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SPHERE

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Sphere

Copyright © Jack Rosewood, 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-4087-3109-3

Sphere

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Armin Meiwes, The Rotenburg Cannibal

Missy Bevers and the SWAT Murderer

Carl Tanzler and His Eternal Love Story

Teresita Basa, The Woman Who Solved Her Own Murder

Michael Malloy, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die

Issei Sagawa, The Celebrity Cannibal

Daniel LaPlante, The Ghost in the Walls

The Miyazawa Murders

Kevin Ives and Don Henry, The Boys on the Tracks

Christina Kettlewell, The Eight-Day Bride

Murder at the Red Barn

Otto in the Attic: The Bat Man of Milwaukee

Arne Cheyenne Johnson, The ‘Devil Made Me Do It’ Case

The Circleville Letter Writer

Katarzyna Zowada and the Buffalo Bill Murderer

The Greenbrier Ghost

Charles C. Morgan and the Ecclesiastes Mystery

The Axeman of New Orleans

The Ibadan Forest of Horror

Ahmad Suradji, The Killer Shaman

Conclusion

Introduction

With the massive wave of true crime content that has been produced over the last decade, even those who aren’t interested in the macabre seem to know the gruesome details of the major cases in the crime realm. The heavy hitters are a little played out at this point. By the time a streaming service makes an eight-part TV drama about a ‘shocking’ true crime story, it’s usually already old news to the die-hard crime devotee. They call it a riveting tale with twists you’ll never see coming; meanwhile, crime junkies have already read all the books, watched the news coverage, and heard every detail of the story from about ten different podcasts. Simple murder has become mundane. Where’s the weird? Where are the one-off cases that don’t get the Bundy treatment? Where’s the truly creepy stuff that makes you think twice about turning off the light?

While the Night Stalkers, BTKs, and Killer Clowns of the world can still provide some graphic nightmare fuel, real true crime lovers are either left underwhelmed by the straightforward nature of their crimes or have heard the details so many times that they have lost their impact. The most intense fans of the genre are looking for something new. We want to be genuinely shocked, deeply disturbed, and left wondering if anyone or anything is safe.

That’s exactly what this collection of stories aims to do. In The Most Bizarre True Crime Stories Ever Told you’ll find utterly odd cases that contain some seriously strange details that go beyond the run-of-the-mill murders everyone has heard of.

This book includes tales of cannibals, one of whom proudly walked free in search of new victims; a seemingly impossible account of a dead woman who solved her own murder; bone-chilling stories of killers hiding in family homes, unbeknownst to the people living there; and several morbid mysteries that have such heart-pounding twists and turns they seem like they were stolen right off the big screen from a Hollywood thriller. Like all great true crime stories, these cases also delve deep into human nature, love, loneliness, fear, and the absurdity of the justice system.

So lock your doors, close the blinds, and keep an ear out for someone who might be living in your walls, because you’re about to go on a journey through the most bizarre true crime stories that will creep out even the most desensitized of fans.

Armin Meiwes, The Rotenburg Cannibal

Meeting someone online and having them over for dinner sounds like a perfectly normal story of modern dating, but when Armen Meiwes met Bernd Jürgen Brandes on a message board, neither man was simply looking to uncork a bottle of wine and begin a romance. What transpired after that meeting turned out to be a fascinating case, blurring the lines of fantasy, morality, and the very nature of consent.

Armin Meiwes was born on December 1, 1961 in Kassel, Germany, the last of three boys. As a child, he was obsessed with the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, a German story about a witch living in the woods who tries to cook and eat two abandoned children who trespass into her candy-coated cottage.

Meiwes’s family moved to a massive thirty-six-room farmhouse in Rotenburg where he ran around with his brothers, rode horses, and played on the huge estate. He described his early childhood as ‘lovely.’

According to Meiwes’s recollection, when he was eight years old, his parents divorced and his father left the family, taking all their money with him. He remembers seeing his father drive away, and running after him, screaming for him to stop while his father stared straight ahead and ignored his young, distraught son. When Meiwes’s two older brothers also left the home, he began dealing with deep feelings of abandonment, and tremendous pressure to be the ‘man of the house.’

Meiwes recalls creating an imaginary brother he named Franky, to whom he would tell all his darkest secrets. He desperately wanted someone to be with him forever, someone who could not abandon him, and he frequently had fantasies about consuming others’ flesh so they would always be with him.

His mother, now thrice divorced, was domineering and extremely overbearing. She berated Meiwes in public and would go with him everywhere. If women were ever interested in Meiwes, she would chase them away. She lived a rich fantasy life, dressing up in medieval costumes, and decorating her expansive estate to match.

