Eat Thy Neighbour (13 page)

The following day, Denke’s relatives were notified of the suicide and the body was turned over to the local mortician for burial. Because of the unusual circumstances of the old man’s death, and the still outstanding accusations of Olivier, Denke’s apartment was declared off limits to everyone but the police until a thorough investigation had been carried out.

On Christmas Eve, a police detail went to Denke’s home to search for any pertinent evidence before releasing the remainder of his belongings to the family. On entering the tiny flat they were assailed by the acrid smell of vinegar, but in a nation where pickled meat and sauerkraut were dietary mainstays this was hardly surprising, particularly since everybody knew that Denke made most of his money from packing and selling boneless pork. The smell came from two large pickling crocks, filled with meat and brine, standing in a corner of the kitchen. Nearby, a set of shelves were stocked with jars of the finished product waiting to be taken to market. Some sources claim there was also a
quantity of fresh pork in the icebox, presumably for Denke’s own use and possibly to be shared with those unfortunates who occasionally stayed with him. There were also chemicals and equipment both for soap making and tanning leather as well as leatherworking tools that Karl used to make the belts and braces he sold. It may have been the pile of bones that gave the investigating officers their first indication that something here was not quite right. They were obviously not pig bones; they were human. When one of the policemen found the dish containing 240 human teeth their confusion quickly turned to revulsion. When they moved into Denke’s bedroom, the nightmare got a whole lot worse.

On the wall hung dozens of pairs of braces and an equal number of belts made, as it turned out, not from pigskin but from human leather. The closet was filled with bloodstained clothing. Every little detail seemed to cry out the truth of what Karl Denke had been doing. Even the shoelaces were made either from human leather or braided from human hair. If anyone needed more proof, it was lying on the windowsill and the table in the corner of the bedroom. There, in neat piles, were Denke’s records, carefully recorded from 1921 to the present. Three years of murder and cannibalism. In his ledger were the recorded details of thirty-one victims; their names, the dates he had murdered them and how many pounds of meat he had taken from each body. There were also the documents and identification papers he had taken from twelve of his victims, and newspaper cuttings listing the names of individuals who had recently been released from nearby prisons and hospitals. To verify the obvious, a jar of Papa Denke’s popular pickled pork was sent to a police lab in Warsaw for testing. When the results came back, they were no surprise to anybody.

No story can be kept out of the press for long, and when this one broke in the local paper – with the improbably coincidental name of
Journal Frankenstein
– it was as salacious and grim
as possible. ‘Murder’, ‘cannibal’ and ‘peddler of human flesh’ screamed out at every horrified reader in Münsterberg. By the time the tri-weekly
Münsterberger Zeitung
newspaper came out, the tests on the pickled ‘pork’ had come back from the lab and the panic started all over again. Not surprisingly, although pork is the traditional New Year’s dinner throughout Germany, that year no one in Münsterberg could bear to look at it.

Police examination of the articles taken from Denke’s apartment positively identified twenty of his victims – about two-thirds of the names listed in his ledger. Although the final count may never be known, estimates of Denke’s victims run anywhere from his own thirty-one to as high as forty.

In 1999 the tiny museum in Ziebice, located in one room of the town hall, held a display of the knives, vats, jars and other paraphernalia used by Denke during his grisly days as the chief purveyor of pickled people in Münsterberg. The display, named ‘An ancient iconography of Ziebice’, proved so popular with locals and tourists alike that it still remains in place.

If the grim facts of Karl Denke’s crimes came as an unbelievable shock to the good people of Münsterberg, it was only one small part of a much larger pattern that was taking shape all over Germany. Three years earlier and more than 300 miles to the west, in Berlin, an incident had occurred that was so similar in its details to those of the Denke case that it makes the mind reel. Sadly, if the morbid details in Karl Denke’s story are rather limited, they appear positively abundant in comparison to the information available on Georg Grossman. This may, in part, be due to the massive amount of information destroyed when Berlin was repeatedly bombed during 1944 and 1945.

