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Cannibal Who Ate Friend Is Free And Wants To Do It Again

Cannibal Who Ate Friend Is Free And Wants To Do It Again

Japanese man Issei Sagawa has been free since 1986 - and is ready to eat human flesh again

Simon Catling

Simon Catling

Everything in this world is terrifying - even just walking the street is liable to be risky for all sorts of reasons.

Well, here's another one: in Japan a cannibal killer has been free to walk the streets since 1981, and he's on records as saying he'd happily eat again.

Born in the Japanese city of Kobe, Issei Sagawa murdered, dismembered and devoured Renee Hartevelt in 1981 while studying in Paris - but spent little time inside for his punishment.

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In an interview from 2017, Sagawa has subsequently admitted that he was fulfilling a dream 32 years in the making and that he'd happy do it again.

According to All That's Interesting, Sagawa says that he first realised he had a fetish to eat a fellow human after seeing a classmate's thigh in school and thinking "Mmm, that looks delicious." However, it wasn't until he moved to Paris to study that he acted on his impulses.

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

"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 befriended Dutch student Renee Hartevelt and invited her back to his place for dinner, with the intention of shooting her from behind before eating her.

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Grimly enough, he failed to kill her at the first attempt, misfiring the gun. Somehow, though, she returned the next night and he was successful in his aim.

"I thought about calling an ambulance," he recalled.

"But then I thought, 'Hang on, don't be stupid. You've been dreaming about this for 32 years and now it's actually happening!'"

We'll spare you the grizzly details, but Sagawa went onto say that tasting her flesh was an 'historical moment' for him, adding that his only regret was not having 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."

Two days after the murder, Sagawa packed the parts of the body he hadn't eaten into a suitcase and got a taxi to Paris' park Bois de Boulogne. He hoped to dump the body parts in a secluded lake there - however, passers-by couldn't help but notice the blood dripping from the suitcase he was carrying around.

He was swiftly reported and found by French police, to whom he confessed straight up that he killed her to eat her flesh.

That should've seen Sagawa behind bars, but French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere declared him legally insane and unfit to stand trial, dropping the charges and ordering him to be held indefinitely in a mental institution.

He was then deported back to Japan, where was supposed to spend the rest of his time in a Japanese mental hospital.

However, with the the charges in France dropped, the court documents were sealed and couldn't be released to Japanese authorities. Therefore they had no case against Sagawa and had to let him walk free.

Sagawa checked himself out of the mental health institution and has been a free man since - and seemingly well up for another feed of human flesh.

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

"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."

Chilling.

Featured Image Credit: Getty

Topics: World News, Weird, Japan