Mexico City Man Suspected Of Being Cannibal Serial Killer

MEXICO CITY – On the stove, a frying pan with chunks of flesh. In the refrigerator, a leg and part of an arm, both deboned. The bones were stuffed into a cereal box.

Mexico City police made the grisly discoveries this week as they arrested the man the Mexican media are calling a cannibalistic serial killer.

Police said José Luis Calva Zepeda, 40, was arrested Monday and was being held on suspicion of homicide after an investigation into the disap-pearance of his girlfriend. Investigators found the mutilated body of Alejandra Galeana, 30, in Calva's closet and believe he has killed and mutilated at least two other women since 2004.

Calva was sent to the hospital after his arrest – police say he fell from his apartment balcony while trying to flee – and will undergo a battery of psychological testing, police said. Authorities are also testing the limbs and flesh found in Calva's apartment to determine whether they are human.

The apparent slayings and cannibalism have sent shock waves through the capital, a city long accustomed to violent crime but not to such gruesome dismemberment.

The details of the case seem to come straight from a Halloween movie. Calva is a poet and writer of tales of horror. Inside his small apartment in the heart of Mexico City and just a few blocks from the mariachi musicians at the famed Plaza Garibaldi, police found an unfinished manuscript titled “Cannibal Instincts,” according to media reports.

Calva sold his poetry at the city's informal markets. He also reportedly is a failed screenwriter who tried to sell his scripts for horror movies.

Cutberto Enríquez, curator of an exhibition on serial killers and the death penalty at Mexico City's Police Cultural Center, said Calva's frustration with his writing career may have fueled his rage.

Calva also is accused of killing his former girlfriend, Verónica Consuelo Martínez Casarrubias, who was found dismembered in 2004, and a prostitute known only as “La Jarocha” in April.

Police say his two girlfriends had similar appearances and that both worked at pharmacies.

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_pre-Columbian_America#Aztec_cannibalism

The Mexica are perhaps the most widely studied of the ancient Mesoamerican people. While most pre-Columbian historians believe that there was ritual cannibalism related to human sacrifices, they do not support Harris’s thesis that human flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet. Noted scholar Michael D. Coe states that while “it is incontrovertible that some of these victims ended up by being eaten ritually […], the practice was more like a form of communion than a cannibal feast”.

There is some documentation of Aztec cannibalism, mainly accounts from the date of the conquest:

* Hernán Cortés wrote in one of his letters that his soldiers had captured an indigenous man who had a roasted baby ready for breakfast.

* Francisco López de Gómara reported that, during the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards asked the Aztecs to surrender since they had no food. The Aztecs angrily challenged the Spaniards to attack so they could be taken as prisoners, sacrificed and served with “molli” sauce.

* In the book of Bernardino de Sahagún, the first Mesoamerican ethnographer according to Miguel León-Portilla, there is an illustration of an Aztec being cooked by an unknown tribe. This was reported as one of the dangers that Aztec traders faced.

* The Ramírez codex, written by an Aztec using the Latin alphabet after the Conquest of Mexico, reports that after the sacrifices the flesh from the hands of the victim were given as a gift to the warrior who made the human capture. According to the codex, this was supposedly eaten, but in fact discarded and replaced with turkey.

* In his book Relación Juan Bautista de Pomar states that after the sacrifice the body of the victim was given to the warrior responsible for the capture. He would boil the body and cut it to pieces to be offered as gifts to important people in exchange for presents and slaves; but it was rarely eaten, since they considered it of no value.

* However, Bernal Díaz reports that some of these parts of human flesh made their way to the Tlatelolco market near Tenochtitlan.

* In 2005 the INAH reported that some of the bodies found under Mexico City’s “Catedral Metropolitana”, i.e. the basement of Aztec temples, showed cut marks indicating the removal of muscles from the bones, though not all the bodies show this treatment.

* In August 2006, near Calpulalpan, Mexico, Reuters reported that an analysis of the skeletons of 550 victims killed after the conquest indicate that some of the victims were dismembered, and that many bones showed knife, teeth marks and evidence of boiling.

Update 10/25/2007

Suspected Cannibal Refuses to Make Plea

MEXICO CITY (AP) - An aspiring writer who left a horror scene of body parts in his apartment was arraigned on Thursday on charges of murder and desecrating a corpse after he allegedly cut up and ate part of his girlfriend’s body.

Jose Luis Calva—better known in tabloids as Mexico City’s “cannibal”—refused to make a formal plea, saying “I can’t get my thoughts together right now.”

Police say he had previously acknowledged killing 32-year-old girlfriend Alejandra Galeana, and prosecutors believe he killed and dismembered two other girlfriends, but have not charged him for those crimes.

“He killed her because he was high on cocaine,” said defense attorney Humberto Guerrero Plata. “He didn’t eat her, he just cut her body up.”

Calva told police he cooked the flesh in order to feed it to neighborhood dogs, as a way to get rid of the body.

But city coroner Rodolfo Rojo has described how Calva carefully separated and de-boned Galeana’s arm, sliced away the skin and fat, fried the flesh and seasoned it with lime juice—not pains one usually takes with dogs.

With graying good looks and a dark, penetrating stare, Calva made his first public appearance since his arrest on Oct. 8, when police discovered Galeana’s rotting, mutilated torso stuffed into a closet, a leg in the freezer and bits of arm meat on a fork and plate.

Calva, 38, met his girlfriends—several were single mothers and drug store attendants—while passing himself off as a playwright, television personality, reporter, novelist, actor and poet.

“He must have had a super personality, to charm me the way he did,” recalled Veronica R., 40, a drugstore employee who said he read his poetry to her when they dated in August. The woman asked that her full last name not be used to protect her family.

Soledad Garavito, Alejandra’s mother, described him as “a very vain person ... everything was me, me, me.”

“I am going to imagine myself as a balloon the size of the sun, and I’m going to roll around in the cosmos that is me,” he wrote in one a short work, “The Night Before,” a strange mix of introspection and self-help exhortations.

Experts said he may have courted drugstore workers—including Veronica Martinez, who was killed and dismembered in 2004—to get access to clonazepam, an anti-seizure medication also used to treat anxiety.

But prosecutors say he focused on drugstores because he was looking for working women who were relatively poor, vulnerable or easier to impress—and dominate.

“The way in which he treated his girlfriend, it seemed like a classic dominant-submissive relationship,” said an acquaintance who co-signed Calva’s apartment lease. “He would say things like ‘Who told you you could talk?’” said the man, who asked not to be identified because the lease is now a court matter.

Police say sadomasochistic literature and films found in his apartment, and Calva also had a lengthy affair with his alleged accomplice in the Martinez killing—a man named Juan Carlos Monroy, who described their relationship after he was arrested this month for his alleged role in the murder.

Calva purportedly bought drugs and alcohol with the money one surviving girlfriend made selling his poetry and crudely bound, photocopied “books” on the street.

Police said Calva described a traumatic childhood—that he was practically abandoned by his mother, his father died when he was 2, and around age 7 he was raped by a male friend of his brother.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8SGK3F00&show_article=1&catnum=0

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