The year was 1981. 25 year old Renee Hartevelt was a Dutch student studying with Issei Sagawa (also known as Pang) at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Unbeknownst to anyone, Sagawa was a man with perverse longings. Over time, he gained Hartevelt's trust, then he attempted to kill her. On one attempt the gun misfired while her back was turned. “[It] made me even more hysterical and I knew that I simply had to kill her,” he said. On the very next night he did. The gun fired and Hartevelt was dead. “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!" After killing her, he raped her corpse and began cutting her up to eat her flesh.
Sagawa was seen carrying two suitcases to Bois de Boulogne Park, just outside Paris, where he dumped them. The dismembered body of Hartevelt was found inside. Police arrested Sagawa, who openly confessed “I killed her to eat her flesh.” Despite eye witness accounts, evidence found at Sagawa’s apartment, and his confession of the crime, the judge found Sagawa legally insane and unable to stand trial for Hartevelt’s murder. He was deported back to Japan and institutionalized at Matsuzawa Psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where he was eventually able to checked himself out in 1986.
Sagawa loved his new found celebrity status as a murderous cannibal and profited from it. He has starred in documentaries, appeared on game shows and cooking shows, became a public speaker, published books, appeared in movies (including porn), created artwork, food critic and wrote columns for magazines etc.
Today he remains a free man, but his fame has waned. He lives on his inheritance and fees for interviews. His younger brother, Jun, has been taking care of him since he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in 2013, and ironically later in life, had a gastrostomy and can no longer eat.
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