegedly held to make her uncle wealthy. Her remains were then cooked and eaten, with some evidence indicating that more than the eight people found guilty might have eaten her flesh. There are two other accounts of cannibalistic Vodou ceremonies by self-claimed eyewitnesses from the 1870s and 1880s, but their reliability is disputed.[112]
In November 1874, three British sailors survived by committing cannibalistic acts in the aftermath of theCospatrickdisaster.[113]
Alfred Packer was an American prospector who was accused of cannibalism during the winter of 1873–1874. First tried for murder, Packer was eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison after being convicted of manslaughter.[114][115]
1880s
The Flatters expedition of 1880–1881 was a doomed attempt to explore the route of a proposed Trans-Saharan railway from Algeria to the Sudan. Many members of the expedition were massacred by hostile Tuaregs at Bir el-Garama in February 1881. Of the expedition's 93 men, 37 were killed by the Tuaregs, who also seized over 200 camels. The 56 survivors, including four Frenchmen, began a 1,500 kilometres (930mi) retreat by foot to Ouargla with little food or water. Continuously stalked by the Tuaregs, they resorted to cannibalism on the long retreat through the desert. Only seven of them survived.
The case of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) is an English case which dealt with four crew members of an English yacht, the Mignonette, who were cast away in a storm some 1,600 miles (2,600km) from the Cape of Good Hope. After several days, one of the crew, a 17-year-old cabin boy, fell unconscious due to a combination of starvation and drinking seawater. The others (one possibly objecting) decided to kill and eat him. They were picked up four days later. Two of the three survivors were found guilty of murder. A significant outcome of this case was that necessity was determined to be no defence against a charge of murder.
In May 1888, the Scottish whiskey heir James Sligo Jameson, while participating in the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, allegedly paid an associate of the slave trader Tippu Tip to procure a young slave girl who was then killed and eaten in front of them. In his diary, Jameson admitted that he saw the event and made drawings of it, and even that he paid for the girl, but claimed that he considered the whole affair a joke and did not expect her to be actually killed.
Presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old at the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward, and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell. Until the last moment, I could not believe that they were in earnest... that it was anything save a ruse to get money out of me... When I went home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory, not that it is ever likely to fade from it. No one here seemed to be in the least astonished at it.[116]
Jameson's diary also shows that he was well informed of cannibal customs and had even seen remains of a cannibal meal, making his line of defence doubtful.[117] The interpreter Assad Farran accused him of having deliberately instigated the murder out of curiosity, and Henry Morton Stanley finally decided to inform the European and American press. The resulting bad publicity likely contributed to the fact that privately organized, non-scientific expeditions into Africa ceased after that time.[118]
During October 1888, during the investigation of the Whitechapel murders, George Lusk received a letter alongside half a preserved human kidney. The letter's writer claimed to be the serial killer Jack the Ripper, and claimed to have fried and eaten the other half of the kidney.
1890s
Girls held captive shortly before being killed and eaten at a feast held for Rodolphe Festetics de Tolna on Malaita (Solomon Islands) in the 1890s
A report dated 28 July 1892 indicates that three people were convicted on charges of cannibalism in the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin. Two songs referencing cannibalism were also recorded among the residents of the colony.[119]
In the 1890s, five or six young slave women and girls were butchered for a cannibal feast held in honour of the French count Rodolphe Festetics de Tolna and his crew on the occasion of their visit to Malaita, one of the Solomon Islands. The count took their photo shortly before they were killed. He does not say whether he ate any of their flesh, but admits to having eaten human flesh on one or two other occasions.[120][121]
During the Congo Arab war of 1892–1894, native Batetela troops allied with Belgian commander Francis Dhanis engaged in widespread cannibalism of the bodies of defeated Arab-Swahili soldiers, supposedly eating hundreds in a few days.[122] During the subsequent reign of the Congo Free State, cannibalism was widespread among native soldiers of the Force Publique, with European officials repeatedly turning a blind eye to "cannibal feasts" which followed punitive raids against villages unable to meet their rubber quota.[123] Several accounts indicate that officials handed captives, including infants and elderly women, over to native soldiers or allies, understanding that they would be killed and eaten[124][125] and that they looked away when slaves were sold as a source of meat.[126] Free State official Guy Burrows once rescued a young slave boy from being killed and served as the pièce de résistance at a banquet planned by his master; Burrows then talked with a colleague who had been aware of the planned banquet but had seen no reason to bother as this custom was practised in many of the surrounding villages.[127]
In the late 19th century, the German travel writer Stefan von Kotze[de] got himself invited to a cannibal feast in New Ireland, one of the largest islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. The main course was a young woman purchased by the host; Kotze himself contributed financially to the feast, thus effectively helping to pay for her purchase (and murder). He did not see how the woman was killed but watched while her flesh was roasted, some parts in an earth oven and the rest on spits over an open fire. The piece he was served reminded him of "foie gras pâté". According to his own account, seeing it made him feel so nauseous that he did not eat it, though he had intended to do so.[128]
When travelling through southeastern Guinea in 1899, a German marine lieutenant named Woelffel heard that killed and captured enemies were still frequently eaten. At one place he gifted his hosts a bar of salt to express his gratitude. They immediately slaughtered a girl and ate her body with some of the salt in order to make good use of the gift. The girl, apparently a captive made to work the fields, had become dispensable since the season of field work was over, they explained.[129]
