Issei Sagawa, the “Kobe Cannibal” who murdered and ate a Dutch student but was never imprisoned, has died at the age of 73.
Sagawa died of pneumonia on November 24, and his burial was attended solely by relatives, with no public ceremony planned, according to a statement from his younger brother and a friend.
Sagawa was studying in Paris in 1981 when he welcomed Renee Hartevelt, a Dutch student, to his house.
Over the course of three days, he shot her in the neck, raped her, and ingested pieces of her body.
He then tried to dispose of her remains in the Bois de Boulogne park, but was apprehended.
Sagawa was ruled unfit to stand trial by psychiatric specialists, and he was originally detained in a mental institution in France before being repatriated to Japan.
He was declared insane by Japanese authorities, but because the allegations against him in France had been dropped, he was released.
Sagawa made no secret of his crime and profited from it, notably with a novel-like book titled In the Fog, in which he reminisced about the murder in great detail.
In interviews and a 2017 documentary, Caniba, he detailed the experience and his fixation with cannibalism.
He told Vice magazine that he was “crazy with cannibalism.”
