In 1981 he invited a friend to his house, killed her, raped her body and then ate her. Issei Sagawa, the “cannibal of Kobe”, died at the age of 73, and in the course of his life he only spent a few days in prison. Sagawa, who died of pneumonia, went down in horror history for the events that took place in Paris 41 years ago, when he decided to end the life of Dutch student Renee Hartevelt with a shotgun blast from behind her back.
He was arrested while trying to scatter its remains, after having eaten it for three days, in the Bois de Boulogne park. In France he was labeled insane, and ordered to be transferred to a psychiatric institution, but his father later managed to have him extradited to Japan, where he was declared sane.
The charges set up in France had been dropped, and Sagawa was able to spend his life as a free man, unpunished and never regretting what he did. Indeed, he profited financially from that crime by writing and selling books in which he narrates, among other things, the atrocious passages of the student’s end. He had recently said in an interview with Vice that he was “obsessed with cannibalism”. «My desire to eat a woman – he added – has become imperative».