During the Bailundo revolt of 1902–1904, a group of Ovimbundu rebels murdered a "particularly hated" merchant named António de Silveira, then roasted and consumed his body. Besides revenge, a goal of the ceremony might have been to produce "success magic" for the rebellion.[131]
On 27 March 1902, the body of 11-year-old Sosuke Kawai was found in Tokyo, Japan, with his eyeballs gouged out and pieces of flesh from his buttocks missing. His supposed murderer, Otokosaburo Noguchi, who was arrested three years later for an unrelated murder, claimed that he had boiled the boy's muscle tissues and served them in chicken soup to his ill brother-in-law, ostensibly to cure his leprosy.[132]
Seven-year-old Bernardo Gonzalez Parra was kidnapped and murdered by Francisco Leona and several others in June 1910 in southeastern Spain. A man named Francisco Ortega had ordered the murder so he could drink the boy's blood and use his body fat as cataplasm, as this was considered a folk cure for tuberculosis.[133]
An elderly Iraqi couple named Abboud and Khajawa murdered one adult neighbour and more than a hundred young children in Mosul in 1917, then cooked and ate or sold their remains. They blamed their cannibalism on a famine that had been brought about by the inflation of the country's currency. Both were executed that same year.[134]
The crew members of the US steamship Dumaru spent three weeks adrift in a lifeboat, after the ship exploded and sank in the western Pacific Ocean on 16 October 1918. Quickly exhausting their supply of food and water, they resorted to cannibalism to survive.[135]
In Germany, Fritz Haarmann, also called the "Butcher of Hanover", sexually assaulted and murdered at least 24 boys, most of them teenagers, between 1918 and 1924. He regularly sold boneless ground meat on the black market and gave different and contradictory explanations about the origin of this meat. Suspicions that this was his way of getting rid of some of the mortal remains of his victims were never definitively confirmed, nor refuted.[136]
During the Russian famine of 1921–1922, "thousands of cases" of cannibalism were reported.[137] In Samara, "ten butcher shops were closed for selling human flesh."[138] In Pugachyov, "it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh." An inhabitant of a nearby village stated: "There are several cafeterias in the village — and all of them serve up young children."[139] The historian Orlando Figes estimates "that a considerable proportion of the meat in Soviet factories in the Volga area... was human flesh", often from kidnapped children.[140] Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the famine as the worst since centuries, even worse than the Russian famine of 1601–1603 during the Time of Troubles.[141]
After Karl Denke was arrested on 21 December 1924, German authorities found pieces of cured human flesh in his home, along with a list of more than 30 people he had previously killed and cannibalized.
On 19 December 1926, fisherman Eli Kelly washed up on Santa Catalina Island (California) after being lost at sea for 11 days. He had partially subsisted on the flesh of his fishing companion James McKinley who died naturally (of dehydration or starvation) during the ordeal.[142]
Between July 1924 and June 1928, the American serial killer Albert Fish murdered at least three children, afterwards roasting and eating their flesh. "How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven", he wrote about one of his victims, ten-year-old Grace Budd, adding that "It took me 9 days to eat her entire body".[143] Another of his victims, four-year-old Billy Gaffney, he confessed to having eaten completely "in about four days", cooking the meat with "onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper". He described the boy's "sweet fat little behind" as far tastier than "any roast turkey".[144] Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham stated that Fish's account of the culinary process was "like a housewife describing her favorite methods of cooking. You had to remind yourself that this was a little girl he was talking about."[145] Fish claimed that a friend had introduced him to cannibalism after getting used to eating children's flesh during a severe famine in Hong Kong in the 1890s, though the police could not verify this.[143]
Before 1931, New York Times reporter William Seabrook, allegedly in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy man killed in an accident, then cooked and ate it.[146] He reported:
It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.[147]
Seabrook might have eaten human flesh also on another occasion. Originally he had implied that he had eaten it during a trip to West Africa, and when this claim turned out wrong (and he had not yet dared reveal the hospital story), he was much mocked for it. According to his autobiography, the wealthy socialite Daisy Fellowes one day invited him to one of her garden parties, stating "I think you deserve to know what human flesh really tastes like". During the party, which was attended by about a dozen guests (some of them well-known), a piece of supposedly human flesh was grilled and eaten with much pomp. Seabrook comments that, while he never found out "the real truth" behind this meal, it "looked and tasted exactly" like the human flesh he had eaten before.[148]
Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was 'not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you'. The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died... At least 2,505 people were sentenced for cannibalism in the years 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, though the actual number of cases was certainly much higher.[152]
Cannibalism also occurred in the parallel famine in Kazakhstan, which was another part of the widespread Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Some of the starving consumed corpses, while others committed murders in order to get meat. Villagers "discovered people among them who ate body parts and killed children" and a survivor remembered how he repeatedly saw "a little foot float[ing] up, or a hand, or a child's heel" in cauldrons boiling over a fire.[153][154]
In May 1933, about 6,700 Soviet prisoners were deported to a Siberian island and there abandoned with scant supplies and virtually no clothing, shelter, or tools, resulting in widespread disease, violence, and cannibalism. This episode became known as the Nazino tragedy, after the name of the island.
On 9 December 1934, grave robber and suspected serial killer Alonzo Robinson was arrested for the axe-slaying of a couple in their Cleveland, Mississippi home. Salted and cured portions of the woman's flesh, with bite marks, were found in his pockets.[155]
An Italian woman named Leonarda Cianciulli killed three women in 1939 and 1940, turning their bodies into teacakes which she fed to others as well as consumed herself.
