Japanese Cannibal Who Got Away With Eating and Raping a Dutch Woman Is Dead

A Japanese cannibal who admitted to killing a woman in Paris and then defiling and eating her body, without ever serving a prison sentence for his crimes, has died, his brother confirmed on Thursday. 

Issei Sagawa, who died at age 73 of pneumonia on Nov. 24, gained international notoriety in 1981 after he brutally murdered his classmate, Renée Hartevelt. 

The then 32-year-old was a phD student in comparative literature at the University of Sorbonne and was obsessed with tasting human flesh. 

“Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her,” Sagawa told VICE in a 2009 interview. He wanted Hartevelt to let him taste a bit of her flesh while she was still alive, he said. 

Though he explicitly confessed to his gruesome crimes when he was caught by French police, claiming “I killed her to eat her flesh,” Sagawa never served a prison sentence. Loopholes in international laws allowed him to walk free, right up to his death. 

When he was arrested by French authorities, examining doctors declared him legally insane and unfit to stand trial, thereby leading authorities to deport him to Japan. 

But when Sagawa was sent to Tokyo’s psychiatric Matsuzawa Hospital upon return, doctors there gave him a different diagnosis. Psychologists found him sane and determined that he murdered the woman, aged 25, solely out of sexual perversion.

Yet because the charges against Sagawa in France had been dropped after he was deported, Japanese authorities couldn’t access sealed court documents and were unable to charge him without evidence. In the years since, no notable efforts have been made by authorities to charge Sagawa for his crimes. 

In later interviews Sagawa conducted with the media, he explained that he had been fascinated with cannibalism since the first grade, when he’d stare at a male classmate’s thigh. He also partook in bestiality with his dog.

He had tried to eat people before, but was scared to follow through. In Paris, he lured sex workers to his home almost every night but failed to kill anyone, until he met his Dutch classmate Renée Hartevelt.

Pretending he needed help learning German, Sagawa invited Hartevelt to his apartment. He said he chose her for her physical beauty, a quality he felt he lacked as a man with small hands and measuring under five feet tall. 

After attempting to murder her once, Sagawa killed her on June 11, 1981, creeping up behind her as she was reading poetry to shoot her in the neck with a rifle he’d bought and kept hidden. There are conflicting accounts about how he obtained the gun. He fainted at the sight of her pooling blood, he said in later interviews. 

After waking, Sagawa raped her corpse. He then ate parts of her flesh, both raw and cooked. Several days later, when her body started decomposing, he put her in two suitcases and dumped the bags in a lake in a public park just before sunset. Two joggers, who saw blood dripping from the suitcases, alerted the police. By this time, Hartevelt’s family had reported her missing. 

Sagawa made a living on his infamy after checking himself out of hospital on Aug. 12, 1986, once the Japanese legal system couldn’t charge him. He enjoyed about a decade of fame in Japan, where people were fascinated by his gruesome story. 

Sagawa wrote books and drew manga about his actions and cannibalistic desires. He also enjoyed a stint as an on-screen celebrity, starring in several pornographic films where he reenacted his crimes and appeared on cooking shows eating raw meat. He also sold nude paintings of women. 

Sagawa had been living with his younger brother in Tokyo and had a stroke in 2013. He admitted in 2009 that he still fantasized about eating a woman’s body, though he claimed he’d never act on what he called “simply a fetish.” 

"If a normal man fancies a girl, he naturally feels a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right?” he said in the 2009 VICE interview.

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