a newspaper saying as much, adding that he’d been framed by the Gestapo. A handwriting check soon established who he’d become, a Captain Valéry serving in Reuilly. He was arrested and after seventeen months in captivity he came to trial, charged with murdering the twenty-seven people whose remains the firemen had found.
One intriguing suggestion is that Pétiot at one time himself aroused the suspicions of the Gestapo – who arrested him as what he proclaimed himself to be: a member of the Resistance involved in smuggling people out of Paris. He was freed on the grounds that, in murdering Jews and people on the run, he’d simply been doing their work for them…
Pétiot gave people hope before brutally murdering them
Issei Sagawa
T he story of Issei Sagawa, a small, shy man who became a celebrity in his native country, is like the plot-line of a perverse Japanese movie. For Issei was a cannibal. On the evening of June 11th 1981, while studying in Paris, he invited a fellow student called Renée Hartevelt to his flat to help him with some translation. At some point during the evening, he asked her to have sex with him and when she refused, he calmly shot her in the back of the neck with a .22 rifle, undressed her and had sex with her corpse instead.
Then, in what he called ‘an expression of love,’ he began to eat her. He cut slices of flesh from her buttocks and consumed them raw, shuddering with delight. Later he cut her body into pieces, taking photographs and reserving choice cuts of meat along the way, and finally stuffed what remained into two suitcases, which he set off by taxi to dump into a lake in the Bois de Boulogne.
At the last minute, though, scared off by passers-by, he abandoned the suitcases and fled. The police were called; and soon found not only Renée’s mutilated corpse, but also the taxi driver who had driven him. Issei’s rifle – not to mention his photographs and his hoard of fresh meat – was quickly found in his flat, and he was arrested.
His confession was ready enough. A game of Giants and Cannibals played by his father and uncle at birthday parties, he said, had left him as a child with a morbid fear of being eaten and this fear had been transmuted during adolescence into an obsession with the idea of eating a woman. But he never came to trial. Instead he was declared insane and held in a mental asylum in Paris until May 1984, when he was returned to Japan under an agreement between the two countries – an agreement which happened to coincide with the signing of a contract between a Japanese company of which Issei’s father was president and a French conglomerate.
In Japan, where a book of his letters about the murder had been published, Issei quickly became a star; and after little more than a year, he was released from the Tokyo mental hospital to which he’d been confined, over the considerable objections of the hospital’s own deputy superintendent. In a magazine interview shortly after his release, he confessed that he still dreamed of eating another woman’s flesh – though this time, he said, with her consent. He went on to have a successful career as a journalist and television personality in Japan.
Issei Sagawa’s cannibalism shocked the Japanese public
Anders Behring Breivik
O n the afternoon of 22 July 2011, a curious compendium titled 2083 A European Declaration of Independence was emailed to over a thousand recipients around the globe. Its author was a complete unknown, but by the end of the day he would be famous – not for his writing, but as the worst spree killer in world history.
Anders Behring Breivik was born on 13 February 1979 in Oslo, but lived most of his earliest days in London, where his father, an economist, worked as a diplomat for the Royal Norwegian Embassy. At the age of 1, his parents divorced, setting off a custody battle that his father lost. Still an infant, Breivik returned with his mother, a nurse, to Oslo. Although
One intriguing suggestion is that Pétiot at one time himself aroused the suspicions of the Gestapo – who arrested him as what he proclaimed himself to be: a member of the Resistance involved in smuggling people out of Paris. He was freed on the grounds that, in murdering Jews and people on the run, he’d simply been doing their work for them…
Pétiot gave people hope before brutally murdering them
Issei Sagawa
T he story of Issei Sagawa, a small, shy man who became a celebrity in his native country, is like the plot-line of a perverse Japanese movie. For Issei was a cannibal. On the evening of June 11th 1981, while studying in Paris, he invited a fellow student called Renée Hartevelt to his flat to help him with some translation. At some point during the evening, he asked her to have sex with him and when she refused, he calmly shot her in the back of the neck with a .22 rifle, undressed her and had sex with her corpse instead.
Then, in what he called ‘an expression of love,’ he began to eat her. He cut slices of flesh from her buttocks and consumed them raw, shuddering with delight. Later he cut her body into pieces, taking photographs and reserving choice cuts of meat along the way, and finally stuffed what remained into two suitcases, which he set off by taxi to dump into a lake in the Bois de Boulogne.
At the last minute, though, scared off by passers-by, he abandoned the suitcases and fled. The police were called; and soon found not only Renée’s mutilated corpse, but also the taxi driver who had driven him. Issei’s rifle – not to mention his photographs and his hoard of fresh meat – was quickly found in his flat, and he was arrested.
His confession was ready enough. A game of Giants and Cannibals played by his father and uncle at birthday parties, he said, had left him as a child with a morbid fear of being eaten and this fear had been transmuted during adolescence into an obsession with the idea of eating a woman. But he never came to trial. Instead he was declared insane and held in a mental asylum in Paris until May 1984, when he was returned to Japan under an agreement between the two countries – an agreement which happened to coincide with the signing of a contract between a Japanese company of which Issei’s father was president and a French conglomerate.
In Japan, where a book of his letters about the murder had been published, Issei quickly became a star; and after little more than a year, he was released from the Tokyo mental hospital to which he’d been confined, over the considerable objections of the hospital’s own deputy superintendent. In a magazine interview shortly after his release, he confessed that he still dreamed of eating another woman’s flesh – though this time, he said, with her consent. He went on to have a successful career as a journalist and television personality in Japan.
Issei Sagawa’s cannibalism shocked the Japanese public
Anders Behring Breivik
O n the afternoon of 22 July 2011, a curious compendium titled 2083 A European Declaration of Independence was emailed to over a thousand recipients around the globe. Its author was a complete unknown, but by the end of the day he would be famous – not for his writing, but as the worst spree killer in world history.
Anders Behring Breivik was born on 13 February 1979 in Oslo, but lived most of his earliest days in London, where his father, an economist, worked as a diplomat for the Royal Norwegian Embassy. At the age of 1, his parents divorced, setting off a custody battle that his father lost. Still an infant, Breivik returned with his mother, a nurse, to Oslo. Although
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