Eat Thy Neighbour (32 page)

When Meiwes told Brandes how many of those who responded to his ad were not really serious, the 43-year-old Brandes responded with a line that may have been intended as an erotic tease. ‘I hope you are serious because I really want it. My nipples look forward to your stomach.’

As the two came closer and closer to meeting, their conversations got correspondingly stranger.

Soon, the records of their conversations show that things had moved from the realm of sick fantasy to bloody, matter-of-fact reality:

In retrospect, it would seem clear that Brandes meant every word of what he said to Meiwes because before leaving Berlin for Rotenburg he took the time to have his will drawn up. Obviously, he had no plans to return home.

On the evening of 9 March 2001, Meiwes picked Brandes up at Rotenburg railway station and drove him back to his creaking old house. Once there, Brandes got the grand tour of the place, including the slaughterhouse room on the top floor. After a loving romp in Meiwes’ bed, the men wandered downstairs to the kitchen where Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping pills, a bottle of night-time cold medicine and a bottle of schnapps. So as not to lose one minute of the action that was to follow, Meiwes dragged out his camcorder and trained it on the table where they sat discussing the forthcoming human feast. At some point, they started deciding just how to proceed with the business of doing away with Brandes. Finally, they determined it would be a fine thing if they could share some of Brandes’ flesh before his
final dispatch; it seemed like a last, friendly gesture to bind their deadly relationship.

While Brandes waited patiently, Meiwes got a butcher’s knife and cut off his new friend’s penis, bound the gushing wound, and sautéed the fresh meat in butter, adding a little garlic for flavour. When the meal was ready, they ate it together. Later, Meiwes remembered it as being ‘tough and unpalatable’, but such little inconveniences can be laughed off among friends. By the time they finished dinner, Brandes was becoming increasingly weak from blood loss and the drugs were beginning to take effect. There seemed little doubt that he would not last much longer, so Meiwes switched off the video recorder long enough to drag Brandes up the stairs to the bathroom where he placed him in a tub of warm water where he could, in Meiwes’ words, ‘bleed out’. While his friend lay slowly bleeding to death, Meiwes settled down with a
Star Trek
novel. How often Meiwes checked on Brandes’ progress is unknown, but ten hours later the man was still not dead so Meiwes decided to help him along.

Retrieving a kitchen knife, Meiwes knelt beside the bathtub, cradled Brandes’ head in one arm, kissed him gently on the lips, and plunged the knife into his throat. Hauling the carcass out of the tub, Meiwes proceeded to dismember and butcher the body of the man he had been having sex and dinner with only a few hours earlier. The result was 65lb of prime cuts, most of which were portioned out into freezer bags, neatly sealed and stashed in the chest freezer next to pizzas and other, more traditional foodstuffs. A small portion was kept aside for more immediate consumption. The scabrous leftovers – bones, skull, viscera and so forth – were taken to the garden where they were buried next to a barbecue grill that would later be used to prepare a few ‘Brandes steaks’ for the table.

To celebrate his first meal of fresh flesh, Meiwes set the table with his best linen, china, crystal and silver. The candles added a
nice, intimate touch. In true Hannibal Lecter style, Meiwes chose a bottle of South African red wine as a proper accompaniment to the delicate flavour of the meat.

Although he would later admit that Brandes had been something of a disappointment as a person, having lied about his age and not wanting to spend more time together before submitting to the slaughter, in retrospect he wasn’t such a bad guy. Meiwes insisted that Brandes had spoken much better English than he had, but once he began ingesting his friend his own English improved markedly. And there was a more romantic side to the coin as well. ‘With every bite, my memory of him grew stronger’, Meiwes would recall wistfully. And over the next ten months there were quite a few bites to enhance the memories.

The vast majority of Brandes would eventually be cooked and eaten, but well before the meat supply ran out Meiwes was back on-line looking for a new source of groceries. Meiwes complained to an on-line friend at one of the cannibal chat-rooms, ‘I hope I will soon find another victim, the flesh is almost gone.’ Now, as before, there seemed to be no shortage of people willing to sacrifice themselves to an on-line cannibal. In the coming months Meiwes would meet up with four of them, but in every case things seemed to go wrong at the last minute. Stefan from Kassel travelled to Rotenburg and got as far as the slaughter room, where Meiwes hung him on meat hooks, wrapped him in cling film and labelled the various parts to be dissected ‘steaks’, ‘chops’, ‘ham’ and so forth but, according to Meiwes, ‘We called it off because it was so damn cold in there.’ Whatever Armin Meiwes was, he was neither an out-of-control killer nor an inconsiderate host.

In the end it was one of Meiwes’ own correspondents who tripped him up. An Austrian student who had entered into conversation with Meiwes thinking the whole thing was a joke, soon realised he was in contact with a real-life cannibal
who had his eye firmly planted on some Wiener schnitzel. In July 2001, the student contacted the German police and told them everything he had learned about Armin Meiwes. For seventeen months the police tracked Meiwes’ progress on the net before finally closing in in December 2002, arresting Meiwes, and confiscating the remaining 15lb of Brandes’ body from the freezer. It was only a matter of days before a salacious international press was publishing photos of the German ‘Internet Cannibal’, his ramshackle house and the gory slaughter room on the third floor.

