Man who ate 5 people: Demonic or desperate?

He was the perpetrator of one of the most gruesome crimes of the 19th century, vilified as the “Human Hyena.”

Yet Alfred G. Packer, accused of dismembering and eating his travel companions while stranded in the Rocky Mountains, was later exonerated by the press and buried as a war hero.

What actually occurred in those woods is the heart of a new investigation, “Man-Eater,” by true-crime journalist and American literature professor Harold Schechter.

Schechter relies on primary research and recent examinations into the exhumed bodies of Packer’s five victims to answer the question that has lingered for over a century: Was Packer truly a monster or merely a victim of his circumstances?

6 left, 1 came back

Much of Packer’s early life remains a mystery — mostly because Packer was an unreliable narrator.

Packer fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War until he was discharged due to epilepsy. He headed west, taking on jobs as varied as saddle maker, trapper, teamster, hunter and wilderness guide, until jumping on the silver prospecting bandwagon in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado.

In February 1873, Packer was hired as a guide for a group of 21 out of Provo, Utah. Immediately, though, the others realized that Packer was not who he said he was. He “did not know the way and . . . was lying when he said he could guide,” one of the prospectors later recounted.

He was greedy with the meager food rations and often inquired about the amount of money the other men were carrying on them. To top it all off, he was often incapacitated by violent seizures. Knowing that they “hated him so,” Packer “stayed apart from the balance of the men,” nursing a “cordial hatred.”

During their brutal first leg of the trek, they nearly resorted to eating their horses until they arrived at a cow camp near Montrose, Colo. The group was warned not to move on in the deep snow. Only six, including Packer, decided to press on.

Two months later, Packer was discovered by a man gathering firewood in the woods. The first impression was that he looked “none for the worse.” When asked where his travel companions were, he responded that he “didn’t know.”

When a member of his prospecting team who stayed behind saw Packer, he noted that a skinning knife he was carrying belonged to one of the lost men. Packer said that the man had stuck it in a tree and then walked off.

This aroused suspicions, which grew into accusations once Packer returned to the nearby town. There, he spent money wildly, gambling and drinking, dropping $100 at a saloon (about $2,000 today).

It didn’t take long for the local authorities to arrest him on suspicion of murder and for a rescue party to start searching for the missing men.

Packer confessed, telling authorities the team was crazed with starvation, eating roots from the ground when the oldest in the troop died. All of them feasted on his body and, when another man died, they ate him, too. One of the men, Shannon Wilson Bell, plotted to kill the remaining men. When Bell tried to attack, Packer shot him.

Packer pled self-defense — and self-preservation. “It wouldn’t be the first time that people had been obliged to eat others when they were hungry.” His only crime? He stole money from the dead.

By August, the corpses were found and Packer’s story didn’t add up. “The bodies,” one article at the time read, “were all more or less mutilated. The head of one had been severed from the body; the head of another was badly crushed, while the flesh had been cut in huge masses from the breasts, thighs and the fleshy part of the legs of all.” Not one of them had been shot.

Before they could move forward with a trial, however, Packer escaped. The Man-Eater, the papers warned, was now on the loose.

A forgivable crime?

Cannibalism may be reviled, but it isn’t uncommon in human history.

In Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris, gave gifts to humans to stop them from eating each other. Cannibalism also is mentioned repeatedly in the Old Testament — Moses is warned that if the Israelites denied God that they would cannibalize their own children, the ultimate evil.

The word entered the English language when Columbus came to the New World and encountered a tribe called the Caribs, who were known to eat their captives. That became “canibales” in Spanish.

But what is more shocking than the act itself is our history of leniency, even sympathy, in cases of cannibalism in America. Take the sinking of the Essex (on which “Moby Dick” is based).

Stranded at sea, 20 crewmen resorted to eating a 17-year old boy, the cousin of the Essex’s captain George Pollard. When Pollard was rescued, the “townspeople absolved him of blame . . . cannibalism having long been accepted as the ‘custom of the sea.’ ”

“For the most part,” Schechter writes, “those who had endured such ordeals could count on the sympathy of a forgiving public. Even on those rare occasions when survivors were brought before the law, they tended to be treated with leniency.”

‘Dead, dead, dead’

Packer escaped justice for nine years before being spotted in Utah and returned to Colorado.