1940s
Finnish soldiers show the skin of Russian soldiers eaten by members of a Soviet patrol during the Continuation War
There are eyewitness accounts of cannibalism during the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944), including reports of people cutting off and eating their own flesh.[157]
In November 1942, Finnish soldiers discovered the remains of a Soviet partisan, butchered and eaten by his comrades near Lake Segozero. There are also accounts of cannibalism in Karelia during the 1920s Heimosodat wars.
Following the German surrender at the Battle of Stalingrad in January and February 1943, roughly 100,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner of war (POW). Almost all of them were sent to POW camps in Siberia or Central Asia where, due to being chronically underfed by their Soviet captors, many resorted to cannibalism.[158]
The Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, led by prosecutor William Webb, collected numerous written reports and testimonies that documented Japanese soldiers' acts of cannibalism among their own troops, on enemy dead, and on Allied prisoners of war in many parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In September 1942, Japanese daily rations in New Guinea consisted of 800grams of rice and tinned meat. However, by December, this had fallen to 50grams.[164] According to historian Yuki Tanaka, "cannibalism was often a systematic activity conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers".[165] In some cases, flesh was cut from living people. An Indian POW, Lance Naik Hatam Ali, testified that in New Guinea
the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this happen and about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese. The remainder of us were taken to another spot 50 miles [80km] away where 10 prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died.[166]
Another well-documented case occurred in Chichijima in February 1945, when Japanese soldiers killed and consumed five American airmen. This case was investigated in 1947 in a war crimes trial, and of 30 Japanese soldiers prosecuted, five (among them General Yoshio Tachibana) were found guilty and hanged.[167]
In early 1945, Japanese soldiers gave Korean forced labourers on Mili Atoll, Marshall Islands, "whale meat" to consume, which was actually human flesh from other dead Koreans. Upon realizing what had occurred, the enraged Koreans staged a rebellion that was eventually put down, which resulted in around 55 deaths.[168][169][170][171]
1950s
In 1950, a Belgian administrator ate a "remarkably delicious" dish in the Belgian Congo, made with "the meat... from a young girl", as he found out after eating.[172] A few years later, a Danish traveller was served a piece of the "soft and tender" flesh of a butchered woman.[173]
In Nyasaland (today Malawi) in the 1950s, a European shopping for meat for his Christmas dinner was offered "two well-fattened children".[174]
German serial killer Joachim Kroll, nicknamed the "Duisburg Man-Eater", practised cannibalism from the mid-1950s until his arrest more than 20 years later,[175] murdering probably more than a dozen women and girls. When he was arrested, parts of the body of four-year-old Marion Ketter, his last victim, were in his freezer, while a small hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water.[176]
A tradition of ritualistic cannibalism among the Fore people caused a kuru epidemic, leading to approximately 1000 deaths between 1957 and 1961.[177]
Thousands of cases of cannibalism are associated with the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961 that chiefly resulted from the Great Leap Forward. While the government downplays the events and treats the famine as a natural rather than a human-made disaster, the journalists Yang Jisheng and Jasper Becker provide many detailed reports in their books Tombstone[178][179] and Hungry Ghosts.[180]
1960s
In 1961 in Uganda, the anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton (author of Sick Societies) was offered smoked human fingers as well as "a smoked slab of a young woman's buttocks, a truly 'choice cut'", according to the seller.[181]
In the summer of 1963, Josef Kulík from Czechoslovakia (at that time serving compulsory military service) killed two young boys in a railway wagon. He cut their bodies open, roasted some of their internal organs on a fire, and ate them. He used some old funeral wreaths he had found near the wagon for fuel.[183][184]
On 13 July 1970, police arrested Stanley Baker on charges of killing and cannibalizing a Montana, US, resident.[188]
In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed on a glacier in Argentina at 3,570 metres (11,710ft) altitude. They had only eight chocolate bars, a tin of mussels, three small jars of jam, a tin of almonds, a few dates, candies, dried plums, and several bottles of wine which they made last a week. Eight days after the crash on 13 October 1972, they learned that the search had been terminated. The remaining survivors, including the rugby team from Stella Maris College in Montevideo and some of their family members and other passengers, mutually agreed to cannibalism. They were rescued after 72 days on 22 December. The story of the survivors was chronicled in Piers Paul Read's 1974 memoir, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974), in a film adaptation titled Alive (1993), and in various other books and films.
Also in 1972, at the same time as the Andean incident, Marten Hartwell crashed his aircraft near the Arctic Circle in Canada's Northwest Territories. The three passengers died in the month it took searchers to find them, but Hartwell survived by eating part of one body.
Between 1970 and 1973, Lester Harrison raped and murdered between four and six women in Chicago's Grant Park area. After his arrest, he confessed that he had cut off a piece of flesh from one of the victims' bodies, which he brought back to his home and ate.[189]
In 1977 and 1978, the "Vampire of Sacramento" Richard Chase ate parts of his victims and drank their blood to treat his imaginary illnesses.
