HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(yodeling) Yo hee-hee! Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you got it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(yodeling) Yo hee-hee! Man. I just think of that music playing over a bunch of Hummel figures cutting each other's dicks off.
MARCUS PARKS
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. We have yo hee-hee Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hit me with the polka! (polka music plays)
ED LARSON
Natalie just got pregnant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just remember this is the soundtrack of this entire story.
MARCUS PARKS
I maintain that the soundtrack to this entire story is Heino but we'll get to that on episode two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Polka.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course with us is Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
Hello. I can't wait to eat some dick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what's really sad?
MARCUS PARKS
Don't worry, your time will come soon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And truly one of the worst things about all of this, dick isn't even that good.
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No, dick is actually impossible to cook. And the reason why we're talking about cooking dicks is because today we're gonna be talking about (German accent) Armin Meiwes, the Rotenburg cannibal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Ja. The most charming man in Rotenburg. He is. All they ever said was that he was classy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Armin Meiwes, aka the Rotenberg cannibal, was a German middle aged loner who in 2001 killed and ate a man that he'd met on the internet, A guy named Bernd Brandes. The twist is that Brandes had not only volunteered to be killed and eaten but was on the internet specifically to find someone who would fulfill his suicidal sexual urge.
ED LARSON
Yeah, the internet's like four years old at this point and people are already finding each other and eating each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually this is back when the internet was truly nasty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh it really was.
MARCUS PARKS
These are the nasty days of the internet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why? What do you mean, Marcus? The fact that there was necrobabes.org that you could actively post upon. And it was just on the normal internet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is just on the regular ass internet. But I want to remind you guys that this series, like we cover true crime a lot. And this isn't true crime. This is true romance.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the story about the most romantic weekend that ever happened in Germany besides the time when Hitler killed himself.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the morals of such an arrangement were of course the subject of much discussion during Armin's trial. But some Germans saw the humor in the situation. (German accent) You see, it's very funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Oh ja.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They gave him the additional nickname of Der Metzgermeister, meaning the master butcher.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did it in a fairly efficient way.
MARCUS PARKS
Extremely efficient way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I saw the pictures.
MARCUS PARKS
Of the neatly wrapped piles of meat?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I mean they have the pictures, unfortunately they have the pictures from the film. They have stills from the film out there and I did look at them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Did he have deli paper?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Very much so.
ED LARSON
That's awesome. That's why you do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's why he was Der Metzgermeister.
ED LARSON
I know we'll get more into it but did he make sausage?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh he made everything. He made sausage, he made bacon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta wait!
ED LARSON
All right, all right, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta wait. We're blowing it, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
ED LARSON
We'll see you next week. We'll see next week. All right, let's just stop now so we can get to the nasty shit.
MARCUS PARKS
But as far as Armin Meiwes goes, while his story is not a 1:1 comparison, it's sort of like what would have happened if a guy like Ed Gein had the internet. And yes, I know that Ed Gein is not a cannibal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that he's not a cannibal but these guys are spiritual cousins.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yes. If he had the internet he might have been a cannibal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would have been a lot of things.
ED LARSON
If he would have had it as an option.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is funny is that I feel like that... Weirdly I feel like the internet would have given him a lot more pushback about looking for cadavers where there was something about this within the actual fantasy of it that they were all... I still don't know if Ed Gein was great at improv.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we're gonna look at, we're gonna definitely talk about people later who frequent necrophile forums. So I don't think Ed Gein would have gotten any pushback.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God bless America and the internet.
ED LARSON
It's Germany!
MARCUS PARKS
Hey, what are you talking America? This is the world, my friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
The World Wide Web.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know who we can thank for all of this? Al Gore.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is the time that he gets the credit.
ED LARSON
Yeah, sustainable meat, non gas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Low carbon footprint if you eat the entire thing.
MARCUS PARKS
But there are other parallels between Gein and Meiwes that are hard to ignore. Both had a bizarre worshipful relationship with their domineering mothers and the general consensus on both men was that they were oddballs who never fit in anywhere. In Germany, by the way, oddballs are often called either der Spinner or der Komisch. Which der Komisch literally translates to 'the funny one'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I feel that I was said both of those in a derogatory fashion when we were in Berlin.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) Look at der Spinner here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and I'm being like I know what that means, okay, buddy. I saw What's Eating Gilbert Grape. All right? I know what you're saying, buddy. All right? And yeah, I am stupid. But this guy, he's very, again he's a romantic. And I just love the concept of like you even have to point out that they were oddballs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They say like (German accent) oh this guy's weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well additionally Meiwes also lived alone in a gigantic creepy farmhouse that he inherited after his mother died, just like Gein.
ED LARSON
Awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Located in the tiny village of Wüstefeld, the 36 room farmhouse remained totally unchanged after Armin's mother died. Although it did, like Gein's place, get pretty messy by the end.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were pretty dependent on mommy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Well that and just chopping up a human being makes it pretty messy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically that was when he was the most neat.
MARCUS PARKS
But even before Armin's crimes came to light, his home was known by the local kids as the haunted house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Even though, as we'll get to later, an actual satanist black magic once lived next door to Armin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly this is one of those where when we do our research, you never know what comes up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You never know. And this was on our list and there was something, we were moving our schedule around. We're like oh I've always wanted to do the Armin Meiwes story. I've always wanted to do this and it was like oh it'll be a good like one-parter, we'll get into it, we'll talk about the murder. His childhood is one of the funniest single stories that is laid out. I was so just like wowed by how-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So was I.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just right down the pipe for us, the story was. Oh man, he's a fucking... It's crazy. Rudolf Steiner's here.
MARCUS PARKS
But the big difference between Ed Gein and Armin Meiwes, besides of course the fact that Gein wasn't a cannibal-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's still saying that.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just making sure that everybody knows.
ED LARSON
Everyone's gonna stick up for his boy.
MARCUS PARKS
The big difference is that Meiwes eventually found another person in this world who was on his exact same wavelength. Although that relationship was by its very nature short and sweet, if you'll excuse the expression.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it was short and savory. I could feel that motion now is that as soon as Bernd got off that train and Armin saw him for the very first time, he heard this magical sound. Rob? (polka music plays)
ED LARSON
(German accent) It's you, finally! I've been waiting and waiting and waiting!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you, Rob.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
True romance.
MARCUS PARKS
Now for our source today we've got 'Cannibal: The Story Behind the Maneater of Rotenburg' by Lois Jones which is good enough but does tend to fall into the unfortunately common true crime literature trap of having weird and outdated opinions on homosexuality. I don't know what the fuck it is with these true crime writers but they just either willfully want to misunderstand it or they just want... I think they want to give everything like that little extra nasty edge.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everything has got to be slightly grimy from their perspective.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You kind of feel that sort of like dirty noir edge. Also the main issue is that a full misunderstanding of what BDSM is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Immediately saying that that's all like homosexuals do is whip each other. And again we've talked about this many times, we did this in the Andrew Cunanan series-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
About how gay people are largely extremely boring.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they're just people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean there's no more or less BDSM in the gay community than there is in the straight community.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'm sure there's plenty of cuddling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh there's a lot of cuddling.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot of cuddling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Lot of cuddling.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But otherwise-
MARCUS PARKS
I mean we'll get into that later, that's really all Armin wanted. Besides to eat and kill someone.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he wanted cuddle them with his duodenum.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He literally wanted to cuddle him with his colon and his guts. That is his actual motive. But this story though has more detail about his life than any other source I found.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The facts that are presented are solid. So let's get into the story of the Rotenburg cannibal. Armin Meiwes was born in 1961 to a domineering and difficult woman named Waltraud Meiwes who was almost 40 when she gave birth to Armin. Waltraud and Armin actually look quite a bit alike with deep set eyes, thin lips, and long sharp noses. It's your classic German goblin face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know exactly what he's saying, right?
ED LARSON
Oh absolutely, yeah. Those people are disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We love the German people. Heidi Klum is one of the most beautiful women in the world.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No but these people, they're fucking, they're Nosferatus.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These guys. It's a bad batch. I think that a lot of Germans are extremely beautiful. And fun and cool.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're beautiful people. But there's a reason why Werner Herzog did the best Nosferatu.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. He knows a Nosferatu.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's gotten milk from a Nosferatu. It is wild. I have never seen such a couple that if you threw a wig on the son, he would look just like the mother.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if you know anything about Armin Meiwes, which is like the more and more stuff I watch, all they ever do is focus on the teeth. They always zoom in on the teeth.
ED LARSON
Well of course because he ate people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He also has a massive mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so does the mother. Like a wolf's mouth filled with huge ass teeth. Very frightening, very frightening people.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Armin was Waltraud's third child but Armin's father, Dieter, was Waltraud's second husband and they had custody of two boys from their first marriage. Their names were Ingbert and Wolfgang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, one was a composer and the other one sold piss.
MARCUS PARKS
And for a while things were okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's Germany?
ED LARSON
How much is piss?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly? Super cheap.
MARCUS PARKS
Market price. Well for a while things are okay for the Meiwes family. They lived primarily in the West German city of Essen but spent their summers about three hours away at the aforementioned farmhouse near the town of Rotenburg. But when Armin was between the ages of 6-8, Dieter, Ingbert, and Wolfgang all began leaving one by one. First Ingbert joined his father in Berlin and Armin's father left soon after. Reportedly Dieter left Armin with Waltraud because he believed quote "that he would turn out okay".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he'll be fine. I gotta go.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that he read the room.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Waltraud, I mean not to speak ill of the dead, big heinous bitch, right. Big fucking pain in the ass.
ED LARSON
With a name like Waltraud, you figure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, she does sound like she tries to kill the Smurfs each week.
MARCUS PARKS
Waltraud, even worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Waltraud! Yeah, face like a cannibal. And so they were already having a lot of marriage difficulty.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it wasn't a happy home. But it was just kind of the way that he left because he just jumped ship and he really was lik, I'm gonna take the good boys, you guys are gonna be normal, I could tell that immediately. You're coming with me. And they were like daddy, daddy, we want to go with daddy!
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't even I'm gonna take the good boys. It was like I'm out. Because the boys went to their real father.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's right.
MARCUS PARKS
Like the way they told us is that Armin was out front like playing in the garden, he heard a door slam and that was the fucking last time he saw his dad.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean unfortunately anybody who ends up as a cannibal, that is one of the last sounds you hear from your father is the literally, it's the Simpsons bit. It's the (stomping) (door slam) (engine starting). Yeah, that's what we did.
ED LARSON
I'll be right back. I promise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Yes. Daddy when you come back will you bring some more sausages? Yeah. Yeah son, definitely, see you soon.
