On April 2, 1988, Christopher Bryson, 22, leaped from the second story of a house on Charlotte St. in Kansas City and ran for his life. He was wearing a dog collar and nothing else.
Bryson told police a tale of four days of torture, sodomy and terror at the hands of the man who lived there, Robert Berdella, 39.
Although bruised, drugged and abused, Bryson was luckier than six other “guests” of a monster who would soon be known as the “Butcher of Kansas City.” Those young men left the premises stuffed into dog-food bags that were dumped in the garbage. All had been chopped into small pieces.
Berdella’s corpse disposal method was so creative he might have gotten away with the murders, except for one thing. He kept detailed notes — a torture diary, illustrated with more than 350 Polaroid photographs of his victims. Entries were brief, clinical and in shorthand. “EK,” for example, was Berdella’s way of noting that he had subjected his victim to electro-shock with a 7,700-volt neon-sign transformer he kept in a bedroom. “CP” was his abbreviation for chlorpromazine, one of the drugs he used to control his hostages. Berdella owned and bred Chow Chow dogs and obtained sedatives usually used on animals through veterinary supply sources.
There were notations on sexual positions and reactions, methods of punishing his victims like injecting drain cleaner into the voice box or caulking ears shut, as well as details of the physical condition of his subjects, whether they were awake, snoring or unresponsive. A final notation for one victim was simply “86.”
Berdella, born on Jan. 31, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, showed no early signs of a budding serial sex slayer. Problems emerged in the mid-1960s, after his father died and his mother remarried. The boy became increasingly withdrawn, absorbed by stamp and coin collections and letter writing to pen pals.
It was around this time he saw the 1965 screen version of John Fowles’ novel “The Collector.” The story is about a disturbed loner who kidnaps a beautiful art student, hoping she will learn to love him. He never forgot that movie.
Berdella’s artistic talents earned him a partial scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. He attended classes but at the same time, he used and sold drugs. His work deteriorated into weird performance art, such as one piece in which he beheaded a live duck and then danced around with the bloody carcass.
By 1969, Berdella and art school parted ways.
He found work as a cook and established a business collecting and selling primitive art, ancient artifacts and creepy curios.
In time, he opened Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre, a booth specializing in “ethnological curiosities from the world’s far corners” at the Westport Flea Market. There he made the acquaintance of another merchant, Paul Howell, and his son, Jerry, 19, a male prostitute.
Berdella and the younger Howell began to hang around together. On July 4, 1984, Berdella picked Howell up, supposedly heading for a dance. First, they stopped at Berdella’s house on Charlotte St. Howell was never heard from again.
Neighbors were used to Berdella’s eccentric ways and said that there was nothing about the pudgy loner that suggested he was capable of murder.
Young men came and went frequently but, as one neighbor told a reporter, everyone assumed he was offering a safe place for young runaways. “I thought he was a father figure to those kids,” one man said.
No one had a clue about what was going on until almost four years after Howell vanished, when the naked man in a dog collar ran from the house screaming for help.
Bryson told police that he had been hitchhiking and Berdella had picked him up five days earlier, took him home, and subjected him to days of torture and sodomy, drugging, electric shocks and bondage.
Police were outside the house when Berdella drove up and asked what was going on.
He was promptly arrested for sexual assault.
Investigators had to wade through mountains of clutter — piles of books and papers, artifacts and gemstones. In a bedroom, they found the torture diaries, with photos of young men bound, gagged, and in agony. One photo showed a man suspended from the rafters by his ankles, apparently dead. They also found a couple of human skulls.
One was very old and considered a part of the curio collection. The other was new.
Digging in the backyard turned up more human bones — a spine fragment and another skull. Dental records confirmed this was all that was left of a missing Wichita man, Larry Pearson, 20. The skull from inside the house belonged to a California man, Robert Sheldon, 18.
In July, Berdella was charged with Pearson’s murder. In August, he pleaded guilty to murder and was given a life sentence.
As part of the deal, he kept his property. In an auction orchestrated from jail, Berdella sold off his collections, including fossils, Roman glass vials and knick-knacks from all over the world.
Just before Christmas, Berdella confessed to five additional killings, including Sheldon and Howell, and three others — Todd Stoops, 21, Mark Wallace, 20, and Walter Ferris, 20.
In a television interview, Berdella described his victims as “play toys” and blamed his killing spree on police for not stopping him sooner. He also denied that he was a member of a devil cult, as a television special had suggested.
He got six life sentences with no chance of parole. In October 1992, the sentence was cut short when he died of a heart attack at age 43. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” quipped one judge when told of his death.
