30 Classically Creepy Cannibal Killers

1. He Barbecued His Victims and Ate Them With Bloody Sauce

A mildly retarded epileptic, Ottis Elwood Toole endured extreme childhood abuse. His mother dressed him in girls’ clothes and called him “Susan.” Other relatives sexually abused him from age five onward. His grandmother allegedly forced him to perform Satanic rituals involving self-mutilation and grave-robbing.

Upon reaching adulthood, Ottis became a gay prostitute and a drifter. He met Henry Lee Lucas in a Jacksonville, FL soup kitchen. Together they became one of America’s most infamous serial-killing teams, with Toole claiming they’d committed over 100 murders in the service of a cult called “The Hands of Death.” Although his claims may have been exaggerated, it is widely believed that Toole murdered Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh from the defunct TV show America’s Most Wanted.

Henry Lee Lucas once told an interviewer that Ottis would crucify his victims, then barbecue and devour their corpses. A “recipe” for barbecue sauce allegedly handwritten by Toole includes one cup of blood as an ingredient. Lucas denied ever joining Toole in acts of cannibalism. “I don’t like barbecue sauce,” he explained. (source)

2. He Tore Out a Seven-Year-Old Girl’s Entrails and Gnawed on the Half-Digested Food Inside Them

Friends described Canadian lumberjack Dale Merle Nelson as “a regular guy.” But on one highly irregular day in 1970 while drinking heavily, he killed eight people, including five children. He used a knife to tear open a seven-year-old girl’s guts and gnawed on the partially digested food therein. (source)

3. ‘How Sweet and Tender Her Little Ass Was Roasted in the Oven’

An odd bird by any measure known to mankind, Albert Fish had habits such as embedding needles in his scrotum and abdomen, torturing himself with a nail-studded paddle, and shoving wool doused in lighter fluid up his ass before setting it ablaze. He killed at least three—and possibly more than nine—children, selecting the mentally handicapped and African Americans because he figured they wouldn’t be missed.

Especially audacious was his habit of bragging to his victims’ parents about the hellish abuses he’d rained down on their children. After murdering 10-year-old Grace Budd in 1928, he flayed her flesh into strips and cooked it with carrots, onions, and bacon. In 1934, he sent a letter to Grace’s mother that included the following passage:

I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her, though, I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

A year before murdering Grace Budd, Fish slew four-year-old Billy Gaffney in Brooklyn. When Billy’s mother eventually visited Fish in prison, he allegedly confessed the following:

I made a stew out of his ears – nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put in the oven.…At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hr., it was nice and brown, cooked thru. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was as sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.

Fish fried in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison in 1936. (source)

4. Impotent Russian Bed-Wetter and Serial Nipple-Swallower

A chronic bed-wetter as a child and chronically impotent as an adult, Andrei Chikatilo was one of Russia’s most prolific serial killers, with a confirmed body count of at least 52 women and children.

He confessed to feeling “chills” and shaking all over when tasting his victims’ blood after ripping through their genitals, lips, tongues, and nipples with his teeth. He also said he chewed on the testicles of male victims and the extracted uteri of his female prey. Although he denied swallowing their genitals, he confessed to swallowing the nipples of several victims. (source)

5. He Ate Hearts, Livers, Biceps, and Thighs

One of America’s most infamous serial killers, Jeffrey “The Milwaukee Cannibal” Dahmer drugged, raped, murdered, and dismembered seventeen men and boys during a grisly spree lasting from 1978 to 1991. Marinated in self-hatred for being gay, Dahmer drowned his misery in alcohol and cruised Milwaukee’s gay bars looking for prey: “I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of [as] people,” he would later say.

Dahmer was a necrophile who kept his victims’ body parts in various states of decay in his seedy apartment, often spurring complaints from building residents about the foul stench wafting from his abode.

