An aspiring writer who left a horror scene of body parts in his apartment was arraigned last Thursday on charges of murder and desecrating a corpse after he allegedly cut up and ate part of his girlfriend’s body. But he refused to make a formal plea, saying: ”I can’t get my thoughts together right now.”
Looking haunted, nervous and unsmiling, José Luis Calva — better known in tabloids as Mexico City’s ”cannibal” — had previously acknowledged to police killing his girlfriend, Alejandra Galeana (32). Prosecutors say they believe he also killed and dismembered two other girlfriends, but he was not charged for those crimes on Thursday.
”He killed her because he was high on cocaine,” said defence attorney Humberto Guerrero Plata. ”He didn’t eat her; he just cut her body up.”
Calva told police he cooked the flesh in order to feed it to neighbourhood dogs, as a way to get rid of the body.
But city coroner Rodolfo Rojo has described how Calva carefully separated and deboned Galeana’s arm, sliced away the skin and fat, fried the flesh and seasoned it with lime juice — not pains one usually takes with dogs.
It was Calva’s first public appearance since his arrest on October 8, when police discovered Galeana’s rotting, mutilated torso stuffed into a closet, a leg in the freezer and bits of arm meat on a fork and plate. Before the judge, Calva displayed the dark, penetrating stare and graying good looks that may have seduced his victims.
Calva (38) met his girlfriends — several of whom were single mothers and drugstore attendants — while passing himself off as a playwright, television personality, reporter, novelist, actor and poet.
”He had a super personality. He must have had a super personality, to charm me the way he did,” recalled Veronica R (40), a drugstore employee who said he had read poetry to her when they dated in August. The woman asked that her full last name not be used to protect her family.
Soledad Garavito, Alejandra’s mother, called Calva ”that damned beast”, and described him as ”a very vain person, very egoistic; everything was me, me, me. He told a lot of lies.”
Calva’s writings — a mix of introspection and self-help exhortations — reveal a super-sized ego: ”I am going to imagine myself as a balloon the size of the sun, and I’m going to roll around in the cosmos that is me,” he wrote in The Night Before.
Experts said he may have courted drugstore workers — including Veronica Martinez, a woman prosecutors said he strangled, dismembered and left in a suitcase in 2004 — to get more clonazepam, an anti-seizure medication also used to treat anxiety.
But lead homicide prosecutor Gustavo Salas said Calva may have focused on drugstore attendants because he was looking for working women who were relatively poor, uneducated or easily impressed. With only a 10th-grade education, Veronica acknowledged that ”it was extraordinary for me, to meet a writer”.
He liked to dominate women, according to an acquaintance who said he took money from Calva in exchange for co-signing his apartment lease early this year.
”The way in which he treated his girlfriend, it seemed like a classic dominant-submissive relationship,” said the man, who asked not to be identified because the lease is now a court matter. ”He would say things like, ‘Who told you you could talk?”’
Police said Calva also had a lengthy homosexual affair with his alleged accomplice in the Martinez killing — a man named Juan Carlos Monroy, who described their relationship after he was arrested this month for his alleged role in the murder.
According to police, Calva bought drugs and alcohol with the money one surviving girlfriend made by selling his poetry and crudely bound, photocopied ”books” on the street. His taste for domination was also apparent in the sadomasochistic literature and films found in his apartment, they said.
Police also said Calva described a traumatic childhood — that he was practically abandoned by his mother, his father died when he was two, and around age seven he was raped by a male friend of his brother. — Sapa-AP