Eat Thy Neighbour

by Daniel Diehl

  I try to eat her eyes. It’s hard for me to stab into them, though it is the easiest part of her face. I can see tears coming from them. It frightens me. Her eyes are all that is left of her face. It is nearly a skull.

  At last I have to cut off her head. It is the most difficult thing I have to do. I cut off the meat on her neck until I can see bone . . . I use the hatchet. It is surprisingly easy to cut through. With the head gone her body is now only flesh. When I grab the hair and hang up the head, I realize I am a cannibal. I put the head in a plastic bag.

  [I] open the refrigerator. I recognize each piece of meat. This is part of her hip and this is part of her thigh. I fry them on the stove. I set the table. There is mustard, salt, pepper and sauce. I put her underwear beside the dish. I sniff it and look at a nude woman in a magazine. I try to remember which part of her is in my mouth, but it is difficult to connect the meat with a body. Each day the meat becomes more tender, each day the taste is more sweet and delicious.

  At some point during this unspeakable chain of events, one of Sagawa’s neighbours remembered hearing him howling and banging on the walls of his apartment.

  By 15 June, four days after the murder, Sagawa realised that he would have to dispose of the rapidly putrefying carcass of Renée Hartevelt. Before stuffing the butchered remains into garbage bags, he went out and bought two immense, wheeled suitcases, lugged them home and proceeded to fill them with Renée’s body parts. He then called a taxi, heaved the bags into the boot with the driver’s help, and told the cabbie to take him to the lakes in the Bois de Boulogne park. The sight of this tiny, limping Oriental man lugging two huge suitcases over the vast expanse of lawn inevitably drew the curious stares and excited chatter of people in the park. Suddenly confused and terrified, Sagawa abandoned his burden and bolted for home, leaving the bags and their grotesque contents behind. Predictably the police were summoned and the suitcases opened. It only took two days for detectives to learn where the suitcases had come from and who had purchased them.

  When the gendarmes arrived at Sagawa’s flat, he made no attempt to flee. As they carried out a search that turned up various parts of Renée in the refrigerator, he went into great detail explaining exactly what he had done, why he had done it and the fact that he had once been to see a psychiatrist in Japan for his little problem. Shortly thereafter, the police hustled him off to the Henri Colin psychiatric ward in Villejuif where a team of three doctors tried to determine whether he was sane enough to stand trial for murder. They all agreed. Issei Sagawa was ‘untreatably psychotic’, legally incompetent and it was unlikely that he could ever be cured. By the time the trial came up in 1983, the presiding judge had no choice but to declare that Issei Sagawa was in a ‘state of dementia’ at the time of the crime and therefore unable to stand trial. Because it was unlikely that he could ever be cured, he would be committed to the Paul Guiraud Asylum in Paris where he would be detained for an indefinite period of time. It was the judges’ intent that Sagawa be incarcerated for the remainder of his life, but somehow things did not quite work out that way.

  After three years spent chatting with the doctors and corresponding with the seamier members of Japanese intelligentsia – who sent him a stream of books on cannibals and cannibalism – Sagawa came to a startling conclusion. ‘I realized I was not so unusual.’ Unusual or not, Akira Sagawa had no intention of allowing his little boy to rot in a French asylum, so he began making discreet enquiries as to how much it would cost to have him repatriated to Japan. The French authorities had no desire to feed and house Issei Sagawa for the next half-century or so, so they agreed to a deal. They would allow Issei to be flown back to Japan on condition that he be permanently institutionalised there. In May 1984, Issei was on his way back home where he was to be comfortably ensconced in the Matsuzawa Psychiatric Hospital in Tokyo.

  Once at the hospital, two things seemed to happen simultaneously. First, he became the object of constant attention by a salacious Japanese press and, secondly, the doctors decided he was sane after all. Hospital superintendent Tsuguo Kanego went so far as to say, ‘I think he is sane and guilty . . . he should be in prison.’ Evidently, the Japanese police agreed and requested French authorities to hand over the evidence and legal transcripts that would allow them to build a case against Sagawa. The French adamantly refused to cooperate. If Sagawa was declared sane and allowed to stand trial, it would make the French psychiatric and legal system look incompetent – this they could not tolerate. Reluctantly but, it would seem, under intense pressure from Sagawa’s father and his money, in September 1985, Issei Sagawa was released from the hospital.

