Issei Sagawa, the “Kobe Cannibal,” was a Japanese cannibalistic killer who walked free after he murdered his friend Renée Hartevelt in 1981 and ate her remains.
Issei Sagawa was carrying out a 32-year-old dream when he murdered, mutilated, and ate Renée Hartevelt. At the time of his crime, Sagawa was studying comparative literature in Paris.
He describes himself as a “weak, ugly, and small man” (he was just under 5ft tall) and claims that he wanted to “absorb her energy” by eating her.
Sagawa was quickly arrested and sent to a psych hospital. Due to a legal loophole, he was allowed to check himself out of a different psych hospital after his return to Japan, and he remained free to his very last day.
He’s effectively made a good living off his crime in the years since, and even become a celebrity in Japan. He’s appeared on several talk shows and written manga books portraying the murder and eating of Renée Hartevelt.
And he has remained chillingly unapologetic throughout his life. When he talks about his crime, he acts as if it were the most natural thing in the world and he wants to do it again.
Early Life
Issei Sagawa was born on April 26, 1949, in Kobe, Japan, to wealthy parents. When he was around 2-3 years old, he developed cannibalistic desires and a fascination with eating human flesh.
He recalled his uncle wearing different dresses of monsters each day and used to play the same game of lowering him and his sibling into a stew pot to be eaten with pleasure.
In first grade, he remembered eyeing friends’ thighs and thought, “Mm, that looks good.”
He was attracted to fairy tales about people being eaten, and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ was his favorite.
According to him, his cannibalistic thoughts grew to an extent because of the media’s portrayal of Western ladies like Grace Kelly, connecting it with what most people would term sexual desire.
Issei Sagawa claims that the reasons for his cannibalism cannot be explained or understood by someone who does not share his same desires.
Although Sagawa went to consult a therapist for his urges when he was 15, he found it ineffective and sank even deeper into his mind.
First Unsuccessful Attempt
Issei Sagawa, the Kobe Cannibal, didn’t try to fulfill his urges until 1972 when he sneaked into the Tokyo apartment of a young German woman to eat a portion of her body.
Fortunately, the woman awoke before Sagawa could attack her, she was able to save herself and capture him because Sagawa was weak and only 5 feet tall.
Sagawa was arrested for attempted rape, even though he had intended to eat the woman rather than sexually abuse her. Sagawa’s rich father, on the other hand, offered the young woman money in exchange for her dropping the case against his son.
Then, in 1981, after 32 years of suppressing his desires, he finally decided to act on them with full planning.
Killing of Renée Hartevelt
Issei Sagawa had moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, a public research institution, to study literature. Renée Hartevelt was a Dutch student at the Sorbonne who studied with Sagawa.
Sagawa built a friendship with her over time, even asking her to dinner at his house several times to gain her trust.
She was selected because of her health and beauty, those characteristics Sagawa believed he lacked. Before murdering her, he attempted to kill her once and failed.
When her back was turned, the gun misfired the first time. Though most people would consider this a sign to give up, for him it just helped his intentions to kill Renée the other day.
Sagawa said in his words, “It drove me even more insane. He did it the next night. This time he fired at Renée without mistake and Renée was killed instantly.
Sagawa was only remorseful for a while as Renée was his friend. But, soon he started enjoying the moment as he achieved what he wanted for 32 years.
He recalled, “I considered calling an ambulance. But then I said to myself, ‘Hold on, don’t be a fool. You’ve been dreaming about this for 32 years’, and it’s finally happening!”
Cannibalism of Renée Hartevelt
Then he raped Renee’s corpse and began cutting her apart. He started by cutting into her bottom. Later, he admitted that his one regret was not eating her while she was alive.
Sagawa was always short and skinny with legs that “looked like pencils,” and he believed that at just under five feet tall, he was too repulsive to attract the kind of physical intimacy that would have tempered his desires.
He said, “All I wanted to do was eat her living flesh,” .”No one believed me, but my ultimate goal was to eat her instead of killing her.
“Does it make sense? I know your answer would be ‘No.’ But this is what he said. Sagawa disposed of what was left of Renée’s remains two days after killing her.
He’d eaten or frozen most of her pelvic region, so he stuffed her legs, torso, and head into two suitcases and called a cab. He was dropped off at the Bois de Boulogne Park, which had a quiet lake.
Arrest and Unsuccessful Trial
He intended to throw the luggage in it, but other passersby observed the blood dripping out of the suitcase and alerted the French cops. Issei Sagawa spent two years in a French prison awaiting his trial.
His wealthy father provided a top lawyer for his defense, who looked for loopholes in the case. Sagawa was held for two years without facing any trial.
When his trial time came around, French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere declared him legally ill and incompetent to face trial. He dismissed the charges and ordered him to be kept in a mental hospital forever.
They then deported him to Japan, where he intended to spend the rest of his days in a mental hospital. Until his death, Issei Sagawa walked around the streets of Tokyo, free to do as he liked.
Issei Sagawa, the Kobe Cannibal, doesn’t hesitate in the interviews to show his desire to murder women. He just explains how he wants to kill another woman to taste the human flesh one more time.
Celebrity Status
In the meantime, Sagawa made a huge profit from his crime. He has written 20 books to date. One of his most recent books is ‘Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls’. The book is filled with drawings by himself and other well-known artists.
Now, I’m going to tell you a very disturbing part of Renée’s story that happened in 1985. Renée Hartevelt’s murder and dismembered crime scene images were leaked to the public and were published in a popular French magazine.
The images revealed her body from the crime scene, which had been disfigured and cut into pieces. Its publication shocked the French public as well as Renée’s relatives and friends.
Because of the outcry over the photos’ circulation, one reporter was arrested for publishing them. Law authorities seized more than 200,000 copies of the magazine.
Issei Sagawa says the reasons behind his cannibalistic tendencies can’t be explained to or conceptualized by anyone who doesn’t share his exact urges.
“It’s simply a fetish,” he said. “For example, if a normal man fancied a girl, he’d naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right? To me, eating is just an extension of that. Frankly, I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t feel this urge to eat, to consume, other people.”
He maintains, however, that he never thought of killing them, only “gnawing on their flesh.”
Death of Issei Sagawa
Sagawa suffered from two heart attacks back in 2015. He lived in Tokyo with his brother, and continued to attract media attention until 4 November 2022.
Issei Sagawa, the Kobe Cannibal, died in a hospital in Tokyo on 24 November 2022, due to complications of pneumonia at the age of 73. His funeral was attended only by relatives, with no public ceremony planned.