On 20 August 1979, Albert Fentress lured, killed and cannibalized an 18-year-old high school student.[190]
8-year-old Tiffany Papesh was abducted in Maple Heights, Ohio on 2 July 1980. Brandon Flagner, the man convicted of her murder, later told the FBI that he had dismembered her and eaten parts of her body after killing her, although his confession has been disputed.[192]
On 11 June 1981, Issei Sagawa murdered a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt by shooting her in the neck with a rifle in his home in Paris. After having sex with the corpse, he began to eat parts of it, starting with the buttocks and thighs. A few days later, he was discovered while attempting to dump the mutilated body into a lake and subsequently arrested. At his trial in France, he was found to be legally insane and ordered to be held indefinitely in a mental institution. Soon afterwards, Japanese author Inuhiko Yomota published his memoirs, including a detailed account of the murder. The book was a bestseller and Sagawa became a minor celebrity. A short while later he was extradited to Japan, where mental health professionals announced that he was perfectly sane. Because the French authorities did not hand the court documents over to Japan, he was not tried again but instead released in 1986. He moved to Tokyo, where he made a living as a freelance writer.[193]
Ladislav Hojer, a serial killer from Czechoslovakia, confessed to killing a young woman in 1981. He cut off her breasts and vulva and tried to eat the latter with mustard, after boiling it in salty water. He later admitted he had thrown part of it away because of its underwhelming taste.[194]
Michael Woodmansee was convicted in 1983 of kidnapping and killing 5-year-old Jason Foreman in 1975 in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. According to the victim's father, Woodmansee wrote in his journal that he ate the boy's flesh.[195]
In April 1986, a married couple in Beijing killed a teenage boy. They then ate his flesh, also sharing some of it with their neighbours, who were told it was camel meat. After their arrest, they confessed to two prior murders of young men likewise followed by cannibalism. They stated they had gotten used to eating human flesh during a time of starvation and had murdered out of a longing for its taste.[196]
In May 1986, American Hadden Clark killed and cannibalized 6-year-old Michelle Dorr.
In November 1986, American Gary M. Heidnik abducted six women. After one of the women died, he allegedly fed the other victims a combination of dog food and human flesh.
Bovine testicles offered for sale on an Italian market. Artist Rick Gibson repeatedly preferred eating human testicles instead.
In 1988, artist Rick Gibson tried to eat a slice of human testicle in Vancouver in 1989 but was stopped by the police.[197] However, the charge was dropped and he finally ate a testicle hors d'œuvre in Vancouver, in 1989.[198]
On 19 August 1989, New York City resident Daniel Rakowitz stabbed Monika Beerle to death in their apartment. He then boiled and ate her brains before distributing food containing her body parts to the homeless.
1990s
Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, murdered 17 young men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Following his arrest, he told police that he had cut up the thighs, biceps, and internal organs of three of his victims and cooked them in a stovetop skillet before consuming them. He claimed they tasted like filet mignon.[199]
In November 1991, newlywed Omaima Aree Nelson murdered, dismembered, and cannibalized her husband, William E. "Bill" Nelson, in their Costa Mesa, California, home. Pathology reports indicate he was still alive when she began butchering his body, in a manner that court and media reports interpreted as ritualistic. She boiled and cooked his head in the oven, ate its flesh, and stored the foil-wrapped skull in the freezer. She skinned his torso and deep-fried his hands in oil. She also tasted his ribs after cooking them and dipping them in barbecue sauce.[200][201][202][203]
Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer born in Soviet Ukraine, experienced killing and cannibalism as paraphilia. He was convicted for murdering more than 50 women and children in 1992 and executed two years later.[204][205]
The Chijon family was a South Korean gang that engaged in cannibalism between 1993 and 1994.[206]
On 21 February 1995, 21-year-old Brazilian farmer Marinaldo de Alcântara Silva killed his own mother, 54-year-old Raimunda Soares Alcântara Silva, with a knife and ate some parts of her face, before being shot dead by a soldier in Castanhal II, Belém, Brazil. Earlier, he wanted to kill a watchman from the Secretaria Estadual de Agricultura's building, Domingos Souza, but was prevented by his mother. Silva then threatened to set his family's hut on fire. His mother attempted to calm him down, but he stabbed her in the face, decapitated her, tore off her eyes, lips, nose and tongue, and ate the pieces. José Lima Soares, Silva's brother-in-law, called the police. Silva resisted arrest and was shot in the thigh, dying of haemorrhage. Before being shot, he injured a soldier, Miguel Gurjão.[207]
Child molester Nathaniel Bar-Jonah was suspected of abducting, murdering and cannibalizing 10-year-old Zach Ramsay in February 1996. Bar-Jonah, who had sexual fantasies about eating human flesh, possessed a journal written in code which, when decoded, was found to contain a number of recipes for cooking and eating children. Neighbours recalled that he often hosted barbecues where he served "funny-tasting meat" that he claimed to have personally hunted despite never going hunting.[208] He also had not made any grocery purchases in the month after Ramsay's disappearance[209] and human hair and body tissue that was not his was found in his meat grinder.[210]
Alexander Spesivtsev killed and partially ate at least four young girls in Novokuznetsk, Russia. His mother assisted him and cooked the victims' flesh. Following their arrest in October 1996 and subsequent trial, Spesivtsev was permanently sent to a psychiatric hospital, while his mother was sentenced to a prison term.[211][212]
Notorious Liberian ex-rebel and warlord Joshua Blahyi confessed in 2008 to having participated during the First Liberian Civil War (1989–1997) in various human sacrifices, which "included the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for us to eat". There had already been many rumours of such sacrifices during the war, but he was the first person to publicly admit having partaken in them while fighting against the militia of Liberian president Charles Taylor.[213] During the same war crimes trial, Joseph Marzah, Taylor's chief of operations and head of his alleged "death squad", accused Taylor of ordering his soldiers to commit acts of cannibalism against enemies, including peacekeepers and United Nations personnel.[214]
Between 1997 and 1998, Mikhail Malyshev murdered at least two acquaintances and cannibalized their remains at his apartment in Perm, Russia. He was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment with two years time served for these murders and multiple counts of animal cruelty, and was released in October 2022 after serving out his sentence in full.[216]
In March 1999, in Indonesia, more than 200 (according to estimations) Madurese people were beheaded and eaten by Dayaks when an ethnic conflict erupted into violence.[217][218]
A court submission at the trial of perpetrators of the Snowtown murders in South Australia revealed that two of the murderers fried and ate a part of their final victim in 1999.[219]
Dorángel Vargas, also known as el comegente (Spanish for "people-eater"), was a Venezuelan serial killer and cannibal who killed and ate at least ten men in a period of two years preceding his arrest in 1999.
