The Paris Cannibal
Nishanthy Thayananthan
Centennial College
300818711
“By shooting a bullet as small as my finger I have hurt and changed many people” – Issei Sagawa.
Issei Sagawa also known as the “Paris Cannibal” is a Japanese man was arrested for the murder of Renee Hartevelt in 1981. Issei Sagawa has confessed to killing and to eating parts of her body. He grew up in a rich family that were able to provide for him to go to France to study, where he committed his crimes. He has professed to having cannibalistic tendencies since he was a child. He was not prosecuted in France and sent back to Japan in 1984 because of this frail mental health issues. Upon arriving
…show more content…
My desire to eat a woman had changed into and obligation,” he states in his interview with Vice. He left Tokyo on April 26th on his 28th birthday and went to Paris to study. “I didn’t acknowledge Renee’s existence until near the end of the course. She was so beautiful. I’ve never seen a woman like her before,” he says when asked about his victim. Thinking back on his crime he says that if they had went out for dinner one last time he might have not killed her at all. Renee and Issei were students in the same school and were both pursuing a Ph. D. in literature at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris. He did not want to be caught staring at her in class, so he would make sketches of her instead. On June 11th 1981, which his 32nd birthday and the day of the murder he convinced Renee that his professor wanted some German poetry recorded and since she was so good at speaking German if she would help him. She did not doubt a thing and later showed up at his apartment to help, he claims. He let her sit at his desk and reached for the gun while she was reading. He killed her with three bullets to the back of her head. He proclaimed he was scared but still had everything planned out in his head from which part he would start feasting on and so on. He describes his murders in explicit details stating that once he had killed her he wanted to start eating her starting with her right butt cheek. It was too hard to bite into so he