Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-seven – storage”. (burp)
If a cannibal plans to eat a whole human, given how long it would take and how each part needs to be prepared differently to ensure that its safe to eat, surely their first thought should be how to store it? 1987, Philadelphia, Gary Heidnik, an inspiration for ‘Buffalo Bill’ in The Silence of the Lambs, kidnapped his 2nd victim, Sandra Lindsay. Holding her captive in in a self-dug basement pit, she died of starvation, torture and fever. Having dismembered her, he said he ate her ribs, boiled her head and having frozen her limbs which he labelled as ‘dog food’, it is claimed he fed it to his dogs, as well as his other victims. Few cannibals or serial-killers are experienced butchers or chefs – except Dennis Nilsen, Stephen Port ‘The Grindr Killer’ and Karl Großmann ‘The Berlin Butcher to name a few – so, how likely are others to know how fast the edible bits of a body will go off, how fast putrefaction sets in, or what it smells like? With the average home freezer being 100litres, big enough to fit Steve our average UK male, the first option for preserving the body is a mortuary bag. Technically known as cadaver pouches, they’re made of a 4mm non-porous mix of vinyl and polyethylene with a reinforced heat seal, they’re designed to prevent leaks, and act as an airtight barrier and limited temperature control to delay decomposition. ‘Cadaver pouches’ are available online without restrictions with one type (worryingly) sold on Amazon. Again, few serial killers have access to a mortuary – exceptions being necrophile David Fuller and John Wayne Gacy who was briefly a mortician’s assistant, to name a few – but keeping a body at 2 degrees Celsius, some embalming is still required after 24 hours, and it only delays decomposition by a week. Freezing is said to be the best long-term solution. September 2018, Birmingham, UK, said to be grieving his friend’s death, Damion Johnson was “unable to let go” and said to be “not thinking rationally”, he bought a 2ft by 3ft freezer where he kept the body for two years. Arrested on unrelated matters, the flat was boarded up, the freezer unplugged, and the body only found when the removals men sent it to a refuse tip, and they noticed the smell. The Food Standard Agency states “meat needs to be frozen at 0°F (-18°C) to prevent bacterial growth”, but with many types of meat spoiling owing to ‘freezer burn’ – being exposed to cold, dry air which causes the outer layer of moisture to dehydrate – many chefs agree that meat is best frozen in small portions as at some point it’ll need to be thawed, as well as wrapped in air-tight plastic like cling film. Admittedly, the purchase of mortuary bags is as suspicious as buying an axe, a spade, plastic sheets and 20 litres of formaldehyde, so - as one unnamed ‘supposed’ cannibal did in France – he used a food vacuum sealing machine in the restaurant’s kitchen he worked in. Able to air-seal a whole 25lb turkey in a single package, with all of the oxygen mechanically extracted, once frozen, it was said if he hadn’t been caught, each limb would have stayed fresh for 3-4 years, twice as long just being in a freezer. But what if a cannibal doesn’t have a fridge, or can’t risk buying one? An artisan food supplier, who (for obvious reasons) wishes to remain nameless, suggested five options for preserving the meat. Curing which uses salt to limit the moisture, smoking but who owns a smoker, brine which is effective and cheap, air-drying which isn’t best suited to the moist British climate, or being submerged in oil and sealed in fat, although does run the risk of being an incubator of botulism. Each of these options gave the meat a potential ‘best before’ date of a few weeks, or at best months, but none were as effective as vacuum sealing, although a decent 25lb sealer costs as much as £4000. Without an adequate method of storing a body, the smell of decay is what leads to many serial-killers and cannibals being caught. But decomposition doesn’t have a single smell, but six, as the body gives off different chemicals during the process. Cadaverine (caused by the decarboxylation of lysine) smells like rotting flesh, Skatole (caused by the metabolism of L-tryptophan in the digestive tract) has a strong faecal odour, Indole (from the breaking down of faecal matter) smells like mothballs, Hydrogen sulfide smells like rotten eggs, Methanethiol smells of rotting cabbage, and Dimethyl disulfide smells of garlic. And although they are all very different, the smell of decomposition is said to be unforgettable. 2009, Ohio, from the corner of East 123rd Street and Imperial Avenue, for years an overpowering smell had been put down to overflowing drains, a faulty sewer, and even a sausage shop. Gaining entry, that smell alarmed the police, and with at least 11 women found in shallow graves and crawlspaces, where the law had failed, that unforgettable smell of decay led to the conviction of the Cleveland Strangler. Join me tomorrow for the final part of Cannibalism.
