Eat Thy Neighbour (31 page)

It was another two years before Claux was transferred from Fleury-Merogis jail to the Maison Centrale Poissy maximum-security prison. To make good use of his time, Claux studied computer programming and took up painting, for which he seemed to discover a latent talent. He joined the prison’s video staff and helped record concerts, football games and boxing matches and learned to edit the tapes they had made. Claux was
released back into an unsuspecting world on 12 March 2002, after serving only seven years and four months of his sentence.

Deciding that he deserved a holiday after his imprisonment, he visited Sweden and England before settling back down in Paris. Always a great self-promoter, Claux immediately went to work establishing himself as the self-proclaimed ‘Vampire of Paris’, advertising his past life on several websites that he continues to maintain. One site is dedicated to the sale of his paintings which, not surprisingly, deal with scenes of autopsies and portraits of famous serial killers and cannibals of the past. Claux’s artwork now adorns the official website of the Church of Satan and the covers and interior pages of several murder and cannibal-related books. On one of his websites he blithely provides instructions for would-be grave robbers and ghouls, expanding on his theme with the butchering and cooking instructions presented earlier in this chapter. Being every bit as promotion-minded as either Henry Lee Lucas or Issei Sagawa – both of whom we met in earlier chapters – Claux has turned his tawdry fame into a career by getting himself booked on to television chat shows and radio programmes where he happily expounds on his life as a ‘reformed’ vampire and cannibal. While he insists on one of his websites that ‘I do not profit from my past’, this is exactly what he is doing.

To keep his little ball rolling, and keep the money coming in, Claux attends Goth and vampire conventions where he lectures on his past lifestyle and sells paintings to his morbidly fascinated fans. If nothing else, Claux seems, through his newfound cult celebrity status, to have finally learned how to make friends with the living. They may not be the kind of friends that most people would want to have around, but if they keep him grounded enough not to kill, or eat anyone in the future, then they are doing their bit for civilisation.

He also seems to have calmed down a lot. He has a steady girlfriend and says he spends his spare time ‘painting, watching
horror flicks, working out and writing to other killers and watching documentaries on freaks or amputees’. He also insists that he has a fetish for murderesses: ‘I like girls who kill. There should be more of them.’ He does not, however, indicate whether or not his current girlfriend is a killer. While he claims to worship the devil, he simultaneously insists that he no longer eats human flesh and says, ‘I do not encourage other people into doing the things that I have done. The spiritual and social prices to pay are far too high.’ Odd sentiments for a Satanist.

Finally, if you, dear reader, wonder if Nicolas Claux, the Vampire of Paris, has any advice for you, the answer is yes. ‘I have a message for people who smoke, do drugs, eat junk food and drink alcohol . . . You have no respect for your own body . . . Do some sport, stop smoking, go on a protein diet, take care of your arteries. You will feel a lot sexier.’

Eighteen

Spider on the Web: Armin Meiwes (2001)

T
ragically, but possibly predictably, Armin Meiwes’ childhood shared much in common with many of the dangerously deranged characters we have met previously in this book. By all accounts his father was – and as of this writing, still is – a kindly if rather weak-spirited man who was absolutely no match for his shrewish wife, Waltraud. Waltraud, commonly known as Ulla, was a sharp-tongued harridan who took delight in venting her spleen on her two sons and husband. She seemed to find a particular satisfaction in bullying Armin, the younger of her two boys, derisively calling him ‘Minchen’, a deprecating term once used by Germans to refer to their servants. Some of the Meiwes’ neighbours insisted that Ulla was a witch, who was so evil that she must have been in league with the devil himself.

Torn between an unresponsive father and a cruel mother, Armin withdrew into a fantasy world shaped largely by old horror movies and the often disturbing characters from the traditional fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers. Because his mother discouraged him from having any friends of his own, Armin invented friends. His favourite was a make-believe boy named Franky who shared his burgeoning interest in everything dark and macabre.

