In this unsettling episode, we delve into the chilling world of cannibals among us, exploring the shocking stories of individuals who commit the unimaginable act of killing and consuming other human beings. With a focus on understanding the motivations, psychological factors, and societal context that drive such horrific behavior, we dive deep into cases from history and the present day. Join us as we attempt to comprehend the minds of those who walk among us, challenging our understanding of the boundaries of human morality. * Listener discretion is strongly advised as we confront the darkest corners of humanity's psyche.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 I've always been a little bit confused as to how people can practice cannibalism and actually eat another person.
0:40 But at the same time, it intrigues me a little bit because I don't understand it.
0:46 We know that many animals eat their parents and siblings and even their offspring for different reasons.
0:54 But this has been recorded in more than 1500 species.
0:58 And unfortunately, human cannibalism is well documented in both ancient and recent times.
1:06 Now, I found it interesting that back in New Guinea, researchers made their way to a village back in the 1950’s and found something very disturbing.
1:20 There was a tribe of about 11,000 people called the four and up to 200 people a year had been dying of a disease there.
1:31 So they called the disease Kuru, which means trembling or shivering.
1:37 Once the symptoms actually kicked in people who had them died relatively quickly.
1:45 So they would have trouble walking and then they wouldn't be able to control their arms and legs and then they had issues with their emotions, which is why many times they called it the laughing death.
1:59 And within a year, these people could not feed themselves, control their bodily functions.
2:06 They couldn't even get up off the floor.
2:09 A lot of people that lived in New Guinea back then thought that it was some result of sorcery.
2:15 The disease would actually primarily hit adult women and Children younger than eight years old in some villages.
2:24 So many people had died of this, that there were almost no women left, no female Children.
2:30 They were obsessed with trying to save themselves because they knew that demographically women were becoming extinct.
2:40 So they were trying to figure out what was causing it.
2:43 They thought maybe there was some sort of contaminant.
2:47 They thought maybe it was genetic in 1961 Shirley Lindenbaum, who was a medical anthropologist with the city, University of New York actually traveled to the village.
3:01 She mapped the family trees so that she could maybe try to figure out why all these women and young girls were dying.
3:10 It seemed to affect the same social groups.
3:14 But genetically, she didn't really see a link and she also knew that it started in villages in the north and then it moved south over the decades.
3:25 She thought she knew what was going on and it had to do with funerals.
3:31 So specifically, it had to do with eating dead bodies at funerals.
3:35 And in many villages, when someone died, they would be cooked and consumed.
3:42 And that was how they showed grief and love.
3:46 If the body was buried, it was eaten by worms.
3:51 And if it was left out, it was eaten by maggots.
3:54 And so these people believe that it was much better for their loved one to be eaten by other people, other than insects and worms, women would remove the brain and mix it with ferns and then cook it in bamboo and they fire roasted and ate everything except the gallbladder.
4:19 Now, I don't know.
4:20 I mean, gallbladders might not taste like chicken.
4:22 Who knows?
4:23 I'm not sure why they would not eat the gallbladder, but it was mostly the adult women that did that because their bodies were supposed to be capable of handling any dangerous spirits that would accompany a dead body after it was eaten.
4:41 So the women would actually consume the dead body and basically give it a safe place inside themselves.
4:49 They would occasionally give pieces to the Children.
4:53 And I mean, that's not a very good snack, I don't think, but the kids ate what their moms gave them.
5:00 Biologists did decide that this strange disease was from eating dead people.
5:06 Now, a group at the US National Institute of Health injected infected human brain into chimpanzees and watched the symptoms of Kuru develop in the animals months later.
5:22 And that group actually won the Nobel Prize for its findings, but it wasn't a virus or bacteria or parasite or fungus.
5:30 It was a new infectious agent.
5:33 It could survive being boiled.
5:38 Another group found years later that it was actually a protein capable of contorting the brain cells.
5:47 So they think this epidemic started when one person in the village developed Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which is a degenerative neurological disorder, similar to the symptoms of Kuru.
6:01 About one in a million people in the US develop this disease.
6:06 But the difference is that you usually don't come in contact with infected tissue.
6:12 The four stopped the practice of eating their dead more than 50 years ago.
6:18 However, the last person with Kuru didn't die until 09.
6:23 So I found this to be interesting because I mean, it makes sense, I guess, right?
6:30 Like you want them to be safe and you feel like if you eat them, it's going to prevent other people from eating them and it's going to prevent them from being decomposed.
6:39 I prefer cremation over this. just FYI. But there's a lot of instances of this.
6:46 I know we've talked about Jeffrey Dahmer and several other cannibals in the past.
6:52 But again, I research this a lot because I find it really interesting.
6:56 Now in Brazil, in 2014, 3 people were tried for killing two women and eating them 2014 y'all.
7:05 That was not that long ago.