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Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-six – decomposition”. (burp)
As very few cannibals are qualified chefs or butchers, they’ll be unaware how fast a body rots. Across 1998 and 1999 in Venezuela, homeless man José Vargas Gómez nicknamed ‘The People Eater’ hunted at least 11 passersby using a spear and rocks. Burying the hands, feet and heads, he only kept the pieces he could eat, and (he claims) was forced to kill often, as the flesh would decompose quickly. It is said that, in the 1930s, Chicago crime boss Al Capone lobbied for sell by dates to be added to milk. By the 1950s, Marks & Spencer’s were using them n their storeroom, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that they were added to the products in their store and saving lives. But cannibals don’t have that luxury. A human body doesn’t decompose at the same rate, as every part degrades at different speeds. Upon death, the brain (being high in water and needing a supply of oxygen) decomposes first, followed by the heart within minutes, the liver as it’s full of enzymes, followed by the liver, kidneys and pancreas after an hour, with the skin, corneas, tendons and heart valves surviving a day after death, and owing to the level of its fibromuscular tissue, the uterus and prostate is the last body part to fully decay. Although each human in 99.9% genetically identical, we decay at different rates, as a smaller, skinner person – left in the same room - will decay faster than those with higher mass and body fat, but one which is badly burned will decompose significantly slower as oxygen and flies has less access to it. Decomposition begins about 4 minutes after brain death. With the cells deprived of oxygen, the acidity increases, waste product can’t expel, excess carbon dioxide causes the cell membranes to rupture, and the digestive enzymes of the liver and stomach begin the process of autolysis, or self-digestion. When a pig (being 87% genetically similar to humans) is slaughtered, its meat is not immediately safe to eat, as this lack of oxygen causes anaerobic glycolysis, a state which in humans we call rigor mortis. Therefore, until the meats pH level drops, it has to be hung before it can be butchered. Local butchers do this in 5 to 6 days, or as much as 3 weeks, with industrial meat production done in 24 to 48 hours. As we die, our body temperature drops, acclimatising to its surroundings, which increases the bacteria. When police entered the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer, they found a waist-heigh 100-litre fridge, just big enough for the food of a single man who lived alone. But with the volume of the average human male 62,000 cubic centimeters roughly 62 litres, it wasn’t big enough for one corpse, let alone four. The second stage of decomposition is bloating, as self-digestion causes the gases to accumulate, which occurs 3 to 5 days after death, which also results in putrefaction and the noxious odours which ensue. Following a pig’s slaughter, the carcase is chilled, but with the meat not allowed to go lower than 10c, and then (once the pH level is stable), it is bled, skinned and eviscerated to remove every organ which speeds up the rate of decomposition. The blood is either disposed of or sterilised for sale, the skin is removed and heat treated, the organs are removed (to ensure no cross-contamination of toxins) so all that remains is the meat and primary skeleton, and the carcase is inspected by qualified vets. Speed is paramount, as in the first 24 hours, a fly can lay up to 250 eggs, having been attracted by the “foul, sickly-sweet odour” that decomposition produces, which itself increases the level of bacteria in the body, as when maggots mass, that increases the body temperature by up to 10 degrees Celsius. In the case of necrophile Dennis Nilsen, he kept his victim’s bodies hidden for only as long as he could stand the smell, with those who survived him saying his flat was always cold as he left the windows open even in winter, and it smelled of joss sticks, bleach and “it had an odd stench like off stew”. The rate of decomposition is entirely affected temperature, weather and moisture, with the organisms less active in colder temperatures and is drastically reduced when the body is buried owing to the lack of oxygen, which is why mortuaries store bodies at a steady temperature of 2°C (36°F) to 4°C (39°F). Which begs the question. Jeffrey Dahmer admitted “I was branching out, that's when the cannibalism started. At first it was just curiosity, and then it became compulsive". With the accumulation of bodies in his pokey little flat, and his landlord and neighbour complaining about the smell, if he had planned this properly and purchased larger fridge, would he have been caught much later, if at all? Join me tomorrow for the penultimate episode of Cannibalism, which is all about… preserving.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-five – the other bits”. (burp)
Is it anger or ignorance which causes a cannibal to chop up a human body into bits? Baltimore, 1996, Joseph Metheny confessed that of the 13 victims he claimed to have slayed, at least 3 he had dismembered, minced-up, mixed with pork, and having set up a roadside barbeque stall, where he sold these sizzling patties, later stating “if you mix it together no one can tell the difference”. Too often, cannibals destroy a body or dispose of it, rather than considering its culinary merits. But is this down to anger or trauma, a lack of education or emotional intelligence, as although some have a high IQ, being smart enough to join MENSA, doesn’t that they’re good at making rational judgements. There are several parts of a body that an uneducated cannibal may miss or may eat by mistake. The spleen is a purple fist-shaped organ behind the left ribs, measuring 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, 1 ½ inches thick and weighing 170 grams, it’s part of the immune system. With a texture and taste like liver, it’s low in calories (79 per 100g) and it’s high in vitamins B and C, iron and selenium. Essentially being “a bag of blood”, chefs state “the spleen crumbles in your mouth like a coarse blood sausage”, and with only a small elastic membrane, it requires little preparation, and is best served fried in oil. As a 15-cm-long leaf shaped organ under the liver, the pancreas is part of the endocrine system and one of the sweetbreads. Only 160 calories but packed with vitamin B and selenium, it’s sweeter than muscle but with a slight savoury aftertaste. And although it requires preparation (by soaking it in milk) as it’s full of digestive enzymes, eating raw pancreas has been trialled as a treatment for diabetes. You see cannibals, instead of getting angry because mummy didn’t love you, try reading a cookbook, as there are many potential delicacies in the human body, you won’t learn about in Guns n Ammo. The auricular muscles surround the ear and are an ancient part of our anatomy, which in animals make their ears to swivel, but defunct in humans, they can make your ears wiggle. The plantaris is a 5-10cm leg muscle with no primary use except to aid the knee, which has a tendon nicknamed the freshman's nerve as medical students mistake it for a nerve. And the palmaris longus is a wrist muscle, only found in 20% of people, and is thought to be hangover from the days where – as apes – we hung from trees. If a cannibal filleted and sautéed those bits, wouldn’t we be less likely to see them as uncouth yobs? And yet, without the know-how, they could end up in hot water. In 2023, Georgie Piano of Washington went into hospital to have his