Eat Thy Neighbour

by Daniel Diehl

  Deciding that he deserved a holiday after his imprisonment, he visited Sweden and England before settling back down in Paris. Always a great self-promoter, Claux immediately went to work establishing himself as the self-proclaimed ‘Vampire of Paris’, advertising his past life on several websites that he continues to maintain. One site is dedicated to the sale of his paintings which, not surprisingly, deal with scenes of autopsies and portraits of famous serial killers and cannibals of the past. Claux’s artwork now adorns the official website of the Church of Satan and the covers and interior pages of several murder and cannibal-related books. On one of his websites he blithely provides instructions for would-be grave robbers and ghouls, expanding on his theme with the butchering and cooking instructions presented earlier in this chapter. Being every bit as promotion-minded as either Henry Lee Lucas or Issei Sagawa – both of whom we met in earlier chapters – Claux has turned his tawdry fame into a career by getting himself booked on to television chat shows and radio programmes where he happily expounds on his life as a ‘reformed’ vampire and cannibal. While he insists on one of his websites that ‘I do not profit from my past’, this is exactly what he is doing.

  To keep his little ball rolling, and keep the money coming in, Claux attends Goth and vampire conventions where he lectures on his past lifestyle and sells paintings to his morbidly fascinated fans. If nothing else, Claux seems, through his newfound cult celebrity status, to have finally learned how to make friends with the living. They may not be the kind of friends that most people would want to have around, but if they keep him grounded enough not to kill, or eat anyone in the future, then they are doing their bit for civilisation.

  He also seems to have calmed down a lot. He has a steady girlfriend and says he spends his spare time ‘painting, watching horror flicks, working out and writing to other killers and watching documentaries on freaks or amputees’. He also insists that he has a fetish for murderesses: ‘I like girls who kill. There should be more of them.’ He does not, however, indicate whether or not his current girlfriend is a killer. While he claims to worship the devil, he simultaneously insists that he no longer eats human flesh and says, ‘I do not encourage other people into doing the things that I have done. The spiritual and social prices to pay are far too high.’ Odd sentiments for a Satanist.

  Finally, if you, dear reader, wonder if Nicolas Claux, the Vampire of Paris, has any advice for you, the answer is yes. ‘I have a message for people who smoke, do drugs, eat junk food and drink alcohol . . . You have no respect for your own body . . . Do some sport, stop smoking, go on a protein diet, take care of your arteries. You will feel a lot sexier.’

  Eighteen

  Spider on the Web: Armin Meiwes (2001)

  Tragically, but possibly predictably, Armin Meiwes’ childhood shared much in common with many of the dangerously deranged characters we have met previously in this book. By all accounts his father was – and as of this writing, still is – a kindly if rather weak-spirited man who was absolutely no match for his shrewish wife, Waltraud. Waltraud, commonly known as Ulla, was a sharp-tongued harridan who took delight in venting her spleen on her two sons and husband. She seemed to find a particular satisfaction in bullying Armin, the younger of her two boys, derisively calling him ‘Minchen’, a deprecating term once used by Germans to refer to their servants. Some of the Meiwes’ neighbours insisted that Ulla was a witch, who was so evil that she must have been in league with the devil himself.

  Torn between an unresponsive father and a cruel mother, Armin withdrew into a fantasy world shaped largely by old horror movies and the often disturbing characters from the traditional fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers. Because his mother discouraged him from having any friends of his own, Armin invented friends. His favourite was a make-believe boy named Franky who shared his burgeoning interest in everything dark and macabre.

  As if it were not bleak enough already, eight-year-old Armin’s world took a decided turn for the worse when, in 1969, his father decided he had taken all he could of Waltraud. Packing up Armin’s older brother and his belongings, he left, filing for divorce. He may have wanted to take Armin with him but, as is usual in such cases, the courts believed that young children should remain with their mother. In this case, the results of such an arrangement were to be disastrous. Now cut off from anyone who had even the slightest sympathy for him, Armin’s retreat into fantasy increased at an alarming rate. Deprived of any model on which to build normal reactions to life and family, he invented his own rules based on the experiences of his sad life. With his real brother gone Armin fantasised about what it would be like to have another brother, one who would not abandon him as his own had done.