7:07 So a man, his wife and his mistress who lived with this couple were arrested in 2012 for bringing women to their house and promising them nanny positions in the home.
7:23 And then they would kill them and ate parts of their bodies, and they use the rest of the flesh to make thick empada-like pastries, which they ate with a child who also lived with them.
7:37 So these people were like sharing this with Children again and guess what?
7:42 They also sold a lot of them to their neighbors.
7:46 Now in October of 2014, an Australian chef.
7:51 Now this guy was young, he was only 27 years old.
7:54 He killed his girlfriend and dismembered her and cook parts of her body before running from the police when he was in the process of getting caught and then taking his own life.
8:07 So he boiled parts of her body on the stove.
8:10 Officers went to Marcus Volks apartment after they received complaints of a foul odor.
8:16 A lot of neighbors said that it smelled like rotting meat.
8:19 Now, I go to homes of people who are decomposed frequently.
8:25 And unfortunately, this has happened a lot this summer here in Texas, supposed to be 110 degrees today.
8:30 And I've talked a little bit about the heat in the past, but it does start to smell bad, especially when there's no air conditioning, but we deal with this kind of thing.
8:40 All the time when it comes to foul odor and a body that has been somewhere for a long time when the officers went to his apartment, he actually leaped over a balcony in a tip to flee.
8:52 And then he hid in an alleyway and then slit his own throat.
8:56 Now, his mother said that he seemed to be fine, and he was a happy guy and had planned to go home for Christmas and he and his girlfriend were just starting to get settled.
9:09 Now, his girlfriend who was the victim was a transgender prostitute.
9:16 So it's unknown actually what prompted him to kill her.
9:20 And that's one thing I hate about when people kill themselves.
9:22 Right?
9:22 You can't ask any questions.
9:24 Why did you do that?
9:25 Why did you kill her first?
9:27 What happened?
9:28 Of course, she can't tell us either.
9:30 It's easier if there's some sort of a history of domestic violence, it gives you a clue as to what might have happened.
9:37 But in this case, they really don't know, parts of her body were also found in garbage bags.
9:44 And again, his mom said that he seemed happy just the week prior when she saw him.
9:52 And so who knows?
9:53 Now for some murderers killing isn't enough.
9:57 And of course, that's what these cannibals have proven to us over the years.
10:04Austin Harrouffrandomly stabbed a couple to death in Florida.
10:09 Now, this guy was 29 years old and then he went on to eat the face of one of his dying victims.
10:15 And he was growling like a dog when he chewed on the face of John Stevens who was 59 after killing him and his wife Michelle.
10:24 And this was back in August of 2016.
10:26 So again, not that long ago, there's another case in 2017, Sunil Kuchakurni. He came out of his home dripping with blood and the 27-year-old was drunk when he killed his mother and took her heart out and ate it.
10:44 Now he put pepper on it, and you know, before because you know, season to taste as they say, but I mean, if he was angry at her and killed her, I'm not really sure why he felt the to eat her heart.
10:58 But he worked as a laborer at a construction site, and he was married with three kids.
11:04 His wife wasn't with him because he had beat her.
11:08 And so she and the kids left him.
11:11 But the day of the incident, he was drunk, and he walked, can you imagine? He wandered over to the neighbor's house asking for food.
11:19 They refused food.
11:22 They didn't want to give him anything to eat.
11:24 And so he went back home and then he fought with his mom and then out of rage killed her and then he took her heart out and placed it on a plate.
11:33 He also fried her organs and ate them.
11:36 Now, this stuff really happens y'all.
11:39 And the scary thing is this guy probably looked normal.
11:42 This is probably somebody that you would walk past in the mall and not even think twice that he would have done anything like that.
11:50 Now, he was sentenced to be hanged because he showed no remorse and it's believed that he killed her because he was an alcoholic and he was demanding that she give him her pension so that he could buy liquor.
12:06 One of the other interesting stories I found was about an Oklahoma man.
12:11 And so here in Texas, of course, we're super close to Oklahoma.
12:14 We go to Oklahoma a lot to gamble at the casino.
12:17 And there was an Oklahoma man, Lawrence Paul Anderson who pled guilty to killing three people in March of this year y'all, 2023 he ripped out the heart of one of his victims.
12:31 Now, this happened just weeks after he was accidentally released from prison where he was serving a 20-year drug sentence.
12:41 How does that happen?
12:42 How does the parole board accidentally let someone out of prison?
12:46 But he had pled guilty to multiple counts of murder, maiming and assault.
12:52 Now, the actual murders happened back in 2021.
12:57 So 2023 is when he pled guilty.
13:00 So it took three years now, he killed Andrea Blankenship who was 41 and he stabbed her after he broke into her house and then he removed her heart and took it with him next door to his aunt and uncle's house.
13:17 Now his aunt and uncle's granddaughter who was four, was visiting.
