Issei Sagawa: Japanese murderer who ate a Dutch student and starred in a documentary dies

In 1981 he was studying in Paris, where he shot his partner Renée Hartevelt after inviting her to his apartment. After that she raped her corpse, tore it to pieces and kept it in the fridge to eat it slowly. A few days later he was arrested while throwing the remains that he did not eat into a lake. He was never prosecuted.

This Friday the death of Issei Sagawa at the age of 73 was confirmed.

The man lost his life on November 24 in a Tokyo hospital, the Kyodo news agency published this day.

According to his brother, the Japanese cannibal died of pneumonia.

In life Issei Sagawa was a writer but before, in 1981, he made news for murdering and partially devouring a young Dutch woman while she was studying in Paris.

Nicknamed in certain circles as the “vampire of Japan&#8221 ;, Sagawa committed the cannibal crime while studying Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

The Japanese shot Renée Hartevelt in the back after inviting her to his apartment, where she rejected his propositions.

He later raped her corpse, tore it to pieces and kept it in the refrigerator.

After that, he devoured it until a few days later he was surprised and arrested by the police while trying to throw the remains in two suitcases into a lake in a Parisian park.

Issei Sagawa He went unprosecuted, became a writer and inspired a documentary

Sagawa, the son of an influential Japanese family, was not prosecuted for the crime after a psychological evaluation declared him insane.

Thus, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Paris until a few months later he was repatriated to Japan, where he became a writer and a figure of media relevance.

Among his works are includes “Kiri no naka” (Between the fog, 1984), a memoir in which he details the macabre crime and which would also be transferred to comics.

Another writer, Juro Kara, won the prestigious Akutagawa national literary award in 1982 for &# 8220;Sagawa-kun kara no tegami” (“Letters from Sagawa”), based on the event.

In 2019, reminiscences of the case returned to the forefront for the premiere in Japan of the documentary “Caniba& #8221;, which competed in the second section of the Venice Film Festival in 2017.

The film, which begins by emphasizing that “it does not intend to justify the crime”, is a succession of confessions and close-ups of the criminal, prostrate in his apartment in an evident state of mental disturbance and assisted by his brother, Jun, with whom he is conversing.