While Meiwes was sent off for examination by psychiatrists the local prosecutor’s office, under the direction of Marcus Kohler, set about putting together their case. The preliminary psychiatric report was a prosecuting attorney’s dream. Dr George Stolpmann described the 42-year-old Meiwes as having ‘no evidence of a psychological disorder’, but admitted that Meiwes did have a ‘schizoid personality’. Explaining this apparent contradiction, Stolpmann said, ‘What we have here is an inability to have warm and tender feelings towards others.’ With such a clear-cut case dropped into their laps, prosecutors must have been deeply chagrined to find that Germany had no laws against cannibalism. Considering previous cases such as Karl Denke and Georg Grossman, who were covered in an earlier chapter, this would seem to be an egregious legal oversight. Even at this early stage, prosecutor Kohler knew that because of Meiwes’ videotape of the killing, it would be virtually impossible to get a conviction for first-degree murder. Consequently, he decided to go for a charge of ‘murder for sexual pleasure’, with second-degree murder held in reserve as a back-up. The former charge would guarantee a sentence of fifteen years in prison, the second only eight-and-a-half. For good measure, they would also charge him with ‘disturbing the peace of the dead’. Whatever they could get him on, Kohler would do everything in his power to keep Armin Meiwes behind bars for as long as possible. In Kohler’s
words, Meiwes ‘slaughtered his victim like a piece of livestock and treated him as an object of fancy’.

Meiwes’ defence team knew there was no way their client was going to walk away when two hours of videotape showed his crimes in grisly, living colour, and the psychiatric report had already disallowed an insanity defence. They finally agreed on pleading guilty to ‘killing on demand’, a term usually used in cases of assisted suicide and euthanasia. This lesser charge would carry a maximum sentence of only five years in prison.

The trial began on 3 December 2003 with a slate of 38 witnesses to be questioned over 14 days. A major part of the prosecution’s case would be an airing of the two-hour video of Brandes’ death and dismemberment, but the three-judge panel requested that only the ‘relevant parts’ – those concerning ‘what the victim is saying and doing before and during the killing’ – be shown.

As he walked into court with his attorneys, Meiwes seemed amazingly relaxed, talking casually and joking. For his time on the stand, however, he was much more serious. Addressing the court, Meiwes explained that what he had done was a benefit to both himself and Brandes; saying that he had only wanted ‘someone to be part of me’ and that Brandes ‘enjoyed dying, death. Bernd came to me of his own free will to end his life . . . For him, it was a nice death.’ If he had any regrets it was in how long Brandes took to bleed out. ‘I only waited horrified for the end after doing the deed. It took so terribly long.’

As much as anything, it was Brandes’ state of mind that occupied the court’s attention. While psychiatrists had declared Meiwes to be sane, had Brandes been emotionally capable and mentally stable when he invited his own murder? Could anyone in their right mind consent to be slaughtered and devoured? The testimony, like much in the case, was contradictory.

Brandes’ father insisted that his son had never shown any signs of depression, and his most recent lover, 27-year-old René
Jasnik, agreed. He said Brandes and he were happy together, that Brandes had never entertained morbid or suicidal thoughts, and that they were in the midst of planning a summer holiday when Brandes took off for Rotenburg. Jasnik did admit that he had received a letter from Meiwes apologising for having eaten his boyfriend.

The flip side of this picture of Brandes as a stable, seemingly happy man came from a former, occasional sex partner who insisted that Brandes had once offered him 2,000 Euros to bite off his penis. At the end of the day, the only thing prosecutors and defence could agree on was the version of Brandes who appeared on video. ‘The victim appeared to be fully aware of the situation. Videotape material definitely shows both him and the suspect engaged in eating his own flesh prior to his death.’

Although not directly related to the Brandes case, Detective Inspector Wolfgang Buch told the court that Meiwes was under investigation for the presumed disappearances of at least two other men – one from Frankfurt and one from Austria – with whom he had been corresponding through the Cannibal Café. Buch concluded, ‘It is at this point impossible to say whether others among the 204 persons [with whom Meiwes had been corresponding] might also have been homicide victims.’

In his final statement before the court, Meiwes said, ‘[I] regret all that I have done’, insisting that he would not kill and eat anyone else in the future. Expounding on this theme he added, ‘I always had the fantasy and in the end I fulfilled it. I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again. I regret it all very much, but I can’t undo it.’

On Friday, 30 January 2004 the court concluded that Armin Meiwes had no ‘base motives’ in his killing of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, but that he was undoubtedly guilty of his death. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison. While Meiwes’ defence attorneys seemed satisfied, the prosecution immediately lodged an appeal.
In April 2005 the German courts ordered a retrial and it seems likely that the case will make its way through the system all the way to the German Supreme Court.

While he waited to find out what would happen, Armin Meiwes whiled away his time in prison writing his memoirs. Since there is no law in Germany prohibiting criminals from making money by selling their story to the press, publishers and movie companies, Meiwes looks forward to being a very rich man whenever he is finally released. Already a German film company has been awarded a government grant equivalent to $25,000 to begin work on a cinematic version of Meiwes’ story – tentatively titled
Your Heart in My Head
– and even Hollywood has its eye on the marketing possibilities of the Rotenburg Cannibal. Says Randy Sanchez, marketing director of a Los Angeles firm that analyses markets for the American film industry, ‘It’s all very Hannibal Lecter.’ Meiwes hopes for a $1 million advance for the film rights to his story. The German heavy metal band Rammstein has already climbed on the bandwagon with a Meiwes-inspired song ‘Mein Teil’, or ‘My Piece’. In German, ‘piece’ is a slang term for penis.

Thanks to the dogged persistence of Prosecuter Marcus Kohler when Meiwes’ case was retried in May 2006, the internet cannibal’s sentence was increased to life imprisonment.

Nineteen

Something Completely Different: Marc Sappington (2001)

B
ig cities worldwide harbour both the best and worst examples of the human condition. In this respect, the American midwestern metropolis of Kansas City, Kansas, is no different from any other city. The city centre and wealthy neighbourhoods in the suburbs stand in stark contrast to the crime-ridden, largely black ghettos of the north side. While drugs, guns and violent gangs rule the streets, good, honest, hard-working people struggle to survive in the face of poverty and despair.