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BAD PEOPLE			Date Added
	Issei Sagawa		April 2003

	Bio
	Full Name	Issei Sagawa
	Date of Birth	26th April 1949
	Known Also As	The Japanese Cannibal
	Hit Count	1
	Information & Pictures
	It was getting on for midnight on the 13th June 1981, and a middle-aged couple, taking advantage of the warm night air, were enjoying a stroll in the wide open spaces of the Bois de Boulogne, the largest and best known park in Paris. Despite the lateness of the hour, the couple decided on one more turn along the edge of the Lac Inferieur, the largest of the lakes in the Bois, as the park is more often called. The couple were nearing the eater's edge when they noticed a taxi pull up at the side of the road nearby. A slightly built young man, whom they later described as of Asian appearance, got out, paid the driver, and began to drag two heavy suitcases across the grass on small portable luggage trolleys.
	[ Issei Sagawa ] 32 year old Issei Sagawa at the time of his arrest in June 1981. Far from looking threatening, he was slightly-built, under five feet tall and gentle in appearance. He had tiny child-like hands, spoke with a lisp and walked with a slight limp.
	The couple paid little or no attention to the man, and walked slowly on. The sound of music wafted through the summer evening air, and the contented voices of the diners at the Chalet des Iles, a restaurant on an island in the middle of the lake, came clearly across the water. Then the couple realised what the man was planning to do. He was dragging his baggage straight across the neatly mowed grass to the water's edge. There could be no doubt about it: he was going to dump the suitcases into the water. This was bizarre even for the Bois de Boulogne, and the couple began to pay closer attention.
	[ The Two Suitcases ] Two suitcases, supposedly containing the dismembered body of Sagawa's victim, Renee Hartevelt, appeared on a French TV news bulletin. The picture was probably a hoax, since the original suitcases were found at night in the Bois de Boulogne and removed by the police.
	At that moment the man looked up and saw them staring at him. He then seemed to panic, abandoning the suitcases under a bush and ran off into the night. Their curiosity aroused, the couple walked over to see just what it was the man could have been in such a hurry to dispose of. Whatever gory sight met their eyes, they had seen enough, and hurried off to summon the police who arrived quickly at the scene. When the police opened the first case, they found the limbless, headless torso of a young woman; packed into the other suitcase were her arms, legs and head. Suitcases and contents were quickly removed to the mortuary for further post-mortem examination. As is normal practice, a large number of photographs were taken of the dismembered corpse as it lay on the autopsy table - photographs that would later get into the wrong hands and be used for distasteful publicity. From the descriptions given, it was clear the police were looking for a small town man of Oriental appearance. But as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, Paris was full of such men. The vital clue was that the man they were looking for had arrived in the Bois de Boulogne by taxi. This was not a case for inspirational detective work; it was one where good old fashioned, labourous police methods would yield results. Detectives began the long and arduous task of contacting every taxi firm in the capital to see if one of the drivers remembered picking up an Asian man with two unusually heavy suitcases that Saturday night. Within 48 hours their efforts turned up a driver who recalled such a fare. The driver had collected him from an address near the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne at Porte D'Auteuil, and was quite certain he could point out the very building to the police. Just two days after the discovery of the dismembered body, six heavily armed police officers called at an apartment building on rue Erlanger in the smart district of Auteuil in Paris's 16th arrondissement (district). Off the usual tourist routes, the seizieme, as it is called, is not the kind of place where the small-time criminals and prostitutes who frequent the Bois would be living. This was one of the most fashionable residential areas in Paris, where the chic and the successful came to escape the hurly-burly of the busier parts of the city. The apartment building, just a couple of streets from the southern end of the Bois, was typical of the area - small and expensive. There was no need to search it, because by then the police knew exactly which apartment they were going to. A second floor studio flat had been let to a Japanese student named Issei Sagawa. He was the only man in the building who fitted the witnesses descriptions.
	[ The Killer's House ] Police managed to track Sagawa down to his 2nd floor studio flat at this apartment block in a smart district of west Paris near the bois de Boulogne.
	Doing their best not to alert their suspect, the police made their way cautiously up to the second floor and rang the bell. They were keyed up, and prepared for anything. The autopsy had established the cause of death as a single gunshot wound to the back of the victim's neck, so they knew the man they were looking for was armed and probably dangerous. An inspection of the corpse had revealed that parts of the dismembered corpse were still missing, while closer examination of the dead girl's wounds showed that a knife had been used to cut pieces of flesh from her buttocks and thighs as well as the tip of her nose. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the police were nervous. The man who opened the door, however, did not look anything like the monster they imagined. Small and quietly spoken, Issei Sagawa answered the policemen's enquiries easily and directly. He told the officers he had come from his native Japan to study at the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne had been a centre of intellectual brilliance ever since the 14th Century. In modern times, it had become a Mecca for bright young people from all over the world, and Sagawa was just one of the many students who had made long journeys to pursue post-graduate work there. He told the police his chosen specialty was the study of modern literature, which he was pursing in the Sorbonne's School of Oriental Studies, situated in the Dauphine area, also in the 16th arrondissement. The police asked Sagawa if he would be prepared to accompany them to the police station for further questioning. The young student displayed no signs of anxiety at their request, however, and offering no resistance, willingly went with the officers. Expecting a long and difficult interrogation, the police began to question the 32 year old about his movements. Naturally enough, they were particularly anxious to know where he had been on Thursday night when the young woman's body had been dumped in the Bois. To their surprise, Sagawa was quite prepared to talk about the events of the previous week. He admitted calling a taxi. He admitted having had two particularly heavy suitcases with him. He admitted planning to dispose of the cases in the lake. Then, finally, to the astonishment of the police, he admitted their contents.
