Robert Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, tortured, murdered, and dismembered six men in Kansas City, Missouri during the 1980s. He was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio on January 31, 1949, one of two sons of Robert Berdella Sr. and Mary Huffman Berdella. Robert Sr. was an auto worker for Ford and Mary a housewife. The family were practicing Catholics and their sons attended religious classes. Robert was a bright but antisocial child who had few friends and tended to keep to himself. He was not the most physically fit individual around--severely nearsighted, had difficulty speaking clearly, and was on blood pressure medications. For contrast his brother Daniel, seven years younger, was a born athlete. Robert Sr. encouraged Daniel's athletic pursuits and was disappointed in his older son for his introverted lifestyle, often calling him a loser and asking him why he couldn't be more like Daniel. He also disciplined his children with a belt if they displeased him.Berdella was a good student but his aloof personality sometimes frustrated teachers and he was unpopular with other kids. By the time he entered adolescence, he knew that he was gay although he kept it to himself for some years. He had a brief high school girlfriend. By the time Berdella was 15, he became something of an aggressive bully, often insulting those around him, especially females. He developed a knack for art and cooking. The Berdellas drove to Canton to visit relatives over the 1965 Christmas season and on Christmas Day Robert Sr. was stricken with a heart attack. Robert went home to Cuyahoga Falls by himself and was told that his father had died at only 39. He found solace in the Catholic faith he'd been raised in and came to read about various religions, but in time became an agnostic and distrusted all of them.
Around the same time, Berdella saw the 1965 movie adaption of the John Fowles novel The Collector, about a disturbed man who kidnaps a woman he likes, holds her captive in his basement, and treats her like an attractive animal specimen. After several weeks, the woman gets sick and dies despite her captor's attempts to keep her alive. Berdella said the movie was a huge influence on his later actions.Mary Berdella re-married not long after her husband's death, which Robert disliked and considered an insult to his father's memory. He became even more withdrawn and focused on his hobbies like coin and stamp collecting, painting, and writing to foreign pen pals, including ones in such exotic places as South Vietnam and Burma. They would send him back stamps and photos of temples, shrines, and artworks, expanding his fascination with exotic cultures and art. Berdella became an art and antique collector from his late teens.Berdella graduated high school in 1967 near the top of his class. During his senior year, one teacher, recognizing his potential, put him in an independent study program. Shortly after graduation, he moved to Kansas City and enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute with the hope of becoming a college professor. Berdella was a good student his first year, but by year two he got involved in the tumultuous campus politics of the late '60s and became openly critical of authority and the Vietnam War. Berdella also discovered drugs and resold them to other students at a profit. He does not appear to have consumed them himself and preferred alcohol instead. Berdella also participated in animal abuse such as beheading a duck in front of his peers.
He logged his first arrest in 1968 when he sold meth to an undercover cop. Berdella was released on $3,000 bail, pled guilty to selling a controlled substance, and got a five year suspended sentence. One month later, he was arrested with two other students for possessing marijuana and LSD. Berdella couldn't post bail this time and sat in jail for five days, but was eventually let go and the charges dropped for lack of evidence. He dropped out of KCAI a year later after a controversial "art" display involving killing and cooking a duck; opting to stay in Kansas City, he moved to a residence on Charlotte Street in September 1969. Berdella had lived as an openly gay man for about two years at this point and usually hung out with the seedy underbelly of society; male prostitutes, junkies, petty criminals, and runaways. He claimed he befriended them with the intent of trying to set them straight of their lifestyles, although he claimed he had no physical contact with any of them.This was an untrue claim because he did often have homosexual relationships with the men he befriended and wielded control over them by loaning them money or letting them stay at his place. Berdella was known to be active in the local community and civic affairs despite his somewhat pompous attitude and the unkempt state of his property. From about 1976, he worked with the South Hyde Park Crime Prevention and Neighborhood Association, rising to chairman in a few years and encouraging neighborhood watch patrols. Berdella remained active in the association until leaving it in 1984. He also volunteered at fundraising events for a local public TV station for a number of years.