On 13 August 1999, Kazakhstani authorities arrested three male psychiatric nurses on charges of killing and eating seven prostitutes.[220]
2000s
In February 2000, Katherine Knight killed her partner John Price and cooked his corpse, later preparing to serve it to his children.[221]
On 11 March 2000, Igor Churasov and Gennady Shurmanov were arrested for murdering seven people in Ryazan, Russia, from 1997 to 2000. It was later revealed that Churasov dismembered some of the victims' corpses and ate parts of them. Both men were found incompetent to stand trial for reasons of insanity and instead committed to a psychiatric hospital.[222]
The Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu cooked and ate what he claimed to be a human fetus in a controversial performance entitled "Eating People" at an arts festival in Shanghai in 2000. When pictures of it began to circulate on the Internet one year later, both the FBI and Scotland Yard started investigations into the matter.[223][224][225] Zhu claimed that "no religion forbids cannibalism, nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people", and said that he "took advantage of the space between morality and the law", publicly performing an act that is widely considered immoral but not actually illegal.[223] Whether he ate an actual fetus is unclear.[223] He claims to have cooked and eaten a six-month-old aborted fetus stolen from a medical school,[224][225] but others maintain that the "fetus" might have been a prop, possibly constructed by placing a doll's head on a duck carcass.[223][226][227]
In February–March 2001 in Indonesia, violence between Dayaks and Madurese erupted again during the Sampit conflict, with various reports indicating that body parts, including the hearts, of Madurese victims were eaten.[228][229]
In March 2001 in Germany, Armin Meiwes posted an Internet ad seeking a young man willing to be slaughtered and eaten. The ad was answered by Bernd Jürgen Brandes. Meiwes stabbed Brandes in the neck with a kitchen knife, kissing him first, then chopping him up into several pieces. He placed several pieces of Brandes in the freezer. Over the next few weeks, Meiwes defrosted and cooked parts of Brandes in olive oil and garlic and eventually consumed 20kg of human flesh. Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter in 2004.[230] A retrial in 2006 found Meiwes guilty of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.[231] Three songs, "Mein Teil" by Rammstein, "Eaten" by Bloodbath, and "Armin Meiwes" by SKYND, are based on this case.
In April 2001 in Kansas City, Kansas, United States, Marc Sappington went on a murder spree and was subsequently convicted of murdering four acquaintances. He gained notoriety for eating part of the leg of one of his victims, Alton "Fred" Brown.
In July 2002, four Ukrainians were arrested in Kyiv for killing and eating a teenage girl. They were suspected of killing at least six people.[232]
In late 2002, Russian brothers Denis and Evgenyi Gorin were arrested for killing an acquaintance in Aniva, Sakhalin Oblast, and then eating the soft tissues of his body. Both served minor prison sentences and killed at least three people after release, with Denis eating parts of one victim.[233]
In a 2003 drug-related case, the rapper Big Lurch was convicted of the murder and partial consumption of an acquaintance while both were under the influence of PCP.[234]
In 2003 and 2004, South Korean serial killer Yoo Young-chul murdered a total of 21 people, eating the livers of several of his victims.[235]
In February 2004, 34-year-old Peter Bryan from East London was caught after he killed his friend Brian Cherry and ate parts of his brain, fried in butter. He had been arrested for murder previously but was released shortly before this act was committed. For the murder of Cherry, Bryan was sentenced to life imprisonment, despite his claim of diminished responsibility.[236][237] In January 2006, his sentence was revised to a minimum of 15 years.[238]
The Korowai people of south-eastern Papua could be one of the last ethnic groups in the world still engaging in cannibalism.[239] Some suspect, however, that such reports are exaggerated to attract the interest of tourists.[240]
Between 2005 and 2006, Surinder Koli allegedly killed at least nineteen people, most of them young girls, in Uttar Pradesh, India. Koli's employer was also convicted for involvement in two of the murders. Various media reported that Koli had eaten parts of the murdered children, but the police were "cautious" regarding such rumours, not ruling out the possibility due to the "barbarous brutalities" with which the murders had been committed, but refusing to positively confirm it.[241] In a retrial in 2023, the two accused were acquitted of all charges due to a lack of convincing evidence other than their own confessions, much to the dismay of the victims' families.[242]
On 5 January 2007, French authorities reported that a prison inmate committed cannibalism on a cellmate, in the city of Rouen.[243]
On 13 January 2007, Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party where the main course was agnolotti pasta that was topped with a meatball made from his own fat, removed some time before in a liposuction operation.[244]
At least 29 albino Tanzanians were murdered between March 2007 and November 2008 out of a "belief that potions made from an albino's legs, hair, hands, and blood can make a person rich".[245][246] In one case, a group of men cut off the legs of a young albino child before slitting the child's throat, and then they drank the fresh blood. Another man was arrested while transporting an albino baby's head to a witch doctor who had offered to pay for it.[246]
On 14 September 2007, Özgür Dengiz was arrested in Ankara, the Turkish capital, after killing and eating a man. After cutting slices of flesh from his victim's body, Dengiz distributed the rest to stray dogs on the street, according to his own testimony. He ate some of the man's flesh raw on his way home. Dengiz, who lived with his parents, arrived at the family house and placed the remaining parts of the body in the refrigerator without saying a word to his parents.[247][248]
On 8 October 2007, Mexican police arrested José Luis Calva for murdering his girlfriend. Numerous pieces of human flesh were discovered in his house, some of them already cooked.
