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Twisted Vladimir Nikolayev's crimes are about as macabre as it gets.
But when describing his heinous behaviour, he cannot help but laugh, with no attempt to hide his sick glee.
Vile cannibal Nikolayev killed, chopped up, cooked and ate his victims. He then tricked friends into eating human meat by pretending it was kangaroo – and they were none the wiser until he was tried for murder.
Almost 30 years after his crimes he is regarded as one of Russia's most dangerous criminals.
Now 62, the remorseless killer cannibal has featured in several documentaries about life in the country's toughest prison, a high-security jail dubbed Black Dolphin.
In one, he reminisces about how the first of two his killings happened after a drunken argument got out of hand.
And before he knew it, he was chopping off a man's head and chowing down on a chunk of his thigh.
Recalling his shocking 1996 crime, Nikolayev says: "I was coming home from a party a little drunk and next to the door to my building another guy, also drunk asked me for a light.
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"We started arguing and we got in to a fight. He hit me and I hit him, and it turned out he died.
"What was I to do? I dragged him to the bathroom, undressed him and started cutting him apart."
Smirking, he seems to take pleasure in sharing the details of what happened once he had dragged the dead man back to his flat in the city of Novocheboksark.
He smiles: "I cut off his head, arms, legs, all of a sudden something sort of struck me and I thought I would try him.
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"I cut off a piece of meat from his thigh and boiled it. I tried it, didn't like it. So I chopped it up and fried it in a frying pan."
As the interviewer tries not to gag, Nikolayev's eyes light up as he continues with his twisted tale.
He laughs: "I gave some meat to one of my friends, he took it home gave it to his wife. She made dumplings with it. She had some herself and fed it to her children.
"I said it was kangaroo. We don't have kangaroos around here, they didn't know what it was."
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He adds that they didn't get sick from eating human meat, but only found out it was of human origin after he went to trial.
Nikolayev killed a second time, and sold 5kg of the dead man's flesh at a market, telling customers it was "exotic meat".
He was only caught after some of his customers were suspicious of the meat and took it to a doctor for testing – where the presence of human blood was discovered.
Author Sondra London mentions how Nikolayev was arrested in her book, True Vampires: Blood-Sucking Killers Past and Present.
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She writes: "The police found a pan of roasted human meat on the stove and another cannibal dish in the oven. He had stored more body parts outside, which he packed into the snow on his balcony."
At his trial, Nikolayev told the court he would have continued eating people if he hadn't been arrested.
The court also heard that he had joked with investigators, asking them to whip him up a dinner made from the remains they had discovered on his balcony.
Nikolayev was sentenced to death, but in 1999 his sentence was changed to life imprisonment – much to the delight of his victim's relatives who believed the death penalty was "too mild".
- Russia
- Crime
- Serial Killers
- Murder
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