Berdella also worked as a restaurant cook for periods of time, partially to pay legal expenses from his drug arrests and he sold art and antiques he acquired from various contacts around the world. He initially operated this side business from home. Berdella performed all his jobs well and eventually became a senior cook at several upscale Kansas City restaurants. He joined a local chefs' association and helped establish a training program for aspiring chefs at a local community college. As Berdella's antique business expanded, it eventually became a full time operation and he withdrew from the culinary business.Beginning in 1982, he rented a booth at Westport Flea Market which he called Bob's Bazaar Bizarre and specialized in primitive art, jewelry, and antiques. The business wasn't enough to pay the bills most of the time and so Berdella would sometimes steal or scavenge items to sell. He would also take in lodgers at home for additional income. At the flea market, Berdella met fellow merchant Paul Howell, who ran a booth next to his, and had a teenage son named Jerry. Jerry Howell and his friends often made fun of Berdella for being gay, although he later confided in him that they sometimes hustled as male prostitutes to earn money.
Paul Howell eventually moved his business to a location near the intersection of 39th and Main Street, living in an apartment above the shop and Berdella remained a casual friend of the family. Jerry Howell turned 19 in the summer of 1984 and became Berdella's first known victim. That July 5, Berdella offered to drive Jerry to a dancing contest in Merriam. Along the way, he drugged him with alcohol, diazepam, and acepromazine and knocked him out. He then injected Howell with a tranquilizer and tied him to the bed where he was kept for 28 hours of torture, rape, and penetration with foreign objects as he ignored Howell's pleas for mercy and to be let go. Jerry eventually died from what Berdella claimed was choking on his own vomit or else the effects of the drugs in his system.After failing to revive Howell from CPR, Berdella dragged the body to the basement, suspended it over a cooking pot, and made several cuts. The body was left hanging there overnight to allow the blood to drain, after which Berdella dismembered it with a chainsaw and boning knives and wrapped the parts in newspaper and garbage bags. He put them in larger garbage bags and left them out for the trash collectors to dispose of. After Howell disappeared, Berdella was questioned by police and merely told them he drove him to Merriam and hadn't seen or heard from him since. As with all his later victims, he kept a detailed log of everything he did to Howell.
On April 10, 1985, Robert Sheldon, a 20 year old itinerant former lodger, came to Berdella's house and asked if he could stay there. Sheldon paid his rent but Berdella was annoyed by his presence. Two days later, he came home from work to find Sheldon drunk. Berdella was not especially attracted to Sheldon, but nonetheless he drugged him and held him captive upstairs for three days, inflicting various tortures on him like swabbing his left eye with drain cleaner, sticking needles under his fingertips, binding his hands with piano wire, and plugging his ears with caulk. On the 15th, a worker came by to do some scheduled repairs to the roof of Berdella's home, so he quickly suffocated Sheldon by wrapping a bag over his head and then dismembered the body in the third floor bathroom.Two months later, Berdella found Mark Wallace, an acquaintance who'd once done yard work for him, hiding in his toolshed to seek shelter from a summer thunderstorm. He invited Wallace inside and offered him chlorpromazine to steady his nerves. Berdella decided to keep Wallace captive; he was taken to the second floor bedroom where he tortured him for a day, including zapping him with electric shocks and sticking hypodermic needles into his back muscles. Wallace died about an hour later; Berdella noted the time of death as 7:00 PM on June 23.
On September 26, Berdella received a phone call from an acquaintance named James Ferris, who asked if he could stay at his place, which he accepted. He claimed this was the first victim he properly tortured and that during the captivity of the last three victims, he ceased taking notes in his diary as he believed they wouldn't last much longer. Berdella invited Ferris home and drugged him with tranquilizers he put in his food, then tied him to the bed and subjected him to 27 hours of torture, including administering high voltage electric shocks to his shoulder and genitals and inserting hypodermic needles in the neck and genitals. Ferris gradually became delirious but Berdella continued the torture until he could barely sit up more than a few seconds at a time. He noted that Ferris's breathing had become labored and that he died with a slang term he sometimes used as a chef, "86", which he said meant roughly "anything from throw it out to stop the project."Todd Stoops was a 23 year old junkie and sometimes male prostitute who with his wife had stayed at Berdella's house briefly a year ago. Berdella didn't see him again until running into him at Liberty Memorial Park in Kansas City on June 17, 1986. Berdella offered him lunch and sex as Stoops said he needed $13 to buy drugs with. He found Stoops highly attractive and kept him captive for two weeks. The tortures became gradually more extreme as he tried to turn him into a totally obedient sex slave, including electric shocks and injecting drain cleaner into his larynx to stop his screams. During the second week of captivity, Stoops asked for something to eat. He cried when Berdella refused. On June 27, he fisted Stoops and ruptured his rectum in the process. Eventually Berdella offered him food although he wasn't able to keep anything down by that point. By the end Stoops was so weak that he could only breathe lying down. He died on June 1 of septic shock from the injury to his rectum.