On 2 May 2008, it was announced that the British model Anthony Morley had been arrested for the murder, dismemberment and partial cannibalization of his lover, magazine executive Damian Oldfield. Police believed that Morley killed Oldfield, who worked for the gay lifestyle magazine Bent, after inviting him into his flat in Leeds, England. He then removed a section of his leg and began cooking it, before he stumbled into a nearby kebab house around 2:30 in the morning, drenched in blood and asking that someone call the police. He was found guilty on 17 October 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment.[249]
Members of a Satanist youth gang killed four teenagers (three girls and a boy) in Satanic rituals in the Russian Yaroslavl region in 2008.[250] After killing their victims, they beheaded the corpses, ate their tongues, breasts, and hearts, and had sex with the corpses. Nikolai Ogolobyak, who had been an adult at the time of the murders, was sentenced to 20 years in a penal colony. Several minors who had also been involved received sentences of 8–10 years or were sent to mental institutions.[251] In 2023, Ogolobyak was pardoned after having volunteered to fight in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[250][251]
On 30 July 2008, Tim McLean, a 22-year-old Canadian man, was stabbed, beheaded and cannibalized while riding a Greyhound Canada bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. According to witnesses, McLean was sleeping with his headphones on when the man sitting next to him, Vincent Li, pulled a large knife out of his backpack and began stabbing him in the neck and chest. The attacker then decapitated McLean, severed other body parts, and consumed some of McLean's flesh.
In a documentary by Colombian journalist Hollman Morris, a demobilized paramilitary confessed that during the mass killings that took place in Colombia's rural areas, many of the paras performed cannibalism. He also confessed that they were told to drink the blood of their victims in the belief that it would make them want to kill more.[252]
In November 2008, a group of five undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic, who were en route to Puerto Rico, ate the flesh of starved companions after being lost at sea for over 15 days. They were finally rescued by a US Coast Guard patrol boat.[253]
In February 2009, it was reported that five members of the Kulina tribe in Brazil were wanted by Brazilian authorities on the charge of murdering, butchering, and eating a farmer in a ritual act of cannibalism.[254]
In April 2009, two men from the city of Perm, Russia, killed and ate their brother.[255]
On 28 April 2009, Angelo Mendoza Sr attacked his 4-year-old son, eating the boy's left eye and damaging the boy's right eye. Angelo Mendoza Jr. told authorities "my daddy ate my eyes", when they came to the scene. Mendoza was charged with mayhem, torture, child cruelty, and inflicting an injury to a child, and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.[256]
In October 2012, Japanese authorities convicted three men for killing and eating a man to whom they owed money in 2009.[257]
On 26 July 2009, a woman was found in San Antonio, Texas, in a hysterical state, after having killed her own 3-week-old son and cannibalized parts of the infant's corpse.[258]
On 14 November 2009, three homeless men in Perm, Russia, were arrested for killing and eating the parts of a 25-year-old male victim. The remaining body parts were then sold to a local pie and kebab house.[259]
Between 2009 and 2011, serial killer Alexander Bychkov engaged in numerous acts of cannibalism, targeting people he had previously lured into his house in Berlinskoe, Russia.[260]
2010s
In April and May 2010, PhD student Stephen Griffiths from Bradford, England, killed and ate three prostitutes, becoming known as the Crossbow Cannibal.[261]
In November 2010, Isakin Jonsson killed and decapitated his girlfriend in Skara, Sweden. With a knife, saw and axe, he separated her head from the body. He also cut off pieces of flesh from one of her arms and legs, which he carried into the kitchen to cook. He prepared them with salt and homegrown cannabis leaves, and ate them. He also carried her head over to the kitchen counter and processed it with an axe and knife, possibly to eat it. Jonsson was convicted of murder and sentenced to forensic psychiatric care.[262][263][264]
In April 2011, in the town of Darya Khan, Punjab, Pakistan, the brothers Arif Ali and Farman Ali were arrested for eating a human corpse stolen from a grave. They were cooking body parts for a meal when they were arrested; the police also recovered further human remains from their house.[265] They were released from jail in 2013; however, in April 2014, they were again discovered making curry out of a human corpse (this time, of a two- to three-year-old child), presumed to have been stolen from a graveyard.[266]
On 9 July 2011, a model in the St. Petersburg region of Russia drowned her colleague and consumed parts of her corpse. She was later detained, found guilty of murder, and sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.[267]
In August 2011, police found body parts of various victims in the refrigerator of serial killer Matej Čurko, including of two Slovak women who disappeared in 2010.[268]
In 2011, officials in South Korea received a tip that ethnic Koreans living in China were smuggling drug capsules into the country containing powder made from dead babies, using them as stamina boosters. Some smuggled the capsules into South Korea to consume them or distribute them to other ethnic Koreans for consumption. Reportedly, the capsules were made in northeastern China from aborted fetuses whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder.[269][270][271][272]
In December 2011, a man killed and ate a homeless man in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States. The perpetrator of the crime was later found insane and committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital.[273]
On 21 March 2012, a Vladivostok man killed his friend, later selling his meat in a local market. Another man was convicted of knowingly consuming the flesh of the victim.[274]
