By John Ikani
Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who killed and ate a Dutch student in the 1980s, but was never Jailed, has died at the age of 73.
Sagawa died of pneumonia on Nov. 24 and was given a funeral attended only by relatives, with no public ceremony planned, his younger brother and a friend said in a statement.
Sagawa was studying in Paris in 1981 when he welcomed Renee Hartevelt, a Dutch student, to his home.
He shot her in the neck, raped her, and ate pieces of her body for three days.
He then tried to dispose of her remains in the Bois de Boulogne park, but was apprehended.
Sagawa was deemed unfit to stand trial by psychiatric experts, and he was initially detained in a mental institution in France before being deported to Japan.
He was ruled sane by Japanese authorities, but because the allegations against him in France had been dropped, he was released.
Sagawa shot to notoriety and celebrity status in Japan and throughout his life he showed no remorse for his actions.
He went on to write a novel-like memoir titled “In the fog,” in which he reminisced about killing Hartevelt, going into significant detail.
He would also give interviews to local and international media. In an 2009 interview with Vice, Sagawa went into detail about his cannibalistic tendencies and desires.
“After I went to study in Paris, my cannibalistic urges showed no signs of slowing down, he said.
“Almost every night I would bring a prostitute home and then try to shoot them from behind while they washed their vaginas at the bidet.
“I tried hundreds of times, but for some reason my fingers froze up and I couldn’t pull the trigger.
“From around that time, 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.”
Sagawa went into graphic detail about his killing of Hartevelt and even suggested that she should have let him eat a small part of her while she was alive to prevent him killing her.
He said: “This must sound rich coming from me, but the moment the girl became a corpse, I realized 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. Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her.
To this day, I still think, ‘If only she had let me taste her, just a little bit…’ If we had spend another evening having dinner and chatting about our families, I never would have been able to kill her.”