In May 1987, Berdella befriended 20 year old Larry Pearson when the latter entered his shop and said he'd been into sorcery and witchcraft once. Pearson was invited to stay at Berdella's place and did chores for him as a form of rent payment. Berdella had not originally meant to hold him captive but eventually decided to after bailing Pearson out of jail on June 9 and noting that he didn't show much interest in trying to find a job. On June 23, the two went to see the movie Creepshow 2 and then had lunch. As they drove around Kansas, Pearson joked about robbing gay men in Wichita which convinced Berdella to hold him captive.That evening, Berdella got Pearson drunk, injected him with chlorpromazine, and moved him to the basement, where he bound his hands with a rope, then linked it to a brick column before injecting Pearson's larynx with drain cleaner. He took an electric transformer to the basement. Pearson was the most cooperative of Berdella's victims. By day five of captivity, after being electrocuted repeatedly and having his hand bones broken with an iron rod, Berdella decided Pearson was trustworthy enough so he moved him to the second floor and told him if he cooperated, the abuse would become lighter. For the latter part of his captivity, Pearson trained himself to be as quiet and still as possible so as to not anger Berdella and invite further abuse. By week six, Pearson finally snapped and bit Berdella's penis as he yelled that he could stand his treatment no more. Berdella beat him unconscious with a tree branch, then suffocated him with a bag and ligature. He went to the hospital to have the injury to his penis treated, then dismembered Pearson's body in the basement. The head was kept in a bag in the freezer before being buried in the backyard.
Berdella abducted his last victim on March 29, 1988 when Christopher Bryson, a 22 year old male prostitute, was lured to his house with the offer of money for sex. There, he knocked Bryson unconscious with an iron rod, tied him to his bed, and tortured him. After several days, he considered Bryson trustworthy and said he was willing to talk over some aspects of his treatment, although there would be no negotiations over it. Berdella warned him that he'd done this to others and they died because of their mistakes.By day three of his captivity, Bryson was allowed to tie his hands in front of him on the grounds that keeping them above his head restricted the circulation to his arms. He also convinced Berdella to let him have a TV in his room. The next day, Bryson escaped his restraints by burning them with a book of matches Berdella had carelessly left in the room within his reach while he was off at work. Nude except for a dog collar, Bryson escaped the house by leaping from a second floor window, breaking his foot in the process. He ran towards a meter reader across the street and yelled for him to call police. The meter reader escorted Bryson to a nearby house, whose occupants called police.
The officers questioned Bryson, who said he was hitchhiking when Berdella picked him up and subjected him to four days of rape and torture before he managed to escape. Bryson said he was tied to a bed much of the time, repeatedly sodomized, drugged, and his throat injected with drain cleaner. The cops noticed that his eyes were red and swollen and his body was covered in scars and welts. Two officers were told to keep an eye on Berdella's house while Bryson was driven to a hospital for treatment while another officer requested a search warrant of the property. After Bryson was treated for his injuries, he said that Berdella had shown him Polaroids of men who seemed to be dead, told him he was never going to leave the house, and if he caused him any problems, he would be tortured harder or else killed.Berdella was arrested when he came home from work that afternoon on charges of sexual assault. He did not want to let police inside the house, but as they had already obtained a search warrant he didn't have a choice. They found burned ropes in the second floor bed and a transformer plugged into a wall with wires leading to the bed. Nearby was a metal tray with syringes, bottles with prescription drugs, swabs, and eye drops. There was also an iron pipe and assorted ropes and leather belts. Investigators also noted that posts on the bed had been extensively worn, suggesting that restraints had earlier been tied to them, and that the individual or individuals had struggled to free themselves.
