Online Killers (3 page)

Meiwes’s culinary plans didn’t come to fruition with any of these candidates, but he was a patient fellow. It was not until early 2001 that his message, “Searching for a well-built young man who would like to be eaten by me,” was greeted by, “I am offering myself to be eaten but alive. No slaughter but consumption.”

Who would reply favorably to an invitation like “Gay male seeks hunks 18-30 to slaughter,” unless that nightmarish sentiment stirred something deep and secret within?

From the start secure within the confines of the rambling half-timbered house so painstakingly customized by his host, Bernd placed his glass on the table beside him and rose. Smiling, he embraced the tall man standing before him and allowed himself to be led out of the room and along a narrow hallway. Once in Meiwes’s bedroom, he lay down on the bed and, with that same vapid smile on his face, he watched as the 41-year-old man produced something sharp that gleamed in the lamplight.

Bernd closed his eyes and waited.

First he felt his fly being unzipped and then his slacks slowly being tugged off. Meiwes was gentle but firm, wary of doing anything that might spoil the coming moment. Bernd snapped at him, “Just do it. Just cut the thing off!” Taking Bernd’s flaccid penis in his hand, Meiwes drew the razor-sharp blade slowly across the member several times until it separated from his guest’s body.

The pain must have been excruciating and the flow of blood powerful, but this Meiwes partly staunched with a wet towel. Without immediate medical assistance, Bernd would bleed to death, but death is exactly what he wanted.

Both men were unable to consume the penis raw and, unfortunately, when Meiwes tried to cook it, he burned it black.

With Bernd bleeding heavily from his mutilated groin and his time running out, the two men agreed to forgo the first course and head directly for the main dish. With a glass of wine in one hand, the guest proffered the “delicacy” to his host. Meiwes gladly accepted and, as Bernd looked on, he savored the heady sensation of realizing this powerful mutual fantasy, then took up his knife and fork.

In the yellowy light of the dining room, the delighted castrator tucked into this most succulent, although overdone piece of flesh, savoring it as one might a tender venison steak. He had taken the liberty of frying the organ in garlic butter—he had trusted his guest had no objections. Then, after voicing his approval, he gestured for Bernd to join him and both tucked in.

After dinner, Meiwes waved away his guest’s polite offer to help him clear the table. He invited him instead to sit down and make himself comfortable with another cognac. Before long, the two men repaired again to the bedroom, where, after saying goodbye to the almost unconscious Bernd, the gracious host took one last longing glance at the crudely cauterized, gaping, bloody hole between his new friend’s legs.

It took many hours for the man to die, during which time Meiwes read a
Star Trek
novel before setting to work with the sharpest of his bread knives.

Meiwes had a video camera rolling at the time. He had decided early on in the proceedings that he would allow himself the opportunity to relive this moment time and again. Similarly, Bernd’s willing emasculation, followed by the unforgettable meal, was captured for posterity.

After Meiwes had finished plunging his knife into his guest’s throat, he picked up his video camera and dragged the bloody corpse into his special room. It was here, after he had
suspended the body from a meat hook, that the next phase of the ritual began.

At peace in his self-constructed abattoir, surrounded by heavy metal hooks and drains, Meiwes opened the body from groin to sternum and gutted it as one would a deer. Throughout the night he labored, hacking and severing until finally, one dismembered corpse later, it was time to separate the choicer fleshy morsels and render them into what he would later describe as “meal-sized packets.”

With his special food supply placed in his freezer along with the dead man’s skull, he disposed of the cumbersome bones and teeth—and let us not forget the innards—by burying them in the garden.

Meiwes would consume a piece of his friend almost every day, but he never finished the task, for frozen chunks of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes were discovered in his home on his capture on December 10, 2002. Indeed, the crime only came to light when Meiwes, having chewed through 44 pounds of his victim, began to search for another dish on the internet, and a correspondent invited to become a meal took fright.