appendix taken out, instead they removed part of his large intestine. As we know, the lobe of a liver can be mistaken for a heart, but what might a cannibal unwittingly eat. The prostate. Weighing 25 grams, this walnut shaped gland wrapped in muscle fibres and connective tissue produces seminal fluid. Oddly, unlike penises and testicles, the prostate is not an aphrodisiac. The gallbladder is toxic, as it’s a veritable stockpile of bile, used for digesting fats and removing toxins. And although the tonsils look a little tasty to some weirdos, they are a bundle of lymphatic tissues. Which is useful to know for any cannibal, or if you’ve had a body part removed by surgery, and wanted to turn your leg into a doorstop or your winkle into a coat hook, or maybe to eat it. I mean it is yours. Currently in Britain, depending on the hospital, patients are free to do whatever they want with their amputated limb “as long as there is not a public health issue" according to the Human Tissue Authority. With written consent, you can take your severed appendage home with you, but you can’t cremate or bury it until you have also died, there’s no law against you eating it, but it’s illegal for you to sell it. 2023, Pennsylvania, Jeremy Pauley sold the bones and body parts he’d stolen from a mortuary, with three buckets containing two brains, skin, fat, a heart, a kidney, livers, lungs, and a child’s jawbone. He was sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to a charge of abuse of a corpse. But if a cannibal isn’t feeling peckish, how much could they get by selling the body parts, either legally, or on the black market? Legally, in America, you can donate your whole body to the Anatomy Gift Registration, a non-profit with a rigorous application process which uses limbs for medical procedures. On the dark web, kidneys go for £150,000, livers for £120,000, hearts for just £90,000 (as pacemakers are a super reliable replacement), corneas for £21,000 and the small intestine for £1800. Eggs go for £6000 and sperm for £60 a pop but you’ve got to make the donation in person. A foot of human hair goes for £100, blood plasma for £200 a month, the pharmaceutical industry buys body fluids to test drugs (like “£1750 for 1ml of blister fluid and £1,600 for a gram of earwax”), and on fetish websites, you can sell everything from saliva to scabs, and breast milk to bum fungus. Everything had a price. 2023, Colerado, funeral-home owner Megan Hess was sentenced to 20 years in prison “for defrauding relatives of the dead by dissecting 560 corpses and selling body parts without permission”, as although it’s illegal to sell organs for transplant in the US, these were sold to surgical training companies which are not regulated by federal law. They also charged the grieving relatives for cremations which never occurred, and handed them an urn full of mixed ashes from a bin, along with a bill for their services. We may see cannibals as deeply unethical, but are they any worse than those we supposedly trust? Join me tomorrow as we explore the side of meat-eating that a cannibal often forgets till it’s too late… decomposition.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-four – DNA”. (burp)
No matter how thorough a cannibal cleans up, it’s the tiniest body part which will always convict them. 2007, Canada, Robert Pickton was convicted of murdering 26 women, having ground their bodies in a meat grinder and fed it to his pigs, or (it is claimed) to the public. Forensic anthropologists used soil sifters as all that remained were tiny traces of human remains, and without a body, the case may have collapsed. But with the DNA of 80 profiles found on his jacket, boots and freezers, he was sentenced to life, and later admitted “I killed 49. I planned an even 50, but I got caught as I got real sloppy”. Every human is 99.9% genetically identical, but that 0.1% difference comprises of a 3 billion letter long genetic code with its combinations so infinitesimal that even identical twins are genetically different. And with our 36 trillion cells, each containing 6 feet of DNA, if our genome were stretched into a single thread, it would reach to the sun and back ten times, yet it only weighs six one-trillionths of a gram. 2005, Sweden, Lennart Persson stabbed, drank the blood and ate a breast of one of two victims killed seven months apart, and yet all it took was a few microscopic drops of blood to convict him. The oldest DNA discovered is so far over 2-million-years-old, with the DNA of Richard III able to identify his remains after 540 years underground. When we die, our DNA lives on in dead cells, but when DNA loses its purine base, known as depurination, it breaks apart at an atomic level. If buried it can last as long as 10,000 years, exposed to the elements it can last just a few weeks, but subjected to stomach acids, after just 2 hours, 80% of the DNA is destroyed, and within a day, almost all of it had dissolved. If a serial killer buys sulphuric or hydrochloric acid to dispose of a body, that leaves a trail of clues, but with 99% depurination happening at 37 degrees Celsius - the temperature of our stomach acid - it’s as efficient as a liquid crematorium and it’s entirely untraceable, as well as being natural and legal. The problem is that before a cannibal even feasts on Steve, that day, he’s shed 1 to 5 eyelashes, 50 to 100 hairs, 10 litres of sweat, it’s estimated that he’s left 140 usable fingerprints, and has sprinkled 500 million dead skin cells everywhere he’s been. 1975, Pennsylvania, Lindy Sue Biechler was found with 19 stab wounds and the knife embedded in her back. The police had the suspect’s DNA, but with no name, the case went cold. Until 2022, when that DNA was uploaded to a genealogy website, and finding his relatives, Police surveilled 68-year-old David Sinopoli, and getting his DNA off a discarded coffee cup, he was convicted 48 years after the murder. So paranoid are serial killers, that in 2003, when South Korean serial killer and self-confessed cannibal dubbed ‘The Raincoat Killer’ cut himself opening a safe, he burned the house down to destroy his DNA. We leave traces of ourselves everywhere, without even thinking about it. We imagine cannibals sinking their teeth into a thigh and tearing it apart, and although our palaeolithic ancestors had larger jaws and sharper canines to do just that, as omnivores who use tools to cut meat apart and cook them to make them often, evolution has made us a much less efficient apex predator. Therefore, a cannibal has a problem that a serial killer doesn’t. A survey of dentists stated 87% of patients arrive with food (often meat) stuck between their teeth, which may be embarrassing for us, but as evidence of cannibalism - with it pointless to extract digested meat from a stomach and no use once it’s been expelled - the cannibal’s own saliva will protect that DNA from any regurgitation acids. In the case of Karl Denke, the Cannibal of Münsterberg, almost a century after his crimes, DNA tests are being used to trace and authenticate the 30 to 40 victims he cannibalised and sold at the market. The problem is, even those of us who aren’t cannibals, are mucky buggers in our daily lives. And if you think that some of these facts about cannibalism have been unsettling, get ready to be grossed out. In Britain, just once a year, 36% of people wash their bedsheets and 18% their jeans, 25% of men wash their undies after five wears compared to 55% of women, with 6% of women washing a bra after 10 washes. I mean, how can a cannibal hide the evidence of a crime, if we can’t hide the evidence of a pizza? To cut up a body requires knives, saws and sinks, and although