Food is one of the simplest pleasures in life—sausages sizzling at Oktoberfest, a family dinner on a quiet evening, or a shared meal in a Paris apartment. But what happens when what’s on the plate isn’t what it seems? Across decades and continents, three men horrified the world not just by killing—but by consuming.
This is the story of Joachim Kroll, Richard Chase, and Issei Sagawa—three very different cannibals, whose legacies reveal how ordinary hunger can twist into something monstrous.
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The Ruhr Cannibal: Joachim Kroll
Picture it: Oktoberfest in Germany. You grab a bratwurst from a street vendor, the smell of roasted meat thick in the air. What if someone told you that, once upon a time, sausages in the Ruhr region may have contained human flesh?
That rumor stems from Joachim Kroll, a quiet German laborer and butcher born in 1933. To his neighbors, he seemed unremarkable: shy, polite, and almost invisible in daily life. But from the late 1950s until his arrest in 1976, Kroll lived a double life. He murdered women and children, sometimes keeping “trophies,” and was rumored to have cannibalized parts of his victims.
The most chilling speculation? That he mixed human flesh into sausages he sold. While never conclusively proven, the idea captured public imagination, transforming him from a serial killer into a folklore monster—the Butcher of the Ruhr.
Kroll reminds us of a terrible truth: sometimes evil doesn’t look like a monster. It looks like the man next door, smiling as he hands you your dinner.
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The Sacramento Vampire: Richard Chase
If Kroll represents the hidden monster, America’s Richard Chase was horror unmasked.
In the late 1970s, Sacramento learned his name in blood. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Chase believed his own body was wasting away—that his blood was turning to powder. To survive, he thought he needed to drink blood.
Over the course of one month in 1977–78, Chase murdered six people, mutilating their bodies and drinking their blood. His crimes were as theatrical as they were terrifying, embodying the worst kind of vampire mythos come to life.
When police entered his apartment, they found a scene straight out of a horror movie: walls and floors stained with blood, rotting animal carcasses in the refrigerator, and a pervasive stench of decay.
Chase wasn’t the neighbor who hid his crimes like Kroll—he was the nightmare who turned his home into a stage set for madness.
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The Cannibal Who Walked Free: Issei Sagawa
And then there’s Issei Sagawa, whose story reads like fiction but is chillingly real.
In 1981, Sagawa—an awkward, wealthy Japanese student studying in Paris—invited Dutch classmate Renée Hartevelt to his apartment. There, he shot her in the neck, mutilated her body, and cannibalized parts of her flesh over the course of several days.
Caught while attempting to dispose of her remains, Sagawa was arrested but soon declared legally insane by French authorities. Rather than standing trial, he was extradited to Japan. There, after only a short period in psychiatric care, he was declared sane and released.
Sagawa walked free—and he never disappeared from the spotlight. He wrote books, gave interviews, and even appeared on television, discussing his crime with unnerving openness. He thought it was a good idea to make some pornografic movies. He lived as a minor celebrity, profiting from the infamy of the act that should have kept him caged forever.
If Kroll was the hidden monster, and Chase the madman made flesh, then Sagawa was something worse: proof that society itself sometimes fails to contain evil.
I hope you enjoyed this seasonal step in a different direction. Keep coming back for more true crime content this month.
Mic G
Life after door kicking. 
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