by Ray Black
One might think it could not get much worse than this, however there exists a rumour some believe true. It is said that many of his victims did not end up thrown into water but rather placed into his sausages and sold outside the Silesian train station, turning the unwitting German public into cannibals.
NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH
As Grossmann hacked his way through the female population of Berlin, unsurprisingly human remains began showing up in the numerous waterways. It was not long before the police realised they had a serial killer on the rampage. A total of twenty-three bodies between 1918 and 1921 had been discovered.
When police posted public notices around the capital in early August 1921, Grossmann’s neighbours finally began to suspect there might be more to the man on the top floor. Now regarding their neighbour with extreme suspicion they kept a watchful eye on the lothario’s movements, especially when bringing lovers back to the flat. At one point Helene and Mannheim Itzig, a couple living down the corridor from Grossmann, went as far as to drill a hole through his door in order to catch sight of his evil actions.
Consequently, when residents heard the usual violent screams followed by an eerie silence on Sunday 21 August, they decided it was time to call the authorities. The police rushed straight over and broke down the door to a scene of pure horror.
Inside the dingy room thick with the foul stench of blood and viscera, they found the body of a woman in a semi-state of dismemberment. Over her stood Grossmann covered in her blood. Further examination of the apartment found that at least three others had been butchered in recent weeks.
The identity of the victim was found to be thirty-five-year-old Marie Nitsche, a down-at-heel ex-con who had only just been released from a month-long stay at Moabit prison. She had met Grossman on the street from where they frequented various drinking dens. Straight out of jail without a place to stay or money in her pocket, she must have felt as if she had landed on her feet when her newly-acquired friend invited her back to his apartment. Little did she know her friend was the devil incarnate.
ONE LAST KILL
Caught red-handed, Georg Karl Grossmann was arrested and initially charged with the murder of Marie Nitsche. His defence would have a tough time finding him innocent of this crime. Police, however, had to try and connect this evil man to the mutilated bodies washed up around Engelbecken and now lying at the city morgue. This would be more difficult.
The authorities worked tirelessly to develop a series of witnesses prepared to testify against Grossmann. Many Berliner women came forward, their interviews shedding light on the perversions of this sexual sadist. Yet despite this damning evidence provided by these testimonies Grossmann was charged with just three murders in the first degree. As the judge passed a sentence of death it is said the mad butcher laughed out loud.
On the 5 July 1922, while awaiting his execution, Grossmann committed suicide, hanging himself inside his cell. In all his time in prison he never gave a full confession, for that reason the actual number of victims he murdered and mutilated is not known. Some suggest as many as fifty young women found their way from the streets of Berlin into Grossmann’s apartment. How many of these filled the frankfurters served from his stall no-one dares contemplate.
Issei Sagawa
Unable to resist his lustful urges for human flesh, this pint-sized celebrity cannibal succumbed to an unnatural appetite, inviting a friend over for dinner.
DISTURBING DREAMS
With Japan still reeling from the double atomic hits upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Issei Sagawa entered early into this world on 11 June 1949. As well as being born premature, no bigger than the palm of his wealthy father’s hand, he was also diagnosed with anoxia; a condition characterised by a severe, lack of oxygen often causing brain damage. Such an affliction might go some way to explaining his future actions.
Sagawa began to have dark thoughts at a very early age. He recalled a game he played with his father and uncle in which they would chase him around the house pretending to be man-eating monsters. This idea remained with him even in sleep, often dreaming of being roasted in a cannibal’s cauldron. Such visions of the subconscious slowly began to seep into his everyday thoughts, and he was soon fantasising about consuming a human body.
AN ABORTIVE ATTEMPT
At just five feet short with tiny hands and feet, an oversized head and a high-pitched feminine voice, Issei was never going to be a girl magnet. However, he was blessed with brains and performed well at school and soon he was enrolling at the Wako University in Tokyo. It was here, whilst studying for an English Literature degree, that he became fixated on tall, Nordic women; their white skin beguiling him into the bizarre belief that if he could consume them it would be the ultimate expression of love.