Robert Pickton’s farm was a forensic nightmare, the average person’s kitchen is no better. In a study of 1000 people by a British kitchen retailer, 13% of sinks are only cleaned once a month, 4% of people never sanitise their worktops, 8% are 'unlikely' to clean a chopping board before or after cutting meat, and with vomiting being very possible in a cannibal as humans are toxic, studies show that your sink has more E-Coli than your toilet. But before a cannibal has committed a crime, the evidence to convict them may already be out there. In 2005, Dennis Rader alias ‘BKT’, a sadistic serial killer of at least 10 people in Kansas was arrested. His killing spree had gone silent for 14 years and as the Police only had circumstantial evidence of his guilt, the only way to prove it and stop the new killing spree he was threatening to commit was to get a sample of his DNA, or that his daughter whose DNA they retained by subpoenaing her pap smears. So although, a long laborious task, digesting a body may be the most efficient way to ensure a cannibal leaves no evidence of their crime. But only if (pardon the pun) they’ve got the stomach to do finish it. Join me tomorrow as we tick off all of the body parts a cannibal probably didn’t know existed.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-three – the sex organs”. (burp)
Of all our episodes so far, this is the one which has got Steve, our ordinary UK male crossing his legs. 2024, London, five men were convicted of conspiracy to commit GBH for a sadistic site called Eunuch Maker, with 22,000 followers who were aroused by the amputation of men’s penises and testicles. Using clamps, knives and saws, 29 cases of genital castration and mutilation were filmed and uploaded which netted its mastermind £300,000, with one video showing him eating some testicles with a salad. From Ancient Egypt to the Pagans and the Aztecs, across all tribes before our cultures combined, the genitals have been a symbol of power and fertility, and are still seen today as a potent aphrodisiac. 2001, Armin Meiwes severed his volunteer’s penis, but too chewy to eat raw, he fried it with wine, garlic and Brandes' fat. Only having burnt it, he fed it to his dog. But is penis a viable cannibal’s meal? Sort of. Only the penis isn’t a muscle, it’s a spongy mass of erectile tissue and blood vessels, and (on average) weighing 160 grams, being roughly 6 inches long when erect and 3.5 inches when flaccid, it’s a lot smaller when it’s been severed and drained, with Napoleon’s amputated penis being just 1 ½ inches long. Consisting of roughly 9 to 22 calories per inch (dependant on girth), a penis is twice as long as it looks, as it extends well into the pelvis, with the average erection lasting seven minutes, and although ladies may joke that a man’s brain is in his pants, ejaculation is actually controlled by a neurons in the spine. So, if a cannibal wanted to eat a sizable appendage, shoe size is a myth, but the International Journal of Impotence states “penile size correlates with age, height and index finger length”. A death erection is therefore vital to maintain length and girth post-mortem, which scientists believe may be due to pressure on the cerebellum during strangulation, or in shotgun wounds “the destruction of the cervical spinal cord”. Therefore to maintain that girth, before severing, the shaft needs to be tied and cauterised to prevent blood-loss. Animal penis is eaten in many cultures, they’re prepared by splitting it down the urethra, rinsing it to remove the urine smell, and being tough when raw, it needs to be boiled for several hours, after that “they gain a soft and gelatinous texture”, but lacking much flavour, it requires a strong seasoning. Like Armin Meiwes, in 2012, when Japanese performance artist Mao Sugiyama cut off and cooked his own penis for six $250 patrons, having pan-fried it, the Culinary Director of Serious Eats wrote “it was chewy, he didn’t cook it right, what a waste of a good penis”. It’s a delicate meat so it needs to be treated with care. As for testicles. At between 3.5 to 5.5cm long, 2 to 3.5cm wide and about 20g each, they contain no meat, being made of about 800 coiled tubes of germ and Sertoli cells encased in a scrotum. At roughly 20-30 calories per teste, although Albert Fish claimed “his pee wees were chewy”, it’s likely he didn’t cook them correctly, as needing no special preparation, testicles have a “delicate, melting texture when braised”, they suit being breaded and deep-fried as “their texture is a little like a large fresh scallop”, and my local butcher states “they have a very distinctive pop, when bitten into”. It's odd that some cultures are squeamish about eating testicles, when they are considered delicacies in most countries, with the World Testicle Cooking Championship being held each year in Serbia. So, with 167,000 people dying each day, if we put our morals aside, each penis would be a tasty snack for the population of Scunthorpe, 3 testicles each could make a great soup for everyone in Clacton-on-sea, and with the average penis skin being 6.5cm wide and 11cm long, that could cover 60,000 hardback books. So, Steve’s ‘love plumbs’ and ‘pink oboe’ could make a tasty snack for a cannibal, but what about if he wasn’t a Steve, but an Eve? I hate to shock you, but boy’s pee-pee’s are not the same as girl’s nu-nu’s. Biologically men and women are 98.5% identical. Even the labia is comprised of the same mix of skin, sweat glands and blood vessels as the scrotum, it’s also as sensitive and as chewy. When Czech killer Ladislav Hojer stabbed a woman known only as Ivana M in 1981, he sliced off her labia, penetrated the severed lips with his penis, then boiled them in salted water, seasoned them with mustard owing to their “bland taste”, but deciding that they were too chewy, he flushed the remains down the toilet. Like testicles, ovaries are an acquired taste and texture, as they contain no muscle, and only 1cm wide, they are a mix of ovarian follicles, connective tissue, blood and lymphatic vessels. In the 1891 murder of New York prostitute Carrie Brown, her genitals were mutilated, and although an ovary was said to have been removed, it was believed it had dislodged owing to a cyst. So far, there are no known cases of cannibals willingly eating an ovary, although this may simply be that testicles are easy to spot, but ovaries are well hidden. The same could be said for the murders of Annie Chapman & Catherine Eddowes purportedly by Jack the Ripper, as the removal of a uterus drove the press into overdrive about his woman-hating mission. But given that an adult uterus is 8cm long, 5cm wide and the walls 4cm thick, with the intestines, uterus and labia of Annie Chapman having been fully or partially removed, rather than insisting that Jack had a “surgeon’s skill” as it makes for a better story, given the close proximity of these organs and that he also removed her bladder, maybe the truth is more likely that he was simply a vengeful bedwetter who was terrible at anatomy? As mentioned before, it’s possible that many body parts have symbolism (no matter how insignificant) for a cannibal, which is why they eat some bits, and not others. But by accepting their motive after the fact, or by trying to force a motive on their actions to suit a narrative is wrong… unless proven. 2024, Chicago, Clarisa Figueroa was sentenced to 50 years for strangling 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, and slicing open the heavily pregnant teen’s womb to claim the unborn baby as her own. The baby died two months later, and the mother’s body was dumped in a rubbish bin. It was said, not long after Clarisa’s son had died, she lied to her family that she was pregnant, and continued with the lie. Join me tomorrow to explore the one bit of a body a cannibal can’t destroy in its entirety… the DNA.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-two – a disorder?”. (burp)