Dahmer would later tell investigators that he’d feasted on the livers, hearts, thighs, and biceps of multiple victims in the year leading to his arrest. In 1994, another prison inmate beat him to death with a metal bar. (source)

6. ‘Looking for a Well-Built 18- to 30-Year-Old to Be Slaughtered and Then Consumed’

In 2001 a German man named Armin Meiwes posted a personals ad on The Cannibal Cafe, a now-defunct website catering to the culinary proclivities of those who enjoy gnawing on human flesh:

…looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.

A Berlin engineer named Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes found this offer irresistible. In March of 2001 he paid a visit to Meiwes’s home for his fatal soiree.

With videotape rolling, Meiwes attempted to bite off Brandes’s schween, but to no avail. He then sliced it off with a knife. Finding the raw severed penis to be unsuitably “chewy,” Meiwes pan-fried it in garlic and wine but burned it beyond the point where he deemed it edible, so he tossed the charcoal penis chunk to his dog.

Having plied the now-penisless Brandes with booze and painkillers, Meiwes read a Star Trek book for three hours while Brandes was bleeding to death in a bath.

Meiwes then butchered his victim’s body, storing it in a freezer and eating an estimated 40-plus pounds of his flesh over the next ten months.

Meiwes later spoke about taking his first taste of human flesh:

I decorated the table with nice candles….I took out my best dinner service, and fried and piece of rump steak—a piece from his back—made what I call princess potatoes, and sprouts….The first bite was, of course, very strange. It was a feeling I can’t really describe. I’d spent over 40 years longing for it, dreaming about it….And now I was getting the feeling that I was actually achieving this perfect inner connection through his flesh. The flesh tastes like pork but stronger.

I’ll take your word for it, mein Freund.

Meiwes was sentenced to eight years in prison, where he became a vegetarian. (source)

7. He Uploaded a Video of Himself Murdering His Gay Lover

A young Canadian gay pinup model, porn star, kitten-torturer, and plastic surgery addict, Luka Rocco Magnotta rattled the Deep Web in 2012 with an 11-minute video called 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick posted on Bestgore.com. It showed a nude male bound to a bedframe being stabbed to death with an icepick and kitchen knife. His carcass was then sexually assaulted and then chopped to pieces. A dog is seen chewing on the murder victim’s body. Police subsequently uncovered a longer, unedited version in which “cannibalism may have been performed.”

The real-life murder victim was Jun Lin, reportedly Magnotta’s gay lover. Magnotta fled to Germany, where the mega-narcissist was ultimately arrested in a Berlin Internet café while reading about himself online. (source)

8. PCP-Addled Rapper Found With Human Flesh in His Stomach

Hip-hop MC Big Lurch was born Antron Singleton but earned his stage name due to the fact that he’s six-foot-six. After a car accident left him permanently in pain, he developed a PCP habit to blunt his screaming nerve endings. During an all-night PCP smoking binge in April 2002, he stabbed and bit his 21-year-old female roommate to death, ripping her lungs from her chest cavity in the process. Police found him naked and blood-soaked outside, staring at the sky in the middle of the street. Chunks of human flesh were found in Lurch’s stomach during an examination. He later said that during his rampage, he was trying to kill the Devil to prevent the end of the world. (source)

9. He Later Became a Restaurant Critic

A mere five feet tall as an adult, Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa was allegedly so small at birth that he could fit in his father’s palm. Due to a savage inferiority complex because of his innate puniness, he targeted a five-foot-ten female classmate named Renée Hartevelt for murder, aiming to absorb her life energy and beauty by eating her remains.

In 1981, he invited Hartevelt to his Parisian apartment under the ruse that they would translate poetry together for a homework assignment. He shot her in the back of the head, raped her corpse, and ate her flesh for two days. Due to egregious legal bungling between French and Japanese authorities, Sagawa was able to check himself out of a Japanese mental hospital a mere five years after murdering, raping, and eating his victim.

He later became a restaurant critic and complained that his notoriety made it difficult for him to find writing gigs. (source)

10. She Cooked Him With Potatoes, Pumpkin, Cabbage, Squash, and Gravy

Having once slit the throat of a boyfriend’s puppy while he watched, Australian woman Katherine Knight was what could fairly be termed a high-maintenance girlfriend. She also tried strangling her husband to death on their wedding night.

