They Killed Them... Then Ate Them - Cannibal Crimes

You ever eat something called long pig? Oh, you probably haven't, and if you have, then you probably actually do think crime is fun. What the heck is a long pig you might be asking yourself? Well, you see back in the 1800s, European traders, explorers, and missionaries made a habit of visiting the Pacific Islands. They thought, "Damn, these islands are pretty cool! There's tons of resources and all sorts of great stuff that could be taken back to Europe and traded." They're all these new exotic people to meet and learn from. Well, some of these exotic people to meet and learn from, like eating meat that was super similar to pig, but longer than a pig, you know, like a person. Long pig! Yeah, they were eating people. Ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about eating people today. More specifically, we're talking about crimes involving people, eating other people because crime is fun. I'm not saying you should do crime, but crime is fun to listen to. Thank you for joining us for another episode. I know it's been a minute. Life's been pretty crazy, by the way, speaking of Crazy Life, watch my swatting video on this channel. As of recording this, yesterday, I got swatted again. That's lucky number six. Welcome to episode 11 of Crime is Fun. So, who are our long pig enjoyers that are up for discussion today? One of them was an Italian grandmother who turned three women into soap and baked their blood into tea cakes that she served to her neighbors. She did that because a fortune teller told her it would protect her son in the war. Neighbors said the tea cakes were delicious. One of them was a Soviet firefighter with metal teeth who hunted women in the Kazak countryside, served their cooked remains to his friends at dinner parties, escaped from his psychiatric hospital, and made to this very day be out there somewhere. Nobody's entirely sure. We'll get to that. One of them was a frail old man in 1920s New York who looked like somebody's kindly grandpa and turned out to be one of the most monstrous child killers in American history. One of them was a German computer technician who posted that on the internet looking for someone to kill and eat him, while somebody replied and then traveled across the country for the appointment. One of them was a New York City police officer who got caught playing into kidnap, cook, and eat women, including his own wife. And then he walked free because a court decided that thinking about it even in an elaborate documented blueprint level detail isn't the same as doing it. And then we're going to end on one. It's pretty popular you might have heard it before. It was a Japanese student in Paris who killed and ate his classmate, confessed to all of it, then went home to Japan and became a quasi celebrity and published author. This is crime is fine and today we're talking about people who enjoyed the long pig. Oh my god, I'm going to f*ck this guy's name to pieces. I want to start somewhere that sounds not so bad when it comes to eating human beings. That's pretty terrible. This was just kind of a cakewalk compared to the other ones. Let's venture into a small town in northern Italy in the late 1930s called Correcio. Correcio, f*ck. Correcio. I got to ride Correcio! Let's go! Pete Silazonia Spaghetti. Correcio! And in this town there's a woman named Leonardo, f*ck sake. Leonardo? Leonardo Chinchulli. Leonardo Chinchulli. She's a warm, generous mother who's loved by the entire town. All of her neighbors adore her. She's the kind of woman who's always baking and sharing her delicious creations and always pressing little homemade treats into the children's hands when they stop by. In addition to baking, she loved making soap to hand out to all her neighbors in town's folks too. Let's just get into Leonardo's background a little bit before we get into the long pig. So she attempted suicide twice as a young woman. Needless to say, she had a rough upbringing. Later in life, she married a man named Rafael against her mother's wishes and she always believed her mother had cursed the marriage with an actual curse. Whether or not you believe in curses, what happened next was genuinely tragic. Leonardo was pregnant 17 times. She lost three of those to miscarriage and of the children who were born 10 of them died young. I should be honest, she's probably fucking eaten them. By the time we get to the late 1930s, Leonardo has four surviving children, and she is fiercely, desperately almost frantically protective of them. These are the ones that wretched, motherly curse didn't take. And she'll do anything and I mean anything to keep them safe. Let's add one more ingredient to this pot of crazy, though. Leonardo was deeply superstitious. She believed in fortune tellers, palm readers, signs, omens, probably crystal bullshit, all of it. Early in her life, a fortune teller had told her all her children would die. Damn dude, mom's cursing her, fortune teller saying, your kids are gonna die. Lady can't catch a break, but this palm reader looked at her hands and said, and this is a real quote that was recorded in your right hand, I see prison, in your left, a criminal asylum. Like I said, she can't catch a break. All this comes together in 1939 with Leonardo's eldest favorite son, Giuseppe, the apple of her eye tells her he's going to join the Italian army. This is in 1939 and there might have been a little something going on in Europe at the time. Leonardo became convinced that Giuseppe was going to die in World War II. Somewhere in her confusion and grief and superstition and terror, she arrives at a pretty wild conclusion. She becomes convinced that the only way to protect Giuseppe, the only way to keep her sweet baby boy safe, is through human sacrifice. She tells herself that if she offers up other lives, the universe will spare her sons. Leonardo, Chengchu, lead did not kill for money, although she did take her victim's money. She didn't kill out of rage or lust, she killed because she had constructed an entire magical police system in her