  He decided that the only sure way to bind this fantasy brother to him permanently would be to eat him. In this mixed-up world, images from the Brothers Grimm came flooding back; the tale of Hansel and Gretel – the siblings abandoned in the forest by their parents – who found themselves captured by a wicked witch, only to be fattened up until they were tender enough to eat, seemed to make some kind of sense. Even those few boys at school that Armin would have liked to have had for friends could only be seen in terms of how satisfying, how reassuring, it would be to serve them up on a plate. But none of his fantasies would ever come true – at least not as long as his loving mother stood in the way of Armin making any real friends.

  She followed him everywhere, never letting him out of her sight, never letting him gain even the slightest inkling of independence. When Armin was old enough to start dating, Ulla insisted on chaperoning them. When he joined the armed forces she even trailed along when his company went on manoeuvres. How and why the officers allowed this has not come to light, but it certainly did nothing to endear Armin to his peers. When the other young men in his company went on leave, Armin was instructed to come home with mother. And home with Ulla was not the place any rational person would want to be.

  When Armin was sixteen Ulla had bought a house on the outskirts of Rotenburg, not far from the city of Kassel. A rambling, ancient, tumbledown, half-timbered farmhouse, it already had the reputation of being haunted long before Mrs Meiwes and her browbeaten son moved in. With more than thirty dusty rooms punctuated by sloping floors and bulging walls, it did, indeed, look like something out of a Gothic horror novel or the stereotypical ‘haunted house’ from a children’s ghost story. If the place itself were not grim enough, the half-empty rooms with their hard linoleum-covered floors did nothing to impart the slightest hint of cheer, but it certainly fitted the mood of its inhabitants. When Armin was twenty years old his mother slapped a sign on the door of his room: ‘Kinderzimmer’ it read – ‘Children’s Room’ in German. So cowed was Armin by his tyrannical mother that even after she died in 1999 he left the humiliating sign in place.

  Once out of the military, Armin Meiwes continued to live in the ramshackle house and earned his living as a computer engineer. To acquaintances and neighbours he seemed a perfectly normal, if slightly shy, man. He was always polite, offering to mow the lawn for elderly neighbours, helping people work on their cars and even occasionally inviting someone from the neighbourhood in for dinner. One neighbour later described him as being almost ‘childlike’ in manner. What no one knew was that the dark fantasies of his childhood had completely taken over his private existence.

  No matter how awful his mother had been, she was the only anchor in Armin’s life and he simply had no idea of how to live without her. So, in his own way, he kept her alive. In an unbelievable reflection of the Norman Bates character from Psycho, Armin began wearing his dead mother’s clothes, wandering around the decaying mansion talking to himself in her voice. He even put a mannequin’s head on the pillow of her bed. If this was a newly created aspect of his fantastic inner world, there were still plenty of other, more familiar fantasies to occupy his time.

  The twisted dream of having a brother or friend who he could keep with him for ever by devouring their body had begun to take on new and eve
r more bizarre aspects. From a variety of underground internet sites, Meiwes began downloading pictures of torture and cannibalism. Before long, despite thousands of images stored on his computer and printed out, Meiwes needed more. He needed to find real people with whom he could share his fantasies. That is when he discovered literally hundreds of cannibalism-related websites floating around the darker corners of the net. Trawling sites with names like ‘Flesh and Bone’ and ‘Cannibal Café’, Armin found that not only was he not alone in his desire to eat someone, but that there were hundreds of unstable people in the world who were more than happy to entertain the thought of becoming someone else’s dinner.

  Beginning late in the year 2000, Meiwes became a constant visitor to these sites, logging on to their bulletin boards and chat-rooms under the pseudonym of Franky, the name of his imaginary boyhood friend. In his personal ads, Meiwes solicited possible victims, specifying the type of person that he thought would look best in his oven. At first he asked for a man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, who was in good physical condition and would consent to be eaten. Although he would later raise the age limit to thirty, he always stated ‘slim and blond’ as a requisite. Between May and August 2001, Meiwes corresponded with over four hundred would-be cannibals and victims from all over Europe and the USA. Some of them answered his ad just to chat, but according to his computer files a total of two hundred and four men actually offered themselves up to sate his culinary peculiarities.