MARCUS PARKS
Well finally Wolfgang joined Ingbert in Berlin, leaving Armin and Waltraud all alone. As a result, Armin decidedly did not turn out okay. Now with Armin being the only male in Waltraud's life, she put all her emotions and energies into bullying and controlling this little boy. She was embittered, middle aged, and it felt like her second marriage, the one that produced Armin, had ruined her life. There's no coming back and this little boy's gonna pay for it. As such, Armin became essentially her lifelong man servant as punishment, to the point where she would call him Minchin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Minchin!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Minchin. It's an affectionate term, yes, but it's an affectionate term for a girl. And in Old German it also meant servant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's kinda wild those two words mean the same exact thing.
ED LARSON
I remember my mom, she'd be like Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, come here! Then I'd get there and she's like 'get me a Diet Coke'. And I'd get it. It's the same. Eddie, turn on the light!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but she didn't call you like come here, you fat little girl! Like if she kept calling you a fat little girl and going like come on, fat little girl, go get me some juice!
ED LARSON
Yeah. She definitely called me fat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's different. My mom called me fat too and it's like who the fuck do you think did that?
ED LARSON
You're feeding me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did this to me!
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, didn't your mother like guilt you for not finishing your plate, telling you that you didn't love her because you didn't eat her food?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Here's a dozen stuffed cabbage, fat boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Being like I can't tell. But then if you only eat four, she's like oh that's fine, I guess you don't like it as much as you used to.
MARCUS PARKS
ut just like good old Augusta Gein, Waltraud Meiwes wore a permanent expression of disapproval for everything. Although unlike Augusta, Waltraud had no religion whatsoever to justify her behavior. Really she was driven by nothing but pure secular hatred mostly stemming from the failure of her two marriages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a weird just immediate off the cuff not an expert opinion where it's like you could kind of see... Yeah, it's pretty funny, right?
ED LARSON
Yeah, go figure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No thinking required.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's hear an opinion from der Spinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey!
ED LARSON
Chocolate?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you dare keep calling me der Spinner throughout this entire process. I'm gonna end this talk.
ED LARSON
Don't tell us!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
ED LARSON
What are you doing? I would have thought of doing that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. It's just the German version of my Spinney character.
ED LARSON
All right, what are you talking about, der Spinner?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, so... But you see the essential difference between Ed Gein being raised in a religious household where there was a lot of kind of religiosity in what he was doing. Like he made crucifixes and he did all these kind of weird things. It was kind of like oddly, in a funny way, shame-based. He hid them, he put them away. Where Armin Meiwes is like the example of when Ed Gein is put in a Montessori school almost in a way.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like this is a secular way of fucking you up. This is a fun way. So that not only is it like, it's a special new batch of fucked up but then it leads to his style of what he did, which is like technically the "most responsible form of murder cannibalism we've ever seen" quote unquote.
MARCUS PARKS
It's so extraordinarily respectful. And he's like a humanist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a humanist literally, entirely a humanist. He's a humavore.
MARCUS PARKS
Now to fill her days, because Waltraud did not work, she tried writing a history of her own family line, giving accounts of her forefathers in the Napoleonic Wars and WWI. There was no word however on whether or not she included her family's military history between 1933- 1945, if such a history existed at all.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a short short chapter that just said (German accent) yadda, yadda, yadda. Don't you worry about that one.
MARCUS PARKS
Now to put it mildly, Armin Meiwes was not a well liked child. He was known as a mama's boy, der Komisch, the oddball. This opinion was only reinforced by the fact that Armin's mother insisted that he always dress in traditional Bavarian-style lederhosen at all times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just the idea of a little six year old pre-cannibal dressed up as lederhosen. Because he never was normal.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
Was he fat?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
ED LARSON
That's too bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We said same.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you're just thinking of Üter from The Simpsons once again.
ED LARSON
I know, I know. You gotta fill out those lederhosen.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) Don't chase me, I'm full of chocolate!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) I'm full of chocolate! But honestly skinny guys in lederhosen, what is this, Epcot?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I want to see a big fat guy. Like if you're in lederhosen, you better be pushing on them buttons.
MARCUS PARKS
Have you ever seen the pictures of Hitler in lederhosen?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god. It's very, I think lederhosen is fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You would look great in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm built for it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You really would.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a body for lederhosen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Lederhosen does-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Require a gut.
MARCUS PARKS
It does flatter the egg-shaped man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, of course it does. Oh Hitler's very stylish. I'm looking at these pictures of him in his lederhosen. Ooh, what elegant ankles.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah, suspenders would be great for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Natalie's already said that that's probably in my future.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it has to be. Your pants fall down all the time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, belts aren't gonna work after a while. Now lederhosen-
ED LARSON
It's all right. It's all right, my baby der Spinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna kill and eat someone.
MARCUS PARKS
Now lederhosen might have flown at least a little during the summers when Armin and his mother would stay at their farmhouse in the country. But until he was 16, Armin and his mother lived in the city of Essen. This is like in the middle of one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Germany. And this was during the 70s when later home in the city would have been noticeably weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, there was probably a lot of der Spinners flying around as he's on the bus in his lederhosen and the little hat with the feather sticking out of it, just going (slurping), like looking at everybody that's got fucking sweat coming down like they're being steamed.
ED LARSON
Can I lick your hand, please?
MARCUS PARKS
Now to me, the lederhosen seemed to be a tactic to keep other children away from her son. Because even when kids knocked on their door to see if Armin could come out to play, Waltraud always insisted that Armin was grounded and wasn't allowed to leave the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She fed him a superiority complex. So that's weird, that's how I view it. It's like between... Yes, it is infantilizing, making him a child, right, like constantly and isolating him specifically. But what also she's doing is feeding him a line of we do this because we're better than others.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We do this because we are... She viewed in her delusional mind. Like I think I see her as like a Bavarian countess in her own brain where she's like doing her historiographies-
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And dressing him up in traditional clothing and basically showing everyone being like we're different, we're a step aside, we're outside of your modernity which makes us special. And I actually weirdly think that is one of the driving force behind Armin is a sense of superiority in a way.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where he does believe my philosophical cannibalism makes me Homo sapiens 2.0.
MARCUS PARKS
And in some cases that really was, like not to get too far off topic here, but that was in many ways like a symptom of post-WWII Germany. Like this idea of we're going back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Going back.
MARCUS PARKS
Like 1933-1945, that didn't happen, like Germany is a (German accent) wonderful place full of a very wonderful culture. And so going back to pre-1933, that kind of erases the guilt when it comes to the German people. It's a fascinating subject.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I imagine.
MARCUS PARKS
But she may have been one of those people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I just can't believe all the people they put into ovens, he's the first one to eat people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god.
ED LARSON
I'm Jewish!
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, thank you. Good cover. Eddietunes.com.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you. Well in all aspects, Waltraud kept Armin's life strictly regimented as her personal servant, demanding that he rush home during lunch every day to spend his free time doing chores like washing windows or taking out the trash. And this was all under strict orders from his mother. But even if Armin made it past his mother to play with the other kids, it's possible that what was already going on within his inner world, it's possible that would have scared off any potential playmates because this shit was lifelong. Armin was obsessed with Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which were German by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But Armin was particularly fascinated with the story of Hansel and Gretel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. I love the idea of being fed to death by a witch.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please.
ED LARSON
I think it's currently happening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feed me to death next to a witch.
MARCUS PARKS
But instead of identifying with the kids, Armin would pretend to be the witch and he would play at fattening up Hansel in particular so he could cook and eat him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one likes this game. None of the kids like feeder/gainer games.
ED LARSON
I mean it sounds delightful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know, again we're 40+ men, we understand good things.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But how much candy could... You can't eat that much candy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not anymore.
ED LARSON
No, no, no. Bad for the teeth.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Me too.
ED LARSON
But back in the day I could have had so much.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I actually had to quit Pez because it was destroying my teeth and I love Pez more than anything as far as food goes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a huge, huge problem.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The fact that he ate so many Pez it was literally destroying his mouth.
ED LARSON
You just like eating out of Donald Duck's neck.
MARCUS PARKS
You do remember my favorite dispenser was my Donald Duck dispenser. You do remember. That's really nice that you remember that.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's impossible to point to the Hansel and Gretel story or some other experience and say this is why eating people made Armin horny. But Hansel and Gretel-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean we're all trying to ask the question.
MARCUS PARKS
We are. But Hansel and Gretel seems to be the beginning of Armin's fantasies, they're the first building blocks of an extremely abnormal psychological landscape.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we spoke with Katherine Ramsland about BTK's childhood a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
A little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She went into a little bit and she could-
MARCUS PARKS
We spoke about it on the update show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Last Update on the Left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And partly it really indicates that there is some connection. We're already seeing connections all over the place. Jeffrey Dahmer, right, Jeffrey Dahmer had that, what was it, Nowhere Land?
MARCUS PARKS
Infinity Land.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Infinity Land. So he'd go out, so when he was a little boy he would start going away and playing with like dead body parts of animals that he'd find, he'd make little shrines. And he did all this weird shit alone. And then BTK also apparently was having some fantasies as a little kid, he was doing all this kind of shit. But it's interesting to see like that this was another example of how it was baked in. It started as a little boy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He had these thoughts and it never stopped. This shit was rampant since he was five.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is fascinating. And sadly also all the documentary material I watched on this is like... Not my normal documentaries, actual documentaries.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The way everybody talks about this case is all just been like and would you believe? Everyone's so happy how horrible it is. Everybody's just like yeah and he did this other thing! So I get into that zone.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he's an actual, well not a literal ghoul. He's a half ghoul. Because ghouls technically are creatures that eat dead bodies.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, sure. He did eat a dead body.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But he started when he was alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but he finished a year later.
MARCUS PARKS
I see a ghoul as someone who digs up a grave and eats the dead body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a ghoul. Okay? I think if there was a ghoul club and they were all talking about it, they'd let him in. I think he'd need one letter of recommendation from another ghoul and that's it and he'd be in.
ED LARSON
He definitely made human goulash.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, he did.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the other part of the equation, which is sort of a chicken or the egg type of thing, is that while Armin had little independence, he would sometimes sneak away to neighboring farms during those summers in Wüstefeld. It was on those farms that Armin would eagerly watch pigs, ducks, hens, geese, and deer get slaughtered on a very regular basis. Armin would later describe these slaughters as his fondest childhood memories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, it was like his television.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's all to say that it's hard to tell whether he associated happiness with slaughter and that wired up his brain incorrectly or if the slaughter was what made him happy in the first place. Chicken or egg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I don't know, there were plenty of kids to hang out with. There was still television.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they said there were very few kids in Wüstefeld.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He could have found one. There was one. Every weird kid I ever met had one separate other weirdo play der Spinner friend.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually he did have one friend. One of the documentaries that I watched-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) They said he had a pony and we would take the pony and ride it into the forest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was also a weird game. He said that it was weird that he'd come over in his lederhosen and they had an old fashioned horse and carriage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they would get into his horse and carriage and ride it around this little town. And he'd be like (German accent) that's as far as mother allows me to go. And then he'd kick him out of the carriage like he was some horrible version of Cinderella. So but yeah, it's just strange.
