Fun with Cannibals – or – What the F*ck is Up with Canada?
In the last few days the Western Hemisphere has seen three new notorious cannibals chew their way into the news.
The first story involves the Causeway Cannibal Case here in sunny Florida. Some Haitian emegre allegedly goes nuts on ‘bath salts’, strips off his clothes, assaults a homeless man, who he then strips naked before stripping the flesh off the guys face with his teeth. In broad daylight. On the side of the road in Miami. (I contend that in his drug induced stupor Rudy Eugene got his Haitian zombie lore and his American zombie lore all mixed up. I also contend this case isn’t as unusual as you might think down here in sunny Florida. Florida is really REALLY fucked up.)
The most disturbing two details* about this case so far are that (a) several people appear to have ridden by the assault while it was happening and didn’t do much about it, and (b) that pictures of the victim (who has lived, so far, with 75-80% of his face torn off) post-attack have appeared online in numerous places.
* The most disturbing BIG PICTURE item is that this occurred at all.
I’m not going to link to this story as it has received enough publicity, and on the off-chance someone here hasn’t heard about it yet and wants to know more can find the stories easily enough. Just watch out for the pictures. (I haven’t seen them, and don’t want to see them. Beyond the gore is the simple fact that I would feel like I was violating the victim’s privacy in most indecent fashion.)
This morning another cannibal attack was reported to have taken place in the Baltimore Maryland area.
Behind the door of a townhouse on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, a house of horrors. It’s here police say 21-year-old Alexander Kinyua confessed to eating the heart and parts of the brain of a missing man. Police say Kinyua’s brother went down to the laundry room of the house and saw a blanket on a box. He pulled off the blanket and saw two metal tins. Police say he opened them and saw a head and two hands. When Kinyua’s brother confronted him about this, police say Kinyua said they were animal remains and not human.
The brother then got his dad. The dad went downstairs and the items were gone.
Kinyua’s brother called police.
“Human remains, specifically a head and hands, were recovered on the main floor of the residence,” Sheriff Jesse Bane of Harford County said.
Police believe they belong to 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, a family friend who was living at the house.
So, that makes two. Kinyua, BTW, is Kenyan.
Tonight a bizarre story out of Canada went off the deep-end. Yesterday a foot and a hand were sent via mail, the foot to the ruling Conservative Party’s HQ while the hand was found en route to wherever. It was determined that the suspect was a male porn star named Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, aka Eric Clinton Newman aka Vladimir Romanov. Okay, so far this is pretty fucked up, and I immediately thought of Walter in The Big Lebowski, “You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me.”
They were after the porn star because police found the torso associated with the foot and the hand near Magnotta’s apartment building (he was a ‘model’ tenant), which led naturally enough to his apartment, where the killing and the dismemberment took place. And the cannibalism, The Sun now tells us. (Yes, this means some crazy Canadian fucker was running around chopping up people and eating them. This MUST have been an episode of South Park.) It has been reported that Magnotta left a video behind of the killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.
Also, the diveresity freaks can now breath a sigh of relief – Magnotta is white, so the spectre of having nothing but black cannibal stories has come to an end. No more nasty old tropes here!
But this is only part of the weirdness. Apparently Magnotta had become known to The Sun several months back because of rather disturbing videos he had posted, among other things. The Sun interviewed him, leading to The Sun asking authorities to investigate Magnotta for being, well, psycho. The authorities ultimately weren’t able to do much, in part because they didn’t know where Magnotta was. If you want to know more you can read about this case here. I’m not going to post details about his prior videos. (Annie, you’ll want to skip that link.)
Other details about Magnotta have emerged. He’s allegedly bi-sexual and bi-polar. He has dated (allegedly) a paedophile serial killer, Karla Homolka. He wrote a blog on how to disappear completely. According to The Sun, police believe he has fled to Europe. Back to The Sun’s reporting:
Two days later a misspelled email was sent to The Sun.
It told of the writer’s love for London and warned: “Well, I have to say goodbye for now. But don’t worry, in the near future you will be hearing from me again. This time, however, the victims won’t be small animals. I will however, send you a copy of the new video I’m going to be making. You see, killing is different than smoking… with smoking you can actually quit.
“Once you kill, and taste blood, it’s impossible to stop.”
Our reporters were convinced it was from Magnotta.
And so on. All this leads one to ask, What the fuck is up with Canada that it is out-weirding Florida? This is way more fucked up that the bath-salt zombie case down here.
