Issei Sagawa
One of the more notorious cannibals in recent history is Japan’s Issei Sagawa. Sagawa was studying in Paris when he met 25-year-old Dutch student Renee Hartevelt. On June 11, 1981, Hartevelt was visiting Sagawa at his apartment when he shot her in the back. After she was dead, Sagawa spent two days eating parts of her body.
In
his memoir, Sagawa said that he ate the red meat of her buttocks raw. He said that it was tasteless and odorless, but it melted on his tongue like raw tuna sashimi. Next, he cooked flesh from her hip in a roasting pan, describing it as decent, but flavorless until he added mustard and salt. He also baked parts of Hartevelt’s breasts, but didn’t like them because they were too greasy. His favorite was meat from the thighs, which he described as “wonderful.”
Sagawa was arrested three days later, after witnesses saw him disposing of the body. He was declared insane and put into an asylum. In 1985, he was deported back to Japan, where they found him sane, but evil. However, the French authorities refused to hand over the evidence needed for a criminal trial. Since the Japanese authorities had declared him sane and could not try him as a criminal, Sagawa became a free man. After his release, he wrote a book and became something a celebrity in Japan. However, in a later interview he
rolled back on some of his claims: “In my book, I wrote that it was tasty, but that was not really true; I’d much rather eat Matsuzaka [Kobe] beef. But because I’d desired to consume human flesh for so long, I’d managed to convince myself that it would necessarily be delicious.”