May 17 1924
Two youths discover a human skull on the banks of the Leine in Hanover, Germany. And although two more skulls are found a month later, police ignore it until a sackful of bones turn up on the riverbank. Dragging the Leine yields another 500 bones, belonging to about 27 victims. Eventually, police arrest Fritz Haarmann for the crimes. He would lure runaway boys back to his apartment, where they would be raped, killed, and cut into steaks. Then the unlicensed butcher would sell the meat as beef on the black market. All told, he killed between 40 and 50 boys.

Ewwwww!

Cannibalism

In 15th century Scotland, a highlander named Sawney Beane and his wife lived in a remote mountain pass, where they subsisted on a steady diet of unfortunate travelers, which they also fed to their 14 children, and a number of incestuous grandchildren. Needless to say, when the civilized world found out about this, their outrage was so great that they executed the entire family, amputating the limbs of the men so that they bled to death, and burning the women and children at the stake. Now that's civilized!

At no time did any one of them express remorse or repentance. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that the children and grandchildren of Sawney Beane and his wife had been brought up to accept the cave dwelling cannibalistic life as normal. They had known no other life, and in a very real sense they had been well and truly "brain -washed," in modern terminology. They were isolated from society, and their moral and ethical standards were those of Sawney Beane himself. He was the father figure and mentor in a small tightly integrated community. They were trained to regard murder and cannibalism as right and normal, and they saw no wrong in it. It poses the question as to how much of morality is the product of the environment and training, and how much is (or should be) due to some instinctive but indefinable inner voice of, perhaps, conscience. Did the young members of the Beane clan know that what they were doing was wrong?