Nathaniel Bar-Jonah

"Lunch is served on the patio with roasted child."

Nathaniel Bar-Jonah was a pedophile, serial rapist and abductor. He is also believed by many to have been a serial killer, and a cannibal or projected cannibal.

Massachusetts Crimes
Bar-Jonah's crimes and accusations of cannibalism were almost as old as Bar-Jonah himself, who had been born David Paul Brown in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 15, 1957. Starting at age six, he would pick at his scabs until his skin festered, then proceed to suck on the blood from the wound. His mother was called multiple times from the school to tell her that this habit was upsetting both children and teachers. One year later, in late July 1964, he invited a five year-old neighbor girl to his home's basement, claiming that he had an Ouija board that could predict the future. Once inside, he attempted to strangle her until her screams alerted Brown's mother and she rescued her. At thirteen, he lured another six-year-old boy from the neighborhood to a hill outside, claiming that he wanted to go sledding with him, and raped him. In his last high school year, Brown impersonated a police officer for the first time and abducted eight-year-old Richard O'Conner while he was on his way to school, raping and strangling him in his car. A neighbor observed the abduction from a window and called police, which rescued O'Conner when he was unconscious and almost dead. Brown was arrested and sentenced to some months in probation. Just a few days before graduation, before his sentence was over, he drove to Hartford, Connecticut and impersonated a police officer again. This time he abducted a nine year-old girl and proceeded to rape her in his car, but he threw her out after she started convulsing and vomiting. A witness got the license plate and Brown was also arrested for the new incident. However, this arrest never got back to Brown's probation officer, and he was released from probation in May 1976 with a letter thanking him for his "cooperation." On September 24, 1977 Brown impersonated a FBI agent and abducted two boys coming out of a movie theater. He drove them to a secluded area, where they were handcuffed. Brown, who weighted 375 pounds at the time, left one of the boys in the car's trunk while he took the other away and simultaneously tried to strangle and suffocate him with his weight until he thought he had killed him. The boy actually pretended to be dead, and was able to maintain the act even when Brown started blowing ciigarette ashes on his face. When Brown left, the boy run away and reported him to the police. Brown was arrested agin and his other victim was rescued. This time, Brown was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to between 18 and 22 years in prison. However, he was transferred soon to Bridgewater State Hospital, where he told psychiatrists repeatedly about having sexual fantasies involving murder, torture, dissection and cannibalism. While still interned, on March 22, 1984, he changed his legal name to Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah, claiming alternatively that he wanted to honor his Jewish heritage or to know what it was being a discriminated Jew.

Bar-Jonah was released from the hospital on July 1991. Only a month later, he observed a seven-year-old boy sitting inside a car outside a post office in Oxford, Massachusetts. Bar-Jonah entered the vehicle and sat over the boy, muffing his screams with his body mass. However, he was seen by the boy's mother and other people, and he fled home, where he changed clothes in an attempt to avoid recognition. Although he had lost 100 pounds during his institutionalization, his description was recognized by one of the police officers who had arrested him 15 years before and he was arrested again. In his defense, Bar-Jonah claimed that he had entered the car to get out of the rain, and that he intended to wait for the driver to return and ask him to take him home. As for the boy, he said that he had not noticed that he was there, so any possible injury was accidental. However, he later admitted that he had intended to kill the boy. For this attempt, Bar-Jonah was given two years on probation with the condition that he moved with his mother in Great Falls, Montana and never returned to Massachusetts.

Montana Crimes
In Great Falls, Bar-Jonah became a collector of toys and memorabilia, mostly Star Wars-related, and organized yard sales that drew great crowds of children. His first brush with the Law in Montana was in December 1993, when he was accused of molestation by an eight-year-old boy that he was babysitting. Bar-Jonah shocked officers when he contested the accusation by plainly stating that if he had done that in rality, he would have killed the boy. Bar-Jonah's prosecution was upheld until it was dropped following a claim by his lawyer that his right to a speedy trial had been violated. On February 10, 1996, ten-year-old Zach Ramsay disappeared on his way to school. Witnesses saw an off-white vehicle almost running Ramsay over, and later that he was crying and appeared to be followed by an obese man around the time he disappeared.

