Cannibal father and son behead ex-policeman, cook body parts and serve human broth to guest
A father-son cannibal duo in Ukraine was jailed for 15 years after they beheaded a former policeman and cooked his body parts.
It all started when Maxim and Yaroslav Kostyukov, 42 and 21, were drinking with Yevgeny 'Zhenya' Petrov, 45. When they started a conversation over the conflict between Kyiv's forces and pro-Moscow rebels in the eastern part of the country, a row developed between them. The argument grew increasingly violent and the younger defendant held the victim from behind while his father stabbed Petrov, Daily Mail reported.
After killing the policeman, Yaroslav severed the victim's head and cut out the flesh from the corpse along with his heart, kidneys, liver, and other internal organs. The father-son pair proceeded to cook and serve the "meat" recovered from the dead body when they hosted a homeless man called Yura at their house.
Although Yaroslav initially confessed to cooking the human flesh, he later changed his testimony and said he was not the cook and "hardly ate" the human "broth" because he felt sick as soon as he took the first bite. As to who ate the larger portion of the meal, he said that the homeless man "feasted" on most of it.
Nevertheless, investigators have said that they believe that the suspected father and son were the ones who cooked the meat and ate it.
During the trial, the accused pair kept smirking as they stood in the court. The prosecution explained why the state had not added the charges of cannibalism in their charges against the father and the son.
"There is no such crime as cannibalism listed in the Criminal Code of Ukraine. That is why the prosecution cannot include this into the charges in court," Prosecutor Oksana Karnaukh said. "We charged them with murder and aggravating circumstances committed by a group of persons, and... illegal possession of arms."
The crimes were traced back to Maxim and Yaroslav after a petrified resident discovered the headless corpse which was dumped near a cellar doorway close to an apartment block in Saltivka, near Kharkiv. "I looked — and it seemed like there was no head… I looked again — definitely. Detectives questioned us and told us he had no head. And then his trousers were rolled up and it turned out that they had cut meat from there," a resident Alexandra Grabeynik said.
The victim's wife has demanded compensation for "insomnia" after the trauma, after being forced to identify her husband's corpse from his severed head.
Last month, Russian cannibal couple Natalia Baksheeva and Dmitry Baksheev, who reportedly confessed to killing up to 30 women, were declared sane by a medical team. The pair was arrested in October 2017 for the murder of a woman in the city of Krasnodar in south-western Russia's Krasnodar Krai region.
Medical professionals of the Serbsky National Medical Research Centre for Psychiatry and Addiction recently evaluated Natalia and found her to be sane of mind. The pair were caught by chance after a group of construction workers found a mobile phone which contained photos of Dmitry with a severed hand in his mouth.