If you’ve never heard of Issei Sagawa, consider yourself lucky. The Japanese cannibal who killed and ate his former classmate over the period of three days is one of the most terrifying criminals ever, not just because he’s roaming free but because he has openly admitted that he would like to taste human flesh again before he dies. Ahhh!
- He first acted on his impulse in 1981. Sagawa was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris doing a PhD in comparative literature. While there, he purposely befriended his classmate Renée Hartevelt, eventually luring her to his apartment where he shot her, had sex with her corpse, and then began dismembering and eating her.
- This is one of the most horrific crimes ever. As if all of that wasn’t enough, Issei Sagawa cooked the flesh and “made teriyaki,” according to Canniba co-director Verena Paravel. After Hartevelt’s body began to decompose, he decided to dispose of it by packing the remains into suitcases and taking it to a local park. “How he did it was so stupid,” Paravel told The New York Post. “He did it before sunset when there were many people in the park.” He was seen by people in the park, who alerted the police.
- Oddly, Issei Sagawa isn’t spending the rest of his life in jail. Despite admitting to being a cannibal and expressing no remorse for his crime, he was deemed criminally insane during the trial and sent to a psychiatric hospital in France until 1983, when he was deported back to Japan. Unfortunately, he was never tried in his homeland and was therefore free to roam.
- Sagawa has always wanted to try human flesh. He said the obsession began when he was in third grade and glimpsed a classmate’s thigh. Finally killing and eating Hartevelt was a “historical moment” and he admitted at the time that his only regret is that he couldn’t eat her when she was still alive. “What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh,” he said. “Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her.”
- He doesn’t know why he has these urges. “It’s simply a fetish,” he attempted to explain. “For example, 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.” Yikes!
- Perhaps it goes without saying that Issei Sagawa is still a cannibal and would eat a woman again. “The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June, when women start wearing less and showing more skin,” he told VICE. “Just today, I saw a girl with a really nice derrière on my way to the train station. When I see things like that, I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die. So yes, I do still harbor these desires, and I specifically want to eat a Japanese woman this time. I think either sukiyaki or shabu shabu [lightly boiled thin slices] is the best way to go in order to really savor the natural flavor of the meat.” Well, I’ve lost my appetite.
You can watch a video interview with Sagawa below. Please be aware that the video contains potentially disturbing content, so watch at your own discretion.
