Throughout history there have been many reports of criminal vampirism and cannibalism. Some as famous as the Hanover Vampire; others not as famous, but as equally intriguing. This essay selects legendary cases of vampirism/cannibalism throughout history. Most of the cases are early twentieth century with the odd classic or modern day case thrown in for contrast.
One of the most infamous vampire related mass murderers was Fritz Haarmann (1879 - 1925), who with his two accomplices was responsible for the deaths of at lest twenty and as many as fifty young men. He was known as a vampire because of his cannibalism and habit of biting his victims in the throat.
He was a child molester and a homosexual, and spent much time in a sanatorium after being discharged from the army. After being released he rejoined the army, this time serving with an elite group, distinguishing himself throughout World War I.
A civilian again during Germany's post war era, he opened a cook shop and worked as an informer. By this time he was already a murderer and then in 1919 he met Hans Grans, a fellow homosexual, who came do dominate Haarmann and lead him into the gaudy underworld of Hanover's homosexual community.
It was here that Haarmann found a seemingly endless supply of prey. He often brought young men home with him and murdered them in a grisly fashion; all under the watchful eye of Grans.
Another mysterious accomplice entered the scene and aided in body disposal. The victims' clothing was sold on by Haarmann, and the most horrid of all acts was that Haarmann actually sold flesh to unsuspecting people for human consumption.
Finally, the police captured him. They visited his lodgings on previous occasions when bodies were hidden just feet away. He confessed his crimes in minute detail, proclaiming insanity but declaring he was forced to commit the crimes whilst in a trance.
Fritz Haarmann was executed in April 1925; ironically he was beheaded, which is one of the most common and affective ways to dispose of a vampire. His brain was removed by officials and given to scientists at the Göttingen University to be studied. This in more ways than one granted him a kind of vampiric immortality in itself.
Another infamous murderer of vampiric connection is John Haigh. He was more commonly known as the Vampire of London and Acid Killer. The case shocked the British public when the details of his crimes came to light.
A onetime choirboy, John George Haigh was the son of a fanatically pious and puritanical family that forced him to lead a life utterly devoid of social activities and filled with threat of eternal punishment for sin. In this environment he grew up repressed, becoming fixated on religion and blood, with the increasingly uncontrollable urge to drink blood.
By the time he was finally caught in 1949, he had murdered nine people, in each case he drank the blood of his victims, including that of a young girl.
Assuming that he could not be prosecuted if there were no bodies, he routinely disposed of the corpses in drums of sulphuric acid, for which he earned the nickname 'Acid Killer'. What made Haigh so horrible in the public's mind was his absence of remorse, his seemingly normal physical appearance and the detailed often unbelievable accounts of his crimes, told in an inhuman matter-of-fact style.
Of gruesome interest was his own recitation of his early life, including his experiences as a junior organist for Wakefield Cathedral, where he spent hours gazing at the statue of the bleeding Christ, dying on the cross. Haigh was also distinguished by the apparent absence of motivational sexual content in his cravings, a characteristic commonly exhibited by other serial killers.
The Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory (1560 - 1614) portrayed one of the most historical accounts of vampirism. She was a member of the powerful Bathory family and later became known as the 'Bloody Countess' for her multiple murders and obsession with blood.
Married to the warrior count Ferenz Nadasdy, Bathory spent many nights alone while her husband was fighting the Turks. She developed interests that were beyond obsessive in the subjects of her beauty, pleasure, the occult, and in most depraved kinds of sadism, which were normally directed towards her serving girls, with whom she engaged in acts of lesbianism before murdering them with the help of her lieutenants.
Bathory became convinced that blood held the key to halting the process of her ever-increasing age. This idea came about when she hit out at a servant; the blood that splashed onto her hands seemingly, to her, made the skin smoother and younger looking. Henceforth she believed that drinking, bathing in and showering in the blood of young virgins cured the fact that she was ageing, resulting in the murder of hundreds of servant girls in her service.
The exact amount of virgins she murdered will never be known and various accounts have their ideas; some say as many as several hundred others as few as fifty. Inevitably the truth became known, and in 1610 the countess and her henchmen were arrested, tried and convicted. Her accomplices were executed or imprisoned, and Bathory was walled up in her bedchamber at Castle Csejthe.
Four years later the guards who attended to her peered through the slot used to give her food to discover that she was dead. The 'living vampire' was no more, although her memory was kept alive by legends and tales. Several films were made about here, including Countess Dracula (1971), Blood Castle (1972), and Ceremonia Sangrienta (1972).
Martin Dummolard was a late-nineteenth-century mass murderer in France, known as the 'Monster of Montluel', whose crimes were made more macabre because of the control exercised over him by his obese mistress, Justine Lafayette.
After meeting Justine while in her Lyon boarding house, the youthful, handsome Dummolard fell completely under her spell. They were both necrophiles, Dummolard drinking the blood of his victims and bringing the fleshier parts home, which he served up for Justine.
Despite the terror that broke out in Montluel, he was able to murder some eighty girls. The capture of these 'vampires' in 1888 was followed up by a sensational trail. Justine was guillotined (again the common destruction of vampires - beheading) and Dummolard was confined to an asylum. He died early in this century and is ranked as one of the most hideous of the so-called vampires of history.
Peter Kürten, the so-called 'Vampire of Düsseldorf (1883 - 1931) he was responsible for murdering or assaulting twenty-nine people during his reign of terror that lasted for years, ruining the city's reputation amongst Europeans.
The son of an alcoholic and a long-suffering mother, whom he revered, Kürten worked as a truck driver, appearing as a boring, bespectacled little man with a moustache and neat clothes. As was true with other mass murderers, beneath this quiet exterior lurked his true demeanour as a remorseless killer.