  After taking a small apartment near his parents’ house, Issei set out to rebuild his life as a sort of renaissance man or, in his case, a renaissance cannibal. He wrote the fictionalised account of his French dining experience, previously mentioned and excerpted above, that sold over 200,000 copies. A Tokyo book reviewer wrote that In the Fog was ‘Beautifully done . . . outstanding among recent Japanese literature.’ With this first literary success under his belt, he began churning out a column for a porno magazine and appeared in a few cheap porno films, several of which featured re-enactments of his murder and consumption of Renée.

  If the public’s fascination with Japan’s notorious woman-eater had died down since his days at the Matsuzawa Asylum, Issei did everything he could to revive it, mostly through his unrepentant attitude to having broken the great social taboo, which he was more than happy to expound on at every possible opportunity. His big break came in 1989 shortly after the capture of child murderer Tsutomu Miyazaki. A tabloid newspaper contacted Sagawa and asked him to comment on the Miyazaki case, and Issei made the most of the opportunity, parlaying his moment in the sun into a string of appearances on television chat shows where he revelled in his own crime, giving short shrift to that of Miyazaki.

  The Japanese public were morbidly fascinated by Sagawa and quickly made him into a bizarre ‘pop idol’. In 1994 he held a one-man seminar entitled ‘Sagawa’s World’ in which he discussed his culinary preferences and aired a video predictably entitled The Desire to be Eaten. With some sort of sick fame now relatively assured, he took up more ‘artsy’, gentlemanly pastimes such as painting – mostly turning out rather pedestrian renditions of women’s backsides. In a television drama he played a cult leader; he wrote a legitimate newspaper column and a string of seven books (to date) including a 1997 commentary on the fourteen-year-old Japanese serial killer from the city of Kobe, known as ‘Youth A’. He turned his own crime into a ‘Manga’ style comic book entitled Manga Sagawa-san, published by Okura Shuppan. In the most obscene twist of all, he became a restaurant critic for the Japanese magazine of high culture, Spa; in one issue his smiling image even made it on to the magazine’s cover. To ensure that the widest possible audience can share Sagawa’s views on his dietary preferences he maintains his own on-line website.

  More than a quarter century after his murder of Renée Hartevelt, Issei Sagawa seems to find as much pleasure in cashing in on his crime as he did in committing it. ‘The public has made me the godfather of cannibalism, and I am happy about that. I will always look at the world through the eyes of a cannibal.’ To this day he has never once expressed any regret at his heinous act, but does say that the only thing that can possibly save him is to be eaten by a young western woman. At least as disturbing as Sagawa’s own sanguine attitude towards his crime is the continuing fascination of the Japanese public for their home-grown cannibal. One British foreign correspondent insists that their failure to condemn Sagawa ‘is rooted in their perception of his victim as less than a person’. If this is true – and in light of the Japanese seeming willingness to kill and eat prisoners of war during the Second World War cited in chapter four, it well may be – then it is a sad and disturbing comment on the continuing Japanese attitude towards the West.

  The best comment on the entire Sagawa affair may be found in the title of a Rolling Stones song which recounts Issei’s cri
me: ‘Too Much Blood’.

  Fifteen

  Even the Best of Families: Hadden and Bradfield Clark (1984–92)

  When Hadden Clark proposed marriage to Flavia Scranton it seemed the perfect match. Both families were from the social stratum that Americans call ‘good families’; in Britain they would be referred to as ‘the right sort’. Flavia could trace her family’s arrival in America back to the Mayflower and her ancestors had distinguished themselves in the American Revolutionary War. Her parents still maintained a small estate in Meriden, Connecticut. If Flavia’s people were long established, Hadden’s were newer, but no less successful. His father, Silas Clark, had been the Republican mayor of White Plains, New York, and Silas and his wife now lived in a mansion in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Hadden himself had a Master’s degree in business administration and a Doctoral degree in chemistry. Not only was he bright, he was also ambitious. Over the years he would be instrumental in developing plastic food wrap and the process by which carpeting could be made fire resistant. He was a young man who was going places.