As if it were not bleak enough already, eight-year-old Armin’s world took a decided turn for the worse when, in 1969, his father decided he had taken all he could of Waltraud. Packing
up Armin’s older brother and his belongings, he left, filing for divorce. He may have wanted to take Armin with him but, as is usual in such cases, the courts believed that young children should remain with their mother. In this case, the results of such an arrangement were to be disastrous. Now cut off from anyone who had even the slightest sympathy for him, Armin’s retreat into fantasy increased at an alarming rate. Deprived of any model on which to build normal reactions to life and family, he invented his own rules based on the experiences of his sad life. With his real brother gone Armin fantasised about what it would be like to have another brother, one who would not abandon him as his own had done.

He decided that the only sure way to bind this fantasy brother to him permanently would be to eat him. In this mixed-up world, images from the Brothers Grimm came flooding back; the tale of
Hansel and Gretel
– the siblings abandoned in the forest by their parents – who found themselves captured by a wicked witch, only to be fattened up until they were tender enough to eat, seemed to make some kind of sense. Even those few boys at school that Armin would have liked to have had for friends could only be seen in terms of how satisfying, how reassuring, it would be to serve them up on a plate. But none of his fantasies would ever come true – at least not as long as his loving mother stood in the way of Armin making any real friends.

She followed him everywhere, never letting him out of her sight, never letting him gain even the slightest inkling of independence. When Armin was old enough to start dating, Ulla insisted on chaperoning them. When he joined the armed forces she even trailed along when his company went on manoeuvres. How and why the officers allowed this has not come to light, but it certainly did nothing to endear Armin to his peers. When the other young men in his company went on leave, Armin was instructed to come home with mother. And home with Ulla was not the place any rational person would want to be.

When Armin was sixteen Ulla had bought a house on the outskirts of Rotenburg, not far from the city of Kassel. A rambling, ancient, tumbledown, half-timbered farmhouse, it already had the reputation of being haunted long before Mrs Meiwes and her browbeaten son moved in. With more than thirty dusty rooms punctuated by sloping floors and bulging walls, it did, indeed, look like something out of a Gothic horror novel or the stereotypical ‘haunted house’ from a children’s ghost story. If the place itself were not grim enough, the half-empty rooms with their hard linoleum-covered floors did nothing to impart the slightest hint of cheer, but it certainly fitted the mood of its inhabitants. When Armin was twenty years old his mother slapped a sign on the door of his room: ‘Kinderzimmer’ it read – ‘Children’s Room’ in German. So cowed was Armin by his tyrannical mother that even after she died in 1999 he left the humiliating sign in place.

Once out of the military, Armin Meiwes continued to live in the ramshackle house and earned his living as a computer engineer. To acquaintances and neighbours he seemed a perfectly normal, if slightly shy, man. He was always polite, offering to mow the lawn for elderly neighbours, helping people work on their cars and even occasionally inviting someone from the neighbourhood in for dinner. One neighbour later described him as being almost ‘childlike’ in manner. What no one knew was that the dark fantasies of his childhood had completely taken over his private existence.

No matter how awful his mother had been, she was the only anchor in Armin’s life and he simply had no idea of how to live without her. So, in his own way, he kept her alive. In an unbelievable reflection of the Norman Bates character from
Psycho
, Armin began wearing his dead mother’s clothes, wandering around the decaying mansion talking to himself in her voice. He even put a mannequin’s head on the pillow of her bed. If this was a newly created aspect of his fantastic inner
world, there were still plenty of other, more familiar fantasies to occupy his time.

The twisted dream of having a brother or friend who he could keep with him for ever by devouring their body had begun to take on new and ever more bizarre aspects. From a variety of underground internet sites, Meiwes began downloading pictures of torture and cannibalism. Before long, despite thousands of images stored on his computer and printed out, Meiwes needed more. He needed to find real people with whom he could share his fantasies. That is when he discovered literally hundreds of cannibalism-related websites floating around the darker corners of the net. Trawling sites with names like ‘Flesh and Bone’ and ‘Cannibal Café’, Armin found that not only was he not alone in his desire to eat someone, but that there were hundreds of unstable people in the world who were more than happy to entertain the thought of becoming someone else’s dinner.