ED LARSON
I wonder if the guy who was killing all these pigs in front of him started like playing it up a little bit, like putting on a show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Here it comes, that big old cleaver. And going inside them guts. And he's just like (German accent) this is the best show I have ever seen in my life!
ED LARSON
The guy who's killing these animals, he's not like get out of here, kid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Because at the time-
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) Come here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do feel like it's a little bit of like this is an art form maybe. According to if you're a normal butcher, if you're just a butcher, that's a good job.
MARCUS PARKS
Well these aren't butchers, these are just people who are killing animals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On a farm.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. And they could also see it as like oh yeah, kids need to get used to this stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's a farm. You're gonna get used to it. And he probably goes (German accent) ah, get me the hook! Ah, get me the other piercer!
MARCUS PARKS
Well really though Armin said that all he wanted was to be accepted and hugged.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really could have knocked that out quick then.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, mama could have really knocked both of those things out. So he invented an imaginary friend named Franky to help with his loneliness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See Franky was the bad guy. You didn't want to be anywhere near Franky.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Armin would tell Franky he loved him and Franky would say he loved him back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) I love you too, Armin.
ED LARSON
So far so good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And tellingly though, Franky would be the name Armin would use years later as his handle when he was trawling various cannibalism forums for a man who was willing to be killed and eaten.
ED LARSON
His name already has 'arm' in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's too on the nose.
ED LARSON
Hey!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There we go.
ED LARSON
OnTheNose would have been a great name.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Armin said he started fantasizing about eating little boys and girls between the ages of 8- 12. He would spend night after night lying awake in bed going through every motion of killing, butchering, and eating a child, emulating what he'd seen on the neighboring farms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
During one of his interviews, and I believe this, he said (German accent) you'd be surprised how difficult it is to make friends when all you imagine is what your friend's nipple tastes like. Thanks, Armin.
MARCUS PARKS
But just like Dennis Rader fantasized about torturing and killing Annette Funicello at around the same age while watching the Mickey Mouse Club, Armin Meiwes' prepubescent fantasies revolved around Flipper.
ED LARSON
Died on Henry's birthday!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know. We know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Committed dolphin suicide on my birthday.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's true.
MARCUS PARKS
Now for those of you unfamiliar with Flipper, it was a mid 60s TV show about a boy and his dolphin. But the titular animal was not Armin's focus, rather he was obsessed with the boy, child actor Luke Halpin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, if he was obsessed with Flipper the dolphin, he might have been a scientist.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or he might have been a marine biologist or he might have been a dolphin hunter.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but he would have been obsessed with fucking Flipper and his story would have been in and out of the news real fast.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The thing about him, yeah-
MARCUS PARKS
No books would be written about him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. But if you wanted to go fuck Flipper, guess what? Flipper fucks back.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you gotta be careful. Armin Meiwes thinks he's gonna roll in and easily fuck Flipper. Flipper is gonna fucking just ruin your weekend. All right?
ED LARSON
That kid does look delicious by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna cut this out but I've been saying that. Looking at the old footage, I'm like yum.
ED LARSON
Tasty. Dolphins are filled with mercury anyway, you can't eat them.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Halpin's character, Sandy Ricks, was just the kind of perfect, popular, successful boy that Armin so desperately wanted to be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh boy! That's what he wished he could be.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Armin came to believe, as many cannibals do, that if he were to only consume Sandy Ricks then he would take on all of the same characteristics and abilities of his hero while also fulfilling a sexual urge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey there Flipper, there's this man who says he wants to sexually cannibalize me. What are we gonna do?
ED LARSON
(dolphin noises)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right, I'll strangle him in his sleep.
ED LARSON
(dolphin sounds)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Excellent. I'll pretend to be into it and then I'll wait until he's most vulnerable and I'll kill him while he can't know.
ED LARSON
(dolphin sounds)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Flipper, stop flirting with me.
ED LARSON
(dolphin sounds)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stop it, Flipper. Stop it.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm gonna put an end to this right now. Putting an end to this right now. Well according to Armin, he ran this idea about consuming and internalizing Sandy Ricks, he ran this past his imaginary friend Franky. And Franky thought that the idea of killing and eating another boy to steal his power was a pretty good idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All Franky gave him was thumbs up. Just being like (German accent) sounds like you are thinking what I was thinking.
MARCUS PARKS
Flipper however was just one half of Armin's media obsessions. He also loved horror movies of course, particularly the gory ones. If I had to guess I'd imagine Armin was a fan of movies like the 1976 German slasher Mosquito der Schänder, released elsewhere as Bloodlust.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh.
ED LARSON
Show off.
MARCUS PARKS
The plot revolves around a clerk who collects puppets but also murders women and drinks their blood with a glass straw then writes 'mosquito' on the walls of the rooms where his victims are found.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It kind of sounds like a Giallo movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh no, I would imagine he probably did see some Giallo movies that came over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He might have seen Suspiria. I don't know if like Blood Feast came all the way over from America. You know Herschell Gordon Lewis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I doubt he saw Blood Feast.
MARCUS PARKS
I doubt he saw Blood Feast. But there's plenty of like that weird 60s style of gory that I fucking-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, the weird stuff. The fluorescent red blood.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That I personally love and I think is actually scarier because it feels like you're watching a dream rather than some realistic gore. I much prefer Herschell Gordon Lewis gore.
ED LARSON
You know what really scared me the most of everything you just said was the glass straw.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, right? It's creepy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
There's something about a glass... I mean obviously it could just break in your mouth but it's terrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It might be good for the environment.
ED LARSON
Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
Who knows? Now before puberty, the idea of cutting open chests, ripping out hearts, livers, and lungs, then eating them raw while they were still warm, this simply made Armin feel good inside. It's like how another kid might fantasize about it'd be awesome if I could fly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He was just like man, I'd love to flop a pancreas around. Like literally nothing would make... Think about a little boy that if you ask him for Santa, like if you went to Sinterklaas and got on his little knee and he'd go like ho ho, little Armin, what would you like for Christmas? And he'd just be like (German accent) I want a hat made out of human intestines. It's like how about a football?
ED LARSON
Ooh, pig skin.
MARCUS PARKS
But around the age of 12, Armin found that these thoughts about handling organs, eating organs, these were now extremely arousing thoughts. And as a result he would find himself, as Henry said, gazing longingly at a male classmate's bare chest while asking himself what their nipples would taste like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'll tell you what, they taste like nipples.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They're chewy.
ED LARSON
Yeah. The rest of the chest except, yeah, chewier.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just lick a guy. Honestly when it comes down to it, why do you gotta eat them? Just lick them. Be like a sommelier but for a guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But you know what it's like. I mean that's the thing though is if you were to just lick a hamburger, would you really get the flavor profile?
ED LARSON
Have you ever sucked a hamburger?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is one of the dumber conversations we've ever had.
ED LARSON
Ooh hamburgers. I wanna suck ya.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yum, I wanna suck it. Make it nice and wet.
MARCUS PARKS
Now once Armin turned 16, he and his mother moved from Essen to the 36 room farmhouse in Wüstefeld permanently, which wasn't that much of a change because neither one of them had any friends or family in Essen anyway. But while Waltraud had grand dreams of a majestic country home, she didn't have the money to properly maintain a 36 room farmhouse because she lived solely off the meager alimony paid by her two ex-husbands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That house is beautiful.
MARCUS PARKS
It is gorgeous. Or it was until it was burned down by the locals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's what happens when a fairy tale monster lives inside a very nice piece of property.
MARCUS PARKS
Even so, she still gave each room in the farmhouse a grand name like Sonnenglanz meaning sunlight, or früher Tau meaning mountain dew. Tell me-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mountain Dew?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa! Is tha why it's fucking called Code Red?
MARCUS PARKS
Excuse me, morning dew. Not mountain dew.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Dude, that would be awesome if there was a fucking X Games room. He'd never have to be a cannibal.
ED LARSON
This is my room Sierra Mist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. (German accent) Let me mutilate him in the Sunny Delight room!
MARCUS PARKS
If anywhere it would be in the Surge room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh. Shots fired.
MARCUS PARKS
Tellingly though, even though Armin was 16, Waltraud insisted that his room be called Kinderzimmer or the child's room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The child's room. He was also not unwilling.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was very much a willing mama's boy.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh he loved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loved this lifestyle.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the small village of Wüstefeld was made up of a friendly, close knit community of residents who held regular parties and barbecues where the whole town would be invited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aw.
MARCUS PARKS
A bunch of happy smiling German farmers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And what did it sound like, Rob? (polka music plays)
ED LARSON
Come to the nonhuman barbecue!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Why does he keep saying that?
MARCUS PARKS
Well these barbecues included Armin and Waltraud, even though everyone in town knew that these were the town spinners. The townsfolk felt we can't leave them out, we can't invite everyone except the fucking weirdos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Town spinners. I just feel like that's a new slur that we're gonna have to deal.
ED LARSON
Yeah, we got a leak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We're gonna use 'spinners' for a little while longer. I just think of The Spinners and I feel bad. Der Spinners.
ED LARSON
Der Spinners.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Der Spinners.
ED LARSON
Would have been an all German cover band of The Spinners.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll save that. You and I will save that for our VFW tour, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
Well inviting der Spinners proved to be a bad idea because during one... Actually I gotta do it, it's die Spinner, that would be the plural for der Spinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Inviting die Spinner proved to be a bad idea because during one barn party, Waltraud marched to the center of the barn at 10 p.m. and began shouting (German accent) that the music was too loud, she hated loud music and the party had to stop immediately on her say so because it's too late to be that loud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ, lady.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now one adult neighbor took a special interest in Armin because he thought Waltraud's treatment of the young boy was unfair. He thought that it might be stunting his growth a little. The neighbor had a chat with Waltraud over a glass of wine and he got her to agree to let Armin attend the next party on his own.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds like when the principal visited Forrest Gump's mom.
ED LARSON
Your mama should does care about your schooling, boy.
MARCUS PARKS
But even without his mother, Armin, who was always more comfortable with children just like Ed Gein-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because he's another Spinner.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Armin chose to not mingle with the other teenagers and instead spent the whole party sitting at the kids' table. In 1968 however, the village of Wüstefeld became infinitely more interesting when a new neighbor moved in next door to Armin and Waltraud. She was a self avowed witch, Satanist, and published occult author named Ulla von Bernus, who publicly claimed that she could cast death spells on anyone in the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This lady is a character and fun as fuck. What a great neighbor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like especially for this. Because again, it is Hummel figurines including the scary ones.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is every character from a German thing is there. You got the cannibal, you got the weird wistful boy cannibal. You got the domineering big-titted evil mom. You got the fucking beautiful Bavarian forest witch who probably at some point transforms into something else, like transforms into like a meerkat.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) She transforms into a fawn and scampers into the forest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I love this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) And leads you to your death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it just makes me want to go to fucking Germany.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now as to Ed Gein's highly Christian mother Augusta, Waltraud Meiwes embraced the evil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god, I just looked up a picture of her. I never saw her before. She looks like Tony Clifton. I might have to take all this back.