…
Finally, I want to go on record. The Causeway Cannibal chewed a hapless homeless human being in Florida. I live in Florida. Kinyua the Kenyan Kannibal self-served his mordantly macabre meal in the Baltimore Maryland area. Some of you may recall that I lived in the Baltimore Maryland area for a few years. And the Canadian Cannibal killed his vic with an ice pick. I had nothing to do with any of these cases, and I’ve got witnesses that place me far away from the cuisine, er, crime scenes! I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way you can prove anything!
Ambiance 
amba12 said,
June 1, 2012 at 12:32 am
I don’t need to click even the judiciously selected links you provided — this tells me all I want to know and not an ounce more!
Icepick said,
June 1, 2012 at 12:35 am
Thanks for the tip with mordant. I would have never thought of that one!
Really, the whole post should be done in Ellroy’s schlock style (as opposed to the many other styles he uses), but that’s really really hard to do, even without the headcold.
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 1:23 am
Jeffrey Dahmer was into that years ago, was he not? In Wisconsin. Wisconsin is rife with serial killer-cannibals like Dahmer and Ed Gein, to name a couple. Did you ever live in Wisconsin, Ice? ;-)
Icepick said,
June 1, 2012 at 8:33 am
The closest I ever got to Wisconsin was Ann Arbor Michigan where, as far asI know, they have no cannibals. But I have been to Broadway….
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 8:42 am
:-D
Melinda said,
June 1, 2012 at 10:17 am
Soon someone on YouTube will be roasting someone on a spit and we will be idly thinking, “Why not throw a few vegetables on there unless you’re going paleo.”
>(Annie, you’ll want to skip that link.)
Uh-oh. That means there’s cats, right? I’ll skip it too.
Icepick said,
June 1, 2012 at 11:05 am
Melinda, that would be telling.
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 11:41 am
Melinda, I though vegetables and fruit were OK in paleo. Or is it just fruit that’s acceptable?
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 11:44 am
Not to put any kind of damper on the fun [LOL!] but I do detect a general deterioration of social mores and behaviors. In many respects I’m glad I’m old enough not to have to see what’s coming. :-\
Icepick said,
June 1, 2012 at 11:55 am
mock, I thought that was the script for the 1960s and 1970s.
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 12:21 pm
My imperfect recall indicates that people were generally a lot kinder to each other than they are now. Other than the ubiquitous ‘Love It or Leave It’ stickers and nasty comments, we were even well tolerated by our ideological opponents [Chicago and Kent State excepted]. I know we looked out for each other very well.
But you raise a good point. Did we hippie/radical types of the 60’s sow the seeds of social degeneracy? Did we throw the baby out with the bathwater? If so, we’ve got some ‘splaining’ to do. :-\
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 2:13 pm
Just got an email from a friend discussing a new book about Auschwitz and it caused me to remember that Solomon was right: “There is nothing new under the sun.” :-(
karen said,
June 1, 2012 at 7:02 pm
I avoided the story of FL cannibal- on Drudge. Then i saw a pic somewhere, and Althouse had a post on it, too.
I’m disturbed greatly by these reports(i wanted to write ~stories~, but think of stories as fiction.
O/T(as usual)-
i had a dream the other night of something that i’ve never experienced before. I was walking w/a friend and we were crossing a small corral-shaped meadow ringed w/large maples–w/spaces between the trees to pass through, like gates. My dog barked furiously- at nothing- and my friend noted that she always did so in this particular spot– why?
Then this fella started to shake, and he’s not the type to get scared- not to my knowledge. We were standing still by then, and his shadow, cast ahead of him, was super-imposed by another shadow of a man in a cowboy hat. We were both scared- there was no one behind us.
I saw a young man squatting by his horse, he was before us, and he looked up and started to shake his head– no. No, don’t do it. I felt like i was this young man, looking back into the shadowed face of this other, older man– and then i felt(in my sleep) my legs jerking and my friend’s legs were also jerking– then they stopped and i woke up.
I prayed right then and there for both men- and i really hope i never dream like that again.
And, i really, really hope that this corral-area isn’t my front lawn.
Ice– glad to get you back here:0).
Paleo? As in– era?
wj said,
June 1, 2012 at 7:39 pm
MT, I don’t think the problem is a deterioration of morals today so much as an improvement in communications.
It’s the same reason that people think the world has gotten more dangerous when, demonstrably, it has gotten safer. But now, where once you only heard about stuff like this which happened within a few dozen miles of where you live, today you can hear about it anywhere across the continent. (Or across the world.)
