Issei Sagawa, Japanese Cannibal Who Killed And Confessed But Never Got Punished For His Crime

Japan's Issei Sagawa confessed to the crime of killing a Dutch woman and eating parts of her body while he was studying in France in 1981.

How perfectly do the stars of a person need to be aligned so he confesses to a crime but still walks free for the rest of his life? Japan’s Issei Sagawa could be put on this rare list. He had confessed to his crime of killing his Dutch friend and feeding on her body parts, and yet remained unpunished for the rest of his life. In 1981, Sagawa, who was studying in Paris, invited a Dutch student, Renee Hartevelt, to his home and shot her in the neck, and raped her, as per an AFP report.

He then consumed parts of her body over the course of three days before attempting to dispose of her remains. On the afternoon of June 12, 1981, Sagawa walked into the woods in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne to dump the corpse in a remote lake when witnesses spotted him and he was arrested, according to a report on Vice. 

Sagawa confessed his crime to the police but was deemed legally insane to stand trial and was deported to Japan in 1984. Once in Japan, the authorities ruled him sane stating that his only problem was a “character anomaly”, ruling out requirements for hospitalisation. But the Japanese authorities could not secure his case files from their French counterparts who considered the case closed — while Hartevelt’s family continued to push for his prosecution — leaving Sagawa a free man, the AFP report cited above said. 

On November 24, 2022, the "Kobe Cannibal” Sagawa died of pneumonia. 

‘Regretted Killing, Wished To Eat Her Living Flesh’

Before pulling the trigger on Hartevelt, Sagawa would bring a prostitute to his Paris home almost every night trying to shoot them to satiate his cannibalistic urges. “But for some reason, my fingers froze up and I couldn't pull the trigger,” he told Vice in a chilling 2009 interview. This made him vow to carry out the “ritual” to kill a girl no matter what and after meeting several French women, Sagawa spotted Renee Hartevelt who was "friendly and warm", as described by him.

Sagawa was a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris at that time. He invited Hartevelt to his house for a party one day when she “became another candidate for my ritual". Sagawa would then frequently call her to his place, pointing a gun at her from behind, still not able to shoot her. 

On one occasion, he pulled the trigger but it misfired, which made him even more hysterical. Two days later, he again called Hartevelt to his home, “slowly crept up from behind, took a deep breath, held it in when my lungs were half-full, and pulled the trigger”. She was dead this time. 

“For a split second, I thought about calling an ambulance, 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!" Sagawa told Vice Japan's editor, Tomo. 

“This must sound rich coming from me, but the moment the girl became a corpse, I realised that I had lost an important friend and even regretted killing her for a moment. What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh.”  

'Human Meat Is The Tastiest Of All Meats’ 

Sagawa delved into the harrowing details of his crime, retelling how he devoured the body parts of his dead friend.

“It was truly a historical moment for me,” he said. 

As he fed on his victim “mostly raw”, Sagawa said he found human meat to be the “tastiest” of all meats and is “odourless”. 

Sagawa’s Cannibalistic Urges 

Describing himself as physically weak since birth, Sagawa said it was in the first grade of elementary school when he first saw “quivering meat” on a male classmate’s thighs and thought, “That looks delicious.” Denying himself to be a homosexual, he said that “tall, healthy-looking Western women” became the trigger of his cannibalistic fantasies. His urge was “purely” a form of sexual desire as he wanted to “merely gnaw” on their flesh and not to kill or eat them per se, he was quoted as saying in the interview. 

“It wasn't like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry.” 

For Sagawa, cannibalism was an extension of sexual intimacy of sorts. “If a normal man fancied a girl, he'd naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right? To me, eating is just an extension of that.” 

Life In Japan 

Sagawa gained a level of celebrity status in Japan, as he would frequently give interviews to domestic and international media and also produced a manga depicting his crime. He was also referenced by Rolling Stones and The Stranglers in their songs, according to the AFP report cited above.