screwed-up head where murdering strangers was a loving act of maternal protection. In her mind, she was a good mother. Her first victim was a woman named Faustina Setti. Faustina was a lonely single, middle-aged woman who wanted to find a husband. The incredibly kind, warm, generous Leonardo told her she could help. She told Faustina she'd found her a man, a loving husband, but he's in another town. This was all very exciting, finally a man to love her. Leonardo, this criminal mastermind, told the poor, the only woman. "You gotta keep it a secret, though. Don't tell anyone where you're going." Write letters to your friends and family, saying you've arrived safely, and give them to me. I'll mail them out for you once you're settled. I don't sound fishy at all. Faustina, though, she was delighted and excited about meeting her new man. So she did exactly that. She wrote the letters, told no one, then showed up at Leonardo's home. Leonardo shared her excitement, and they talked about how wonderful life is going to be with a man in the house. They drank wine, they celebrated, but Faustina was suddenly sleepy and dripped at all. Leonardo, that rascal, had drugged the wine. When Old Girl fell asleep, Leo buried an axe in her head, and then Leo did the thing that earned her the name history remembers her by. I'm going to read you her own words here from her confession because nothing I could write would land the way her own basic matter of fact description does. It's kind of paraphrasing because it's translated from Italian, but she said, roughly, "I threw the pieces into a pot, added several kilos of caustic soda, which is some of the stuff she used to make so, and stirred into everything dissolved into a thick, dark mush. Then I poured it in a bucket and emptied it into a septic tank. I let the blood coagulate, dried it in the oven, ground it into a powder, and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, eggs, and a bit of margarine. I then made some tea cakes. She went on to serve those tea cakes and the ladies who came to visit. She was even eating them herself and serving them to her dear son Giuseppe." The one that she was trying to protect by killing people. The neighbors actually complimented the tea cakes. They were delicious. Not long after feeding a woman to all her neighbors, she ran into another new friend. This lady's name was Francesca Suave. Francesca just happened to be down on her luck employment-wise. The friendliest woman in the neighborhood told her she could get her a job, but she had to come over to the house to talk about it. And Leo did the same thing, drugged her with wine and slimed her out with an axe. But her in the pot with some caustic chemicals, just like the last woman. Then Leo runs into another lady named Virginia Kachopo, a big fat former opera singer. Then as wacky Leonardo does, she drugged her and asked her some questions. Leo later said that Virginia's flesh made especially good soap, saying her flesh was fat and white. And when I had melted, I added a bottle of cologne. And after a long time, the boil was going, I made some of the most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to the neighbors in acquaintances. The cakes too were better. The woman was really sweet. That's fucking gross. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's no way this didn't inspire that scene from Fight Club. You remember Edward Norton and Brad Pitt were stealing laposuction fat from plastic surgery clinics, making soap out of it, then selling it to iron department stores. Tyler Durden even makes the joke, we're selling their fat asses back to them. He said fat people make the best soap. Anyways, the big ol' opera singer is how Leo eventually got caught. Unlike the first two lonely women with no one to miss them, Virginia had a sister-in-law and that sister-in-law new Virginia had gone to see Leonardo. And then just was never seen again. This lady went to the police who launched an investigation and it didn't take long for her to confess everything. She ended up spilling the beans about killing three women with an axe and cooking them because police started to suspect her sweet baby boy, Giuseppe, was in on it and she wasn't about to let him get in trouble. At her trial in 1946, she strolled into the courtroom and showed no remorse. Witnesses say she almost seemed proud of her work. She even corrected the prosecutor on the details of her own murders when she felt he'd gotten them wrong. She said she wanted the record to be accurate and one of the most darkly, [BLANK_AUDIO] incredible moments in the history of criminal trials, she proudly told the court that the copper ladle she'd used to skim the human fat off the top of her bowling pots had been donated to the Italian government during the war because she wanted to assist in the war effort. That's right, she was helping the war effort with her human fat skimming ladle. She ended up being sentenced to 30 years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. Leonardo can truly died in that asylum in 1970, and to this day if you go to the criminal logical museum in Rome, you can see the actual pot she boiled her victims in right there behind some glass. Oh, and just that'd be, the sun that she did all of this to protect? Oh, he survived the war just fine, he didn't need any of it. She turned three women into soap and pastries for nothing. Oh man, I mean unless her human sacrifice has actually worked. Before we go any further, there's one thing I want to discuss, given the theme of this episode of Crime is Fun. Let's talk about why you shouldn't eat people. Well, I mean for one, it's morally wrong to do that. But there are some pretty crazy diseases that have happened because of this. When I was a little doughnut growing up in the early 90s, I always heard eating people can make you crazy. I picked this idea up from a bunch of movies I probably shouldn't have been watching. The cannibals are always crazy, of course, were they crazy because they eat human flesh? Or did they eat human flesh because they were crazy? I remember