Fiendish Killers Read online

  Armin Meiwes

  The story of Armin Meiwes almost defies belief as a tale that involved a man volunteering to have himself mutilated and killed as part of a sordid sadomasochistic tryst arranged over the Internet. When the case came to court, Meiwes was charged with murder, but he argued that the man he had killed had volunteered to die, and also to be mutilated beforehand. His case was a legally complex one because his victim had chosen to die voluntarily, and initially he was charged with manslaughter. However, it became clear that he was a very dangerous man, and eventually he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Lurid cannibalistic fantasies

  Armin Meiwes was born on December 1, 1961. He grew up with his mother in a large house near the German town of Kassel. He had a very lonely childhood, with few friends, and created an imaginary brother whom he named Franky. Without any real friends to confide in, he told ‘Franky’ his problems, and fantasised that they were lifelong companions. Later, at his trial, Meiwes explained that as an adult he evolved a desire to eat a man, so that this ‘younger brother’ figure would become part of him for ever.

  According to one of his former schoolfriends, his mother was a domineering figure who often scolded Armin in public. She lived alone with her son until her death, and treated him in a humiliating way. She would accompany him on dates with women, and even went on outings with the troops when he was serving in the German army. It was this experience of being constantly humiliated by his mother that, he felt, had poisoned his relationships with other people in adult life, both men and women.

  At the age of forty-two, Meiwes was living quietly in Rotenburg and earning a good living as a computer technician. One woman he befriended at the time described him as ‘friendly’ and ‘sensitive’. Well spoken, smartly dressed and apparently confident, there was nothing to mark him out as a man who engaged in lurid cannibalistic fantasies, but that was exactly what he was. Sadly, it was not long before his desire to see these fantasies acted out in real life got the better of him.

  Penis cut off and eaten

  He posted an advertisement on the Internet for a ‘well-built eighteen- to thirty-year-old to be slaughtered’. A willing victim presented himself in the shape of Brend Jürgen Armando Brandes, who was known to police as having an interest in sadomasochistic male prostitution. According to Meiwes, there were over 200 replies to his advertisement, but this was never verified.

  The men met at Meiwes’ large, half-timbered house, and decided that they would start the killing ritual by cutting off Brandes’ penis. Brandes insisted that Meiwes try to bite it off, but this proved to be too difficult, so instead Meiwes cut it off with a large knife. At this point, the story becomes even sicker. Brandes now decided he would like to eat his own penis, but again this proved difficult to do, as it was ‘too chewy’. So, to help him out, Meiwes offered to cook it. Accordingly, Meiwes cooked the penis in a frying pan, seasoning it with garlic, salt and pepper. All the while, the men were recording the scene on a video, which has not been made public.

  Stabbed to death

  Unsurprisingly, Brandes was not feeling well enough to finish his meal, since he was bleeding to death. Meiwes tried to fortify him with alcohol and painkillers, and then took him to a room he had specially prepared for him, and killed him by stabbing him to death in the throat. After the killing, he hung the body up on a meat-hook dangling from the ceiling, and proceeded to tear bits of flesh from it and stuff them into his mouth. He then froze the remainder of the body parts and over the next few months he ate about 20 kg (2.2 lb) of his victim’s flesh.

  Meiwes then began to advertise on the Internet again, but this time a student spotted the advertisement and alerted the police. They paid a visit to his house and found the body parts and the videotape of the killing, at which point he was arrested and taken into custody. However, once it was established that his victim had willingly offered to have himself tortured and killed, it became clear that the case was a complicated one. Initially, there was some doubt as to whether he could be tried at all. To confuse matters further, it transpired that cannibalism was not illegal in Germany at the time.

  When the case came to court, he was charged with manslaughter, found guilty and sentenced to a term of eight and a half years’ imprisonment. However, there was a public outcry and many felt that he deserved a much longer sentence; besides having killed a man, he was thought to be dangerous, since he had advertised again for a willing victim. Thus, in April 2005, he was tried again, after appeals from the prosecution. This time, he was charged with murder, convicted and received a life sentence.

  Since then, Meiwes has accepted his guilt and is reported to have regretted his action in killing Brandes. He has spoken of writing his life story, which he hopes will help to deter anyone thinking of following in his path. However, in recent times, a number of websites dedicated to Meiwes have appeared on the Internet, where advertisements are placed to contact willing victims. Meiwes claims there are thousands of victims waiting to be claimed, and estimates that there are about 800 cannibals in Germany.