	[ Renee Hartevelt ] The daughter of a wealthy Dutch industrialist, Renee Hartevelt earned a degree at the University of Leiden before deciding to do post-graduate research for her doctorate at the famous Paris university of the Sorbonne. Following disagreements with her family who disapproved of her Arab boyfriend, she received no financial assistance from home and was living the life of an impoverished student in Paris. She had a maid's room at 59, rue Bonaparte where she lived for free in exchange for taking care of the landlords children. Issei Sagawa first noticed the pretty, grey-eyed 25 year old when she was reading a paper about Dadaism, an early 20th Century avant garde literary and artistic movement, in a literature class he was attending. 'I was unable to take my eyes off her,' he later admitted. Tragically for her, she was soon to befriend her killer.
	In an quiet, almost apologetic tone, Sagawa told the police he had killed the girl and cut her body into pieces in the bathroom of his apartment. No identification of the dismembered corpse had been possible, but Sagawa obligingly identified his victim. he told them that she was a fellow student at the university named Renee Hartevelt, who had come from the Netherlands. The post mortem revealed that Renee had been sexually assaulted after death. Ever cooperative, Sagawa admitted the assault. But this was no ordinary sex-crime, because when the investigating officers asked him why he had killed her, Sagawa made the astonishing claim that it was not because he had wanted to have sex with her, but because he had wanted to eat her. Right from the outset, the French police found it hard to accept Sagawa's claim that it was cannibalism, not sex, that had been the prime motivation for the killing. To their minds it seemed inconceivable that a young man should not want to make love to an attractive young woman - and photographs of Renee would soon show that she had been attractive - but instead want to eat her flesh. Meanwhile, a more thorough search of the small studio apartment was already producing evidence to support Sagawa's account.
	[ Flesh in the Fridge ] Plastic bags containing flesh from Renee Hartevelt's body are laid out in front of Sagawa's refrigerator, where they were discovered by police.
	Carefully wrapped in plastic bags in the refrigerator, officers found pieces of red meat. These were taken to the police laboratory, where forensic evidence established beyond any doubt that this was human flesh. The pieces also matched the strange mutilations found on Renee Hartevelt's dismembered corpse. These scraps of red meat had been cut from Renee's arms, thighs and hips. There were also other pieces of human flesh in the refrigerator, which the police eventually identified as the coming from the victim's lips. The newspapers went wild. Headlines had already proclaimed the bizarre discovery of the dismembered body in the Bois de Boulogne. Now, as soon as news of the arrest got out, nationwide banner headlines announced that a 'Japanese Cannibal' had been responsible for this horrific crime. The photograph of Sagawa which accompanied all the stories showed the classic 'inscrutable' Oriental face, complete with dark staring eyes. it was easy to jump to the conclusion that this man was a cold-blooded psychopathic killer, but the investigating officers were already discovering the case was not going to be as straight forward as it first looked. The man placed in charge of the investigation was Judge Jean-Louis Bruguieres. As Examining Magistrate - a French office combining the roles of sleuth and judge - he had extensive powers allowing him to order searches and arrests, and to extend his investigations to any part of the world. Bruguieres' pursuit of the truth about the killing of Renee Hartevelt would ultimately take the judge to Japan itself. But at the beginning of the investigation there seemed to be no real difficulty in gathering information about the killing, because Sagawa was happy to talk about what he had done. In a series of interviews beginning the day after Sagawa's arrest, Bruguieres built up a detailed account of the murder. The more he learned about the crime and the murderer, the more puzzled Bruguieres became. Just what sort of case was he dealing with? What could have been the real motivation of the slender, cultured Japanese man who admitted his gruesome crime so readily? Open, honest and eager to help, Sagawa did not come across as a psychopath. Yet could a sane man really have done what he had done? The newspapers all claimed Renee had been Sagawa's girlfriend, and characterised the murder as a crime of passion, albeit a particularly horrific one. The press then jumped to the conclusion that the reason for the killing must therefore have been sexual. But in his own account to Bruguieres, Sagawa denied that there was any sexual motive to his crime. It seems likely that he was telling the truth at the time. But he was also probably unaware of a deeper, more complex, motivation at work. His intense desire to eat the flesh of a woman was, as he later admitted, the only means of satisfying his long-term frustration resulting from a sense of physical and, by association, sexual, inadequacy stemming from early childhood.
	[ Issei Sagawa ] A young Issei Sagawa poses dutifully for the camera. As a tiny boy, Issei appeared unconcerned about his small size and, although he was something of a loner, his elementary school reports described him as a happy and active child. It was only when he went to secondary school that his smallness began to bother him and he became introspective and shy.
	Issei Sagawa was born prematurely on 26th April 1949. Shortly before his birth, his mother, Tomi, had fallen down some steps at a department store and almost had a miscarriage. When the child was born, he was so under-developed that his father, Akira, was able to hold him in the palm of his hand - that was the family story anyway, and it was one which made an impression on the child as he grew slowly into an undersized, sickly child, who even today describes himself as 'having arms and legs like pencils'. Even at the time of the murder, Sagawa was less than 1.5m (5 foot) tall and weighed only 38kgs (6 stone). Perhaps the most important psychological events in Sagawa's early life began when he was about three years of age. Each year at the family's traditional New Year party, Issei's Uncle Mitsuo dressed up as a terrifying giant who loved to feast on human flesh. Sagawa and his younger brother were the giant's victims and their father played the part of the brave knight who tried to save them. But every time the monstrous giant would win - the defending knight was first blinded and then killed and the two little children were lowered kicking and screaming with mingled terror and delight into an enormous cooking pot. It was an innocent bit of fun and both children loved the game - for most children love being frightened when they know there is nothing to be scared of. Many also find it exciting to glimpse the forbidden, dangerous world of adults, and Issei and his brother would probably have been disappointed if the good knight had killed the wicked giant. The game appears to have left no lasting impression on Issei's brother, but Issei was a sensitive child and the game lodged deep in his imagination. Issei began reading fairy stories about monsters and giants who ate children and found he enjoyed the almost frightening excitement that they aroused.
	[ Enteritis ] When Issei Sagawa was born, he suffered from enteritis, a disease which affects the intestine. He was given saline injections, with potassium and calcium which saved his life. He grew very slowly and remained a small, sickly child. He would later refer to his size as making him feel somehow 'incomplete'.