MARCUS PARKS
Ulla von Bernus?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Oh my god.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you like California witches. German witches...
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, German witches, that's-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I love German witches.
MARCUS PARKS
Old World witches are an entirely different breed, my friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, I will fuck Baba Yaga. All right? I have no problems with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Waltraud Meiwes soon became close friends with Ulla von Bernus. Now even though she sounds kind of goofy, Ulla von Bernus had serious occult cred. Her godfather was Rudolf Steiner, one of the biggest names in the occult game during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was a guy who rubbed elbows with Madame Helena Blavatsky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So for Eddie, just so you know, Madame Helena Blavatsky, HPB-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
HPB that we call her, that is what she's called. And she is a pain in the ass master occultist from back in the day that wrote this massive book called The Doctrine of...
MARCUS PARKS
The Secret Doctrine'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Secret Doctrine'. And what it is is an occult explanation of the history of the world. And Rudolf Steiner, we did a series on Madame Blavatsky and she is one of the most impressive con women/true occult masters of all time, like she's a big, big deal.
MARCUS PARKS
She's secretly one of the biggest influences on the 20th century in many different ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, one of those.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the shockwaves of what this woman did still reverberate to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sort of led to Nazism. And then Rudolf Steiner was a guy that was like basically he was a compatriot to her and then he broke off and did his own thing. He created the things called the Waldorf Schools. Have you heard of the Waldorf Schools? It's like a super intense version of a Montessori school.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they basically teach you about aligning your spirit and soul with your intellect. And Rudolf Steiner was all about this idea that you could apply scientific method to the psychic sciences. And then obviously had some issues because anybody who's a dramatic origin, there seems there would be some race implications at the very bottom of their works no matter what they do.
MARCUS PARKS
Alternative history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, a lot of alternative history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, pseudo historian is how Rudolf Steiner is often referred to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But technically he was one of the first guys to be like Hitler's bad during the 1910s. Where he's like this guy is bad news. And he started basically doing the anti-Nazi thing at the very, very beginning. And they fucked him up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They fucked him up real bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Ulla however, like Rudolf Steiner, serious occultist.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very, very serious. Very, very high level. One of the big names. He's one of the classy ones.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He like ran Hogwarts but instead of wizard, it was witches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's what I took from that anyway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup. Take that. That's fine. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Eddie, your occult education has not yet begun. We haven't chose, we have not-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll give you 'The Secret Doctrine'.
MARCUS PARKS
We have not yet chosen what your first occult episode is gonna be.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But we're gonna choose wisely, trust me.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Good.
MARCUS PARKS
But Ulla, she's more of like an Anton Lavey. You know Anton Lavey, right?
ED LARSON
Yes, yes. Not well, we've only hung out once or twice.
MARCUS PARKS
But Ulla is someone who liked to play the part. She liked to put on a show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
For example, when she moved in next door to Armin and Waltraud, she painted her house black and switched the standard doorbell mechanism, switched that with a skull that had the doorbell button affixed to its outstretched tongue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fucking awesome!
ED LARSON
Awesome! I hope it screamed whenever you pressed it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Ah! Ah!
MARCUS PARKS
Inside, Ulla decorated her walls with paintings of Lucifer and various other devilish imagery. And this is in addition to her altar fully dedicated to worshiping and communing with Satan himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's busy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Claiming herself to be a satanic priestess, Ulla would hold black masses to contact Satan so he could give her the power she needed to kill people with black magic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is very a German version of this.
MARCUS PARKS
These spells however were not random. Basically killing people with black magic was Ulla's job. And this service cost anywhere between 20-1000 marks depending on the client and the target. I think she had a sliding scale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, oh yeah. Obviously very responsible of her. It's a very nice thing to do as a business owner. I will say to you, remember, in magical actions, any form of hex will come back on you. So it's never ever really a good thing to do unless it's very, very specific and honestly needs to remain largely positive. The thing about Ulla is that also when you pay to have someone do something like this outside of you, it's very, how do you say? It's easy for it to go wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the process was that she would cast a spell, then soon after the target would die in a car accident, fall down a flight of stairs, or have some other fatal accident. And from what she claimed, she had a 90% success rate. 9/10.
ED LARSON
Damn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So she's a fucking assassin? She's a murderer like multiple times?
ED LARSON
A hit witch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A hit witch!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Hit Witch is another great film.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Save it.
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed she did have plenty of customers who made the trip out to Wüstefeld. But they were mostly women who wanted to sentence unfaithful husbands to untimely deaths. Now incredibly, and this is part of the reason why I'm fascinated with Germany, Ulla von Bernus became a beloved local character who could be found gambling at the nearby casino when she wasn't casting black magic spells on wayward husbands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So fun.
MARCUS PARKS
But as she put it, Satan never helped her gamble because he quote "has more important things to do".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I said. He's very busy.
MARCUS PARKS
Others in Germany however took Ulla's claims very seriously. She was briefly involved in a murder trial in the mid 1980s in which a defendant claimed that he ordered a death curse from Ulla but carried out the murder himself when it didn't work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he had to fucking... He's like goddamn it, now I gotta go kill her?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
She can't get blamed for that.
MARCUS PARKS
NO. She didn't. She was just consulted. She was just a part of the whole thing. She was like yeah, he asked me. Yeah, I did it. Yeah, it didn't work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It didn't work.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I told him, he signed the paper, he saw the thing, it does not guarantee...
MARCUS PARKS
Results?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not guaranteed, I don't know what to tell you.
ED LARSON
He was in that 10%.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
After that, Ulla earned the title of the most famous witch in Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's huge.
ED LARSON
That is!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like being the most famous asshole in California.
MARCUS PARKS
Now just a few years before that murder, both Waltraud and Armin were spending a lot of time hanging out with Ulla. For Armin though, the Satanist stuff, he didn't really give a shit about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What he cared about was that she was like the witch from Hansel and Gretel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was like the witch from Hansel and Gretel though, like that's not an exaggeration.
MARCUS PARKS
By 1985 however, around the time of the aforementioned murder trial, Ulla moved out of the black house in Wüstefeld and rented an apartment in nearby Bad Homburg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bad Homburg!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Armin was once again left alone with his mother. Left to his own devices when his mother wasn't ordering him around, Armin got a hold of a slew of Barbie dolls and began acting out his violent fantasies by dismembering them and cooking their limbs on a tiny barbecue, watching with pleasure as their faces melted into a mess of black plastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I definitely tortured the Barbies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I loved torturing the Barbies. But a lot of it was sort of like touch the butt in a weird... Like boobs in the Barbie body.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'm sorry now, I want to say I'm sorry to those dolls.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For what I did to you.
ED LARSON
You were just trying to piss off your sister though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. No, no. I think at some point I was just looking at the boobies.
ED LARSON
Yeah. There was nothing there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, I like setting toys on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah of course.
MARCUS PARKS
But I just like setting anything on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. For the boobies, I used to always like, if there was like a Zest commercial or something I'd always get up to the TV and kind of look and see if I could look down and see the boobies.
MARCUS PARKS
That's adorable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They probably thought that they had a real der Spinner on their hands.
MARCUS PARKS
Completely obsessed, Armin also made dolls out of marzipan in addition to marzipan penises, hearts, livers, and stomachs that he could pretend were the real thing.
ED LARSON
I mean this is a business.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well now it is. Now it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Erotic marzipan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, now it is. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He'd also make arrangements out of pork and ketchup, trying his best to recreate a scene of torn flesh covered in blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I mean this, all right, I'mma give this creepist fucking some credit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's trying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's trying to not be a cannibal. Actually no-
MARCUS PARKS
Well he's trying to not kill someone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well yes, he's not trying to not be a cannibal. How would you even say that? Because technically he is practicing and he got really good at it.
ED LARSON
You hosted a cannibal dinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did.
ED LARSON
This is very similar. There could have been a der Spinner there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god. I didn't even fucking think about it like that.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you could have been creating an Armin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Uh oh. That's called making content the locally sourced way. That's sustainable content.
MARCUS PARKS
But after Armin graduated high school, he ended up volunteering for the West German military where he fit in well at least in a professional capacity because he was already so used to obeying commands after years of acting as his mother's servant. Armin became an administrative clerk in charge of ordering office supplies for the 52nd Armored Infantry Battalion. He did this for 12 years, known only as a quiet, mannered, and calm, if extremely weird loner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he did like the little modicum of control of other men that he got.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He enjoyed that. That helped him a little bit. Also loved showering with the guys.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He liked looking around.
ED LARSON
Seasoning. Marinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. So he was very like-
ED LARSON
Who replaced all my shampoo with olive oil?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Take some rosemary! Have a piece of lemon. But he liked just horsing around with the boys, man.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean he didn't horse around with the boys.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He liked watching the other boys horse around.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he'd do the thing, be like (German accent) ja, it is fun. Grab assing is fun with the men. And they'd go like yeah, Armin. Meanwhile they're like yeah, come here, Gunter, oh yeah, it's so funny, Gunter, look. It's so funny you're sucking my dick, Gunter. So funny we're having sex, Gunter. Look dude, I'm fucking eating your ass, Gunter, this is the craziest prank in the world, Gunter.
ED LARSON
It's so funny because you're doing this and I'm like thinking of a legitimate question.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm really not sure how you got to the point where you're like acting out a gay porno.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that this is what he in his mind thought was happening.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh okay. What he wants to happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What he wanted to happen.
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck yeah, Gunter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, fuck yeah, Gunter. When he's watching them all fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's Cunter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Legitimate question?
ED LARSON
I thought they couldn't have an army.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they absolutely could because remember the Soviets, East Berlin, West Berlin.
ED LARSON
Ah yes, yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They absolutely needed an army. You're thinking of Japan.
ED LARSON
Ah okay, okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Armin had no hobbies and rarely hung out with the other guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You said he made Marzipan bodies that he used to fuck. Okay? So I think that he had hobbies.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually baking is a hobby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Very much a hobby.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Fuck me. Well at his request, Armin was stationed at Rotenburg so he could go home to his mother every night to take care of her until she fell asleep. This of course earned him a considerable amount of shit from his fellow soldiers. Do you want to go out to the bar? No, I have to go home and take care of mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's the way he probably does it too where he's like unfortunately tonight I can't join you for your reveries. I must be with my mother. And they're like yeah, cool, great then. Cool, just wanted to make sure.
ED LARSON
Please leave.
MARCUS PARKS
Sorry I gotta go fuck Gunter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Go fuck Gunter, this is hilarious. I'm coming on you! Gunter, this is so funny. We're having sex right now now.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though Armin by this point knew that he was gay, he still tried putting on appearances to please his mother, even though Waltraud did everything she could to make sure that Armin never made it past the first date with any woman. At Waltraud's insistence, she would chaperone dates by sitting in the back seat of the car, silently judging girls as too bossy, too plain or in one case judging a woman's atrocious annunciation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I feel like Armin would not be attracted to a woman who had atrocious pronunciation.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think he was attracted to any woman. I don't think the enunciation had anything to do with it. He was gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. Maybe if some of these women spoke more articulately, maybe they could have impressed him.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing is that Armin couldn't understand why any of this was weird even when others patiently explained to him why bringing your mother on a date was strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) How could it possibly be strange? My mother's the most exciting backseat driver that's ever been. She tells me what to do!