  PART TWO: Serial Killers

  Jack the Ripper

  Of all the serial killers in history, Jack the Ripper is the most famous. He was one of the first murderers to achieve notoriety by committing a series of gruesome crimes that shocked and horrified the public in London, where he operated; he was also never captured and brought to justice, opening up a continuing debate as to the real identity of the killer. The sheer violence of his crimes ensured that he has not been forgotten: he used to disembowel his victims, remove their internal organs, and drape them round rooms in the most appalling way. The Victorian setting of the murders, in the seedy, rough district of Whitechapel, London, has given rise to endless portrayals of the Ripper in novels, films and on television; and what makes the story even more appealing to modern-day amateur sleuths is that to this day his identity is still unknown. In the new millennium, many books have been written claiming to have found new evidence, most memorably one by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who is thought to have spent over eight million dollars of her own fortune in an effort to prove that Walter Sickert, a Victorian painter, was the murderer. However, it is still not clear who the murderer was, and many believe that his identity will never be found.

  Frenzy of rage

  The story of Jack the Ripper starts on August 31, 1888, when a young prostitute named Mary ‘Polly’ Nichols was found dead. Initially, the case did not attract a great deal of attention; murders of prostitutes were fairly common in the rough area of London where the Ripper stalked his victims, and Victorian values were such that prostitutes were held in very low esteem, so that their disappearance and murder was not greatly mourned. Poor ‘Polly’ was, in fact, the third prostitute to have been killed that year in the East End of London. Police did little to follow up the murder, except to note that whoever had committed the crime was extremely violent. There were stab wounds to the woman’s genitals, and her throat had been cut. Moreover, her torso had been stabbed, apparently in a frenzy of rage.

  At this stage, no one in the police linked the three murders of prostitutes, but before the week was out, another murder was reported. Annie Chapman, who went by the name of ‘Dark Annie’, was found dead, her throat cut, and this time the murderer had had a field day, disembowelling her and pulling out her entrails, which were draped over her shoulder. Further investigation revealed that the victim’s ovaries and vagina had been cut out, and had been taken away. Police were surprised to find that the cuts were very accurate and carefully done. Obviously, this was the work of a trained mortician, or someone who had considerable medical experience in dissecting human bodies.

  Gruesome rituals

  Pressure was now on for the police to solve the case. The murdered women may have been very low-ranking in the social order, but the general public now began to feel uneasy that such a crazed murderer was on the loose. On September 30, there were another two murders, which further
panicked the public: it seemed that, in this case, both of the women had been killed in separate incidents on the very same night. The first unfortunate victim was Elizabeth Stride, known as ‘Long Liz’, who worked as a seamstress and occasionally supplemented her income by prostitution. It appeared that she had been killed by a knife wound to the throat, but police investigators found no other mutilation and came to the conclusion that the murderer had somehow been interrupted, and had not had time to carry out his gruesome rituals before he was disturbed. It then seemed that he had made up for this by killing another prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, this time making sure that his vile desecration of the corpse was enacted to the full. Strangely, at the scene of the crime, someone had written a message on the wall: ‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’ No one was sure who the message was from, or what the meaning of it was; in any event, it was rubbed off by the police investigating the case, so that there would not be any copycat murdering of Jews, or any other kind of backlash from this horrible incident.

  Double murder

  What complicated the case was that the newspapers now began to get messages from the killer. The Central News Agency, to whom the messages were sent, was not sure if these letters were genuine; the murders had provoked many hoaxes, and some believed that these new messages were sent by ordinary mischief-makers. However, when a letter came into the agency within hours of the double murder, the newsmen decided it was time to call in the police. The writer of the letter signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ and dropped some clues which gave the police reason to believe that he had personal knowledge of the case. This, of course, made headline news, and soon the case of ‘Jack the Ripper’ had become famous all over the country.

  Then, a fortnight later, another letter was sent to George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, which had been formed to protect ordinary members of the public from this new danger on their streets. The letter was different from the ones that had been sent before. The writer appeared to have difficulty spelling and did not seem very literate. However, the content of the letter was terrifying. The writer put down the provenance of the letter as being ‘from hell’, and enclosed a fragment of human kidney, which he claimed to be that of Catherine Eddowes. As the police knew, Eddowes had had her kidney removed and taken away. It was impossible to confirm that the kidney really did belong to Catherine Eddowes, but it seemed likely, and the letter had the desired effect of frightening its recipients, who waited in horror to see what would happen next.

  Womb and foetus ripped out

  Less than a month later, Jack the Ripper killed his next victim. This was a prostitute, one Mary Kelly. In this instance, the Ripper committed the crime indoors, rather than out on the street, where his other victims had met their deaths. The room where Kelly was killed was in a place called Miller’s Court, a down-at-heel lodging where the Ripper was left free to indulge in his unsavoury rituals without disturbance from neighbours or passers-by. When her body was found, police and investigators were dismayed to see that the body of this unfortunate woman had been completely ripped to shreds. She had been flayed and then disembowelled, her entrails arranged around the room in a parody of domestic decoration. Parts of her body were missing, including her womb and a foetus that was inside it – Kelly was known to have been pregnant when her assailant struck.