One day in 2000, she broke into another boyfriend’s home, stabbed him 37 times, hanged his corpse from a meat hook, chopped off chunks of his flesh, and cooked them with potatoes, pumpkin, cabbage, squash, and gravy. She set a table and planned to serve his meat to his children, but the feast was interrupted by her arrest and eventual life imprisonment. (source)

11. ‘Mr. Gay UK’ Murdered His Boyfriend and Cooked His Flesh

Anthony Morley won the first-ever “Mr Gay UK” contest in 1993. Fiftheen years later, he invited another former Mr Gay UK contestant to his flat, where he stabbed him to death after they watched Brokeback Mountain together. He then sliced some flesh from his thigh and seasoned it in herbs and olive oil before frying and eating it. (source)

12. He Made Meat Pies From His Victims’ Flesh and Sold Them on the Streets

Working in tandem with his wife and mistress, Jorge Beltrao Negromonte of northern Brazil formed a fanatical religious sect they called The Cartel whose purpose was to rid the world of bad souls by practicing “population control.” He was convicted in 2013 of murdering three young women, one of whom he slaughtered in front of her 18-month old daughter before feeding the infant pieces of her mom for lunch. Negromonte and his accomplices sautéed their victims’ flesh with onions and vegetables and made them into meat pies, which they sometimes ate and sometimes sold on the streets to unsuspecting customers. Brazen beyond all comprehension, the cultists even sold a book describing how they murdered, skinned, and ate one of their victims. After being sentenced to 23 years in prison, Negromonte would helpfully explain:

The women would prepare the meat. I can’t remember if we ever fried it like a steak. I did buy a mincing machine for Bruna, but I’m not sure if she used it….The meat would last for three or four days. We would have it for lunch and dinner until it was all gone….If I were let out as I am today, I could kill another one. Human meat, for me, is no different to beef. (source)

13. She Murdered Women and Baked Them Into Sweet Buns

An Italian serial killer who operated as World War II began raging, Leonarda Cianculli murdered three women. She would offer them drugged wine, then murder them with an axe and ritually dismember them. She made one of their corpses into soap and the other two into food. As she explained in her autobiography An Embittered Soul’s Confessions:

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…. (source)

14. A Small Hand Was Cooking in a Boiling Pan of Water When He Was Arrested

A borderline retarded bedwetting serial killer from Germany in the 1930s, Joachim Kroll confessed to fourteen murders, all but one of his victims being young girls. His typical MO was to surprise a victim, strangle her to death, strip her naked, rape her corpse, dismember her, and take pieces of her body home to eat. A neighbor in his apartment building became alarmed one day after Kroll told him not to use his toilet “because it is blocked up with guts.” When the neighbor notified police, they searched Kroll’s apartment and found parts of a chopped-up girl in his refrigerator, human entrails clogging a waste pipe, and a tiny hand boiling in a pan on his stove. Kroll would explain that young children had the best-tasting meat and that he ate them in order to save money on his food bills. (source)

15. ‘Once I Put the Parts Through a Meat Grinder and Made Dumplings’

Known as “Metal Fang” due to the fact that he had his real teeth replaced with metal ones, Kazakh serial killer Nikolai Dzhumagaliev was convicted of murdering seven people in 1979-1980. He would serve his victims’ flesh to friends at dinner parties, telling them they were eating “long pig.” Police were alerted after he murdered and started dismembering a party guest in another room during a house party. Describing his first murder, he told detectives:

I warmed my hands on the woman’s body and stripped her naked. I cut the corpse’s breast into strips, removed the ovaries, separated the pelvis and hips; I then folded these pieces into a backpack and carried them home. I melted the fat to fry with, and some parts I pickled. Once I put the parts through a meat grinder and made dumplings….The meat of this woman took me a month to eat. (source)

16. He Said That Eating People Was Like Eating Pears

Known in Venezuela as El Comegente (“People Eater”), a homeless man named Dorángel Vargas confessed to slaughtering and consuming at least ten men in the late 1990s. A man of high ethical standards, he refused to eat women and children. During an interrogation after his arrest, he blithely claimed that eating people was as simple and easy as eating pears. (source)

