The Cannibal Writer Who Was Never Punished: The Story of Issei Sagawa.
Type of criminal activity: murder, cannibalism
Who: Issei Sagawa
This story shocked me to my core. Not just because of the crime itself, but because Issei Sagawa remained free until his death, even though everyone knew who he was. He wasn’t some forgotten criminal — no, he actually became quite famous and made a living talking about the horrible crime he committed.
Issei Sagawa was born on April 26, 1949, in Kobe, Japan. His family was wealthy and well-off. Sagawa was born prematurely and sick. Doctors didn’t think he would survive long, but after a lot of treatment, he made it through, although he stayed weak and sickly for the rest of his life. In a 2011 interview with Vice, Sagawa said that puberty was a turning point for him. He admitted that, as a teenager, he committed sexual acts on his dog and said he had cannibalistic desires toward women as early as elementary school.
Sagawa’s first crime happened when he was 24. In Tokyo, he stalked a German woman. She was living in the same apartment his grandmother used to live in. The apartment was on the ground floor, so he snuck in while she was sleeping. His plan was to knock her out and then cut off a piece of her flesh. But she woke up and fought back. He was arrested for attempted rape. During the interrogation, Sagawa didn’t say anything about his cannibalistic intentions. His father paid the woman compensation, and she dropped the charges.
In 1977, Sagawa enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris. By the time he got to Paris, his obsession with cannibalism had turned into a full-blown need, even an addiction. He admitted that every night he fantasized about bringing a woman home and shooting her.
On June 11, 1981, Sagawa invited his 25-year-old classmate Renée Hartevelt over to his apartment under the pretense of working on some poetry together. While she was sitting at a table reading poems, Sagawa stood behind her and shot her in the neck.
He then had sex with her dead body. Afterward, he tried to bite off a piece of her flesh, but he couldn’t do it with his teeth. So, he went to the store, bought a butcher knife, and used it to cut up her body. He ate various parts of her, mostly the breasts, face, and buttocks. Sagawa took detailed pictures of every step of his gruesome crime, eating both raw and cooked flesh.
If you’re interested in the details, you can watch Vice’s interview with Issei Sagawa on YouTube. (Warning: Better Not Watch)
He put some of Renée’s remains in the fridge, then packed the dismembered body into two suitcases. He called a taxi and took the bags to the Bois de Boulogne park, near his university, to dump the body in a lake. While he was looking for the right spot to throw away the bags, a passerby got suspicious, opened one of the suitcases, and started screaming when he saw what was inside. And what did Sagawa do? He just walked away. Four days later, he was arrested.
Sagawa’s father hired a lawyer. After two years of being held in custody and going through interviews with psychiatrists and detectives, Sagawa was declared legally insane. He was sent to a criminal psychiatric facility. Later, he was deported back to Japan. He was placed in Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo, but after an examination, it was determined that he was mentally fit. Since France never officially charged Sagawa and the case documents were never given to Japanese authorities, he was able to walk free. On August 12, 1986, Issei Sagawa left the hospital and was released.
He lived a pretty active life. He was often invited by various media outlets as an expert, gave interviews, and had his articles published in magazines and newspapers. There’s even information that he worked as a restaurant critic at one point. Sagawa wrote several books about the murder of Renée Hartevelt, and in 1997, he published a book about Seito Sakakibara, a serial killer from Kobe. He also painted portraits of women and sold around the world.
Issei Sagawa admitted that he was haunted by cannibalistic fantasies for the rest of his life. He died on November 24, 2022, at the age of 73.
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