Detective Bill Bellusci, who had investigated the 1993 case, was assigned to investigate Ramsay's disappearence. Although he was provided with a list of sexual offenders in the area by the FBI, Bellusci discarded them almost immediately and centered his suspicion on Bar-Jonah, who wasn't registered as a sexual offender in Montana. Bar-Jonah was still living in his mother's home at the time, but she was out for a funeral, and her house was dark and apparently empty. Since nobody answered and they didn't have a warrant, the police left a card soliciting Bar-Jonah to call them, but he was advised to remain silent by his lawyer. Bellusci solicited a search warrant of the property, but he was turned down. It was later found that Bar-Jonah's mother owned an off-white Toyota Corolla, that Bar-Jonah had access to it, and that he had the day off and had been seen standing in an alley just before Ramsay entered it. Bar-Jonah was also wearing a dark blue jacket that day, similar to a police officer's, had worked previously near Ramsay's home and school, went to the same church as Ramsay, and had mentioned Ramsay's name to an acquitance a few days before he disappeared. Bellusci solicited a new search warrant, unsuccessfully. Some time later, Bar-Jonah moved away from his mother's house. On December 13, 1999 Bar-Jonah was seen outside an elementary school for the third time in a few days. He was wearing a dark blue jacket and a knit cap, and was carrying two cans of pepper spray and a toy gun and badge. Despite the doubts of their colleagues, Bellusci and the attorney general charged Bar-Jonah with impersonating an officer and carrying a concealed weapon. A judge finally approved a search warrant for objects that could be used to impersonate an officer in both Bar-Jonah's mother's house and his new address. They retrieved two coats, one dark blue and another with a toy badge in the pocket; a second toy badge, a stun gun, and a baseball cap reading "security enforcement". During the search, they also found a strange pulley on the ceiling of Bar-Jonah's kitchen, two albums with cutouts of children and two documents about bondage and auto-erotic asphyxia. Two days later, Bellusci was granted a second warrant for any documents and photographic material. Besides the albums, they also found several lists of boy names. Many were later identified as boys from Bar-Jonah's youth in Massachusetts (including three that he had molested), but one also had an entry for "Zackery Ramsey" next to the word "DIED." 3,500 photographs of children, multiple news clippings about Ramsay's disappearence and undeveloped film containing sexual images of Bar-Jonah and three unidentified boys was also recovered. But the most disturbing finding was made when a book written in code was cracked and was revealed to be a cookbook with recipes such as "little boy pot pie", "french fried kid" and "little boy stew". The macabre picture was completed by a large, stained section of plywood in Bar-Jonah's garage that someone had scrubbed with bleach, and which also had been struck several times with a cleaver as if it had been used as a cutting board. A luminol test in the same room revealed that the word "Tita" had been once written on the floor. This was tentatively linked to James Teta, a fifteen-year-old boy who was found raped and strangled in Rindge, New Hampshire in 1973. Further inquiries seemed to confirm the officers' fears that Bar-Jonah had killed and cooked Ramsay and possibly other children. It was learned that in the days after Ramsay's disappearence, Bar-Jonah had held cookouts for his neighbors in which he served "deer burgers" that tasted strange. When a guest told him that they were repulsive, Bar-Jonah simply stated that he had "hunted, killed, butchered and wrapped the meat" personally. However, Bar-Jonah did not own a gun or a hunting license, and credit card records suggested that he had stopped buying food for a month after Ramsay disappeared. A former roommate of Bar-Jonah had seen a pair of bloody gloves and soiled boy clothes matching Ramsay's at Bar-Jonah's apartment, and Bar-Jonah had also surprised people several times by bringing up Ramsay, including one time when he said that Rmsay would never be found because he had been chopped up, and the parts scattered in different places. Finally, human-looking hair was found inside Bar-Jonah's meat-grinder, and an excavation at one of his former residences uncovered 21 bone fragments belonging to a boy between eight and thirteen years old. The neighbors who moved in after had also changed the pipes because they got constantly clogged. However, DNA from the hair and bones turned to belong to two different African-American males, neither of whom was Ramsay.