17. He Cooked a Dead Man’s Brains in a Frying Pan

After beating a woman to death with a hammer in 1993, Englishman Peter Bryan was judged to be insane and thus sent to a mental hospital rather than prison. After being suspected of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl near the hospital, he was transferred to an open psychiatric ward for his own safety, a move which seems fairly insane. He walked out of that ward one day in 2004 and murdered his friend Brian Cherry. Responding to neighbors’ reports of hearing screams from Cherry’s flat, police found Bryan cooking Cherry’s brain in a frying pan next to a tub of butter. Hair, scalp, and brain tissue were found on a nearby plate, along with a knife and fork. Bryan was sent to another mental hospital, where he beat a 60-year-old man to death. He said that if hospital workers hadn’t interrupted him, he would have eaten that man, too. When asked why he liked to eat his victims, Bryan nonchalantly explained, “I want their souls.” (source)

18. He Decapitated a Man and Began Eating Him on a Greyhound Bus

When one boards a Greyhound bus headed for any destination, one must expect that some of the passengers might be unwashed, unruly, and even a tad smelly. One doesn’t someone to decapitate a fellow passenger and then begin eating him. But this is exactly what happened on March 5, 2009 on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba traveling the Trans Canada Highway. Vincent Li approached a sleeping Tim McLean and plunged a large knife into his neck and chest. The driver pulled to the roadside and exited the bus along with all the other passengers as Li locked the doors and displayed McLean’s severed head. During a police standoff, Li began eating parts of his victim’s body. Upon his arrest, police found McLean’s tongue, nose, and ear in Li’s pockets. The week after this gruesome attack, Greyhound Canada pulled a series of ads that included the line, “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of bus rage.” (source)

19. For Him, Cannibalism Was ‘Part of the Magic’ of Killing

Describing himself on his MySpace profile as “Hatred Bound Tightly in Flesh,” Englishman Stephen Shaun Griffiths was an aficionado of high-tech archery, which eventually earned him the moniker “The Crossbow Cannibal.” He was found guilty of killing and eating three prostitutes in 2010. He filmed the murders and his subsequent acts of flesh-eating at his home, which he called “The Slaughterhouse.” A psychology grad, he told detectives that eating the dead prostitutes’ flesh was “part of the magic” of killing them. (source)

20. Buck-Ass Naked, He Ate a Homeless Man’s Face

Although it was originally thought that he was high on bath salts, police only found traces of cannabis in the bloodstream of Rudy Eugene, who gained national infamy in 2012 for assaulting a homeless man under a bridge in Miami. The entire 18-minute attack was filmed by a security camera at the Miami Herald building. Eugene had abandoned his car, stripped naked, accused 65-year-old homeless man Ronald Poppo of stealing his Bible, beat him unconscious, and proceeded to start eating his face. When Poppo was admitted to the hospital, 75-80% of his face was missing and one eye had been gouged out. During a standoff with police, Eugene allegedly only growled at them and was eventually shot to death. He became known as the “Causeway Cannibal” and the “Miami Zombie.” (source)

21. ‘When They Opened the Door He Was Eating Her Face’

When Welsh police responded to a call about suspicious activity in a hotel room in 2014, they opened the door to the sight of recently released violent criminal Matthew Williams eating a dead woman’s face. They Tasered him, which eventually led to his death. A former female associate of Williams described him as an “animal”:

Security said they told him no girls in his room and he didn’t answer; when they opened his door he was eating her face. (source)

22. A Taste for Raw Liver

Like most murderers, South Korean serial killer Yoo Young-chul was motivated by an implacable sense that he was doing the right thing. Claiming that “Women shouldn’t be sluts, and the rich should know what they’ve done,” he murdered 21 women and rich people between 2003 and 2004, beating most of them to death with a hammer. He told investigators that he ate some of their livers raw. (source)

23. He Drank Little Girls’ Blood and Taunted Their Parents by Mail

Known in Japan as “The Little Girl Murderer,” Tsutomu Miyazaki’s rage was allegedly fueled by the fact that nature had saddled him with a micropenis. He developed a taste for child porn in the early 1980s. In 1988 and 1989, he murdered four girls between the ages of four and seven, drinking their blood, sexually defiling their corpses, and eating part of one victim’s hand.