  As a family, the Clarks made all the right moves. They were liked by their neighbours and included in all the proper social circles. Between 1950 and 1959 they produced four children. Bradfield was the first, a year later came Hadden Jr, then Geoffrey in 1955 and Alison in 1959. But the good appearances were just that: appearances. Both Hadden Sr and Flavia drank heavily and loud arguments leading to fisticuffs were hardly a rarity. Anxious and restless, Hadden moved from one job to another faster than was good for him or for his family’s stability. When the pressure got too great, Hadden would retreat to the garden shed to brood and contemplate his life. As a result of this unsettled atmosphere the children, particularly the boys, developed severe emotional problems.

  From their earliest years both Brad and Hadden Jr proved unruly and hard to manage, each in his own way. Hadden developed into a touchy boy with a mean, vengeful streak a mile wide. The slightest criticism could make him lash out with every intention of hurting somebody. He was the kind of boy that other children went out of their way to avoid. On one occasion, he and younger brother Geoff were out riding their bikes when, for reasons unknown, Hadden grabbed the handlebars of Geoff ’s bike and pushed him over; Geoff toppled to the ground, cutting his head badly. Hadden left him to run home and tell their mother what had happened. His explanation was completely typical of his attitude: ‘There’s been an accident, but don’t worry, the bike’s okay.’ Geoff ’s condition could not have concerned him less.

  Flavia insisted that his odd behaviour was the result of having been delivered with surgical forceps and that he had developed cerebral palsy. Hadden Sr was more blunt, but no more accurate. When he had been drinking he simply referred to his son as ‘the retard’ – a slight specifically aimed at Hadden’s speech problems and difficulties at school. At least part of the explanation for Hadden Jr’s behaviour may have lain in the fact that Flavia had wanted her second child to be a girl. From his earliest years she dressed him in girls’ clothes and, particularly when she was drinking heavily, called him Kristen. Thanks to his mother’s insistence on feminising him, although Hadden was heterosexual, he became a transvestite and found it nearly impossible to develop normal relationships with women. Although Flavia was at fault for Hadden’s problem, she once criticised him for wearing women’s clothes. He snapped back: ‘I like my ladies’ clothing. Don’t try to change me.’ It would seem that she already had.

  Three of the Clark children went to university, as was expected of them. Only Hadden, who had never been the most accomplished of students, could not qualify. Determined that their son should have a respectable place in life, Hadden Sr and Flavia enrolled him in the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. Amazingly, Hadden did extremely well there, excelling in his artistic ability as a sculptor of ice and tallow centrepieces. This is not to say that all of Hadden’s problems disappeared at the CIA. He remained hypersensitive to criticism and would retaliate in nasty, insidious ways to even the smallest slight. On one occasion he urinated in a tub of mashed potatoes. He did, however, graduate in January 1974 and his entire family turned out for the occasion.

  If Hadden’s problems manifested themselves in violent behaviour, Bradfield became the rebel. Like many teenagers, Brad experimented with drugs and alcohol in high school. But where most kids give up the drugs and learn to control their drinking so they can get on with their lives, Brad did not. He was bright enough to earn two university degrees and became an early whiz in the emerging world of computer engineering despite his problems. But his deepening involvement in drugs, and the emotional baggage of his childhood, almost guaranteed that he would come to a bad end. By 1984 Brad was living in the San Francisco suburb of Los Gatos, California, where he worked as a computer software specialist in the booming computer industry. In June of that year he struck up a relationship with a co-worker named Patricia Mak, a charming, stunningly attractive woman of twenty-nine. On the 23rd of that month he invited her to his apartment for dinner and she accepted.

  The evening seemed to be going well until Brad – fuelled by too much booze and drugs – moved a little too fast for Patricia’s liking. He made a rude and clumsy pass at her, she slapped him and he attacked her. During the scuffle he slammed her head against a concrete block and proceeded to strangle her to death. Then, in a crazed and nearly incoherent fury, he dragged the body to his bathtub where he hacked her into eleven pieces with a large kitchen knife.

