A German court on Friday ordered the retrial of a cannibal who killed and cooked a willing victim, saying his eight-and-a-half-year jail sentence for manslaughter was too lenient.
Armin Meiwes (43) admitted to killing Bernd Jürgen Brandes, also 43, but the trial judge sensationally cleared him of murder when he ruled the two were simply ”psychologically sick people who found each other”.
The two-month trial shocked the world with its gory details of cannibalistic fetishism. Computer engineer Brandes answered an advert Meiwes had placed on the internet asking for a victim and, in March 2001, travelled by train to his timbered farmhouse in Rotenburg, central Germany.
Later that evening, Meiwes cut off Brandes’s penis and fried it for them both to eat, but the two found it unpalatable. Brandes then took 20 sleeping tablets and a bottle of Vick’s cold cure. At 3.30am, Meiwes stabbed an unconscious Brandes to death, videotaping the entire episode.
The next afternoon he set about cutting off some of Brandes’s body parts, which he stored in his freezer. He admitted in an interview with Stern magazine before his trial to cooking parts of Brandes’s body with olive oil, garlic and pepper and eating them with sprouts and a bottle of South African red wine.
”The conviction only for manslaughter and not for murder does not stand up to legal review,” Germany’s Federal Court of Justice said on Friday in a statement, upholding an appeal by prosecutors that Meiwes had killed to satisfy perverted desires.
Meiwes’s defence team had argued at his original trial for a finding of ”killing on request”, a form of illegal euthanasia that carries a maximum five-year sentence.
The federal court ruled that Meiwes’s crime could have constituted murder as it included characteristics required for the more serious crime, namely the satisfaction of sexual desires and the enabling of a further crime.
The judges said that the lower court had ignored the fact that Meiwes had recorded the killing for sexual gratification at a later date.
”There does not need to be a relationship of immediacy, in the sense of the killing and the sexual satisfaction having to be in a confined time space,” their statement said.
The court also ruled that the killing had made possible other later crimes, such as interfering with a corpse, glamourising violence and spreading pornography.
Judge Mütze, the original trial judge, told the court when he sentenced Meiwes that there was little evidence to support the prosecution’s main contention that the killing was a sexual murder, carried out for gratification.
He described how Meiwes had experienced cannibalistic feelings as a young boy, after his father and two brothers walked out on the family home. He had also fantasised about eating Sandy, the blond boy hero of the Sixties TV series Flipper.
These feelings got stronger after the death of his ”domineering” mother in 1999 and eventually led him to place an advertisement on the internet seeking someone to ”slaughter and eat”, the court heard.
”There was an agreement between them. This was the killing of a person without murder,” the judge told the court in Kassel. ”The victim offered up his body because he wanted to get the kick of his life.”
It was, the judge said, ”to be the final act, the high point of his life”.
Police revealed during the trial that there were at least 800 participants in cannibal forums on the internet and two suspected cases of other cannibal killings.
The retrial will be in a Frankfurt court. — Guardian Unlimited Â