This smiling boy grew up to be one of the most evil men on earth
By age 15, he had decapitated a dog, nailed its body to a tree, and impaled its skull on a stick. In high school, he became known for strange pranks, bleating and faking seizures to get attention.
He’d stumble past open classroom doors while lessons were in session, peer through windows from outside the building, or make strange bleating noises just out of the teacher’s earshot.
“He would bleat like a sheep,” recalled former friend and classmate John Backderf.
“Sometimes he did it loud. He knew it cracked us up.”
First victim
But underneath the jokes, darker compulsions were forming.
Just three weeks later, on June 18, 1978, the young man picked up a hitchhiker —and committed his first murder.
Over the next 13 years, he killed 16 more young men, dismembering some and, in horrifying cases, consuming parts of their bodies. The majority of his victims were first drugged with sedatives and then strangled to death.