A thigh, a heart or an eye are easy pickings for a cannibal, but do true cannibals have a disorder which means they will eat anything, no matter how disgusting or complicated, and wannabe cannibals don’t? Body parts are symbolically unique for different cannibals based on what they are lacking in their lives. From 1988 to 89, Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Japanese ‘Little Girl Killer’ murdered and mutilated four girls aged 4 to 7. As a paedophilic necrophile, he raped their corpses, drank their blood, and eat their hands, as being born premature with a birth defect, he envied theirs as his were deformed and claw-like. For less imaginative cannibals, a thigh is an obvious choice as food, whereas hands are complex. They contain 27 bones (a quarter of those in the body), 27 joints, 3 main nerves, five main blood vessels, 100 ligaments, tendons and 30 muscles, the biggest being the dorsal interosseous at just 0.5 mm thick – which for a cannibal is hardly a snack. Like feet, with 26 bones, 33 joints and 29 muscles, many of which being thin, lack much calorific value, so in extreme cases like the Kazakh famine of 1930–33, eyewitnesses recalled “a foot or a hand of a child boiling in a cauldron over a fire”, as loved one’s were forced to make soup from their dead. But often with cannibals (who unlike other killers have taken that depravity to a greater extreme) what parts they covet play a large part in their psychological trauma and logic. Having stabbed her abusive husband to death, Omaima Nelson cooked his head, hands and “castrated him in revenge for his alleged sexual assaults”. Conversely serial-killer Jerry Brudos, ‘The Lust Killer’ (who wasn’t a cannibal) severed and froze the feet of three females to assuage his fetish and he dressed the dismembered feet in high heel shoes as he masturbated. Cannibals often don’t eat to sate a hunger, as guided by emotions like anger or lust, some eat faces, eyes, intestines, even penises, with Dahmer sexually driven to dine on the thighs and biceps of “athletic young men”. No-one really knows why some people turns to cannibalism; maybe it’s a remnant of our palaeolithic past, that’s it’s linked to nutritional deficiency (as is common amongst many mammals, which humans are), that it’s fuelled by cultural taboos which prevent us from feeding the world in a population crisis, that it symbolises love (as it has done across many centuries in art and literature), that its ceremonial, sacrificial, a psychiatric disorder fuelled by trauma, or a psycho-sexual paraphilia like Vorarephilia. Paraphilia – the intense sexual arousal sparked by the atypical - isn’t common. It can begin with harmless objects like armpits, mannequins, feathers or fur, and extend all the way up to the more extreme like strangulation, amputation, faeces, or Vorarephilia. This is the erotic desire to be consumed by or to consume another human being´s flesh, and – at a stage further – anthropophagolagnia, which is the raping and cannibalizing of another person. As individuals, we all have our own idiosyncrasies, we have odd behaviors or harmless fantasies which border paraphilia, and in moments of stress or arousal, especially in sexual situations, they appear; whether dressing up, whispering, role playing, mild pain, voyeurism, sensual feeding, or submission. Cannibals are merely those who have taken their paraphilia beyond what is acceptable, morally and/or legally to society, and in some cases, even to themselves, as even the most disturbed have boundaries. Some have also suggested it could also be a psychopathic variation of Pica, an eating disorder resulting from a psychiatric disturbance. Sufferers are known to eat mildly toxic items like soap, plaster or paint; more destructive items like pins, glass, or metals; the disturbing like vomit, urine, and in one case, a woman called Keyshia ate soiled nappies, describing them “having a sour candy like flavour”. But are these real obsessions, an odd nutritional hunger, or merely a psychiatric cry for help or attention? 2009-10, Bradford, Stephen Griffiths, the self-styled ‘Crossbow Cannibal’ murdered three sex-workers (Shelley Armitage, Susan Rushworth & Suzanne Blamires) and back at his council-owned flat at Soho Mills, he dismembered and supposedly “he told detectives he cooked flesh from the first two women and ate the third one raw”, and although their murders were proven, none of the cannibalism was. Described as an “insignificant loner” with a warped sense of morals and an obsession with true crime, it’s unlikely that Griffiths was a cannibal in the true sense of the word, or that he had a paraphilia which drove him to eat a woman’s flesh. Guided by a lack of love in his life and a sad desperate need to be revered, having bragged about his crimes to the police which were regurgitated by a salivating tabloid press, he felt it would take that level of depravity to join the pantheon of serial killers… …which explains why – having murdered this last victim in the flat’s communal hallway – he waited to be caught, positioned the evidence, and raised a toast to the CCTV camera which captured his crime. He wasn’t a cannibal, he was just a sad little man who was desperate for the attention his life lacked. Join me tomorrow to explore the sexual and reproductive organs.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-one – the inedibles”. (burp)
Hair is indigestible, bones are tricky to absorb, many organs require preparation, and several body parts are too toxic for anyone to swallow. But what about the bits which (it is said) are inedible? 2021, Russia, in the car boot of Yegor Komarov ‘The Murino Cannibal’ a headless body was found with its throat ripped out, surrounded by teeth marks. But as the throat contains several tough structures like the pharynx, the larynx and the hyoid bone, not only would swallowing it have risked ripping apart his own throat from within, although the thyroid is seen as a sweetbread, eaten raw and unprepared, he risked thyrotoxicosis, a violent hormone storm to the system which risks heart failure, and death. And that’s the problem, there’s a lot of myths and misinformation about what can be eaten and can’t. Teeth. With tooth enamel being the hardest part of a human, many assume that Coca-Cola is a good way to dissolve teeth given enough time, and it is, but so does any drink containing citric acid, worst of which is Pepsi, who some say originated this anti-Coca-Cola myth as a cunning piece of propaganda. With a pH level of 1.5, stomach acid can dissolve teeth hence why our mouths produce saliva. If swallowed, teeth easily pass through the GI Tract, and although more than 2.5 grams of calcium a day can be toxic, with 32 teeth weighing 1 gram each, a cannibal could safely digest a set of gnashers in 13 days. Or, if they didn’t want to risk having their arsehole bitten from within, just buy a can of Pepsi. 2023, at an 18-acre farm called Fox Hollow in Indiana, investigators found 10,000 fragments of human remains of at least 11 gay men, 8 were positively identified by bone fragments, skulls and their teeth, as from the 80s to 90s, Herbert Baumeister, the Happy Face killer was also said to be the I-70 Strangler. But that’s what’s so baffling about serial-killers and cannibals, they’re so fixated on sating their sexual needs, power struggles and daddy-issues, when it comes to disposing of bodies, they lack diligence. Nails, like hair (and the hooves and horns of animals) is also made of keratin and can’t be digested, but salt (known as sodium chloride) strips keratin from hair. Or given that 30% of all people bite their nails, a cannibal could rip out a set – as when moisture dissipates from the body, the cuticle becomes weak – and nibble, as 99% of its DNA will be destroyed by stomach acid. Or they could just burn it and save a CSI from having to identify a body by a bit of fingernail by wading through a cannibal’s nightsoil. 