	Later Issei would conjecture that these games had appealed to a masochistic streak which was already present somewhere in his nature and that they were at the root of his obsession with cannibalism. He recalled that the game frightened him, both it and the fairy stories that he had read had also given him a tremendous shiver of excitement - an excitement akin to a sexual sensation. At elementary school Issei was a solitary boy. Although he remembers this time as being happy, he wasn't a normal boy - his extreme frailty and his aggressive fantasies of cannibalism, of being killed and eaten, would have set him apart from other boys. As a result of his delicate constitution, his mother pampered him to the point where he became, in the eyes of many, as a spoilt child. At his secondary school, which he entered at the age of 12, Sagawa switched from the fairy stories about man-eating monsters which had fascinated him as a young boy to the great works of Western literature. An avid reader from an early age, he now became obsessed with the romantic heroines of such novels as Little Women, Wuthering Heights and War and Peace. He thought of these Western women as angels, embodying an ideal of femininity. He also developed a passion for Western classical music, especially the works of Handel and Beethoven, and he gazed with fascination at reproductions of the paintings of the French Impressionist paint Auguste Renoir. Amply proportioned and with flesh the colour and texture of strawberry icecream, Renoir's women stimulated a morbid idea that was growing in Sagawa's mind - the idea that he would one day eat the flesh of a white woman. When adolescence brought changes to the body which starts most young boys thinking obsessively about having sex with girls, Issei began to fantasize about eating them.
	[ Teen Years ] As a teenager, Sagawa pictured here with his mother at a swimming pool, was always painfully conscious of his slight build and short stature, which reinforced his isolation and loneliness.
	It was at this stage in Sagawa's development that his diminutive physical size began to bother him. He felt that he needed to absorb the healthy plumpness of those Renoir women into his own pitiful body. Sagawa's fantasies also included Western women, especially American actresses such as Grace Kelly and Jean Seberg, whose marble-white flesh fascinated and excited him. Much later Sagawa was to say: 'I was a premature and unhealthy baby, I am ugly and small, but I indulge in fantasies about strong, healthy bodies.' These fantasies began to dominate his life and became increasingly powerful, and Sagawa began to recognize that the realisation of his fantasies would have to involve an act of violence against another human being. 'I saw a Western woman in the street,' he wrote. 'My fantasies started to act with their own force, sneaking in through the window. She's showing her back. I should take a belt and strangle her.' Sagawa became so concerned about his fantasies that, at the age of 15, he telephone a psychiatrist for advice. But the psychiatrist refused to talk to Issei on the phone, telling him that he would have to visit him in person, and Issei found the idea too shameful. He tried telling his brother about his fantasies but he seemed to think it was a joke. In hindsight, Issei's actions appear to be a cry for help - an attempt to escape from these fantasies, which were beginning to get out of control. But being denied help by both the psychiatrist and his brother pushed Issei into an even lonelier world, where his fantasies took on a more powerful life of their own.
	[ Sagawa - The Student ] Issei Sagawa photographed in Paris during his years as a student there. The city made him feel lonely and alienated, intensifying his cannibalistic fantasies.
	While carrying out his investigation of the murder, the Examining Magistrate, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguieres, was painstakingly thorough. In his attempt to build up a clear picture of the crime, the judge talked to everyone in Paris who had known either the dead student, Renee Hartevelt, or her killer, Issei Sagawa. Bruguieres soon learned that 25 year old Renee usually spent the weekends with an Arab boyfriend of whom her Jewish parents disapproved. This, said one friend, had caused a rift between Renee and her family, and was the reason why she was receiving no financial help from them. As a result, Renee was short of money and had eagerly accepted an offer from Sagawa that she teach him German. Those who knew Sagawa did not believe there was any kind of romantic attachment between him and Renee. Their assessment was that she must have agreed to go to his apartment in the first place strictly out of pity for the diminutive Japanese student, who was seen as a sad loner by all the other students. But none of the people to whom Bruguieres spoke could shed any light on the most extraordinary aspect of the crime, the one that all the newspapers were full of, and the one which its perpetrator said was his chief motivation - cannibalism. Only Sagawa himself could explain that. Bruguieres began an extended series of interviews with the killer in which he was able to build up a detailed account of the lead-up to the horrific killing of Renee Hartevelt. Sagawa seemed just as anxious as his interrogator to understand how he had ended up committing such an extraordinary crime. Slowly, as the Japanese student talked and talked, and the pieces of the jigsaw fitted into place, a nightmare picture of the darkest recesses of the human mind began to take shape.
	[ Examining Magistrate - Jean-Louis Bruguieres ] Jean-Louis Bruguieres, the Examining Magistrate in the Sagawa case, undertook to find out all he could about the murderer. Before long, his detailed investigation began to reveal the deeply complex fantasies of the killer's mind.
