Eat Thy Neighbour (12 page)

Meanwhile, ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson tried to find a precedent that would stand up in court. The angle he hit on was both ingenious and workable. According to Anderson’s brief, the alleged murders had taken place within the boundaries of the Los Pintos Indian Reservation and therefore, Packer’s case should have been tried in federal court, not in a state or territorial court.

By now, the Colorado legal system had no real interest in Alf Packer; he had already been tried twice and taken up the time of the State Supreme Court with his bothersome appeal. The best thing to do was simply to get rid of him. Consequently, and probably with much frustration, in January 1901, Colorado Governor Charles Thomas consented to parole Packer on medical grounds. According to the wording of the original parole document, dated 7 January, Packer was being released because the prison physician had certified that he suffered from ‘hydrocele and Bright’s Disease’. Hydrocele is defined by
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
as ‘an accumulation of dangerous fluids in a bodily cavity’. Bright’s Disease is described as ‘an archaic term describing a generalized, chronic kidney complaint’.

After being incarcerated for almost seventeen years Packer was overjoyed. Polly Pry was happy because she had done something ‘good’. ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson was happy because he would get paid and the
Denver Post
’s publisher/editors were happy too. In the last case, Bonfils and Tammen were happy not because they had done what they thought was right, or even because Pry’s story had sold a lot of newspapers; they were happy because they were going to make a lot of money out of Alf Packer. It seems that Bonfils and Tammen not only owned the
Denver Post
, but also the Sells Floto Circus, and they had offered to take up Packer’s case on condition that he join their travelling troupe as a sideshow freak. Evidently they thought there would be a big appeal in advertising ‘Alf Packer the Colorado Cannibal’ all across America.

So everyone was happy. At least they were happy until Governor Thomas attached a single condition to Packer’s parole. Possibly because 1900 was an election year and Thomas wanted to avoid being accused of turning America’s only convicted cannibal loose on the country at large, or maybe it was just to ensure Alf ’s good behaviour, he stipulated that Packer had to
remain in the Denver area for a period of not less than six years and nine months after his release. Although Packer described the condition as ‘arrogant and vicious’ he accepted the offer. Bonfils and Tammen were less sanguine about the restriction.

What happened next is unclear, but conjecture allows us to assume that because Packer’s movements were restricted he became useless as an attraction in a travelling circus. It is also possible that Bonfils and Tammen then refused to pay ‘Plug Hat’ Anderson because the case had not turned out to their complete satisfaction. Whatever the reason, Anderson and his employers got into a terrible row and in the finest tradition of the Wild West, the lawyer shot both Tammen and Bonfils. What eventually happened to Anderson is unclear, but both Bonfils and Tammen recovered from their wounds and apparently held no animosity against Packer for the incident.

Once free, Alfred Packer moved into a small house in Littleton, Colorado, where, reportedly, he became a model citizen, was liked by his neighbours and spent the rest of his life as a vegetarian. In truth, he was probably looked on as a curious relic of America’s fast disappearing Old West. He died on 23 April 1907, one day after his sixty-fifth birthday, and was buried in Littleton’s Prince Avenue Cemetery. Because he had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, he was accorded full military honours at the interment. His grave was, and still is, visited by thousands of tourists every year.

Nothing else of much note happened in Alf ’s life – or death – until 1989 when a forensic expedition exhumed the bones of his victims, who had been buried near the campsite at Slumgullion Pass. Having remained in surprisingly good condition, the evidence of their murders was clearly shown by the hatchet marks in their skulls. Forensic examination also showed that certain portions of their flesh had been cut from the bone with a skinning knife. Most noteworthy, however, was a bullet hole in one of the pelvises. To check this evidence against Packer’s
testimony that he had shot Bell when the man attacked him with the hatchet, lead scrapings from the wound were compared with bullets still resting in the revolver which had been confiscated from Packer at the time of his first arrest, and was now housed in the collection of the Museum of Western Colorado. Amazingly, the metal samples matched perfectly, supporting Packer’s claim that Bell had murdered the other men and that he, Packer, had only killed Bell in self-defence. ‘Alferd’ Packer may have been a cannibal, but it seems likely that he was not, after all, a murderer.