asking my dad about the cannibal family that tried to eat Sylvester Stallone and Judge Dredd and him telling me eating people messes with your brain. Well, lo and behold, that can't happen sometimes and it's terrifying how it does. There are a couple things that messes up real bad when we eat the long pig. The creepiest one that you may have heard of before is pre-ondisease, more specifically the kuru virus. That's the one that Ellen DeGeneres was accused of having a while back because people were saying she eats kids. Well, all Hollywood elites and government officials do that. We know that and that's an entire episode for another day. Is Brandon Herrera eat kids? Anyways, kuru has a weird vague history and I want to tell you about it. It's kind of neat and insane down the donut hole we go. We're going to head on over to the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea sometime around the turn of the 20th century. This is on to the four people F-O-R-E. There are tens of thousands of them. They're spread across small villages and still living the way their ancestors had lived for generations. Somewhere in a village called Uwami something goes wrong inside one person's brain. It's not from anything they did or anything they ate, or at least not yet. It's just bad luck. It's kind of the strikes roughly one in a million people on earth every single year. It's a completely random occurrence. What happens is a single protein in their brain folds itself into the wrong shape. In this misfolded protein does something that normal protein doesn't. It somehow starts convincing its neighbor proteins to turn into copies of itself. So one wrongfold becomes two, they become four, they become eight and so on and so on until the person develops a deadly mysterious neurological illness that the four have never seen before. They call it kuru which means to shake. This quickly goes from tragedy into epidemic because in this community when a person dies the other people do what their culture has always done to honor the dead. They honor the dead by consuming the body as part of the funeral. This is their people's way of saying we will not simply put you in the ground and let you disappear. We want to keep you with us. Keep you living inside of us. So women and children with most often consume the brains of the deceased while they men preferably consume muscle tissue. Well, the brain is exactly where those misfolded proteins were talking about were concentrated. So the mourners who ate that tissue, mostly women and children, walked away from the funeral carrying something inside them that would not show itself for years and some of them for decades. By the early 1900s it moved from this one village you want me to neighboring villages by the 1930s that had reached the south for by the mid 1950s that had reached epidemic proportions with more than 3,000 kuru cases eventually recorded over 2500 of them were within the four population alone and some villages entire generations of women were wiped out leaving behind villages with far more men than women. This messed a lot of things up. For decades, nobody outside Papua New Guinea knew this was happening. The four people themselves believed it was sorcery. They thought it was a curse laid on their people and they held ceremonies trying to burn away the evil spirits responsible. It wasn't until 1957 that the outside world found out about this. That happened when an American physician named Daniel Gajusik who traveled to the region of study child development encountered the disease and began investigating alongside an Australian medical officer named Vincent Zegas. They ended up finding this disease that killed with total certainty every single time. It also showed no signs of viral or bacterial infection and that it only seemed to strike women and children almost exclusively while sparing grown men. It took a lot of years before they finally figured out it was a genetic disorder that comes from eating people's brains. Once the funeral practice was discouraged and eventually stopped by the late 1950s and 60s, new kuru cases began to fail. Because of how long this thing could sit dormant in the body before symptoms appeared, cases kept surfacing for decades afterwards, some as late as the early 2000s, and people who had eaten that tissue as children back before the practice ended. Anyways, I thought that was kind of cool. Kuru is pretty much gone, but there's still a lot of danger in eating people because there's no cross-species barrier, so every disease or pathogen another person has can just go right into our body because it's already suited for it. Let's continue on with more people who like eating the long pig. Let's head on over to the Soviet Union, specifically the Kazak Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1970s. There's a man there named Nikolai Zama-Gla, bleep f***ing sounds like he's in the UFC and he's a really good wrestler. Zuma-Galia, Zuma-Galia, Zuma-Galia of Nikolai, Nikolai, the first thing that people notice are Nikolai's teeth. At some point earlier in his life, Nikolai lost his front teeth in a fight and when he got them replaced, he didn't go with the normal white porcelain or resin. He got dentures made of metal. He had gleaming white metal teeth which earned him eventually the nickname that followed him through history. Metal f***ing! It sounds cool as shit, but Nikolai wasn't a very cool guy. He was super charming though, dude was super well dressed, clean shaven, well spoken, and polite to everyone. He was a perfect gentleman who had no trouble at all meeting women and getting him to go for a walk with him. They thought the metal teeth was a little odd, but he carried himself in a way that put people at ease. He wasn't a good thing for the young women who would so easily trust him because Nikolai was hunting. Later on by his own words, he did say he was hunting. When he was eventually caught and described his crimes, he specifically used that word. He talked about seeing a woman walking alone and feeling his heart pound and running after the