	Issei Sagawa had arrived in Paris in 1977, when he was 28 years old. A quietly spoken, shy young man from a highly cultured background, he had already had an MA degree in Shakespearean literature following his studies at Wako University in Tokyo. Now he was joining the Sorbonne's School of Oriental Studies to specialise in modern avant garde literature. But while on the outside he lived the ordinary life of an overseas student in a foreign city, seeing the sights and enjoying the excitement of Paris, he was also living in a terrifying fantasy world which had obsessed him for some 25 years. His fantasies focused on attractive, well-formed Western women and American screen actresses in particular. The low-cut dresses they wore on screen, exposing large areas of white skin, filled him with overwhelming and terrifying urges. he said that he had wanted to bite into those soft, white shoulders, to taste that cream-coloured flesh. The masterpieces of Western art with their rose-coloured naked models also served to fuel his wild imagination. Coming to Paris therefore only helped to exacerbate the abnormal fantasy of life which was growing ever harder to control. Sagawa's homeland of Japan was still in many ways a traditional society. Even into the 1990's one third of Japanese marriages were still arranged by the old matchmaking system, in which a relative or friend of the family introduces eligible singles to each other. In spite of the well known blind eye which the authorities turn to the so-called 'love-hotels', where rooms can be rented by the hour, respectable women still tend to dress modestly. In any case, Sagawa's sadistic fantasies revolved around Western women. Yet despite Japan's growing global status as an economic superpower, there were relatively few of these to be seen in the country. There had been one incident in 1970 in which he had climbed through the window of a German woman's apartment at night, hoping to act out his cannibalistic obsession. Fortunately for her, she woke up and her screams frightened him off. As a result of the incident, Sagawa went to see a psychiatrist, who declared that Sagawa was 'extremely dangerous'. The incident was hushed up, however, and it seems that for the remainder of his time in Japan, Sagawa managed to keep his urges under control, allowing his fantasies to revolve primarily - and safely - around film stars and paintings. But in Paris, a city that has always claimed to have the most attractive women in the world, he was surrounded by real life versions of the kind of women who had occupied his feverish thoughts for so long. These women were not afraid to wear revealing and sexually provocative summer fashions. As they sat outside pavement cafe's with bare shoulders and exposed legs, Sagawa felt like a starving man looking through the window of an expensive restaurant. Perhaps, he thought, if only he acted out his terrible fantasy just once, the obsession would leave him, and he could continue his life in peace. It was now, uprooted from the familiar ways of Japan and transported into what literally seemed like another world, that Sagawa crossed that line between imagination and action. With the alluring Parisiennes driving him into a fever of longing, his fantasy became ever more powerful to the point where it became his dominate reality. He finally reached a point where he made a conscious decision to carry out his desire and he laid plains accordingly. His first thought as to act out his cannibalistic fantasies on a prostitute - a common recourse for sex criminals from Jack the Ripper to Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Yorkshire Ripper'. No doubt, Sagawa believed that a prostitute would be less likely to be missed. On at least seven separate occasions, therefore, he invited prostitutes back to his apartment, but each time found himself unable to go through with his plans. Sagawa was living in an apartment on rue de Longchamp - in the same fashionable district where he was staying at the time of his arrest - when he picked up one particularly beautiful blonde prostitute and took her back to his room. She went to his bathroom to use the bidet, and he got as far as following her with a knife. But at the last minute, he could not bring himself to stab her. He had sex with the woman instead and to his relief the fantasies for cannibalism subsided, but only for a while. The relief was only temporary. Soon the urge was back, stronger than ever. At this point he decided that if he could not bring himself to stab a woman, perhaps it would be easier to kill her with a gun.
	[ Issei Sagawa ] Was Sagawa the victim of a bizarre and terrifying sexual obsession or, as some psychiatrists who examined him believed, simply a dangerous sexual criminal, who should have been locked away behind bars?
	Sagawa was surprised at how straightforward obtaining a gun proved to be. Without bothering to apply for a permit, he walked into a gun shop and brought a .22 carbine, a small rifle usually used for hunting. He put the weapon in a cupboard in his room and went out searching for another potential victim. Once again a prostitute seemed like the easiest target. He took another girl back to his room, but once more could not bring himself to kill her. This one was young, almost like a school girl. 'I enjoyed talking to her,' he told Judge Bruguieres. Instead of murdering and eating her, as he had planned, he made friends with the young prostitute. She returned to his room on several occasions, even cooking meals for him. He raised the subject of cannibalism in as casual a way as he could. She listened, and even went as far to bring him a book on the subject. When the authorities finally tracked the girl down, she told them that she remembered Sagawa, but that it had never crossed her mind that this apparently harmless young man had a genuine longing to taste the flesh of a human being. In October 1980, Sagawa went home to Japan for an extended visit. None of his friends or family reported seeing any change in the young man whose fantasies were now running so terrifyingly out of control. But during his four month stay Sagawa was forcibly struck by the absence of those beautiful Western women he had got so used to on the streets of Paris. 'For Japanese I haven't any sexual desire,' he later told Peter McGill, a reporter for the Observer newspaper, 'I am feeling as if she is my own daughter - no, sister, so it would be incestuous.' Sagawa returned to the French capital in February 1981. His studies at the Sorbonne were now near complete. Soon he would be returning to Japan permanently, and the chance to live out his fantasy of eating a white woman might be gone forever. Later, Sagawa claimed that the thought of leaving Paris without having tasted female flesh caused him extreme mental anguish - as this might be his only opportunity of fulfilling his dream. It was at this point that his path crossed that of 25 year old Renee Hartevelt from Holland. Sagawa had come back to the Sorbonne to put the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis about his favourite Shakespearean play, The Tempest. But he was a hard worker and he also found time to continue attending classes in modern literature. Renee had arrived at the Sorbonne only recently. She was in Paris to do post-graduate work for her doctorate at the Censier Institute, another arm of the University of Paris. One day in May she stood up in class to read her paper about Dadaist poetry. Sagawa, who was attending the same class, was immediately captivated. Renee, a typically fair-skinned Dutch girl, had the classic white shoulders that had so obsessed the young Japanese man. Renee also had a sweet, gentle smile, clear grey eyes and a sensual figure. Sagawa later recalled in his autobiographical book In The Fog how he was completely mesmerized by his first impression of her: 'I couldn't keep my eyes off her. Out of her short t-shirt I could see her white arms.' There and then, Sagawa - now deep in the grips of his dark fantasy - decided that this was the woman he was destined to eat. He went on to explain to Judge Bruguieres that he had not been in love with Renee - it had been a sexual obsession. For Sagawa, however, this meant not ordinary sex, but rather cannibalism. Within a month, he would have turned this terrible fantasy into a still more terrible reality.
	[ Issei Sagawa ] Back in Japan, Issei Sagawa has been feted for his crime. His attitudes towards sex and eating have been heavily exploited by popular press and television. This picture, showing Sagawa eating barbecued food in a restaurant, appeared as part of a feature on the gourmet page of a magazine.
