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TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? (more munching) with the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part one – the myths”. (burp)
Serial killers who claim to be cannibals are often liars, and I can prove it. Cannibalism dates back to the palaeolithic era, when our ancestors ate their dead, and although rare, it still exists today; with the Asmat tribe of New Guinea who eat human brains for its nutrients, and the Aghori tribe of India who make sacrifices to Shiva, the Hindu God of destruction, and eat any body part that their belief sees as polluted, like a corpse’s flesh, its internal organs and even the excrement. In modern times, extreme circumstances have forced humans to resort to cannibalism for survival. Like in 1933, when 6700 prisoners were sent to Nazino Island, a brutal gulag in the frozen Siberian tundra. Starving, within 13 weeks, 4000 were dead, with many having had their meat stripped from their bones. And more infamously, the survivors of UAF Flight 571 which crashed in the Andes and were forced to eat not only the skin, muscle and fat of the dead, but also the hearts, lungs and brains. Cannibalism is so rare that most countries have no law against it, so if caught, you’re more likely to be convicted of murder, manslaughter, assisted suicide, assault, desecrating a grave or denying a burial. It’s fascinating that we find cannibalism so shocking, when many of us will happily eat every part of a captive farmyard animal, which some cultures regard as filthy. As the saying goes, “the only part of a pig you can’t eat is the squeal”, and yet, we eat their intestines, eyes, skin and bladders with hot dogs made of fat, feet, blood and by-products like the vagina. Many sausages are made of its waste system like the intestines and digestive tracts, and it was recently discovered that most imitation calamari isn’t made of a derivative of squid, but pork bung, also known as pig’s rectum. Oh, how we love to eat anus. And yet, we wouldn’t eat a clean and healthy human who has lived a good life and bathed daily? So, what about those murderers who are said to be cannibals? How many of them really were? Robert Maudsley dubbed Hannibal the Cannibal by the tabloids was said to have dug a spoon into the brain of his victim and ate it, only this was proven untrue by a post-mortem. But all it takes is a fact to be twisted, and if enough people repeat it, it becomes truth. The same can be said of Anthony Morely who lured Damian Oldfield to his Leeds flat, stabbed him, cut off a slice of his thigh and cooked it. He was called a ‘cannibal’, even though a partially chewed piece of flesh was found in a bin bag. And as for Peter Bryan who ate a piece of Brian Cherry’s brain fried in butter, although that was proven, with him being a paranoid schizophrenic, can we really call him a cannibal, as his moral barometer was off? Some so-called cannibals do it for attention, like David Harker who claimed he ate part of his victim’s thigh with pasta and cheese, but given that his pathetic little ambition was to be “Britain’s most notorious serial killer”, can we really trust anything he said? Some do it out of curiosity, like Armin Meiwes, who found a volunteer to sacrifice and together they tried to eat his severed penis, but having found it too chewy, they fed it to a dog. And there are others whose fridges contain potential evidence of cannibalism, like Özgür Dengiz the so-called Cannibal of Ankara, but having confessed that he only ate a few pieces of flesh, that’s like calling yourself a strict vegetarian because you once ate a tomato. There are very few proven cannibals, as although some are insane and some are sadists, others do it to elevate their reputation, to establish a place in infamy, or to argue for an insanity plea especially in a country where the death sentence exists. Think about it. Cannibalism is almost impossible to prove as – given the speed and the efficiency of the human digestive system, although dismemberment can be proven - any evidence of consuming a dead body is destroyed by stomach acids, so all we have to go on is the killer’s word. Albert Fish claimed he had dismembered 10-year-old Grace Budd, and in a cruel letter to her parents, he bragged “how sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body”. But with her remains not found for six years, her decomposition made it hard to prove. There have been a few documented cases of criminal cannibalism. Issei Sagawa the Kobe Cannibal, who mutilated, cannibalized and performed necrophilia on the corpse of Renée Hartevelt for sexual pleasure was declared sane. He ate her most of her breasts, face, buttocks, feet, thighs and neck, both raw or cooked, and documented his crimes with photographs. As did Dmitry & Natalia Malyshev, the Krasnodar cannibals, chronic alcoholics who killed, ate and sold off body parts as food, filmed the process and wrote it up as recipes, with a heart fried in onions and an oven-cooked human head swathed in mandarins, with olives in the eyes and a lemon on the nose. And with a wealth of evidence, Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment contained the remnants of 11 bodies, with some body parts kept as souvenirs (like severed hands, two preserved penises, a mummified scalp, and seven painted skulls), with three torsos dissolving in 57-gallon drums of hydrochloric acid, and several plastic-wrapped organs in his fridge ready for consuming. Dahmer later confessed to eating “the hearts, liver, biceps and thighs” having tenderised the meat and flavoured it with condiments. How much of this is true can never be known, as any evidence of cannibalism had gone, and we have no proof whether they ate it all, nibbled it a bit, kept it down, disposed of it, or again, fed it to a dog. And yet, they only ever eat the body parts that any meat-eater would consider; the heart, the liver, the kidneys, and the muscle, or as we would call it, the meat. But what about everything else? The offal, the eyes, the hair, the blood, the spine, the bones, the genitals, the face, and even the anus. We (often unwittingly) eat it when it belongs to a dismembered pig, so why not a human? Every day for a month, I’ll release an episode exploring cannibalism and the human body, asking which parts can be eaten, how long they take to digest, what’s its taste and texture, which bits are too toxic, and how much of what a so-called cannibal claims to have eaten is the truth, a lie, or an exaggeration. If you tried to eat a whole human being, what parts could you eat, and how long would it take? Join me tomorrow for the best way to dispose of a human body – the stomach. SOURCES: (some, not all)
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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