At eighteen, Meiwes joined the army, where he did exceedingly well, and was promoted several times. He had a community, a real brotherhood, for the first time in his life, and his fantasies of consuming people subsided for the twelve years that he served. Despite his successes, he was eventually discharged from the services. He went to live with his aging mother in the farmhouse where he had grown up and started working as a computer technician.

In 1996, Meiwes’s mother was injured in a car accident. He was already her caretaker, but she became almost impossible to live with once she was practically bed bound. She became more demanding after her accident.

In 1999 she died, leaving Meiwes alone in the expansive and remote family home. Free from the structure of the army, and the tyranny of his mother, Meiwes was finally able to do what he wanted. He began looking at brutal torture and pain pornography. Despite the graphic nature of the videos he watched, he was still not satisfied. His childhood fantasies of consuming others were still lurking in the back of his mind. Eventually, Meiwes made his way to websites and message boards devoted to finding people who wanted to be killed and eaten.

In 2000, Meiwes posted on the website Cannibal Cafe that he was ‘looking for a young, well-built man aged 18 to 30 years old to slaughter and consume.’

Meiwes later alleged he received around two hundred serious applicants for his post, all willing to be killed and eaten. He met up with several young men wanting to experience being killed and eaten, but most left the meetings after getting cold feet. Meiwes never wanted to do anything without the person’s enthusiastic and free consent, however, so whenever one of his potential victims hesitated even slightly, he lost interest and let them go.

A hotel worker by the name of Dirk Moeller later testified that he had met with Meiwes, who had chained him up, and per Moeller’s request, pinned pieces of paper to his body that denoted what cut of meat each section would be, as you would do to an animal before butchery. Moeller changed his mind about being killed and was freely let go by Meiwes without any trouble. He only wanted willing victims.

Meanwhile, Bernd Jürgen Brandes, a forty-three-year-old computer engineer, was also perusing Cannibal Cafe, looking to be eaten by a cannibal.

His post read ‘Dinner—or your dinner’ in which he promised the reader they’d get ‘the chance to eat [him] alive.’ Brandes had a troubled life. His mother committed suicide when he was five, and his father had shut down and refused to discuss it. Later, when Brandes came out as gay, Brandes alleges his father stopped talking to him.

Brandes had a significant pain fetish and would pay sex workers to satisfy his needs. One man said Brandes had offered him all his belongings and money for him to bite his penis off.

On February 14, 2001, Brandes got a message from Meiwes, replying to his post on the message board. The pair exchanged messages for a few weeks, discussing boundaries, and detailing how Meiwes would kill Brandes, how he would eat him, and what should be done with the rest of his body afterward.

On March 9, 2001, Brandes took an early morning train from Berlin. At 11:14 a.m., he got off the train and met the man who would eventually kill him. Meiwes recalls being ‘nervous and excited’ when he first laid eyes on Brandes, and later described him as ‘a very nice, lovely man.’

The loud, busy train station made for an awkward first meeting place. The two yelled their hellos as best they could over the hustle and bustle of regular people taking their everyday train journeys who could have no idea about the sinister reason these two seemingly normal men were meeting. The hour-long ride back to Meiwes’s home gave them time to relax into each other’s company. Brandes was apparently very comfortable by the time they reached their destination, as he stripped naked almost as soon as they entered the house. Meiwes recalls that Brandes wanted him to ‘admire dinner.’

On the second floor, Meiwes had constructed a ‘slaughter room’ complete with a bed, a butchery table, and a meat hook. They lay on the bed chatting and touching one another. Meiwes said they had sex because Brandes wanted to, but neither of them was that enthusiastic about it. Brandes quickly realized Meiwes didn’t have the strength or inclination to inflict the pain on him that he really needed.

After that disappointment, Brandes seemed to change his mind about the whole thing. Meiwes was once again facing the possibility of having his fantasy slip through his fingers, but he was not at all interested in forcing anyone to do anything. As soon as consent was removed, Meiwes soured on the situation and no longer wanted to go through with it. He agreed to drive Brandes back to the train station.

At the station, though, Brandes changed his mind back. He requested they stop in town for some sleeping pills and cough medicine that he thought might dull his sensation and calm his mind enough for Meiwes to be able to go through with the original plan.

Back at the farmhouse, around 6:30 p.m., Brandes anxiously said to Meiwes, ‘I can’t stand it anymore. Cut it off.’

Meiwes set up his camcorder to record the night and set to work attempting to remove Brandes’s penis. The first knife he used was too dull. The second made quick work of the amputation. Meiwes said Brandes ‘screamed horribly,’ but it only lasted twenty to thirty seconds.