	Issei Sagawa claims that his sexual violation of Renee Hartevelt was almost an afterthought, altogether less important that the pleasure of eating her flesh. But should we trust his own account of his actions if we are to make sense of this most bizarre of murders? Was it, as Judge Bruguieres decided, the act of someone who had completely lost his grip on reality and was suffering from psychosis - the deluded belief that eating human 'meat' would bring him sexual satisfaction? In many ways, Sagawa showed the classic symptoms of a sexual murderer. Unlike other murderers, this type of killer does not strike out of revenge or in a spontaneous outburst of rage. He kills to satisfy an overwhelming inner compulsion, which, if repeated, turns him into a serial killer. By his own admission, Sagawa's compulsion was to possess women to the extent of consuming their flesh. It was a fantasy that had taken root in childhood and had haunted him for 20 years before he finally yielded to it.
	[ Issei Sagawa ] This self-portrait by Issei Sagawa reveals the face of an aloof and rather suspicious man. The acting out of his fantasies turned him into a psychiatric puzzle . But the tragedy of the case is that if he had believed he could build a relationship with Renee, based on a 'normal' sexual relationship, his flesh-eating obsession might have retreated permanently.
	There were aspects about the crime that puzzled Jean-Louis Bruguieres. On one hand, Sagawa appears to have had no desire to see his victim in pain or for her to know she was about to die. This showed a concern completely alien to the typical sexual killer who is by nature a sadist. Another oddity is that Sagawa did not find the act of killing a peak sexual experience. Instead, fulfillment came with undressing Renee's body and eating her flesh. However, in other aspects Sagawa's behaviour showed the marks of a serial killer. He chose one of the buttocks - a very sensual part of the body - as the area to eat first and then kept some of the victims parts so that he could savour the sensation again. He also maintained a facade of normal behaviour, showing not the slightest trace of guilt. When the full impact of what he had done began to register, he experienced a deep sense of anti-climax and sank into a black depression. According to Sagawa, he found the murder and its aftermath such a brutal awakening that it cured him permanently of the temptation to be violent (although, significantly, he has never claimed to have lost his desire for eating human flesh). Judging by the hopelessly inept way he tried to dispose of the body, his actions were indicative of a man who wanted to be caught. It is fortunate that Sagawa was caught early, for there was enough evidence to suggest that, after his initial revulsion at what he had done had gradually been overtaken by the urge to do it again, he could quite easily have developed into a fully fledged serial killer. Sagawa later claimed that - after the murder and his stay in La Sante Prison and the Henri Colin Asylum - his delusional world burst like a bubble. He believes that his compulsion made him temporarily sick, but that he has now made a full recovery. However, others disagree. Some French and Japanese psychiatrists still think he deceived the authorities into believing he was insane to disguise the fact that he was a dangerous sexual criminal.
	[ Crime Scene ] Sagawa chopped up Renee's body in the cramped bathroom of his Paris flat to let the blood drain away. Many sexual killers derive pleasure from cutting up their victims' bodies but Sagawa claimed to find the whole process of dismemberment extremely distasteful.
	According to the account given by Sagawa to Judge Bruguieres, the first moment he saw Renee Hartevelt in a literature class at the Sorbonne, Sagawa started to lay plans to lure the unsuspecting girl into his fantasy world of murder and cannibalism. Pure chance and the Dutch girl's easy-going, friendly disposition combined to make this far easier than he had imagined. Sagawa was on his way home on the Metro after that very first class, when he bumped into the girl again by sheer accident. They fell into easy conversation about their research work. It was just the opening Sagawa had been hoping for. he made sure he did not miss the next class. Sure enough, Renee was there too. When the class ended, someone came up with a plan for an outing to a Greek restaurant - Renee and Sagawa formed part of the group. Sagawa was the only Japanese among the group of students, and one of them suggested they should try a Japanese restaurant next time in his honour. Sagawa instantly took the opportunity to invite them all to his apartment to eat the traditional Japanese meat, vegetable and noodle dish called sukiyaki. It may be that most of the students did not take Sagawa seriously. Or it may be that they did not want to visit the Japanese mans room. Bruguieres found no one among the student body who considered himself Sagawa's close friend, and the killer regarded himself as being entirely friendless in Paris. So, on the appointed day, only one of the students actually turned up for the meal. Much to his surprise, it was Renee Hartevelt. The two students talked about music, while Sagawa played recordings of his favourite composers, Handel and Beethoven. Sagawa later described the conversation as 'pleasant'. Renee let slip that she could speak English, French and German fluently. She also made no secret of the fact that she was short of money. Sagawa saw his opportunity. He suggested she should return to his apartment on a regular basis to give him German lessons for which he would pay her well. Renee was delighted at the prospect of an extra source of income and agreed readily. Renee asked Sagawa why he was so anxious to learn German. The explanation he offered was that he wanted to be able to read German Romantic poetry in the original. The truth was that he had not been prepared for Renee arriving that day, so he had not laid his plans for murder. Now he needed an excuse to invite the girl back to his apartment again alone, when she would be totally at his mercy. By the day of the first German lesson, Sagawa had his plan worked out. He would wait until Renee was occupied with a book. Then he would go to the could while she read, take out his gun, step behind her and shoot her through the neck just above the shoulders. Once she was dead, he would undress her. Then he would eat her. But after his experiences with the prostitutes, Sagawa was not at all sure if he would be able to go through with the killing when the time came. And anyway, would Renee turn up? Sagawa need not have worried about her reliability. She was not the kind of girl to break appointments, and anyway she needed the money. She arrived on time. In the room which served as both bedroom and study, she sat on the floor with her book. The gun was ready in the cupboard. But once again, when it came to the point, just as he had suspected Sagawa found himself unable to carry out his plan. The gun stayed safely in its cupboard and Renee got up and left when the lesson was over, totally unaware of the danger she had been in. When she was gone, Sagawa was full of self-loathing. He called himself a hopeless dreamer - too weak to live out the fantasy that had haunted him for so long. He told himself that if he did not go through with it the next time he would never be able to respect himself again. The day before his next German lesson with Renee, Sagawa was not feeling well. He had a bad cold and was running a slight fever. But then a man from his father's firm, Kurita Water Industries, a water treatment company in Osaka, arrived, bringing with him some choice items of Japanese food with him from home. Sagawa felt it his duty to show him the bright lights of Paris. They spent the day sight-seeing and that evening ended up in a Japanese restaurant. Looking at the raw fish laid out in the Japanese style on the counter for the customers to see, Sagawa was suddenly filled with a new and terrible determination. He had dreamed for so long of biting into the soft white flesh of a woman. How stupid it would be if the mere fact of not feeling well should prevent him from finally fulfilling his ultimate fantasy the next day.
