KEBABBLE A meaty tale of sordid murder
By Fazile Zahir
"I love to eat human flesh. It makes me ecstatic. We are fools to have been
eating beef for so long." - Ozgur Dengiz
FETHIYE, Turkey - Ozgur Dengiz was arrested in the Mamak area of Ankara
recently for the murder and consumption of 55-year-old council worker Cafer Er.
Er had been missing for a week when the police discovered his corpse in the
public garbage dump in Mamak. On closer
examination of the body, it became apparent that Er had been murdered and his
body mutilated. Large chunks of flesh had been cut from the soft parts of his
body. Further investigation by the homicide squad turned up information that Er
had last been seen arguing with a young man in the council park he was
responsible for keeping clean.
The police soon traced Ozgur Dengiz, 27, and when they went to charge him and
searched the apartment he shared with his parents for evidence, they allegedly
discovered fresh meat in the refrigerator. Immediately suspicious because of
the wounds to Er's body, samples were sent for analysis. These came back with
the positive identification of human arm, thigh and buttock flesh, police say.
Dengiz showed no remorse for his alleged actions, saying he was irresistibly
drawn to eating people. He coolly recounted what had taken place in his police
statement:
I was walking around the area under Mamak Bridge. I had gone
there to kill someone and had my special knife with me and a gun. I had already
fired at someone gathering litter because they were cluttering up my space.
Then I saw a man on a bench in the park and sat down next to him and struck up
a conversation. After I got up [I] walked behind him and shot him twice. I
dragged his body off and put it in the back seat of the car.
I cut off some meat with a cleaver. Then I felt [nauseated], so I ate some of
it raw to get over that and put the rest in my bag. I found I liked the taste.
Then I wrapped him in a black cloth and put him in the [luggage compartment] of
my car and drove around the city for a while. Later I dumped his body at the
[garbage dump] and went home. I gave some of his meat to the dogs outside my
apartment and put the rest in the fridge.
The only emotion he
is said to have exhibited as he explained his grotesque behavior was to break
into fits of laughter.
Dengiz had killed before, shooting a friend after a trivial argument when he
was 17 years old. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1997 but was released
after three under the terms of a "special conditions" amnesty. He also
confessed to attacking Abbas, another council worker, a few months ago. Despite
having been shot in the head and stomach, Abbas managed to escape. Dengiz said,
"If he hadn't gotten away I would have cut him up too. I murder because I want
to eat human flesh."
He was also found to be in possession of the gun used to murder computer
engineer Sedat Erzurumlu, who was killed last month by a bullet to the head. He
said he killed Erzurumlu because the engineer had said Dengiz could not afford
to buy the laptop they had been looking at. Dengiz has been officially charged
with "murder most monstrous".
Martha Stout in her book The Sociopath Next Door argues that the
development of dangerous sociopathic behavior is due half to genetics and half
to non-genetic influences. Psychologists and psychiatrists say the following
environmental factors can create a psychopath (the most extreme form of
sociopath):
Studies show that 60% of psychopathic individuals have lost a parent.
A child is deprived of love or nurturing; the parents are detached or absent.
Inconsistent discipline: if one parent is stern and the other not, the child
learns to hate authority and manipulate the soft parent.
Hypocritical parents privately belittle their child while publicly presenting
the image of a happy family.
Although it is probably impossible in any modern society to avoid creating the
conditions that encourage the development of sociopaths and psychopaths, these
personalities are rarer in Turkey than they are in the West, perhaps because
children are less often neglected or unloved. However, Dengiz's family
fulfilled at least one of the above environmental criteria. His father was a
retired military man, strict and meticulous in his own habits, and it was he
who turned his son in for killing his friend as a teenager. His mother made her
living as a seamstress and indulged her son, recently renting a small shop for
him and outfitting it as a tailor's in the hope that he would work there. In
six months, he never set foot inside.
Cannibalism has occurred in serial-killing cases in Christian countries, but
Islam's taboos against meat that has not been killed in a halal manner
and the insistence that man is sacred (as he is God's image) seem to have
stopped it occurring here. Dengiz appears to be Turkey's first man-eater and
perhaps one of its few psychopaths.
Certainly his police statement and neighbor's comments indicate some key
psychopathic traits. He was purposeless, consistently irresponsible and unable
to hold down a job, antisocial and emotionally callous. To him other people
were objects to be dealt with as he willed, and his lack of empathy or
conscience empowered him to disregard the rights of others. He insists that his
behavior was correct and has said, "I don't regret it, my conscience is clear.
God told me I was to punish people. I think I will keep on killing and eating."
In a story so full of horror, there is only one light note. The Turkish for
"cannibal" is yam yam, pronounced, rather ironically, "yum yum".
Fazile Zahir is of Turkish descent, born and brought up in London. She
moved to Turkey in 2005 and has been writing full-time since then.
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