James Douglas, 3rd Marquess of Queensberry, was a Scottish nobleman. He was the eldest son of James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry. The younger James Douglas was born in 1697. Stories describe him as an “imbecile,” and violently insane. Douglas was kept under lock and key from childhood at Queensberry House in Edinburgh, which is now part of the Scottish Parliament complex. In 1706, the elder James Douglas attempted to have his son removed from the succession.

It is reported that when the Act of Union was signed in 1707, which placed the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland under the same monarch, the disruption allowed the 10-year-old James Douglas to escape. He then entered the kitchen of Queensberry House and slaughtered a young servant. The report says that Douglas roasted the boy alive on a revolving spit. He then ate sections of the boy before being apprehended. After the event, Douglas was known as “The Cannibalistic Idiot,” and the oven he used to kill the boy can still be seen in the Parliament’s Allowances Office. James Douglas died in 1715 and was buried in Calverley churchyard. His brother Charles Douglas, 3rd Duke of Queensberry succeeded him. The Queensberry House kitchen is still said to be haunted to this day.

4:32 pm  •  5 March 2012  •  26 notes

The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who set out for California in a wagon train. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.

As the blizzard progressed, Patrick Dolan began to rant deliriously, stripped off his clothes and ran into the woods. He returned shortly afterwards and died a few hours later. Not long after, possibly because 12-year-old Lemuel Murphy was near death, some of the group began to eat flesh from Dolan’s body. Lemuel’s sister tried to feed some to her brother, but he died shortly afterwards. Eddy, Salvador and Luis refused to eat. The next morning the group stripped the muscle and organs from the bodies of Antonio, Dolan, Graves, and Murphy and dried it to store for the days ahead, taking care to ensure that nobody would have to eat his or her relatives.

12:34 pm  •  3 January 2012  •  48 notes

Cannibalism (from Caníbalis, the Spanish name for the Carib people, a West Indies tribe formerly well known for their practice of cannibalism), is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy.
 

There are fundamentally two kinds of cannibalistic social behavior; endocannibalism (eating humans from the same community) and exocannibalism (eating humans from other communities).

A separate ethical distinction can be made to delineate between the practice of killing a human for food (homicidal cannibalism) versus eating the flesh of a person who was already dead (necro-cannibalism). 

The social stigma against cannibalism has been used as an aspect of propaganda against an enemy by accusing them of acts of cannibalism to separate them from their humanity. 

During their period of expansion in the 15th through 17th centuries, Europeans equated cannibalism with evil and savagery. In the 16th century, Pope Innocent IV declared cannibalism a sin deserving to be punished by Christians through force of arms and Queen Isabella of Spain decreed that Spanish colonists could only legally enslave natives who were cannibals, giving the colonists an economic interest in making such allegations. This was used as a justification for employing violent means to subjugate native people.

The reasons for cannibalism include the following:

• As sanctioned by a cultural norm
• By necessity in extreme situations of famine
• Caused by insanity or social deviancy (Note that cannibalism is not mentioned in the formal index of insanity, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The medical literature on the topic is likewise sparse.^[16])

12:00 pm  •  12 November 2010  •  11 notes

Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy, (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989), was an American serial killer active between 1974 and 1978. He escaped twice from county jails before his final apprehension in February 1978. Bundy was executed by electric chair for his last murder by the state of Florida in 1989.

Between 1974 and 1978 he raped and killed young women in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and Florida. He confessed to 28 murders, but estimates make him responsible for hundreds of deaths.

All of Bundy’s victims were white females and most were of middle class background. Almost all were between the ages of 15 and 25. Many were college students. In her book, Ann Rule notes that most of Bundy’s victims had long straight hair parted in the middle—just like Stephanie Brooks, the woman to whom Bundy was engaged in 1973. Rule speculates that Bundy’s resentment towards his first girlfriend was a motivating factor in his string of murders. However, in a 1980 interview, Bundy dismissed this hypothesis: “[t]hey… just fit the general criteria of being young and attractive… Too many people have bought this crap that all the girls were similar — hair about the same color, parted in the middle… but if you look at it, almost everything was dissimilar…physically, they were almost all different.”

After luring a victim to his car, Bundy would hit her in the head with a crowbar he had placed underneath his Volkswagen or hidden inside it. Every recovered skull, except for that of Kimberly Leach, showed signs of blunt force trauma. Every recovered body, except for that of Leach, showed signs of strangulation.

On death row, Bundy admitted to decapitating at least a dozen of his victims with a hacksaw.He kept the severed heads later found on Taylor Mountain in his room or apartment for some time before finally disposing of them. Some of the skulls of Bundy’s victims were found with the front teeth broken out. Bundy also confessed to visiting his victims’ bodies over and over again at the Taylor Mountain body dump site. He stated that he would lie with them for hours, applying makeup to their corpses and having sex with their decomposing bodies until putrefaction forced him to abandon the remains. 

11:16 am  •  11 November 2010  •  45 notes

Kroll was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale), and the Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger Menschenfresser). He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a total of 13.

On July 3, 1976, Kroll was arrested for kidnapping and killing a four-year-old girl named Marion Ketter. As police went from home to home, a neighbor approached a policeman and told him that the waste-pipe in his apartment building had blocked up, and when he had asked his neighbor, Kroll, whether he knew what had been blocking the pipe, Kroll had simply replied; “Guts”. Upon this report, the police went up to Kroll’s apartment and found the body of the Ketter girl cut up: some parts were in the fridge, a hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water and the intestines were found stuck in the waste-pipe.

Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery bills. In custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted murder. In April 1982, after a 151-day trial, he was convicted on all counts and was given nine life sentences.
He died of a heart attack in 1991 in the prison of Rheinbach, near Bonn.

6:51 pm  •  7 November 2010  •  11 notes