Georg Grossman was born in 1863 in the town of Neuruppen, Germany, and spent most of his working life as a peddler of used clothes, but sometimes worked in the better paying butcher’s trade where he specialised in sausage making. Sullen and anti-social, Grossman was a great bear of a man who neither
cultivated nor wanted friends; but few people wanted to make friends with a surly rag merchant anyway, and that suited Georg Grossman perfectly.

Like many of his countrymen, in the wake of the First World War Grossman lost his business premises and was reduced to selling his second-hand clothes from a handcart on the streets of Berlin. Although he could not find work in a legitimate butcher’s shop, Grossman supplemented his income by making, and selling, sausages on the black market. Because meat was tightly rationed and could only be purchased with government-issued coupons, unlicensed meat was in constant demand. Eventually, Grossman found that his most profitable market was to be found at the main railway station where he not only sold bulk sausages but offered sausage sandwiches to hungry travellers. Those few people who could still afford to travel could, presumably, also afford a few marks for a sausage sandwich. With the ensuing food shortage, Georg was forced to make his sausages from whatever meat he could scrounge: often horse, mule or even dog meat. As the quality and quantity of available meat continued to drop, so did Grossman’s income.

Some sources insist that Grossman had served three prison sentences for molesting children and that the charges may have included accusations of sadism and bestiality, but there is little hard evidence to support anything beyond the heinous crime of child molesting. What we do know is that once he began selling his sausages at the railway terminal, Grossman made a habit of picking up itinerant and homeless women who had been reduced to prostitution by the economic crisis and used Berlin’s central railway station as their base of operations.

With an almost animal cunning, Georg Grossman decided he could, quite literally, kill more than one bird with a single stone. From his sausage cart at the railway station he would spot women who appealed to him sexually and make the appropriate advances. When they had settled on a fee for the woman’s
service, Grossman would take her back to his tenement, have sex with her, murder her and grind up her flesh, using it as the main ingredient in his tasty sausages. Georg’s sexual appetite had been satisfied, he did not have to pay for his victim’s service, he had a steady supply of free meat and was guaranteed to turn a profit and get rid of the evidence all in one fell swoop.

How long Grossman carried on this grim pattern is unknown, but unless it began before Germany’s economic collapse, it cannot have been more than two years. In August 1921, neighbours in Grossman’s tenement were alarmed to hear the piercing screams of a woman coming from Grossman’s flat. Dutifully, someone notified the landlord who, in turn, rang the police. If, indeed, Grossman was already on the list of known sex offenders, the police’s response would have been all the quicker. In either case, when constables kicked in the door of Grossman’s apartment they found the half-butchered body of his latest victim lying on an old camp-bed, along with the remains of three other women in various states of dismemberment and preparation. Beneath the bed was a pot of cleanly rendered human fat and a saucepan full of human fingers. In the refrigerator and closet were stores of sausages left for curing before being sold on the open market. Based on laboratory analysis the victims had all been killed within the past three weeks. After his arrest, the 58-year-old Grossman, like Denke, would hang himself in jail before he could be thoroughly questioned and examined by psychiatrists.

Had either of these men lived long enough to give their side of the story it might have provided us with a greater understanding of their motivations than the simple cataloguing of the horrific facts which turned up in the ensuing police investigations.

Georg Grossman’s bloody story has been immortalised in a song by an Australian ‘grunge’ band by the name of Blood Duster, but otherwise he, like Denke, has been largely forgotten, which is probably for the best.

Nine

Candy from a Baby: Albert Fish (1924–34)

O
n 19 May 1870 Albert Fish was born into a relatively prosperous, middle-class family who made their home in Washington DC. His mother was a homemaker and his father, Captain Randall Fish, piloted a riverboat along the Potomac. It seemed a reasonable start in life, but it all went sour when his father died of a heart attack in 1875. Left with no income, and unable to bring up her children alone, Albert’s mother was forced to place him in St John’s Orphanage. There the five-year-old’s life took a dramatically wrong turn.