One summer day Issei chose to act upon this impulse and climbed in through the apartment window of a German woman he had seen in the street. He found her semi-clothed and fast asleep, but before he could act out his fantasy, the woman woke, screamed and he fled the scene. If there was to be a next time, he knew he would have to plan more carefully.
Following this attack, the diminutive student visited a psychiatrist to confess his depraved desires, who wasted no time deeming him highly dangerous. Unfortunately, his rich industrialist father stepped in to cover up this evaluation and Sagawa was swiftly removed from the area. This would not be the last time Issei would need his father’s help.
INDECENT PROPOSAL
Escaping further punishment in Tokyo, Sagawa finished his bachelor’s degree and attained a master’s at the University of Osaka. The thirty-two-year-old then went further afield to gain his PhD at the famous Sorbonne in Paris. The social side of academic life rather left him behind, ignored by his fellow students – no doubt due to his odd appearance – allowing Issei to disappear into a fantasy world.
He would daydream about killing any of the large number of fair-skinned European women he would see in the French capital, and devouring their flesh in a bid to get close to them. He began to invite prostitutes back to his 16th Arrondissement apartment, but was ultimately too frightened to deliver the final blow.
Then he saw her. A twenty-five-year-old Dutch beauty called Renee Hartevelt, a highly intelligent student, fluent in three languages and a bright future ahead of her. Knowing he would not be able to get close by any normal means, Sagawa approached her with a proposition: would she be open to teaching him German for a generous fee. The stunning blonde accepted, unaware she would be the one to pay the ultimate price.
SORBONNE APPETIT
Teacher and student began to meet regularly to improve Issei’s German. They would also exchange views on European literature, art and architecture and Renee soon began to enjoy the little man’s company, bonding with another intellectual mind. Sagawa, on the other hand, was dreaming of an altogether different bond. He had become infatuated with his tutor, licking the place where she had sat after she had returned home. He now made up his mind to eat her.
On 11 June 1981 Sagawa waited for the arrival of Renee Hartevelt. He had purchased a cassette recorder on which he wanted to record her reading one of his favourite German Expressionist poems. Behind the chest of drawers he had hidden a .22 calibre rifle. Today was the day he would make his dreams a reality.
Sharing pleasantries and some herbal tea, Issei cut to the chase, openly declaring his love for her. Renee revealed her feelings towards him were purely platonic. She found him engaging but sadly not sexually attractive. To avoid an awkward silence, Sagawa retrieved the poetry book from which Renee had agreed to read and turned on the tape recorder.
With her back to him as she recited, Sagawa moved for the rifle, aimed at the back of her head and pulled the trigger. By all accounts he fainted and on waking saw the lifeless body silently sprawled on the floor, blood pouring from the gunshot wound. Phase one of his despicable deed was complete.
MEAT FEAST
Having rendered her altogether more receptive to his desires, Issei undressed the ob
ject of his warped affection, her beautiful white body beckoning him onward. He tried to bite into her naked buttock, but could only leave teeth marks, so he jabbed a knife into the flesh, a corn-coloured sallow fat oozing from the punctured skin. Beneath he found the red meat he yearned for, discovering it was soft and odourless like raw tuna. He looked into her eyes and told her she was delicious.
Now he had taken his first step into cannibalism, Sagawa began sampling various parts of Renee’s dead body. Serving up dish after distasteful dish with salt and mustard, he sat at the dinner table and feasted on her remains using her underwear as a napkin. Once he had eaten enough he took what was left of Renee Hartevelt to the bedroom and had sex with her corpse before falling into a deep sleep.
The next day he awoke next to the mutilated body, surprised to discover it did not smell. So Sagawa continued with the evil tasting menu indulging in the less desirable parts: genitalia, eyeballs, armpit and even anus. It was only after he had decapitated his victim, holding the head up by the hair before him, did he realise he was now a cannibal.