	[ Crime Scene ] Sagawa prepared the flesh from his victim on the cramped work surface of his tiny kitchenette and cooked it on this two ring cooker. The whole procedure was carried out with almost ritualistic precision.
	Renee arrived on time once more for the German lesson the following day. By now, it seems it was not just the money she was interested in. Her parents gave the police access to letters she had written home during her time in Paris. In one of the last she wrote of a new friend she had made. She described her new friend as being 'kind and sympathetic', and she said that she hoped to be able to introduce him to the family. There seems no doubt that she was referring to Sagawa himself - behind the shy, diffident manner there was a charming, sociable and entertaining man. Sagawa made sure that Renee sat with her back to the cupboard where the gun was kept. He waited until she was totally occupied reading German poetry aloud, then he made his way quietly over to the cupboard, drew back the curtain and gripped his .22 rifle. This time his nerve did not fail him. With Renee quite oblivious to her danger, he aimed the weapon at the back of her neck at point-blank range and pulled the trigger. There was a click and nothing else. Inexplicably, the rifle had jammed. Renee did not seem to have heard the faint sound, so Sagawa simply put the rifle quietly back in the cupboard, and went on with his German lesson. Still without the slightest inkling of the danger this quiet man posed, Renee returned to his apartment once more. It was Thursday 11th June 1981. They sat once again on cushions on the floor in the Japanese manner, he gave her a concoction of tea and whiskey, 'to deaden the pain' as he explained later, she with her back to the cupboard and its fatal contents, while she began reading him a poem by the German poet Becher called 'Evening'. Saying he was going to switch on the tape recorder, Sagawa got up and went to the cupboard. He took out the .22 and stood behind the girl. Again, he held the muzzle of the rifle to the nape of her neck, almost touching the white skin. Renee stopped reading. Sagawa fired. Unlike the last time, the rifle operated normally. Death was instantaneous. According to his own account, Sagawa fainted when he saw what he had done. When he came to, and saw Renee lying dead in a growing pool of blood on the apartment floor, he could not believe this was really happening. A part of him was horrified at his own actions and afraid of the dead body, the first he had ever seen. Another part of him slipped into the fantasy he had imagined so many times. In this dream world the horrific reality of what he was doing could not reach him. He undressed the dead girl, and placed her carefully face down on the floor. Sagawa had planned exactly what he would do next. Believing that the left buttock might contain more blood because it was closer to the heart, and not liking the sight of blood, he bent down and bit into her right buttock, but failed to break the flesh. Sagawa went to the kitchen drawer for a knife. Using a sharp carving knife, he cut deeply into the white flesh of which he had dreamed so much. He remembered seeing a thick layer of fat which he described as 'as yellow as a corncob'. Then his knife reached red meat. He cut a piece, put it in his mouth and chewed in a state of extreme sexual excitement. The flesh reminded him of raw tuna fish. It was as delicious as he had hoped. He turned the body over and cut more flesh from the thigh, which he also ate raw. Then, he admitted to Judge Bruguieres, he raped the dead woman. But he insisted that the sexual violation was more or less an afterthought. The main pleasure and satisfaction he derived from the killing was from eating Renee's flesh. The dead woman had bled profusely all over the carpet, and Sagawa realised he could not leave the body where it was. He dragged the corpse into the bathroom and heaved it into the bath. Then he set about the task of dismembering it, leaving the tap running so the dead girl's blood would wash down the drain. He told Judge Bruguieres and the other investigating officers this had nothing to do with his lurid fantasy, it was purely a practical consideration - he knew he had to get rid of the body, and he wanted it in smaller, more manageable pieces.
	[ Issei Sagawa ] Sagawa as a sightseer, photographed in front of the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel near the Louvre Museum. After he killed Renee he disposed of most of her clothing by dumping it in dustbins along the Champs-Elysees.
	Parts of the thighs and buttocks he wrapped in plastic and kept in the refrigerator, planning to eat them later. But he claimed that cutting up the body gave him no pleasure, and in fact made him feel ill. He had severed a breast, planning to eat it, but it reminded him of animal offal which he had never been able to stand. He was nauseated by the sight, calling the breasts, 'revolting lumps of fat'. Over the next two days - Friday and Saturday - Sagawa left his flat several times. He dumped the dead woman's clothing in dustbins along the Champs-Elysees, keeping only her pants. he brought two large suitcases. He also met some fellow students for a trip to the cinema. Questioned later, the students who went with Sagawa to the movies seemed to recall nothing out of the ordinary about the Japanese man's behaviour. In between these excursions, during which he seemed completely normal, Sagawa would come back to the apartment, take more flesh from the refrigerator and cook himself a meal. He added salt, pepper and mustard to his gruesome cooking to give flavour to the meat which, he said, reminded him of rather tough veal, once cooked. Despite these culinary objects, he went on to say that eating the human flesh each time took him to another peak of sexual excitement. On Saturday night, he put the dismembered parts into the suitcases he had bought and called a taxi. The cab arrived at about 11.30pm. Sagawa loaded his suitcases into the boot and told the driver to take him to the Bois de Boulogne.
	[ Issei Sagawa's Prison ] Huge walls encircle the prison of La Sante in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, where Sagawa was held while it was decided whether he would face trial.
