With his special food supply placed, along with the dead man’s skull, in his freezer, he disposed of the cumbersome bones and teeth – and let us not forget the innards – by burying them in the garden.
Meiwes would consume a piece of his friend almost every day, but he never finished the task, for frozen chunks of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes were discovered in his home on his capture on 10 December 2002. Indeed, the crime only came to light when Meiwes, having chewed through 20 kilograms of his victim, began to search for another dish on the internet and a correspondent invited to become a meal took fright.
After being tipped off by worried internet chatroom users about the existence of disturbing advertisements placed by Meiwes, undercover police officers posing as respondents quickly determined that the ads were meant literally. When Meiwes was eventually arrested, his reaction was one of confusion. Why was he being taken away? No crime had been committed. He contested it had all been completely consensual. A congenial arrangement for their mutual pleasure: victim and killer, in it together. The cops, however, took a somewhat different perspective, and the protesting Meiwes was promptly marched off to the police station.
From the very start of his sensational trial, which opened in Kassel on a suitably overcast day, Wednesday, 3 December 2003, Meiwes’s primary objective, with the aid of his solicitors, was to convince the jury that he was not a murderer. This they ultimately achieved. The prosecution struggled laboriously to secure dual convictions pertaining to ‘sexual murder’ and ‘disturbing the peace of the dead’. But the fact that videotaped evidence showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brandes had been perfectly happy to have his peace disturbed after his demise did not help their case one bit.
After taking in the evidence that the victim had been a willing participant in his own killing, the court was shown the videotape. The pair had clearly been in agreement about filming the killing and the subsequent butchering.
Brandes was seen explaining that, for him, being eaten would be the fulfilment of a dream. As the carnage began, the video revealed two men locked into a very private world.
One of those viewing the grisly film, which also showed Meiwes talking to the severed head while he disembowelled the body, actually fainted.
The court heard that the killing had taken place in March 2001. Brandes had been reported missing at this time. The judges heard how, for the defendant, the act of eating another human being was akin to the merging of two souls. It was the nearest feeling Meiwes could experience to being close to another person.
At the trial, and with considerable understatement, both Meiwes and Brandes were described as ‘having mental difficulties’, and Meiwes did little to dissuade psychologists from persisting in this notion. For he disclosed in detail how he had achieved his closeness with Brandes by eating pieces of him for more than a year, and stated that by so doing he had gained the dead man’s ability to speak English.
On the topic of the unique dinner, the defendant had an important culinary message to impart. After first trying, unsuccessfully, to bite off Brandes’s penis – at his request – he decided that it should be severed with a knife. The freshly removed organ was then sauteed and flambeed, and prepared to be served. Meiwes, with a touch of Hannibal Lecter’s panache, delivered his verdict on the dish: ‘It was passable, but a little tough; it would have been better braised,’ and he paused before adding, ‘And the wine, a Riesling, was not at all correct, too sweet, lacking body, next time, perhaps, a Pomeral.’
Later, with the slaughtered Brandes in pieces in his freezer, Meiwes positively revelled in dining every day on this special meat. Retrospectively, the self-confessed connoisseur of human flesh commented, ‘Honestly, I’ve taken a fancy to American-style cuts rather than traditional German or French.’
A brief background of the defendant was supplied by the usual gamut of family, friends and neighbours, who described the killer as pleasant and mild-mannered, a mostly quiet man who kept himself to himself.
He had served a dozen years in the German Army as a non-commissioned ordnance officer and was said to have been an amiable and conscientious military man. After leaving the armed forces in 1991, Meiwes retrained as a computer technician and started working for a software company in the Rhine Valley city of Karlsruhe.
Evoking vividly the shades of Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, Meiwes had lived with his mother in the farmhouse and remained there for several years after her death. One neighbour had put it succinctly for reporters: ‘He was a mama’s boy.’ The young Meiwes had been totally fixated with his overbearing mother, who had never let him have a girlfriend. Meiwes, who in any case preferred boys, had meekly acquiesced. He himself later recounted how his desire to eat another man had begun during puberty and that his fantasy had become so powerful over the years that he always knew he would one day enact it.