  Literally thousands of these always grotesque, but frequently hysterical, exchanges survive. ‘Hi!’ one of them began, ‘Being roasted alive, that is absolutely a beautiful concept.’ To another applicant he wrote, ‘I hope you can come quick to me, I am a hungry cannibal. Please tell me your height and weight and I will butcher and eat your fine flesh.’ Even the details of portion control found their way into these odd correspondences: ‘But keep in mind that with your weight there is about 35kg of your flesh available for eating.’ Even the festive season was an integral part of this cannibalistic correspondence. In January 2002, Jorg, one of Meiwes’ chat-room friends, enquired, ‘Did you kill any young men over the holidays?’ Armin responded, ‘It was the only thing I didn’t do over the holidays. Do you think that I have slipped out, [because] I want to kill a young man and eat him?’ Jorg’s blasé reply was, ‘No, there is nothing sexier than to be killed like a pig.’

  Just how ‘sexy’ being killed like a pig might be is probably best left unimagined, but it is beyond question that such an end requires specialised equipment. So, just to be ready for any eventuality, Meiwes constructed a slaughterhouse on the third floor of his house. The windowless, attic room was painted in horror movie shades of blood red and stygian black. There were meat hooks hanging from the beams, a slaughtering table and a wood and wire cage in the corner. No cheap flick from the Vipco Vaults of Horror could have looked any sleazier.

  While there is no way of knowing how much of the ghoulish conversation carried on over the websites that had become Meiwes’ secret world was nothing more than bored people letting their unwell imagination run wild, it is certain that some of the people who stumbled across Armin Meiwes were just as serious, and at least as sick, as he was. An Italian respondent, who identified himself as Matteo, asked if Meiwes would enjoy burning off his testicles with a blow-torch before crucifying him and then whipping him to death. Armin replied that he was not particularly into torture; he just wanted a friend who was willing to be eaten. At least one other applicant was also rejected by the discriminating Meiwes. When Alex from Essen, Germany, asked ‘Franky’ to behead him, Armin refused, saying that Alex was just too fat. In one instance, however, Armin came awfully close to getting what he wanted.

  Later, Meiwes recalled that a man named Andres from Regensburg, Germany, ‘wanted me to pick him up in a cattle truck and slaughter him like a pig. I told him to take the train.’ Amazingly, Andres did exactly that. Meiwes remembered their encounter. ‘I picked him up at the station and we went back to the butchery at my house. He wanted me to wear rubber boots, which I did. I wrapped him in cling film ready for slaughtering, but he backed out. So we just fooled around, drank beer and ate pizza.’

  From as early as March 2001 Meiwes had been in almost constant communication with a man named Bernd-Jurgen Brandes who lived in Berlin. Like Meiwes, Brandes was a computer engineer and, since he also wanted to be eaten, the two had much on which to base their developing relationship. Whether Brandes originally got in touch with Meiwes, or it happened the other way round, seems in doubt, but certainly Brandes had his own posting on the Cannibal Café website. It read, ‘I offer myself to you and will let you dine from my live body. Whoever REALLY wants to do it will need a REAL VICTIM.’ However the two found each other, their relationship quickly evolved from chatty exchanges like the note Brandes sent to Meiwes in which he quipped, ‘You don’t have to buy meat again, there will be plenty left,’ to far more serious affairs.

  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.

  Brandes:

  Are you a smoker?

  Meiwes:

  Yes, but my teeth are still pretty white.

  Brandes:

  That’s good, I smoke too. I hope you like smoked meat.

  Meiwes:

  Just bring yourself for breakfast.

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

  Brandes:

  What will you do with my brain?

  Meiwes:

  I’ll leave it, I don’t want to split your skull.

  Brandes:

  Better bury it, preferably in a cemetery; nobody notices skulls there. Or maybe pulverise it?

  Meiwes:

  We have a nice, small cemetery here.

  Brandes:

  You could use it as an ashtray.

  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. Ho
w 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.