Smiling cannibal cleared of murder
The smiling cannibal who ate his willing victim was cleared of murder today at the end of a trial that shocked Germany with its macabre revelations.
A court ruled that Armin Meiwes, a 42-year-old computer expert who met his victim on the internet, had no ”base motives” – sparing him a possible murder conviction.
The judges convicted him of manslaughter and jailed him for 8-and-a-half years.
Prosecutors, who called Meiwes a “human butcher” who acted simply to “satisfy a sexual impulse” and had sought a life sentence for murder, immediately said they would appeal.
His defence argued that since the victim had volunteered to be killed and eaten, the crime should be classified a mercy killing, which carries a five-year maximum penalty.
Before the verdict Meiwes looked calm, occasionally grinning for cameras allowed inside the courtroom before the session began.
After the sentence was read he appeared satisfied, shaking his lawyer’s hand and nodding curtly to the cameras.
Explaining the verdict, Presiding Judge Volker Muetze said Meiwes’ intention was not evil but “the fulfilment of his fantasy.”
His primary motive was “the wish to make another man part of himself,” Muetze said. “Meiwes reached this bonding experience through the consumption of the flesh.”
When his trial opened last month in the central German city of Kassel, Meiwes confessed in detail to the March 2001 killing of 43-year-old Bernd Juergen Brandes at Meiwes’ home in the nearby town of Rotenburg.
Brandes travelled from Berlin in reply to an internet advertisement seeking a young man for “slaughter and consumption.” Meiwes testified that Brandes wanted to be stabbed to death after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness.
“Bernd came to me of his own free will to end his life,” Meiwes said in his closing statement in court on Monday. “For him, it was a nice death.”
Still, he said he regretted the killing.
“I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,” he said. “I regret it all very much, but I can’t undo it.”
The grisly video he made of the act was shown to the court during a closed session.
A doctor testified that Brandes died from loss of blood and that the medication, along with a half-bottle of liquor and 20 sleeping pills he took beforehand, could not have lessened his pain.
Several experts have testified that Meiwes was fit to stand trial and was not mentally ill.
Police tracked down and arrested Meiwes in December 2002 after a student in Austria alerted them to a message Meiwes had posted on the internet.
“If I hadn’t been so stupid as to keep looking on the internet, I would have taken my secret to the grave,” Meiwes said in his closing statement.
The court rejected the defence argument that Meiwes should be convicted of “killing on request”, a form of illegal euthanasia carrying a far shorter sentence of six months to five years.
Meiwes may be eligible to be released earlier for good behaviour.
Judge Volker Muetze said the deed was “viewed with repulsion in our civilised society” but he said the very clear video evidence showed that Meiwes could not be found guilty of murder.
“Seen legally, this is manslaughter, killing a person without being a murderer,” he said.
Meiwes, a well-spoken computer repair man, had shocked the court during his two-month trial with his calm, unemotional testimony.
Judged sane and fit to stand trial, Meiwes recounted how his desire to eat another man began as a teenager.
A psychologist said Meiwes was subconsciously trying to eat a human being to fill the void caused by the departure of his father and brother, which left him to care for his domineering mother until her death.
A video Meiwes took of the macabre slaughter was shown in court. Woman almost fainted watching the video, which showed Meiwes talking to the severed head while he disembowelled the body, hung from a butcher’s hook in his slaughter room.
Meiwes recalled the killing began by him trying unsuccessfully to bite off the victim’s penis at the victim’s request, then cutting it off with a knife.
They both tried to eat it raw, and then fried it, trying again unsuccessfully to eat it. Meiwes then waited for hours until the victim, weakened by loss of blood from his wound, fell unconscious.
He then laid him out on his butcher’s bench, cut him in pieces and ate 44lbs of the body over the following months, defrosting pieces portion by portion.
The meals were often washed down with Muscat or a red South African Cabernet.
He kept the skull in the freezer and buried other body parts in his garden.
Meiwes’s obsession with cannibalism was such that he made life-size models of bodies from marzipan.
Using the pseudonym Franky, he inserted internet advertisements which read: “If you are 18-25 you are my boy, Franky from Germany” and “Come to me, I’ll eat your delicious flesh.”