2016, Lonnie Franklin Jr, known as the ‘Grim Sleeper’ of Los Angeles was convicted of murdering 10 prostitutes. As a garbage collector, he shot, strangled and tossed them in dumpsters, with the nails of one victim leading to his arrest. And again, lacking empathy and seeing these women only as a meal, sex or a souvenir, serial killers often get caught as they’re too focussed on feeding their cruel addiction. Tendons. With roughly 4000 tendons in the body, stretching 300+ metres (as tall as the Eiffel Tower) - with some as long as a leg, others barely visible to the naked eye and buried 1mm to 9mm deep into muscles and organs - many are impossible to remove. But larger tendons like the Achilles, being rich in collagen, 100 grams provides roughly 22 grams of protein and about 70 calories. Sadly, as tendons are tough and chewy, they require slow cooking over 10 hours before they can be sliced and served. Other bits, which are probably too complicated for a serial-killer’s pea-sized brain or lack of patience is the spine (which is meaty, fatty and contains 2900 calories), but it requires skill to extract, the central nervous system is expansive being 45 miles long and although our blood vessels stretch 60,000 miles, when ‘The Murino Cannibal’ bit into a throat, he winged “I didn’t like the taste of his veins". With some parts of the human body inedible, indigestible and in many cases seemingly indestructible, this is why (laziness aside) many serial killers and cannibals use chemicals to dissolve a body. John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer’s issue was patience, as when sulphuric acid is kept boiling it can dissolve flesh in 40 minutes and bones in 9 hours, but being left at room-temperature, sulphuric struggles to dissolve flesh in 52 hours and bones in 28 days. His issue, of many, was he didn’t let it boil. 2012, Germany, in vats of hydrochloric acid, bone fragments and a green fatty gloop was identified as two men who had been murdered three years earlier. An accomplice was sentenced to 30 months for aiding the disposal, but an unnamed Dutch family were acquitted as (although there was no denying that the barrels contained bodies) murder couldn’t be proven, even though the bodies hadn’t dissolved fully as hydrochloric & sulphuric acids struggle to dissolve the hydrogen atoms in fatty tissue. As Santiago Meza Lopez, ‘The Pozole Maker’ discovered, even having chopped up and stewed his 300+ victims in barrels of boiling lye, although sodium hydroxide is more effective at destroying flesh than hydrochloric and sulphuric acid, the only chemical which can dissolve fat is acetone or gasoline. Inspired by Breaking Bad, Thomas Gotthard, a priest from Denmark crammed his lover’s body into a 208-litre barrel of 45 litres hydrochloric acid and 6kg of caustic soda. Having partially dissolved her body, then was forced to remove her remains, cut her up further, burn and rebury her, but still her charred remains contained enough DNA to convict him. Whereas in the TV series itself, Walter White uses hydrofluoric acid, which dissolves skin fast, but – as Stefano Brizzi found out when he tried to dissolve the body of PC Gordon Semple in South London – it takes several days to destroy muscle, bone and sinew, it leaves great globules of fat, and the resulting gas was so noxious, that the neighbours (and ultimately the police) were alerted. Other options include nitric acid, which dissolves the fibres hydrochloric can’t, and deoxycholic acid, which can destroy fat cells, and is widely used by plastic surgeons to remove jowls and double chins. As discussed, even cremulators, the furnaces used in crematoriums have to work at incredibly high temperatures to destroy all parts of a human body, but a company called Bio-Response in Indiana has developed a fast and environmentally friendly machine which can liquify a body in just 4 to 6 hours. Mimicking a stomach, it constantly washes and churns the corpse in hot pH-neutral water, and instead of acid, it uses hydrogen to dissolve the molecules at a chemical level. What remains are the bones, which go into a cremulator to be pulverised, but everything else ends up as a brown coffee-like water which is safe enough to dispose of down the sink, and the whole process only costs $500 more than a standard cremation. Join me tomorrow as we explore whether a true cannibal has a disorder, and wannabes don’t.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty – the sensory organs”. (burp)
Of all the parts of a body, nothing epitomises a human more than the four sensory organs in our skull; the eyes, ears, nose and tongue. But do they fascinate serial killers and cannibals, or freak them out? Andrei Chikatilo, The Rostov Ripper, a serial killer, cannibal and necrophile who murdered at least 52 women and children – it is said - chewed off their noses, cut out their tongues, sliced off their ears, and – having become obsessed with the Victorian theory of retinal optography - many had their eyes gouged out, as he believed that the last image his victims saw was recorded into their retina. Weighing about 7.5 grams and one and a quarter inches in diameter (the same as a ping pong ball), the eye is composed mostly of water, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates with the cornea made of collagen. Held in place by the optic nerve and the ocular muscles, eyes can only be removed by force or trauma. With the vitreous and aqueous humors made of salts, sugars and proteins, although Dr Jim Stoppani, Yale certified nutritionist said “eyes contain an acidic solution which can make humans sick”, each eye contains 57 calories, the equivalent of 125 grams of apple, 12 grapes or 2 marshmallows. In 2009, Angelo Mendoza Sr attacked his 4-year-old son and ate his left eye. He was charged with child cruelty, torture, and inflicting an injury to a child, and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. The eating of sheep eyes is common across many cultures, and according to those who have; "the trick to eating an eyeball is to keep it in your mouth for as long as possible, it’s slightly squishy, and delivers a succulent pop like a cherry tomato”, with “a rush of fatty flavour with a gelatinous, spongy texture like eating the fat and cartilage from a lamb chop, but a bit better”, and “whilst the inky black liquid” (the aqueous) “seeps down the throat, you’re left with the hard chewy lens like a pigs trachea”. Nice. Eyes gross us out. In 2022, when Djalma Figueiredo was caught, the headline read ‘Cannibal who 'ate the eyes of victims' captured’ – as (apparently) it’s fine to eat the eyes of a different species, but it’s newsworthy to eat the eyes of our own. James Serpell of the University of Pennsylvania said, “eyes represent faces… it's through the face that we learn to recognize and empathize with others”, which could be why many killers cover, close or remove their victim’s eyes after death, as once they’re gone, they want the victim to appear less like a human. Ears. In 1942, at the Battle of Wake Island, veterans recalled “seeing Marines walking around with Jap ears stuck to their belts”. Lacking the symbolism of eyes, ears have long