This must be one of the strangest stories of the year: a 21-year-old Filipino man decapitated a woman because she spoke English to him. Not only did he kill her, however, he then went on to use the brains as a topping on some rice, and ate it all.
Lloyd Bagtong, 21, was arrested Thursday on the island of Mindanao, British newspaper the Daily Mail reports. The woman approached him early in the morning when he was “drunk and hungry.” Because she spoke to him in English, he decided to use a garden tool to decapitate her.
Next, he used a piece of cloth to wrap her head in and carry it home. Once he took out the brains — in order to eat them — he threw the skull in a hole nearby his house.
The woman, meanwhile, was found topless and with her hands tied behind her back. It goes without saying, then, that she truly suffered a horrific fate. She must have been fully aware of what was happening when Bagtong killed her.
The ruthless murderer has been sent for psychiatric evaluation. Police, meanwhile, are trying to identify the victim’s body. They are urging those with missing loved ones or relatives to contact them.
As a classical (Hayekian) liberal, I’m opposed to the death penalty. Not for some wonderful moral reason, but because I simply don’t trust the government enough to give it the power to kill its own people. Having said that, if ever there was a man deserving of capital punishment, it’s this Lloyd Bagtong. Just imagine what his victim went through in her final moments on earth. It’s horrific — and it’s made even worse by him using her brains as topping for his rice.
However, Bagtong will undoubtedly be pleased to know that capital punishment is currently suspended in the Philippines. The harshest punishment he can receive is life in prison.
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