PARK AND HIDE
Four days passed before Issei Sagawa, lost in a world of lust-filled debauchery, realised it was time for his guest to leave the house. Her putrefying corpse had now developed a noticeable odour and had begun to attract a host of flies. Using an electric knife and hatchet, he hacked away at the limbs, cramming body parts into two wheeled suitcases, pausing only to masturbate … with her severed hand!
He then called for a taxi to take him and his shameful luggage to the Bois de Boulogne, a nearby park, where he planned to dump the dismembered Dutch girl into the lake. But a short Oriental man with a limp lugging two oversized suitcases through the grounds was anything but inconspicuous. Soon spotted, Issei panicked, dropped everything and bolted from the park.
It did not take long for the police to get the call to examine the abandoned cases. Stomachs turned as they opened them up, taking in their shocking contents, and they were swiftly traced back to Sagawa. When gendarmes searched his Parisian apartment they found all the evidence they required; Hartevelt’s lips, left breast and both buttocks sitting in the refrigerator. He did not resist arrest.
EXTRADITION OF EVIL
The French court, on advice from three separate psychiatrists, declared Issei Sagawa legally insane and unfit to stand trial, and he was ordered to be held indefinitely in a mental institution. However, his father, now president of Kurita Water Industries, was to intervene once again, pulling some strings to get his son extradited back to his native Japan.
In May 1984 the thirty-four-year-old disgraced student arrived in Tokyo to a media frenzy. He was swiftly escorted to Matsuzawa Asylum, where psychiatrist Tsuguo Kanego adjudged him to be sane but recommended he remain behind bars. Only there was a problem. Japanese authorities discovered they had no legal right to hold him. With the relevant legal paperwork back in France and the French courts refusing to send the necessary documents to build a case against him, Sagawa was able to walk out of the hospital on 12 August 1986. Unbelievably, he was now a free man.
HE’S A CELEBRITY . . . GET ME OUT OF HERE!
Sagawa became a minor celebrity in his homeland, revelling in his past atrocities, taking pride in his notoriety. Dubbed ‘The Godfather of Cannibalism’, he was invited on numerous talk shows, cameoed in soft core porn films and wrote a number of books, including In The Fog, a fictionalised account of the infamous murder, selling over 200,000 copies.
Nearly thirty years on, Sagawa lives under an assumed name in the city of Chiba thirty miles east of Tokyo. No longer able to make a living from his past crimes, he works as a freelance artist, his paintings dominated by white fleshy buttocks. Only time will tell if he will kill and eat again.
Jeffrey Dahmer
Between 1987 and 1991 this unassuming, sandy-haired serial killer cruised the gay bars of Wisconsin for victims to take home. Refusing to let them leave, he strangled them before subjecting their corpses to the most terrible injustices, securing his place as the poster boy of sexual perversion.
ANIMAL LOVER
The initial years following the birth of Lionel and Joyce Dahmer’s first son on 21 May 1960 were a joy to behold. Baby Jeffrey was a happy child who loved life and helped bring some much-needed harmony to the Wisconsin couple’s troubled marriage. However, events in his infancy would conspire to change their sunny child into a monster in the making.
At the age of six Jeffrey suffered a double hernia. The simple operation that followed appeared to have an enduring effect on his behaviour. From this moment on the smiling, ebullient toddler gradually began to turn into a shy, forlorn child; his smile replaced with a blank stare.
Uncommunicative with the outside world, Jeffrey withdrew into a dark place, preferring the company of dead animals to his fellow man. He would often roam around on his bike searching for roadkill to take back to his hideaway for examination. By the age of ten he was bleaching the bones and collecting insects in pickle jars filled with formaldehyde.
His teenage years fared little better with the discovery of alcohol and sex. Frequently drunk during lessons, his studies began to slip, acting the class clown rather than applying himself. By now Jeffrey was spiralling out of control, masturbating three times a day to pornographic images of muscular men.