been a sick trophy of war. As the only visible part of the ear, the pinna is on average 2.5 inches long and weighs just 3-6 grams. Made of skin and ridged cartilage, an ear contains just 25 calories, but it has no flavour and although it only takes 7lbs of pressure to rip an ear off, its texture can only be described as tough and chewy. Most butchers state “the preparing of ears is tiresome”, as they require the wax to be scraped out and the hairs to be singed “to get rid of any scum”, before being boiled for 2 to 3 hours, then either sliced and heavily seasoned as they can be quite bland, or coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Although, if you are looking for a bitter and buttery taste, leave the earwax in, as it contains 12.7 calories a gram. The nose. Across 1997 and 1998, Mikhail Malyshev nicknamed ‘The Perm Cannibal’ was suspected of six murders, who he dismembered and ate. Having killed 16-year-old Natalia Suvorova with an axe, aided by his friends they ground her flesh into mince to make pelmeni (a Russian dumpling). But with the threesome falling out, he bit of the tip of his friends’ nose, chewed it, and then swallowed it, Excluding the nasal bones, weighing roughly 14 grams, a nose contains 45 calories, and also made of cartridge, it’s neither tasty nor hygienic as we produce 1.5 litres of mucus a day as the nose is our first defence against dust and allergens, and – according to a study by a medical school in Southern California - “the average number of nose hairs in each nostril is 120 in the left and 122 in the right”. When Andrei Chikatilo murdered his first victim, he bound her, beat her, stabbed her, and (like many others) although he severed her nose, there was no evidence that he ate it. And who can blame him? The same can be said for the mouth, tongue and vocal cords, the last of the four sensory organs in our skull. In 1973, serial killer Edmund Kemper murdered his abusive mother with a clawhammer and slit her throat. In retaliation for years of humiliation, he cut off her head, screamed at it, smashed in her face, and (sick of her voice) he cut out her tongue and larynx, and threw it down the waste compactor. But being too tough for the machine, it spat her tough vocal cords back up, of which Ed said “that seemed appropriate, as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years". As mentioned before, with the tongue “soft, tender with a luxurious taste”, Ed Gein having turned a pair of lips on a window shade drawstring, the windpipe as slightly chewy and the larynx too tough for kitchen equipment, for good reason, few cannibals would consider these organs are suitable snacks. And rightly, as although the eating of a thigh, a heart or even the genitals is sexually motivated, the sensory organs are symbolic of who a victim was, as most of our memories are sensory experiences. The idea of retinal optography – where the last image a victim sees (being their death) is imprinted on their eyes - may seem ludicrous to a rational mind, but across many cultures, that theory holds weight in the more superstitious; with a nose retaining its last smell and the ears its last sound, just as often (in a mortuary) a corpse will seem to speak its last word. So, is it really that strange that a serial killer would attempt to destroy every piece of evidence, no matter how silly that may sound? Join me tomorrow to uncover even more body parts which a cannibal couldn’t or shouldn’t eat.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? (munching) With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part nineteen – the stomach”. (burp)
The stomach is a masterpiece of biology, it digests meat, bone, fat and fibre, and its walls regenerate every 3-4 days so we don’t ingest ourselves, But could a cannibal digest another person’s stomach? 1972, when Flight AF571 crashed in the Andes, Eduardo Strauch recalled of the moment they first ate human flesh; “my mind was okay, but my body rejected it”. Being frozen, it had no smell to repel them, but initially they vomited it back up, as they had broken a sacred taboo. As Catholics, they only way they could accept this sin to save their lives was (as in the Eucharist) to see these as the body of Christ. As discussed in the last part, although the stomach is a biological marvel, its waste contents aren’t for consumption. So, any undesirable offal would safely (and happily) be eaten by foxes, urine and faeces is good for the soil, and as anyone who lives in a city knows, pigeons will happily eat last night’s vomit. So, why are serial-killers willing to commit the worst taboos (dismemberment, necrophilia and even cannibalism), and although they often compete to be gross-out each other, they draw the line at what body parts they will eat? But is it a lack of education, an odd moral code, cowardice, or is it queasiness? In Robert Ressler's book, Whoever Fights Monsters, 40% of serial killers interviewed said they’d been physically abused as a child, with 70% sexually abused. Manifesting in adulthood as rage, isolation, cruelty and a lack of empathy, many suffered from stomach problems; like Dennis Nilsen, John Wayne Gacy, Carroll Cole & Aileen Wuornos to name but as few. And especially cannibals like Albert Fish (who was sadistically beaten as an orphan), Armin Meiwes (who was abandoned by his abusive dad), Jeffrey Dahmer (whose personality changed after a bungled double hernia operation), and Issei Sagawa (whose premature birth plagued him with pain, illness and being unusually short for an adult male). We’re affected by trauma in different ways, and although our brains may blank it out to protect us, our stomach remembers. The stomach is our second brain, it’s also a vital part of our emotions, and although vomiting is a natural reaction to poison, it is also to trauma, as according to a study by UCLA, “the composition of your gut’s microbiome can be indefinitely impacted by intense trauma”. Stomach lining needn’t be a traumatic meal for a cannibal, as being 3-4 days old, it’s reliably fresh and although its walls of muscle and mucosa are 2 to 5mm thick, at 1300 calories, that’s half a day’s energy. In cow’s, stomachs can be prepared by washing, soaking, cutting off any unwanted yellowy brown fat, rubbing it with rock salt and rinsing it with vinegar (a process repeated until the lining is a nice pinkish hue), then scraped with a sharp knife to rid it of any final impurities and par-boil for 10 minutes. Stomachs are badly maligned by us all. During conflicts, like World War Two, combatants witnessed soldiers on both sides mutilating the bodies of their enemies, with the abdomen ripped open and the stomach filled with discarded rubbish, like chewing gum and cigarette butts, as if it was a waste bin. A cannibal could eat a whole stomach, and if they bothered to read a cookery book, they’d realise that it could made into a variety of world dishes; in Mexico stomach is thinly sliced, pan fried and served in tacos, in Scotland it’s a vital component of haggis, in Louisiana it’s stuffed with pork, veg, spices and rice and is called ‘Ponce’, and in many countries its rolled up, smoked and is sliced like a fine pepperoni. But that’s the problem with serial killers and cannibals alike, as although their ‘fans’ love to bore the tits off everyone about ‘how high their IQ is’, they often lack commonsense, patience, a strong enough constitution to do the ‘dirty deed’ in full, and when it comes to preparing and cooking a corpse, they lack the education and courage to turn a dead body into a banquet of delights. But what do you expect from a bunch of maladjusted misfits who live on a diet of burgers, hotdogs and microwave meals. But as much as stomachs can be made into a meal, it can also be used for cruelty. 2007, Czech Republic, sisters Klara & Katerina Mauerova had a mission from God, or so they believed. Having joined a cult which practiced incest, they confined her sons aged just 14 and 10 to dog cages, left them to sleep in their own filth, starved, beat and burned them, and with the boys screaming, she cut the flesh from their buttocks, and fed it to them. And even though they were often sick from the fear and revulsion, when they threw up, she forced them to eat that too. Sentenced to between five and ten years, both women are now free, having been paroled. Join me tomorrow for possibly the most personal pieces of a human to eat… the senses.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? (munching) With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part eighteen – waste”. (burp)
