‘The boy,’ the journalist continued, ‘who apparently lacks the faculties necessary to judge his own acts and take responsibility for them but at the same time is perfectly capable of erasing the traces of his crimes. The boy who carefully made sure that his victims were completely unable to defend themselves. The boy who revelled in acts of the utmost perversity. The boy with subnormal intelligence who somehow managed to avoid capture and repeat his crimes. This little monster I say! Little because of his age perhaps but old in the scope and magnitude of the crimes he committed. He has been forgiven all of this by our legal system!’
As he was only 16, Godino was too young to face the death penalty but the prosecutor, with the public opinion rising against Godino, obtained a retrial and this time the teenager was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He went first to a jail in Buenos Aires but in 1923 he was transferred to one of the toughest jails in Latin America: Ushuaia, otherwise known as the ‘prison at the end of the world’. Located in Argentina’s southernmost tip, it was as good a place as any to banish this national embarrassment.
In 1927, doctors in the jail performed surgery on Godino’s ears to try to curb his aggressiveness, but – unsurprisingly – this didn’t do any good. After 23 years in jail, Godino applied for parole but was denied on the grounds that he still presented a danger to society. In all, he was punished 13 times for insubordination, spent 30 years of his life in prison without a single visitor or a letter and was refused parole three times. So ashamed of him were his parents that they returned to Italy, along with his brothers and sisters.
Godino died in his cell at the age of 49, on 15 November 1944. His death certificate states that he died in his cell as a result of internal bleeding brought about by an ulcer, but the circumstances around his death remain unclear. Legend has it that he died soon after he’d received a tremendous kicking at the hands of his fellow prisoners. Unrepentant to the end, he just hadn’t been able to resist throwing the much-loved prison cat into an oven.
CHAPTER TWO
ISSEI SAGAWA: HOW TO EAT PEOPLE AND INFLUENCE THEM
Cannibal Issei Sagawa murdered then ate a young student in Paris in 1981. But instead of being ostracised and hated, fame and stardom beckoned.
One trait that cannibals share the world over is that they very rarely rush their food. They don’t like to throw away cuts that can be stored and set aside for later either. While many of us might be too precious to eat sweetmeats or offal, a cannibal has no such reservations, knowing that they can be saved for a tasty snack or starter.
Cannibals are, of course, pioneers in the relatively uncharted area of human cuisine. When faced with a willing audience, they are known to go into details on the subtle change in taste and texture of each body part, while in the kitchen they can prove themselves adept in the ways of pickling and creative and inventive in the use of daring culinary combinations. Eager to provide tried-and-tested recipes (stew being a particular favourite), they wax lyrical on the challenges each limb presents, and many cannibals are even known to put a morsel aside and carry it around for later – just in case they get peckish.
But if the confession made by the so-called Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa is to be believed, he was different from his peers in many ways. Sagawa told the authorities that he had been waiting for his chance to eat another human being; and when it finally came, he claimed, he consumed as much of his victim as he could stomach in a 24-hour feeding frenzy – and he ate most of her raw.
Sagawa was declared insane and not responsible for his actions by the French courts. Instead of being ostracised and hated, however, he soon found himself catapulted into the surreal world of Japanese show business where, for almost five years, he eagerly cashed in on his own notoriety. While the ‘joke’ lasted, Sagawa’s cult status allowed him to take part in porn films and chat shows, write a bestseller and even appear on the front page of a cooking magazine slurping on sushi.
A bright boy with an exceptionally high IQ, Sagawa was the son of a millionaire and enjoyed a privileged upbringing in his hometown of Tokyo, where he showed a natural talent for languages. But from an early age he was prone to nasty tantrums, and from the age of 12 he suffered violent nocturnal seizures and nightmares.
His cannibal fantasies began at the age of seven and to begin with revolved around boys, but this changed during his teenage years. The shy, retiring Sagawa found himself lusting hopelessly after tall, blonde Western women, whom he found impossibly daunting and out of reach.
