Top 20 Human Cannibals by Country( flesh eaters)

There is nothing as disgusting as people who torture, murder, and cannibalize humans. In the past, humans have practiced cannibalism in many parts of the world. Today, the Korowai are one of the few tribes believed to eat human flesh as a cultural practice. In most countries, the act of human cannibalism is not illegal, nor a problem. People who eat human flesh are unusually charged with a crime relating to murder or desecration of a body. In the past, cannibalism has been practiced by people suffering from famine or starvation, but this article will not cover any such cases, only people who have committed criminal cannibalism.

Within the field of psychology there is a debate on what factors lead a person to practice criminal cannibalism. Some evidence suggests that cannibalism is a result of trauma experienced in childhood. It has been called a “psychological response to anger and frustration” expressed through oral aggression and an urge to literally absorb a person through consumption. In reality, people who kill and eat others are mentally unstable and dangerous predators. These types of individuals are rare and many countries have never seen a serial human cannibal. The life of a cannibal encompasses some of the worst and most sadistic examples of human capability.

This article will examine twenty people who were caught in the act of eating or having just consumed a human victim. It was organized specifically by country, with one person chosen from each area of the world. However, it has two Russians and two Germans, as I could find eighteen countries with documented cases of criminal cannibalism. The article is a sequel to a list posted on December 18, 2008, which covers the Top 10 Cases of Human Cannibalism. For that reason, it will not include any people mentioned in that article, most notably Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, Armin Meiwes, Issei Sagawa, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Vince Weiguang Li

Canada

Vince Weiguang Li was born in Dandong, China on April 30, 1968. He immigrated to Canada from China on June 11, 2001, and became an official Canadian citizen on November 7, 2006. On the evening of July 30, 2008, a 22-year-old Canadian man named Tim McLean was riding on the same Greyhound bus as Vince Weiguang Li. The bus was traveling from Edmonton to Winnipeg. According to witnesses, while McLean was sleeping on the bus, Li suddenly produced a large knife and began to stab him repeatedly in the neck and chest until he decapitated him. Li then displayed McLean’s severed head to other passengers as they fled the bus in horror. The event took place approximately 30 km west of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba on the Trans Canada Highway.

On several occasions, Li went back to the body, severed parts, and consumed some of McLean’s flesh. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) responded to the call and found the suspect still on board the bus. The other passengers were huddled at the roadside, some of them crying and vomiting. Witnesses continually observed the suspect stabbing and cutting McLean’s body, and carrying McLean’s severed head. Five hours after the murder, the suspect attempted to escape from the bus by breaking through a window.

Vince Weiguang Li was tazed twice, handcuffed, and placed in the back of a police cruiser. Inside of his pockets, the police found parts of the victim’s body. This included McLean’s ears, nose, and tongue. The victim’s eyes and part of his heart were never recovered and are presumed to have been eaten by Li. Vince Weiguang Li’s trial started on March 3, 2009 and he plead not criminally responsible due to insanity. He was remanded to a high-security mental health facility where he remains to this day.

19

James Douglas

3rd Marquess of Queensberry, Scotland

James Douglas, 3rd Marquess of Queensberry, was a Scottish nobleman. He was the eldest son of James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, who was created Duke of Dover, Marquess of Beverley, and Earl of Ripon in 1708. In 1709, the elder Douglas was made Secretary of State for Scotland. The younger James Douglas was born in 1697. Stories describe him as an “imbecile,” and violently insane. Douglas was kept under lock and key from childhood at Queensberry House in Edinburgh, which is now part of the Scottish Parliament complex. In 1706, the elder James Douglas attempted to have his son removed from the succession.

It is reported that when the Act of Union was signed in 1707, which placed the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland under the same monarch, the disruption allowed the 10-year-old James Douglas to escape. He then entered the kitchen of Queensberry House and slaughtered a young servant. The report says that Douglas roasted the boy alive on a revolving spit. He then ate sections of the boy before being apprehended. After the event, Douglas was known as “The Cannibalistic Idiot,” and the oven he used to kill the boy can still be seen in the Parliament’s Allowances Office. James Douglas died in 1715 and was buried in Calverley churchyard. His brother Charles Douglas, 3rd Duke of Queensberry succeeded him. The Queensberry House kitchen is still said to be haunted to this day.