On 13 April 2012, the Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama cut off, cooked, and served his genitals to five people. Each of the diners paid $250 for their portion.[275]
In April 2012, a man and two women, subsequently called the "Garanhuns cannibals", were arrested in the town of Garanhuns, Pernambuco, Brazil, for murdering at least two women and eating their flesh. One of the suspects is said to have used some of the flesh of her victims for making pastries, which she allegedly sold in the town.[276]
In April 2012, Jieming Liu, 79, was accused of killing his wife and eating some of her flesh in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. The couple had immigrated from China in November 2011.[277]
On 26 May 2012, police in Miami, Florida, United States, shot and killed Rudy Eugene, 31, after he was found on the MacArthur Causeway naked and eating the face of a homeless man, Ronald Poppo, 65, who survived the attack. Police believed that Eugene was under the influence of a synthetic drug, but the autopsy showed only marijuana in his system.[278] A security camera at the headquarters of the Miami Herald caught the attack live on film, which quickly began making rounds on the internet.[279] Poppo needed facial surgery after the attack, with treatment continued for at least one year.[280]
In July 2012, 29 people accused of being members of a cannibal cult were arrested in northeast Papua New Guinea after eating at least seven people (four men and three women) believed to be sorcerers.[281][282]
On 26 December 2012, Mridul Kumar Bhattacharya and his wife Rita Bhattacharya, who owned tea gardens in Assam, India, were murdered by an angry mob of workers. Cannibalism was later reported in the incident.[283]
On 10 January 2013, the Chinese cannibal Zhang Yongming, aged 57, was executed for his crimes. He sold victims' flesh as "ostrich meat" and kept eyeballs in wine.[284][285]
On 17 March 2013 in North Bay, Ontario, Canada, a 47-year-old man sexually assaulted and mutilated a 77-year-old woman, eating pieces of flesh he had cut from her body. The victim survived severely wounded. The man reportedly suffered from severe depression and had committed his attack during a psychotic incident.[286]
In May 2013, during the Syrian civil war, a rebel named Abu Sakkar was filmed cutting open the body of a fallen enemy soldier and biting into one of his organs.[287]
In July 2013, the Italian Lino Renzi, aged 45, was discovered by the police cooking remains of his 70-year-old mother. The police had been called by a neighbour who complained about a disgusting stench coming from Renzi's apartment. Pieces of the body were discovered in a freezer, oven and pots, while most of the corpse, lying in the bathroom, featured severe mutilation to arms and legs, with several intestine pieces removed. Renzi confessed that his mother had not died of natural causes, but that he had beaten her to death after a quarrel before dismembering her with a saw and a butcher knife.[288]
On 6 November 2014, Matthew Williams, 34, was allegedly found eating the face of a 22-year-old victim in a hotel room in the village of Argoed, near Blackwood, South Wales.[292]
On 6 January 2015, a Reuters report revealed that the Mexican La Familia Michoacana and Knights Templar cartels were forcing potential recruits to eat the hearts of their victims as part of an initiation rite.[293]
In November 2015, police in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia, arrested 30-year-old Rudi Efendi and his wife Nuriah on suspicion of having murdered and castrated a man whom Nuriah accused of raping her, then cooking and eating his penis.[294]
Gordon Semple was strangled to death by Stefano Brizzi in London on 1 April 2016 during a sex act. Evidence presented at trial showed that Brizzi had cooked and eaten parts of Semple's body during the following days.[295][296]
On 10 July 2016, an American man, along with ten of his friends, legally ate tacos made out of his own foot. The leg had been amputated three weeks earlier after his foot failed to heal following a motorcycle accident two years prior. The man asked his friends: "Remember how we always talked about how, if we ever had the chance to ethically eat human meat, would you do it?", and that led to the friends sharing meat cut from his amputated foot. Details of this incident were posted to Reddit in 2018.[297]
On 16 August 2016, 19-year-old Florida State University student Austin Harrouff fatally stabbed a couple, Michelle Mishcon and John Stevens, in their garage and began eating Stevens' face before being subdued by deputies.[298]
In 2017, a ring of cannibals was arrested by the police and tried in South Africa.[299]
In a CNN documentary series titled Believers, journalist Reza Aslan consumed a portion of a human brain presented to him by the Aghori Hindu sect.[300]
Journalist Jesús Lemus Barajas claimed in an interview in 2017 that he had witnessed Los Zetas cartel kingpin Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano eating flesh from the buttocks of enemies he had sentenced to death. According to Barajas, before they died the victims were forced to bathe for two hours and given whiskey in order to reduce adrenaline levels and allow the meat to de-stress. They would then be killed as quickly as possible and their buttocks would be served to Lazcano in tamales, on toast, or in a stew. Barajas stated that he also saw other Los Zetas members knowingly eat of the human flesh, which was served during meetings.[301]
In August 2017, a man living in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India, killed his mother and ate her heart with chutney and pepper.[302]
Russian serial killer Eduard Seleznev was arrested in March 2018, and was soon found to have killed three people before liquefying their bodies and consuming them.[303]
On 30 October 2018, a father and son were arrested in Saltivka, Kharkiv, Ukraine, after being accused of beheading an ex-police officer, aged 45, and consuming his body.[304]
