Thread by @chimaihueze

Issei Sagawa.

A Japanese man, who escaped prosecution for murdering and eating a fellow student.

Thread 👇🏽

He was a student at the Sorbonne btwn 1977 & 1981, studying literature. But unknown to Parisians, their city’s population just grew by one cannibal.

Long before he moved to France, Sagawa was already experimenting with cannibalism, as he found an interest in it from a young age.

He was even charged in Japan with attempted rape of a woman whose home he broke into, but his true intent was to eat her.

In the years leading up to his attack on fellow classmate Renee Hartevelt, Sagawa attempted to murder several other women, mostly prostitutes.

But he never pulled the trigger, claiming his fingers would freeze up every time.

"Almost every night I would bring a prostitute home and then try to shoot them from behind” he said.

“It became less about wanting to eat them, but more an obsession with the idea that I simply had to carry out this ‘ritual’ of killing a girl no matter what.”

Eventually, he found the perfect victim.

Renee Hartevelt was a Dutch student studying with Sagawa at the Sorbonne.

Over time, they became friends, occasionally inviting her to his home for dinner. At some point, he gained her trust.

He attempted to kill her once, unsuccessfully, before actually murdering her.

The first time the gun misfired when her back was turned. Though most would take this as a sign to give up, it only pushed Sagawa further down his rabbit hole.

“It made me even more hysterical and I knew that I simply had to kill her,” he said.

He tried again. This time the gun fired and Hartevelt was killed instantly.

Sagawa only faced an instant of remorse before it turned to elation.
Immediately after killing her, he raped her corpse and began cutting her open.

"The first thing I did was cut into her buttock. No matter how deep I cut, all I saw was the fat beneath the skin. It looked like corn, and it took awhile to actually reach the red meat....

The moment I saw the meat, I tore a chunk off with my fingers and threw it into my mouth. It was truly a historical moment for me.” 🤮🤮

Ultimately, he said his only regret was that he hadn’t eaten her while she was 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.”

The body.

Sagawa also took photos of her body between each stage of eating, and cut up the rest of her to both store for later and dispose of.

But when Sagawa attempted to dump Hartevelt’s body in the river, police caught him in the act and arrested him immediately.

He awaited his trial for two years in a French prison. When it was finally time for him to be tried, the judge declared him legally insane and unfit to stand trial, dropping the charges and ordering him to be held indefinitely in a mental institution.

They then deported him back to Japan, where he would spend the rest of his days in a Japanese mental hospital.
But he didn’t.

Because the charges in France had been dropped, the court documents were sealed — they couldn’t be released to Japanese authorities.

Therefore, the Japanese had no case against Issei Sagawa and no choice but to let him walk free.

Issei Sagawa still walks free through the streets of Tokyo.

"The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June when women start wearing less and showing more skin,” he said.

“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.”

“What I’m saying is, I can’t bear the thought of leaving this life without ever tasting that derrière that I saw this morning, or her thighs”.

“I want to eat them again while I’m alive, so that I can at least be satisfied when I die.”

And he plans to eat again, before he dies...

Thanks for reading 😋😁

Source - @aggystacked