Had Meiwes been convicted of murder he would most likely have ended up spending the rest of his life in prison. Considering the ghastly acts involved, justice would surely have demanded no less. Instead, after adhering more to Meiwes’s solicitor’s claim that his client had merely assisted in a suicide, a panel of judges decided to convict the cannibal of manslaughter: he was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.
The sentence equates to just over two years for every ten pounds of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes that Meiwes cooked and ate.
Though the court rejected the defence solicitor’s main argument, that Meiwes should be convicted of ‘killing on request’, a form of illegal euthanasia carrying a shorter sentence of six months to five years, it was agreed that he could not be found guilty of murder.
Judge Volker Muetze, one of those presiding at the trial, said the deed was ‘viewed with revulsion in our civilised society’, but, on the basis of the very clear video evidence presented, Meiwes had not committed murder, the hushed courtroom was informed. Instead, he had displayed ‘a behaviour which is condemned in our society, namely the killing and butchering of a human being. Seen legally, this is manslaughter, killing a person without being a murderer’.
As the verdict was read, Meiwes maintained the same relaxed posture he had throughout the two-month trial, where he had earlier been given the opportunity to question witnesses against him. This he had done in a most precise and unemotional manner.
Meiwes had been waiting for many years for an opportunity to realise his gruesome fantasies. With the advent of the internet he seized his chance. Taking full advantage of the medium’s success as a huge dating agency, he was able to cast his net for prospective candidates. It transpired that Meiwes had ‘auditioned’ four other potential victims who had agreed to be examined for physical suitability by the prospective killer.
Hooked by internet ads proclaiming lurid offers like ‘I could just gobble you up’ and ‘Let me feast on you’, these four individuals – three from Germany and one from London – travelled separately to Meiwes’s house for their interview and examination. Three of the men baulked when faced with the reality of being cannibalised, having initially assumed it was all part of some erotic role-playing game. The fourth was rejected as ‘pudgy and unsexy’ by the very particular Meiwes.
Continuing to trawl the internet in search of the perfect human meal, Meiwes eventually stumbled across his main course.
After his trial and sentencing, it was observed by many eminent authorities that on his release – possibly as early as 2008 – it is unlikely that he will become a repeat offender. One expert on cannibalism, an author named Jacques Buval, felt slightly differently about the matter: ‘Cannibalism is like paedophilia. It is in him. You can’t cure it. He will want to do it again.’
Judge Muetze made this disturbing observation: ‘We have learned through this process that there is a massive cannibal following out there [on the internet].’ So how many other ghouls like Armin Meiwes are presently at work, flourishing as a result of the ease of ensnaring their prey over the internet? Dozens, hundreds, thousands?
Research has shown that there are an es
timated 10,000 cannibal websites, with millions of equally lonely people who sit for hours and hours in front of their computer screens, fantasising about eating someone – perhaps you!
The Meiwes case has opened the door on something far more insidious and pernicious: the secret world of the suburban cannibal, and the internet is the key.
The four men who met Meiwes before he killed Brandes were clearly prepared to indulge in a deep and dark sexual fantasy, part bondage and part flagellation. They allowed him to wrap them up in cellophane and mark out their body parts as joints of meat. When they chickened out, Meiwes let them go.
Countless websites dedicated to cannibalism and portraying horrific photographs of women apparently being prepared for eating by roasting and boiling alive are linked to hard-porn sites.
Are the Western world’s eating habits changing, or what?
SAUL DOS REIS: OUTSIDER
‘I have many qualities which make me unique. I’m romantic, always funny, I always have a positive attitude and have many hidden things as well.’
SAUL DOS REIS AS HE ADVERTISED FOR PEN FRIENDS ON THE WEB FROM JAIL
Twenty-five million Americans visit cyber sex sites for between one and ten hours a week, while another 4.7 million log on for in excess of 11 hours per week. And when Saul Dos Reis, a 24-year-old Brazilian national living in Greenwich, Connecticut, lured 13-year-old Christina Long to her death, he used the internet to help him.