way you'd run down prey. He was a huge outdoorsman and had been a hunter of animals in the mountains his whole life. At a certain point, he turned those same skills of patience, stalking, and even filled dressing his prey onto human beings. Between 1979 and 1980, Nikolai killed and cannibalized at least eight women. He'd lure them or follow them to an isolated area, kill them, and then carve up the bodies the way you'd dress a deer by taking specific cuts, organs, and certain parts than carrying them home in a bag. After getting home, Nikolai would throw the tea on, preheat his oven, and cook up the parts for a delicious homemade dinner. I want to give you his own account on the first one to kind of get you into his brain a little bit. He was finally caught and interrogated, he described the very first murder in January '79 in great detail. It's kind of messed up, and homeboy certainly didn't hold back on those details. He told the fuzz about loving the hunt, about how he'd hunted animals his whole life, and said the first time he hunted a woman, he spotted a young lady walking along on a rural stretch of trail. He said he filled his heart pound in his chest and he ran after her. She heard his footsteps and turned, but he called her, got an arm around her neck, dragged her off of the path, and cut her throat. After he cut her throat, he drank some of her blood right there in the woods, and then when a bus happened to stop nearby, he laid down next to the body and hid. While he was waiting in the cold for the bus to leave, he warmed his hands over her body. He talked about it the way you talk about going out with your buddies to a deer blind for God's sakes. The hunt and the patience and the field dressing, and to him there was apparently very little difference between the deer and the mountains and the woman on the tracks. Ok, don't worry, he's a crazy guy with metal teeth who ate eight women, that's not that bad. Well it gets worse. Nikolai just a homolo leave, liked to host. He throw little dinner parties, get together with friends, and he'd cook up a big spread of meat to serve to his guests. He by all means was a talented chef who reportedly made ethnic dishes, dumplings, grilled meat, all sorts of goodies. And just so happen, these gatherings always seem to take place right after one of his murders. Yep, he was feeding his friends and neighbors the women he'd killed. They had no idea they were eating the long pig. They compliment the food, graciously thanked their host, went home with the full tummy, not knowing that they just became cannibals themselves. Oh, it gets a little bit crazier somehow. There's a slight interruption in the murders and eating women. In August of 1979, while he's in the middle of an act of cannibalistic killing spree, Nikolai gets blasted on a bunch of vodka with his bros, and one of them suggests they play around with his grandpa's hunting rifle. Everyone's like, hell yeah, let's drink and play with guns. Alcohol and firearms are an awesome combination. One of the boys says, hey, let's try to shoot that pigeon off of that TV and ten on top of that house. Oh, Nikolai is so shmammered, he misses the pigeon and goes to reload the rifle, but he trips over and somehow shoots his friend, killing him. He gets arrested for accidentally killing his friend, cops have no idea about all that other stuff, you know, the woman eating. So he goes to jail for manslaughter and ends up being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because the shooting was eventually ruled an accident and he's a model prisoner, just a great guy, stand up dude, they release him after less than a year. He didn't want to go back to prison, so after he was released, he completely gave up on hunting women and feeding their remains to his friends out here. I'm just kidding, he immediately began doing all the crazy shit again. You and I are here talking about everything he did, so obviously he was eventually caught for all the people eating shenanigans. What had happened was he invited some local guys over to his house that he'd been drinking with lately. Same good group of dudes, one of which he killed with a rifle on accident, but they were there at his house. While they were there at his house, one of them wondered into the kitchen and found Nikolai preparing a woman's head and some of her insides. They did what any sane person would do and immediately high-telt it down to the police station. Then let me tell you guys, this next part is documented, it's not me being a big goof. The police arrived to find Nikolai on his knees covered in blood. He was in such a crazy skit-so-state and the scene was so shocking that in the chaos he actually managed to beat up the cops, escape and flee into the mountains naked with a hatchet. But fortunately he was caught for real the next day at a relative's house. While Nikolai ended up being charged with seven murders, but the real numbers believed to be at least ten with some estimates running into the dozens, no one really knows for sure. He was found insane and committed to a psychiatric hospital, then in 1989 while being transported between facilities, he escaped. Again, he was a fugitive for two years before being recaptured in 1991. And after that, the reports get a little murky as to what really happened to Nikolai. Some sources say he was returned to an institution where he remained. Some sources claim he was released at various points. There have even been unconfirmed reports over the years of further escapes. When journalists have tried to nail down exactly where metal fame is right now, the answer that keeps coming back to them is some version of "it's unclear." He'd be in his early 70s today and I genuinely cannot tell you with confidence whether he's in an institution dead or somewhere out there. The records are soviet era, then post-sovious, scattered across collapsed bureaucracies and sealed psychiatric files in a part of the world that wasn't exactly known for transparent record-keeping. Somewhere out there, there may be a charming, well-dressed old man with metal