His victims were strangled and raped, then their throats were slit and their blood consumed by Kürten, who sought to find some release from his unstoppable cravings. Eventually marrying a woman who fulfilled his need for a mother figure, he was a devoted husband by day, setting out at night on his ghastly adventures. His murders probably would have continued had he not confessed his crimes to his astonished wife.
The police picked him up after his wife turned him in; he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death, never appealing his conviction. Adding to the horror surrounding Kürten were his letters to the parents of the victims, in which he described how some humans were alcoholics, whereas he needed blood.
The inspiration for the Fritz Lang masterpiece M (1931), Kürten made the statement: "You cannot understand me. No one can understand me." His story was told in the 1964 French-Italian film Le Vampire de Düsseldorf, directed and starring Robert Hossein.
More modern day cases of vampirism/cannibalism, are those of Issei Sagawa known also as the Japanese Cannibal and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Sagawa was a student in Paris who developed an irresistible urge to taste human flesh. In the beginning of his murders a dismembered body was found in a Paris park. Things turned for the worse when police discovered parts of the body had been eaten and that they were dealing with a cannibal.
Sagawa was caught and placed in Henri Colin psychiatric hospital in Villejuif. During his stay at the Henri Colin Asylum, three psychiatrists examined Sagawa. One of them, Dr Bernard Defer, believed there was no cure for perverted sexual fantasies. He told the authorities Sagawa's 'psychosis' was permanent and he would probably have to be kept at Villejuif for the rest of his life, which would have cost the French taxpayer a small fortune. This practical consideration was probably part of the reason why the French authorities decided to get rid of the problem by deporting Sagawa to Japan.
In 1985, Sagawa was deported back to Japan. As he stepped of the plane he was overwhelmed by a mob of journalists and photographers. This was a man who had killed and eaten a woman and to all intense and purposes got away with it. From the airport he was taken to the Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo; this was a plan devised by his family to prevent a public outcry. But despite all this people still felt they needed justice.
No one at the hospital was pleased at having to deal with their new patient and the Japanese psychiatrists believed him to be an ordinary sex criminal who had deceived the French into believing he was psychotic and therefor not responsible for his actions. 'I think he is sane and guilty,' declared hospital superintendent Tsuguo Kanego. 'He should be in prison'.
The Japanese applied to Bruguières in Paris for Sagawa's file with a view of bringing him to justice in Japan. However, Bruguières refused to hand over a single document. In due course the Japanese came to the same decision as the French; they washed their hands of the whole incident.
On 12th August 1986, the Matsuzawa Hospital discharged its most notorious patient, as he was only a voluntary patient, into the community to begin his life over again as an ordinary, private citizen.
The Jeffrey Dahmer case is similar to Sagawa's and many others, yet so different in other aspects. Dahmer was the Milwaukee serial killer who killed 17 young men and kept part of their bodies in his home.
Pure chance led police to the home of Jeffery Dahmer in the summer of 1991. What they found inside had the seasoned officers reeling in horror, as they uncovered evidence of years of murder and mutilation. Tracey Edwards, a 32-year-old was nearly Dahmer's 18th victim, but he fortunately escaped and flagged a police car down, which began the investigation into the murders.
After killing each of his victims, Dahmer would decapitate them and he often kept parts of the bodies - torso, skull - in his home. Occasionally he would have oral sex with the corpse before dismembering it. Certain murders were excluded from his trail as he Dahmer was drunk and had no recollection of his actions.
When Dahmer was caught a televised trail began and although it was known by all, including Dahmer himself that he was guilty, it still lasted for three weeks. On the 14th of February 1992 the jury found Dahmer guilty on every charge and sentenced to over nine centuries in prison (quite a lengthy sentence which the folkloric vampire would have easily passed). Dahmer addressed the court with a speech and apologised for the pain he had caused. After spending five minutes with his father and stepmother, he was led away from public view forever.
On the morning of November 28th 1994, Dahmer went to carry out his work detail in the showers of the prison gym and was left for some 20 minutes during which he was not under direct supervision. Dahmer was later found by his guards lying in a blood-spattered shower room with severe head injuries. Despite being rushed to a nearby hospital he was pronounced dead around an hour later.
25-year-old Christopher Scarver, Dahmer's assailant and fellow inmate, claimed that he was the 'Son of God' and had been given divine orders to carry out the murder. He had received a life sentence in 1992 and would not be up for parole until 2042. Scarver was charged for both murders and referred for psychiatric tests.
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All of these cases seem to stem from psychological and obsessive problems. Fritz Haarmann and Martin Dummolard were cases that involved psychological displacement, but harboured the more gruesome fact of actually being talked and mentally pressured into committing the crimes for others as well as themselves.
Bathory is one of the many cases not noted here who's psychological and obsessive was increased more with her interest in sadism and the occult.
Dahmer is a case that is so similar yet so unique. I believe that he was fully aware of his actions and did not have any psychotic disease other than the fact he is seriously unstable.
Sagawa on the other hand is what could be considered as 'curious'. He only killed one person (and although killing is not to be justified it clearly set him apart from the likes of others that killed more than ten times). Despite this it is quite ignorant of the French and Japanese authorities to not at least investigate Sagawa's case further.
I suppose all people have a vampiric/cannibalistic curiosity in their mind, although not everyone will yield to it. All in all no one can be forgiven or forgotten for crimes that involve the consumption of human flesh and blood for means none other than to ease curiosity or the stomach.
(taken from: vampirewine.com)
I started college when I was sixteen years old. It was a big, scary place, and I was young. I remember standing in line for registration with the hordes of other people. I felt so insecure and inadequate next to those who were my supposed peers. How would I ever measure up to these people who seemed so confident and sure of what they wanted? 