While studying English literature at Wako University in Tokyo, Sagawa made his first attempt to eat someone, attacking a German woman. Having stalked her and followed her back to her apartment, he tried to knock her unconscious while she was asleep. She fended him off and Sagawa fled, only to be arrested shortly afterwards. In a taste of things to come, Sagawa served just ten days at Kitazawa police station for the attack.
In 1977, now on prescribed tranquillisers, Sagawa was quietly packed off to the Sorbonne Academy in Paris, ostensibly to further his studies in French literature. In September 1978, aged 28, he bought a .22-calibre rifle.
By 1981, even with the change of scenery, Sagawa’s luck with the ladies wasn’t improving – he wasn’t helped much by the fact that he was less than 5ft tall. He found it hard to make friends at the university, regarded first as an outcast, then a pest, and was described by fellow students variously as ‘childish’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘embarrassing’. Indeed, Sagawa was more or less friendless save for Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, who took pity on him and agreed to help him with his German. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sagawa fell head over heels in love with her. Tall, beautiful and intelligent, Hartevelt was just the type of girl he had been drooling over for all those years.
According to his confession to the police after his arrest on 11 June 1981, he invited Hartevelt (then aged 25) over to his apartment to read some German poetry – and promptly declared his love for her. Not one to stand on ceremony, he also asked her to go to bed with him. Hartevelt refused. Sagawa acted as if nothing had happened and asked her to resume her reading, which he was recording. At 5.30 p.m., he fetched the rifle and shot her once in the back of the head.
Sagawa later made a great deal of money by writing about what might have happened next in his bestselling book called Into the Fog, which earned him rave reviews from many Japanese critics. Sagawa set the story in Paris, though in the Latin Quarter, not Montmartre (where he had actually lived). The hero of the piece is called Akito Kamura, a 30-year-old Japanese student who is studying literature at the Sorbonne. Because of his vast intellect, Kamura is greatly appreciated by his teachers but less revered by the other students in the class who regard him as distant and arrogant. The lonely Kamura therefore spends most of his free time listening to classical music, reading and working on his thesis. Then, one day, Kamura meets a student from Holland. She is friendly and open and they quickly become friends. One day he invites her to his apartment for dinner. After she turns down his advances, he shoots her.
Sagawa has made varying claims as to how much he remembers after he had shot Hartevelt – and also told one journalist that he wrote the book because he was flat broke and needed the money. It’s possible, then, that the acts Sagawa writes about next in the book were exaggerated in order to maximise shock value – and therefore sales. Having said that, many of the details that feature in Into the Fog tally with the autopsy that was carried out on Hartevelt’s corpse. Whatever the case, the chapter on how the hero of the story eats his victims reads as if Sagawa is wistfully reliving a particularly pleasant and unusually long dinner.
In between declarations of love and gratitude to the lifeless corpse, no part of the body was taboo, and, the way Sagawa tells it in the novel, the more flesh the character eats, the more curious he becomes. Kamura starts off by sinking his teeth into his victim’s buttocks. For some reason, this gives him a headache, so he starts to hack at the body with a knife and starts chewing on th
e tasteless fat, which is, Sagawa writes, reminiscent of tuna.
After engaging in sex with the corpse (for ten seconds), Kamura hugs her and then, after a brief scare as the body seems to let out air, he roasts her hip in a pan and seasons it with salt and mustard. While Kamura eats, he listens to her dead voice, recorded reading German poetry only hours before, and dabs at the corners of his mouth with her panties. He then bakes one of her breasts and eats that too.
Next, Kamura turns in for the night – taking what is left of the corpse with him. With a renewed appetite the next morning, Sagawa’s character is relieved to find that his sleeping partner hasn’t decomposed too badly and almost immediately he starts chewing on her calf and then her ankle. He then moves on to her foot before deciding to eat her armpit.
By this time, the whole flat smells of what Sagawa describes as ‘fried chicken’ and there are flies buzzing all over the corpse. Saying a final farewell, Kamura begins to dismember the body, only stopping for the occasional snack. He plays around with her internal organs for a while, then puts the head in one plastic bag and the body in the other and stuffs her remains in a suitcase.
