Robert Berdella was apprehended on April 2, 1988. By that time, he had abducted and tortured at least six young men, and the Kansas City Police Department suspected him in two other disappearances. Berdella had detailed torture logs and large numbers of Polaroid pictures he had taken of his victims. Volumes of pictures were recovered by the Kansas City Police Department, and remain in their possession. He claimed that he was trying to “help” some of his victims by giving them antibiotics after torturing them. Methods of torture included electrical shocks, puncturing their anal cavities with his fist, applying bleach to their eyes by way of cotton swabs, and even injecting their vocal cords with drain cleaner. He tried to gouge one of his victim’s eyes out “to see what would happen”. Berdella had buried two victims’ skulls in his backyard (one of which had been retrieved and placed inside a closet on the second floor of his property, with the teeth removed and stowed inside an envelope in the same room). The dismembered bodies of all six of Berdella’s victims had been stowed in trash bags and subsequently taken to a landfill. The bodies of Berdella’s victims were never recovered.

Robert Berdella’s confirmed victims were white males aged 18–25, five of whom he had known prior to their kidnap and murder while one, Mark Wallace, Berdella had not known. After taking them to his house, he would get them drunk or drug them with sedatives or animal tranquilizers and keep them restrained in his basement. Over the course of anywhere between a night, and several weeks, he would torture and sodomize them, documenting the process with a camera and keeping a detailed log, before eventually killing them by asphyxiation, sometimes using a plastic bag. He claimed to have administered antibiotics to his victims to keep them alive longer. Afterwards, he would drain the blood out of their bodies by placing them in a bathtub and cutting slits in them. He would then dismember them with kitchen knives and a chainsaw and leave the body parts in trash bags to be picked up by garbage men. He occasionally kept body parts, such as the heads, as trophies, burying them in his backyard.

A few months before the arrest was made, Robert Berdella was offered a ride home from a bar by people who noticed he was too intoxicated to drive. On the way back, Berdella allegedly told stories about young men he had abducted and tortured in the previous months. It was not taken seriously at that time considering his advanced state of intoxication. He claimed that the film version of John Fowles’ The Collector, in which the protagonist kidnaps and imprisons a young woman, had been his inspiration when he was a teenager. Robert Berdella died of a heart attack in 1992 at Jefferson City Correctional Center, after writing letters to a minister claiming the prison officials were not giving him his heart medication.