	The cab headed north through the Bois, past the Hippodrome D'Auteuil, where the steeplechases are run, and past the Lac Superieur. Opposite an island on the Lac Inferieur, the driver stopped. Sagawa remembered the middle-aged French couple staring at him as he dragged his suitcases towards the waters edge. He recalled the sudden panic at being spotted. He had dumped the cases under a bush and run straight back to his apartment as fast as he could. This was the lucid account of his horrific crime that Issei Sagawa gave to Judge Bruguieres. it left the examining magistrate in a quandary, for it was he who had to decide whether Sagawa was fit to stand trial for the crime of murder, or whether he was insane - in which case he could not stand trial but might have to be confined to a mental institution for an indefinite period. From the police point of view the killing looked like a case of premeditated murder. It had been carefully planned and executed. Nothing about Sagawa's demeanour suggested that he was obviously mad. Nut surely the very bizarreness of his crime, and his admitted life-long obsession with cannibalism, cast doubts over the balance of his mind. And, if his account was to be believed, this obsession had started when he was just three years old. The questions was: could he be held responsible for his childhood fantasies? An intelligent and sensitive man, Bruguieres deliberated long and hard about what to do. An endless series of tests was carried out on Sagawa, looking for signs of abnormality in his brain. A team of psychiatrists offered their expert opinion. But it was solely up to the judge to determine whether a trial would take place or not. In the end, his decision would cause a world wide sensation.
	[ Issei Sagawa's Prison ] Sagawa, in the foreground, gazes out from the grounds of the Henri Colin Asylum in Villejuif, south of Paris. Confined initially for 'an indefinate period', his stay here would span little more than two years.
	The Examining Magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguieres, was a heavily built man with the brusque manner of someone accustomed to wielding authority. This facade disguised a genuine desire to understand the workings of the criminal mind and a tenacity which took him to extreme lengths in this baffling case. With his dossier more or less complete on how, where and when the killing of Renee Hartevelt had been carried out, Bruguieres was free to concentrate on the aspect of the crime that still remained in doubt - why had Renee Hartevelt been killed in the first place? He decided he might have more chance of getting at what lay behind the crime which remained incomprehensible to all its investigators by visiting Japan, and conducting a probe into the background of Issei Sagawa. Perhaps in Sagawa's home country he would discover secrets that could help him decide if the killer was sane or insane - and therefore whether he should stand trial for murder or not. Bruguieres boarded a plane for Tokyo. In Japan, the judge talked to Sagawa's family. He talked to doctors. He talked to the psychiatrist who had examined Sagawa after he broke into the German woman's apartment back in 1970 - the first indication that one day he might go on to commit a violent attack. But Sagawa's actions were just as puzzling to Japanese experts as they had been to the French. Sagawa himself had told Bruguieres about the childhood New Year game which he believed started his obsession with cannibalism, but interviews with his eminently normal family offered the judge no further explanation for the adult Sagawa's perverse fantasies. Meanwhile Akira Sagawa, father of the man the press called "The Japanese Cannibal", travelled in the opposite direction. Arriving in Paris, he immediately hired one of France's top lawyers, Philippe Lemaire, to defend his son. Legal and hospital expenses would ultimately cost the Sagawa family a small fortune, but the money was never begrudged. The family stood by Issei Sagawa throughout. Mr Sagawa took some of his son's fellow students out to dinner, trying to find out from them how this nightmare had been visited on his family. One of the students told the press afterwards that Sagawa's father had asked for their help, saying, 'He didn't do it.' But following the sensational newspaper coverage in his own country, he had resigned from his position as head of Kurita Water Industries, feeling he had no alternative. For Issei's mother, Tomi Sagawa, the experience of having her eldest son arrested for murder and cannibalism was too much. She suffered a nervous breakdown. With Akira Sagawa in Paris organising his son's defence, Bruguieres returned to the French capital, apparently without having made up his mind about how to proceed. For a time the case went quiet. The newspapers moved on to other things. Then finally, in 1982 - nearly two years after the killing of Renee Hartevelt - came the sensational decision. After all due deliberation, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguieres accepted Sagawa's explanation that he had killed Renee Hartevelt because of his obsession with cannibalism. Further, Bruguieres did not believe it was possible for a man who killed a woman in order to eat her to be sane. He concluded that Sagawa had been suffering from 'dementia' at the time of the killing (a degenerative disease of the brain that is thought to be linked to psychosis), and could not be held responsible for his actions. Bruguieres' decision was that Sagawa should be detained for an indefinite period at the Henri Colin Asylum for the criminally insane, a secure hospital in Villejuif, a southern suburb of Paris. There was to be no trial. The newspapers went wild. In fact, there was almost as much coverage of the fact that Sagawa would not stand trial for murder as when the killing took place. Most of the coverage was strongly against the decision. Led by the press, popular opinion still maintained that this was a straightforward case of a scorned lover turning to vengeful murder, and that the cannibalism was simply a gruesome distraction. All the same, the papers took every opportunity to remind their readers of every gory detail of the killing.
	[ Issei Sagawa's Deportation ] In 1985, Sagawa was deported back to Japan. As he stepped off the plane at Tokyo Airport, he was met by a mob of journalists and photographers.