ED LARSON
Do you mind if we go in the back and make out? I was talking to my mom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was talking to my mom.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the furthest Armin ever got with a girl was when he was introduced to a friend of a friend named Martina who already had three children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Poor single moms. It is hard for pickings out there.
MARCUS PARKS
Real hard. Now as I said, just like Gein, Armin was better with kids than adults. So he got along well with Martina's children and that was promising for a single mother. But while the romance was essentially platonic, Armin bragged to his coworkers that they were engaged and that they had all kinds of sex. None of which was true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What? I could just see him being like (German accent) it was so nice to finally see her glands. I loved how fluorescently pink her bottom is.
ED LARSON
(German accent) We're slowly stretching the clitoris to make a penis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. (German accent) I pull and I pull and I pull and I pull. I tug and I tug and I tug and I tug. Where are the balls?
MARCUS PARKS
It all fell apart however when Martina told Armin she intended to have her tubes tied because she already had three kids and didn't want any more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And that's gotta be disappointing for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Well even though Armin knew that he was gay, he firmly believed that he would one day marry a woman and have children. So a woman who couldn't have children was useless to him. But when they broke up, he did confess to her all right, all right, you got me, I'm gay. The worst part though is that this drama, this all occurred over a period of three weeks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that was as close as he ever got to having anything that was remotely normal. And that woman, that is just a desperate lady.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's less than a month.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That lady was lucky. Because she went straight almost into marriage. She almost went straight to being... Ooh man.
MARCUS PARKS
Mrs. Meiwes.
ED LARSON
Ugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Armin was forced to leave the military after 12 years in 1991, partly because he racked up two DWIs in quick succession and partly because it was obvious that this lone weirdo was never gonna have the makings of a leader.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is the truth is that this is where we're heading into you could see the danger points. Where Dennis Nilsen, Jeffrey Dahmer, same style of avoidance of their own inner struggle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And using alcohol to mask it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just slam it down.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he was obviously riddled with cannibalistic fantasies at work. And he was in the army and he knew that if he said anything, he was not gonna be treated very well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If he said anything about any of his... Even just wanting to kiss Brad.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't have to... Oh, being gay. Not being a cannibal.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, that's what I'm saying. It's bad enough just being his normal self.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nevermind telling them his real self. Right? So he can't deal with it. So his fantasies were just supercharged and getting harder to avoid and harder to avoid. So that was why he was drinking himself to death.
ED LARSON
I don't know why I pictured him as sober.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No dude, a lot of these guys, especially Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer are perfect examples about how in order for them to face this inner paraphilia, they have to be drunk.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
See that's the thing with Nilsen and Dahmer, if they're getting hammered they would have made more mistakes and got caught earlier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did. Well they made a lot of mistakes but it was because... With Jeffrey Dahmer it was because who he chose to kill and with Dennis Nilsen it was because it all happened inside of his apartment and no one saw anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the only reason why he got caught is because he was getting rid of the bodies down his drain and a plumber found it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because his pipes got clogged.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, all filled with like slurries of meat because he would try to jam the meat down there.
ED LARSON
Good old Mario and Luigi saving the day once again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So after leaving the army, Armin took a computer technician course and got a job at a software firm in the town of Kassel, about 200 miles away from the farmhouse in Wüstefeld. Primarily he serviced ATMs which sounds like the dullest job in Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It seems fine.
MARCUS PARKS
It's servicing ATMs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds like honestly at some point you're just like it's one of those jobs you could probably rip a fucking bong and do your day.
ED LARSON
Yeah, man. I did data entry for a while.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That's the fucking worst.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I showed up when I had my data entry job, I was fucked up the whole time. It was awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But you were living in your car and drinking, what was it, scotch every night?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, to go to work.
MARCUS PARKS
But Armin actually liked his work and hoped to one day use his income to renovate the Wüstefeld farmhouse so he could turn it into a technical school where executives could stay and attend week-long computer courses. This plan of course went nowhere because Armin spent all of his money on broken down cars, lawnmowers, and cement mixers that he planned to refurbish and flip. He also started buying old tires, broken office chairs, and various other pieces of junk that he figured he could fix up and sell. And of course he just ended up with a yard full of shit. His life continued this way for another eight years. I mean think about this, this is really like... I mean it's 20 years where this guy is just sitting there staring into the middle distance and thinking about eating people and doing nothing about it.
ED LARSON
I mean he seems lazy to me.
MARCUS PARKS
Lazy?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I would say unambitious.
ED LARSON
Unambitious? Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh he was ambitious.
ED LARSON
Well I mean because he's buying all this shit to fix up but it's just sitting in his front yard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he's a hoarder.
ED LARSON
Is he incompetent or is he lazy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a hoarder mentality. I think it's something else. When it comes down to hoarding items is that what you're doing... You don't wanna look in. Hoarding is a good example of an avoidant way of living where you're exteriorizing your problems.
MARCUS PARKS
Your anxiety.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're putting them in front of you, you're doing it on purpose, you're crowding yourself in. In some ways they believe that they're insulating themselves or they're protecting themselves. And so this is more of the shoving down.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I view this as a symptom of more and more his mom's getting older, he's getting older, he's never lived his dream.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've met a 40+ stand up who just started.
ED LARSON
Oh god, the worst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know that feeling.
ED LARSON
I mean we just hung out with one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, imagine one that's fucking a cannibal. You know what I mean?
ED LARSON
I mean at least he's got a new angle.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in 1999, Waltraud Meiwes finally died at the age of 77. Armin himself was about 3, he was almost 40 years old at this time. And after that Armin was all alone in the world. His two half brothers came to the funeral and they never saw them again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And he subsequently went half Gein for a short period of time. After making a shrine to his dead mother, Armin started dressing in her clothes, then would adopt her mannerisms and personality while performing her daily chores around the house. Embarrassingly, an acquaintance once just popped by the farmhouse to say hi and check on Armin and opened the door to find him in full mother Meiwes drag.
ED LARSON
Want some borscht?!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so frightening.
ED LARSON
I'm glad I checked on you but not gonna stay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen, seems like things are under control here. All right. Do you need any pantyhose from the store? No? All right. See you in five or six years.
MARCUS PARKS
But when he wasn't dressing as his mother, Armin would lay her clothes out on her bed as if he was expecting her to come home at any minute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a very broken man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the villagers in Wüstefeld found Armin to be just as awkward and peculiar as a grown man as they'd found him as a young boy. Although they did know him as an extremely polite, well presented man who always wore a disturbingly large smile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the teeth.
ED LARSON
Yeah well he had a big mouth. He didn't have a choice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all teeth, man. It's just the little eyes that are too close to each other and just a big snaggle mouth full of human chomping.
ED LARSON
I wonder if he had extra teeth. You know some people are born with extra teeth like Freddie Mercury?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's right. He was born... Was it extra teeth or just wrongly spaced out teeth?
ED LARSON
I think it was extra.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I think it was extra. I think he had something that like made him able to... It was his teeth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Add an octave.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was his teeth that made him where he could sing like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Super cool.
ED LARSON
Look at that mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was born with four extra teeth at the back of his mouth. Wow. Good work, Rob.
MARCUS PARKS
Huh. Thanks, Rob.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well.
ED LARSON
I'm the one who remembered the fact, he's got a computer over there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good work, Rob.
MARCUS PARKS
But to try and cure his loneliness and still unwilling to accept his own sexuality, Armin joined what's known in Germany as a marriage institute during that same year as his mother's death. This is a last ditch effort to find a wife.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now he did meet one woman who liked him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Again, it's hard to be single.
MARCUS PARKS
It is very hard to be single. But she refused to move into the farmhouse and Armin refused to move out. So that affair ended as quickly as it began which also ended Armin's efforts to find a wife to replace his mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's really what he wanted.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think he wanted, it's not about the companionship.
MARCUS PARKS
He wanted new mommy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But now fully unfettered and faced with a lot more free time-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because he didn't have to take care of mama anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm free!
MARCUS PARKS
Armin retreated fully into his cannibalism fantasies by reading every true account he could find. He read 'Alive'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love that.
MARCUS PARKS
Alive!
ED LARSON
Alive!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I love that the inspirational story of the men who survived that crash in the Andes-
ED LARSON
He took the worst part of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally the thing that they fought to not reveal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The thing that they did not want the world to know. That was the thing that he was just like (German accent) what an opportunity.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he's sitting there jerking it as hard as he can reading those passages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because he saw pictures of them, just young soccer playing men. And then all he could think about is no, oh no!
MARCUS PARKS
Read books about Jeffrey Dahmer, Fritz Haarmann-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Albert Fish, and of course read everything available on the Donner party.
ED LARSON
I thought Albert Fish was a pescatarian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just pass, just keep going, just keep going. Don't acknowledge him. Don't acknowledge this.
MARCUS PARKS
It's also around this time that Armin seems to have started developing a sort of philosophy as it applied to his own cannibalistic urges. It's something that might even be considered a moral code.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is why I view him as like he viewed himself as a step above.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. For Armin, eating a woman was wrong because women were needed if the human species were to continue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
MARCUS PARKS
Men however were viewed as no different than pigs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tell me about it.
MARCUS PARKS
And it also didn't hurt that men were what he was attracted to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. He wanted the man part of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he truly did, like the very, very bottom of him literally is a need for acceptance and for somebody to come and be there and not run away. Like everybody else who's ever interacted with him has. And so in his mind he starts building this real concept, which we've heard from Jeffrey Dahmer, he's not unique in this.
MARCUS PARKS
And Dennis Nilsen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Dennis Nilsen. About when I wanna eat somebody, the reason why I eat them is that then they can be with me forever and they can never leave.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I'd rather eat a woman but I understand where he's coming from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Same.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd have to think about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You actually would choose a man over a woman.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd have to think about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd definitely eat a woman before a man. Is that weird?
ED LARSON
Yeah. Oh for sure I would eat a woman before a man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's strange.
ED LARSON
But once you put your conscience in there, you gotta eat the dude.
MARCUS PARKS
See that's the thing is I'm kind of like him with like yeah, dudes are more like pigs.
ED LARSON
Yeah, cause it doesn't matter.
MARCUS PARKS
Like sitting in the room with two right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically that's called toxic masculinity that we have been fed that men are disposable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's true.
ED LARSON
Is that toxic masculinity?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Because what it does then is cause us to act in bad ways and in the end that hurts us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we believe that at the very end we live to provide and nothing else. And then if we don't go to war, we should just die early and get out of the way.