Inside a second floor closet the cops found a human skull and a partially decomposed head in the backyard. They also found several vertebrae scarred by hacksaw and knife marks in a hallway and two envelopes with human teeth inside them. A hacksaw and miter saw were found in the basement and a chainsaw soiled with blood, flesh, and pubic hair. Luminol tests found the basement floor and two trash barrels were extensively bloodstained. A total of 334 Polaroids and 34 snapshot prints of different men were found in Berdella's house, including photos of Christopher Bryson and other men alive and dead; many of the photos were taken while they were being tortured. There were also a variety of restraints and sex toys, pornographic literature, hypodermic needles, and a book on narcotics. Investigators also found a stenographer's pad with detailed torture logs that Berdella had maintained for each victim atop a chest of drawers. Several newspaper clippings from the Kansas City Star mentioning Jerry Howell's disappearance and a wallet and driver's license belonging to James Ferris were found in a closet.A task force assembled by the KCPD extensively looked into Berdella's history. They found that he had a semi-infamous reputation in Kansas City's gay scene, known for preying on young transients. Some men were reluctant to associate with Berdella because of his tendency to drug, torture, and inject his sexual partners and because he was long suspected in the disappearances of Howell and Ferris. Both men had been reported missing and Berdella questioned by police, but he wouldn't admit to anything. He remained a suspect but despite extensive surveillance, they couldn't pin anything on him. Whenever police tried to talk to Berdella about Howell and Ferris, he wouldn't speak without a lawyer present and when he did get one in the room the lawyer would threaten to sue the KCPD for harrassment if they didn't stop.
James Ferris's wife identified him from some of Berdella's Polaroids, some of them postmortem photos. Paul Howell identified a shot of a young man hanging upside down in Berdella's basement as his son. Other photos had different and still unidentified males. Detectives were assigned to determine if they were dead or alive and if alive, what was happening in the picture. Since the photographer could be partially seen in the photos, Berdella was ordered to undress and pose for several photos in the same angles as the evidence pictures.The stenographer's pads in his house had the names of numerous men written on them, so detectives attempted to trace them. One turned out to be a young man named Freddie Kellogg. He said that he and other young men had stayed at Berdella's house since the early '80s and that he had a habit of drugging lodgers, often intravenously, and having sex with them whether they consented or not. Kellogg said that Berdella made a condition that if he wanted to stay with him, he must talk young men Berdella fancied to attend parties at Charlotte Street so he could drug them. If they turned out to be police informants, Berdella would use this knowledge to blackmail him. Despite this threat, a lot of Kansas City's transients and gays didn't want anything to do with Berdella because of the suspicion that he killed Jerry Howell.Kellogg also named three of the men in the Polaroids as Todd Stoops, Bob Sheldon, and Larry Pearson. Police found that Berdella had paid Pearson's $30 bail on June 9, 1987 and that Pearson had afterward vanished without a trace. It was also discovered that about two months after he bailed Pearson, he'd checked into a local hospital to get an injury to his penis treated, claiming a "Larry Person" had done this. In addition, Robert Sheldon had been employed at a factory in Kansas City and was usually a dependable worker until April 1985 when he abruptly stopped coming into work.
After the search of Berdella's property, he refused to give handwriting samples to compare with the writing on the stenography pads and was sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court. Initially he was charged with unlawful imprisonment, assault, and forcible sodomy while the investigations continued. Berdella was held in the protective custody wing of the Jackson County Jail on $500,000 bail.About a month after his arrest, the skull found in the closet was identified through dental records as that of Robert Sheldon. At the same time, two men called the KCPD to report that one of seven unidentified young men depicted in the photos was a former high school classmate named Mark Wallace. A detective called Wallace's sister, who said he disappeared during the summer of 1985. One photo was also identified as showing Larry Pearson. Berdella was formally charged with murdering Pearson in July after identification of the head found in his backyard. He was indicted on July 22. A month later, Berdella pled guilty. The plea came as a surprise to the judge and DAs, who readily accepted--assistant DA Pat Hall said it was the sensible thing to do for everyone's sake.After Berdella pled guilty, Judge Alvin Randall ordered him to confess under oath as to how he killed Pearson. He explained that he simply put a plastic bag over his head and wrapped it around his neck. The judge asked if he did this deliberately and maliciously. Berdella replied simply "Yes." He was sentenced to life without parole and transferred to Missouri State Penitentiary. Berdella was temporarily assigned to protective custody at Potosi Correctional Center. On August 24, he pled guilty to committing forcible sodomy on Chris Bryson and received another life sentence.