After being tipped off by worried internet chat room users about the existence of disturbing ads placed by Meiwes, undercover police officers posing as respondents quickly determined that the ads were meant literally. When Meiwes was eventually arrested, his reaction was one of confusion. Why was he being taken away? No crime had been committed. He contended it had all been completely consensual, a congenial arrangement for their mutual pleasure—victim and killer, in it together. The cops, however, took a somewhat different perspective, and the protesting Meiwes was promptly marched off to the police station.

From the very start of his sensational trial, which opened in Kassel on a suitably overcast day, Wednesday, December 3, 2003, Meiwes’s primary objective, with the aid of his lawyers, was to convince the jury that he was not a murderer. This they ultimately achieved. The prosecution struggled laboriously to secure dual convictions pertaining to “sexual murder” and “disturbing the peace of the dead.” But the fact that videotaped evidence showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brandes had been perfectly happy to have his peace disturbed after his demise did not help their case one bit.

After taking in the evidence that the victim had been a willing participant in his own killing, the court was shown the videotape. The pair had clearly been in agreement about filming the killing and the subsequent butchering.

Brandes was seen explaining that, for him, being eaten would be the fulfillment of a dream. As the carnage began, the video revealed two men locked into a very private world.

One of those viewing the grisly film, which also showed Meiwes talking to the severed head while he disemboweled the body, actually fainted.

The court heard that the killing had taken place in March 2001. Brandes had been reported missing at this time. The judges heard how, for the defendant, the act of eating another human being was akin to the merging of two souls. It was the nearest feeling Meiwes could experience to being close to another person.

At the trial, and with considerable understatement, both Meiwes and Brandes were described as “having mental difficulties,” and Meiwes did little to dissuade psychologists from persisting in this notion. He disclosed in detail how he had achieved his closeness with Brandes by eating pieces of him for
more than a year and stated that by so doing he had gained the dead man’s ability to speak English.

On the topic of the unique dinner, the defendant had an important culinary message to impart. After first trying, unsuccessfully, to bite off Brandes’s penis—at his request—he decided that it should be severed with a knife. The freshly removed organ was then sautéed, flambéed and prepared to be served. Meiwes, with a touch of Hannibal Lecter’s panache, delivered his verdict on the dish: “It was passable, but a little tough. It would have been better braised.” He paused before adding, “And the wine, a Riesling, was not at all correct, too sweet, lacking body. Next time, perhaps, a Pomeral.”

Later, with the slaughtered Brandes in pieces in his freezer, Meiwes positively reveled in dining every day on this special meat. Retrospectively, the self-confessed connoisseur of human flesh commented, “Honestly, I’ve taken a fancy to American-style cuts rather than traditional German or French.”

A brief background of the defendant was supplied by the usual gamut of family, friends and neighbors, who described the killer as pleasant and mild-mannered, a mostly quiet man who kept himself to himself.

He had served a dozen years in the German Army as a noncommissioned ordnance officer and was said to have been an amiable and conscientious military man. After leaving the armed forces in 1991, Meiwes retrained as a computer technician and started working for a software company in the Rhine Valley city of Karlsruhe.

Evoking vividly the shades of Norman Bates from Hitch-cock’s
Psycho
, Meiwes had lived with his mother in the farmhouse and remained there for several years after her death. One neighbor had put it succinctly for reporters: “He was a mama’s
boy.” The young Meiwes had been totally fixated with his overbearing mother, who had never let him have a girlfriend. Meiwes, who in any case preferred boys, had meekly acquiesced. He himself later recounted how his desire to eat another man had begun during puberty and that his fantasy had become so powerful over the years that he always knew he would one day enact it.

Had Meiwes been convicted of murder he would most likely have ended up spending the rest of his life in prison. Considering the ghastly acts involved, justice would surely have demanded no less. Instead, after adhering more to Meiwes’s lawyer’s claim that his client had merely assisted in a suicide, a panel of judges decided to convict the cannibal of manslaughter. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

The sentence equates to just over two years for every ten pounds of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes that Meiwes cooked and ate.

