(We’re apologizing ahead of time for including the Polaroids without warning…)
Robert Berdella
1949 – 1992
He wasn’t the sort of guy who everyone was all surprised about when they found out he was a psycho perv and a killer: Bob Berdella, later known as The Kansas City Butcher, was the owner of a small shop called “Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar” in Kansas City which sold things like human skulls and books on witchcraft and occultism–or as some of the local press put it “a downtown novelty shop selling lava lamps… incense, and other kinds of supplies that would appeal to potheads and weekend Satanists.” When he was arrested in 1988 on suspicion of the rape and torture of a young man who had leapt out a second story window and ran naked through the neighborhood wearing a dog collar, he was already well known among he local hustler community for being dangerous and for making young men disappear.
Clues That This Guy Was Fucked Up
Appearance: kind of a schlub; overweight, glasses, shaggy hair, mustache: your garden variety perv in a spooky occult shop. He had a habit of getting drunk in bars and, when he wasn’t picking up hustlers to maim and torture, bragging about how many guys he’d gotten to take home and subject to his extreme acts of subjugation, control and pain.
Relationship History: Lived alone, never married–appears to have accepted his gayness at a young age, if not without some serious psychological damage. Claims to have been inspired by the 1965 William Wyler film The Collector in which a man takes a woman hostage for pleasure.
Jail Time: None before his arrest — he served four years of his life sentence before dying in prison.
What Got Him Off: Extreme sadomasochistic torture and sexual slavery involving young men who were often prostitutes. Bob would overpower his victims, either with sedatives or with a blow to the head, or both. Then, he kept them bound and gagged on a bed for days at a time, alternately torturing them (blinding them, beating them with a metal rod, injecting them with drain cleaner, attaching electrodes to their genitals), fucking them and masturbating over their prone bodies. He kept careful notes of every drug and torture act he administered, noting the amounts, and noted the subject’s reaction, including the exact words if they were verbal. He kept hundreds of Polaroid pictures as documentation. His first victims were men he had extended sexual relationships with, but later the men he subjected to his sport were prostitutes, some of whom died within a few days. He hacked up their remains in a bathtub and disposed of them, keeping several souvenirs and burying one skull in the backyard. Police found a skull, some vertebrae, and an envelope full of teeth in Bob’s bedroom at the time of his arrest.
Not Really That Nice: Bob Berdella was organized and cleanly enough to schedule all of his rituals on weekends and to be finished with his slaves by Monday, just in time for trash pick-up. He is suspected in the deaths of at least seven young men, but the remains of several victims were never found.
Bob ended up dying in prison of a heart condition, after claiming to a priest that his heart medication was being withheld by prison guards. Later revelations have suggested also that he may have been poisoned. No investigation into his death ever occurred. Incidentally, an independent film called “Berdella” is currently shooting and will likely be released next year.
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The Kansas City Butcher (TruTV)
Rites of Burial (Savage Cinema)