The annals of history are filled with many celebrity criminals. Most celebrity criminals attained their fame after being caught and have only been able to enjoy their status from behind bars. But this is not always the case. One of the most bizarre criminal cases in history involved a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa, who brutally murdered and cannibalized a woman. Although his crime is certainly shocking, what makes this case even more shocking is the fact that he was actually released from confinement and got to enjoy fame (or infamy) from it as a free man.
Issei Sagawa was never quite right in the head.
Sagawa was born a premature baby in Kobe, Japan in 1949 to a family of means and connections. From an early age, Sagawa knew that he wasn’t like the other kids. When he was in the first grade, Sagawa began seeing the other kids not simply as other children, but as food! To him, the urge to commit cannibalism was/is quite natural as he said in interview:
“I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t feel this urge to eat, to consume, other people.”
For Sagawa, cannibalism and sexuality were intertwined and part of a fetish he continually fed internally, although he didn’t act on it in real life. To satisfy his twisted sexual desires, Sagawa sexually assaulted his family’s dog and then attacked a German woman with the intent to eat her. Although he was caught before he could kill the woman, the failure taught Sagawa how to commit a crime and allowed him to establish an M.O.
At four feet nine inches, Sagawa was very short (even for a Japanese person) and not particularly good looking. His physical qualities were always a source of pain for him and they are what drove him to strike out at society. He was particularly attracted to tall, good looking women and he wanted to gain those qualities through cannibalism.
Sagawa continued to put up a good public front and was able to secure a spot as a doctoral candidate in poetry at Paris’ Sorbonne University in 1977.
The first couple of years went well for Sagawa, but in June of 1981, he couldn’t wait anymore.
He had to eat someone.
He chose fellow student Renée Hartevelt as his victim. Hartevelt was everything Sagawa was looking for and everything he wasn’t: tall, attractive, and sure of herself. Sagawa invited Hartevelt to his apartment for dinner and to study. As the night progressed and the pair had a few drinks, the would-be cannibal jumped into action. He pulled out a hunting rifle from his secret spot and prepared to shoot her from behind but froze at the moment of truth.
“[It] made me even more hysterical and I knew that I simply had to kill her,” he later said about failing to murder his classmate.
Sagawa then invited Hartevelt over on the evening of June 11, 1981. Being familiar with the seemingly polite and gentlemanly Japanese student, she readily accepted.
This time Sagawa didn’t freeze.
He shot Hartevelt from behind, almost immediately raped her corpse, and then proceeded to slice pieces of flesh from her buttocks and other parts of her body. He continued to feast on Hartevelt for several days and was finally caught when he attempted to throw her remains in a lake. Sagawa confessed to murdering Hartevelt and cannibalizing her body. The only question now should have been not if he would go to prison, but how long he’d spend there.
But justice has a strange way of working in some nations.
The judge found Sagawa legally insane and therefore not liable for the crime under French law. He spent short time in a mental institution and was deported to Japan where many believed he would spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital. But since he hadn’t been convicted of any crime in France, there was little that could be done to Sagawa under Japanese law.
He simply signed himself out of the hospital and walked into Japanese society a free man.
The case caused just as much of a stir in Japan as it did in France, and most Japanese were sickened by Sagawa’s attack. But Japanese culture is such that following societal laws is perceived as a virtue and there is a high degree of trust, so the cannibal’s life was never seriously threatened by vigilantes. He was free to live openly, gave plenty of interviews, wrote some columns, and even did a little acting.
As the 2000s came though, Issei Sagawa’s celebrity status began to wane considerably. A young or even middle-aged cannibal might be interesting, or even sexy to some, but an elderly cannibal is just plain creepy. He now lives on public assistance, but still gives interviews to those willing to listen. And according to a 2017 interview he gave, his cannibalistic impulses continue to be strong in his old age.
“The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June when women start wearing less and showing more skin,” Sagawa said. “Just today, I saw a girl with a really nice derrière on my way to the train station. When I see things like that, I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die.”
Hopefully for the women of Japan, he’s too old to pull off another attack.