Almost 31 years ago, a 22-year-old man was arrested in Paris on suspicion of murder and the man they caught would go on to be given the nickname 'Vampire of Paris'.
This man was Nico Claux, he was suspected of killing 34-year-old Thierry Bissonnier, and when police searched his home they found a gun under his bed as well as human remains including fragments of bone and human teeth scattered about the place.
Other bones were hung from the ceiling of his Parisian apartment, jars of human ashes were kept on top of his TV and a number of stolen blood bags were in his fridge.
Claux confessed to murdering Bissonnier, having been caught after attempting to forge one of his victim's cheques, and explained that he had also robbed graves so he could mutilate the remains buried there, and had been stealing bags of blood to drink.
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He also admitted that he had been working in a mortuary to give him access to dead bodies and told police he cut off strips of meat from the corpses and ate them.
Sentenced to 12 years in prison, Claux was released in 2002 after just seven years behind bars and has since gone on to write The Cannibal Cookbook.
He recently appeared on Anything Goes with James English where the cannibal spoke about the moment he first got an appetite for human flesh.
Asked when he first had a fantasy about eating people, Claux claimed that he had been 12 when he saw a magazine with 'photos of a victim of a cannibal crime', and said that the graphic images 'had a really deep impact on me'.
He said he had 'psychopathic fantasies' about 'tearing flesh apart with his teeth', then alleged that when he was 17 he developed a fetish for blood before he got a job in a morgue.
"When I first started to work in the morgue I saw how easy it was when I was left alone for the autopsies to get strips of flesh from the body and eat them," the cannibal said.
"So at first it was raw, and then I cut little strips, brought them home, cooked them several ways and I also was working part-time in the surgery unit in digestive surgery.
"So one of the things that I had to do was go to the blood bank, get blood bags for the transfusions and they had a system with labels. Sometimes I would get the label off, pretend that the bag had been used and uh that would temper that their trust.
"I was able to steal a few blood bags, about two or three a week. So this is something that I did for the course of maybe five, six months while still working in the morgue."
The cannibal said that eating people 'wasn't about the taste' and instead he did it for 'the rush, the sensation' he got.
These days Nico Claux runs a website where he sells collectibles based on serial killers.
Topics: True Crime, Crime, World News
Joe Harker