Cops Catch Insane Killer Who Fled Field Trip in Wash.

He confesses to eating flesh of one of two teen victims

(NEWSER) - A German identified only as "Jan O.," who admitted eating the flesh of one of his two teenage victims, has been sentenced to life in prison. The killer, 26, confessed to licking blood from the wound of a 14-year-old girl he murdered and eating her flesh. He had lured her to the woods intending to rape her, reports the AP, but cut her throat instead, the court was told. Five days later he sexually assaulted and killed a 13-year-old boy. " I don't know what came over me ," the killer told the victims' families in court. The judge said the murders showed an "almost unimaginable dimension of criminality." More»

Ripper scholar calls himself a 'cannibal'

(NEWSER) - Forensics experts are examining a suitcase filled with tools found near the suspected remains of murdered hookers linked to a British "Jack the Ripper" scholar. Stephen Griffiths, 40, who dubbed himself the ''Crossbow Cannibal" last week in court, has been charged with the dismemberment murder of 3 prostitutes in Yorkshire, and is linked to at at least 3 other missing women. Remains of one of the prostitutes have been positively identified in the River Aire in West Yorkshire, where divers also uncovered the black suitcase. More»

8 dead after gunman rampage

(NEWSER) - Some 100 Virginia police have converged on a heavily wooded area to surround a gunman suspected of killing 8 people. Christopher Speight, 39, nearly shot down a pursuing police helicopter when one of his bullets ruptured the fuel tank. The police hunt was triggered after officers discovered 7 men and women dead at an Appomattox home. Another victim found on a nearby street died a short time later. Police wouldn't speculate about a motive. Speight lived on the street where the killings occurred, possibly in the same house, reports AP . More»

(NEWSER) - Mental health experts have lost touch with the benefits of old-fashioned insane asylums, where patients once enjoyed a sense of community and jobs like cleaning and farming, Oliver Sacks writes in the New York Review of Books. Touching on a new book of Christopher Payne photographs called Asylum—which offers "a mute and heartbreaking testimony" to "once-heroic structures"—Sacks argues that modern state hospitals, which rely on antipsychotic drugs, ignore "the benign aspects of asylums." More»

Police sought Ohio man for murdering new wife and family

(NEWSER) - An Ohio man accused of killing his wife and four children took his own life today when police cornered him in a bathroom, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Following a tip, Cleveland police and US marshals were hunting room-to-room in a house when they found Davon Crawford, 33, hiding behind a shower curtain. "When he spotted the agents, then he took his own life," police told CNN. More»