On 17 May 2002, Dos Reis would meet the pretty, golden-haired schoolgirl. Before he left her that night, he had raped and strangled her.
Dos Reis looked anything but threatening. One has only to glimpse this man, who appears to be more like a boy, to form this opinion. A slender-faced, shy-looking fellow, he looks as though he would be more at home delivering the local paper, smiling meekly if ever he earned himself a tip. But Saul was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; seemingly charming, even bookish, yet simmering with anger at the all-American girls because he resented the stigma that he felt came with his Brazilian heritage here in the United States. Quite wrongly, he perceived himself to be a second-class citizen. He had low self-esteem and, although not unattractive to the opposite sex, he felt that he was unable to form a meaningful relationship with a girl in the face of the competition from his thoroughbred American peers.
As he grew older, this view of himself as someone different – someone who couldn’t even speak English when he came to America, so had no chance of chatting to the desirable girls he would see on the school bus – remained with him long enough for Saul to develop a serious grudge against young white females. And, as he would quickly discover after arriving in New England’s ‘Nutmeg State’, Connecticut was anything but the Land of the Free.
Saul had first set foot on North American soil as a ten-year-old immigrant. This thin, outwardly unassuming boy with thick, dark hair and coffee-coloured skin would learn fast that girls in the United States could be quite selective as to whom they spent their time with. This seemed to him to be a pervasive attitude and the impressionable young outcast, in his strange new land, did not care for it one bit.
He festered, withdrawing into a dark world of bitterness and frustration, to become a brooding, sullen loner. Young Saul, with South America in his blood, had felt very much out of place when his family first came to Fairfield County. In Greenwich, with its 60,000 residents, he was not only a long way from home but also felt all the more isolated as he was part of the mere 1.4 per cent of the town’s population that was of Hispanic origin.
In conservative Connecticut, pleasant beaches and rolling hills share the land with bustling cities and seafront casinos; it seems there is something for everybody. With such scenic treasures as Litchfield Hills, Housatonic River and Connecticut River Valley, the state also boasts a variety of parks, quaint village greens and hiking and biking trails. It also has its fair share of deep ravines. If a body were tossed into one of these it could be some time before anybody would find it.
Locked away in his small bedroom, Saul Dos Reis spent hundreds of hours on his computer. Soon he had gained a lot of experience of using chatrooms to ensnare underage girls. In cyberspace he could reinvent himself. He could become anyone he so chose.
Enchanted by the masses of syrupy dialogue spewing forth from him, impressionable teenage girls were very keen to engage with the young and pleasant-looking Dos Reis, who, if they were lucky, would send a photograph of himself. Of infinitely greater importance to the man on the other end of the modem, they would send through a picture of themselves.
He would pore over these images, fantasising about all the things he could do to an attractive, all-American teenage girl. The pictures the girls sent in return only added more excitement to the anticipatory conversations they had shared online.
In 1998, Dos Reis had met a 15-year-old-girl from nearby Prospect with whom he had built a shadowy relationship in a chatroom. The girl consented to intercourse with the tightly wound internet Casanova and, for reasons unknown, she was not harmed. Four years and countless obsessive chatroom babblings later, Christina Long would not be so fortunate.
Pictures of Christina show a truly lovely young girl. Facing the camera, she is not bashful but smiles happily, her pretty features framed by her flowing golden-brown hair. To Dos Reis, she was a delightful-looking creature, poised and full of life. At her Catholic school, where she was a sixth-grader, Christina was a good student. As well as heading the cheerleading squad she was an altar girl.
‘I’m so devastated,’ said Andrea Cappiello, Christina’s one-time fifth-grade English and religious education teacher, when asked to comment on the sad death of her former pupil. ‘She was a very good student and a very good cheerleader. She was very spirited, just a doll.’ But the girl also evidenced a harder side. ‘She was streetwise,’ Andrea said. ‘But you could see the other side coming up, too. It’s clear she was very torn in both directions.’