Though the court rejected the defense solicitor′s main argument, that Meiwes should be convicted of “killing on request,” a form of illegal euthanasia carrying a shorter sentence of six months to five years, it was agreed that he could not be found guilty of murder.

Judge Volker Muetze, one of those presiding at the trial, said the deed was “viewed with revulsion in our civilized society,” but, on the basis of the very clear video evidence presented, Meiwes had not committed murder, the hushed courtroom was informed. Instead, he had displayed “a behavior which is condemned in our society, namely the killing and butchering of a human being. Seen legally, this is manslaughter, killing a person without being a murderer.”

As the verdict was read, Meiwes maintained the same relaxed posture he had throughout the two-month trial, where he
had earlier been given the opportunity to question witnesses against him. This he had done in a most precise and unemotional manner.

Meiwes had been waiting for many years for an opportunity to realize his gruesome fantasies. With the advent of the internet he seized his chance. Taking full advantage of the medium’s success as a huge dating agency, he was able to cast his net for prospective candidates. It transpired that Meiwes had “auditioned” four other potential victims who had agreed to be examined for physical suitability by the prospective killer.

Hooked by internet ads proclaiming lurid offers like “I could just gobble you up” and “Let me feast on you,” these four individuals—three from Germany and one from London—traveled separately to Meiwes’s house for their interview and examination. Three of the men baulked when faced with the reality of being cannibalized, having initially assumed it was all part of some erotic role-playing game. The fourth was rejected as “pudgy and unsexy” by the very particular Meiwes.

Continuing to trawl the internet in search of the perfect human meal, Meiwes eventually stumbled across his main course.

After his trial and sentencing, it was observed by many eminent authorities that on his release—possibly as early as 2008—it is unlikely that he will become a repeat offender.

One expert on cannibalism, an author named Jacques Buval, felt slightly differently about the matter: “Cannibalism is like pedophilia. It is in him. You can’t cure it. He will want to do it again.” Judge Muetze made this disturbing observation: “We have learned through this process that there is a massive cannibal following out there [on the internet].”

The sentence was appealed by the prosecution, resulting in a new trial in April, 2005. A psychiatrist at the second trial testified
that Meiwes “still had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people” and, if released, could reoffend. The court re-sentenced him to life imprisonment for murder.

So how many other ghouls like Armin Meiwes are presently at work, flourishing as a result of the ease of ensnaring their prey over the internet? Dozens, hundreds, thousands?

Research has shown that there are an estimated 10,000 cannibal websites, with millions of equally lonely people who sit for hours and hours in front of their computer screens, fantasizing about eating someone—perhaps
you
!

The Meiwes case has opened the door on something far more insidious and pernicious: the secret world of the suburban cannibal, and the internet is the key.

The four men who met Meiwes before he killed Brandes were clearly prepared to indulge in a deep and dark sexual fantasy, part bondage and part flagellation. They allowed him to wrap them up in cellophane and mark out their body parts as joints of meat. When they chickened out, Meiwes let them go.

Countless websites linked to hard-porn sites are dedicated to cannibalism and portray horrific photographs of women apparently being prepared for eating by roasting and boiling alive.

Are the Western world’s eating habits changing, or what?

—SAUL DOS REIS AS HE ADVERTISED FOR PEN PALS ON THE WEB FROM JAIL

 

 

Twenty-five million Americans visit cyber sex sites for between one and ten hours a week, while another 4.7 million log on for in excess of 11 hours per week. And when Saul Dos Reis, a 24-year-old Brazilian national living in Greenwich, Connecticut, lured 13-year-old Christina Long to her death, he used the internet to help him.

On May 17, 2002, Dos Reis would meet the pretty, golden-haired schoolgirl. Before he left her that night, he had raped and strangled her.