Meiwes’s lawyer Harald Ermel, who later had the macabre task of studying the four-hour video made that night, said he could tell that Brandes was very much enjoying the fountain of blood spurting out of the open wound where his penis used to be.

The two men had already agreed that they would share the member as Brandes’s last meal. Meiwes cut it in half, blanched the pieces, and pan-fried them with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Unfortunately for them, the pieces shrive-led up and became inedible.

Around 9 p.m., Brandes began feeling very cold from blood loss, so Meiwes ran him a hot bath and went to another room to read a Star Trek novel while waiting for Brandes to pass away. Hours passed, and Brandes was still alive. Meiwes went to check on him at about 11:30 p.m. to find him woozy but ‘happy, because he was lying in his own blood.’

Eventually, Brandes wanted to get out of the bath. He was so badly weakened he could barely stand, and he soon collapsed onto the floor. He spent the next several hours in the slaughter room coming in and out of consciousness.

At around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of March 10, Brandes once again collapsed to the floor unconscious after trying to get out of bed. The tape of the night showed Meiwes distraught and clearly unsure of what to do. He picked up and put down a knife several times. He later said he thought about calling for an ambulance but was stopped by how close he was to the fulfillment of his lifelong desire to butcher and eat a person.

Meiwes even prayed for guidance on what to do next, though he admits he didn’t know if he ‘should pray to the Devil or God.’ He also says he asked God for forgiveness for what he was about to do. After a lot more hesitation, Meiwes eventually cut Brandes’s throat, finally bringing his life, plagued with morbid sexual fetishes and dark fantasies of being eaten alive, to a sobering end.

Meiwes was now free to fulfill his equally dark fantasies. The internet had provided him with all the information he needed to butcher a human. Meiwes decapitated Brandes, hung him on the meat hook in the slaughter room, removed his organs, and cut his body in half. The pieces were cut into meal-sized chunks, with Meiwes mentally labeling the pieces as you would a cow in a slaughterhouse.

His first meal made from Brandes’s body consisted of ‘a piece of rump steak—a piece from his back,’ which he ate in a candle-lit room, on his best dinnerware, along with a lovely red wine, potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. He kept the rest of the body in a false-bottom freezer in his kitchen, underneath cuts of other, non-human meat.

Meiwes said Brandes tasted ‘like pork, but stronger’ and that he very much enjoyed the flavor. However, the taste wasn’t all he was interested in. Consuming another was always a pathway to true bonding and a deep connection. He said later, ‘I was getting the feeling that I was actually achieving this perfect inner connection through his flesh,’ and that since consuming Brandes, ‘he is always with me.’

Meiwes buried the inedible parts of Brandes’s body in his garden and set out to find another willing victim as he worked his way through the meat in his freezer. Again, he posted on Cannibal Cafe, and again, he got a lot of interest.

In November 2002, an Austrian student got in touch, curious about Meiwes’s history and experience. Meiwes didn’t go into detail but told him that he ‘wouldn’t be the first.’ The student got a weird feeling that Meiwes was actually telling the truth and was keeping a dark secret, so he called the authorities.

On December 11, 2002, police raided the farmhouse and found fifteen pounds of Brandes’s body still untouched in the freezer, as well as the videotape Meiwes had recorded that night.

On July 17, 2003, Meiwes was charged with murder and brought to court, after being judged sane and fit to stand trial. The case proved difficult for prosecutors because cannibalism is not actually illegal in Germany. The tape, and the correspondence between the two men, also clearly showed that Brandes was a willing victim who seemed to enjoy what happened to him.

Meiwes pushed for being convicted of ‘killing on demand,’ a kind of euthanasia that, while not totally legal, only carried a five-year jail sentence. He said, ‘I wanted to eat him but I didn’t want to kill him,’ and reiterated that ‘Bernd came to [him] of his own free will to end his life.’

On January 30, 2004, Armin Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

In April 2005, the prosecution called for a retrial, claiming Meiwes should have been charged with murder. During the trial that began on January 12, 2006, lawyers argued that Brandes could not have consented to the acts due to his level of intoxication and that there was no way around the fact that Meiwes was the one who ended Brandes’s life. This time the verdict was not so lenient. Meiwes was convicted of murder and given a life sentence.

Meiwes says he regrets what he did and would not do it again given the opportunity.

To people with similar inclinations, he gave this advice, which seems to imply that he was not satisfied by carrying out the macabre dream he had wished for his entire life: ‘The wishes, the fantasies you have can never, ever be fulfilled, and everything that you dream about will always remain a dream.’

Sources say he is now a vegetarian.