Beginning late in the year 2000, Meiwes became a constant visitor to these sites, logging on to their bulletin boards and chat-rooms under the pseudonym of Franky, the name of his imaginary boyhood friend. In his personal ads, Meiwes solicited possible victims, specifying the type of person that he thought would look best in his oven. At first he asked for a man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, who was in good physical condition and would consent to be eaten. Although he would later raise the age limit to thirty, he always stated ‘slim and blond’ as a requisite. Between May and August 2001, Meiwes corresponded with over four hundred would-be cannibals and victims from all over Europe and the USA. Some of them answered his ad just to chat, but according to his computer files a total of two hundred and four men actually offered themselves up to sate his culinary peculiarities.

Literally thousands of these always grotesque, but frequently hysterical, exchanges survive. ‘Hi!’ one of them began, ‘Being
roasted alive, that is absolutely a beautiful concept.’ To another applicant he wrote, ‘I hope you can come quick to me, I am a hungry cannibal. Please tell me your height and weight and I will butcher and eat your fine flesh.’ Even the details of portion control found their way into these odd correspondences: ‘But keep in mind that with your weight there is about 35kg of your flesh available for eating.’ Even the festive season was an integral part of this cannibalistic correspondence. In January 2002, Jorg, one of Meiwes’ chat-room friends, enquired, ‘Did you kill any young men over the holidays?’ Armin responded, ‘It was the only thing I didn’t do over the holidays. Do you think that I have slipped out, [because] I want to kill a young man and eat him?’ Jorg’s blasé reply was, ‘No, there is nothing sexier than to be killed like a pig.’

Just how ‘sexy’ being killed like a pig might be is probably best left unimagined, but it is beyond question that such an end requires specialised equipment. So, just to be ready for any eventuality, Meiwes constructed a slaughterhouse on the third floor of his house. The windowless, attic room was painted in horror movie shades of blood red and stygian black. There were meat hooks hanging from the beams, a slaughtering table and a wood and wire cage in the corner. No cheap flick from the Vipco Vaults of Horror could have looked any sleazier.

While there is no way of knowing how much of the ghoulish conversation carried on over the websites that had become Meiwes’ secret world was nothing more than bored people letting their unwell imagination run wild, it is certain that some of the people who stumbled across Armin Meiwes were just as serious, and at least as sick, as he was. An Italian respondent, who identified himself as Matteo, asked if Meiwes would enjoy burning off his testicles with a blow-torch before crucifying him and then whipping him to death. Armin replied that he was not particularly into torture; he just wanted a friend who was willing to be eaten. At least one other applicant was also rejected by the
discriminating Meiwes. When Alex from Essen, Germany, asked ‘Franky’ to behead him, Armin refused, saying that Alex was just too fat. In one instance, however, Armin came awfully close to getting what he wanted.

Later, Meiwes recalled that a man named Andres from Regensburg, Germany, ‘wanted me to pick him up in a cattle truck and slaughter him like a pig. I told him to take the train.’ Amazingly, Andres did exactly that. Meiwes remembered their encounter. ‘I picked him up at the station and we went back to the butchery at my house. He wanted me to wear rubber boots, which I did. I wrapped him in cling film ready for slaughtering, but he backed out. So we just fooled around, drank beer and ate pizza.’

From as early as March 2001 Meiwes had been in almost constant communication with a man named Bernd-Jurgen Brandes who lived in Berlin. Like Meiwes, Brandes was a computer engineer and, since he also wanted to be eaten, the two had much on which to base their developing relationship. Whether Brandes originally got in touch with Meiwes, or it happened the other way round, seems in doubt, but certainly Brandes had his own posting on the Cannibal Café website. It read, ‘I offer myself to you and will let you dine from my live body. Whoever
REALLY
wants to do it will need a
REAL VICTIM
.’ However the two found each other, their relationship quickly evolved from chatty exchanges like the note Brandes sent to Meiwes in which he quipped, ‘You don’t have to buy meat again, there will be plenty left,’ to far more serious affairs.