teeth and a talent for hosting dinner parties, that long big. So Leonard is a sweet old mom who liked making soap out of fat chicks with disturbing in a dark ironic way. Metal fangs disturbing in a creepy campfire story way. But our next guy, Albert Fish, is just genuinely bottomlessly dark. There's not really a way to make what he did very comedic. I'm not even gonna try. Albert Fish was born in Washington DC in 1870. By the time the events that made him infamous took place, he was an old man, gray hair, self-spoken frill, and very gentle seeming. He looked like everyone's grandfather. Like the kind of a harmless old man he'd help across street or load up groceries. People who encountered him described him as "meek, polite, and unthreatening." Underneath the grandfather leaf aside, he was one of the most prolific and sadistic predators of children in American history. In May of 1928, Albert Fish was having his morning coffee when a certain newspaper ad called his eye. It was an 18-year-old named Edward Bud, who had placed a classified ad looking for work. Fish, who was living on the countryside at the time, traveled to New York City to offer Edward Bud a job. He went to the Bud family's home, presented himself as a kindly farmer who wanted to help this young man out. Fish ended up ingraining himself in the whole family. I mean, he was charming grandfatherly, generous even to the point where he brought them gifts. The Buds loved him and who could blame them? They had zero reason not to. During his visit to their own, Fish met Edward's little sister of 10-year-old Grace Bud. Fish told the family he was hosting a birthday party for his niece that evening and asked if he could take a little grace along. He said it would be fun for her, a party, there's other children, and the Bud parents who have spent the whole time being charmed by the sweet old man said yes. They let their 10-year-old daughter walk right out the door with him, and she never came home. What actually happened is that Albert Fish took Grace Bud to an abandoned house in West Chester County. It was a little place called with Sterea Cottage that he had scouted in advance specifically for this purpose, and there he murdered her and violated her all sorts of awful stuff I'm just going to leave it at that. The details of what he did at that child are among the worst things I'd probably ever read. So yeah, he killed her, violated her, and in the following days he ate her remains. And then for the Bud family, there was nothing for six years. They had no idea what happened to their daughter. They said a man named Frank Howard had taken her to a party and vanished, and Grace had vanished with him. The police investigated and even arrested the wrong man at one point, but the trail went cold, and for six years the Buds lived in a specific hell of not knowing. Was she alive somewhere? Was she dead? Where was our little girl? I'm not going to read the letter, it does exist out there, you might be able to find it, but it's one of the most genuinely evil documents I've ever seen. In the letter, Fist described the graces on Mother in detail what he had done to her daughter. There's no real answers on to why he sent the letter, like was it cruelty or compulsion? Is it the same broken wiring that made him do everything else? For some reason though, he wanted that little girl's mom to know exactly what had happened to her. There's one good thing about the letter, though, it's the only thing that got him caught. This is some really good detective work, especially for that time. The letter came in an envelope that had a small emblem on it. The emblem was a logo of private chauffeur's association. Fist traced that stationary to a building and from that building to a rooming house and from the rooming house to a recently departed tenant whose male was still being forwarded. They staked out the address and when the frail, grey-haired old man returned to collect a payment, Detective William King was waiting for him. Albert Fist didn't put up a fight at all. When they finally got him down into an interrogation room, he confessed not only to Grace Bud but to a bunch of other children. He confessed to murders across multiple states. He even claimed at various points to have had victims in nearly every state in this country. He said the number of children he hurt ran into the dozens, maybe even higher. At the trial, of course, the main question was his sanity and the defense had what looked like a strong case. This was a dude who heard voices, who believed he was receiving a structure from God, who has spent his life in the grip of compulsions no same person should experience. I know Dal, he was crazy, but he was also dangerous when he killed children. Even crazy little facts about this whole thing, when doctors X-rayed him, they found 27 sewing needles that he had over the course of years inserted into his own body and left there. So yeah, he's crazy, but yeah, you know, he's still killed a bunch of kids. The jury looked at what he'd done to Grace Bud though, and they made a decision that one jury later more or less admitted out loud that yeah, they believed he was insane, but they still voted to convict him anyway because they wanted him to die. Damn, good job. They prioritized making sure he could never do this again over the clinical question of his sanity. God, I wish we had more of that these days. Albert Fish eventually died in the electric chair. And the final horrible detail about this is as a man whose entire psychology was wired around pain, suffering, and the inflection and reception of agony. By all recorded accounts, he was not afraid of his execution, and he was actually excited about it. He was quoted saying that being electrocuted would be the supreme thrill. It's the only one that I haven't tried. He was executed at Sing Sing on January 16th, 1936, because attorney left the prison that day in possession of a final statement, Fish had written in his last hours, reporters begged to know what he had said and the lawyer refused to even said, I will never show this