ED LARSON
Or go to Woodstock '99 and cause a fucking bunch of trouble.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, definitely.
MARCUS PARKS
But the most important part of Armin's philosophy was that he decided he would never eat and kill another human being unless that person absolutely wanted to be killed and eaten. Because he did believe that a straight up murder committed to satisfy his own urges was wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see what's funny is that I think that he never thought it was wrong but it was his explanation. I think that he decided at some point that if I create this rule, it feeds his sexuality. He wants to be willing because that's what makes him horny. The people begging to be eaten is what he wants the most because then it's they want him, they need him to eat them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
See I look at it as like I'm not gonna go to prison loophole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He played it later as that. But we'll get to this.
MARCUS PARKS
Could be. But that's the thing, I do think that he did have some sort of moral code where he was like murder is wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the moral code made him horny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I'm saying is that the moral code made him horny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I guess it does always come back. But isn't that another sort of toxic masculinity, thinking that everything just comes back to sexuality over and over again?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
That we're driven by nothing but our sexual urges and that we're no more complicated than our own cocks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
ED LARSON
I gotta go jerk off, I'll be back.
MARCUS PARKS
But at the time, Armin was at a loss as to how to find such a volunteer. So he made substitutions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard to bring up.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. First he started cutting pictures out of magazines of just body parts. Then he started taking photos of his own body so he could imagine butchering it to make chops and cutlets. He then bought a video camera and filmed himself holding a knife to his own throat, using ketchup and paprika as fake blood in his mock slaughter. Didn't know the red food coloring and corn syrup trick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely.
ED LARSON
A little dab of green in there to make it darker.
MARCUS PARKS
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's so nice to do it that way or you put a little bit of dish soap in ao it's easy to clean up once you're done.
ED LARSON
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm talking to two fake blood specialists here that ruined many-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Many things.
MARCUS PARKS
Many a bar in Brooklyn in New York City.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just banned from many venues.
MARCUS PARKS
He also, this is very funny, he took photos of his own penis sandwiched between two slices of bread and put a little garnish next to it, put a little parsley and again used ketchup to serve as blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the thing, man-
ED LARSON
Excuse me, I gotta go jerk off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loves sandwiches. It is the problem, right, is that the story, the more details you go into it is that like that would be an improv joke I'd make.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, he's doing it.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what's funny? When I picture him doing it, I imagine lettuce in the sandwich.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me too.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
But only lettuce.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Like no tomato.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I definitely see the big cartoonish slices of white bread.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With the top of his withered gray German penis hanging out at the top of it with that little tuft, like that nice glistening, like it's a Carl's Jr shoot. Where yeah, the tomato's wet.
ED LARSON
I just can't believe he'd use like normal bread instead of like a bratwurst bun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am now furious. I cannot believe he didn't put it in a bun.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sure he put it in a bun at some point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is silly. And as soon as he put it in a bun he's like (German accent) I am not some kind of frankfurter salesman. I am a man.
ED LARSON
I want a glandwich.
MARCUS PARKS
Armin also revisited his teenage hobby of making dolls and genitals out of marzipan, all while masturbating to photos of gruesome crime scenes. All this was just-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What'd you do this weekend, Armin? It's just like all the boss being like how was your weekend?
ED LARSON
But you'd never guess.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) Are you a fan of marzipan by any chance?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, I love marzipan.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) How's about crime scene photos?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I like those too.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) I have a farmhouse that perhaps you would enjoy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're fucking crazy. We had the funniest weekend, me and Gunter, fucking crazy ass sex with each other. It was so hilarious when I told him I loved him and he made me come. I was fucking dying, dude. Just fucking laughing my ass off thinking about how we're going to get married in nine months, dude. It's fucking crazy dude, so hilarious.
MARCUS PARKS
But all this was just peanuts compared to the world that was revealed to Armin when he finally got internet access in his own home in the late 90s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If the internet ruined somebody else just as bad as Anders Breivik, it's this man. The internet was bad in Europe, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the same internet we have!
ED LARSON
It's the same internet!
MARCUS PARKS
It's the same one we have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a bad one. Fucking different, dog. Something went wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
And by the way there's no comparison between Anders Breivik and Armin Meiwes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they both had AOL accounts.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually no, Armin had a Hotmail account.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And AOL is America Online.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know, dog. Al Gore.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I brought him up before, man. This is all his fucking fault, dude. I want him in front of me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it's not like he got radicalized, like cannibal radicalized by the internet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, you don't mean to tell me... Technically this would be sort of like cannibal radicalization because he thought he was alone in this.
MARCUS PARKS
True.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's one thing that's an interesting thing here is up to this point, besides he's reading about these famous cases-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he's still like-
ED LARSON
It's like six people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And he's like there's nobody else like me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then it's not until now when he... Like in Epcot where it turns out now all this stuff's gonna happen.
MARCUS PARKS
With near unlimited access to the most gruesome images and videos available, albeit with what was probably a dial up connection, Armin downloaded hundreds of pictures and videos of torture porn and fake cannibal fetish content. These would be stored in hard drive folders labeled 'grausam' meaning terror, or 'Fleisch' meaning meat. Not willing to let go of analog just yet though, Armin also kept a tape in his VCR at all times so he could record any autopsy show that happened to be on TV. In fact HBO had an autopsy show.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You can still see on Max now that's fucking incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's one of the best true crime series that are on HBO Max. I love that series.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is. It's so good.
ED LARSON
I used to do this but with like Skinemax.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it was normal behavior.
ED LARSON
We were the same, we had the same skill but for different reasons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Hey but guess what? Same result.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Well more often though he was able to catch bloody accident footage that was shown on the news, which used to be a lot more common than it is now. Man, I saw some shit on the news when I was a kid.
ED LARSON
I remember when I saw that chick get murdered on the news, like the news reporter in the cemetery and the guy walks up and he just shot her a bunch. Do you remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I remember that.
ED LARSON
I saw that live. That was wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you remember the footage? Do you remember the guy that shot everybody on the train? He was a white man who shot people, that he was afraid of guys that robbing him on the train.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh, Bernie Goetz?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember them showing that, like the pictures of that. As a kid I remember seeing the dead bodies. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because you grew up in New York. So yeah, you would have, that would... Wow.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Bernie Goetz, that was a big one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I remember that.
MARCUS PARKS
But in searching for images of faux cannibalism on the internet, Armin soon found like minds when it came to cannibalism, even finding essays that promoted it as humane. In one essay cannibalism was promoted as a way to fix overpopulation and paired its arguments with tips on the best slaughter methods for humans. Armin also found fantasy recipes on the internet like 'Paniermehl Jungenleber' or boy's liver in breadcrumbs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also Penis mit Rotwein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh what does that mean?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Penis in red wine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh. I dip my penis of red wine every Friday at Vintage Wine + Eats.
MARCUS PARKS
But from what I'd imagine, most of these recipes were probably just pork dishes with the word 'human' replacing the word 'pork'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes because long pig was the term for a human.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's the term from human meat. Long pig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Long pig.
ED LARSON
And we're closest, meat-wise we're closest to pig, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
According to Armin Meiwes, (German accent) they are like pork but harsh.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But most importantly, Armin found multiple cannibalism chat rooms where he adopted the name of his childhood imaginary friend, Franky. Also my dog's name, by the way.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Always weirds me out now when I see the Franky in relation to fucking cannibalism. But Franky was his online handle. Perhaps inspired by the discovery that there were so many others like him, Armin wrote a short story called Der Strichjunge. That's a hard word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is.
MARCUS PARKS
Strichjunge!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That means rent boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It was all about a male sex worker being willingly slaughtered for consumption. And it was not written well. Here's a bit of the dialogue. So Henry, do you want to play the sex worker or the protagonist?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will play the protagonist because I will play Armin Meiwes.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay. (German accent) "I only have you and I only want you, let me become a part of you."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "Well that isn't right. I'll eat you up then."
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) "Then slaughter me. Apart from you, nobody else is interested in me anyhow."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "But I love you!"
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) "And that's precisely why you have to do it or otherwise I'll kill myself. I can feel an incredible feeling inside of me, it's as if our souls are connected."
ED LARSON
(German accent) Ja! Ja!
MARCUS PARKS
Now lest ye think that online cannibals were a small community, it's estimated that Armin visited and participated in over 400 cannibalism websites and forums with names like TortureNet, Goremet-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And GuyCanni-Balls.
ED LARSON
That's a good one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a funny one. That's the humor one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. That's the funny one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
What seemed to be his favorite however was Cannibal Cafe. Now we were able to access Cannibal Cafe from the internet Wayback Machine and found that it was a forum hosted on a site called necrobabes.com.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See I know people that did Gorno.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know Gorno. It's fake.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's all fake shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Snuff film porno.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. From what I can tell aside from the primitive 3D art snuff porn section, none of it was real of course, Cannibal Cafe was the same two dozen or so guys posting about cannibal fantasies and made up recipes. Like the guy who asked if anyone had a recipe for Italian girl meat lasagna because he quote "loves ethnic dishes". Among the last users who posted before the site shut down were HungryJack, BettyPig, MistressGoo, and IAmBeaverFart666.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love that guy.
MARCUS PARKS
My personal favorites are either Burgerman39 or DoctorDoctorGimmeTheNews.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
DoctorDoctorGimmeTheNews!
ED LARSON
DoctorDOctorGimmeTheNews!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) I got a bad case of eating you!
ED LARSON
I was trying to think of some better names for Franky. Here's what I came up with. I got six, maybe you guys can help me pick the best one.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
ED LARSON
TongueEatCheek.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh cute, cute, cute. Funny.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, cute. NealMarsala.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, that's funny. That's funny, yeah.
ED LARSON
I got CannibalRuns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nope. Close it off.
ED LARSON
DickenCacciatore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you. Okay. Here we go, so far so good.
ED LARSON
BillyCheesesteak?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
DickenCacciatore is still the best one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
And Bradwurst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely DickenCacciatore.
MARCUS PARKS
DickenCacciatore. And by and by number one, absolutely.
ED LARSON
All right, all right. Dickencacciatore.com.
MARCUS PARKS
But what's interesting about this forum is that despite the content, this forum worked just like any other community on the internet works to this day. Amongst the violent fantasies were posts about fucking whatever. Like this one. This is the title of one of the last posts on Cannibal Cafe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I had to watch that movie Highlander again. What sheer exhilarating and complete adrenaline rush to go into a battle on a one on one basis against all unbeatable odds. What an ultimate high."
MARCUS PARKS
And none of this is code nor does it lead to a discussion about cannibalism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just a post about how awesome Highlander is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is!
MARCUS PARKS
And it's really short too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Just the whole thing. "I swear the more and more I watch that movie, the more I love it better all the time. What a rush to be in an intensive battle scene, to be immortal, to fight for the end prize, to fight to the very end so that there will be only one. What an intense movie that is."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then imagine some guy just being like yeah. Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wanna eat my balls?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The follow up is "That was a great movie. I saw it in Vienna years ago. As regards Terry, sorry to tell you, old cock, but I ate her last night with fava beans and a fine chianti." It did turn into cannibalism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's funny. But that's a Hannibal Lecter reference.
