On June 11, 1981, 32-year-old literature student Issei Sagawa invited his 25-year-old classmate, Renée Hartevelt, to dinner at his apartment in Paris under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment.
After she began reading, Sagawa shot the 25-year-old in the neck with a rifle. The shock caused the killer to faint, but Sagawa soon awoke, realizing he had to proceed with his plan of killing and eating her.
Sagawa chose her for her health and beauty, characteristics he believed he lacked. The cannibal considered himself weak, ugly, and small, and told the police he wanted to absorb her energy.
Sagawa then had sex with her corpse and ate various parts of her body, including breasts and face, and preserved other pieces in his refrigerator. The cannibal also took photographs while dissecting her corpse.
After fulfilling his perverse desires, Sagawa stuffed the girl’s body into two suitcases and tried to dispose of them in a lake.
He was caught in the act and arrested by the French police.
Despite the brutality of his crime, Sagawa was deemed unfit to stand trial due to insanity and spent five years in a mental facility.
After further testing, psychologists changed their opinion and declared him sane, attributing his sole motivation for the murder to sexual perversion.
However, Sagawa could not be legally detained in Japan, and despite public outrage, he walked free.
After his release, Sagawa gained notoriety as a Japanese celebrity.
Sagawa was frequently invited as a guest speaker and commentator, appeared in a movie as a sado-sexual voyeur, freelanced as a food critic, and authored twenty books about his crimes and fantasies.
His latest work, titled “Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls,” is filled with pictures drawn by Sagawa himself as well as other famous artists.
“I hope that people who read it will at least stop thinking of me as a monster,” Sagawa said.
On November 24, 2022, Issei Sagawa died from complications of pneumonia at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 73.