to anyone. Alright, we need to come up for a little bit of fresh air after Albert Fish and weirdly, the way we're going to do that is with a story that is somehow even more bizarre, but lands on a completely different register. This one isn't about a predator and a victim in the way you'd normally mean it. This one's about two people who found each other on the internet, and together they made one of the most disturbing agreements in recorded history. Armin Mews with a German computer technician, he was a pretty quiet guy, lived alone in a big old farmhouse in the town of Rottenburg, and by every account, completely unremarkable to the people who knew him. Like a lot of the other people we've talked about, or killers that we're going to talk about, who's polite and helpful to his neighbors and kept to himself, who one might say a loner. In childhood, Armin had harbored a very specific and very intense fantasy. That was that he wanted to consume another person. Not out of hatred or sadism exactly, he described it almost as a desire for connection, like a way to make someone a permanent part of himself so he'd never be alone again. In the early 2000s, Mews did what people on the internet age normally do when they have a niche interest. He went online and found a community. There were forums online actually dedicated to cannibal fetishes. Mews started posting on these forums, and in early 2001 he posted an advertisement looking for in his words, "A young man willing to be slaughtered and consumed." It mostly did, several people made contact, and then sensibly backed out of it. One man didn't back out though, and this man's name was Bern Brandes. He was a 43 year old engineer from Berlin. Bern was intelligent, had a good job, and by outward appearances completely functional. Berned on the other hand, has spent his entire life with a mirror image of Mews fantasy, instead of wanting to consume someone he wanted to be consumed. It's exactly how he wanted to die, so I had some match made in hell. I guess the internet does produce soulmates sometimes. So this dude Brandes answered the ad, and they got to talk with each other, and he got on a train and traveled from Berlin to Rottenburg, and walked into Armin Mews' farmhouse fully intending never to walk out. It was all filmed, it's a 4 hour video. What happened that night by all the evidence that was brought up in court? This is something that Brandes actively wanted and consented to at every stage leading up to it. This includes his own death, Mews killed him, and then over the following weeks consumed a substantial amount of his body. By Mews on account, he said it was around 20 kg. because this was so successful. and awesome to him, he went back online and posted again looking for someone else. That's actually what got him caught. A student in Austria saw one of the ads was pretty freaking horrified to understandably and alerted the police. Police went to the farmhouse and they found the four hour tape and some remains and arrested Armin Mews in December of 2002. The German legal establishment had a genuine problem on its hands though. Mews hadn't in all traditional sense committed murder in the way the law would imagine murder. His victim had travelled across the country on his own specifically to make this happen and had documented his own enthusiastic agreement on video. Well the German course we're wondering is this murder or is it manslaughter? Germany actually has a law against killing on demand. Well the trial rolls around in 2004 the court more or less agreed it wasn't standard murder and convicted a manslaughter since seeing the eight and a half years. Prosecutors have failed arguing that it was far too lenient that consent doesn't make killing legal of course and that there were sexual and predatory dimensions to what Mews did that put it in the category of murder. Finally at a retrial in 2006 Mews was convicted of murder instead of life. Yeah just because someone let it happen doesn't mean it's not a very very huge felony. And as of the most recent reporting he is still in prison in Germany. And you guys know a lot of these stories I only tell you because I like bringing up the wacky facts. He became a vegetarian behind bars dude even became politically active in a prison group affiliated with the German Green Party. As recently as 2025 there was reporting about a potential release request. Oh yeah what I forgot to mention is that the dude stayed alive long enough to eat some of himself. So while Mews was in prison a German newspaper came out and said that they ate the dude's wiener but Brant actually wrote the newspaper not to complain about being in prison but about the inaccuracies of their story. He said no no no you got it all wrong. You see we both tried to eat his wiener but we couldn't because it was too tough. Cool man thanks for clearing that up for us let's move on to our next story. This next one that we're going to talk about is the only one in the episode where nobody really got eaten like nobody was eaten but it's got to do a little bit with eating people we're going to talk about a guy named Gilberto Valley Gilberto was married and he had just had a baby with his wonderful wife. Gilberto as a police officer worked in Manhattan and by all outward appearances just like everyone in this video seemed like a normal guy just living his life. He'd even grown up in Queens he went to a good Catholic high school he got a psychology degree from the University of Maryland and then joined the NYPD. Clean record not even parking tickets on it nothing about him said anything was wrong. But in 2012 his wife Kathleen started to feel something was a little bit off. She noticed him spending strange hours on the computer and being really secretive. You know wife is thinking oh he's probably found him a big booty nurse out there while he's policing. So we got to the point she was so thrown off as behavior that she installed spyware on their shared laptop to see what he was doing. What she found made her take her infant daughter leave the state go to her parents