13:22 So he killed his uncle and killed the granddaughter, and his aunt Delsie was injured.
13:30 Now, he repeatedly stabbed her, but she survived.
13:34 He did cook Blankenship’s heart and he tried to feed it to his relatives before he stabbed and killed his uncle and then killed the four-year-old and stabbed and wounded his aunt.
13:49 He received life in prison and returned for pleading guilty because the family did not want to see photos and did not want to hear stories about exactly what happened in a trial.
14:03 Now again in June of 2021 a Spanish man was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he killed his mom and also ate her remains.
14:13 This happens a lot y'all.
14:15 And I've not had a case personally where someone has killed somebody and eaten any of their remains.
14:22 Alberto Sanchez Gomez was arrested back in 2019 after police found body parts around his mom's home.
14:30 Now, some of them were actually in plastic containers.
14:33 The court rejected the argument that he was experiencing a psychotic episode.
14:41 Police arrived at the home, and this is in Eastern Madrid after a friend raised concerns about the welfare of his mom who was in her sixties.
14:51 Now, Alberto Sanchez Gomez was 26 at this time and he strangled his mother during a dispute.
14:58 And then he dismembered and ate parts of her body over the next two weeks.
15:02 And he also fed some to his dog.
15:05 Now, his mother had a restraining order against him at the time because there was a history of violence against her.
15:11 But he's serving 15 years for murder and then an additional five months for the desecration of a corpse.
15:20 Now, he said he didn't remember doing it and he reportedly had a personality disorder and a drug habit.
15:28 Some of the remains were in the process of being cooked when the police caught him.
15:33 Now, Dmitry Bakshi has a very similar story from September of 2017.
15:39 He was 35.
15:41 He and his wife, Natalia was arrested after a dismembered body was found at the military base where they lived.
15:49 Now, a number of food and meat items discovered at their home was also being tested for human DNA.
15:56 But a mobile phone found by construction workers earlier contained graphic images of dismembered body parts and one photo showed Dmitri posing with a dismembered body part in his mouth.
16:11 Now, the body of a 35-year-old woman was found dismembered and a bag of her belongings were also found in Dmitri in Natalia's home, and they lived in a hostel where they once worked.
16:23 So human body parts were found at the residence also to be preserved in Saline jars.
16:29 And again, food fragments and frozen meat pieces of unknown origin were seized from their kitchen.
16:35 So they think that they had killed people back two decades ago because there was one photo dated from December of 99 that showed a human head on a serving plate with fruit.
16:48 So I mean, this is crazy.
16:51 This is crazy stuff.
16:53 And again, the scary thing is it really happens.
16:56 So there was a day when cannibalism was used as a medical treatment.
17:01 Human fat was sold as a remedy for broken bones, brains, and arthritis.
17:07 I could use some of that right now.
17:09 Also human fat was rubbed as a ball and not deep.
17:13 There are also examples of a human skull being ground into a fine powder and mixed with liquid to help treat epilepsy.
17:23 But you remember when the big fad was eating placenta, so it seems different, but it's kind of the same thing even though I get to tear up unless it's not.
17:33 But we don't really know if eating the placenta is safe.
17:37 The centers for Disease Control and prevention warn against it because we do know that it's possible for it to become infected with bacteria and viruses either while raw or during processing, there are concerns about the safety besides bacteria and viruses.
17:56 It can contain stress proteins that can be harmful if consumed.
18:01 Even though we do know that the benefits include increased energy, increased milk supply, improvement in mood, lowering, the chance for postpartum depression.
18:11 It can help prevent anemia and reduce pain and enhance bonding with a newborn.
18:19 We also know that it just seems weird to me.
18:24 I mean, I know I've seen it on TV a lot, hell the Kardashians do it.
18:27 But they say if you do that to make sure it's prepared as safely as possible, cook it or prepare it in ways to minimize contamination, heat it to at least 120 degrees.
18:39 Ok.
18:39 All this seems right, heated to at least 130 degrees for at least two hours to reduce the risk of salmonella bacteria.
18:49 Now, you can also pay a professional.
18:52 You may want to pay somebody that's trained to prepare capsules out of your placenta.
18:58 They will dry powder and pack the placenta in capsules for you so that you can take them as supplement, but you can cook or freeze it right away because it can spoil very much like meat.
19:12 Again, there are many, many forms of cannibalism.
19:18 I know that eating your placenta is not really one of them, but for some reason, it just came to my mind.
19:23 So I thought I would discuss it.
19:25 But do you have any stories to share with Pushing Up Lilies?
19:29 If you do be sure to email me at julie @ pushinguplilies dot com and you can also visit our website at pushing up lilies dot com.
19:42 We look forward to hearing from you.
19:43 We would love to hear your story ideas and welcome those.
19:47 We would also love to interview you if you have a story to tell.
19:52 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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