In February 2019 Alberto Sánchez Gómez was arrested in Madrid, Spain. He subsequently confessed to killing his mother, cutting her body into pieces, and sharing some of the meat with his dog to eat.[305]
In December 2019, the mutilated body of Kevin Bacon, a 25-year-old hairstylist from Swartz Creek, Michigan, was found hanging from the ceiling in the home of a man he met on the gay dating app Grindr. The alleged murderer, who had mental health issues, said he cut off and ate Bacon's testicles.[306]
In October 2022, three people were arrested in Kerala, India, for performing a human sacrifice.[311] During interrogation, it was revealed that they killed two women and then cooked and ate body parts of the victims in hopes of health and prosperity.[312][313]
In early 2024, a video went viral which showed a Haitian man taking a bite out of a human leg that was on fire. While social media users claimed the video showed a recent event during the ongoing Haitian unrest, it was in fact two years old and depicted an incident that occurred during a feud between two gangs in the Artibonite Valley region.[314]
In March 2024, in Wasco, California, a man was run over and killed by a train. An apparently homeless man then took his severed leg and was seen chewing on it and hitting it on walls and other objects.[315]
In April 2024, a 29-year-old homeless man was arrested in downtown Las Vegas, kneeling over the corpse of a man he had allegedly knocked to the ground and killed. The victim was missing an eyeball and an ear, which the suspect said he ate. The suspect claimed to be possessed and that he had been hearing voices telling him to kill someone named Drake, whom he did not know.[316]
Florentina Holzinger's musical production Sancta, which premiered in 2024 in Stuttgart, Germany, features real on-stage excision of a piece of skin from the abdomen of a cast member, followed by its consumption by another cast member, symbolizing the Eucharist.[317]
Strabo (1892) [c. AD 20], Hamilton, H. C.; Falconer, M. A. (eds.), The Geography of Strabo, vol.I, London: George Bell & Sons, p.464 (book VII, chap. III, para. 9)
Schaff, Philip; Wace, Henry, eds. (1893). St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works. New York: The Christian Literature Company. p.394 (book2, ch.7). "Why should I speak of other nations when I myself, a youth on a visit to Gaul, heard that the Atticoti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and that although they find herds of swine, and droves of large or small cattle in the woods, it is their custom to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women, and to regard them as the greatest delicacies?"
Symeon of Durham (1855). The Historical Works of Simeon of Durham. The Church Historians of England. Vol.III, Part II. Translated by Joseph Stevenson. London: Seeleys. p.551. So great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, that of horses, dogs, and cats, and whatever custom abhors.
Peters, Edward (1998). The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials (2nded.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p.84.
Jones, Evan T., ed. (30 September 2019). "Bristol Archives 09594/1"(PDF). Bristol Annal. Bristol Record Society. Archived(PDF) from the original on 25 January 2021.
Barry L. Isaac. Cannibalism among Aztecs and Their Neighbors: Analysis of the 1577-1586 "Relaciones Geográficas" for Nueva España and Nueva Galicia Provinces. Journal of Anthropological Research 2002 58:2, 203-224
История Востока В 6 т. / Отв. ред. Л. Б. Алаев, К. З. Ашрафян, Н. И. Иванов. Т. III. Восток на рубеже Средневековья и Нового времени. XVI–XVIII вв. М.: Издат. фирма «Восточ. лит-ра» РАН, 2000. С. 101.
Ginzburg, Carlo (2012). "Montaigne, Cannibals, and Grottoes". Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ch. 3. ISBN978-0-520-27448-8.
Daly, Nicholas (1994). "That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 28 (1): 24–51. doi:10.2307/1345912. JSTOR1345912.
Noble, Louise Christine (2011). Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-0-230-11861-4. OCLC714086301.
Whatley, Janet (1984). "Food and the Limits of Civility: The Testimony of Jean de Lery". The Sixteenth Century Journal. 15 (4): 396. doi:10.2307/2540357. JSTOR2540357.
Montgomery, Dennis (2007). 1607: Jamestown and the New World. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. pp.75–81, 82–85, "There are, then, at least half a dozen written seventeenth century reports of Starving Time cannibalism, each of which corroborates another in one or more details." (p.85). ISBN978-0-87935-232-5.
W Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent, p. 65, citing Akheograficheskaya Kommissia, Dopolneniia k Aktam Istoricheskim, St Petersburg 1846–1872, III, document 12, pp. 52–60.
Patenaude, Bertrand M. (2002). The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p.268.
Allen, Gary (1999). What is the Flavor of Human Flesh?. Corvallis, Oregon: Presented at the Symposium Cultural and Historical Aspects of Foods Oregon State University. Archived from the original on 2 February 2008.
Schindley, Wanda; Makara, Petar (2005). Jasenovac: proceedings of the First International Conference and Exhibit on the Jasenovac Concentration Camps, October 29–31, 1997, Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. Dallas Pub. p.149. ISBN978-0-912011-64-6.
Lituchy, Barry M. (2006). Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia: Analyses and Survivor Testimonies. Jasenovac Research Institute. p.220. ISBN978-0-9753432-0-3.
Dubb, Allie, ed. (1960). Myth in Modern Africa: The Fourteenth Conference Proceedings of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research. Lukasa: The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. p.146.
"СМИ узнали о связях московских сатанистов с убийствами под Петербургом". rbc.ru (in Russian). 5 August 2021. Retrieved 2 February 2024. Московская полиция задержала двух сатанистов, которые сознались в нескольких убийствах и каннибализме, сообщила «Фонтанка» и Telegram-канал Mash со ссылкой на источники. [Moscow police detained two Satanists who confessed to several murders and cannibalism, Fontanka and the Mash Telegram channel reported, citing sources.]
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