and immediately contact law enforcement. And Gilberto Valley was living a second life on the dark corners of the internet. He was an active member on fetish forums devoted to abduction torture and cannibalism. On these forums Valley wasn't just lurking and reading he was an active enthusiastic prolific participant. Everyone on those forums knew him. He played a character called this chef and he normally talked in elaborate and specific details about his plans to kidnap cook and eat women. Oh and these were fictional women that he made up in his head because he's a weirdo. He was talking about real women. He was talking about women he actually knew in real life. This included his own wife. He named former college classmates friends and acquaintances. Oh he used their real names and real photographs and even talked in great detail about their lives. He wrote out entire twisted ass documents. One in particular resettled something like abducting and cooking with the name of a specific real life woman attached to it. Oldboy really got into the details on his ride ups. He discussed oven sizes like whether a particular woman would fit in it. He discussed which women would be easiest to take and where they lived. He talked about wanting to serve girl meat for thanksgiving to his family. He talked about a technique for cooking a victim slowly over a low heat to keep her alive and in pain as long as possible. Well, the FBI ended up getting involved because he used his access as a police officer to look up real personal information about at least one of these women in a restricted federal law enforcement database. That means he took a concrete real world action using his actual police powers in connection with these fantasies and planning all this crazy stuff. Yeah, and then he was arrested and the case became an international tabloid sensation. I mean the headlines read "Cannibal Cop" dibs on the metal band name, by the way. Ed is trial in 2013 and jury rightfully convicted of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. I mean, hell, why wouldn't they? Oh, and then the judge threw it out. Yeah, this is New York City, isn't it? The trial judge and later a federal appeals court looked at everything Valle had written and said and did and they reached a conclusion that is deeply uncomfortable. But I guess legally correct. It was as far as everyone could prove all fantasy and elaborate, disgusting, genuinely upsetting fantasy. For all the blueprints in the oven talk and the named victims, Valle had never actually taken a concrete step to abduct anyone. I mean, he'd never go now and bought rubber gloves and painters plastic sheeting like dexter. He'd never actually followed through on any of these plans. The dates he discussed for kidnapping and his write-ups came and went and nothing happened. The appeals court straight up said, fantasizing about committing a crime, even a horrific crime against a real person, you actually know is not in itself a crime, just weird, man. So Valle was cleared of all charges. He's served about 21 months so far with seven of them in solitary confinement and then he walked out of free man. There's a little something ironic and kind of funny about this story too. Valle was in prison waiting on all this, he got a job. That's right, a good old prison job in the kitchen. Yeah, the cantable cop spent his incarceration cooking meals for his fellow inmates. According to his mom, he got pretty good at it and said he had mastered making pizza in the guards like this food enough to eat it themselves. After his release, he wrote a book about the whole ordeal that I kind of want to read now. He framed himself as the victim of a government that tried to criminalize his imagination. And then he wrote a second book. It's a horror novel about people who kidnapped and tortured victims. Anyways, let's wrap this whole episode up with one of the wildest cannibal stories ever. I saved this one for last because every other person in this episode either died for what they did or are sitting in a prison or an institution for what they did or in Valle's case never actually did the thing just planned it in great detail, still weird. This is the story of a man who did it, confessed to a completely and then walked free and became quasi-famous. No shit, legitimately slightly famous, like a sea-less celebrity. He'd stayed out of jail and stayed famous for the rest of his life actually. This disgusting piece of shit died an old man in his bed. This guy's name was Issei Sagawa. Sagawa was born in Kobe, Japan in 1949 into a wealthy well-connected family. His father was a successful businessman, Popps was the president of a major company. Aside was born small and stayed premature his entire life. Even as an adult, he was only about 4'9", he was little and frail, but very intelligent. By his own extensive account that he told in interviews for years he had harbored cannibalistic urges since he was a small child. He said he always had a fixation on the bodies of other people, specifically a fixation of consuming them. As a young man, Sagawa moved to Paris to pursue a PhD in literature at the prestigious Serbon. In 1981, he met a fellow student named Rene Hartville, she was a beautiful 25-year-old Dutch woman. According to him, she had the health and good looks that he lacked. His jealousy or whatever the heck was going on in his head caused him to become obsessed with the young woman. His obsession wasn't like, "I'm a weird little Japanese man who thinks you're hot and I want to steal your underwear." It was more like, "I'm a weird little Japanese man who thinks you're hot and I want to consume your flesh because I think I'm going to absorb your beauty and health." So on June 11, 1981, Sagawa approached Rene and invited her to his apartment to help with a poetry translation for class. She thought, "Alright, this is a weird little Japanese man and every alarm in my head is going off to not do this, but hey, he needs help and I'm a nice gal." She gets up to his house and everything seems okay, so she starts reading the poetry