After placing hundreds of ads on the website called The Cannibal Café seeking “Well-built men, 18-30, who would like to be eaten by me” forty year old German computer repair technician Armin Meiwes eventually met his match in forty three year old Berlin engineer Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes. This just goes to show you that there is someone out there for all of us. The two men agreed to meet up at Meiwes’s apartment in the small town of Rotenburg on Friday the 9 March 2001 and there wasn’t a full moon in sight. With Bernd high on painkillers and Schnapps, Meiwes removed the man’s penis with a knife and decided to sauté it in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and a little garlic. The whole episode was filmed by them on videotape. From that video it appears that Bernd collapsed and lost consciousness from the loss of blood. Meanwhile, Meiwes spent the next three hours reading a Star Trek book while Bernd bled to death in the bath. It certainly was a night to remember. Meiwes ate the body over the next ten months. He stored body parts in his freezer under pizza boxes and consumed up to 20 kilograms (44 lbs.) of the flesh. Meiwes was arrested in December 2002 and mid a media frenzy after a college student in Innsbruck phoned the police when he saw new advertisements for victims and details of the killing on the Internet. Investigators searched his home and was later found guilty of murder and given a life sentence. Meiwes was far from Germany’s first cannibal. Before him we had Fritz Haarmann, Joachim Kroll, Karl Denke, Carl Großmann and Peter Stumpp. And he certainly is going to be the last one either. In December 2013 Der Spiegel reported the case of alleged cannibalism near the Czech border in Germany. The murder was allegedly committed by a fifty five year old police officer working as a handwriting analyst in the Dresden office of the State Criminal Police. The policeman admitted to killing the fifty nine year old Polish-born businessman from Hanover. Apparently they met on a cannibalism fantasy forum. This fascinating study of cannibalism traces its history and origin and focusses on nine of the world’s most notorious cannibal serial killers: Albert Fish, Friedrich Haarmann, Joachim Kroll, Andrei Chikatilo, Henry Lee Lucas, Ottis Elwood Toole, Richard Trenton Chase, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev, and, of course, Jeffrey Dahmer. A hugely enjoyable read from best-selling writer David E. Malocco, author of Serial Sex Killers-Real American Psychos; Sexual Psychopaths; Who’s Who Serial Killers-The Top 100; Forensic Science-Crime Scene Analysis; Wicked Women; Murder for Profit and the World’s Worst Serial Killers.

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