In his confessions, Berdella said the movie The Collector had been a major influence on him. He ceased to see his victims as human once he decided to keep them captive. His torture logs often contained abbreviated notations for various acts he performed on the victims. He also said that he buried the two heads in the backyard; Sheldon's skull was cleaned and placed in the second floor closet and he put the teeth in envelopes. He said he was going to retrieve Pearson's skull once the flesh had decomposed from it, and he also insisted he did not practice Satanism or sell body parts at his flea market booth. Berdella knew the names of each victim. Mark Wallace had been found hiding in his shed but the others had been junkies or transients and Berdella claimed he tried to get them out of their lifestyles but was unable to do so. He explained graphically all the abuses he inflicted on each victim, but insisted he did try to keep them fed and free of infection by sometimes administering nutrients or antibiotics intravenously.Each successive victim was tortured more extensively than the last. No other human remains outside the skulls and some bone fragments were found on his property. Berdella's confessions confirmed that he'd disposed of the dismembered victims in the trash and they were never found.
Some time after beginning his prison sentence, Berdella agreed to be interviewed by TV station KCPT and to correspond with various journalists and true crime authors. In all of these, he believed the media had been unfair to him and that the police had displayed considerable incompetence by not arresting him after the first murder. He also complained about the conditions in the prison, arguing that he had a congential high blood pressure condition from childhood and that he should have been receiving medicine for it. On October 8, 1992, Berdella complained of chest pain and was taken to the prison infirmary where they diagnosed him as suffering from atrial fibrillation. Berdella was taken to a Columbia hospital where he died of heart failure that afternoon. He never expressed any real remorse for his actions, in interviews from prison he referred to the victims as his "play things."His house was purchased at the end of 1988 by a local businessman and later demolished.
>>18064779>>18064788god i wish i was alive in the 80s, it was so easy to pick up young transient twinks then and use them as you pleased. granted i'd draw the line at actually murdering someone but fuck that's hot.
WTF was wrong with boomers and Silent Generation people? you never hear of this stuff before or after them.
>>18064870leaded gasoline melted everyone's brain
>>18064828>and that the police had displayed considerable incompetence by not arresting him after the first murderwhat did you expect? typical homophobic Midwestern 80s cops who were just like ah, fags being fags not my problem.
>>18064859>i'd draw the line at actually murdering someonenah you would soon find that death is the greatest pleasure >>18064944>Kansas>midwesternAnyway I wish I lived in a homophobic society where nobody gives a fuck if bratty runaway teen boy whores go missing.The faggot paradox: the more accepting a society is of faggots, the harder it is to be a faggot.
so like Dahmer but he didn't actually eat the victims
>>18064859>god i wish i was alive in the 80s>era of AIDSnah i'll pass on that
>>18064730>is raised C*tholic>turns out gaytotally never saw that coming
>>18065210Better gay than worshipping pissrael
>>18065101it seems like the most hardcore gay serial killers from this era were all from flyover states where gay culture was more repressed than in, like, California or something
>>18065245Nope, you can get straight out with this shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_Killer
What a jerk
>>18064828i guess they didn't give him his heart meds because they didn't really care if he died
>>18065245^This. Lot of bottled up tension that exploded, I guess.
why are faggots so ridiculously easy to murder?
ok
Is there a true crimefag archive? Has he ever done one on Dennis Nilsen?
>>18065616I don't think we've ever done a thread about him.
>>18065355Boomers have no survival instincts. I suspect its because of an universally underdeveloped amygdala, stemming from drug and alcohol abuse and generally having a coddled life.
>>18065355and cf. Larry Eyler
>>18065355Not nowadays. Lots of gymbros