Throughout the century since his death, Alf ’s weird tale has, somehow, continued to gnaw at the bones of America’s popular imagination. From time to time Alfred Packer fan clubs have been formed, allowing his legend to grow large enough for folk singer Phil Ochs to write a song in the early 1960s entitled ‘The Legend of Alfred Packer’. A few years later, in 1968, students at the University of Colorado, at Boulder, named their new cafeteria the Alfred E. Packer Grill and fourteen years after that, in 1968, a statue of Packer was erected on the campus. The following year James E. Banks wrote
Alferd Packer’s Wilderness Cookbook
, published by Filter Press.

With his fame now spread far and wide, two movies were made about Alf ’s life. The first,
The Legend of Alfred Packer
, came out in 1980, and in 1996 Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the animated
South Park
television series, wrote, directed, produced and starred in
Cannibal: The Musical
, a bizarre, over-the-top, song-filled rendition of Packer’s life.

Those who find themselves hungry for souvenirs of the Old West’s only convicted cannibal should visit his online store at
www.everythingalferd.com
. (note the alternative spelling of his name) where you can buy everything from the movies mentioned above to mugs, tee-shirts and Christmas cards.

Eight

This Little Piggy Went to Market: Karl Denke and Georg Grossman (1921–4)

W
ar, and the inevitable economic hardships that follow in its awful wake, can rip even the most stable societies to shreds. When Germany lost the First World War in 1918 the resultant chaos was unequalled in modern history. The governments of the triumphant allied powers – France, Great Britain, Italy and the United States – demanded that Germany reimburse them for every penny they had spent on the war. Faced with this clearly impossible demand, the German economy went into free-fall. Inflation spiralled so far out of control that it became cheaper to burn money than to buy wood or coal. A life’s savings could be wiped out in a matter of days. As factories and businesses collapsed and banks failed, unemployment soared to epic proportions.

The disaster was compounded by a severe food shortage linked directly to the economic implosion. Farmers simply could no longer afford to raise and sell their products. A piglet that may have cost a few marks to buy in 1920 suddenly cost millions of marks to keep. Even if a cow or pig was slaughtered and taken to market, trying to sell it at anything less than a dead loss would have made it too expensive for people to buy, even if they had any money, which most of them did not. The German depression was a recipe for social and political disaster. Eventually its effects would cause the worldwide depression of
the late 1920s and early ’30s and be the prime factor in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but in the early and mid-1920s, its effects remained more localised; that is not to imply they were any less horrific for the people involved. In the frantic, paranoid atmosphere of a poverty and famine-stricken nation, only those who were emotionally and physically strong could hope to survive. The morally debased and emotionally unstable, like the men we are about to meet, as well as Hitler and his circle of cronies, often became social predators, while those least able to defend themselves became their victims. Although not all of these social predators were cannibals, it is interesting to note that there were more of this ilk than the subjects of this chapter, notable among them being the notorious child murderer and cannibal, Fritz Haarmann.

Karl Denke was born on 12 August 1870, just outside the tiny mining village of Oberkunzendorf, Germany, located in the north-eastern province of Silesia near the Polish border. He came from a family of prosperous and respected farmers and seems to have had as much going for him as a young person in that place and time could reasonably expect, but he always had trouble keeping up at school. Undoubtedly there were recurring family arguments about his academic performance because, at the age of twelve, he ran away from home and took a job as an apprentice gardener.

What he did and where he lived over the next dozen years is almost entirely unknown, but he must have remained on relatively good terms with his family. When he was twenty-five his father died, leaving the farm to Karl’s older brother but willing enough money to Karl for him to buy a small farm of his own outside Oberkunzendorf. It would seem that farming was simply not Karl Denke’s forte because the land failed to make a profit and he eventually sold it, using the money to buy a two-storey house in the nearby town of Münsterberg, now Ziebice, Poland.