MARCUS PARKS
Hannibal Lecter, yeah. And then it's your lame ass pun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a reference.
MARCUS PARKS
"You're an idiot and I'm gonna kick your ass." Oh yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Back to normal?
MARCUS PARKS
Just like any other internet forum on the fucking, since the beginning of the fucking internet.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
After the nerds turned it over to the rest of us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it went.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Al Gore, you did this! And I'm gonna terrorize your family.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the end, Cannibal Cafe was for 99.9% of its clientele all about fantasy. For example, the site had a so-called livestock application one could fill out that had, amongst other questions, the option to choose previous sexual training like oral sex, anal sex, or toilet sex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What is toilet sex?
MARCUS PARKS
Sex in a toilet.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh. That's like a chair though, that's just a chair.
MARCUS PARKS
No but they made it sound like it was a skill.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like it was a thing that you needed it like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't look it up, Rob. I just see him go into Google. As soon as you type in toilet sex, everything is gonna stop.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one is gonna be happy.
ED LARSON
It's better than fucking on a chair because you can just flush the cum as soon as you're done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like it would be much easier for me to convince my wife to have sex with me on a chair.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Well not when you don't have a chair and you just have a toilet and a bathroom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Then nothing's going right for you. And you should really think about like maybe I should invest in me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that means you live at the dog park and you're fucking... And your only inside space is the goddamn Port-a-Potty.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this application also had livestock termination preferences like live roasting, impalement, or vivisection. There was also one separate page called #SnuffSex that for some reason automatically downloaded a midi version of Stairway to Heaven to my computer that I did not open.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. Delete that.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in looking further into Cannibal Café, we found that the forum was run by an extraordinarily creepy-looking man with a huge walrus mustache who went by the name Perro Loco. Crazy Dog in Spanish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Perro Loco started this forum in 1994 and called himself the one true prophet of the holy church of Dolcett. Dolcett, I discovered, is an internet slang term for the fetish that involves killing, cooking, and eating other people. The closest to an origin I could find is that Dolcett is an archaic word meaning sweet or pleasant which evolved into the word 'dulcet' which means pleasing to the ear. In other words I have no fucking clue why he chose this word to mean cannibalism makes me horny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought it meant to be honest because I just already know-
MARCUS PARKS
Also he's the only one who uses that fucking word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I went to go look for it and I couldn't find it. There's a little part of me that wonders if it's based off a piece of media or if it's a name of something.
MARCUS PARKS
Could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like I feel like it might be that. But sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com.
MARCUS PARKS
Please let us know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you know the difference, please tell me. Because I did try to look into it and I'm just never gonna, I'd never be able to get a real job or anything. Everything I've looked up just this week.
MARCUS PARKS
I went further into it than I really wanted to and still found nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. I got a lot of stuff I shouldn't have seen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I really saw a lot of shit that I really didn't want to see this week.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. Hey. But hey.
MARCUS PARKS
Hey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey.
ED LARSON
It's all part of the job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep, yep. Sometimes the job chooses you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as far as what Perro Loco did outside of running the Cannibal Cafe forum, he was an EMT prior to his involvement with the site. Doesn't really surprise me because EMTs, a lot of our listeners are EMTs.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Jet black sense of humor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And Cannibal Cafe, I mean the guy's not funny-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But a lot of jokes are made.
ED LARSON
And like we said about in the necrophilia episode, they have access to fresh bodies.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's also funny because in 2016 Perro Loco was interviewed for this thing called Encounters with Evil. And it's just so funny because then you realize he's just a guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so this whole thing, it's all technically still all fantasy and then cuts to Perro Loco. And this is literally what he sounds like. (Midwest accent) No, Meiwes's posts, they never stood out. Yeah. He never wrote anything particularly alarming because this is what everybody writes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Midwest accent) It's just so common. I get emails from people asking to be snuffed, murdered, or cannibalized. And there's thousands, thousands of people out there. I have a mailing list close to 10,000 people that like this.
MARCUS PARKS
Again your Midwest turned into Irish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's what it does.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
(Irish accent) I have a mailing list close to 10,000 people!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey!
MARCUS PARKS
But when Cannibal Cafe was most active, he was not an EMT, he was an employee at a fly fishing store.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's the incredible thing about guys like Armin and guys like Perro Loco, it really is just the dude that you have a 10 second interaction with. You have no idea what's going on in that guy's head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You never know what anybody does.
MARCUS PARKS
No. You really don't. Now interestingly Perro Loco was peripherally involved in a murder that happened years before Armin Meiwes made headlines and it is very close to being the same story. The only thing missing is the cannibalism hook which is why you've probably never heard about the murder of Sharon Lopatka. In 1996, 5 years prior to Armin, a 35 year old advertising copywriter named Sharon Lopatka used one of Perro Loco's forums to find someone who would torture, strangle, and kill her. Now by day Sharon charged money to rewrite ad copy at the rate of $50 per ad and helped manage several websites that distributed psychic readings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
But by night Sharon sold her dirty panties to strangers, marketed pornography that often featured unconscious women, and spent a lot of time on necrophilia and S&M discussion forums.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll let you know something, buddy. Panties don't just get sold at night. Panties get sold all day long and that's a woman's life. All right? Don't you dare shut that down for them. All right?
MARCUS PARKS
Well eventually Sharon Lopatka began advertising her desire to be tortured and killed by a stranger. And her posts were picked up by another computer technician.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a lot of IT guys in the story.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh man, a lot of IT guys. This guy was named Robert Glass and his handles were either Toyman or Slowhand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Slowhand, isn't that Eric Clapton's nickname?
ED LARSON
Yeah, Slowhand, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Oh big surprise, an Eric Clapton fan's an asshole. Well after 900 pages of emails-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
900 pages of emails!
MARCUS PARKS
Going back and forth talking about Glass torturing and murdering Sharon, she finally met Glass at his mobile home in North Carolina. There the fantasies became reality and the torture began. But according to Glass, he never intended to kill Sharon Lopatka. Until the day he died, he insisted that her death was a sex game gone wrong. But either way, once Sharon was dead, Glass buried her 3 ft underground in his backyard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The only way I want a sex game to go wrong is we lose the dice inside me. I cannot imagine me playing any form of sexy game that would involve my death.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I mean if a sex game goes wrong you're still in trouble.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Like it's still a bad thing. That's not a good defense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's just the truth. That's what he was just trying to say was that I think it's him trying to say like it was all fantasy, everything got out of control, I'm not a murderer, I just love the idea of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's basically that's where you go from like do not charge me with first degree murder, charge me with manslaughter. Which is what he was charged with and convicted of. After Sharon's sudden disappearance, her email was thoroughly searched and her communications with Glass were found. Interestingly this was the first ever murder case where police arrested a suspect based solely on email communication.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How have we never heard about this? This really is like... Because Armin ran after these people walked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this is a literal testing of what they did. I'm actually surprised the website wasn't shut down immediately.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I'm surprised that this story isn't well known at all. I had never heard of this story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But everyone's heard about the fucking cannibal of Rotenburg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But it's cannibal, that's the reason why.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah it's because it's got a hook.
MARCUS PARKS
But soon after Glass went down, Sharon's body was found in his backyard, pled guilty to manslaughter and died in prison from a heart attack a few years later. During the lead up to the trial though, Perro Loco, the guy who ran the Cannibal Cafe forum, he was investigated as
a material witness because he knew both Sharon Lopatka and Robert Glass. He described them both as quote "very nice people".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very nice people.
ED LARSON
They always are.
MARCUS PARKS
But was unable to add anything else to the prosecution's case. Now Cannibal Cafe was but one of many sites visited by Armin Meiwes and he even had his own cannibal chatroom on Yahoo, which were, if I may say, the best chat rooms to ever exist on the internet. I loved Yahoo chat rooms.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah, we partied on there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they were great. But in this room Armin posed as a woman looking to be slaughtered. This was his bait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "I am a tall, stocky long pig looking for a big bodied male chef who would like to have a feast of me."
MARCUS PARKS
Now naturally Armin got a lot of hits from potential candidates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling) Yeah.
ED LARSON
I bet he was dressed like his mother when he wrote it.
MARCUS PARKS
You gotta get in character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't be lady without my little shoes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He got hits from guys with names like HellEater, SteveO, Snuffy, Turkey. I like turkey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Turkey's a funny guy.
ED LARSON
Oh Steve-O was on there!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But posing as a woman wasn't Armin's real game. After reading so many posts about cannibalistic fantasy that included posts by a lot of people who had fantasies of being killed and eaten, Armin figured there had to be one special man out there who was willing to actually go through with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So Armin managed to snag the email anthrophagus@hotmail.com to proposition potential candidates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is really what it's all about, guys. All right? Patience, openness, being willing to extend yourself. If you want to find love, gotta be honest with yourself first and say man, I just want to chew your dick off. I wanna cut your face off, I wanna fucking smash your bones, I wanna eat your organs. And you just gotta find the right person that's like that's the nicest thing that anybody has ever said to me.
MARCUS PARKS
I've been waiting my whole life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe it's happening.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Armin wrote on Cannibal Cafe that he was a German named Franky searching for a young boy between 18-30 years old, elaborating in broken English by saying quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "Have you a normal build body and will you die? Then come to me, I butchering you and eat your horny flesh."
MARCUS PARKS
Now Armin took the application process seriously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because if he was gonna do this, he was gonna do it right. He interviewed as many as 30 applicants, some of them in person, driving to various locations in Germany and the Netherlands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He worked for this.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is all just building up the horny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
God, he interviewed 30 people to be slaughtered and fucked?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. More than I more than I interviewed to be producer of this podcast. Yes, it's wild. He was more careful about his cannibalism victim. He needed to be.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that once he talked to them, like met them, talked to them, he found that none of them had any intention of actually going through with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, pussies.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
What dicks.
MARCUS PARKS
So Armin politely say auf wiedersehen and move on to the next man. Other applicants were rejected even without an interview because they were either too old or too heavy for his tastes, so to speak.
ED LARSON
So he wouldn't have eaten me?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he said the most delicious person would be... He was really looking, he said obviously the most delicious thing would be a child, like a child or a little boy. But he's just like that was his problem was that they can't consent.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
An adult can consent.
MARCUS PARKS
That's why he said 18-30.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he wanted it to be as young as possible because he was pretty certain that younger meat would taste better than older meat.
MARCUS PARKS
Wouldn't be tough and stringy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But in February of 2001-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just having to take it at face value.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love him. Just going like good, wow. Good, thanks.
MARCUS PARKS
But in February of 2001, Armin saw a posting on one of his cannibal sites from a user named Cator99, saying (German accent) "I offer myself up and I will let to dine on my live body. Not butchery, dining."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now the thing about Cator99, loved exclamation points.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So technically it's (German accent) "Not butchery, dining!!!"