We cannot be sure how closely these actions match the real-life events involving Sagawa himself. We do know that, once Sagawa had finished with Hartevelt’s body, he carefully disposed of her clothes and personal belongings in the River Seine and in rubbish bins around Paris. He also disposed of some of her flesh and internal organs in garbage boxes. Back home, Sagawa saved some parts of her body in the freezer in anatomically labelled bags and called a cab. When the cab driver put the suitcases in the boot, he joked to Sagawa that they were so heavy that he must have a body inside them.
Sagawa took the cab to the Bois de Boulogne park in Paris with the intention of throwing the remains into the Lac Inférieur – one of the Bois’ many lakes. But the suitcases were so heavy that he didn’t have time to dump them before a middle-aged couple spotted him trying to lug them to the water’s edge; realising that he had been spotted, Sagawa immediately fled, leaving the two suitcases under a bush. After he had disappeared, the couple went looking for a policeman who got a very nasty surprise when he opened up those cases. The couple later provided a description of Sagawa and the taxi driver was able to remember the address he’d picked him up from. Three days later, Sagawa was questioned in his apartment and promptly confessed to the hideous crime.
It wasn’t long before Sagawa was back sleeping in his own comfy bed at home and walking the Tokyo streets, though. His family employed one of France’s top lawyers to argue his case for a rumoured million-dollar fee and Sagawa was deported back to Japan and treated in the Matsuzawa mental institution for a further 16 months. As he had entered the institution voluntarily, he was also, in theory, able to leave it, and with his father pulling the strings Sagawa walked out a free man in September 1985.
On his release, Sagawa kept a fairly low profile, embarking on a short-lived career as a dishwasher and also made an unsuccessful attempt to get work as a French tutor. He did, however, persuade a literary magazine to run instalments of one of his novels and he also found more creative work by writing the subtitles for a film about a man who made handbags out of the skin of corpses. But his really big break into show business was just around the corner.
It was the reign of another Japanese killer, Tsutomu Miyazaki, that paved the way. In 1983, Miyazaki killed four young girls and tormented their families by sending them gleeful accounts of their deaths, along with charred bones and teeth. A painfully shy 26-year-old printer’s assistant, Miyazaki was also a cannibal; he had devoured his grandfather’s cremated bones and gnawed on his final victim’s wrist.
The case provided Sagawa with a highly fortuitous break. He soon found himself appearing on chat shows and writing editorials for highly respected newspapers and magazines, offering his own peculiar insights and first-hand experiences of what it was like to eat another human being. From there, stardom beckoned.
Veteran journalist and photographer Antonio Pagnotta was there to observe the phenomenon first hand and wound up spending six months interviewing and researching Sagawa while living and working in Tokyo. It was 1992 and Sagawa was at the height of his popularity. Pagnotta’s story, which was published in France, revealed how adept Sagawa had now become at manipulating the media; protected by a large circle of admirers, he was treated with respect and even awe, happily wallowing in the media spotlight. The report caused shockwaves all over France, where most believed Sagawa to still be locked up in jail.
Sagawa was furious and publicly claimed that the allegations made by Pagnotta were false in an interview published in a monthly magazine called the Tokyo Journal. When Pagnotta refuted Sagawa’s claims in a letter that was published two months later in the same magazine, Sagawa was livid. ‘I will never ever forgive Antonio Pagnotta, this yakuza photographer has followed me for months and has stolen much information,’ Sagawa wrote to the editors of the Tokyo Journal. ‘I want to hang him upside down and smash his skull with a metal bat. I will kill him for sure.’ Sagawa also left ominous messages on an answer machine, was seen lurking outside Pagnotta’s old apartment and very nearly assaulted him in a restaurant. Indeed, the story took its toll on Pagnotta who suffered recurring nightmares of Sagawa trying to attack him and eat his brain.
‘Sagawa is a very cunning man,’ Pagnotta told me. ‘Way beyond imagination, and I suppose the reason he wanted me dead was because I had exposed him in a crude manner as a sexual pervert, porno actor and a could-be serial killer.’