that he requested to help with. Sagawa, the crazy little fucker, sneaks up behind her and shoots her in the neck with a rifle effectively ending her life. He's so overwhelmed by this that he just passes out and when he wakes up, the first thing he does is. violates her corpse. During him violating her, he tries to bite into her, but realizes, damn, that's actually pretty hard, especially for weird little Japanese men with the body structure and muscle mass of the average 9-year-old child. And it doesn't seem like he planned this at all for as smart as he is and how long he's been thinking about it because he doesn't even have a knife. Well, third fantasizes about eating this poor girl had a rifle nearby, but no knife. So he goes to the store and buys a knife. Over the course of a couple days, he butchers and eats, let's just say, a lot of her. Sometimes raw, sometimes cooked, it's pretty gross. Throughout the whole thing, he's documenting it by taking pictures. After a while, what happens to meat that's left out? It starts rotting. Oh yeah, make sure to watch my first episode of Crime is Fun, it's called People's Soup. So master planner here, this criminal mastermind, hadn't even thought of how to get rid of a body. So he cuts up what's left of her shoves her into two soup cases and heads over to a local park to throw them in a lake. Well, people notice the weird little Japanese man attempting to lug two soup cases across the park that are dripping with people's soup. such a little bitch that he can't get the suitcases to the lake so he leaves them sitting alone for for a while to take a break. Mind you, this is in the middle of the day at a crowded park, so people are watching him do all this. Someone watching all this eventually walks over, looks into the suitcase, realizes what's in the suitcase, and calls police. They arrest him and found pieces of the poor girl on his refrigerator and he confessed completely. He's straight up told police, yeah, I killed her, I wanted to eat her. There is no real question of guilt. He did it and he admitted he did it and the evidence was pretty freaking overwhelming. A crazy ass story I know, but like everything we've talked about today, it gets even crazier. He's been about two years in France awaiting trial with the French judge handling the case, found him legally insane and unfit to stand trial. The judge says he's not criminally responsible, he's crazy. So the judge ordered him to be held indefinitely in a psychiatric institution rather than be tried and imprisoned. Well, as wealthy and well-connected family's resources played some role in how things unfolded, meaning his rich daddy had hired a good legal team to kick him into the nut house up to this point. Oh, but he didn't spend the rest of his life in an institution. You see, the French had a problem. They had an insane foreign national on their hands who couldn't be tried in court, so they eventually decided to port him back to Japan. The understanding was that he would continue to be held in a psychiatric hospital over there indefinitely. Segawa arrives in Japan and is committed to a Tokyo hospital. Everyone wants to see him in jail or dangling from rope, but at least he's not on the streets. Japanese doctors examine him and they say, this man's not insane. They conclude that his motivation was sexual perversion, not insanity. I'm not even joking, they evaluated him and said, he's not crazy, he's just horny. So I'm gonna throw a little bit of my personal opinion in here. This is where a bullet can solve a lot of problems that bureaucracy can't. Moving on, because he was found insane in France, the French had dropped the criminal charges and sealed all court documents, and they would not release those documents to the Japanese. So now you have this man in Japan who has been declared sane by Japanese doctors, which means he can't be held in a psychiatric hospital against his will. On top of that, the Japanese don't have a criminal case because the only evidence and the only charges are locked in sealed files in France that the French won't hand over. Dude fell straight through the gap between two legal systems. France couldn't try him because they declared him insane and closed the case. Japan couldn't try him because they didn't have the case. And Japan couldn't hold him in a hospital because their own doctor said he wasn't crazy just horny. On August 12, 1986, five years after he killed violated an eight miss heart belt. Segawa checked himself out of the hospital and walked out into Tokyo a free man. No, it gets worse too. He became kind of a celebrity. Japan was understandably horrified and fascinated in equal measure. I mean, hell, you're sitting here listening to this because crime is fun to learn about. Segawa leaned all the way into the fascination that people had about everything he did. He wrote a book about the murder and it sold extremely well because he was now a successful writer. He wrote 20 more books. He even went on television talk shows and for decades he gave interviews to anyone who asked. He was always happy to describe in detail what he'd done and he still felt urges to do it again. He would appear in small films here and there including pornographic films where he played on his notoriety. He became a public figure that the people called the Godfather of cannibalism and it's a title he said he was happy to hold. For a while, he even worked as a restaurant critic for a Japanese magazine. Segawa lived this way for decades, but in 2013 he had a stroke that left him mostly incapacitated and he spent his final year independent on care living with his brother on November 24th, 2022. Segawa died of pneumonia at 73 years old. He died having never spent a single day convicted of the murder everyone on Earth knew he committed. And that's it for this episode of Crime is Fun. Let me know what you thought about it in the comments below. Are there any stories you want me to tell? Or I guess more specifically for Crime is Fun, a genre of stories are a topic. 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