18

Tarrare

France

The story of Tarrare is one of the most bizarre in history. Around 1772, Tarrare was born in France. As a teenager, it became apparent that Tarrare was different from other people because of his endless need for food. His parents eventually had to disown him because Tarrare ate everything in the house, including the pets. In his twenties, Tarrare was the warm-up act to a traveling charlatan. He would swallow corks, stones, live animals, and whole apples. To satisfy his hunger, Tarrare would eat anything available from the town gutters and garbage piles. His bizarre ability soon caught the attention of the government and Tarrare was the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity.

Tarrare was known to eat live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies. On one occasion, he swallowed an eel without chewing. Despite his unusual diet and endless need for meat, Tarrare was of normal sized man with no signs of mental illness. He was described as having unusually soft hair, and an abnormally wide mouth in which his teeth were heavily stained, and lips almost invisible. Tarrare constantly suffered from foul body odor. He was described as stinking “to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces.”

General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare’s abilities to use, and he was employed as a courier by the French army. He would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination. Tarrare was strongly chastened for his hunger and wanted to fix the problem. He agreed to submit to a procedure that would cure his appetite, but it failed. While at the hospital getting treated, Tarrare would sneak out of his room and scavenge for entrails left in gutters, rubbish heaps, and outside butcher shops.

He attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and looted the corpses in the morgue. After falling under suspicion of eating a toddler, Tarrare was ejected from the hospital. In 1798, he reappeared in Versailles suffering from severe tuberculosis and died. After his death, Tarrare’s corpse rotted quickly. At the autopsy, his body was found to be filled with pus. Tarrare’s liver, gallbladder, and stomach were abnormally large and he was covered in ulcers.

Another man with a similar case to Tarrare is a Polish soldier named Charles Domery (1778-1800). Domery is known to have eaten 174 cats in a year, and although he disliked vegetables he would eat 4 to 5 pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kg) of grass each day if he was unable to find other food. During his service on the French frigate Hoche, he attempted to eat the severed leg of a crew member hit by cannon fire, before other members of the crew wrestled it from him.

17

Leonarda Cianciulli

Italy

In 1893, Leonarda Cianciulli was born in Montella, Italy. As a child, she attempted suicide on two separate occasions and was greatly disturbed. Cianciulli had seventeen pregnancies during her marriage, but lost three of the children to miscarriage, and ten more died in their youth. In 1939, Cianciulli heard that her eldest son, Giuseppe, was to join the Italian army in preparation for World War II. She came to the conclusion that his safety required human sacrifices. Cianciulli then planned the murder of three middle-aged women. After the victims were comfortable, she killed them with an axe and cut their bodies into nine parts. She also gathered the blood into a basin.

In her memorial (titled “An embittered soul’s confessions”) Cianciulli describes what happened next: “I threw the pieces into a pot, added seven kilos of caustic soda, which I had bought to make soap, and stirred the whole mixture until the pieces dissolved in a thick, dark mush that I poured into several buckets and emptied in a nearby septic tank. As for the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk and eggs, as well as a bit of margarine, kneading all the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit, though Giuseppe and I also ate them.”
In regard to her third murder, Cianciulli said: “She ended up in the pot, like the other two…her flesh was fat and white, when it had melted I added a bottle of cologne, and after a long time on the boil I was able to make some most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to neighbors and acquaintances. The cakes, too, were better, that woman was really sweet.” Leonarda Cianciulli has become known as the “Soap-Maker of Correggio,” because she turned the remains of her victims into soap and food.

After a neighbor became suspicious of Cianciulli, the police were called, and she immediately confessed to the murders, providing detailed accounts of what she had done. Cianciulli was found guilty of her crimes and sentenced to thirty years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. Leonarda Cianciulli died of cerebral apoplexy in the women’s criminal asylum in Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970. A number of artifacts from the case, including the pot in which the victims were boiled, are on display at the Criminological Museum in Rome.