DAHMER’S DEBUT
His burgeoning libido combined with his developing fascination with dead fauna soon had the now seventeen-year-old Dahmer desiring human contact. He had seen an attractive man jogging past the house and resolved to meet him. Knowing he lacked the necessary social skills to win him over, he lay in wait with a baseball bat. Luckily for the runner he never came.
His first victim would come a year later, following his parents’ divorce. In June 1978, the day after he graduated from high school, Jeffrey picked up young hitch-hiker Steven Hicks. They returned to his father’s house and had sex, but when his new friend decided it was time to leave, Dahmer bashed in his head with a barbell. He then slit open the body to study the innards before bagging up the remains and burying them in the nearby wood.
Carrying this secret, Jeffrey enrolled at Ohio University, sent by his father who hoped higher education would alter his behaviour. Just two semesters in, he quit. Next, Dahmer Senior issued his son an ultimatum: get a job or join the army and so in January 1978 he enlisted. Stationed in Germany, the new recruit drank himself stupid on cheap liquor and was promptly discharged for alcoholism in March 1981.
SEARCH FOR A SOUL MATE
On his arrival back home, Dahmer the serial drop-out was packed off to his grandmother’s in West Allis, Wisconsin. Under Catherine Dahmer’s roof, he appeared to clean up his act. He read the Bible, attended church regularly and curbed his self-abuse to just once a week. He even found work at Milwaukee’s Ambrosia Chocolate Factory.
Life on the straight and narrow was fleeting, however, and Dahmer soon returned to his wicked ways, searching for a means to satisfy his carnal desires. Once magazines failed to gratify, he stole a shop mannequin for use as a substitute partner. He then hunted the local obituaries for a fresh corpse buried at the local cemetery. Sadly, the night he crept in to exhume a suitable body the ground was frozen.
The bathhouses of Milwaukee were next on Dahmer’s deplorable quest for sexual thrills. Strug-gling to perform while his partners were awake, he started to spike their drinks with sleeping pills. As they lay comatose, Jeffrey would masturbate and listen to their hearts beating through their chests.
STEVEN TUOMI
Like an addiction, Dahmer needed more to achieve his sexual highs. On 15 September 1987, while on probation, he killed for the second time. Outside the 219 Club he met twenty-six-year-old Steven Tuomi and invited him back to the Ambassador Hotel, where he doped his drink. The next morning Dahmer awoke on top of Tuomi’s mutilated corpse with no clue as to what had happened.
Packing the body in a large suitcase, he took it to his grandmother’s house, storing it in the basement cellar. Here Jeffrey diss
ected the cadaver, boiling the skull which he kept wrapped in a blanket on his top shelf. Two more kills in the next twelve months saw his body count double and now the putrid smell from the basement was beginning to cause his grandmother some concern.
Pushed to find somewhere else to live, Dahmer moved in to a one bedroom apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee. The following day on 26 September 1988, he was arrested for drugging and fondling a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy called Somsack Sinthasomphone. Pleading guilty, Jeffrey escaped a prison sentence receiving five years probation on a work release programme.
THE NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD
Free to continue his labours of lust, Dahmer moved to a low-rise building on 924 North 25th Street in Milwaukee’s crime-infested west-side. While his modus operandi of pick-up, spiked drink then strangulation stayed the same, his post-mortem activities became more twisted.
After cutting them open, he would caress the viscera of his victims, masturbating over the mutilated dead, before serving up the flesh seasoned with salt, pepper and occasionally steak sauce. Believing they would live on within him he started to freeze body parts for future consumption.
Over the next two years Dahmer murdered another eight men, increasing his collection of bones, organs and muscles, bleaching their skulls and painting them grey to fool any visitors into thinking they were plastic. His home now resembled an abattoir with maggot-ridden carcasses in his bed and even in the bathtub where he showered.
The problem for Jeffrey was that his rotting playmates were an impermanent source of pleasure. Craving something more he began to inject hydrochloric acid into the frontal lobes of his victims, creating zombies that would stagger about his vile apartment. It was all about control. With this home-made lobotomy he could prevent them from leaving.