Half a century ago, if a child (one not named Lindberg) got kidnapped, you only heard about it if it was local. Which means that mostly you didn’t hear of any. Now you not only hear about every case that happens nationwide, you get bombarded with hysterical calls for someone (i.e. politicians) to do something!!! And we get more draconian laws which accomplish nothing useful towards their avowed purpose of increasing everybody’s safety.
/rant
mockturtle said,
June 1, 2012 at 7:58 pm
No, I didn’t mean to imply there was anything new going on, but moral darkness seems to go in waves and we seem to be on the crest of one now. Yes, the media make it seem worse than it is and their emphasis on these aberrations serves to desensitize us toward them, IMO. But I’m the LAST person to want any new laws! :-O Speaking of which, how do you like Bloomberg’s cracking down on soda? What a guy!
karen said,
June 1, 2012 at 9:29 pm
wj- you sound like my mom– she says the same thing.
I did wonder what happened to the victim of the FL attack– it seems strange to me that this poor man seemed to not defend himself– i hope he did, yet– over 80% of his face. WTF ISUP, for sure.
Icepick said,
June 1, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Karen, apparently the vic in FL got jumped, possibly while asleep, and was probably beaten senseless before the completely insane part started.
Melinda said,
June 1, 2012 at 10:10 pm
I agree with WJ. You just hear about stuff more.
As I say this, I’m hearing on the news that some guy in a restaurant on Long Island had a fight over the bill and tried to chew off a guy’s ear. Guess that was the appetizer.
karen said,
June 2, 2012 at 10:01 am
i was thinking about the morals/occurrences deterioration dilemma and i believe it isn’t so much that this happens more and more(lack of morals)(uptick in technology)as much as it is(to me)the reactions of the ~innocent bystanders~ who carry on w/business as usual and maybe decide to call 911- thank God for cell phones, eh?
Occurrences could be up- but, blase(sp?)reactions are not normal– or are they? Empathy out the window– fear of interfering– what, exactly?
karen said,
June 2, 2012 at 10:03 am
I find our life very parallel to the Harry Potter stories, btw.
Dementors must be breeding rapidly(& rabidly).
mockturtle said,
June 2, 2012 at 10:49 am
Our interactions have become increasingly impersonal and electronic. We don’t even phone any more, we text! Maybe this detachment makes us less and less aware of the humanity of others.
I can’t speak for other communities but we have seen a rash of really brutal crimes here, some involving small children. Sometimes little shrines are erected and candlelight vigils held for the victims but no outrage that it happened at all. :-(
Icepick said,
June 2, 2012 at 12:07 pm
I think the electronics are a symptom, not a cause. Increasing transcience in recent decades has led to the breakdown of local communities. If you don’t speak to your neighbors, you won’t know them. If you don’t know them, you’re not going to stick your neck out for them. If you’re not going to stick your neck out for your neighbors, you’ll be less inclined to help strangers.
Anyway, just a thought.
Icepick said,
June 2, 2012 at 12:46 pm
WTF, Canada?! WTF’ingF?
mockturtle said,
June 2, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Hey, that’s OK! Bears are supposed to eat people. :-)
Icepick said,
June 3, 2012 at 12:20 pm
I thought they were supposed to crap in the woods. Although I suppose that means they need to get ‘ammunition’ first….
Icepick said,
June 3, 2012 at 12:21 pm
But the bear didn’t just eat the guy, it took him into custody too! It’s the Royal Canadian Ursine Police. Do they wear nice hats?
karen said,
June 3, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Buzzbees!
Besides, i suppose to the bear, he was carrion-
as opposed to take out?
Icepick said,
June 3, 2012 at 12:57 pm
Karen, we’ve got cannibals (and maybe zombies) on the loose and bears eating murder suspects in Canada. I’m planning on going completely batshit crazy with this, so don’t try to reason with me!
mockturtle said,
June 3, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Besides, i suppose to the bear, he was carrion-
as opposed to take out?
:-D
A said,
June 3, 2012 at 10:29 pm
I hope the Ursine Police wear (faux) leopardskin pillbox hats. They’d look good.
mockturtle said,
June 4, 2012 at 9:56 am
Idea for a new movie arch-villain: ‘Smokey’: Genial, safety-conscious poster bear by day, bloodthirsty mauler of campers by night. Plenty of sequel potentials, too, each filmed on location in a different national park. Great scenery, minimal costs.