An incident of a cannibal vampire attack in Papua New Guinea occurred on Oct. 9, when Rex Eric allegedly bit his 3-year-old daughter to death and sucked her blood. The crime was first reported by a local paper in Papua New Guinea, and while the events have not been independently verified, similar incidents have been reported across the country.

Eric was arrested by the local police after two boys climbing a tree nearby saw what he was doing and ran for help, according to a story by the Post-Courier’s Franco Nebas. Local government official John Kenny told Nebas Eric laughed at the boys and continued eating the girl’s flesh and sucking her blood.

The incident of cannibal vampirism has left some students wondering how someone could possibly do this to another person.

Student Kathryn Bragwell believes a mix of religion and insanity could be the cause behind such an attack.

“I think it’s a little of both,” Bragwell said. “It was probably just because somebody got into his head.”

Religion is not to blame, said student Savannah Watkins.

“I don’t know; I think he was just crazy,” Watkins said. “There was something wrong mentally with him.”

The capacity for cruelty exists within mankind, but social institutions and constraints have stopped the more extreme forms of cruelty in most countries, said Larry Bates, associate professor of psychology. Bates said he believes those institutions and constraints are not established in places like Papua New Guinea.

Bates said there are several different theories on the reasons people commit cannibalistic acts.

“There are a lot of theories, some of them from what we call nurture theories, that it’s something in the environment that causes that,” Bates said. “And while some of those seem somewhat valid, that they had bad parenting or they learned this behavior from somebody, it just almost doesn’t seem possible that it could come from relatively normal homes, (or) that somebody could come out that bizarre.

“We have got other theories that they have some deficiency in emotional learning. There’s something called the hypo-arousal or under-arousal hypothesis that says that the brain is just not as aroused by normal stimuli like the rest of us, and because of that, they have to up the ante to get enjoyment.”

There is likely a learning element involved as well, Bates said.

“Here in America, we’ve had all the vampire movies out and somebody doing something that bizarre is probably more likely,” Bates said. “We get a lot more exorcism cases after the movie ‘The Exorcist’ comes out, for example. Certainly, I think we can learn, ‘Oh, so that’s the context in which I need to express my psychopathology,’ but to truly be like that, where one would actually engage in biting their child, it just reeks of psychopathology to me and more of a genetic component than a learned component.”

America certainly has had its share of crazy killers. There is the case of Charles Manson, who founded a hippie-cult group called “the family,” whom he manipulated into brutally murdering others for him. Then there is Jeffrey Dahmer, who raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys — many of his murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism and the permanent preservation of body parts.

Bates cautions blaming this act of cannibal vampirism on religion.

“I think people need to be cautious about blaming it on religion, when in fact it may just be one kooky, crazy person out there that’s got a gathering,” Bates said. “It could be a religious ritual, but it equally could be just psychopathology. I think it was the kooky person more than the religion. I’m not saying that this person may not have used religious rhetoric — I’m just saying that it’s more unusual for actual faiths to embrace that.”