The case was further derailed when Zach Ramsay's mother refused to believe that her son was dead or that Bar-Jonah was in any way related to his disappearance. A psychic had convinced her that Zach was living in Italy, and she threatened to declare in Bar-Jonah's defense if he was brought to trial for her son's murder. Eventually, all charges related to Ramsay's disappearance were dropped and the police focused on other possible victims. It was learned that two names in a list belonged to two boys who lived in the same apartment building as Bar-Jonah, and they were identified in turn as two of the boys in the photographic film. One of the boys confirmed that Bar-Jonah had convinced them to come for a sleepover and then molested them; but other visited Bar-Jonah in jail and wrote him saying that he considered him a friend and that he had never harmed him. The investigators made the case that Bar-Jonah had groomed the boys until they agreed to have sex with him, and he was charged with three counts of sexual assault, and one of aggravated kidnapping and another of assault with a deadly weapon for practicing erotic asphyxia with one of the boys in the kitchen's pulley. Bar-Jonah pledged innocence to all charges, but he was found guilty and sentenced in 2002 to 130 years in prison without possibility of parole. On April 13, 2008 Bar-Jonah was found dead in his cell from a heart attack related to his obesity. Three years later, Zach Ramsay's father had him declared legally dead over the opposition of his mother.

Modus Operandi
Bar-Jonah targeted children between five and fifteen years old. In most of his confirmed crimes, he drove a white car and dressed in navy blue coats, jackets and caps, and carried toy guns and badges so he could impersonate a police officer. While this disguise would be unconvincing to most adults, it was enough for young children. After getting the victims in the car, he would drive to a secluded place, restrain them and sometimes rape them. Afterward, he would try to kill them by strangulation or suffocate them using his own weight.

Known Victims
Bar-Jonah is also believed to have committed murders in Montana because of the disturbing findings made in his residences. He was also investigated for possible crimes in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, where he had lived at times during the 1990s, but the police found no links between him and any unsolved crimes.
 * Worcester, Massachusetts:
 * July 1964: An unnamed five-year-old girl
 * January 1970: An unnamed six-year-old boy
 * Unspecified date: Two unnamed boys
 * August 23-25, 1973, Rindge, New Hampshire: James Teta, 15
 * Unspecified date and location in 1973-1974: Janice Pockett, 7
 * Unspecified date and location in 1974: Mary Patrone, 10
 * March 1975, Worcester, Massachusetts: Richard O'Conner, 8
 * March 1975, Hartford, Connecticut: An unnamed nine-year-old girl
 * September 24, 1977, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts
 * An unnamed boy
 * Another unnamed boy
 * August 9, 1991, Oxford, Massachusetts: An unnamed seven-year-old boy
 * Great Falls, Montana:
 * December 1993: An unnamed eight-year-old boy
 * February 6, 1996: Zachary Xerxes "Zach" Ramsay, 10
 * Unspecified dates in 1999::
 * His unnamed fourteen-year-old neighbor boy
 * The unnamed neighbor's cousin
 * A third unnamed boy

On Criminal Minds
While not mentioned in Criminal Minds so far, Bar-Jonah seems an obvious source of inspiration for Floyd Feylinn Ferell. Both had a fascination with cannibalism since they were children, attacked a younger girl when they were seven years old, were committed to a mental hospital, had their previous record covered in some way (as an offending minor's spunged record in Floyd's case, by changing state and not being obliged to register as a sexual offender, in Bar-Jonah's), were prone to gain weight, worked as cooks in restaurants, went to church despite claiming to be of a different religion (Satanism in Floyd's case, Judaism in Bar-Jonah's), had cooking equipment that had been apparently used to cook human flesh, wrote their own cookbooks with cannibalistic recipes, and were suspected of cooking and serving their most famous victim to other people while they were being searched (only confirmed in Floyd's case). Also in both cases, the restaurants where the suspects had previously worked in were closed down until it was determined if they had been used to serve human meat.