ED LARSON
Yeah. And he's a caterer so he loves a party.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does.
MARCUS PARKS
Cator99 was a man named Bernd-Jürgen Brandes. I can't say that like that. It's got to be 'Burned Yurgen Brawndis'. I'm sorry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Burned Yurgen Brandis' is how we're doing this. Talk about, again we're not going to malign the dead. But he was a little weird too, huh?
MARCUS PARKS
He was a bit strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Of course!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I'm just saying it seemed like he was a little weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We're gonna get into his story completely on the next episode. But he claimed to be 36 years old, 5'9", and 160 lbs which was nearly ideal for Armin. Under the username Franky, Armin began exchanging naked photos and torture fantasies with Bernd. Here is an example of their back and forth after Armin sent a photo of his teeth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "I will sink them into your body and bite off your tongue."
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) "That won't be hell but heaven on earth."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "This will be the biggest kick for me. I get a kick out of the idea of having another person inside me."
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) "Great, terrific."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love this.
MARCUS PARKS
Terrific, great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, great. All right, buddy.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you're exactly what I'm looking for. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Terrific. Yeah, see you soon. Talk soon.
ED LARSON
You're hired.
MARCUS PARKS
And so after about a month of what could be described as a whirlwind romance had one of these men not been very specifically suicidal, Bernd agreed to travel to Armin's farmhouse on March 9th, 2001. Just before he left, Bernd told Armin, "I'm your meat".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is also really funny because like the topic of his emails, I went to the Wayback Machine and got their correspondence back and forth. And each one of the titles are all like "Please eat me!" Eat me!
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) Eat me! It's Thanksgiving Day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Eat me!
MARCUS PARKS
Now I'm a little unclear on whether Armin began preparing for Bernd's slaughter after Bernd agreed to meet or if Armin had the full setup already in place. But either way by the time Bernd arrived, Armin was ready for the slaughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had talked about it and preplanned. He was preparing slowly but surely as they were talking and he was showing him his updated room as they went.
MARCUS PARKS
Nice. I mean not nice but yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean if you're doing this... All right, let's just say-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you're already in this situation, if you're already here, it is nice.
MARCUS PARKS
It's nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because look at Mark Twitchell. He surprised those guys. They had no idea. Like he's coming there, that guy knows he's gonna get eaten.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And he's excited about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loves it.
MARCUS PARKS
They're working on a project together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're loving it.
ED LARSON
I spent a lot of time like fixing up the guest room today because I got guests coming over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's nice.
ED LARSON
It's got a lot to do with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You gotta make sure it's nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
And make sure they're comfortable.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course. Well according to what Armin had read on his cannibal sites, 100-200 lbs of so- called long pig could be easily butchered by one person if he had the right setup. First he would need considerable space. So Armin chose a large room on the second floor of his home that had formerly been a smokehouse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he had nothing but rooms.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, he had 36 rooms.
ED LARSON
He had a smokehouse in his house?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that was very common for this time period because it's a farm. And so a lot of times if you're gonna keep meat for a very long specific time, you would smoke it to preserve it. Also it's Germany, which is like the sausage capital of the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So it's very convenient.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Extremely convenient.
MARCUS PARKS
Armin decorated the room with meat hooks for atmosphere, constructed a meat trough to drain the blood, and put a large bed frame and mattress in the center to serve as a sort of altar where Bernd would be killed. Just in case, he also set up ropes and belts to restrain Bernd if necessary but as we'll find out they will not be necessary at all. The butcher's bench would be an old metal patio table while his tools would be sharp knives and his grandmother's old ax. To give it an S&M edge because there was definitely gonna be plenty of that before the slaughter-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You bet, man. You wanna be soft.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Armin bought a cat o' nine tails but made his own whip from an old umbrella and a TV cable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was for him.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was for him.
MARCUS PARKS
A wooden cage was also constructed and placed in the corner of the room to complete the livestock fantasy. And mattresses lined the walls to soundproof the room. Once Armin was done, he took photos of his slaughter room and posted them to his cannibal sites for everyone's enjoyment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this was all done to the soundtrack of what, Rob? (polka music plays) (singing) (German accent) Here's a tarp and here's a hook! Here's a trough and here's a book! We will be together, me and my friend. All right, that's enough.
ED LARSON
(German accent) Now I know my name is Bernd but please eat me raw.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Raw!
MARCUS PARKS
We will find out that his penis will become in fact burnt.
ED LARSON
Nah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Goddamnit.
MARCUS PARKS
Now based on his cannibalism research, Armin decided that Bernd would taste best if he fasted for 48 hours before arriving in Rotenburg. This, Armin decided, would flush Bernd's system, purging stored toxins and bodily waste that would make bleeding and cleaning Bernd easier. In other words, he didn't want Bernd to shit himself after he died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sad.
ED LARSON
That makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like a colonoscopy. You want to be cleaned out.
ED LARSON
Yeah. They let him have water though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
The only worry Armin had was that Bernd might be too old because Armin believed that the best meat would be produced by men no older than 30, lest the flesh be too tough and stringy like so much old cow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Armin had actually taken lessons from the local slaughterhouse to learn the best ways to butcher Bernd that would result in the most meat. And he that the Halal slaughter method would work best. This method involved Bernd being stabbed in the throat, then his body would be hauled up by its feet with loops of rope slung over the wooden beam of a cross Armin had set up. This was the so-called Gein configuration that took inspiration from how Ed Gein had butchered his last victim, Bernice Worden. And so on March 9th, 2001, Bernd Brandes arrived by train in the town of Kassel where Armin was waiting. They immediately recognized each other from the countless photos they'd shared and when they finally met, Bernd said, (German accent) "I am your cattle. I am your flesh. I hope you'll find me tasty."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Me too! Honestly.
ED LARSON
They just furiously making out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh fuck, yeah! Man, it was fucking crazy when it was me and my bro, right, we were watching the baseball game and shit, right. Having some french fries, having a fucking blast, right? We went back to his house, man. Next thing you know, dude, we're totally fucking in the bathroom together washing each other's legs. Fucking funny ass shit, dude. I love him!
MARCUS PARKS
And it's there that we'll pick back up next week-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
With Bernd and Armin's fateful meeting and how that ended.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now I mean, this was supposed to be one but it's so thick. Next week we're gonna wrap it up. We have a huge other true crime series coming after this one. But next week's gonna get fucking gnarly.
MARCUS PARKS
It's gonna get really gnarly because remember all of this shit was videotaped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very much so.
ED LARSON
Oh really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll send it to you.
ED LARSON
You watched it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I saw stills.
ED LARSON
Stills. Okay, yeah. Stills I can do. I could do some stills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's pretty gross.
ED LARSON
Now you don't want to send it to me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's pretty fucking gross.
ED LARSON
Ah, get me ready. That's all right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, send them over to me.
ED LARSON
As a former chef-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta be able to handle it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he is a fascinating character.
MARCUS PARKS
He is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's probably getting out of jail soon.
MARCUS PARKS
Probably.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we'll find out.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Good for him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll find out.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into it next episode. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because his trial was also hilarious.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No, that's the thing is that it's the lead up to it, it's what happened that weekend itself, what happened in the immediate aftermath of that weekend, inbetween the time that he killed and ate Bernd and the time that he was arrested, that's incredible as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, there's a bunch of shit in there that's ridiculous.
MARCUS PARKS
That's so fucking weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And then it's the trial itself which is just so strange. Like we're gonna be getting into the German legal system.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is weird and scary.
MARCUS PARKS
Which is very strange. I mean any legal system is gonna be strange compared to the one that you know.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, there's a lot of ins and outs of this story and it's fascinating. I was so taken aback by how incredible this story was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How much we love this.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We love this. So go to patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft to see us flap our gums at you.
MARCUS PARKS
If you want to see Henry's dance during the German volks music-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Ja.
MARCUS PARKS
You can go and see that there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the only place in the world you can see it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
DoctorDoctorGimmeTheNews!
MARCUS PARKS
And Instagram, don't forget about Instagram.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Go to Instagram. Go to twitch.tv/LPNTV for all of your Twitch LPN needs. It's all going over to our YouTube channel, go check out that. There's so much, we got a lot of good new content coming out. Gud Pud's coming back. Go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to buy tickets to see us live. We are going to be on stage in Seattle tomorrow, I can't fucking wait. We love doing it. If you're around, we only got a couple of tickets left. If you want to grab some, come show up.
ED LARSON
That'd be great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm super excited for the show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Seattle loves us apparently. I was talking to my cousins from there and she's like everyone's talking about the show. So I'm very excited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very excited.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Thank you so much. We've always had such a great time in Seattle. Seattle was actually, the first time we played Seattle, that was the first time a fight broke out at one of our shows.
ED LARSON
Hey!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that was like one of the first times we legitimately bombed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh wow. That's amazing< I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we've been making it up ever since.
MARCUS PARKS
We really have, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So thank you, guys.
ED LARSON
If you want to fight, hit us up, do it on stage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do it on stage. But buy a ticket. You wanna fight us, you have to buy a VIP ticket to the Q&A. And that's where the fight will happen. A lot of fun. I just can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I can't wait. And we also got shows coming up in Washington DC. Thanks to everybody in Chicago, we sold out Chicago.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Thanks so much. And these tickets are going fast everywhere that we're playing in Brooklyn and here in Los Angeles. And we're coming to London, we're coming to Reykjavik, Iceland.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And we're of course going to be coming to Australia in August. So make sure to get your tickets for that now before they sell out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I want to explicitly thank Joel, our researcher. We needed a fast turnaround on this fucking show and he jumped right in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shaw, one of ours, also been great work. I just want to say thank you to everybody who works here. Thank you guys. But honestly we turned the ship around for this episode very, very quickly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I wanna thank one of our other researchers, Patrick Fischer, who actually has German parents and was the one who gave me the word der Spinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh great.
MARCUS PARKS
Because I asked him what is the name, what is the word-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The word weirdo.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, what is the word for oddball in German? And he's like yeah, der Spinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Watch our fucking-
MARCUS PARKS
Der Komisch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Watch if this gets played in Germany and it has to get bleeped out each time. They're gonna be like (German accent) oh my god, they say the S word. We'll find out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We'll see. But thank you, Patrick. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And he also does a great job on No Dogs In Space, researching that as well. And we recorded a couple of episodes. Speaking of Germany, we're still deep in our Krautrock series. We recorded a couple of episodes of our Can series and that's gonna be coming out very soon. We're very excited about that. So yeah, man, I'm fucking knee deep in Germany all the time now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's great.
ED LARSON
Hi. Let's end this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, fuckers. Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail Ulla!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sure, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean she was a murderous witch but a fun one.
ED LARSON
She never killed anybody. She just stole people's money who wanted to kill somebody and that is admirable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically you're right.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually that's good. Yeah. And then she gambled it all away.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As she should.