Like Albert Fish, he had a sick tendency to taunt his victims’ parents. He sent the charred remains of a little girl named Mari to her parents in a box along with a postcard reading: “Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove.” To the parents of another victim, he sent a postcard using words cut out of magazines: “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.” He would also call victims’ parents via phone but remain silent when they answered. In court he blamed his actions on a cartoon character named “Rat Man.” He was hanged in 2008. (source)

24. ‘The Human Body Taste Was Very Similar to Pork’

A morbidly obese Baltimore trailer park resident, Joe “The Cannibal” Metheny admitted to eight murders starting in 1976. He would dismember his victims and save their flesh for consumption. He also mixed their flesh with beef and pork and sold it to unsuspecting customers. At trial he told the court:

I cut the meat up and put it in some Tupperware bowls then put it in a freezer….I opened up a little open-pit beef stand. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches. They were very good….The human body taste was very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference. (source)

25. He Ate His Mother ‘Because He Was Hungry’

An unemployed Russian man named Sergey Gavrilov killed his 55-year-old mother in January 2009 by smashing her on the head with a brick, then used flesh from her legs to make soup and pasta dishes for weeks. “I did not like the flesh,” he complained to detectives. “It was too fatty.” But a judge gave Gavrilov a reduced prison sentence due to his economic indigence and “because he was hungry.” (source)

26. He Allegedly Committed a Murder While Wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ Hat

On his YouTube channel, 19-year-old Floridian Austin Harrouff wrote, “I’ve got a psycho side and a normal side. I’ve lost my mind help me find it.”

After allegedly stabbing a couple to death this summer while wearing a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” cap, Harrouff was found in a driveway by police, biting into the head of one victim. He was subdued by a Taser and subsequently went into an eleven-day coma. He awaits trial for murder. (source)

27. Two Brothers Who Made Curry Out of Human Corpses

After serving a paltry two years in jail when police discovered they’d dug up and eaten more than 100 corpses from a local graveyard, Pakistani brothers Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali were arrested again in 2014 after a boy’s severed head was found in one of their homes. Police found that they were making curry from a toddler’s corpse. (source)

28. Two Brothers Who Ate Their Other Brother

In 2009, two Russian brothers identified only as Timur and Marat G. pleaded guilty to killing and eating their older brother, who’d been released after a ten-year-prison sentence. One of the brothers explained to police that they ate his remains to hide evidence of his murder:

Yes, we’ve decided to eat him. I did not want to return behind the bars, so we have cut off his head and buried it and the body have cut in parts and kept in a refrigerator. We have been cooking and eating his meat for six months. (source)

29. They Ate Female Breasts as Part of a Satanic Ritual

A four-man satanic cult variously known as the “Ripper Crew” and the “Chicago Rippers” were suspected in the disappearances of at least 18 women from 1981 to 1982. After murdering their victims, they’d bring the corpses back to cult leader Robin Gecht’s apartment, which he referred to as a “satanic chapel.” One of Gecht’s accomplices described how they would sever the women’s breasts with a wire garrote and partially eat them as a sort of sacramental ritual. Gecht would then masturbate onto the breasts before placing them in a box. The accomplice said he once saw fifteen breasts in that box. (source)

30. Police Found Huge Jars of Human Flesh in Curing Salts

German serial killer Karl Denke was arrested in 1924 after an axe attack on a man in his house. Police found a notebook wherein Denke detailed murdering and eating 42 victims between 1914 and 1918. He allegedly sold some of their flesh at market, fobbing it off as pork. A search of Denke’s residence uncovered human flesh being cured with salt in huge jars. Denke hanged himself to death in his jail cell. (source)