Issei Sagawa, nicknamed the “Kobe cannibal” for eating a Dutch student in Paris after killing her, died more than 40 years after these events , which shocked the country and turned the killer into a media phenomenon. Sagawa died of pneumonia on November 24 at the age of 73 and only his relatives attended his funeral, his younger brother and a friend said in a statement. The report was issued by the publisher that published his memoir in 2019, written by Sagawa’s brother.
Issei Sagawa was a student at the Sorbonne University in Paris when, on June 11, 1981, he invited the Dutch Renee Hartevelt to his home for dinner. There he killed her with a rifle shot to her neck and raped her. Then he tore her to pieces and ate various parts of her body, for three days. He took many photographs of this macabre crime. Later he tried to dispose of his remains in two abandoned suitcases in the Bois de Boulogne park , on the outskirts of Paris. A few days later he was located and arrested, thanks to a call from police witnesses.
“Eating this girl was an expression of love. I wanted to feel inside me the existence of a person I love,” he confessed after his arrest.
Psychiatric experts considered him mentally ill and did not go to trial. He spent time in a mental institution in France before being deported to Japan, where he was released in August 1985. Although the Japanese authorities considered that he did not need to be hospitalized, they were never able to recover the files of their French judicial peers, considering that the case was closed. So Sagawa was released.
His transfer to Japan sparked outrage from the victim’s family, who vowed to put pressure on Japanese public opinion so that “the murderer would never be released.” Sagawa made no secret of his crime and rather benefited from his fame, with a memoir called “Into the Mist” , in which he described the murder in great detail. He also recounted his obsession with cannibalism in various interviews and in a 2017 documentary called “Caniba.” The news outlet Vice stated that he was “obsessed with cannibalism”.
“My desire to eat a woman became an obligation,” he said. His crime, which shocked public opinion but also aroused a certain morbid fascination for the author, inspired the Japanese writer Juro Kara, who in 1982 won the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize for his novel “Sagawa’s Letter” , centered on the murder. . The British group The Stranglers also alluded to the crime in their song, written in French, “La Folie”, released in 1981.