Armin Meiwes, a German computer repair technician, who murdered and cannibalized a lover he met in an online chatroom named The Cannibal Cafe. Driven by a desire for internet pornography involving torture and pain, Armin’s fetish for human flesh led him to post an internet message that said, “I am looking for a young, well-built man aged 18 to 30 to slaughter.” Interestingly, the last man to respond to the message would become Armin’s first victim, Bernd-Jürgen Brandes. Brandes, a bisexual engineer, under the username “cator99” agreed to be mutilated and eaten. The shocking crime would lead to Armin’s comparison as the real-life Hannibal Lecter.

Zackery Bowen, a twenty-eight-year-old former U.S. Army soldier, who strangled his girlfriend, Addie Hall, and then went on to dismember her body in the bathtub. After jumping from the seventh floor of a New Orleans Hotel, police found a note inside his pocket that read, “This is not accidental. I had to take my own life to pay for the one I took.” Inside the couple’s apartment, investigators found the burned head of Addie in a pot on the stove. Her hands and feet were in another pot, her legs and arms had been seasoned and placed into the oven, and her torso was wrapped inside the refrigerator. The Jeffrey Dahmer style murder would lead to questions involving domestic abuse, mental health issues, and extreme lifestyles in the wake of a natural disaster.

Kevin Ray Underwood, a “single, bored, and lonely” man who murdered his ten-year-old neighbor, Jamie Bolin, after canvassing the internet for death and gore involving cannibalism. Luring the young girl into his apartment to play with his pet rat named Freya and watch cartoons, Kevin smashed Jamie’s skull in with a wooden cutting board and strangled her. Once she was dead, he sexually assaulted her corpse and attempted to decapitate her inside the bathtub. Investigators would uncover a twisted sexual fantasy involving torture, rape, and cannibalism through his online blog where he posted under the username “Subspecies23.”

Brothers Raymond and Donald Duvall murdered two best friends, David Tyll and Brian Ognjan, on a snowy night in Michigan in 1985. For two decades, there were no answers, and the two men were never seen again. However, in 2003, a witness came forward and recounted a terrifying story that had been overheard in the small town of Mio, Michigan. During a night of drunken rowdiness, Raymond and Donald had beaten the two men with an aluminum bat, pushed their bodies through a tree-chipping machine, and then fed the bloody, chopped up remains to their pigs. The Duvall brothers were known for their brutality and instilled fear around those closest to them using one simple reminder, “Pigs have to eat too.”

In all criminal cases investigators strive to find the motive to better under the mind of the criminal. However, not all cases present a clear, defined motive and sometimes investigators are forced to gather evidence, examine the circumstances surrounding the crime, and piece together the psychological profile of the perpetrator. When there is no motive, is the only plausible explanation that some people are just born evil?