16

Matej Curko

Slovakia

Until August 2011, people in the village of Sokol, Slovakia, knew Matej Curko as an ordinary guy that lived with his wife and two children. In reality, he is the latest person to be caught cannibalizing victims he met on the Internet. We will never know the full story behind the “Slovak Cannibal” because he was shot and killed by police. However, in his online conversations, Curko is quoted as saying “I am not a rapist, not gay, I am just a pervert who wants to feel death.” In the summer of 2011, police were contacted by a Swiss man who said that Curko was attempting to coerce him into suicide and cannibalism on the Internet. The police responded by putting together an online operation where Curko was tricked into meeting an agent.

After officers rushed the scene, Curko pulled out a gun, so a sniper shot him five times. Curko later died in the hospital. After a search of his home, police found a large collection of human body parts in his “fridge of horrors.” Curko kept the body parts of his victims for later consumption. Inside the fridge, police found the remains of two Slovakian women who disappeared in 2010. The women are thought to have volunteered themselves for murder and cannibalization. Police are now attempting to link Matej Curko to the disappearance of thirty Italian women between January 2009 and May 2011. The case shocked people in Slovakia and made us all wonder how a seemingly ordinary man could carry out such violent acts.

15

Peter Bryan

England

In 1969, Peter Bryan was born In London. His parents were immigrants from Barbados. In 1994, Bryan was sent to Rampton Secure Hospital after admitting to the unlawful killing of a 20-year-old shop assistant named Nisha Sheth, who was beaten to death with a hammer in 1993. In October 2003, psychiatrists noted that there had been “a continued improvement in his mental state” and talked of plans to move Peter Bryan to a more independent accommodation. In January 2004, social workers applied for a transfer to a “low-support accommodation.” He was described as a nice man, lonely with no friends.

However, in early 2004, Bryan was transferred to an open psychiatric ward at Newham General Hospital after allegations that he had indecently assaulted a 16-year-old girl. In February 2004, he walked out of the mental health unit in Newham, east London and cannibalized his friend Brian Cherry. Cherry was killed by at least 24 hammer blows to the head. On the night in question, one of Cherry’s friends Nicola Newman let herself into his flat around 7.15pm and noticed a strong smell of disinfectant. Peter Bryan then emerged from the kitchen bare-chested, holding a knife, and announced: “Brian is dead.” She didn’t believe him at first until she saw Cherry’s body with his arms and legs separated.

The police arrived to find Peter Bryan standing in the hallway in the dark with bloodstained hands, jeans, and shoes. In the kitchen officers noticed a small amount of human flesh in a frying pan next to an open tub of Clover butter. The meat was part of Brian Cherry’s brain. The police also found brain tissue and hair matted with blood on a plate next to a knife and fork on the draining board. Peter Bryan told officers he had killed Mr. Cherry and “I ate his brain with butter, it was really nice.” He later added: “I would have done someone else if you hadn’t come along. I wanted their souls.”

While at Pentonville jail, Bryan told a member of the staff that he wanted to eat someone’s nose and prison officers had to use riot shields when unlocking his cell in case of attack. Despite the danger, doctors believed that Peter Bryan, who had a long history of brutal violence and deception, should be transferred to a medium risk ward. He was moved to Broadmoor Hospital, where he killed his third victim, a fellow patient, Richard Loudwell, aged 60. Bryan battered Loudwell and tied a ligature around his neck. Mr. Loudwell died in the hospital later that day. Peter Bryan said that if he had not been interrupted he would have eaten Loudwell’s flesh.

On March 15, 2005, Peter Bryan pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to two counts of manslaughters on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Judge Giles Forrester said: “You killed on these last two occasions because it gave you a thrill and a feeling of power when you ate flesh.” Bryan, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, will never be released from jail.

14

Jarno Elg

Finland

Jarno Elg is responsible for the most gruesome homicide in Finnish history. In 1975, Elg was born in Hyvinkää, Finland. As a child, he had a long history of violence towards animals. In one case, Elg killed a dog by duct taping it up and hitting it on a metal pipe. On November 21, 1998, Jarno Elg entered the house of an unnamed man and strangled him to death. He then continued to dissect the man, wrap his head in duct tape, and eat him with a group of accomplices. Elg had three accomplices and they took various body parts from the man and used them in a satanic ritual that included torturing the victim while listening to The Cainian Chronicle album by Norwegian black metal band Ancient.