Always fragile and small for his age, Albert made an easy target for the bullying of older, bigger boys. When his fellow orphans were not beating him up, the matrons were. Along with the official beatings came liberal warnings – often punctuated with passages from the scriptures – of the punishment that awaited those who strayed from the straight and narrow path, practised the sins of the flesh or disobeyed scriptural admonitions. Albert did his best to do what was right. He even sang in the St John’s choir between 1880 and 1884, but somehow the pain and the punishment, and what he believed God expected of him, got all muddled up in his head. Finally, at the age of fifteen, Albert Fish left the orphanage and found his way to New York where he was apprenticed as a house painter.

Ever the dutiful son, once he could afford his own apartment he brought his widowed mother up from Washington to live
with him. In 1898 the 28-year-old Albert married a nineteen-year-old woman with whom, over the next sixteen years, he had six children. Although standing only 5 feet 5 inches and weighing not much over 8½ stone (120lb), Albert worked hard and did his best to be a good father. He never struck any of his children, or his wife, and insisted that grace be said before every meal. There were, however, strange, recurring episodes that may have been a prime factor in the upcoming destruction of his family.

Somewhere along the line, Albert Fish had developed a religious mania that would have been completely recognisable to the medieval flagellants. It would seem likely that he began his self-torture in secret, but soon he forced his children to watch as he administered ever more severe and bizarre punishments to himself. Sometimes he used a nail-studded paddle to whip himself to a bloody pulp; other times he shoved pins under his fingernails while his offspring watched in shocked silence. On at least one occasion the Fish children witnessed their father standing on a hill, arms raised, shouting ‘I am Christ!’ Eventually, it all became too much for his wife to bear. In 1917, three years after the birth of their sixth child, she packed up the kids and left.

Although it was undoubtedly the only sane choice for the stressed-out spouse and offspring, the separation did nothing to settle the troubled mind of Albert Fish. His self-torture slowly turned to self-mutilation. He soaked cotton balls in alcohol, inserted them between the cheeks of his rump and lighted them. He began sticking pins into the soft flesh between his scrotum and rectum, shoving some of them in so deep they became lost in his flesh. He also became convinced that the Almighty, as well as Christ and the angels, were speaking to him personally. In these hallucinatory fits, Fish became convinced that God ordered him to torture and mutilate children as some sort of sacrificial act. Sometimes Fish would ramble on, ‘quoting’ his
own delusional scriptures. ‘Happy is he that taketh thy little ones and dasheth their heads against stones.’ Integral to the delusions was the belief that he needed to castrate little boys.

Alone and increasingly unstable, Fish continued painting houses for a living, but he began to wander from town to town and state to state, carrying his sickness with him wherever he went. He seldom stayed in any one place for very long. Sometimes people just got a weird feeling from him; other times, terrible things happened to children in neighbourhoods where the strange little painter was working. There was never any evidence to connect him with anything, but people just did not want him around. For no particular reason, in the summer of 1924 Albert Fish found himself working on Staten Island, a borough of New York City.

One warm July day of that summer, Anna McDonnell was sitting on her front porch nursing her infant daughter. Nearby, her eight-year-old son, Francis, was playing quietly by himself. Glancing up towards the road, Anna saw the strange figure of a small, rumpled man apparently staring at her. He had grey hair and a droopy moustache and wore a battered suit and bowler hat, both of which were covered with dust. He was obviously a workman of some kind, but why was he standing in the middle of the street staring? More disturbingly, he seemed to be talking to himself and he kept clenching and unclenching his hands. Not one to be intimidated, Anna returned his stare. Finally, the man tipped his dirty hat, nodded and wandered away.

Later that afternoon, a small man in a dusty, well-worn suit was seen watching a group of boys playing baseball. One of the boys was Francis McDonnell. When the elderly man called Francis over to the fence surrounding the ball field, the other boys paid no attention, focusing their young minds on their game. A few minutes later, both the old man and Francis were gone.