Robert Berdella earned the nickname the "Kansas City Butcher" because of the chilling way he tortured, murdered, and dismembered the six men he killed between 1984 and 1987.
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events.
Kansas City Police DepartmentRobert Berdella, the “Kansas City Butcher” who murdered six men between 1984 and 1987.
A quiet spring day in Kansas City’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood in 1988 was shattered when a man wearing nothing but a dog collar around his neck jumped from a second-story window of the house of a man named Robert Berdella. The panicked 22-year-old ran to a nearby meter reader and told him he’d been held captive inside for several days.
The meter reader contacted the police, who secured a search warrant for Berdella’s unassuming home — and uncovered a nightmare. In one closet, they found a human skull. In a nearby hallway, they collected human vertebrae covered in marks from a hacksaw. Another head, this one only partially decomposed, was buried in the backyard.
Christopher Bryson had escaped from the lair of the “Kansas City Butcher.” He wasn’t the first person Berdella had abducted, though. Six other men had met grisly ends in the very same house after crossing paths with the murderer.
Robert Berdella’s gruesome murders, carried out between 1984 and 1987, would land him a life sentence in prison. He died of a heart attack after just four years behind bars, but he left behind a disturbing legacy as one of history’s most unhinged serial killers.
Robert Berdella Starts To Harbor Dark Desires Before His Killings Begin
Born Robert Andrew Berdella Jr. on Jan. 31, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the man who would become the Kansas City Butcher grew up in a deeply religious Roman Catholic family. Outside of Mass and Sunday school classes, however, Berdella was a loner. He was heavily bullied for his thick glasses and his speech impediment, and he had trouble making friends.
Even Berdella’s own father teased him because he wasn’t as athletic as his younger brother. This ridicule eventually progressed into physical abuse.
However, by the time he was a teenager, Robert Berdella had started to gain some confidence. He realized that he was gay, and though he kept this a closely guarded secret, it gave him a level of self-assurance. Around the same time, he saw the 1965 film The Collector, which left a troubling impression on him. The movie follows a man who stalks and kidnaps a young woman, holding her captive in his basement until she dies.
Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock PhotoA scene from the 1965 film The Collector, the movie that inspired Robert Berdella’s disturbing crime spree.
Although The Collector would eventually play a macabre role in Berdella’s life, it would be several years before he acted on the “darkest fantasies” the film inspired within him. After he graduated from high school in 1967, Berdella enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. Though he displayed artistic talent, he quickly got caught up in the drug scene. It was also during this time that he began torturing animals.
After he received harsh backlash from the college’s administration for an art piece in which he tortured, killed, and cooked a duck, Robert Berdella left the school and moved into a house in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City. The home became a sort of boarding house for young men who had lost their way in life. Many of them were addicted to drugs or working in the sex industry.
“He told everyone he was like a foster parent to them,” one of Berdella’s neighbors told the Chicago Tribune in 1988.
Meanwhile, Robert Berdella got a job as a chef and sold antiques on the side to bring in extra money. He rented a booth at a local flea market to sell his wares, and it was there that he met the young man who would become his first victim: Jerry Howell.
Inside The Brutal Crimes Of The Kansas City Butcher
Jerry Howell was the 19-year-old son of the man who rented the booth next to Robert Berdella’s at the market. In July 1984, Berdella offered to drive Howell to a concert. However, he instead drugged the young man, took him back to his house, injected him with a tranquilizer, and tied him to his bed. For the next 28 hours, Berdella tortured Howell and sexually assaulted him with foreign objects until he asphyxiated on his own vomit and the gag placed in his mouth.
Kansas City Police DepartmentA business card for Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre, Robert Berdella’s antiques business.
Robert Berdella then hung Howell’s body over a large pot in his basement, drained the blood from his corpse, and dismembered him before stuffing his limbs into trash bags and putting them on the street for garbage collection. All the while, Berdella was keeping detailed notes on the torture he inflicted upon his young victim on a stenographer’s pad.
The Kansas City Butcher’s second victim was 20-year-old Robert Sheldon, who arrived on Berdella’s doorstep in April 1985 looking for a place to stay. Two days later, Berdella drugged and bound him in order to “express some of the anger and frustration” he felt toward other people, as the killer later admitted.
Over the next three days, Berdella swabbed drain cleaner in Sheldon’s eyes, poked needles under his fingernails, and filled his ears with caulk before suffocating him and dismembering him just as he’d done with Howell.
Robert Berdella’s next two victims suffered similar fates. He drugged, tortured, killed, and disposed of Mark Wallace in June and James Ferris in September. With these men, the Kansas City Butcher added to his torture repertoire and used alligator clips to apply electrical shocks to their nipples and testicles.
Kansas City Police DepartmentA skull found in the Kansas City Butcher’s closet in 1988 was identified as that of Robert Sheldon, the killer’s second victim.
Then, in June 1986, Berdella ran into Todd Stoops, a 23-year-old who had briefly stayed with him twice before. When Berdella saw Stoops at a nearby park, he invited him over — and then held him captive for two weeks, continually raping and torturing him. He even injected drain cleaner into Stoops’ larynx to silence his screams.
Todd Stoops survived for two weeks before he died due to a ruptured anal wall from Berdella’s fist that caused septic shock.
Robert Berdella’s sixth and final murder victim was Larry Pearson, who suffered six weeks of torture at the hands of the Kansas City Butcher in the spring of 1987. Pearson survived so long because he attempted to gain his captor’s trust, but when he bit Berdella’s penis during one of many rapes he endured, Berdella bludgeoned him with a tree limb and suffocated him to death.
Berdella would try to kill again in March 1988 — but this time, his victim would bring about his downfall.
How The Police Finally Brought Robert Berdella Down
On March 29, 1988, Robert Berdella abducted Christopher Bryson, a 22-year-old sex worker he’d solicited. Bryson experienced four days of rape and torture before he managed to break free from his binds while his captor was at work by burning through the ropes using a box of matches Berdella had accidentally left nearby.
Kansas City Police DepartmentRobert Berdella kept his victims tied up while he sexually abused and tortured them. Pictured here is Christopher Bryson, the young man who managed to escape from Berdella’s clutches.
Naked except for a dog collar Berdella had placed around his neck, Bryson leaped from a second-story window, breaking his foot in the process. Ignoring the pain, he ran down the street until he spotted a meter reader, who helped him contact the police.
When investigators arrived at Robert Berdella’s house, they were horrified by what they found: two human skulls, vertebrae, envelopes full of teeth, a bloody chainsaw, and 334 Polaroid photos of the Kansas City Butcher’s victims, both dead and alive.
Kansas City Police DepartmentIn Robert Berdella’s dining room, investigators found newspaper clippings and files he kept about his victims.
Detectives also discovered Berdella’s stenographer’s pad filled with elaborate torture logs for each of his victims lying atop a dresser. With such an abundance of evidence against him, Berdella had no choice but to plead guilty, and he agreed to reveal everything about the vile murders he’d carried out to avoid execution.
His victims’ families weren’t satisfied with the deal. Paul Howell, the father of Jerry Howell, told The New York Times in 1988, “I think he should have got the death penalty.”
Robert Berdella was instead sentenced to life in prison without parole, but he died of a heart attack at Missouri State Penitentiary on Oct. 8, 1992, less than four years into his sentence, at the age of 43. So ended the life of the Kansas City Butcher, one of the most horrific serial killers in modern history.
After reading about the crimes of Robert Berdella, the “Kansas City Butcher,” go inside the gruesome tale of the unsolved Hinterkaifeck Murders. Then, learn about serial killer Edmund Kemper, whose story is almost too disturbing to be real.