The criminal investigation started when a decapitated leg was found at a dump site, thus giving the name “dump site murder” to the case. Jarno Elg was tracked by the police and sentenced to life in prison for murdering a 23-year-old man and eating some of his body parts. The Hyvinkaa District Court in southern Finland sentenced accomplices Terhi Johanna Tervashonka , 17, to eight years and six months in prison and Mika Kristian Riska, 21, to two years and eight months. It was said that the three people “were strongly influenced by Satanism.” The court declared most of the details of the case sealed for 40 years. For this reason, only a limited amount of information is available.

13

Jose Luis Calva

Mexico

In 1969, Jose Luis Calva was born in Mexico City. He had a traumatic childhood that was full of sexual abuse and the death of his father. In October 2007, the Federal Preventive Police visited Calva’s home to arrest him for the disappearance of his girlfriend Alejandra Galeana. As the police entered his home, they found Calva eating a dish of human meat seasoned with lemon. Inside his flat, the police found the mutilated body of his girlfriend in the closet, human remains in the refrigerator, a frying pan full of cooked human flesh, and muscle tissue in a box of cereal. Calva tried to escape by jumping through a window, but was injured and arrested.

Inside his apartment, the police found an unfinished novel titled Cannibal Instincts that bore on its cover a masked image of Hannibal Lecter. Police also found a picture of Anthony Hopkins portraying Hannibal Lecter. The Mexican press dubbed Calva the “cannibal poet” and the case shocked even the most hardened veteran of the Mexico City police. Jose Luis Calva was charged with two counts of murder in Mexico City, convicted, and sentenced to 84 years in prison. There is circumstantial evidence that links him to the murder of eight separate girls. In the early morning of December 11, 2007, Calva committed suicide in prison and was found hanging by his belt.

12

Joachim Kroll

Germany

In 1933, Joachim Kroll was born in Hindenburg (Zabrze), Province of Upper Silesia. In 1955, Kroll started a deadly killing spree in Germany. He would surprise his victims and strangle them. Kroll would then perform sexual acts on the body, mutilate it, and cut off pieces to be eaten. At the time, the police were aware that they were dealing with a human cannibal because of the skinned corpses. On July 3, 1976, Kroll was arrested for killing a four-year-old girl named Marion Kettner. As the police searched his home, a neighbor told them that when he asked Kroll what was clogging his pipes, he simply replied: “Guts.”

The police found the body of Marion Kettner dismembered in Kroll’s house. Some of her parts were in the fridge, and Kroll was in the process of cooking a small hand on the stove. The entrails of the girl were found stuck in the waste-pipe. Kroll was immediately arrested and he confessed to thirteen murders. He was labeled the Ruhr Cannibal, Ruhr Hunter, and the Duisburg Man-Eater by the German media. At his trial, Kroll said that he often sliced portions of the flesh from his victims to save money on his grocery bills. In 1982, Joachim Kroll was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died of a heart attack in 1991, in Rheinbach.

11

Tsutomu Miyazaki

Japan

In 1962, Tsutomu Miyazaki was born in Ōme, Tokyo, Japan. He was a premature birth and had deformed hands, which were gnarled and fused directly to the wrists. In order to rotate his hands, Miyazaki needed to move his entire forearm. Due to his deformity, Miyazaki was ostracized in school. Between 1988 and 1989, Tsutomu Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls, aged between four and seven, and sexually molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim and ate her limbs. In the Japanese media, Miyazaki became known as the Otaku Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer, and Dracula.

During the murder spree, Miyazaki was a mild-mannered employee by day, but outside of work, he randomly selected children to kill. He also terrorized the families of his victims, often times sending them letters which recalled the murders in graphic detail. He allowed the corpse of his first victim, Mari Konno, to decompose and then he chopped off her hands and feet, which Miyazaki kept in his closet until his arrest. Miyazaki burned the bones of his victims, ground them into powder, and sent them to the families in a box.

On July 23, 1989, Miyazaki sexual abused a girl in a park near her home and was apprehended by the girl’s father. After fleeing naked on foot, Miyazaki eventually returned to the park to get his car and was arrested by police. During his trial, Miyazaki displayed a calm and indifferent demeanor. His killings fueled a moral panic against otaku, accusing anime and horror films of making him a murderer. Tsutomu Miyazaki was sentenced to death on April 14, 1997 and hanged on June 17, 2008. The details surrounding his cannibalism have not been fully released.