  The inhabitants of Whitechapel were traumatised, and waited in horror for the next atrocity to take place. Yet, as it turned out, this was the last of the mysterious Ripper’s crimes – fortunately for the prostitutes of the area, he vanished as suddenly as he had arrived and no more was heard of him. There were murders of prostitutes in the following few years, but the ritual disembowelling and stealing of body parts did not feature in these murders, and there was no reason to link them to the series of murders that had occurred so close together, and accompanied by such awful mutilations of the dead women’s bodies.

  Aftermath

  Ever since the fateful day when the Ripper disappeared, succeeding generations of sleuths – both amateur and professional – have speculated as to who he was. To date, commentators have pointed the finger at Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Eddy, who is argued to have committed the murders in a fit of rage, having contracted syphilis. Other suspects include Sir William Gull, the Queen’s surgeon, who was thought to have killed in order to cover up the fact that Price Eddy had conceived an illegitimate child with a working-class girl from Whitechapel. Another theory claims that the Ripper murders were the work of Liverpool businessman James Maybrick, supposed author of The Ripper Diaries, published in 1994. None of these theories is very persuasive, since there is a lack of evidence to support them.

  Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the time when the murders took place, put forward what seems a reasonable theory as to the Ripper’s sudden disappearance. He argued that the murderer had probably gone mad as the result of his final murder, in which the womb and foetus were taken away, and had most likely committed suicide after the event. Alternatively, he claimed, the murderer’s relatives had discovered him in a state of complete mental collapse and had sent him to a mental asylum. Whatever the truth of the matter, to this day we still do not know the real identity of the world’s most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper.

  Albert Fish

  Albert Fish is one of the most bizarre of all serial killers. At the time of his arrest he looked like everyone’s idea of a kind old grandfather. And yet this seemingly harmless pensioner was a paedophile cannibal whose greatest thrill was to eat the flesh of the children he lusted after and strangled. No one will ever know exactly how many children Fish murdered, but there’s no doubt that if it had not been for the Herculean efforts of a New York detective, Will King, there would have been many more.

  Sadistic Urges

  Albert Fish was born in Washington DC on May 19, 1870. His given name was actually Hamilton Fish, in honour of some distant connection to Washington’s famous political family of that name. Later in childhood he adopted the name Albert, which had belonged to a sibling who died young. Albert’s parents were relatively well-to-do. His father, Randall Fish, was a boat captain, working on the Potomac River.

  However, his father was already an old man and in 1875, when Albert was five years old, he died. His mother was unable to cope with looking after her four children and Albert was placed in an orphanage. There Albert was regularly beaten for being a bed-wetter. Gradually he came to enjoy the beatings and whippings he received. His lifelong sadomasochistic urges had been awakened.

  He regularly ran away from the orphanage and, when he was nine years old, his mother was able to take him back home, having found herself a job working for the government. By the time he was twelve years old, however, Albert was engaged in a homosexual relationship with a telegraph boy who initiated him into a whole range of sexual perversions much to the young boy’s delight.

  By 1890, when he was eighteen, Fish had moved to New York City, where he worked as a male prostitute. Gradually, though, he acquired a more legitimate skill and began to work as a painter and decorator, a trade he would follow for the rest of his life. Indeed, for a long while he seemed to become a respectable citizen. In 1998 he married a woman he’d been introduced to by his mother, and they had six children together: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry Fish. Later on Fish would claim to have committed his first murder during this domestic period. His family doubted this, suggesting instead that his descent into barbarity only began when his wife left him for a mentally retarded handyman called John Straube in 1917.

  Extreme Masochism

  Following this desertion Albert Fish began to behave very strangely indeed. He would eat huge quantities of raw meat every time there was a full moon and began to indulge in acts of extreme masochism. He would drive needles into his genital region, he would place pieces of fabric in his anus and set them on fire and he would burn himself with red hot pokers. He made a
wooden paddle and studded it with nails then asked his children to use it to beat him on his naked buttocks.

  After a while his children could stand no more of this and his eldest son, Albert Jr., threw his father out of the house. At this point Albert Fish Snr. dispensed with the respectable life. He became a wandering loner, living in flophouses and supporting himself by getting odd jobs as a painter and decorator.

  Over the next decade or so, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, Fish carried out a huge number of rapes and murders, just how many we will never know for sure. Tragically he was regularly arrested over these years – sometimes for theft, sometimes for vagrancy and on several occasions for sending obscene letters to women – and invariably sent for psychiatric evaluation, but each time the psychiatrists decided that he was an odd bird, perhaps prematurely senile, but basically harmless. And so they let him back onto the streets.