Pagnotta had first met Sagawa at Tama tube station in 1992. ‘Standing one and a half metres in height, wearing a child-sized white ski jacket and thick, tinted glasses, he stood out unmistakably in the busy Tama station,’ Pagnotta remembers. ‘But everybody ignored him. It was incomprehensible that his child’s body would emanate such a powerful aura of menace. To most, he might seem to be a pathetic midget. There was something more to him. As I approached to shake hands, my instinct, beyond understanding, abruptly set off alarms. His sickly acne-scarred face did not suggest any emotion. His skin appeared to have been repeatedly washed in cleansing lotions. He had tried to remove an invisible stain, or perhaps tried to reach under the skin. As we were almost touching, we made eye contact. I felt overwhelmed by nausea.’
Despite Pagnotta’s gut feelings, the fact is that Sagawa is well educated and usually well mannered, traits that earned him the nickname of ‘The Gentleman Cannibal’ in Japan. ‘He spoke French passably and his manners were gracious,’ Pagnotta concedes. ‘He even appeared somewhat modest, the sign of a proper education. No doubt about it, this diminutive man showed good breeding.’
All the same, according to Pagnotta, money was a passion for Sagawa, even though he was still getting a healthy allowance from his millionaire father. If you wanted to interview or take his photo, you invariably had to pay for it. You also had to deal with his many cronies who, Pagnotta says, openly shared Sagawa’s obsessions. One wanted to eat a baby, while others wanted to join Sagawa in another killing.
Sagawa himself was open about his past. ‘As in a thriller movie script,’ Pagnotta observed, ‘I had noted that Sagawa did not hide his obsessions, he even wanted to openly share them. Every year, almost ritually, the cannibal gathered friends and admirers for Hanami, a traditional party under the cherry blossoms of a nearby park.
‘The main dish was barbecued meat. That year, he wanted me to join in. Reality and fiction had fuzzy borders for him. I was sure Sagawa was reliving permanently his crime in his books. I observed his jubilation when asked about his carving of the cadaver. He preciously kept a collection of horror movies running scenes of cannibalism next to a collection of magazines which carried a story about him, and he permanently updated both.’
Sagawa also kept a busy schedule, regularly filing movie reviews for Brutus magazine. So when a movie called Foam of Light was released – based on a true story of how Japanese troops in World War II had resorted to cannibalism to survive �
�� a tabloid paid for Sagawa to attend the premiere where, according to Pagnotta, he was treated like Hollywood royalty.
The release of Silence of the Lambs inevitably resulted in another surge of interest in the poison dwarf. The Asian Wall Street Journal quoted Sagawa as finding Hannibal Lecter ‘unrealistic and comical. He was portrayed as a monster and ate everything. Normally a cannibal is delicate and selects his victims carefully.’
Sagawa also made a big impact by appearing on Fuji TV in a show called Alphabet 2/three, a popular late-night programme for young adults. Pagnotta recalls how Sagawa was addressed as ‘sensei’ (honourable master) and described as ‘a genius and a gentle person’ by the show’s director. For the show, Sagawa was filmed in a Japanese loincloth and also as a priest – a role he clearly relished. ‘Dressed as a Catholic priest and flanked with two blonde twin sisters in red mini skirts, a sick reminder of his victim’s features, he became the first convicted psycho killer to act on TV,’ Pagnotta remembers. ‘His professionalism was impressive. He fitted into the production like a veteran. In his theatrical TV clergyman’s appearance, the lines were: “Believe, believe; only those who believe will be saved!” During the shooting, I could tell… that he was ecstatic.’
Sagawa also dabbled in the weird world of Japanese underground porn. In one film, he appears on the set while a couple is busy having sex and grabs a girl’s breast. Also according to Pagnotta, for porn magazine Takarajima, Sagawa appeared in a black-leather S&M mask; he also dressed up in bondage gear for Sniper magazine, wearing a helmet wrapped with barbed wire. Pagnotta also discovered the most shocking photo of all, which was published in May 1996, where Sagawa appears dressed in a schoolgirl uniform while a half-naked woman urinates on his face.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 2