Next door to his new home Denke rented a small shop where he sold food and daily necessities to the people of his neighbourhood. Over the years he became well liked and respected among the town’s 8,000 occupants. A pillar of his local Evangelical church, he dutifully pumped the bellows of the old church organ every Sunday morning and was cross-bearer in the funeral cortège when one of his fellow parishioners passed on to their final reward. He neither drank nor chased women. He liked children and was kind to friends and strangers alike. When a homeless person passed through Münsterberg, Denke was among the first to offer them a hand-out, occasionally allowing one of them to stay in his house long enough to receive a few hot meals, a clean bed and a hot bath. As he aged people began referring to him simply as ‘Papa Denke’, as though he was everyone’s favourite uncle. He may never have become rich or famous but he had good friends and there was always enough food on his table. To all appearances it seemed that Karl Denke was the type of person we would all like to have living next door to us.

Eventually, like nearly everyone else in the German Empire, Denke’s life was shattered by the aftermath of the First World War. His shop failed in the depression and in 1921 he was forced to sell his house, which the new owners divided into a number of small apartments. The income from the sale allowed Karl to rent a two-room flat on the ground floor of his former home. In an effort to keep some money coming in Denke applied to the local police for a street vendor’s licence. Not surprisingly, they issued it at once.

During the week Karl went from door to door selling shoelaces, trouser braces, belts, homemade soap and other trinkets, and once a week he took his small stock of goods to the nearby town of Breslauer where he set up shop in the municipal market. Soon he added home-packed jars of pickled pork to his inventory. Due to the food shortage caused by so
many farm failures, the meat turned out to be one of his biggest selling items. Eventually, he applied to the Butchers’ Guild in Warsaw, Poland, for a licence to sell his canned meat there. The licence was granted and Denke’s small circle of customers slowly expanded beyond his local community. Although at the age of fifty-two it was unlikely that he would ever find a real job, at least it looked as though he would not starve.

Even in such dire economic straits, Denke remained as kind and charitable as ever. When a straggler from the army of displaced people who were now wandering across the German landscape passed through Münsterberg, they were always welcomed at Papa Denke’s flat. Undoubtedly, these lost and friendless folk were grateful for even this small act of Christian charity.

The first sign of trouble came on 21 December 1924, when a young, itinerant man by the name of Vincenz Olivier came staggering out of Denke’s apartment bleeding profusely from a head wound and screaming his lungs out. Alerted by the commotion, Denke’s upstairs neighbour, a cab driver named Gabriel, came running out to see what was going on. As Gabriel emerged from his rooms, a young man covered in blood slumped into his arms jabbering that the old man in the ground-floor flat had just tried to murder him with an axe. Incredulous, but concerned for the injured boy, Gabriel gently led him to the local police station where the police hurriedly summoned a doctor to tend Olivier’s wounds.

After staunching the bleeding and suturing the wound, the doctor explained to the police that the boy had, indeed, been attacked. After taking Olivier’s confused and disjointed statement, the officer-in-charge dutifully dispatched two constables to pick up Karl Denke for questioning. No one quite believed the young man’s incredible story, but there was obviously something very odd going on and it was the police’s job to find out what it was.

When Denke was interrogated he explained that, as was his custom, he had offered Vincenz Olivier a place to stay for a few days. The young man had attacked him during an attempted robbery and he, Denke, had simply defended himself with the first thing he could grab. Obviously the police would have to carry out a thorough investigation of the conflicting stories and Denke would have to be placed in a holding cell for a day or two until all the facts were known. Around 11.30 that evening, the night officer, Sergeant Palke, wandered into the cell block to see if Denke needed anything. To his horror, he discovered the lifeless body of 54-year-old Papa Denke dangling from the bars of his cell. He had hanged himself with the oversized pocket-handkerchief he always carried. For the moment, this terrible turn of events seemed both tragic and inexplicable. In retrospect Denke’s death has also denied us any hope of understanding what motivated him to carry out the atrocities the police would later unearth at his apartment.