For Christina was not without her problems.
After striking up some online conversations – chats which became increasingly sexually overt – the ostensibly all-American girl began to fall for the worldly-seeming allure of Dos Reis. For example, apparently referring to a Lexus car, he used the screen name ‘Hot es300’ for the model. Obviously, his intention was to convey smoothness. And along with this came a barrage of lewd dialogue. As Danbury Police Chief Robert Paquette later revealed, ‘There was some pretty graphic stuff [in the chatroom logs].’
Indeed, Christina was no stranger to sexual encounters with partners she had met over the internet. She had become absorbed in an ultimately destructive pattern of dating boys she had conversed with online. And sex was something she was more than prepared to engage in with her ‘boyfriends’.
She had come to the town of Danbury two years previously to live with her aunt, Shelly Riling, because her parents were heavy drug users. Riling, very concerned about her niece’s welfare, was eventually awarded custody of the girl. She apparently didn’t know anything about Christina’s online activities, although she had had to speak to her more than once about the late nights she sometimes kept.
Over the next several weeks, Dos Reis was finally able to persuade Christina to meet him. The two had several sexual encounters before their fateful rendezvous at the Danbury Fair Mall, and their final fatal date took place in the back seat of Saul’s car.
As Dos Reis is the last man to have seen Christina alive, we must rely on his word as to what occurred in the events leading to her murder. It is doubtful that the version offered by this rapist and strangler of a young girl has any real mooring in truth, but it is nonetheless instructive when exploring the mindset of a sexual criminal and his rationalisations.
Dos Reis later insisted to police that not only had Christina wanted sex but also that she had requested ‘rough sex’. Unfortunately, this had been taken a little too far and she had somehow accidentally ended up strangled and dead. If Dos Reis expects us to believe that in the throes of passion he had inadvertently choke
d his young partner, let us note that it takes around five minutes to strangle somebody to death.
Allegedly panicked by this sudden surge of violence, the young man drove to a remote ravine, where he dumped Christina’s body.
Not long afterwards, when the police had linked him via an email indicating that he had agreed to meet Christina on the Friday night, Dos Reis immediately caved in and told them his story. With the FBI involved, it was at their insistence that he led them to Christina’s violated corpse. He displayed not a trace of the bravado that had been the staple of his relationships with his ‘girls’. Rather, like a naughty puppy, he hung his head in shame. It seemed that his days of surfing the net for young teens were over. As it later transpired, this wasn’t the case.
Dos Reis was later arraigned in the US District Court in Bridgeport on a charge of using an interstate device – the internet – to entice a child into sexual activity. He was ordered held without bond, with a bail hearing scheduled for later that week.
At his trial in Bridgeport, which lasted from Monday, 3 March to Monday, 7 July 2003, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and three counts of second-degree sexual assault.
Sniffling and speaking so softly that the judge had repeatedly to ask him to speak up, Dos Reis, now 25, apologised for killing Christina Long. ‘I have not had a single night of sleep when I don’t wake up drenched in sweat,’ he said.
Presiding Judge Patrick L Carroll III said the apology should have come sooner. ‘That time for mercy was the evening your victim died at your hands,’ he admonished the defendant.
During the ‘victim impact’ phase of the case, and before handing down the maximum sentence allowable for the crimes, Judge Carroll heard several tear-filled statements from members of both Dos Reis’s and Christina’s families.
Christina’s grandfather, Lawrence Long, held nothing back, calling Dos Reis a ‘habitual predator’ who used his computer, flashy car, money and previous life experiences to lure Christina to her death. Dos Reis’s supporters presented an entirely different picture, testifying as to how he had provided free meals to the needy at his father-in-law’s restaurant. When his father-in-law’s wife had cancer, Dos Reis cared for her and even shaved his own head to make her feel more comfortable while she underwent chemotherapy.
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