Well, at least he didn’t eat them… but that’s all we have to say about Robert Berdella, The Butcher of Kansas City, and his victims in this week’s True Crime Friday!
Hey there, true crime lovers! It is your favorite investigator, Ninetoes, coming to you from Ninetoes HQ, and I am on the beat with the Case of Robert Berdella. I have my notebook in hand and coffee in my system, so let’s get to it!
Robert Berdella was born on January 31, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. His family was devout Roman Catholics who attended Mass regularly. He and his brother regularly attended religious education. As a child, Berdella was a loner. He wore thick glasses because of extreme nearsightedness; he had a speech impediment, and he took several high blood pressure medications. Basically, he was shut in. His father, who values sports and athletic ability, viewed this as failure. Berdella was bullied both at home (his father would beat him and his brother with a leather strap) and at school.
When Berdella reached puberty, he was attracted to members of the same sex. He never made this inclination public, and even had a girlfriend, although that was brief. In his mid-teens, Berdella became increasingly aggressive, rude, and condescending to other people, especially women. After his father died from a heart attack, Berdella became cynical about all religion. His mother remarried shortly after the death of his father, something that Berdella was against and viewed as a betrayal of his father.
After he graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School, Berdella relocated to Kansas City and enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI); he wanted to become a college professor. He became involved with students who supplied him with drugs that he sold for profit. At the age of 19, he was arrested for attempting to sell methamphetamine to an undercover officer. He posted $3000 bond and was released. He would plead guilty to the case and received a five-year suspended sentence.
By the 1970’s Berdella had withdrawn from KCAI, and he was openly gay. He started spending a lot of his free time with drug addicts, male prostitutes, runaways and petty criminals. He would befriend them and then try to help them overcome their lifestyles. He maintains that he was never physically intimate with any of these men.
By the early 1980s, Berdella’s older acquaintances stopped any kind of contact with him. He started to rely on younger men for companionship. He would try to steer them away from their destructive lifestyles. Of course, he was engaging in sexual behavior with these men, and he would engage in controlling behavior with them.
Berdella killed his first victim on July 5, 1984. The young man’s name was Jerry Howell, someone Berdella knew through the young man’s father. Berdella promised to drive Howell to a dance in Merriam, but along the way, he gave the man alcohol, diazepam, and acepromazine, both in the car and at his house. He tied Howell to his bed and repeatedly drugged, raped, and tortured him. According to Berdella, Howell died either by asphyxiation on his own vomit while he was gagged or by the combination of the gag and strong medications given to him.
Berdella then took Howell’s body to the basement, suspended him upside down over a large cooking pot, made several incisions at the elbows and the jugular vein, and allowed the blood to drain from his body overnight. The following day, he used a chainsaw and boning knife to dismember the body. The parts were then placed in newspapers and garbage bags, which were taken to a landfill by the garbage men.
Over the next three years, there would be five more victims: Larry Wayne Pearson, Robert Sheldon, Mark Wallace, James Ferris, and Todd Stoops. As each murder occurred, so did Berdella’s brutality. After each young man was killed, they were dismembered and disposed of, earning Berdella the nickname “The Butcher of Kansas City”.
On March 29, 1988, Berdella abducted a male prostitute, Christopher Bryson. This man was subjected to the same treatment: rape, torture, and abuse, for three days. Bryson managed to gain Berdella’s trust and was tied with his hands in front of him. He managed to escape by jumping out of a second-story window and running towards a meter reader, wearing nothing but a dog collar. The police were called and responded in minutes.
Berdella was arrested that afternoon. The police were able to obtain a search warrant and uncovered an iron pipe, rope, leather belts, syringes, an electric transformer attached to the bed, a human skull, a partially decomposed body in the backyard, several human vertebrae, human teeth, and a hacksaw and miter saw that were used to dismember the bodies.
Robert Berdella was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder. In addition to this, he was charged with selling amphetamines, sodomy, assault, and sexual assault. He pleaded guilty to the murder of Larry Pearson in August of 1988. He did this to take the death penalty off the table. In December 1988, he pleaded guilty to the other offenses.
On October 8, 1992, Berdella complained of severe chest pain and was taken to the prison infirmary. The medical staff said his heart was unstable. He was then taken to a hospital in Columbia, Missouri. He was pronounced dead from a heart attack soon after he arrived. He was 43 years old.
PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing, nor do the views or opinions of Crystal Lake necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or its staff. Thank you for understanding.
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