  Still able to function, but clearly out of control, Brad cut off Patricia’s breasts and took them out on to the patio where he lit his barbecue grill. After grilling and eating his girlfriend’s mammaries he returned to the house where he stuffed the remaining body parts into several trash bags, stashed them in his car, and began planning where, and how, he would dispose of them. By now the drugs and drink must have begun to wear off and Brad started to realise what he had done. He wandered around for two days before finally attempting to kill himself. Later, in hospital, he confessed to the murder under a routine police questioning regarding the disappearance of Patricia Mak. When they asked where Patricia’s body was, he replied: ‘She’s in the trunk [of my car].’ Almost one year later to the day, Bradfield Clark was sentenced to eighteen years to life and shipped off to California’s medium-security Deuel Vocational Institute.

  No matter how much grief and anxiety Brad’s actions may have caused his family, they could not possibly imagine that their nightmare had only just begun – and it was going to get a lot worse.

  By the time Brad’s life had gone down the tubes, his younger brother Hadden was a strapping 6 feet 2, thirty-year-old man with a wiry, athletic build who seemed well on the way to making a name for himself in the world of fine food. With his degree from the culinary institute he had his pick of secure, well-paid jobs all across the country. It might seem odd, then, that he could not hold on to any of them for very long. In addition to his uncontrollable temper he had developed habits that unsettled his co-workers and employers alike. Drinking cups of fresh beef blood from the carcasses delivered to the kitchen was only one of them but, at the end of the day, it may have been the most telling.

  Hadden’s earliest jobs were in the best restaurants and hotels in the resort town of Provincetown, located at the northernmost tip of Cape Cod. It was a renowned, up-scale market catering to singles, gay men and lesbians and the easy, free lifestyle in ‘P-town’ was every new chef ’s dream. But Hadden just could not seem to integrate into society. When he was not working, he spent his time alone, surf fishing along the sandy beaches of the Cape. He worked his way through all the town’s better restaurants and finally had to leave to find a decent job elsewhere. Years later, he would claim that while in Provincetown he had killed several women and buried their bodies in the sand dunes. He claimed that on at least one occasion he had cut off the woman’s fingers and used them to bait his fishing line. Like so much in Hadden’s life, the truth of this story remains unc
lear. What is true, however, is that Hadden left Provincetown because he was no longer welcome.

  He then went through a series of chef ’s jobs: working on a cruise ship, in banquet halls and even serving as a chef at the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, but he never stayed anywhere for very long. How Hadden felt about his transient life is unknown, but everyone he left behind seemed relieved to see him go. Finally, in desperation, he joined the Navy. It may have been a smart move for a down-and-out chef, but it was a very bad move for a transvestite. On the outside he wore regular issue US Navy fatigues, underneath was lady’s underwear; obviously his shipmates found out and took exception. Hadden was regularly beaten. Once he was locked in the meat freezer for three hours. Transfers from one ship to another did not relieve the abuse, it only changed its venue.

  The final beating came in March 1985 and the damage, caused by having his head slammed repeatedly against the steel decking of an aircraft carrier, put him in hospital. During his hospitalisation Hadden was interviewed by a military psychiatrist who appreciated the nature of his problems more than anyone else had. Hadden was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, given a medical discharge and put on the antipsychotic Halidol, but as soon as he was released he stopped taking the medicine. Lost, frustrated, confused and angry he decided to go to his brother Geoff. In fact, he had little choice in where to turn.

  During the years of his absence the Clark family had completely disintegrated. Older brother Brad was now permanently incarcerated, his parents had divorced, his mother had moved to Rhode Island and, a year later, Hadden Sr had committed suicide while living with daughter Alison in Rhode Island. After this terrible incident Alison had severed all ties with her unstable relatives and told people she had no family. Grandfather Silas Clark, to whom Hadden had been close, was also dead and his grandmother had moved from the estate at Wellfleet to a retirement home. That left only Geoff, who had problems of his own.