A Japanese killer known as the “Kobe Cannibal” who lived as a free man after murdering and eating a young Dutch student has died aged 73. Issei Sagawa died of pneumonia on Nov. 24 and had a funeral attended only by relatives, his brother and friend said in a statement issued by the publisher of a 2019 memoir penned by Sagawa’s brother. While studying in Paris in 1981, Sagawa lured Dutch woman Renée Hartevelt to his apartment, where he fatally shot her in the neck. He then raped her corpse and set about eating different parts of her body over three days. Authorities arrested Sagawa as he was attempting to dump her remains in the city’s Bois de Boulogne park. After being deemed unfit to face trial in France, Sagawa was held in a psychiatric facility before being deported to Japan. There, he was deemed sane by Japanese authorities but owing to the fact that the French charges against him had been dropped, he was allowed to go free. He was open about his crime with the media and claimed in a 2009 Viceinterview that trying to find work and live life freely as a known cannibal was his real sentence. “What harsher punishment can there be?” he said. “It’s brutal.”