	In April 1983, Sagawa was finally moved from prison in La Sante to the Henri Colin Asylum. He was a celebrity among both staff and inmates at the asylum, but he was plunged into total despair at the thought of spending the rest of his life with people who were so clearly mad. Nevertheless, in a continued attempt to understand for himself just what had driven him to kill Renee Hartevelt, he pressed on with the writing he had begun while awaiting for the court's decision in La Sante. Before long, he received a visit from a well known Japanese writer and translator Inihiko Yomota. When Yomota learned about Sagawa's attempts to write a book about the terrible fantasy life which had ended in murder and cannibalism, he was fascinated. Shortly after the visit, Yomota wrote to Sagawa, asking if he could see the manuscript. Flattered, Sagawa sent off his unfinished writings, but it came as a complete surprise when a few months later, in September 1983, he discovered he was a published author. Under the title In the Fog, his unfinished manuscript had appeared in book form in Japan, and was rapidly moving up the best seller list. Sagawa had already had the experience of seeing letters he had written from prison to Japanese playwright Juro Kara appear in print as part of a novel called Letters from Sagawa-kun. The new book In the Fog was therefore the second time his writings had been used without his permission. Sagawa had mixed feelings. On the one hand he felt he had been betrayed by these two literary figures who had seemed to take a sympathetic interest in him. On the other hand, the idea that so many people in Japan wanted to read about the inner workings of his mind was flattering and exciting. This further demonstration of the public fascination with Sagawa's crime was a sign of things to come. In the spring of 1985, the popular magazine Paris Match managed to get hold of the official coroner's photographs of the dismembered body of Renee Hartevelt, taken on the slab in the Paris morgue. The police moved swiftly to block this outrageous and criminal intrusion into the privacy of the dead girl's family. One journalist was arrested, and 250,000 copies of the magazine were seized to prevent publication. It was becoming clear to the French authorities that Sagawa remained an expensive public liability who might spend the rest of his days in a French asylum. But what could they do? Just two years after Sagawa had been committed to the Henri Colin Asylum apparently for the rest of his life, the French authorities made up their minds that there was something they could do. In the case's most bizarre twist of all, in May 1985 Issei Sagawa was suddenly released. The 'Japanese Cannibal' was a free man. Not sure of what sort of reception to expect in his home country, Sagawa would have been glad enough to stay in France. He feared that once back in Japan he would never be allowed out of the country again. But an absolute condition of his release was that he board a plane to Japan and never return. A team of French doctors accompanied the newly free Sagawa on his flight back to Japan. They kept reporters at bay as best they could while the plane was in flight but once the aircraft touched down in Japan their job was over and the feeding frenzy in the Japanese press began.
	[ Issei Sagawa's Deportation ] Sagawa sits in a cage as part of a publicity stunt in 1995. In the decade since he left the hospital, he had found himself being drawn more and more into the spotlight.
	At Tokyo Airport, press men and photographers surged around. After all, this was not just a best selling author returning home to Japan. This was a man who had killed and eaten a woman, and to all intents and purposes got away with it. True, Sagawa was taken immediately from the airport by ambulance to the Matsuzawa Hospital, but this was a plan concocted by his family specifically to avoid a public outcry. It was felt that if Sagawa simply walked off the plane and back into Japanese life as a free man, the press would be up in arms. On the other hand, if he entered the Matsuzawa as a voluntary patient, then that would show that in spite of the French authorities' decision to set him free, he himself had not forgotten what he had done, and was still trying to atone for his crime. Of course, it was little more than a token gesture, because, as a voluntary patient, Sagawa was free to leave the hospital at any time. The staff of the Matsuzawa put him into a secluded wing of the building, where the windows were covered at all times to keep their charge away from intruding camera lenses. Sagawa himself was shocked by the hostility and distaste which characterized every newspaper account of his home-coming. He was also to be shocked by the treated he received in the Matsuzawa, because the psychiatrists there were soon to come to a radically different conclusion from their French counterparts. No one on the staff at the Matsuzawa was pleased at having to deal with their notorious patient. For one thing, the hospital was under a state of virtual siege from the media. One psychiatrist told Sagawa he was 'one too many; and that he wished he would simply go away. The Japanese psychiatrists believed that Sagawa was an ordinary sex criminal who had deceived the French into believing he was a psychotic who could not be held responsible for his actions. 'I think he is sane and guilty,' declared hospital superintendent Tsuguo Kanego unequivocally. 'He should be in prison.' The Japanese applied to Bruguieres in Paris for his file on Sagawa with a view to bringing him to justice in Japan. But Bruguieres refused to hand over a single document. In due course, the Japanese came to the same conclusion as the French. They washed their hands of Sagawa. On 12th August 1986, the Matsuzawa Hospital's most notorious patient was discharged into the community to begin his life over again as an ordinary, private citizen.
	[ Media Frenzy ] In his small flat, Sagawa paints while his model reclines on the couch. This sort of 'photo opportunity' for the press began to turn Sagawa into something of a media performer pandering to the sensational tastes of the public.
	In the summer of 1986, Issei Sagawa emerged from five years of confinement in prison and hospital, hoping to disappear anonymously into Japanese society. He changed his name to Shin Nakamoto, and moved into a small apartment, spending evenings with his family who had remained supportive throughout the whole affair. But in the circumstances, anonymity was to prove an impossible dream. The main problem was the attention of the press, whose interest in Sagawa was revived by his release from the Matsuzawa Hospital. Typical of the kind of sensationalised reporting which appeared was one newspaper's headline about the killer's release 'Attention! Sagawa is walking the streets.' But it was not just the tabloids who got in on the act. A highly respected Japanese literary magazine called Hanashi no Tokushu ran an extended interview with him, accompanied by many photographs. In the interview, Sagawa declared the urge to eat human flesh to be perfectly normal and natural. The magazine's editor commented with the kind of sensationalism which accompanied every story about the cannibal killer, 'The ultimate taboo can be overcome, and Sagawa is the only man who can do it.' Of course every story carried a picture and that was Sagawa's biggest problem when it came to establishing a new identity - his face was simply too well known. This proved a particular difficulty when he began looking for a job. One school initially offered him a teaching post, but when his true identity emerged, the entire school staff came out in protest against their proposed new colleague. The principal of the school was obliged to withdraw his job offer. No matter where Sagawa went, his new name was no disguise. He even found himself rejected when he applied for menial work such as washing dishes. The only way he could find to support himself was writing articles for magazines catering to sado-masochists and other sexual minorities - hardly appropriate work for a man ostensibly trying to put his past behind him.
	[ Media Frenzy ] Issei Sagawa wears a devil's mask during the making of the British TV documentary Excuse Me For Living.
	With several more books and films in the pipeline. Sagawa remained as busy as ever. His more recent project is a film which carries his story into the future. Based on a book by Ieda Shoko, the script finds Sagawa living as a respected 70 year old. Then someone finds out about his terrible past and kills him.
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