Australia's dark past isn't without cannibalism either. In 1822 convict Alexander Pearce escaped from the Hell's Gates penal settlement in southern Tasmania with seven other prisoners. After a few days in the freezing conditions three of the escapees returned to prison leaving the others to systematically murder and eat one another to survive.

Finally it came down to two men, Pearce and Robert Greenhill, who stalked each other until Pearce outwitted Greenhill and killed him with an axe and ate him. Pearce was eventually captured and returned to prison where, incredibly, he wasn't sentenced to death for escaping or the ensuing cannibalism.

chapter continues

advertisement

But the next time Pearce wasn't so fortunate when he persuaded fellow convict Thomas Cox to escape with him. Once on the outside, Pearce killed Cox and ate him too.   Alexander Pearce was hanged in Hobart in 1824.

Fritz Haarmann

The "Werewolf of Hannover," Fritz Haarmann, delighted in killing his victims by biting through their throats while raping them and gorging on the meat and blood. In cohorts with another depraved homosexual deviant, Hans Grans, the pair abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered as many as 50 transient young men in Germany between 1919 and 1924.

Hans Grans

In his lucrative profession as a dealer in secondhand clothes and meat, Haarmann was in a perfect position to capitalize on Germany's recent crushing defeat in World War I by giving his starving fellow Germans exactly what they wanted... fresh meat.

His black-market customers, who were delighted with their lovely cuts of veal and hind quarters of lamb, must have wondered where they came from in such grim times, but not in their wildest dreams did they think that they were from the two youths a week that Haarmann and Grans were raping, murdering and cutting up for sale. Haarmann was beheaded in 1924.

Albert Fish, the "Grey Man"

No crimes in history were more abhorrent than those of deranged 64-year-old house painter Albert Fish. Passing himself off as an innocuous, benevolent little old man, Fish abducted, molested, tortured, castrated and ate at least 16 children in New York and all over the USA between 1928-1934.

What made Fish's crimes so ghastly was that he was a prolific writer and his jottings included a letter to the parents of a little girl telling them in detail how he murdered, dissected, cooked and ate their daughter. This letter would be his undoing.

Born in 1870, Albert Fish was a devout Christian who married in 1898, fathering six children. When his wife eloped in 1917, Albert's latent perversions boiled to the surface and he began indulging in coprophilia (eating human excreta), inserting alcohol soaked cotton wool balls in his anus and lighting them, getting his children to beat him bloody with a nail-studded paddle and inserting needles into his genitals.

In 1928, in response to an advertisement, Fish, calling himself Frank Howard, called on the Budd family in New York, taking with him cheese and strawberries. While their 12-year-old daughter Gracie was sitting on the cuddly old man's lap he was fantasizing about eating her. Fish convinced the Budds to let him take Gracie to a local children's party.  That was the last they would see of her.

Six years later, in 1934, the Budd family received a letter which read in part;

I took Gracie to an empty house in the country. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick, bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her into small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook it and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her though I could have had I wished. She died a virgin.

The letter was traced to Fish and hardened police retched as Albert described to them how he had cooked and eaten another little boy's buttocks: "I put strips of bacon over each cheek and put it in the oven," he said. "When the meat was roasted for about a quarter of an hour, I poured a pint of water over for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted with a wooden spoon so the meat would be nice and juicy. In two hours it was nice and brown. I never ate any turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet, fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days."

Albert Fish was delighted to die in the electric chair, describing it as the "ultimate experience in pain" and went to his death like a man going to a picnic, even helping them strap him in.

And no doubt to Albert Fish's eternal pleasure, the metal pins and needles self-embedded in his genitals and scrotum caused the electric chair to short circuit and the first charge failed to kill him. Amid wisps of blue smoke Albert was sent smiling to his maker with the second charge.

 Copyright 2003, Paul B. Kidd Publications.  All Rights Reserved

email print