CANNIBAL ROUND-UP
‘Grannibal Lector’ and other crazed flesh-eaters
In late July, police in St Petersburg found a plastic bag in a pond, containing a headless torso with only one arm and one leg. These were the remains of Valentina Ulanova, 79. Her carer, Tamara Samsonova, 68, was arrested on 28 July after security video footage emerged of her taking several large plastic bags out of the apartment block in the middle of the night. She said she had drugged Ulanova, 79, and hacked her into pieces while still alive, in a row over unwashed cups. Dubbed “the granny ripper” – or “Grannibal Lecter” by the Sun – Samsonova admitted beheading and chopping up 11 people, including her husband, and police suspect her of another 10 murders over the past two decades. The former hotel worker was also accused of eating parts of her victims. She claimed to be especially partial to lungs and admired the cannibal Andrei Chikatilo, who killed at least 52 people between 1978 and 1990. After her arrest, Samsonova was pictured blowing kisses to reporters in court. “I’m haunted by a maniac upstairs who forced me to kill,” she told reporters through the bars of her courtroom cage. A diary found in her flat, written in English and German as well as Russian, detailed several killings, including men known to have rented a room from her in 2000 and 2003. She was found to have a history of mental illness and had been hospitalised three times. Sun, 6+11 Aug; [CNN] 7 Aug; D. Express, 18 Aug 2015.
Alexander Bychkov killed and butchered nine homeless alcoholic men with a knife and hammer in a 28-month spree around Belinsky in Russia’s Penza Oblast region. After being arrested in 2012 for shoplifting, he began telling police about the bodies. He confessed to murdering one man and cutting him up after a drinking session. “I only took his heart,” he said. “Two days later I cooked and ate it.” He also allegedly ate his victims’ livers. One of his victims was said to be his mother’s ex-boyfriend. Police found a diary detailing the killings as well as violent films, books and newspaper clippings about mass killers. Bychkov, 24, was jailed for life. D. Mirror, Sun, 23 Mar 2013.
A man who killed and ate his common-law wife told police: “I got used to eating human flesh when I worked at the morgue.” The former mortuary worker stabbed the woman twice in the neck after a row while out walking, then hid her body in the woods. He said he returned to the spot several times to take body parts to eat. A court in Russia’s northern Yamalo-Nenets region convicted the unnamed man of murder after psychologists declared him sane. He was sentenced to nine years in a labour camp in Aksarka, central Russia. D. Mirror, 4 Dec; MX News (Sydney), 5 Dec 2013.
Two Pakistani brothers – Mohammad Arif Ali (35) and Mohammad Farman Ali (30) – were arrested in 2011 on charges of digging up about 100 graves and stealing the bodies, which they later allegedly consumed. Because Pakistan has no specific laws against cannibalism, the arrest resulted in no more than a two-year prison sentence and a fine. While incarcerated, they spent most of their sentence in King Edward Medical University in Lahore, being examined by the school's neurophysiology department. Residents from their native village of Khwawar Kalan, near the town of Darya Khan in Punjab's Bhakkar district, held a raucous protest when the brothers were released in May 2013. After reports of a stench of rotting flesh coming from their house, police raided it on 14 April 2015 and found a young boy’s skull. They admitted digging up the body of the two-year-old child and making it into curry. In June they were sentenced to a further 12 years in jail at an anti-terrorism court in Sargodha in Punjab. (As well as desecrating the child's grave, the men were convicted of spreading fear and damaging property, offences under Pakistan's antiterrorism law.) Irish Times, 14 April; LiveScience.com, (Brisbane) Courier-Mail, 16 April; BBC News, 11 June 2014.
A cannibal who ate another man’s flesh in the Central African Republic on 7 January 2014 has said he did it to avenge the death of his family. Ouandja Magloire told the BBC that his pregnant wife, his sister-in-law and her child were all killed by Muslim militiamen. He was part
of a Christian mob that dragged a Muslim man from a minibus in the country’s capital, Bangui, stabbed him to death and then set his body on fire. Footage of the attack taken on a mobile phone shows Magloire eating part of the victim’s leg, after which he was known as ‘Mad Dog’. The next day he returned, having saved some of the dead man’s flesh. He put it between two halves of a baguette and ate it, with a side dish of okra. The country’s late ‘Emperor’, Jean Bedel Bokassa, was alleged to have practised cannibalism during his rule between 1966 and 1979. It was said he kept human limbs in fridges and served parts of them to visiting French dignitaries. Sunday Telegraph, 12 Jan; BBC News, 13 Jan; D. Telegraph, MX News (Sydney), 14 Jan 2014.
A 71-year-old Frenchwoman was arrested in the northern French town of Longwy on 22 May 2014. She had killed her 80-year-old husband with a kitchen mortar she used for grinding spices and then “cooked his heart, nose and genital organs in a pot, but we don’t know if she ate them,” said a judicial source. (Queensland) Sunday Mail, 22 June 2014.
Gregory Hale, 37, an ex-slaughterhouse worker from Coffee County, Tennessee, met Lisa Hyder, 36, on 6 June 2014, and took her to his home where he chopped her up, putting her hands and feet in buckets. He was arrested two days later after asking a friend to help him dispose of Hyder’s remains. He admitted he had eaten parts of her body. A ‘friend’ said Hale was a self-styled Satanist who was fired from the slaughterhouse when he was found conducting a ritual with animal parts. D. Mirror, 12 June 2014.
Joseph Oberhansley, 33, of Jeffersonville, Indiana, was arrested in July 2014 for driving erratically and held in custody until his former fiancée Tammy Jo Blanton, 46, paid his £680 bond. When she failed to turn up for work a few weeks later, police found her mutilated body under a tarpaulin in the bath. There was a “plate with what appeared to be skull bone and blood” on it, a pan and blood-soaked tongs. Police said Oberhansley confessed to removing her brain, lungs and heart, and eating them, some cooked and some raw (we are not told which were raw). However, after the charges were read out in court, Oberhansley said: “That’s not my name. Obviously you’ve got the wrong guy.” He claimed his name was Zeus Brown. In fact he had a manslaughter conviction from 2000 when he tried to kill his then-girlfriend Sabrina Elder, 17, days after she had given birth to their child. D. Mirror, 17 Sept 2014.