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Lesser Known But Intriguing Historic Criminals

Khalid Elhassan October 17, 2019 32 min

U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History - Crime

30. The Bean Clan’s Cannibalism Haul Grows

sawney bean's clan 1 — Sawney Bean’s clan filling its larder. The Atlantic Religion.

As the size of the Bean clan grew, their appetite and the amount of human meat needed to keep them in good fettle grew as well. As the local authorities missing person list kept growing and growing, the Bean clan began mounting ever more ambitious hunting forays, ambushing up to half a dozen travelers at a time, and taking their corpses back to the cave to be carefully prepared for the larder by the women folk.

All good things come to an end, however, and the cannibal clan’s luck eventually ran out. They ambushed a husband and wife returning from a fair, and while disemboweling the woman but before managing to kill her husband, a large group returning from the fair came upon the horrific scene. Outnumbered, the Beans fled back to their cave, leaving behind one partially butchered woman, her understandably livid widower, and a clear hint of what had been going on, lo those many years.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.