If a human was made only of meat, a cannibal could shave them like a rotisserie of tasty kebab meat and dine like a king. But they aren’t, as 46% of the body is used to process various forms of waste. 2013, Italy, Lino Renzi beat his mother Maria to death, cut her into pieces with a saw, froze the meat, and the neighbours only became suspicious when the intestines he’d popped on the grill caught fire. Being Italian, it was suggested, he was making the local dish - Torcinelli, a sausage stuffed with offal, tomato, onion, basil and parsley. Only this time instead of using lamb’s intestines, he used momma’s. What parts of a corpse a cannibal eats is dependent on their culture, as although we may retch at an eyeball being burst by the Bedouin, they’d rightly retch at what we put in a haggis or a hotdog. So, the waste? Excluding the skin, kidneys, liver, lungs and blood which we’ve covered, the excretory or urinary system includes the bladder and the intestines (as well as the rectum and colon). Delicious. As a passive biological system, which unlike walking and talking, requires us to consciously do nothing, our excretory system expels waste products like solids, liquids and gases. Each day, the average person expels a minimum of 3 litres of sweat, 3 ½ pints of urine, 1500 millilitres of gas, and 400 grams of poo, so across the year that amounts to 320lbs or 145kgs – in effect, we poo the weight of an adult panda. So, can we eat those organs which process our waste? Weighing 3 ½ kilos, 15 to 20 ft long and made of a 3-5mm fibrous muscle and a layer of mucus whose wave-like contractions move food through the GI tract, the intestines could provide a cannibal with 6300 calories, enough for 2 ½ days. Described as “tender and fatty with a chewy resistance” and a slightly sweet taste, they have no urine or faecal smell, if they’re cleaned and washed properly. Chitterlings, cow’s intestines stuffed with offal, herbs and vegetables, and boiled or fried are common across the world. So, with one human’s intestines enough to feed five cannibals for a day, if we made use of the 167,000 people who die daily, the dead could feed the citizens of Charlotte, North Carolina. The bladder is a tough piece of protein to prepare, so most countries only use it as casings, and at just 32 grams with a wall just 1mm thick, it only contains 12 calories, unlike a cream cracker which has 15, and contains uric acid, ammonia and a parasitic worm which can be transmitted person to person. Or, if you want to go old school, from our annual dead, we could make 60 million 19th century footballs. As for the rectum, with crispy pig’s rectum being a delicacy in South Korea, as “the red glistening tissue contains mucus glands”, oh yum, you could feed anus to the population of Seoul for 10 whole days. Which I’m sure they’ll love, as long as they ignore the fact that, according to a microbiologist Dr Gerba, even after the average human has wiped their anus, it still has a 10th of a gram of poo stuck to it. Even in animals, rarely do we eat the waste system as part of our daily diet, so why should a cannibal? Most unusable parts of an animal are turned into cattle feed, so although we balk at cannibalism, we’re okay with feeding dead chickens to live ones, cow corpses to active moos, and pig stiffs to their own relatives. But for the queasier cannibal, maybe enlisting a furry faithful friend isn’t a bad idea. Humans are carnivores, whereas dogs are hypercarnivores, who produce 100 times the stomach acid we do, and as scavengers, they can rapidly digest the meat, bones and fat that we’d find impossible. 2018, Mexico, Juan Carlos Bejar & Patricia Martinez Bernal were convicted of 20 counts of torture and murder. With the bodies found in 20-litre buckets buried under concrete, many were missing organs, and although impossible to prove, the hearts were fed to their dogs and some said, other innards too. But this is not uncommon, as dogs will eat anything. The inspiration for Mason Verger, Doctor Lector’s nemesis in Hannibal by Thomas Harris came from real-life. New York, 1970s, while high on PCP, a man known only as Michael smashed a mirror, sliced off the skin from his face, gouged out one of his eyes, and fed it to a German shepherd and her two puppies. The vet managed to get her to sick up his lips, nose and some of his face, but with her digestive system being so efficient, his face was beyond saving. Phew! So, after all that grossness, you’re probably thinking “are we finished?” Nope. After the organs comes the waste products, as isn’t that part of a human too? Come on cannibals, don’t be cowardly. The average human’s colon holds 8-25 lbs (or 11kgs) of faecal matter, and with the bowel never empty, every corpse has a little brown package in transit, containing bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli. If you think a cannibal wouldn’t eat poo, as an example, Mark Redwine of Colorado killed his 13-year-old son Dylan after he found photos of him dressed in a sexy red bra and eating faeces from a nappy. At 4 calories per gram, we expel 1200 calories down the toilet daily, and although urine can be sterilised to remove its toxins, its unlikely child-killer Albert Fish did this when he drank piss. Sweat comprises of water, salt and electrolytes, but a cannibal would burn more calories trying to drink it. And although many mammals and birds regurgitate food, the Butyric acid we produce in our vomit is highly corrosive to our nose, throat, eyes and lungs. Thank God, as that would be a real bummer at family mealtimes. But why doesn’t a cannibal (outside of the Aghori tribe) eat human waste? As said before, the eating of flesh is a sexual practice, the same way as those with coprophilia get an intense sexual arousal from faeces and defecation, and those with urolagnia get the same from urine. People are weird, with it said that 32% of men have fantasized about sex with wee or poo, and women more inclined to queening, or – as a humiliating act against a male man – sitting on the Smother Box. (Note sure what that is, Google it). Criminal cannibalism isn’t about food, it’s about power, sex and revenge, with many cannibals eating human flesh in retaliation for childhood abuse and trauma. For example; Ed Gein made a skin suit, Dennis Nilsen slept with dead bodies, and Robert Black took snaps of himself with a wine bottle up his ass. So is eating waste any more embarrassing? Maybe they are appalled by it, or maybe like poo fetishists, they keep quiet about their dirty habits, as even for a cannibal, some perversions are a step too far. Join me tomorrow as we explore if a cannibal’s stomach can digest another person’s stomach. |
AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. Archives
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