A CANNIBAL killer who murdered and ate a female classmate has never served time in jail and has even become a celebrity in his home country.
When French police questioned Issei Sagawa about the murder of Dutch student Renee Hartevelt, he chillingly replied: “I killed her to eat her flesh.”
What followed was one of the most disturbing crime cases ever recorded.
Born in 1949 in Kobe, Japan, Sagawa claims he first fantasised about eating human flesh when he was just six years old.
His favourite story as a child was Hansel and Gretal, and he even recalls staring at classmates’ thighs in primary school and thinking: “Mmm, that looks delicious”.
As he got older, his cannibalistic fantasies took on a sexual component, and he started fantasising about eating the flesh of women, particularly western celebrities such as actress Grace Kelly.
At 23, he first tried to act on his desires when he broke into the Tokyo apartment of a young German woman wearing a Frankenstein’s monster mask.
Thankfully, she woke up before the attack and was able to overpower the 4ft9in Sagawa.
When police arrested him, Sagawa claimed he had intended to sexually assault the woman, believing that he would be treated more leniently than if he said he wanted to eat her.
His wealthy father paid the young woman to drop the attempted sexual assault charges, and Sagawa was free.
In 1977, the 28-year-old Sagawa was accepted at Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne University to study languages and literature.
It was there that he struck up a friendship with Dutch student Renee Hartevelt, and she would regularly visit his apartment to give him German lessons.
But Sagawa was consumed by his sickening desires and bought a rifle with the intention of murdering the 5ft11 Renee and cannibalising her body.
He frequently hired sex workers and brought them back to his apartment with the intention of killing and eating them, but each time he couldn’t bring himself to go through with his crimes.
On the night of June 11, 1981, when the 25-year-old had visited his apartment to have dinner, Sagawa crept up behind her as she was reading poetry and shot her in the neck.
He said he briefly felt remorse for the murder, later recalling: “I thought about calling an ambulance, but then I thought, ‘Hang on, don’t be stupid’.
“You’ve been dreaming about this for 32 years and now it’s actually happening!'”
He then indulged in a truly horrific few days of violence, raping Renee’s dead body before eating parts of her flesh.
Some of the flesh he ate raw, while other parts he cooked before consuming.
Over the course of the next stomach-churning two days, Sagawa ate portions of Renee’s breasts, calves, lips, and thighs, until deciding it was time to dispose of her remains.
He bought two large suitcases and placed her body parts in them before calling a taxi. The unknowing cab driver joked if Sagawa’s heavy bags contained a dead body as he helped him with them, before driving him to a nearby park.
The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June when women start wearing less and showing more skin
Issei SagawaJapanese Cannibal
As he tried to dump the suitcases containing Renee’s body in the Bois de Boulogne Park, two horrified joggers saw blood dripping from them and alerted police.
Police were called and were able to connect the cases to Sagawa with the help of the taxi driver.
Inside his apartment, they found the remnants of a meal including cooked human flesh as well as Renee’s photo ID card.
He was arrested and was held in France for two years where psychologists examined him.
As had happened in 1972, his wealthy father stepped in and, with the help of a top lawyer, had Sagawa declared legally insane and unfit to stand trial.
He spent the next four years in a French maximum security psychiatric unit, during which time he notoriously wrote and illustrated a novel, In The Fog.
The book told the story of a man who murders a woman, rapes her corpse, and eats pieces of her flesh, leading many to conclude it was a true account of his crimes.
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In 1985, grisly crime scene photos from Renee’s murder and dismemberment were leaked to the press and published in a popular French magazine.
The outrage over the publication led to one reporter being arrested and 200,000 copies of the magazine being seized by authorities.
After being deported back to Japan in the wake of the backlash from In The Fog, he was sent to a Tokyo hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
Japanese doctors determined he had a personality disorder but wasn’t legally insane, and could be held criminally responsible for his despicable crimes.
However, French authorities didn’t want to help with the prosecution and so, due to a legal loophole, Sagawa was bafflingly allowed to walk free in 1986.
He became a celebrity in Japan and even starred in a porn film in 1992 in which he pretended to cannibalise a woman.
Sagawa has also written nearly 20 books and a weekly column in a Japanese magazine.
He wrote restaurant reviews and even appeared on Japanese cooking shows where he ate raw meat. He sold paintings, many of them featuring nude women, to support himself.
Today, the 72-year-old Sagawa lives under a new name in Tokyo being cared for by a younger brother following a 2013 stroke, and admits he still has a desire to eat human flesh.
He told an interviewer he still can’t help but see a beautiful woman and “wonder what she might taste like,” although he claims he would never act upon his vile urges.
Sagawa also claimed being a cannibal was “simply a fetish,” adding: “If a normal man fancied a girl, he’d naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right?
“To me, eating is just an extension of that. Frankly, I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t feel this urge to eat, to consume other people.”
“The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June when women start wearing less and showing more skin,” he said, in a chilling interview last year.
“Just today, I saw a girl with a really nice derriere on my way to the train station. When I see things like that, I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die.”
In 2018, a film called Caniba was made about his life.
He has never apologised for his crimes or reached out to Renee Hartevelt’s family.