There, he made a second confession, changing his story to fit the murder scene and insisting that Bell had murdered all four of the others with a hatchet. He maintained that he only shot Bell in self-defense but added that he hit him over the head with a hatchet to finish him off, a detail missing from his first confession. Again he admitted to eating human flesh but only out of extreme hunger.

The papers went wild. “Human Jerked Beef,” one headline read. “The Cannibal Who Gnaws on the Choice Cuts of His Fellow Man,” another read. He was an overnight celebrity. People collected his photograph and lined up at the prison buying watch fobs he crafted from his cell out of horsehair.

Armed with the physical descriptions of his crimes, the prosecutors went to town. Packer “focused on filleting muscle tissue for immediate consumption” (which were the “arms, legs, rib cage, shoulder and buttocks”) and roasted them. Unlike the Essex, where people resorted to eating every edible human part, from the brains to the bone marrow, Parker was so “abundantly supplied with bodies that there was no need of him to report to such unappetizing fare.’ ”

The verdict came back swiftly: guilty. The sentence: “Be hung by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

But a small but vocal group protested the sentence. It was unfair, they said, because the trial was conducted where the notorious crimes were committed and that Packer was “insane when the crimes were committed” because of the extreme hunger and his epilepsy.

Packer was granted a second trial in Gunnison County, Colo., in 1886. This time, experts damningly revealed that the terrain boasted “deer, antelope, rabbits and grouse” in abundance that winter. There were even bones of a deer uncovered near the camp — undercutting his claim that they had only a small ration of food available.

It took only two hours for the jury to render another guilty verdict, naming the sole motive as robbery, discounting his claim that he had been crazed with starvation. His sentence: forty years.

Cause cannibal célèbre

One person disagreed — noisily.

Polly Pry, a reporter with the Denver Evening Post, took on Packer’s case after visiting his jail and hearing his story. She published a series of pieces extolling his virtues as a soldier and attacking his conviction.

She described Packer as a “dauntless embodiment of American manhood — soldier, scout and wilderness guide who did not know how to fear and had a constitution of iron.”

“I believe this man is innocent,” she wrote. “I believe that he has been most unjustly, most terribly punished for a frightful misfortune and not for a crime.”

Thanks to Pry’s writerly flourishes, the governor was besieged with petitioners urging him to issue a pardon. In 1901, after 17 years behind bars and just shy of his 60th birthday, Packer was finally granted parole. He would refer to Pry as his “liberator.”

Once released, Packer, the man who ate men, was “thoroughly disgusted” by the modernized world around him. He was stymied by the “shocking immodesty” of what played in the theater. He moved to a small town and lived for six more years before passing away from natural causes. He was buried with full army funeral rites.

But his story would not remain buried.

James Starrs, professor of law at George Washington University, reopened the case in 1989, exhuming the remains of the five men and analyzing the corpses with FBI forensic research techniques.

Starrs revealed that all four recovered skulls, including Bell’s, “bore the marks of related blunt-force trauma” by only one assailant. Deep gashes on the arm bones were classic defensive wounds. One person killed the men — and that person could only be Packer. “Packer was as guilty as sin, and his sins were all mortal ones,” Starrs said. “It is plain as pikestaff that Packer was the one on the attack, not Bell.”

Then, in 1999, David P. Bailey, curator of history at the Museum of Western Colorado, opened up his own investigation after recovering the long-lost Colt revolver found on the camp site that Packer claimed he shot Bell with.

Bailey analyzed the victims’ clothes and matched gunshot residue from Bell’s clothing to the Colt. Close-up photography also revealed a puncture in Bell’s hip, suggesting that he had been shot, as Packer had claimed. With this new evidence, Bailey proclaimed “definitive proof of [Packer’s] innocence.”

After examining the evidence, Schechter sides with “guilty.”

It is just too implausible, he writes, that Packer “conveniently found himself with a two-month supply of nourishment, thanks to the fortuitous mental breakdown of Shannon Wilson Bell.”

“When I picture the slayer of Shannon Bell and the others, I see a man reduced by unimaginable hardship to a state of feral savagery: a crazed, near-skeletal figure with a wild beard, long matted hair, a hatched in hand and the horribly gaunt but still recognizable face of Alfred Packer.”